Lars Iyer's Blog, page 7

Alongside Bob Dylan, Fred Neil and a local folk singer called Bob Gibson, Callier was discovering John Coltrane, who had just released his free jazz album A Love Supreme. "He was playing at a little club called McKees, and I got there early to see Elvin Jones nailing his drum kit to the floor. Then the quartet rocks on stage, and I wasn't prepared for the intensity with which these guys threw themselves into the music - I had never seen men do that before in my life and it frightened me. It made me realise that everything in life was in this music: the beautiful and the ugly, the godly and ungodly. Not everybody wants to touch those places because there are things we have to forget in order to live with ourselves, and that music didn't let you have any secrets.

Terry Callier, interviewed

There is no doubt that Jesus was crucified in about the seven hundred and seventieth year after the foundation of Rome; there is no doubt that the Lamb of God is being crucified each day, and will be until the end of the world. Yet it is as if now the crucifixion has at last become fully a historical reality. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being rejected by everything ��� I mean literally everything ��� and in every area of man���s endeavours: his thinking, his willing, his undertakings, his building of his world, his consumption, etc. It is in our day that Jesus is being, in the fullest and most radical sense, humiliated: simply left aside as possessing no interest or significance in comparison with what man discovers for himself and bestows upon himself. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being put to death, since none of his words or actions or miracles have any relevance for Eros-inspired man.

As long as the crucifixion of Jesus was the focus of men���s interests and eyes and thoughts, he was not truly crucified. In our day, the means man has acquired have made him turn his eyes and thoughts and consciousness away from the cross; the cross is good for nothing now but to mark men���s graves. Now Jesus has truly been crucified, in the fullest sense that the word ���crucifixion��� can have as the sign and symbol of scorn, derision, unimportance, failure, abandonment. But think what this entails. It means that God has been conquered and eliminate from the society to which he once issued his challenge. The cross of Jesus, which was meant to be the sign of God���s unconquerable love, has now become purely and simply the sign of his failure. Eros has triumphed through technical and political advances. God has fallen silent.

The silence is the great silence that the evangelists tell us descended at the moment of the crucifixion and which had such tragic meaning for Jesus. It is the great silence that the Apocalypse tells us fell upon creation as the Lamb broken open the seventh seal. It is the silence of God, who is Word yet has now withdrawn into speechlessness. The God of the Word no longer reveals himself, no longer makes himself heard. We cannot say that the noise of the world and the words exalted by the mass-communications media have drowned out the Word of God. No, it is simply that God no longer speaks.

Here, it sems to me, we have a new challenge issued by God to this world. The man of the modern age wanted to slay the father; now, by eliminating the Son as he has, he has in effect slain the Father. He wanted to substitute his own power for the supposed or revealed power of God. He has worked miracles which seem divine (like the Pharoah���s magicians, who were as powerful as Moses and worked the same miracles as he did: the whole hermeneutical problem was already posed at that moment). He has mastered creation and has no further need of providence. He sees within his grasp the fulfilment of the age-old dreams he used to tell God about in his prayers. He knows there is no need of forgiveness for sin, because sin is just a sickness. He need not look to God for truth, because he has taken the path of ���research and development���, and this path will lead him to all the answers. Salvation is no longer from the Jews or from God; man saves himself through his sciences and his technical skill.

Indeed, we may ask, what could God still have to say to man? What could he possibly still mean to man? The God who was once revealed in his self-humiliation is still being revealed in his present humiliation, and only in this humiliation! It is nothing but a monstrous show of human pride to extend the humiliation that God deliberately accepted and experienced in Jesus, to all suffering, unfortunate, humiliated, and exploited human beings. The theologians who assert that only in the persons of the por do we encounter Jesus and tat the poor alone are god���s image (the famous ���horizontal relationship���) are simply theologians of Eros and human pride. They are inspired by the spirit of the world and are contributing to the accomplishment of man���s purpose, which is to strip God of his work and his very identity, to strip him of what he chose to be.

These theologians are today���s chief priests and members of the Sanhedrin who rend their garments at the scandal of Jesus declaring himself God. They are today���s Pharisees, far more so than the priests and pastors of another day with their attachments to institutions, who are now lost in the shadows of a history that is over and done with. By thus stripping God in the realm of theology, these theologians are finishing the work western man has done in other areas. And by so doing, they are effectively humiliating God and crucifying Jesus. Like Jesus before Pilate, God remains silent in the face of the insulting accusation; in what may well be the final combat, God remains silent.

God���s silence means that the world that wanted to be left alone is now indeed alone. It is left to its own dereliction. In writing these words, I am not proposing a hypothesis or a personal interpretation. I am simply repeating what the entire Bible tells us, namely, that God adapts himself to man, walks with man along the paths man chooses, and enters into a relationship with man in which God is the Wholly Other and yet is also inexpressibly close to man.

God���s silence also means that an event has occurred that is of capital importance for the history of the West. If, as I have tried to show, the history of the West is constituted by the tension and conflict between Eros and Agape, between man���s ambition to be completely dominant and the humility of God among us; if this history is the ever renewed result of the reciprocal challenges of man and God; if the meaning of man���s undertaking���s springs precisely from this relationship that was established by the Word of God: then the silence of God entails the disappearance of the very meaning of western history; that history is now annulled and rendered impossible. The paradox that is the West exists no longer.

From now on, all that is left as a drab, insipid unfolding of implications, an interplay of forces and mechanisms. There will be structures and systems, but we shall no longer be able to speak of ���history���. Man is now seeing the very purpose of his struggling being removed from him, as well as very opportunity for a more intense life; he may continue to ���fight���, but his fists will encounter only empty air and unbounded darkness. God���s absence means the abandonment of the world, but in this world man will discover that he himself is likewise absent. When the West claims a monopoly of the truth and seeks to proclaim it to others, it will arouse only anger and hatred. The West is dying because it has won out over God.

Jacques Ellul, Betrayal of the West

I see Europe marching with giant steps to its end: not for economic or technical or political reasons, not because it is being overwhelmed by the third world (which is in fact impotent), not because it is also being challenged by China, but simply because it has decided to commit suicide. All the behaviour (and I mean literally all of it) of the technicians, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and, at bottom (despite appearances), the philosophers, the film-makers, and the scientists is suicidal. Everything of a positive character that may be found is immediately turned inside out, distorted, and stood on its head so as to become a new source of accusation or a new means of destruction. The Left has triumphantly joined the Right in this race toward death, while Christianity celebrates its marriage with Marxism and proceeds to slay the old, impotent flesh that was once the glory of the world.

[���] The first movement is that of blind negation, a retreat into unqualified negation of all the West has been and can yet be. Some of its embodiments: the frenzied pleasure in destroying and rejecting, in playing the man without a future or the artist without culture; the sadism of the intellectual who tears language ��� his own language ��� to pieces, and who does not want to say anything further, because in fact there is nothing to say; the explosion of words, because there is no more communication; the mockeries that are regarded as work of art; and finally, the suicides, physical among the writers, painters and musicians. All this is happening because these people regard the ���system��� as utterly frightful, and see it immediately absorbing and rationalising every project whatsoever. They feel caught by an inescapable dilemma, since even their irrationalities serve as compensation for the system and thus become part of it (although it never becomes clear in what precisely the famous ���system��� consists).

[���] Lacan, Derrida, and all their second-rate imitators who think that absolute incomprehensibility offers a way out, when in fact we have shut the door on all possibilities and hopes, and have sunk into a resignation that knows no future. There is no longer anything to live for: that is what these intellectuals are saying without realizing it; the blinding light they shed is that of a sun on the point of sinking into the sea. Virtuosity has never been a substitute for truth. Withdrawal into curiosity of this kind shows only that for these intellectuals, the last Cardinal Eminences of the western world, there is no longer any such thing as truth.

[���] We are content to die of dancing. Our generation is not even capable of cynicism. It takes a kind of terrible greatness to say, ���After me, the deluge���. No one says that today; on the contrary, everyone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.

[���] The intellectuals caught up in this directionless movement take the lids off bottomless wells; they lean over them and fall in.

[���] The nihilistic revolution has succeeded. Today���s political activists who still claim to be revolutionaries have nothing to put in nihilism���s place. Movement for movement���s sake, thorough study for the study���s sake, the revolution for the revolution���s sake: that, they say, is the only way to escape the system. It is a remarkable thing, however, that this system renders mad not only those who are part of it but those who reject it as well. The system is now the God who makes men mad, but it is a God we have created with our own minds.

[���] Yet once we strip away the illusionist���s veil of pseudo-scientific language or the layer of obscurity caused by a fragmented discourse, and look at what our sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Marxists, historians, novelists, and poets are trying to say, we are appalled at the emptiness, inanity, and incoherence of their thought. We realise that there is only a vast repetitiveness. Everything they say I completely familiar and has long since become commonplace.

[���] Today it is the myths of death, and they alone, that speak to us in our madness. The West is at its end - but that does not necessarily mean the end of the world.

Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West

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'The Love of Fate': a talk I gave to students at the European Graduate School. Pierre Hadot - Marcus Aurelius - Nietzsche. Edited down from a 4 hour session.

As the narrator of The Cheap-eaters says:

Life or existence was nothing other than the unceasing and actually uninterrupted and hopeless attempt to extricate oneself from everything in every possible department and drag oneself into the future, a future that time and again had nothing to offer but the renewal of this selfsame lethal process.

This is why all of Bernhard���s internal wrangling with form, with displacement, with beginning, is so important for the works as literature. The Cheap-Eaters demonstrates that the process by which the novel is written, however futile, is not simply a stylistic feature but co-determinate and co-determining with the activity of life.

Rather than enabling us to forget the debility of language and allowing us to revel in its constructions, Bernhard���s self-questioning in The Cheap-eaters shows us that it is paradoxically by resisting literature���s act of creation that one remains closest to life. The reason for doing so is not merely to demonstrate the incapacity of literature, to reveal the wizard behind the curtain for its own sake. Rather, it is that making literature in this way reveals something fundamental about what it is to be human, about our human condition. In order for the world to mean something, we have to reach reduce it, whilst attempting to reach across, to make our reduction always more than what it is. To speak, to name, to narrate, to write: the ways we interpret and understand the world, all do violence against its richness and potentiality. Bernhard is a writer who reveals this in his self-appointed role as a story-destroyer not because he simply removes a traditional plot structure from his work, but because he attacks the conditions of possibility for that structure in the first place. He goes against the story that literature tells itself. Writing in and through such a catastrophe, what is there left to say? Well, for Bernhard at least:

There���s the non-existent conversation with the past, which itself no longer exists, which will never exist again. There���s the conversation with long, non-existent sentences. There���s the dialogue with non-existent nature, intercourse with concepts that are non-concepts, that never could be concepts. Intercourse with conceptlessness, cluelessness. There���s intercourse with a subject-matter that is unremittingly imperfect. The conversation with material that doesn���t answer back. There���s the absolute soundlessness that ruins everything, the absolute despair from which you can no longer extricate yourself. There���s the imaginary prospect that you have built for yourself in order to be able to keep only imagining it. There���s the attempt to brush up against objects that dissolve the moment you think you could have touched them. There���s intercourse with actualities that turn out to be shams. There���s the attempt to piece back together a period of time that was never unified. There���s always the same groping in your imagination towards a representation of things that by its very nature must prove false. There���s your identification with things that have emerged out of sentences, and you know neither anything about sentences nor anything about things, and time and again you know pretty much nothing at all.

Daniel Fraser

Another recent series of novels about the sad decline of academia also trades in apocalyptic thinking. The books are Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012), and Exodus (2012), by British philosophy don Lars Iyer. The novels center on a series of conversations between two philosophers, men steeped in belatedness (they contrast themselves regularly with Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Rosenzweig), pessimism, and bewilderment. At one point in the first book, they agree: ���These are the end times��� . It���s enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We���ll be rounded up and shot, W. says. It���s only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out��� (Iyer, Spurious 40���41). Another of their recurrent feelings is self-disgust: ���What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. ��� You. You are a sign of the End, says W. Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won���t have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer��� (41).

The apocalypse mostly threatens W., in Dogma: ���There are rumours in the corridors, he says. There are murmurings in the quadrangle. Compulsory redundancies ��� the restructuring of the college ��� the closure of whole departments, whole faculties ��� It���s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says��� (8���9). Later the rumour is that ���they���re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialize in sports instead. They���ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says��� . They���ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He���ll probably be teaching shot put metaphysics��� (97). Things go from bad to (at least symbolic) worse:

W.���s college has become a vale of tears, he says��� . Chaos everywhere. Petty vandalism. Dead bodies, face down in the quadrangle, with knives in their backs. It���ll go up in flames, soon, the college, W. says. There���ll be black smoke rising from the lecture halls. And after that, who knows? Cannibalism, probably. Human sacrifice. (144���45)

As the third instalment, Exodus, begins, things have not gone quite so far, but W. now teaches only sports science students, humanities having been abolished at his college; and he predicts that all humanities departments in the country will follow. Not because the government has anything against philosophy or the humanities. No, ���they���re simply going to marketise education, W. says. They���re simply going to turn the university over to the free market, just as they are turning all sectors of the public services over to the free market. They���re going to submit philosophy to the forces of capitalism��� (Exodus 15). The forces of capitalism, that is, similar to those acknowledged in Australia, where higher education has become ���seen by government as an export service industry in which Australia could find comparative advantage, the cultural equivalent of iron ore��� (Connell)

There can be few more uncompromising accounts of a destroyed university system than the one that W. and Lars share. The fullest obituary reads:

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water, that���s what I always tell him, W. says. We���re poking it with sticks. None of us can believe it. Is it really dead, the university?, W. asks me. Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it really is dead, and there it is, floating, face down, I tell him. There���s no point pretending otherwise, not anymore. The university is dead, and there is its corpse. O, there are signs of life in the university, I tell W. It seems that it���s alive. But that life is the life of maggots, I tell W., devouring the substance of the university from the inside, living on its rotting. (Exodus, 11)

To insist, now, that reading Lars Iyer���s novels is a rich and fascinating experience even for a fellow humanities professor, that reading them is exhilarating, and that it is almost irresistible to begin rereading them immediately after finishing, begins to touch on the paradoxical, indeed ironic, nature of the academic novel. These books testify to some real and terrible changes in higher education. But knowing this does not deprive these books that embody those truths of their appeal, their value. One can read about the destruction of the humanities, even when one is employed in and committed to the humanities, read even about universities dissolving into cannibalism and human sacrifice and ��� while hating every bit of the process that led us to where we are today ��� enjoy reading it, as Lars Iyer probably enjoyed writing it, even though his story is dire.

From Merritt Moseley's 'Smaller World: The Academic Novel as Canary in the Coal Mine of Modern Higher Education', published in The Campus Novel: Regional or Global?, ed. Dieter Fucchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski editor. 2019, pps. 20-26.

Nietzsche and the Burbs, in Italian translation. 

Review: PDE

Nietzsche and the Burbs, in Italian translation.