Lars Iyer's Blog, page 50

Wittgenstein Jr, my new novel, will be published on Septe...

Wittgenstein Jr, my new novel, will be published on September 2nd this year.

I feature on this episode of KCRW's The Organist, intervi...

I feature on this episode of KCRW's The Organist, interviewed by Ross Simonini.

Merritt Mosely reviews Spurious, Dogma and Exodus at The Fortnightly.

Colin Dickey chooses Spurious, Dogma and Exodus as his favourite novels of 2013.

One counsel: when you see an open door, newspaper, radio ...

One counsel: when you see an open door, newspaper, radio studio, cinema, bank, anything—don't enter. By the time you're thirty you'll be nuts because you left your laugh at the door. That's my experience. Poetry is in the street. It goes arm in arm with laughter. They take each other along for a drink, at the source, in the neighborhood bistros, where the laugh of the people is so flavorsome and the language that flows from their lips so beautiful.

Blaise Cendars, interviewed

Prior to making The Turin Horse with Béla I wrote a book ...

Prior to making The Turin Horse with Béla I wrote a book called Animalinside, and in this Animalinside there is a sentence, a picture that was very important for The Turin Horse, mainly there is a cage, which is so small that actually the cage is your skin. This is the case in The Turin Horse. In a big space there’s a cage, which is absolutely the same as your skin. That means your fate—the border of your fate—is your skin, and you haven’t a hope of finding a way out of this cage, of your skin, of your fate. This big space is not for you, this is nothing for you, this is only a possibility, which is not for you, it doesn’t exist for you. There is this big space, there is a big created world, but not for you because you gambled everything, you gambled and every possibility which you had you’ve lost, everything you’ve lost and you are now absolutely alone, and the last judgment will come, not tomorrow, the last judgment was yesterday, and you are living now after the last judgment, in your last judgment.

[...] When you want to convince somebody about something, if you speak in a way, in that way, you use only long sentences, almost always just one sentence, because you didn’t need this dot, this is not natural if you speak in this way, if I want to convince you about something, that the world is such and such, then it’s a natural process for the sentences to become always longer and longer because I needed less and less the dot, this artificial border between sentences, because I didn’t use, I don’t use, now, for example, I don’t use dots, I use only pauses, and these are commas, this is not my usual tone because I try, especially in English because of my poor English, to make pauses, and that’s why my tone goes a little bit down, but it is not a dot, what I found there, it is a comma, and in The Melancholy of Resistance, I tried again to write this perfect book, and my sentences became always a little bit more beautiful, although the content, my message, couldn’t change after Sátántangó, after my experience in life, but language did change and became more and more beautiful because the beauty in the language became always more important, so I reached a level, a point, I don’t know, perhaps in Seiobo There Below, perhaps in this book I’ve reached my maximum of this desire for beauty in the sentences.

[...]

MJC: In both El Ultimo Lobo and War & War the protagonists direct their monologues to someone who isn’t listening. There’s a disconnect between the protagonists’ altered state of wanting to say something—to be heard—and their listeners who do not listen.

LK:  Because I don’t believe in dialogue. I believe only in monologues. And I believe only in the man who listens to the monologue, and I believe I can be the man who listens to your monologue the next time around. I believe only in monologues in the human world. The dialogues, in American prose, after the Second World War, to be honest, the best dialogue writers are here in the USA, but dialogue doesn’t work for me because I don’t believe in dialogues.

[...]

MJC: A lot of connections have been made here in the United States between your work and Thomas Bernhard’s. Do you feel an affinity with Bernhard? Is there a connection?

LK: He made a very deep impression, of course. My first reading of Frost, for example, and The Lime Works, these two novels were a very big experience for me. But this is Thomas Bernhard. There is a big difference between us, because I am not sentimental. Bernhard, despite everything, was sentimental. He was a big believer in greatness. That’s why he was so cynical. Because he admired the great intellectuals, he was a big admirer of art. I am not. I am an observer. That’s a big difference.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

According to Cameron’s stated worldview, the ability to ‘...

According to Cameron’s stated worldview, the ability to ‘believe in yourself ’, and by extension, your child, is primary. This is a discourse which vests not only power but also moral virtue in the very act of hope, in the mental and emotional capacity to believe and aspire. Hope and promise become more integral in an unequal society in which hard work alone has less and less chance of reaping the prizes. Through this rhetorical mechanism, instead of addressing social inequality as a solvable problem, the act of addressing inequality becomes ‘responsibilised’ as an individual’s moral meritocratic task. This process devolves onto the individual personal responsibility not just for their success in the meritocratic competition, but for the very will to compete and expectation of victory which are now figured as moral imperatives in themselves. Not investing in aspiration, in expectation, is aggressively positioned as an abdication of responsibility which condemns yourself - and even worse, your child - to the social scrapheap. [...]

Here, social disadvantage is only ‘real’ in that it is an obstacle over which pure mental will and aspiration - if they are expressed correctly by being combined with hard work - can triumph. These tropes and discursive elements generate an affective mode which Lauren Berlant aptly identifies as ‘cruel optimism’. This is the affective state produced under neoliberal culture which is cruel because it encourages an optimistic attachment to the idea of a brighter future whilst such attachments are, simultaneously, ‘actively impeded’ by the harsh precarities and instabilities of neoliberalism. If ‘Aspiration Nation’ is related to such ‘cruel optimism’, it also draws on the English trope of ‘having a go’, which involves a sort of non-competitive competitiveness, of being prepared to compete without any expectation of winning, out of a recognition that sporting competition is a mode of social participation; although the difference is that in the Aspiration Nation you can’t just do your best: you have to want to win.

Jo Littler, Meritocracy as Plutocracy, New Formations

The more refined the more unhappy.Life does not agree w...

The more refined the more unhappy.

Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.

Chekhov, notebooks (via)

Barely half a century after the death of the philosopher,...

Barely half a century after the death of the philosopher, the name Ludwig Wittgenstein - like that of Martin Heidegger - is part of the intellectual mythos of the twentieth century. Even if Vico's distinction between civil and monastic philosophy seemed to have become obsolete ever since the French Revolution, one is inclined to reactivate this distinction for Wittgenstein's sake. How else could one interpret the emergence of the phenomenon that was Wittgenstein in the midst of an age of political philosophies and warring illusions than as the renewed eruption of thinking in the mode of eremetic aloofness from the world? Part of the still luminescent enchantment of Wittgenstein's work and the standoffish nimbus of his life is the unexpected return of the monastic element in the moral centre of bourgeois culture. More so than virtually anyone else he attests to the moral secession of an intellectual elite from the totality of mediocre conditions.

The human being as something to be transcended: that conviction was present in the elect of the educated class in Vienna before the Great War not only in its Nietzschean guise and as a philosophy of life: it asserted itself also in the forms of a bourgeois cult of he saint, at the centre of which stood the figure of the artistic and philosophical genius. It was the responsibility of that figure to offer salvation from ambiguities and mediocrity; it was his task to show an implacably demanding youth the path fromt he depths of shameful commonness to the lofty heights of transfigurative callings. grandeur became a duty for genius, self-transcendence the minimum condition of existence. For the young Wittgenstein this meant: the human being is a rope that is strung between the animal and the logician. 

The story of Wittgenstein's life and thought is the passion of an intellect that sought to explain its place in the world and at its boundaries. What the contemporary world of the philosopher perceived as his rigid and demanding aura was the high tension of a man who required constant concentration on his ordering principles so as not to lose his mind. As one dwelling on the borderline of Being, the philosopher is never concerned with anything less than the block of the world as a whole, even when he is merely pondering the correct use of a word in a sentence. He feels as though the world along with all its order could get lost in the space between two sentences. And so, thinking becomes for him a way of navigating between islands of formal clarity that lie scatterd in the vastness of unclarity. In fact, Wittgenstein is a thinker who left behind a work of individual sentences. It was his unprecedented need for precision that would make him into a martyr of incoherence. He himself was painfully aware that he was suffering from a kind of Lord Chandos neurosis - a disorder of the ability to assert coherences of the world through words, and to believe in these claimed coherences. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein failed to meet the challenge of composing a 'real' text in the sense of continuous speech. He felt, more keenly than any other thinker before him, the difficulties of conjunctions or causal linkages, and no problem preoccupied him more profoundly all his life than the impossibility of moving from the description of facts to ethical precepts. His notes are the monument of an overly brilliant hesitation to create the world in a cohesive text. In their radical modernity, his writings attest to the disintegration of the analogy between the round cosmos and fluid prose. But precisely where Wittgenstein was no longer capable of being a proposition-happy philosopher of systems and totality in the traditional style, he was virtually predestined to lift the pathwork of local life games and their rules into the light. There was a good reason why his theory of language games became one of the most potent arguments of modern and postmodern pluralism.

Looking back today over the waves of Wittgenstein's reception, one can say at least this much about the historical importance of this peculiar Viennese character who ended up in the British world of scholars: he inoculated the Anglo-American world with the madness of ontological difference by exhorting the precritical empiricist to wonder, not at how the world is, but that it is. At the same time, he infected continental philosophy with a new idea of precise style, which brought forth flourishing outgrowths in the milieu of the analytic school. It would appear that both parties are by now in the process of getting over the phase of the initial immune responses. Ever since Alan Janik and Steven Toulmin's classic study Wittgenstein's Vienna, the stage seems set for a healthy engagement with the magical hermit. Who could still invoke Witttgenstein only to elect him the patron saint of old mind games? Who could still denounce him as the positivistic destroyer of the Western culture of reflection? After the waning of the reactive distortions, what emerges is the profile of a thinker who will undoubtedly be counted among the godparents of the intelligence of the future. Even in its logical severities and human one-sidedness, Wittgenstein's intensity holds gifts of incalculable import for posterity. It attests for all those who awaken to thinking after him that ethical questions must become more difficult. Should it ever be possible to write a critique of martyrological or witness-bearing reason - and thus a valid ethics - a decisive chapter would have to be devoted to the man Wittgenstein. He is among those flayed alive , who knows more than others what decency under stress means. among his work, what was written and what was kept quiet, one must count the admirable exertion to have endured himself and his own 'wonderful' life. 

Sloterdijk, Philosophical Temperaments

According to the theologians of the Vedic era, the gods, ...

According to the theologians of the Vedic era, the gods, like the demons, are born from sacrifice. It is thanks to it that they have ascended to the heavens, in the same way as the one who carries out a sacrifice still does. They gather around the sacrifice; they are the product of the sacrifice that they share among themselves, and it is this distribution that determines the way in which they share the world. Moreover, sacrifice is not only the author of the gods. It is a god itself, or, rather, the god par excellence. It is the master, the indeterminate, infinite god, the spirit from which everything proceeds, that ceaselessly dies and is reborn.

Sylvian Levi, from a nineteenth century text cited by Agamben

John Williams (New York Times) on Exodus, at NY1.

John Williams (New York Times) on Exodus, at NY1. 

Exodus recommended in The Skinny.

Exodus recommended in The Skinny.