Category Archives: Verbals

Links of the Week

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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 disappear quickly so download them promptly.

Gerhard Richter - 'The Reader.'

Gerhard Richter – ‘The Reader.’

Gerhard Richter is the top-selling living artist. This thrilling lecture/essay [PDF] takes two of Richter’s paintings (including The Reader) and examines them using as a framework Heidegger’s thesis that art should be understood as a discovery and disclosure of truth. “Things, scenes and persons depicted do not act for the spectator; rather, they act as if the spectator is not present.”

Chris Kraus’s intelligent, controversial I Love Dick narrates an infatuation with a fictional media theorist based, allegedly, on Dick Hebdige, whose 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style , [PDF]influenced by Julia Kristeva’s work, provides a semiotic reading of punk.

Reading Jacques Lacan can be worthwhile but hard work. This guide to Lacan is very useful, as is this Cambridge Companion [PDF] (Alenka Zupančič’s essay is particularly good).

In The Art of Fiction Henry James provides a practical, radical definition of the novel, arguing that the craft of writing cannot be taught and pouncing on the failings of philistine readers. Surprisingly relevant and amusing to read.

Do you know Borges’s short story, Of Exactitude in Science? It is a favourite, and short enough to quote:

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

I mention Borges’s story because I am always reminded of it by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulcra and Simulation [PDF] in which he argues that our models and maps have distanced us from the real world that preceded the models and maps:

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.

Paul Virilio’s The Information Bomb [PDF] packs a lot of power into less than 150 pages, a deeply pessimistic analysis of humanity’s relation to technology.


The legendary 1978 samizdat recording of Audience, starring Václav Havel (1936-2011) as Vanek and Pavel Landovský as Sládek.

The only way I can take Georges Bataille’s work seriously is to read it ironically. Like Björk, I read his Story of the Eye [PDF] when I was 17 years old.

I read Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life much more recently, and it is rare a day goes by that I don’t dip into the copy I keep on my desk.

The Erotic Dimension of Pedagogy

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As Bertram has shown in some splendid pages, we encounter the tradition of Socratic Eros and the educative daimon in Nietzsche. According to Bertram, the sayings sum up perfectly this erotic dimension of pedagogy. One is Nietzsche himself: “The deepest insights spring from love alone.” Another is by Goethe: “We learn only from those we love.” Finally, there is Hölderlin’s dictum: “Mortal man gives his best when he loves.” These three maxims go to show that it is only through reciprocal love that we can accede to genuine consciousness.

Pierre Hadot
The Figure of Socrates
Philosophy as a way of life

This Year’s Idées Fixes

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My reading orbits an accretion of preoccupations. So far, this year’s idées fixes are the influence of the East on Greco-Roman thought (and by extension, modern thought), Epicureanism, the neo-vitalist/transcendental materialist movement in contemporary philosophy, and asceticism. It may be that the interrelation between these themes are personal, but they appear deeply connected.

Following a question on Twitter I thought I’d compile a list of some of the texts that I’ve recently read and that I’ll be reading over the next few months. Please feel free to make further suggestions of titles that speak urgently to these concerns. These are all complementary to the Urtexts  of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Diogenes Laertius, and to this superb companion.

  • Jane Bennett – Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things [PDF]
  • Pierre Hadot – Philosophy as a way of life
  • Jane Bennett - The Enchantment of Modern Life
  • Pierre Hadot – The Present Alone is Our Happiness
  • Alexander Nehamas – The Art of Living
  • David Jasper – The Sacred Desert
  • Pierre Hadot – The Veil of Isis
  • Randall Collins – The Sociology of Philosophers
  • David Jasper – The Sacred Body
  • Pierre Hadot – What is Ancient Philosophy?

“Unclassfiable”

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By the time of the Platonic dialogues Socrates was called atopos, that is, “unclassifiable.” What makes him atopos is precisely the fact that he is a “philo-sopher” in the etymological sense of the word; that is, he is in love with wisdom. For wisdom, says Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, is not a human state, it is a state of perfection of being and knowledges that can only be divine. It is the love of wisdom, which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger in it.

Pierre Hadot
Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse
Philosophy as a way of life

Men dance on deathless feet

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Walter de la Mare, Bertha Georgie Yeats (née Hyde-Lees), William Butler Yeats, unknown woman by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Walter de la Mare, Bertha Georgie Yeats (née Hyde-Lees), William Butler Yeats, unknown woman by Lady Ottoline Morrell

William Butler Yeats’s fascination with mysticism and the occult is well documented, particularly the influence of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Yeats said, “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” WH Auden noted the, “deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.”

The Vedanta had a profound influence on Yeats, particularly evident in his prose work A Vision, a twenty year exercise of automatic writing. Through Theosophy Yeats met Mohini Chatterjee, writer of Man: Fragments of a Forgotten History:

Following the mystic idealists, we may divide the whole range of existence into different states of consciousness, with their appropriate objects or functions. According to these philosophers, existence is coextensive with consciousness; absolute unconsciousness is absolute negation. Now, it is within ordinary experience that consciousness manifests itself in three different states, namely, the consciousness of a man awake, the consciousness of a man dreaming, and the consciousness of one in a state of dreamless slumber. The first two states are recognized by all, the last requires a few words of explanation. It is true, in waking moments one has some conception of the dreaming consciousness, but none at all of the consciousness of dreamless slumber; its existence, nevertheless, is proved by the fact that the identity of the ego is never lost, and the beginning and conclusion of such slumber are strung together in consciousness. Had there been a cessation of all consciousness for one moment there is no conceivable reason for its reappearance. Besides these three states, all mystics hold, as no doubt is the case, that there is a fourth state of consciousness, which may be called transcendental consciousness. A glimpse of this state may be obtained in the abnormal condition of exstasis.

Later in his life, Yeats would bring Chatterjee to mind with the eponymous poem:

Chatterji, Mohini Mohun

Chatterji, Mohini Mohun

Mohini Chatterjee

I asked if I should pray.
But the Brahmin said,
‘pray for nothing, say
Every night in bed,
‘I have been a king,
I have been a slave,
Nor is there anything.
Fool, rascal, knave,
That I have not been,
And yet upon my breast
A myriad heads have lain.
That he might Set at rest
A boy’s turbulent days
Mohini Chatterjee
Spoke these, or words like these,
I add in commentary,
‘Old lovers yet may have
All that time denied –
Grave is heaped on grave
That they be satisfied –
Over the blackened earth
The old troops parade,
Birth is heaped on Birth
That such cannonade
May thunder time away,
Birth-hour and death-hour meet,
Or, as great sages say,
Men dance on deathless feet.’

Circumnavigation and Coetzee’s Foe.

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One mild summer in the late eighties, with limited resources and no compelling responsibilities, I set out to circumnavigate the 11,073 miles or about 17,820 kilometres that make up the coastline of Great Britain.

At the time my only foray outside of London and the south of the country had been on an aeroplane diverted to Birmingham airport due to fog at Heathrow. The single thrill of this inconvenience took place on the return train to London, en-route to boarding school, when my train passed through the small town of Leighton Buzzard. One of my favourite songs from a few years earlier had been Saturday Night (Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees)  sung by The Leyton Buzzards, who went on to greater renown as the pop group Modern Romance.

Provoked by a desire to see the country of my birth I walked a little, but mostly hitchhiked, following the coastal roads. This odyssey became the prototype of similar journeys from north to south, then east to west in Ireland, and across the top of North Africa.

On this trip around Great Britain I slept mostly in small harbour side inns, always with a sea view of sorts, but occasionally in bus stops, or sheltered by seaside groynes and, on one occasion, on a park bench. A touch clichéd, but I felt a wanderer’s imperative.

I discovered many things about the country and myself: Gregg’s bakeries sell different delicacies country-wide, discovering these regional specialities became a mission; people who picked me up from the side of the road for both long and short runs were mostly staggeringly kind and generous; it was rare to even see a car (and very, very windy), let alone hitch a lift on the eastern and northern coastal roads of Scotland. What I found in eastern Scotland, perhaps the highlight of a trip that was terrific and terrible in equal part, was the wind lashed village of Lower Largo, birthplace of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Statue of Alexander Selkirk in Lower Largo.

Statue of Alexander Selkirk in Lower Largo.

This afternoon I finished reading JM Coetzee’s Foe, which uses Defoe’s book as the metatextual framework to explore the ontological status of fictional characters, the nature of authority and language, all themes that Coetzee goes on to question in later novels. As always with Coetzee, as with Beckett, it is as though the writer published fully formed mature novels from the first instance. There is no sense of the writer having to develop their craft in full gaze of readers, as Zadie Smith has described.

A Stranger’s Embrace

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The Smile (1978) - Geta Bratescu

The Smile (1978) – Geta Bratescu

We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?

JM Coetzee
Foe

The (Fractious) Kinship Between the Human and the Nonhuman

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Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-9) – Cornelia Parker

Vital materiality better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. The crook of my elbow, for example, is a “special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. . . .They are helping to moisturise the skin by processing the raw fats it produces. . . .The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.” The its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibratory matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are “embodied.” We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them nested in a set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways.

Jane Bennett
Vibrant Matter

A World of Lively Matter

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Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) – Cornelia Parker

A second advantage hinges on the inflection of matter as vibrant, vital, energetic, lively, quivering, vibratory, evanescent, and efflorescent (to recall some modifiers I have used throughout the book). In a world of lively matter, we see that biochemical and biochemical-social systems can sometimes unexpectedly bifurcate or choose developmental paths that could not have been foreseen, for they are governed by an emergent rather than a linear or deterministic causality. And once we see this, we will need an alternative to the idea of nature as blind mechanism. A vital materialism interrupts both the teleological organisms of some ecologists and the machine image of nature governing many of their opponents.

Jane Bennett
Vibrant Matter

Not Knowing How to Look

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Bourdieu’s judgement, and that of all those who denounce the aesthetic illusion, rests on a simple alternative: you know or you do not [on connaît ou on méconnaît]. If you do not know [méconnaît], it is because you do not know [sait] how to look or you cannot look. But to not be able to look is still a way of not knowing how to look. Whether philosopher or petit-bourgeois, those who deny this, those who believe in the disinterested character of aesthetic judgement do not want to see because they cannot see, because the place that they occupy in the determined system, for them as for everyone else, constitutes a mode of accommodation which determines a form of misrecognition [méconnaissance].

Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). “Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge.” in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).