Deleuze is difficult, but I read his work like opaque poetry. There are good maps available for those who want to engage in what Deleuze called the “nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy.” I don’t read to understand, but understanding comes in the same rushes of lucidity that is common with enigmatic or oracular poetry.
Spinoza can also be difficult, and Deleuze on Spinoza no less so. My edition of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is translated by Robert Hurley, who offers up this wonderful introduction which I think encapsulates what I am trying to say in this post:
[..] one doesn’t have to follow up every proposition, make every connection-the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway. What if one accepted the invitation-come as you are-and read with a different attitude, which might be more like the way one attends to poetry? Then difficulty would not prevent the flashes of understanding that we anticipate in the poets that we love, difficult thought they may be. The truly extraordinary thing about Deleuze is precisely the quality of love that his philosophy expresses; it is active in everything he has written.
This quality of love is also precisely what compels me about Spinoza’s philosophy.
Of Spinoza, Hegel professed boldly, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” and “It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.”
The meticulous Baruch Spinoza has always fascinated me, as much for his modest life as a lens grinder as for his unswerving commitment to philosophy as a transformation of one’s way of living. Like the Stoics, Spinoza believed that philosophy had a curative role by teaching people how to attain happiness, though he differed markedly from the Stoics in rejecting that reason could overcome emotion.
Spinoza’s influence has strayed widely beyond the realms of philosophy and political theory. Borges was deeply influenced by Spinoza’s work. He also wrote the following poem (translated by Richard Howard, César Rennert):
The Jew’s hands, translucent in the dusk,
polish the lenses time and again.
The dying afternoon is fear, is
cold, and all afternoons are the same.
The hands and the hyacinth-blue air
that whitens at the Ghetto edges
do not quite exist for this silent
man who conjures up a clear labyrinth—
undisturbed by fame, that reflection
of dreams in the dream of another
mirror, nor by maidens’ timid love.
Free of metaphor and myth, he grinds
a stubborn crystal: the infinite
map of the One who is all His stars.
At the end of the Ethics, Spinoza wrote
If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. It must indeed be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were easy to find, and could without great labour be found, that it should be neglected by almost everybody? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.
Myths and tales of crows are as old as language. For thousands of years they have been feared, revered and seen as portents of good and bad luck. In Greek mythology, the once white crow is turned dark by Apollo’s glare. Ted Hughes tells a version of this myth in his poem Crows Fall:
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
“Up there,” he managed,
“Where white is black and black is white, I won.”
The collective noun for multiple crows is a murder, inspired perhaps by their dark plumage, haunting calls and tendency to eat carrion. There are tales of flocks of crows holding trials and executing fellow crows for bad behaviour. Long considered folklore, such gatherings have now been witnessed. In Sweden these trials are called “kråkriksdag,” roughly translated as “crow’s parliament” with as many tales of crows acquitted as found guilty and torn apart.
A crow was found guilty in my back garden this week. From the kitchen I could hear a tumult of coarse caws. From the window I saw three trees filled with crows, maybe forty or fifty in total. Some circled, others darted down to attack a single crow which, for a while, stood its ground, surrounded by another dozen crows. The noise was overwhelming. I looked away for a moment, distracted by the telephone. When I returned my gaze the bird lay prostrate, wings spread wide on the ground. I thought it dead and opened the door onto the garden. The crows flew into the trees, still making their coarse calls. As I walked toward the spreadeagled jackdaw, it rose to its feet (do crows have crows feet?) and hopped circumspectly into the nearby hedge. The crows, after a while, dispersed. I looked into the hedge but could see no sign of the bird.
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter. Some of the links to PDFs change or disappear, so if something interests you download it quickly.
Critical Thinkers guide to Maurice Blanchot [PDF]. Blanchot’s own texts should come first, but can be a little opaque. Ullrich Haase and William Large’s introductory book is the finest secondary initiation to Blanchot. The Further Reading section is particularly superb.
Critical Thinkers Guide to Gilles Deleuze [PDF]. Clare Colebrooke is the definitive Deleuzean scholar, with at least six books devoted to Deleuze. This introductory book is the ideal introduction to Deleuzean vocabulary and concepts. As always with these little guides the Further Reading section is invaluable.
Alma Mahler
Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters [PDF] by Alma Mahler, who wrote two books. The second And the Bridge Is Love about the later years in her life is also worth seeking out. Neither are known for their accuracy, and Basil Creighton’s translation is notably idiosyncratic. They nevertheless are fascinating, but read as fiction.
Hal Foster’s (Foster edited the seminal The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture) review of Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord.
Margaret Atwood’s The Female Body confronts how women and men perceive the female body [PDF].
Studying the work of controversial Derrida disciple, Paul de Man, is another way to think about deconstruction and critical misreading. Literary theorist Martin McQuillan’s Critical Thinkers guide to Paul de Man [PDF] is lucid and honest. McQuillan’s Paul de Man Notebooks, an anthology from the de Man archive is due out early next year.
Plato and Aristotle, a fragment from Raphael’s The School of Athens
These days I consider myself more Aristotelian than Platonist, but I’ve read Plato’s dialogues with huge interest for years, and it still stuns me how close we are to the ancients. Socrates was in many ways truly the first modern man. Trying to get hold of all Plato’s dialogues online is tedious, so this collection of all Plato’s works in a single volume [PDF] is immensely convenient.
Psychoanalytic Filiations, an essay by Austrian psychologist Ernst Falzeder reviews the psychoanalytic family tree, and traces back the leading concepts to the Hungarian Sándor Ferenczi and the Viennese Otto Rosenfeld (Rank).
Towards the end of this piece of film, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller are together on screen, a rare occasion:
A word can sometimes snag and spend you spinning through a chain of associations. Listening to The Mills Brothers’ recording of Cole Porter’s Miss Otis Regrets (recorded most memorably by Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues) led to The Mills Brothers’ sentimental song Be My Life’s Companion, a song that bafflingly chokes me momentarily with its saccharine lyrics. Written by Bob Hilliard, lyricist for the film score of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the song has been recorded by diverse artists including Louis Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney.
It is the word “companion” that snags, not in common usage these days. Old women sometimes have “lady’s companions,” slightly less elderly women that help and live with them. It is also less often used as a euphemism for a courtesan, not a prostitute but described in the urban dictionary as “a cross between the oriental-style Geisha and the classic courtesan of renaissance Italy.”
Curiosity about the word’s derivation sent me to my battered twelve-year old Chambers’ Dictionary of Etymology. Emerson wrote, “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” I was pleased to see that the word, originally “companioun,” came into the English language from pre-1300 romantic poem, Arthour and Merline: A Metrical Romance.
Derived from Old French “compagnon” fellow, mate, friend, partner and from Late Latin “companionem,” the word literally means one who takes bread with someone, the Latin ”com”-together and “panis”-bread. We use the term “breaking bread” as a metaphor for having a meal together.
In Latin “breaking bread” is “fractio panis,” the name given to a fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, which depicts six men and a woman, traditionally interpreted as the chalice of benediction, blessing and breaking of the bread. Art historian Dorothy Irvin interprets the fresco as archaeological evidence that women presided over the Eucharist in the early Christian churches.
In Japan, “kagami biraki” is a traditional ceremony translating as “breaking of the mochi” or “opening the mirror,” a 300 year old ceremony usually conducted at weddings and other significant events. The ceremony involves breaking open a mochi (soft round rice cake) or a saké barrel as a symbol of harmony and good fortune.
Some would perhaps call Pierre Bourdieu more of an anti-philosopher than a philosopher. I want to claim that Bourdieu was a philosopher, and stress Bourdieu's role within philosophy. It is true that Bourdieu strongly criticized academic philosophy, but Bourdieu also associated himself with and found inspiration from canonized philosophers of both older and newer times, such as Pascal, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Foucault.
The bird surfed its slack branch, its feathers a perfect even blue like it had been powder-coated at the factory. I thought of Pat Nixon, her gleaming dark eyes and ceremonial outfits stiff with laundry starch and beading. Hair dyed the color of whiskey and whipped into an unmoving wave. The bird tested out a short whistle, a lonely midday sound lost in the infinite stretch of irrigation wheels across the highway. Pat Nixon was from Nevada, like me, and like the prim little state bird, so blue against the day. She was a ratted beauty-parlor tough who became first lady. Now we would likely have Rosalynne Carter with her glassy voice and her big blunt friendly face, glowing with charity. It was Pat who moved me. People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.
There are several reviews around of Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell ranging from bizarre to intriguing. Each offers an idiosyncratic reading that reveals as much about the reviewer as about the book. As Rumi said, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it.” The Unmastered effect is insidious. What begins as an energetically explicit sexual autobiography subverts itself to become tragic, though this may just be its curious mirror-like effect. The aphoristic style and generosity of white-space in the UK edition invites projection, so perhaps it says more about me than Angel’s beautiful and thought-provoking book that I saw more tragedy than sex.
I’ve written before of my interest in philosophy in its Greek context as a way to live life, rather than as empty discourse. Though I found much that was insightful in Alexander Nehamas’ The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, I took less from it than from Hadot’s Philosophy as a way of life. Nehamas writes highly perceptively about Plato, Nietzsche, less convincingly about Kierkegaard and Foucault, but gets bogged down occasionally in nuances of definition. Nevertheless it is an engaging and lucid work that complements Hadot superbly.
On to Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers if I can get beyond dispiriting blurbage from bloody Franzen and Colm Tóibín (“American novel”).
