Lars Iyer's Blog, page 37

I have a kind of personal woe I should like your advice on. I have noticed in the last two or three years a growing tendency to a kind of melancholy apathy or depression. [Its] effect is to make the positive value seem to disappear from the world, so that nothing seems worth the effort of doing it, and whatever I do or what happens to me ceases to matter very greatly …

[His depression might be] 'common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall'.

Walter Pitts, in a letter to Warren McCulloch

August 19, 1960

My dear, good Nelly,

thanks, heartfelt thanks for your letter! You are still in such distress and you find, you dear, you still find words - no word-gifts for us!

Nelly, dear one! I can see that the net is still there, it can't be taken away by the wave of a hand... And yet: it can be removed, it can and should be removed, for the sake of all those to whom you know you are near, for the sake of nearness, of your living nearness! You have your hands, you have the hands of your poems, you have Gudrun's hands - take, please, take ours as well! And take whatever is a hand and wants to be helpful and remain helpful through you, through your being, through your being-there, and being-at-one-with-yourself and being-at-one-with-yourself-in-the-open, take it, please, let it be there, by virtue of this being-able-to-come-to-you-today-and-tomorrow-and-for-a-long-time!

I think of you, Nelly, always, we are always thinking of you and the life you have bestowed! Do you still remember, when we spoke for the second time of God, in our house, the one that is yours, that awaits you, how a golden light shimmered on the wall? Through you, through your nearness, such things become visible, there is need of you, need of your being-here and being-among-people, there is need of you for a long time yet, your gaze is sought after -: send it, this gaze, back into the open, send your true, freedom-loving words with it, entrust yourself to it, entrust that gaze to us, who also live, who live-with-you, let us who are already free be the freest of all, the ones standing-with-you-in-the-light!

Look, Nelly: the net is being drawn away! Look, Nelly: there is Gudrun's hand, she has helped, she is helping! Look, there are other hands helping! Look, yours is helping too! Look: It is getting light, you are breathing, you are breathing freely. You will not be lost to us, I know it, you will not be lost to us, we know it: with all that is near to you, with all that is near from so far away, you are there and here and at home and with us!

With deepest, heartfelt thanks,

your grateful Paul

Paul Celan, letter to Nelly Sachs

You studied law, but all your philosophy seeks, in a sense, to free itself from law.

Leaving secondary school, I had just one desire – to write. But what does that mean? To write – what? This was, I believe, a desire for possibility in my life. What I wanted was not to 'write', but to 'be able to' write. It is an unconscious philosophical gesture: the search for possibility in your life, which is a good definition of philosophy. Law is, apparently, the contrary: it is a question of necessity, not of possibility. But when I studied law, it was because I could not, of course, have been able to access the possible without passing the test of the necessary. In any case, my law studies came to be very useful for me. Power has dropped political concepts in favour of juridical ones. The juridical sphere never stops expanding: they make laws on everything, in domains where it would once have been inconceivable. This proliferation of law is dangers: in our democratic societies, there is nothing that is not regulated. Arab jurists taught me something that I liked very much. They represent law as a sort of tree, with at one extreme what is forbidden and, at the other, what is obligatory. For them, the jurist's role is situated between these two extremes: that is, addressing everything that one can do without juridical sanction. This zone of freedom never stops narrowing, whereas it ought to be expanded. 

Agamben, interviewed

With very few exceptions, there are no longer any philosophers. There are extremely erudite commentators and very knowledgeable historians of philosophy, but hardly any new creation. The only experience with which philosophy tries to deal, henceforth, is the philosophy of its own history. It is condemned to feed on itself, to devour its own flesh.

Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable

The ancient Greeks hoped for nothing, nothing, nothing, and, in my opinion, that is why they were so free in their creation. The tragedies already said, 'you're going to die'. The famous choir of Oedipus said that the best thing is not to be born; and second in quality is, once one is born, to die as soon as possible. That is not hope.

Castoriadis contra Bloch, interviewed in Postscript on Insignificance

There is really something quite mad about speaking and writing: the proper conversation is a mere play on words. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous mistake that people make when they believe that they are speaking about things. Nobody knows the greatest hallmark of language: that it is concerned only with itself. That is why it is such a wonderful and prolific secret: that when one simply speaks for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid and original truths. But if one wishes to speak of something particular, the capriciousness of language lets one say the most ridiculous and perverted things.

It is from out of this that a hatred of language grows in some serious people. They notice its playfulness, but they do not notice that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If one could only make people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language - they constitute a world for themselves - they only play with themselves, express nothing other than their own wonderful nature, and precisely for that reason they are so expressive - and that it is precisely for this reason that the strange play of relationships of things mirrors itself in them. Only through their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free motion does the spirit of the world epxress itself and make them the delicate measure and pattern of things. 

The same is true of language: one who has a fine feeling for its application, its tempo, its musical spirit, one who has perceived the delicate operations of its innermost nature and follows them through the movements of her tongue or her hand, such a person will be a prophet. Conversely, one who knows this, but does not have enough of an ear or sense to write truths such as these, will be mocked by language itself and by derided by me, as Cassandra was by the Trojans. 

If I believe I have shown in the clearest manner the essence and office of poetry, I nonetheless know that no one will be able to understand me, and I will have said something completely foolish precisely because I wanted to say it at all, and so no poetry comes into being. But what if I had to speak? And what if this impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of languag, of the effectiveness of language in me? and what if my will only wanted what I had to do? could this not then, in the end, be poetry without my knowledge or my conviction, and so make a secret of language understandable? And would I then be a writer who was called, for a writer is only someone who is possessed by language?

Novalis, Monologue (complete text)

... we're the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody's authority. We're on the side of those who don't offer final answers of transcendent truths[...]

There are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other[...] Only our cooperation can ensure the continuity of Heraclitus's vision: "This world has always been and will always be a pulsing fire, flaring up accordingly, and dying down accordingly, with the cycling of the eternal world breath"'.

[...] a person does a lot more doubting than a plucked cock does. And these are the people I love - the Dionysians, the unmediated ones, those drawn to what's different and new, seeking movement and inspiration over dogmas and immutable statutes. The innocents, in other words, the speakers of truth.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, from her letters to Zizek

Drugs are a medium for overcoming cultural mediation in order to reach immediate experience. Drugs are the mediation of the immediate. The inebriated man reaches, thanks to alcohol, hashish, and LSD, the concrete experience of the immediate, which is veiled for the sober man by the barrier of culture. He reaches, thanks to such media, the 'unio mystica', through which he dissolves into the concrete. He dives, thanks to such artifices, into the ineffable.

[...] People on drugs refuse to participate in the public space and they withdraw into the private space. To take drugs is a gesture that pushes away the republic, or that rejects it. [...] it is an antipolitical gesture. 

There is no doubt that art is a drug. That it is a medium in order to propriate immediate experience. that it is an instrument in order to escape the unbearable ambivalence of cultural mediation and to emigrate toward a 'better realm', as Schubert sings in the Lied An die Musik, art sings. 

[...] However, in art there is an aspect that is missing in other drugs. Art, having mediated between man and immediate experience, inverts this mediation and makes it so that the immediate becomes 'articulated', that is: mediatized toward culture. Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible. In it, the retreat of culture becomes an advance toward culture. The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it. 

Flusser, Post-History

Mass society, that which entertains itself, is characterized precisely by its lack of memory, by its incapacity to digest that has been eaten[....] there is no memory, no interiority, where there is no 'I'. Mass society is not a digestive apparatus, but a channel through which sensations flow, in order to be eliminated without being digested. What characterizes mass culture is not consumption, but its opposite: the refuse or trash.

Entertainment is the accumulation of sensations to be eliminated undigested. Once 'world' and 'I' are put into parentheses, sensation passes without obstacles. There is neither someithng to be digested not an interiority to digest it. There is neither intenstine nor the necessity of an intenstine. What are left are mouths to swallow the sensation and anuses to eliminate it. Mass society is a society of channels that are more primitive than worms: in worms there are digestive functions. The'worm-like' feeling, by which we are sometimes taken over, is an optimistic sensation. Concrete sensationalism is more primitive than worms.

[Despite all this], there still persists in us some remains of interiorit. These mainfest themselves in two forms. one is the interest that the refuse awakens in us: the awareness that we are being fed shit. The other is our tendency to stir the shit.

[...] Nothing is being taken seriously, everything entertains us. Not only the programs aimed explictly at entertainment. We devour everything with sensationalist attitude. Art, philosophy, science, politics, including the events that relate to our concrete experience: hunger, sickness, and oppression. Our work entertains us. Our human relations entertain us. We are incapable of seriousness [...]

Flusser, Post-History 

Sam Cooper has written an essay, 'The Novel After Its Abandonment', about Stewart Lee and I.

McKenzie, of A Girl With Red Hair, posts on Wittgenstein Jr.