Lars Iyer's Blog, page 12

Anthony M Barr reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs in the Cleveland Review of Books. 

Three long audio interviews (pre-covid) for Nietzsche and the Burbs: London Review of Books, Owls at Dawn and Bad Vibes Club.

Jane Graham reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs in The Big Issue.

When you pass over to the country of the Dead, you also leave behind your symbolic vestments and investments. In some perverse sense, you enter the human community. This is one point of intersection between philosophers and the Dead. If the Dead no longer have anything at stake in the social order ��� pragmatic interests, concerns about status, symbolic and actual capital, then this should also be the position of the philosopher. For the philosopher is or should be someone who has removed himself, albeit not entirely, from the symbolic community of which he or she had been part. Its laws, habitual practices, its customs masked as nature. Deleuze again [on Spinoza]: 

[The] full meaning of the philosopher���s solitude becomes apparent. He cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them.The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveller, or boarding house lodger.

He or she is a kind of supernumerary figure. 

What is called life is always, of course, implicated in a cultural and social order. Life cannot, or except at a great price, flourish or express itself outside the codes and conditions of this cultural and social order. Nonetheless, life is never synonymous with those codes and conditions. There is always a surplus, a surplus vitality. Perhaps, then, it is this surplus which passes over into the country of the Dead, when the symbolic integuments are shed. Perhaps it is this surplus to which the philosopher - the Deleuzian philosopher - is also attuned.

Mark Bowles, 'The Dead and Philosophy' at the reborn Charlotte Street

Three long written pre-Covid interviews for Nietzsche and the Burbs:  Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 3:AM and Full Stop.

Plus this shorter one for LRB. 

I'm a guest on the Show the Meaning podcast (from @wisecrack), discussing Lars von Trier's *Melancholia* (the characters' favourite film in Nietzsche and the Burbs).

Transcript of a Twitter interview from April 10th:

@MelvilleHouse: What consolation does your work offer your readers?

The consolation that there are no consolations. The sky is dark. There are no stars to guide us. The question: how not to forget this primordial absence. This primal scene. (1/3)

Nolen Gertz: 'Discovering life is meaninglessness is not what Nietzsche calls nihilism. Rather, discovering life is meaningless and yet going on with our lives anyway is nihilism'. (2/3)

The consolation: you don't have to be a nihilist. (3/3)

@Samjordison: Can we have an update? Also, what have *recent inconveniences* taught us about futility? 

Damp used to follow me like a dog, it���s true. But now it doesn���t dare, now that I no longer live in isolation and have sold my flat to property investors (serves them right). (1/2)

���Recent inconveniences���: nicely put. The solution to futility is to love fate. Amor fati, as Nietzsche called it. To will what has happened as if you wanted it thus. I admit ��� I���m failing at this. (2/2)

@EmmaWind1e: Do you think that peoples' perception of the suburbs will change during lockdown?

What will happen? The suspension of ordinary life may reveal the suburbs just as they reveal themselves to Nietzsche in my novel. The suburbs in dub. The suburbs out of phase with themselves, as in Steve Reich���s music. (1/3)

What will be revealed? ���Empty hollows of action, singular vortices without meaning or purpose��� - William S. Allen. Lapses in time, in temporal succession.  (2/3)

Incomplete cycles. Echoes. The same action iterated across waves of variations. (3)

@robyn_drury: Can you say more about the music that inspired the band in the book?

I was thinking of several artists. First, Pauline Oliveros & Friends, Deep Listening. Deep trance. The aum of the universe. Messianic peace. (1/4)

Second, Can, Future Days. Weightlessness, expansiveness. Shimmering. A mist, a spray. With Damo���s feather-light vocalising. (2/4)

Third, Miles Davis, Agharta. Energy music. Groove, buoyancy, textures and muscles. Every kind of pedal, phase shifter, wah wah. And Pete Cosey���s solos ��� abstract, soaring. (3/4)

You can hear the Burbs���s Tantric metal in Sun Araw���s Ancient Romans. Dub openness. Lightfootedness. Foam-lightness. (1/2)

And you can hear Dancin��� Star���s songs of disco innocence in that class of David Mancuo���s legendary Loft, the proto Chicago House sounds of Fingers Inc's Mystery of Love, all wistful and trancey. (2/2)

@MDeAbaitua: What do you steal from other writers and what do you borrow?

A kind of ���cultural poaching��� is what���s left to those of us in the ruins, argues Timothy Hampton. ���In an economic and social system that thrives on amnesia, the only possible aesthetic and political response must be to offer fragments of the past. (1/3)

And the task of the artist is not to reintegrate these shards into some new totality that would paper over the destruction, but to hold them up, in their disjointedness, for all to see or hear���. (2/2)

Quotations with and without quotation marks in my books, stolen or borrowed are meant to mark this disjointedness. (3/3)

@MobyLives: Why trilogies?

Three times to get it right ��� (1/4))

Repetition, repetition, repetition as Mark E Smith sang. Both within the books (sentences, paragraphs, scenes) and in the relationship of books to one another. ((2/4)

The Danish for repetition is gjentagelse, which, I���m told, means literally re-taking. The same story re-taken, redone. The title of a great book by Kierkegaard. (3/4)

And repetition is what Duras does (The Sea Wall/ The Lover/ The Lover from North China ��� The Man in the Corridor/ Malady of Death/ Blue Eyes Black Hair) ... Which is recommendation enough for me. (4/4)

Let me put it metaphorically. While the Berlin Wall was falling, Soviet TV brought on a psychic, a guy to do s��ance sessions. And the idea was that he would tell people, if you have back pain, bring a cup of water, put it next to your left ear, move it around. He was kind of controlling people���s minds. A very conservative reading of that event would hold it as proof that the whole Soviet experiment, as they call it, was just mass hypnosis, daydreaming, mind control. And the fall of the Berlin Wall was like penetrating that dream. An alarm clock ��� reality waking up. Now, we are 30 years after that supposed penetration of reality into the dream, and it���s obvious that that���s not what happened.

What happened is more like a Luis Bu��uel film. We fell into a deeper dream where we think we woke up. It���s called false awakening. We are in this long false awakening where we are inside the dream, but we think we are awake. So, we don���t have access to the dream of, say, socialism. But we also don���t have access to reality. We are stuck in this false awakening. And of course, the digital amplifies this false awakening. Specifically, in terms of fascism, the energy of the extreme right everywhere today ��� admiration of the state and hate for government, which follows Alberto Toscano���s concept of late fascism. But where did they get this hatred for government? They got it from neoliberalism. Fascism is now the heritage of neoliberalism.

Interview with Joshua Simon

The young have been obscenely burdened with the responsibility to be a voice of moral authority for their parents and their grandparents. People are looking to a young generation to make the decisions that previous generations have been incapable of making. It���s another form of denialism.

I love Greta Thunberg, I think she���s fucking awesome. I���m so proud of all the kids who are out there fighting the good fight. But the media passing it over to a 7-year-old or a 15-year-old, and using them as the frontline that Trump can then tweet his rants at? It���s diseased. We have to start to reckon with the disease that���s curled around every aspect of our lives in this late stage of capitalism. If we���re not doing that on a daily basis, we���re just lying to ourselves.

You ask, ���What can we do?��� You can talk to everyone you know about this on a constant basis and try to create consensus about it. You can create groups of people and think tanks to try to counter the billionaire-subsidized think tanks that are forming our current trajectory as a species. If there���s anything you can do, it���s to get profoundly involved. Like, quit your fucking job and do something useful. Hold yourself accountable. It���s painful, I can say that from experience. You���re going to have to sit with your own hypocrisy. And then you have to get real comfortable with people telling you that you���re a killjoy.

Anohni, interviewed

Rob McInroy reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs at his blog.