Lars Iyer's Blog, page 71

In the metropolitan civilisation the spirit can only huddle in some corner. And yet it is for instance not atavist and superfluous but hovers over the ashes of culture as an (eternal) witness – as if an avenger of the deity. As if it were awaiting a new incarnation (in a new culture).

Wittgenstein, Diaries

It is true that the raven croaks, the dog barks, and the lion roars. But animal voices are only chinks in the silence. It is as though the animal were trying to tear open the silence with the force of its own body.

'A dog barks today exactly as it barked at the beginning of Creation', says Jacob Grimm. That is why the barking of dogs is so desperate, for it is the vain effort, since the beginning of the creation until the present day, to split the silence open, and this attempt to break the silence of creation is always a moving thing to man.

Picard, The World of Silence

The Jewish idea of messianism is, in its very essence, an aporia: messianism can only affirm itself by realising itself, but no sooner does it realise itself than it negates itself. Whence its tragic quality: the messianic tension of the Jewish people has always had it live in the expectation of a radical upheaval of life on earth, which, each time it seemed as though it was in the offing, very quickly appeared illusory. Whence, too, in Jewish mysticism, the constant cautioning against the temptation of impatience, of premature intervention into history. Whence also, in Jewish religious consciousness, it strange and distinctive experience of time, which is lived, in its very nature as expectation; neither as a kind of pagan enjoyment of the present moment not as a kind of spiritual escape transcending time, but an ever renewed aspiration, from the very heart of time itself, to the coming of the absolutely new, conceived as capable of emerging at any moment: Redemption is always imminent, but if it were to come, it would be immediately put into question, in the very name of the absolute demand it claims to meet.

from Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History (passage omitted in translation)

In the course of L’Attente L’Oubli, these and numerous other self-displacing motifs, either singly or in combination, are reiterated and rehearsed many times over. Paronomasia, ellipsis, oxymoron, chiasmus, paradox, all loom large in their articulation. Phrases or passages that appear in seemingly abbreviated or truncated form at one moment recur in expanded or amplified fashion at the next, and vice versa. Releasing reading from the teleological expectation that it is necessary to begin at the beginning and end at the ending, the fragmentary structure of L’Attente L’Oubli makes it possible to begin or end almost anywhere, with the result that every fragment in the text is simultaneously both a beginning and an ending and anything but a beginning and an ending, sited on the edge and at the core of a configuration that admits of neither.

From Leslie Hill's Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing

My solitude held in its grasp the grief of others until my death.

A plaque attached to Simone Weil’s gravestone. (via)

The challenges for reading are accordingly formidable. Whole sentences hang uncertainly in the void; snatches of unattributed dialogue gesture inconclusively towards scenes or situations that are at best conjectural; and a plethora of unfinished, incomplete, or otherwise interrupted phrases grope for an elusive main clause that might allow them properly to begin or to end. There is likewise a frequent paucity of finite verbs and a corresponding proliferation of enigmatic nominative clauses bereft of temporality, mood, transitivity, or syntactic hierarchy. Names too are conspicuous by their absence, and seem to have been supplanted almost everywhere by a series of mysteriously undefined third-person singular or plural pronouns, while elsewhere words collide, qualify or disqualify each other, or turn back on themselves, generating numerous paradoxical formulations at the very limit of intelligibility.

Leslie Hill on The Step Not Beyond, from his Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing

To write in ignorance and without regard for the philosophical horizon, as punctuated, gathered, or dispersed by the words that delimit that horizon, is necessarily to write with self-satisfied ease (the literature or elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many others do not allow us this.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Exodus will be published in the UK on the 14th Feb 2013, and in the USA on the 29th Jan 2013, according to Amazon. It seems to have gained a (probably provisional) blurb as well. 

Comment I made in an interview coming out next year, when asked about the comparisons critics have made between my work and Beckett's:

Who wouldn’t be flattered to be compared to Beckett? There are similarities indeed between my trilogy and Beckett’s Godot: both concern a pair of bantering frenemies, eternally wavering between hope and despair. But my novels are more fixed in a particular place and a time than Beckett’s fiction. They’re part of a postmodern age, an age of mass media, in a way that Beckett’s are not. My characters surf the ‘net and play computer games. They read gossip magazines and watch trash TV. These are not incidental details. My characters are very much on our side of the great mountain range of modernism.

I would make a similar claim with respect to the flattering comparisons which have been made between my work and Thomas Bernhard’s. My characters, unlike his, are engulfed in ‘low’ culture. They experience the distance between the contemporary world and the life of the mind much more acutely. The intellectual pursuits of W. and Lars are that much more absurd, that much more anachronistic, because they are undertaken in no supporting context whatsoever. Bernhard satirises Viennese high culture; but in Britain, there is no high culture to satirise. W. and Lars are almost alone in their interest in philosophers like Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen. The thinker-friends they admire are likewise entirely cut off from contemporary British life. There is pretty much no interest in Britain, academic or otherwise, in the figures W. and Lars venerate.

W. and Lars remind me of Roberto Bolaño’s quixotic characters in The Savage Detectives, who are dedicated to living a poetico-political life – the life of Rimbaud or the Surrealists, the life of the Beat Generation – in a world in which poetry and left-wing politics are utterly irrelevant, and apocalypse waits round the corner. The story I tell of the lost generation of former Essex postgraduates reminds me most of all of the diaspora of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists. W. and Lars are as quixotic, hopeful and deluded as Bolaño’s Robert Belano and Ulysses Lima, driving into the desert. But W. and Lars are not even part of a movement, as Bolaño’s characters were. They’re quite alone... As alone as Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, albeit in very different way.

(I'll post the full interview next year.)

One often thinks – and I myself often make this mistake – that everything one thinks can be written down. In reality one can only write down – that is, without doing something that is stupid & inappropriate – what arises in us in the form of writing.

Wittgenstein

If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself by resolving myself. But my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and still being tested. I am expounding a lowly, lacklustre existence.

Montaigne