A(nother) note on rhetoric

If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc

Say things like:

Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??

Talks

Zizek's master class on Lacan at Birkbeck college.

Ranciere at the ICA, 27th March.

Letters

In relation to an earlier post on letters and letters writing, it is probable that I was thinking of this:

"It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters we receive from a person should be more or less similiar to oneanother and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the preson we know to constitute a second personality"

Proust, ROTP, iii, 66.

Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low

National Homeland

'The Firbolgs-----‘bagmen’ in Irish-----were the mythical people who are said to have inhabited the island before the arrival of the Celts. If there were still any of them around today, they could no doubt claim prior and proper possession of the place, in resistance to Celtic colonialism.'

From Terry Eagleton, Nationalism and the Case of Ireland.

Dropped out of the calendar

I always attributed the phrase 'a day that had dropped out of the calendar' to Walter Benjamin, but I've almost certainly misremembered it. He said something to that effect, although it was, I think, in a revolutionary and historical context. But every year there are days which seem to have 'dropped out of the calendar', by which I mean only two things:

1) A day like today, in February, when I can walk down the street without a coat, sit out on the balcony reading, breathing in what feels almost like spring air. So it's like a Spring day, or a promise of that, interpolated into February.



2.) A day which doesn't fit its designated name. So, on or near Christmas for example, people will say 'it feels like a Sunday' or simply 'what day is it?' But in particular, and these are curiously among my favourites, those days that fall between the end of Christmas and the beginning of the New Year - days which seem to have no place, supernumerary days, where time seems to pause, idle days but without guilt, for time itself is stalling not you. These days are, in time, what a railway station is spatially.

2 Interviews

Both lucid and interesting. This, with Lacan (from 1957); and this (via A Gauche) with Badiou.

Here is Badiou on Zizek, which I quote partly because of my (near) agreement with it, partly becuase of what I take to be the twinkle of humour in it:


I think that the brilliant work of Žižek is something like the creation of a conceptual matrix that has the power to shed new light on a great field of cultural facts: movies, books, sexual differences, sexual practices, psychoanalysis, and so on. And so I read Žižek as a strange and completely new composition, the composition of a conceptual nucleus between Lacan and German Idealism. He is an absolutely singular unification of Lacan and Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. With this sort of conceptual nucleus, with this conceptual matrix, Žižek can interpret anything in the world. You can ask him, ‘What do you think about this horrible movie?’ And he will have a brilliant interpretation that is much better than the actual movie because his conceptual matrix is very strong and very convincing.

As if..

Last week I had to assess some student presentations. One student gave an interesting talk about ‘Virtual worlds’, a cyberspace phenomenon I hadn’t really been aware of. These are fictional or imaginary worlds given graphic realisation online. They are not copies of particular real locations; nor are they necessarily fantastic (comic-book scifi escapism). Some generic hotel, bar or beach would be typical, it seems. Computer users enter into and ‘hang out’ in these spaces, through some iconic on-screen representation of themselves. However, it is not a game as such - there is no specific task or grid of rules, the time of a visit is not pre-determined. It’s simply a space to 'hang out', but from which the body is exempt.

Now according to the student, people apparently purchase objects or space within these worlds. A virtual island has recently been bought for a significant sum. One enters into a world which is in some sense fictional, and yet there is the desire for and possibility of possession.

This led to some random thoughts on fictional worlds and the category of the ‘fictional’ in general. Of course in one sense, a novel by Dickens or Proust (or whoever) constructs a recognisable ‘world’, similar to but distinct from that of the reader. One enters into this little universe, which has its peculiar feel, a whole phenomenology of characteristic ‘experiences’, the illusion even of textures and odours. Reading Proust or Dickens is to dwell in this world. And withdrawing from such a world can be an abrupt and vaguely disappointing transition. Not wanting to put the book down is among other things a desire to cleave to a certain world, to abide with and in it. It, too then is a ‘virtual world’. But at no stage, when we read the description of a clock on the mantelpiece, of an old sturdy chair do we, or can we say ‘I want to buy that’. Of course, it’s ridiculous. But when we talk about fictional objects, it would seem that not all fictional objects are equally fictional.



I wonder if readers might recommend something on this subject, ie, a possible taxonomy of fictions and degrees of fiction, including legal and political examples. In the film Michael Collins, DeValera, after the 1916 Rising, but before the Irish Free State, DeValera is made to say “We must act as if the Republic is a fact”. I’m unsure whether it’s an actual quote but the idea is that of the enabling fiction. Acting in fidelity to the fiction produces real and otherwise unrealisable effects. What we might question is how this Republic is any less fictional than the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” which it would replace? Is the latter not itself a legal fiction supported and made solid by law, bureaucratic structures and military force? Now before Ireland gained any kind of independence, DeValera also forms, and heads, a ‘cabinet’ with designated ministers. Is this cabinet qua cabinet a fictional entity? Does it await the nod of a posterity - which it also helps bring about - to make it ‘real’? But if it is a fictional entity it is obviously not so in the same way as Mme Verdurin’s Drawing room, or the ‘Elsinore’ that a theatre audience (agree to) see before them on the stage.

These are banal points. But what would interest me is a book which dealt with the category of the fictional without confining itself to the literary, and which when it did look at literary-fictional worlds saw them in relation to the that inescapable quota or fiction which is part of the very texture of (and not the opposite of) reality.