Friday, December 30, 2005

exit 2005

Kafka:

Again and again I am drawn into the past, and the pleasure of experiencing human circumstances and ways of thinking in a finished yet perfectly intelligible manner (God knows, 1863 is only fifty years ago) and yet no longer being capable of absorbing them instinctively in every detail from within, thus being faced with the necessity of toying with them according to one’s own inclination and mood – for me this contradictory pleasure is immense, I always like reading old newspapers and periodicals. And then there is this ancient, heart-stirring expectant Germany of the middle of the last century.

(Letter to Felice , 17 Jan, 1913)

The way in which the past presents itself as 'perfectly intelligible' is partly because we read it through what it became. We are its posterity and look on it with amused condescension or infinite liberal tolerance.

These people, the denizens of the past, are trapped in a form of life whose determinants and destination they cannot know. We know more and know better, we think. As Kafka suggests, ‘instinctive absorption’ in these forms of life is for us no longer possible. This ‘absorption’ is precisely what has leaked away, leaving the props and rituals behind, forlorn and (to us) faintly ridiculous. And faintly ridiculous (it can seem) that the denizens of the past could have absorbed themselves so credulously in thse props and rituals. But here lies the false step – not so much the perception of the past but the implied exemption of the present.

For of course, there is a point of view - oh, not yet, but it's coming - from which our own props and rituals will appear equally ridiculous; they too will be left behind while ‘instinctive absorption has moved on elsewhere. And the work of critical thinking is not simply to await the work of time in sundering the props and rituals of our life from our ‘instinctive absorption’, but to do it now, in and on the present.

One of the most stubborn and spontaneous illusions, as Marx identified, was that there has been history hitherto, but no more. The present has emerged from the dust and blindness of history and now sits in judgement on the past.

And from Qlipoth:

Some twat at work today: "we've got to bring this up to 2005". His mantra. As if his only moral, intellectual and aesthetic compass is the calender on his desk. I say, no, let's bring it back to 1848. Or somesuch. We've got to escape from 2005 by whatever expedient we can, see it from somewhere else. Not only is the Present not the appropriate measure, it is precisely what stands in need of measurement.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Under the Sign of Saturn

An interesting review in the TLS of an exhibition and some books on melancholy. (Let me also put in a word for Agamben's Stanzas, which deals with the same subject in a suitably fragmentary and eccentric manner). And here's something I prepared earlier:




Melancholy, says Freud, is the withdrawal of interest from the external world, due to the prolonged and exhaustive investment in a love object (a person) irrecoverably lost. With emotion fixed on this absent centre, circumscribed in its passive embrace, intervention in reality is rendered pointless, and pleasures and activity other than mourning are prohibited from ever getting off the ground:

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity.

Yet the object lost can not be acknowledged, so painful has its absence become, and - leaving behind a deposit of inconsolable sadness - it disappears from conscious reach. Instead, the melancholic’s gaze is arrested by the racked eloquence of his own empty hands, he is left with the cadence of loss in itself, a sound disembodied from it originary sense, which distributes its sad and Lethean vibration over the vacant things of a once enjoyed world. Deprived in this way of its proper object, memory dwindles to its own elusive ghost. This memory of memory, this afterlife of grief, flickers over the surface of the visible world, attempting to discover some trace, glimpse or reflection of what is buried too deep ever to be recalled. This vagrant yearning seeks out some emblem befitting its state. All that is sorrowful and abandoned, discarded objects and physical remains, the parched chaos of a world in ruins: these are all suitable images for melancholic contemplation, and through them - through their myriad, shattered, partial surfaces - is dreamt that whole which was originally lost.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Idle thoughts on Kafka

“The onlookers go rigid as the train goes past”.

The sheer speed of the train steals their movement. As if it were a sudden metaphor for the collective force of the crowd. And their space - a determinate ‘scene’ - is sliced open for an instant, by this emissary, this promise. Then:

“’If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow.

These two sentences are at the opening of the published Diaries.

I sometimes wonder (it is an idle thought, born from two days with flu): Suppose you were to read Kafka’s Diaries, or his letters to Felice, under the impression that it was a work of fiction, using the questions appropriate to a fictional work, or (as befits a work of fiction) trying to discover the appropriate questions. How would such an assumption light up the pages in front of you? The two sentences above, for example, might appear as two perspectives on movement and escape. Something breaks free from its holding or frame. A word escapes from a sentence; a sound breaks free from a word. The body asserts its separateness and won’t be reigned in. These occasional moments of rude freedom punctuate the Kafka world. There is a leap of analogy between these two apparently disparate sentences, but a leap that immediately slips through one’s fingers and vanishes.

Of course, there is a sense in wihc we read the Diaries as fiction or as precursors of fiction. You remember near the very beginning, there are several versions of the same passage concerning the narrator’s education – I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.

One of these alone would doubtless stand as a firm testament, eloquently final. Here, each version is jettisoned in favour of the next. Each reconfiguration of words and punctuation, each reorganisation of the net of language describes and constructs a new picture. Potentially, it is endless. No version quite ‘grips’ reality- each is 'revealed' as maddeningly provisional, the contours of one fade with and into the emergence of the next. But the effect of this is that reality itself seems to dissolve into the kaleidoscope of language. Reality can only be restored by the arbitrary imposition of the ‘final version’ – the Word as seal and guarantee. Again, the postponement of such a Word, and the consequent sense of suspended reality is hereby identified as a Kafka motif. As is the uncanny power accruing to the word through such postponement (power suspended and in reserve is thereby power augmented).

By ‘education’ Kafka isn’t just meaning the schoolroom. He includes all educators, transmitters of law and language, a ‘multitude’ of people, an adversarial world, the Symbolic itself, we might now say. They have ‘done him great harm’ because they ‘tried to make another person of me’: they barred the Self from emerging. And yet this bar was what let the self emerge and become conscious. This duality, too, is a theme, a herald of things to come.

The fiction of reading the Diaries as fiction produces identifiable ‘motifs’, signs, metaphors, correspondences. Particular sentences are suddenly antecedents or echoes of others. In fact, if you do this, if you bracket off the knowledge that this is a diary, or that the letters are to a real person, a whole new book is produced. From which we might conclude various things: that fiction is, in any case, perhaps always an act of such bracketing, or that reading fiction involves to some extent the ‘fiction’ that what you’re reading is indeed fiction. But also, and I think this might well be true of the letters to Felice, that writing was itself only an escape from events into their fictional equivalent.. Thus, the meeting with Felice and her Mother in the Hotel is simultaneously, a fictional meeting that any of us can step into. Here writing can be an extraction of the fictional seam implicit in facts and events.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Walter Benjamin & Mallarme

Gershom Scholem informs us that in Bern in 1919 Benjamin had on his desk Mallarme’s Un coup de des, ‘in a special quarto edition’. That volume, in various type and color, the text of which Benjamin confessed he didn’t understand, impressed upon Scholem ‘only the visual image of a pre-Dadaistic project’. Later (?) Benjamin will see in this book’s typography a prefiguration of the advertising billboard, and call Mallarme a ‘Bucherrevisor’, “someone who calls into the question the substance and the very foundation of the book and asserts that books will be replaced by some kind of file system in their mission to provide information”(Quoted in Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin 's Passages, 30. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen).

From here.

My question is: who knows where Scholem talks about this, and where WB might discuss the poem? update: And the answer to Q2 seems to have been provided by attested auditor of books, Matt Christie.

Secret Rose

Some time ago, I posted a ‘translation’ of a poem from the Czech, a poem told to me by a Czech speaker who had left the country in the Second World War. The poem’s ‘sprig of rosemary’ was taken by Alphonse Van Worden to be a reference to a tale by Leo Perutz, wherein the Emperor Rudolph 11 and his Jewish mistress are translated out of themselves in order to consummate an adulterous relation across geographical and religious divides. In fact, I knew nothing of the tale until Alphonse mentioned it, although it’s conceivable that the poem does allude to the tale. Anyway, just to say that Le Colonel Chabert has unearthed a version of the tale online. It is here.


ps, perhaps Le Colonel or someone else might know - is there a preferred spelling for bubkis/ bupkes/ bupkis? A friend is considering opeing a blog of that name ...

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Benjamin/ Scholem, a note

After my attention was drawn to Walter Benjamin's remarks on Mallarme's Coup de Des, I'’ve been dipping into Gershom Scholem'’s Walter Benjamin, The Story of Friendship. Actually I have always been rather distrustful of Scholem'’s account, motivated as it seems to be by a certain annoyance that WB failed to arrive at the destination assigned him by Scholem. One hears Benjamin in the next room, but not directly. Still, many nuggets.
Benjamin discussed the scope of the concept of experience that was meant here; according to him, it encompassed man'’s intellectual and psychological connection with the world, which takes place in the realms not yet penetrated by cognition.

In experience a certain historical content announces itself. If its site of annunciation is experience, it can be deciphered only by conceptual thought. But thought must first catch what has been announced using the nets of metaphor.


Also, of obvious relevance to Benjamin'’s own technique:

I had for a long time reflected on the derivation of Kraus'’s style from the Hebrew prose and poetry of medieval Jewry - the language of the great halakhists and of the "“mosaic style"”, the poetic prose in which linguistic scraps of sacred texts are whirled around kaleidoscopelike and are journalistically, polemically, descriptively, and even erotically profaned. (WB himself uses the figure of the mosaic in the epistemo-critical prologue to the Trauerspiel book)


Friday, December 02, 2005

A brief note on Zizek etc

Enforced absence from the internet due to moving house and BT’s tardiness in installing a phone line. Last weekend attended the “Politics of truth” conference at Birkbeck. Very little to say that isn’t at Infinite Thought, including some excellent links (inc. PDF of Badiou’s talk).

On the Paris riots. Zizek: the riots contained “no pretence to any kind of positive vision”, “no particular demands, just a demand for recognition” & also referred to it as a “zero level protest which wanted nothing”. Meanwhile, the intellectuals were desperately trying to ‘translate’ these protests into their meaning. This line of argument, which he qualified later, seemed both wrong and self-contradictory. Why does a riot or ‘protest’ have to be about ‘demands’, particular or otherwise? Is not the implicit frame here a psychoanalytically informed one – Zizek's other characterisation of the riots as a ‘blind acting out’ would seem to suggest this.

But anyway, Badiou took the riots to entail the assertion “this country is my country but this state is not my state”. Why? “Because the only relation to this state is my relation to the police”. Riot creates a new visibility of the problem: ie the contradiction between country and state. State is not the state of the people but of something else.

Zizek wondered if this new visibility would immediately be appropriated by experts, no sooner raised than nullified, transformed into an old liberal problem of multi-cultural accommodation etc.

Incidentally, Zizek typically responds to a question with (something like) “ of course, my argument here is..” So, asked a question which contains a reference to irony, he’ll say “But my argument here is that irony is today the dominant form of ideology..”. But the ‘here’ is often not the place from which the question has been asked, but a point of terrain already mapped in advance by Zizek. That is, instead of arguing directly your point he invokes a pre-existing argument from Zizek the author.


Zizek’s actual paper was on populism. For populist politics, the flaw is never in the system as such, but has to do with an element – a corrupt oligarchy or egregious individual – not playing their role properly. The populist can always point to a “Them” who is the enemy. Anyway, K-punk has an excellent summary and response here. Just a random thought – I realised why Mr Christopher Hitchens had always underwhelmed me. Reading Hitchens, even in his ‘radical’ days, it always seemed to be a question of personnel not structure. It was Kissinger or Nixon or whomever, the venality of an individual, the indictment of some moral monster or ethical weakling. Now of course, he's found an altogether more monstrous enemy, and greeted it with 'exhilaration'.