Lars Iyer's Blog, page 21

I have no desire to demonstrate, to amuse, or to persuade ��� I aspire to absolute rest and continuous night ... to know nothing, to teach nothing ,to will nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still to sleep, this today is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but still sincere.

Baudelaire

 A failure of communication ��� that���s what my film is about. If there was communication, we wouldn���t need to speak, or make music, or make films. Cinema comes at a moment when there is a failure of communication.

Godard, JLG/JLG:

Sometimes I believe that nothing has meaning. On a miniscule planet that has been heading towards oblivion for millennia, we are born in pain, grow up, struggle, fall ill, suffer, cause suffering, cry out and die: and at that very moment, others are born in order to start the whole useless comedy over.

Sabato

 The Russian people in accordance with their metaphysical nature and vocation are a people of the End. Apocalypse has always played a great part both among the masses of our people and at the highest cultural level ��� In our thought the eschatological problem takes an immeasurably greater place than in the thinking of the West.

Berdyaev, The Russian Idea

In a rare lyrical outburst, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant describes what would befall such a philosopher like Spinoza:

Deceit, violence and envy will always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable and benevolent; and the righteous ones besides himself that he will still encounter will, in spite of all their worthiness to be happy, nevertheless will be subject by nature, which pays no attention to that, to all the evils of poverty, illness, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on the earth, and will always remain thus until one wide grave engulfs them all together (whether honest or dishonest, it makes no difference here), and flings them, who were capable of having believed themselves to be the final end of creation, back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were drawn.

Nietzsche and the Burbs, my next novel, out next year from Melville House. More details soon.

A few stray lines from Nietzsche and the Burbs here. And a few stray lines from my next novel project, Simone Weil, here.

New long interview on the podcast Unsound Methods. 

Before the tsunami arrives, before big one arrives, before the capsizing blow, before the tsunami, the sea recedes, for a time that is maybe short or very long. The sea recedes, it leaves sand. It leaves swamp. It leaves a huge feeling of depression, the sense of not being there, the sense that everything is finished, and that it may never begin again. 

Well, I have the impression that in this passage, we are in the undertow and I can feel that this undertow is preparing a comeback so overwhelming, so frightening, that we do don't even have the guts to think about it, the guts to imagine it. You can feel it around, on the train, on the bus, in the streets, you feel it distinctly, this sense of every energy receding, of depression, the cynicism - the only thing that remains in our culture - but a cynicism made of fragments of desperation, of moments, of deja vu, of an inexplicable, unspeakable word.

Well, the undertow, the cynicism, the depression, the sensation of not being able to coordinate will and action anymore. The sensation of an incapacity of the body to move, to perform actions for desire, for pleasure, for communication, simply for freedom, joy of being there, all this has vanished, finished.  [...]

Wait for the tsunami, wait but great ready, because you'll have to think of something, what clothes to wear, a gesture to make, the moment before the wave finally wipes you out. 

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

A guest post from Sinead Murphy, author of Zombie University. It was written to support the current UCU strike.

We were horrified at Trump���s great wall and indulged ourselves in an oh-so-liberal outrage. Again and again we were directed to loathe it, by the media and their politician-puppets. And we did loathe it, again and again. And all the while, a real wall continued to rise, far higher than Trump���s folly ever could. Britain, among other countries, is cut through by this real wall. On one side are those with access to the trillions ���printed��� by ���quantitative easing���, at zero percent, or even ���negative percent���, interest-rates. On the other side is everyone else, who continue to suffer the ���credit crunch��� and who sometimes pay interest-rates equivalent to one-thousand percent or more for loans from ���pay-day��� providers. On one side, lots of cash at no cost. On the other side, very little cash at high cost. The result is neo-Feudal Britain, founded upon a drastically unequal distribution of money and risk allied with the very sinister principle that where the money goes the risk does not. How paltry Trump���s mere bricks and mortar, next to this financial engineering.

But what of the University in neo-Feudal Britain? Does it take issue with the accumulation-by-dispossession that has so surely impoverished all but the few? Does it put all its left-liberal posturing to work in defence of the right-to-livelihood of those it employs? On the contrary. The supposed institution of ideas accepts that there-is-no-alternative idea, and duly plays its part in the British horror show: the low interest-rates that have made such a playground for the elites on the other side of the wall have suppressed yield on investments on both sides of the wall, with the result that pension funds have to engage in more ���imaginative��� speculation, where increased risk comes with increased potential return; and, on that sinister principle that risk must now be borne by the most vulnerable, the University has ruled that the worker take on the risk of her pension contributions doing badly in a market entirely rigged in favour of those who are paid money to borrow it and speculate with it ���   ���Defined Contribution,��� not ���Defined Benefit.���

My Zombie University makes and argues for the claim that, as the Bank now does nothing more or less than steal our money, so the University now does nothing more or less than suppress our thoughts. But it turns out that, given half a chance, the University will steal our money too.

The White Review anthology, featuring my manifesto, reviewed by the Irish Times.