Lars Iyer's Blog, page 48

Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To op...

Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To open it through prose’, as Dante puts it), and the critic was also a poet. Now, the critic has lost access to the work of creation and thus gets revenge by presuming to judge it, while the poet no longer knows how to save his own work and thus discounts this incapacity by blindly consigning himself to the frivolity of an angel. 

Agamben, Nudities

One day humanity will play with law just as children play...

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.

Agamben, State of Exception

What had happened [with the appearance of consciousness -...

What had happened [with the appearance of consciousness - LI]? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily - by spirit made almighty without, but equally menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged weapon cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his votal processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

Peter Zappfe, from 'The Last Messiah'

Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what o...

Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species will still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That our lives might be a paradox and a horror would not really be a secret too terrible to know for minds that know only what they want to know. The hell of human consciousness is only a philosopher's bedtime story we can hear each night and forget each morning when we awake to go to school or to work or wherever we may go day after day after day. What do we care about the horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die ... the horror of shadows without selves enshrouding the earth ... ort he horror of puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons?

[...] Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our very existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, 'The stopwatch has started'. The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of to take care of.

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

While consciousness brought us out of our coma in the ant...

While consciousness brought us out of our coma in the antural, we still like to think that, however aloof we are from other living things, we are not in essence wholly alienated from them. We do try and fit in with the rest of creation, living and breeding like any other animal or vegetable. It is no fault of ours that we were made as we were made - experiments in a parallel being. This was not our choice. We did not volunteer to be as we are.

[...] No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural [...] Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

[...] We are aberrations - beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once ... uncanny things that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts.

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Death - do we really believe it is part of the order of o...

Death - do we really believe it is part of the order of our lives? We say that we do. But when it becomes lucent to our imagination, how natural does it feel? W. A. Mozart's attributed last words are apropros here: 'The taste of death is on my tongue. I feel something which is not of this world'. Death is not like survival and procreation. it is more like a visitation from a foreign and engimatic sphere, one to which we are connected by our consciousness. No consciousness, no death. No death, no stories with a beginning, middle and an end. 

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the ina...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the mdist of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft, opening paragraph of 'Call of Cthulhu'

Fairly new interview with me at Biblioklept.

Fairly new interview with me at Biblioklept.

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of ...

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak).What Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it. A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do.

Mark Fisher, 'Good for Nothing', at Occupied Times

[...] I confess that more and more suicide loses its sinf...

[...] I confess that more and more suicide loses its sinfulness to me. Killing oneself can be courageous; not killing oneself, because you wish to lose nothing, even the worst that life has to off, can also be courageous. Since I live near the Seine, I have seen many people jump into the river in front of my windows.

[...] the more life is what it is - ordinary, simple - without pronouncing the word 'God', the more I see the presence of God in that. I don't know how to explain that.

[...] For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible - not even possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear. You want anything to stop your life. [...] But this way of wanting to die is many things: it is a disgust with life, with people around you, with living only for money. To see everything which is good to lvie for disappear, when you see that you cannot fall into love with people, not only with a woman, but all the people around you, you find yourself alone with people. I can imagine living in disgust with so many things which are against you around you, and then you feel like suicide.

[...] I think in the whole world things are going very badly. People are becoming more and more materialistic and cruel, but cruel in another way than in the Middle Ages. Cruel by laziness, by indifference, egotism, because they think only about themselves and not at all about what is happening around them, so that they let everything  grow ugly, stupid. They are all interested in money only. Money is becoming their God. God doesn't exist anymore for many. Money is becoming something you must live for. You know, even your astronauts, the first one who put his foot on the moon, said that when he saw our earth, he said it is something so miraculous, so marvellous, don't spoil it, don't touch it. More deeply I feel the rotten way they are spoiling the earth. All the countries. Silence doesn't exist any more; you can't find it. That, for me, would make it impossible to live. The way this young person [in The Devil, Probably] wants to die - he doesn't kill himself, himself - he makes himself be killed. The old Robin Hood people used to commit suicide with the help of friends. He kills himself for a big purpose.

[...] Vigour comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.

Robert Bresson, interviewed [He's speaking in English, except in the last paragraph.]