Lars Iyer's Blog, page 47

Dogma now out in Turkish translation.

Dogma now out in Turkish translation.

New interview with me by David Lea at the London Review o...

New interview with me by David Lea at the London Review of Books blog.

Wittgenstein Jr is not out until 4th September, but it's ...

Wittgenstein Jr is not out until 4th September, but it's available now from Melville House.

Starred review for Wittgenstein Jr at Publishers Weekly.

Starred review for Wittgenstein Jr at Publishers Weekly.

First review of Wittgenstein Jr, at Kirkus Reviews.

First review of Wittgenstein Jr, at Kirkus Reviews.

London launch for Wittgenstein Jr, with Ray Monk, London ...

London launch for Wittgenstein Jr, with Ray Monk, London Review Bookshop, 28th August, 7PM. Book tickets and more details here.

Wittgenstein Jr on The Millions' Most Anticipated list.

Wittgenstein Jr on The Millions' Most Anticipated list.

New interview with me at The Honest Ulsterman.

New interview with me at The Honest Ulsterman.

... despite antennae exceedingly alert to the changing 's...

... despite antennae exceedingly alert to the changing 'spirit of the age', I apprehended too late certain key shifts. Aware, early on, of the widening authority of the mathematical and experimental sciences, intensely involved in the 'language-revolution' and the coming of the new media of meaning, I none the less did not identify rigorously the underlying tectonic drift. Educated in a hypertrophied reverence for the classics, in that near-worship of the 'titans' of thought, music, literature and the arts, so characteristic of emancipated central European Judaism, I felt committed to the canonic, the confirmed and the 'immortal' (those immortels mummified in the French Academy!). It took too long before I understood that the ephemeral, the fragmentary, the derisive, the self-ironising are the key modes of modernity; before I realised that the interactions between high and popular culture, notably via the film and television - now the commanding instruments of general sensibility and, it may be, of invention - had largely replaced the monumental pantheon. Influential as they are, deconstruction and postmodernism are themselves only symptoms, bright bubbles at the surface of a much deeper mutation. It is, as I have suggested, of the related classical impulse in art and poetry to endure, to achieve timelessness which are, today, in radical question. It is the transformation of these ontological-historical categories, in Kant's sense of the word, it is the ebbing of ideals and performative hierarchies instrumental since the pre-Socratics, which define what I have called 'the epilogue' but which others acclaim as 'the new age'. There is too much I have grasped too late in the day. Too often my activity as a writer and teacher, as a critic and scholar, has been, consciously or not, an in memoriam, a curatorship of remembrance. But could it be otherwise after the Shoah.

George Steiner, Errata

If I were to resume in a single phrase the difference bet...

If I were to resume in a single phrase the difference between messianic time and apocalyptic time, I would say that the messianic is not the end of time but the time of the end. What is messianic is not the end of time but the relation of every moment, every kairos, to the end of time and to eternity.

[…] In the Judaic tradition there is a distinction between two times and two worlds: the olam hazzeh, the time stretching from the creation of the world to its end, and the olam habba, the time that begins after the end of time. Both terms are present, in their Greek translations, in Paul’s Letters. Messianic time, however – the time in which the apostle lives and the only one that interests him – is neither that of the olam hazzeh nor that of the olam habba. It is, instead, the time between those two times, when time is divided by the messianic event (which is for Paul the Resurrection).

… what is at issue is a time that pulses and moves within chronological time, that transforms chronological time from within. On the one hand it is the time that time takes to end. But on the other hand it is the time that remains, the time which we need to end time, to confront our customary image of time and to liberate ourselves from it. In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, we grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have. 

Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom