Hearing Barthes Out

"Guy Scarpetta, having visited Barthes's seminar, recorded this impression: 'I was at once struck by the marked contrast between his words and his voice. Albeit the content of his discourse was abstract, semiological, 'scientific,' the voice itself never ceased being eroticized: warm, deep, slow-paced, cajoling, velvety, modulated (Casals playing Bach on the cello): it was with his voice that he would cruise. I immediately sensed that most of his auditors, male and female, so intensely submitted to the charm (the 'obtuse meaning') of this voice that they ended by savoring it for itself, almost independently of what it said. A kind of 'extra,' this voice grazed them, disturbed them, enveloped them, seduced them--to the point of excitation pure and simple.'" (26-27)

From a footnote in D.A. Miller's Bringing Out Roland Barthes (UC Press, 1992).

Book Lust #3

Book #1: George Bataille: An Intellectual Biography

Description from Verso Books:

"In this acclaimed intellectual biography Michel Surya enters into a complicity with Bataille’s oeuvre to provide a detailed exposition of its themes as they developed against the backdrop of his life. The essence of Bataille’s life and work were defined by transience and effacement, reflecting a will both to contest the impermanence of things and to confront death. His troubled childhood, his relationships with surrealism and his paradoxical position at the heart of twentieth-century French thought are enriched here with testimonies from Bataille’s closest acquaintances, making this a vivid and detailed study. Revealing the contexts in which he worked, and the ways in which his work and ideas took shape, Surya sheds essential light on a figure Foucault described as 'one of the most important writers of the century.'"

Book #2: Jean-Luc Nancy's The Fall of Sleep

Description from Fordham UP:

"Philosophers have largely ignored sleep, treating it as a useless negativity, mere repose for the body or at best a source for the production of unconscious signs out of the night of the soul.

In an extraordinary theoretical investigation written with lyric intensity, The Fall of Sleep puts an end to this neglect by providing a deft yet rigorous philosophy of sleep. What does it mean to 'fall' asleep? Might there exist something like a 'reason' of sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking 'self' that distinguishes 'I' from 'you' and from the world? What reason might exist in that absence of ego, appearance, and intention, in an abandon thanks to which one is emptied out into a non-place shared by everyone?"

Book #3: Jacques Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1

Description from U of Chicago Press:

"The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable 'The Wolf and the Lamb,' Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem 'Snake,' Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.

Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal."

Perplexing Species

But where is the 50 page introduction on the web? It's missing y'all! 

Hopscotching to History

"When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God's will be done, I said. I'm going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought that he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Perez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published The White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell's estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women's Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then early half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last. I got up and looked out the window: Peace and quiet. The sky was blue, a deep, clean blue, with a few scattered clouds. I saw a helicopter in the distance. Leaving the window open, I knelt and prayed, for Chile, for all Chileans, the living and the dead. Then I rang Farewell. How are you feeling? I asked him. I'm dancing a jig, he said. The following days were strange. It was as if until then we had all been dreaming and had suddenly woken to real life, although occasionally it seemed to be the other way around, as if we had all been plunged into a dream. And we went on living day by day in accordance with the abnormal conventions of the dream-world: anything can happen and whatever happens the dreamer accepts it. Movements work differently. We move like gazelles or the way gazelles move in a tiger's dream. We move like a painting by Vassarely. We move as if we had no shadows and were unperturbed by that appalling fact. We speak. We eat. But underneath we are not trying not to realize that we are speaking and eating." (81-83)

From Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile [trans. by Chris Andrews] (New Directions, 2003). [Originally published in Spanish in 2000.]

Ruined Books

"...But first I should say a word about Raoul Delorme and the sect known as 'the barbaric writer.'

Born in 1935, Raoul Delorme began his working life as a soldier, then sold produce in a wholesale market, before becoming a caretaker in central Paris, a job better suited to someone suffering, as he did, from slight damage to the vertebrae, a souvenir of his time in the Foreign Legion. In 1968, while the students were building barricades and the rising generation of French novelists were putting bricks through the windows of their schools or losing their virginity, he decided to found the sect or movement called 'the barbaric writer.' While intellectuals were taking to the streets, the ex-legionnaire shut himself up in his tiny caretaker's flat in the Rue des Eaux and began to hatch a new kind of writing. The apprenticeship consisted of two apparently simple steps: seclusion and reading. In order to take the first step, one had to purchase provisions sufficient for a week, or go hungry. To avoid inopportune visits, it was also necessary to make it clear that one was not to be disturbed for any reason, or pretend to be away travelling for a week or to have contracted a contagious disease. The second step was more complicated. According to Delorme, one had to commune with the master works. Communion was achieved in a singularly odd fashion: by defecating on the pages of Stendhal, blowing one's nose on the pages of Victor Hugo, masturbating and spreading one's semen over the pages of Gautier or Banville, vomiting onto the pages of Daudet, urinating on the pages of Lamartine, cutting oneself with a razor blade and spattering blood over the pages of Balzac or Maupassant, in short, submitting the books to a process of degradation which Delorme called 'humanization.' A week of these 'barbaric' rituals resulted in a flat or room full of filth, stench and ruined books, with the apprentice writer wallowing in the mess, naked or in underwear, drivelling and wriggling like a new-born baby, or, other like the pioneering fish that had decided to make the break and live out of water. The barbaric writer, said Delorme, emerged from this experience with a new inner strength, and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of the art of writing, a wisdom acquired through what he called 'real familiarity' with and 'real assimilation' of the classics, a physical familiarity that broke all the barriers imposed by culture, the academy and technology." (130-132)

From Roberto Bolano's Distant Star [trans. by Chris Andrews] (New Directions, 2004). [Originally published in Spanish in 1996.]

Use Your Illusions

From Alain Badiou's Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy [trans. by David Macey] (Verso, 2009). [Originally published in France in 2008 as Petit pantheon portatif.]

"If philosophy serves any purpose, it is to take away the chalice of sad passions and to teach us that pity is not a loyal affect, that our plaints do not mean that we are right, and that victimhood is not the starting point for thought. On the one hand, and as Plato teaches us once and for all, licit passions and all creations with a universal intent originate in Truth, which, if need be, can go by the name of Beauty or the Good. On the other hand, as Rousseau knew, the human animal is essentially good, and when it is not, that is because some external cause forces it to be evil, and that cause must be detected, rooted out and destroyed as quickly as possible and without the least hesitation.

Those who claim that the human animal is wicked simply want to tame it and turn it into a morose wage-earner or depressed consumer who helps capital to circulate. Given their ability to create eternal truths in various worlds, men have within them the angel that religions saw as their double. That is what philosophy, in the true sense of the word, has always taught us. Before that inner angel can manifest its presence, it must have a principle or maxim, and ultimately it is always the same, even though it can take a wide variety of forms. Let us choose Mao's: 'Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.' Hold to the truth, cast away illusions, and fight rather than surrender, whatever the circumstances. In my view, there is only one true philosophy, and the philosophies of the fourteen* whose names find shelter in my little pantheon would not want anything more.

The trouble is that, nowadays, the word 'philosophy' is used in an attempt to force upon us quite the opposite maxim, which might read: 'Cling to your illusions, prepare to surrender.' We have seen 'philosophy' appearing in magazines that looks like vegetable-based natural medicine, or euthanasia for enthusiasts. Philosophizing would appear to be a small part of a vast programme: keep fit and be efficient, but stay cool. We have seen 'philosophers' declaring that, as the Good is inaccessible if not criminal, we should be content to fight every inch of the way against various forms of Evil, whose common name proves, on closer inspection, to be 'communism', when it is not 'Arab' or 'Islam'. And so we revive 'values' that philosophy has always helped us to get rid of: obedience (to commercial contracts), modesty (in the face of the arrogance of the ham actor on TV), realism (we must have profits and inequalities), utter selfishness (now known as 'modern individualism'), colonial superiority (the democratic goodies of the West versus the despotic baddies of the South), hostility to living thought (all opinions have to be taken into account), the cult of numbers (the majority is always right), obtuse millenarianism (the planet is getting hotter under my very feet), empty religion (there must be Something), and I could go on. So many 'philosophers' and 'philosophies' do nothing to stop this, and instead wear themselves out trying to infect us with little articles, debates, blazing headlines ('The Ethics of Stock Options: Philosophers Speak Out At Last') and boisterous roundtable discussions ('Philosophers: the G-string or the Veil?). This permanent prostitution of the words 'philosopher' and 'philosophy' (and it should be recalled that Deleuze denounced it from the very beginning), and the media operation that gave birth to the trademark 'new philosophies', will get you down in the long run. At the rate things are going, it is not just cafes that will be described as 'philosophical' (these cafes philosphiques really are a wretched invention, and the natural heirs to the cafe du commerce where all that bar room philosophizing used to go on.) We will end up going, in all our pomp, to the philosophical outhouse." (viii-x)

*Jacques Lacan, Georges Canguilehm, Jean Cavailles, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Borreil, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gilles Chatelet, & Francoise Proust.

Art of the Times

From the current issue of October (Spring 2009). Readers are encouraged to send their responses to octoberanswers@gmail.com. Pretty sure by responses, they may also mean images. Take a stab at it, guys.

"Recessional Aesthetics?

1) What will the effects of the recession be on the social role of the artist?

2) Is the art museum of the neoliberal era sustainable?

3) Might art biennials (and related exhibitions) wither away?

4) How will art schools adapt? 

5) How might art criticism become relevant again?

6) Does the art world bear any responsibility for the economic downturn?

7) Whether the Obama stimulus package represents a break in the neoliberal regime, or simply a neo-Keynesian moment of public spending, might it reawaken a sense of common stake that might be extended, indeed on, in other spheres like the artistic and the cultural?

8) Are the historical examples of socioeconomic crisis that might guide art-world responses to the current one?"