Spurious

Two fragments by Nietzsche written 1882-3:

I do not want my life to start again. How did I manage to bear it? By creating. What is it that allows me to bear its sight? Beholding the overman who affirms life. I have attempted to affirm it myself — Alas.

The instant in which I created the return is immortal, it is for the sake of that instant that I endure the return.

In a very fine article, Paolo D'Iorio comments: Nietzsche, the man of knowledge had attained the climax of his life at the very instant in which he had grasped the knowledge he regarded as the most important of all. When, at the end of his life, he became aware of having attained this summit, he ceased to need an alter ego in order to affirm the life that forever returns and as a conclusion to the Twilight of the Idols, which are the very last lines published in his lifetime, he let these words be printed: ―I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,—I the master of the eternal return.

A note on the relationship of Derrida and Blanchot, copied from this book. here, Derrida is being interviewed by Dominique Janicaud. Comments in square brackets mine.

[François Fédier asks Derrida to participate in a book of essays published in homage to Jean Beaufret, the French Heideggerian. Derrida agrees, after some persuasion, intending his piece to be critical.]

And then, one day, once he had the text, Laporte and his wife came to lunch at my house, in Fresnes, in the winter of 1967-68 (probably 1968 already). During a desultory discussion, Laporte, who had been [Beaufret's] student, spoke to me about some anti-Semitic remarks made by Beaufret. Disturbing remarks. He reported some of them, which concerned Levinas, or the fact that the alleged exterminations of the Jews were as little believable as the rumours that circulated concerning the horrors in Belgium after the war of 1914 (that the Germans were killing and slaughtering children); and finally, he spoke to me about remarks of this type that seemed shocking to me not just because of their anti-Semitism but because of their violence. And so I was shocked and upset. Laporte was a bit surprised. perhaps he had not predicted the effect that this could have on me. 

[Derrida writes to Fédier, asking to withdraw his text from the homage to Beaufret. Derrida is willing to do this discreetly, but Fedier would not accept this ('He reacted with violence: calumny, etc.!'). Fédier found out that it was likely Laporte who had spoken to Derrida about Beaufret's anti-Semitic remarks. Derrida arranges a meeting in his office at the École Normale between Beaufret and Laporte ('a confrontational meeting'). Following this, Laporte feels increasingly under attack from Beaufret's circle. His wife, Jacqueline, 'had alerted Blanchot in order to protect her husband'.]

Blanchot, too, was in the situation of having given a text to Fédier. Obviously, the Laportes knew that Blanchot was very sensitive, irritable, and anxious about these questions. So, as soon as Blanchot was alerted, he contacted me. I didn't know him at that point. I had read him, of course; we had exchanged a few letters, but I had never met him. It was on the occasion of this affair that I met Blanchot quite frequently, during this limited period in 1968, during the 'events' as one says. We met several times, asking ourselves what we should do - whether we should withdraw our texts or not. And then, after endless deliberations, we were in agreement: Beaufret did not admit to having said these things and we could not prove that he had - it was witness against witness, it was Laporte's word against his - we did not have the right to accuse Beaufret publicly of something that he denied, therefore we had to allow the promised texts to appear.

[Blanchot and Derrida agree to write to other contributors to the Beaufret homage once the book was published. Blanchot sent these letters to the publisher, who did not pass them on.]

Another thing as well: Blanchot said: 'we have to talk to Levinas about this'. Thus I remember one day when I had made an appointment with Blanchot and I picked him up with my car (he lived on rue Madame in those days), and I took him to see Levinas, to whom we then revealed this whole affair, since Levinas had been involved by name, having been the subject of the comments attributed to Beaufret. Levinas took things in a very relaxed way: 'Oh, you know, we are used to it'. He was less emotional about the affair than we were. So there you have it!

[Appendix 1. In a speech given at Blanchot's cremation on Feb 24th 2003, Derrida recalls the date of his meeting with Blanchot as being May 1968, and emphasises the importance of the Events for Blanchot. He also remembers 'the gentleness of a smile' that didn't leave Blanchot's face during their meetings. Appendix 2. Note that Derrida's account means Michael Levinas is wrong about the final meeting between Blanchot and Levinas, which he dates to 1961.]

Jonathan Ross versus Aki Kaurismäki, from 1991.

If the fundamental ontological question today is not work but inoperativity, and if this inoperativity can, however, be deployed only through a work, then the corresponding political concept can no longer be that of ‘constituent power’ [potere constituente], but something that could be called ‘destituent power’ [potenza destituente]. And if revolutions and insurrections correspond to constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which makes the law and violence that preserves it.

Agamben, What is a Destituent Power? (draft of last section of The Use of Bodies - paywalled. Article can also be accessed here.)

[Reading In Search of Lost Time] gave me the powerful sense that it didn't matter if one could not see one's way forward, it didn't matter if one was silly and slow and confused, it didn't matter if one had got hold of the wrong end of the stick - what mattered was to keep going. I began to see that the doubts I had were in a sense the temptations of the Devil, the attempt to make me give up at the very start by presenting things in absolute terms (I can do it/ no, I can't do it); and that what Proust (like Dante before him, I later discovered) was offering was a way of fighting that by saying: All right, I am confused, then let me start with my confusion, let me incorporate my confusion into the book or story I am writing, and see if that helps. If I can't start, then let me write about not being able to start. Perhaps, after all, confusion and failure are not things one has to overcome before one can start, but deep human experiences which deserve themselves to be explored in art. Perhaps, indeed, the stick has no right end and therefore no wrong end.

Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale

'What is surprising is not that things are; it's that they are such and not other', Valéry writes in the 'Note et digression' he appended to his Leonardo essay in 1919. This is profoundly opposed to the pragmatic and positivist English tradition, which takes the world and ourselves for granted and sees the task of art as the simple (or not so simple) exploration of the vagaries of life and the problems of mortality. it is this, we could say, that makes it difficult for the English to respond to the manifestations of European modernism, which is too often accused of 'abstraction' and 'deliberate obfuscation', whether it be the poetry of Rilke and Paul Celan, the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Bernhard. For the English reader and critic, not to be interested in nature for its own sake, not to be interested in the moral dimension of murder and adultery, is not merely a literary but a human failing, a sign of a fatal abstraction, an unwillingness to engage with life as it is. For Valéry or Robbe-Grillet, to be interested in a tree or a bird - or a murder or a jealous husband - for its own sake, is to be concerned merely with the anecdotal and ephemeral. What interests them is what bird-leaving-tree tells us about our condition, it is the nature of murder and of jealousy. 

Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale

Our epoch does not love itself. And a world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only in what we love. This is what makes the atmosphere of this world so heavy, stifling and anguished. The world of the hypermarket, which is the effective reality of the hype-industrial epoch, is, as an assemblage of cash registers and barcode readers, a world in which loving must become synonymous with buying, which is in fact a world without love.

from Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals

If this reign of despair causes suicidal behaviour to increase, then this desperation can itself give rise to desperate reasons, that is, transform this despair into struggle, by providing itself with objects of struggle. The problem is that it can get mixed up with some very bad intentions – and it is easy to let these bad intentions circulate, reproduce, and proliferate, more or less mimetically: youth needs to sacrifice itself. Youthfulness is an exalted state, tempted by excess because essentially transgressive, and this is where its very strength and beauty lie, as well as its future, and with this future, the future of the entire world: there lies its humanity. Because what is experienced by young people as exaltation becomes, in those with greater experience, tenacity, conviction, and patience, through which pleasure and reality are knotted together, and becomes the authority of those who pass into action –‘action’ here being understood in terms of those who work and act, and who transform the world through their practices. Such is humanity, a fact that Valery enjoined us to reflect upon, in the epoch of ‘the fall of spirit value’.

But whether or not such a maturity of adult belief exists, whether or not it offers reasons for hope to young people, they still need causes, however deceptive they may turn out to be, because the fundamental character of youth is not to be cynical, to not accept the cynicism that can reign in this world […], or that cynical reign of despair characteristic of the epoch of hyper-power, a hyper-power that shows itself to be nothing more than an effective impotence and an infinite injustice – therefore ceaseless reinforcing disbelief, miscreance, and discredit, drive-based behaviour and desperate reactivity, both suicidal and parasuicidal, both ordinary and pseudo-sublime.

Given this extremely serious context, it is the responsibility of the public collectivity to provide young people (and their elders, within whom they must find some of their resources) with reasons to hope -  failing which the different generations, and firstly the youngest, will find such reasons wherever they can or wherever they believe they can, even if they are being deceived. If society does not provide the objects of sublimation without which it would be capable of elevating itself or transindividuating itself (because transindividuation, being the condition of what is called the social bond, is the outcome of sublimation), it will instead incite desperation, with a far greater need for explosive compensatory objects, and will take these objects more easily for its own, regardless of their provenance – from extremist ideologies, religious sects, evangelical churches, clandestine mosques, videogames in which the score is calculated by the death drive, or from ‘reality television’, which measures how degraded and ‘available’  brains are for the hype and brainwashing of ‘power’.

from Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals

They were the worst of times because they were the best of times; times in which dissent was forbidden, not by the dispersal of dissenters but by their assembly; times in which protest was refused, not by the containment of expression but by its freedom; times in which the people were kept in ignorance, not by narrow educational channels but by immeasurably wide ones; times in which we were made to forget the evils all around by hysterical remembrance of evils dead and gone; in which we were half-dead, not from neglect but from care, and half-mad, not from silence but from talk, and starved out of our wits from much too much to eat; in which want had the form of plenty, and dearth the form of glut, and no one could think their way out, not because there was too little time to think but because there was far too much.

There is in these times such an explosion of thinking, such licence to think and rethink, to think from all angles  and all perspectives, to think of ourselves and of others and of others like ourselves and of others unlike others, to think and think and think again, that we cannot any longer think straight.

the opening of Sinéad Murphy's forthcoming Zombie University

I read [Deleuze's] Logic of Sense a long time ago, 30 or 34 years ago, in fact I was in prison when I read Logic of Sense, and I think that it is reading Logic of Sense that permitted me to live in prison. Logic of Sense allowed me to live in prison and to adopt an ethics of prison. What I call an ethics of  prison is one which permits me to cultivate a virtue, for me an ethics cultivates a virtue.

Bernhard Stiegler, speaking in a seminar