Dry cannellini beans, a finger of guanciale, one onion, a little celery, three cloves of garlic, fresh rosemary, fresh sage, two–three kipfler potatoes (I had beautiful long ones), a quarter of a head of savoy cabbage, some chicken stock, fresh basil, parmesan, lemon zest.

One of my first loves, mostly chaste, was cured pork products. Sitting on the deli counter and watching Mira fill my little hands with shaved ham, so fine and delicate, passed through the slicer and back to me. It figures, then, that this other love doesn’t eat pork. Which is why this recipe should be made on the Monday night apart, after inseparable, alien weeks, on the day off from work, which was meant for recovery, but became another opportunity for speculation.

Although not actually in the book, the spirit of this recipe comes from Anne Bianchi’s Zuppa! Soups from the Italian Countryside (1991), whose heady, vague name hides Bianchi’s real project: an un-marketably specific regional study. Bianchi is most interested in the Garfagnana—an alpine region in the north of Tuscany—and the soup traditions of its inhabitants. She spends pages describing the daily lives of her hosts, and their memories of food. It is an intensely sympathetic, close portrait of an area whose history is more often described as one of scarcity.

I only ever quick-soak dry beans, as a proper soaking method will call for 8–12 hours; an impossible timeframe for daily cooking, which must be able to bend around mood and circumstance. This would be opposed to the meal-prep industrial complex’s insidious over-determining of human intuition and pleasure.

Quick-soaking beans just involves tipping a bag of dry beans into a large pot (likely as large as you can find), filling the pot with water, bringing it up to the boil for a few minutes, and then turning the heat off. The beans can sit like this for some time.

The wonderful thing about this recipe is that the second boiling of the beans also forms the thickened base of the soup. This is not the next step, however. The next step would be taking your healthy finger of guanciale and cutting it into neat, slender chunks. Place these in a large (cold) pot, and bring up the heat slowly to render off their fat. They will give off the most incredible smell, but don’t let them burn. If it seems like they are, remove them.

Now take them out and add some more oil to the pork fat. Follow with the finely chopped onion, and a stick or two of celery, also finely chopped. Let them cook for a minute or two, and add the garlic, sliced, and the crisp guanciale. Let it go on low for 5–10 minutes, until everything is soft and fragrant.

Five months since I had done any gardening, so it was a delight and a surprise to see that the sage survived. A stranger recently described our garden as: that disco ball hanging from that Hill’s Hoist in that overgrown backyard…/that’s what signalled death and rebirth. Which is much how it feels to live inside it. In the last year, every time that something seemed to have died, I would end up gardening.

Finely chop a handful of sage and rosemary, add these to your pot until the smell is complete, and pour in your soaked beans. It is useful, here, to have the chicken stock already simmering, alongside some boiling water for backup. Not the end of the world if you have neither, but much better with stock. Add both now, until the pot is almost filled with liquid. Bring it up to a boil, then down to a simmer for an hour. Add more boiling water as needed, so that nothing burns.

Once the beans are tender enough to squish between your fingers, take about a cup out and blend them. Leave this to the side for now. Add the roughly chopped cabbage and kipfler potatoes. Kipfler, for me, because I had never seen ones so long until the markets on Sunday. They looked more like a slim sweet potato, and I was charmed. Now they sit on the bench beside the fruit basket, because of their ungainly shape.

Have these go for 15–20 minutes at a simmer, and once potatoes are tender add the blended beans from earlier. Stir these through, and taste. The texture should be both velvety and interrupted, but not too thick to move a wooden spoon cleanly through. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper, and turn off the heat. Let sit for ten minutes at least. Stir through a fistful of fresh basil leaves.

Now add the zest of a big lemon, and some finely grated parmesan. Serve yourself, adding some more zest, more parmesan, and olive oil.

In a generation of films, made between the mid-1930s and 1948, Jimmy Stewart’s foibles were a thing of pleasure. In The Philadelphia Story, his stooped height and pliability to the charms of Katherine Hepburn made him the softer option, beside Cary Grant’s half-cruel, already-divorced older love. Even in black-and-white, Grant’s eyes are so clearly darker than Stewart’s, whose long, boyish face is foal-like and earnest in heartbreak.

Stewart’s blue eyes wouldn’t be seen on film until 1948, and the release of his first film in colour—Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. By this time, Stewart was 40 years old, and had spent all of his adult life as an actor. Hitchcock, too, was already well-known, after having made Rebecca and Notorious—both films about the coercion of role-playing under marriage. Rope is quite different. Its conceit is fairly infamous now—two beautiful young Wildean men murder their ex-classmate, hide the body in a cassone, or Italian marriage chest, and host a dinner party around it. Stewart plays their old housemaster, Rupert Cadell, who first introduced the murderers to the concept of a Nietzschean Übermensch. It is he who they most wish to impress; he who explains, over champagne:

[That] after all, murder is, or should be, an art…and as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for the few who are really superior individuals.

Prompting one of his acolytes to declare that,

Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary, average man, the inferior man…

It is Cadell who discovers the body, horrified in the end by his own teachings made flesh.

Cary Grant was first choice to play Cadell, but declined, wary of the film’s homosexual undertones. Stewart, whose career was stalling post-war, assented. Over the next ten years, he would make four more movies with Hitchcock. The last of these was Vertigo (1958).

*

Vertigo, like Rope, makes good use of Stewart’s history—perhaps with greater fluency, as he begins convincingly in the role of genial, scarred ex-cop, co-opted into investigating the strange behaviour of an old friend’s wife. This is Madeline Elster, played by perfect genius, Kim Novak.

Stewart’s character—John “Scottie” Ferguson—is told by Madeline’s husband that she has been possessed by an ancestor from the mid-19th century; Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide, bereft and abandoned by her benefactor, at 26. Madeline is now 26, we are told, and will soon complete the circle.

And so Scottie follows her; to the grave of Carlotta, to her portrait, to the San Francisco Bay, where Madeline jumps into the water, and he saves her. She wakes, naked, in his bed, and his eyes glisten as they pass over her. His height has a different quality now; looming, he takes up half the room. She is small, and sits on the floor. She can’t remember the attempt, or what happened prior—each episode, she says, appears as a dream. Eventually, he will tell her that none of it is dreaming; that everything is explicable, and that he loves her.

This is despite the fact that the name of the film—and Scottie’s diagnosis—is represented as a kind of dreaming. Vertigo is the false sensation of movement; Scottie develops it after watching a man die in the line of duty. This death, and Scottie’s guilt, are inseparable from the coercion of symptoms over which he has no control. And when Scottie dreams, he dreams in vertigo.

There is another side to it, as this lack of control, the feeling of falling, giddiness, over-exposure to sensation, has much in common with how we describe falling in love. Scottie would not get to love Madeline if their afflictions were not, somehow, in common.

Soon, she takes him to Muir Woods, just outside of San Francisco, and points to the cross-section of a redwood tree, marked with dates of human history. She goes vacant, tracing her finger to a point following 1776: The Declaration of Independence.

Somewhere in here I was born…, she says, and here I died and it was only a moment for you…you took no notice…

This is a desperately sad moment; how alone she is, how alien, how impossible for him to understand the depth of her solitude. Leaning against the tree, she takes on its incommunicability and total beauty. But where the forest is green, red, and brown, she is bright white; completely man-made.

Which is, of course, the twist. That, after Madeline appears to succumb to her grief, possession in solitude, after jumping from the bell tower of the Spanish Mission, after all Scottie’s catatonic grief—we learn that Madeline was never Madeline, but a woman playing her part.

The real Madeline, murdered by her husband, never appears (except briefly, immediately before her death). She does not exist. This Madeline was the performance of a woman named Judy Barton (also played by Novak). She will be the film’s second victim.

The real, existing ancestor of the murdered wife—her own history—is used against her, in the creation of a double, the false image of her suicide. But the manipulation of this history sets in play a new form of the same tragedy. Like Carlotta, like Madeline, Judy has to die. Each death comes about, man-made.

For Scottie’s erotic obsession with Madeline can bear no feeble replacement. Still thinking her dead, he finds Judy, and pursues her for the seeming likeness. In his blindness, his projection of Madeline’s original image, he can’t see the truth of the person in front of him.

Judy, with her brown hair, can’t compare to the brief, blonde visions who pass through each public scene. These ghosts, prior versions of herself, haunt her as they haunt Scottie. We watch Novak shift her speech and gait into horrible fusion, as Judy transforms slowly, unhappily, into Madeline once more. She is entirely vulnerable to Scottie’s desires and projections; his need to annihilate her history, force her into pure representation (an actress).

As Stewart’s face twists and tenses, his eyes fix on her hair. He asks if she will bleach it. Terrified, she protests. He insists, and she says:

The trouble is, I’m gone now. For 
		you. And I can’t do anything about 
		it. I want you to love me. If I let 
		you change me, will that do it? If I 
		do what you tell me, will you love 
		me?

He says yes.

All right. Then I’ll do it. Because 
		I don’t care about me anymore. I 
		just want you to love me.

Even then, the hairstyle is all wrong. Judy, in her distress, retires to the bathroom. She re-enters, pinned and coiffed, to a swell of light and music, as the green glow of the hotel sign leaches through her window. A haze, or discrete smoke, seems to follow her into the room. In truth, she herself is hazed and indistinct; she could not be less real.

*

Her beloved, on the other hand, becomes more appallingly real by the second; Stewart seems to expand and contract, his body swelling as his face moves between distraction, repulsion, and the deluded opportunism of making something real again.

Interestingly, Scottie is feminised by his vertigo—he faints, falling into the arms of others. He dreams heavily and often, but refuses to reconcile his dreams with the strangeness of life. As such, he attempts to bend all life towards something both interpretable and familiar, and inflicts the greater estrangement of an artificial cycle on a living woman.

In doing so, he makes himself less human; standing rigid by the tower, in the film’s final shot, Stewart’s height becomes mechanical, or puppet-like. Judy has fallen, and now he hinges at the elbows and knees, no longer struggling but fixed and robotic at the end of fear, the end of illness, the end of sexual desire. Leaning, leaning.

This is a self-translation exercise, as I first wrote this in French about a year ago, and today translated it into English. With limited fluency in French, the reading itself is uneven, but I thought it would be interesting to see how the process of translation roughens and changes the shape of the sentences.

*

Hiroshima mon amour est un film frustrant — il est opaque ; il est abstrait, et froid, même en représentant l’angoisse humaine la plus explicite. Mais, il est dans ces caractéristiques frustrantes que nous pouvons trouver le natur du rapport entre histoire ‘petit h’—l’histoire personelle, et Histoire ‘grande H’—l’Histoire mondiale—dans ce film. Pour cette question, bien que Alain Resnais était le réalisateur du film, c’est particulièrement important que Marguerite Duras en était la scénariste. Duras, comme vous le savez peut-être, a prononcé sa nom avec le ‘s’—‘Durasssss’—en partie, parce qu’elle voulait être plus près du sud de France ; le région de son père. C’était aussi cars ce son—assssss—a l’air de quelque chose érotique, ou bas, qui va au-delà de la langue. La question du rapport entre érotisme, la langue, et la mémoire, était la principale préoccupation de Duras. Alors, à comprendre ces types d’histoire, je crois on doit approcher l’œuvre de Duras, en particulier. La question de la mémoire, et l’impossibilité de sa répresentation est, ici, plus important que la question du fait historique.

Pensez d’abord de la première prise du film ; où nous regardons deux corps—corps, nous pensons, mais, est-ce qu’ils sont vivants ? Est-ce qu’ils sont entiers ? Ces corps sont couverts de cendre, comme les victimes de la bombe atomique. Maintenant, il pleut—une pluie anormale—et, Ah, nous voyons—ils sont deux amants, embrassant. Une main trace le dos de l’autre. Déjà, ils sont couverts par le matérial de l’histoire, mais ils sont aussi dans un état de fusion. Cet état de fusion semble les placer au-déla, ou sous, l’histoire.

*

Hiroshima mon amour is a frustrating film; it is opaque, abstract and cold, even as it represents the most explicit forms of human anguish. But this frustration tells us something: in it, we find the truth of the encounter between personal memory, intimate history, and the History of the world.

Marguerite Duras, its screenwriter, pronounced her name with its ‘s’—Durassss—in part, because the sound felt closer to the south of France, where her father grew up. As well as this, the sound—assssssss—has the air of something erotic, or base, which feeds language without being, necessarily, interpretable. The relation between eroticism, language, and memory, was Duras’ principle preoccupation. The question of memory, and the impossibility of its representation, became more important to her than that of historical fact.

In the first shot of the film, we see two bodies—bodies, we think, but are they alive? Are they whole? These bodies are covered in atomic ash, then rain, and—ah, now we see: they are two lovers, embracing. A hand traces the other’s back. In their state of fusion, they are subject to war, weather, all conditions, but their abstraction places them curiously beyond, or under, history-proper.

*

Ce sont trois ans dans Hiroshima Mon Amour—mille neuf cent quarante-quatre, mille neuf cent quarante-cinq, et mille neuf cent cinquante-sept. Chaque évènement, ou mémoire, a lieu en août de ces années. Commençons avec mille neuf quarante-quatre, et l’histoire personnelle de la femme, joué par Emmanuelle Riva. Son souvenir de la libération est un souvenir de perte et d’humiliation. Son amant est un Nazi ; il meurt ; ses parents la jettent dans une cave. Dans le film, nous voyons ce souvenir comme un ‘mise en abyme’—c’est-à-dire—une histoire à l’intérieur d’une histoire.

Mikhail Bakhtin dit que, ‘Discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context’. Le souvenir aussi travers cette frontière ; l’intérieur et l’extérieur ; le passé et le présent. Pour, elle doit perdre son passé, et son amant. À perdre le passé par l’oubli est dangereux, parce qu’il invite la répétition. Mais cette perte est nécessaire pour la survie. D’être française, d’être du bon côté de l’histoire, elle doit perdre son passé, mais aussi le recréer, juste en amour, avec le Japonais. Avec lui, elle trouve la question de la mémoire et de l’intimité encore ; combien peut-on connaître un autre sans la connaissance de ses mémoires ; ses histoires. Combien peut-on connaître un autre par le corps seul, sans contexte, loin de la vie quotidienne ?

*

There are three years, in Hiroshima mon amour—1944, 1945, and 1957. Every event, every memory, takes place in August of these years. In 1944, we see the personal history of the woman, played by Emmanuelle Riva. Her memory of the Liberation is one of loss and humiliation. Her lover is a Nazi; he dies; she is shamed by her village, and thrown into her family’s cellar. In the film, we see this memory as a mise en abyme—that is, a story within a story.

Mikhail Bakhtin writes that ‘discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context.’ Memory, too, travels across this boundary—between inside and outside, past and present. The woman must become alien; forget her past and disavowed lover. Losing the past through forgetting is dangerous, as it invites repetition; but this loss is necessary for survival. In order to be French, to be on the right side of history, she must release the past—and yet also recreate it, in love, with the Japanese man. With him she encounters, again, the question of intimacy: that is, how much can we know another person, without knowing their memories, their histories? How much can we know another through the body alone, without context, without ordinary life?

*

À Hiroshima, il est Août mille neuf cent quarante-cinq. L’histoire mondiale—selon le film, c’est un histoire des catastrophes ; des violences—que Alain Resnais s’appelait ‘l’angoisse atomique’. C’est important que pour Duras, l’histoire de la grande H aussi comporte les implications du Marxisme—comme nous voyons dans la scène où les villes japonaises ‘entières se mettent en colère…contre l’inégalité posée en principe par certaines classes contre d’autres classes’.

Le monde des événements, de la lutte, insiste sur lui-même. Mais l’événement d’Hiroshima ne peut être représenté, pas entièrement. C’est à cause de son horreur absolue et totalisante. Hiroshima est représentée par une autre mis en abîme, au musée ; ici, nous sommes la Française, avec son point de vue—celle qui n’a pas vu Hiroshima. Alors, l’histoire mondiale est donc partout, mais son horreur est impossible de comprendre. Nous pouvons comprendre, cependant, le mouvement de deux corps. Et à Hiroshima, c’est aussi Août mille neuf cent cinquante-sept, et l’histoire personnelle et l’histoire mondiale rencontre dans ces corps.

*

In Hiroshima, it is August 1945. World History—according to the film—is a history of catastrophes, of violences, which its director, Alain Resnais, called ‘atomic anguish.’ The world of events, of catastrophe, insists upon itself. But the event of Hiroshima cannot be represented—not entirely. This is because of its absolute, totalizing horror. Hiroshima is represented, in turn, by another mise en abyme, at the Peace Memorial Museum; here we are with the Frenchwoman, seeing through her eyes—she who did not see Hiroshima. As History, it is everywhere, and yet its horror remains impossible to grasp. What we can grasp, however, is the movement of two bodies. And in Hiroshima, it is also August 1957, and history meets in these bodies.

*

Hiroshima, le nom, symbolise la peur d’oublier ; mais Nevers, le nom, symbolise la nécessité d’oublier. C’est une contradiction, peut-être. Mais nous avons besoin des deux, particulièrement dans l’itinéraire de la subjectivité personnelle à un sens d’histoire collective. Car dans les deux histoires, il y a l’envie irrésistible à répéter les violences du passé—la violence de l’amour, la violence de la guerre. Ça fait un peu cliché, mais nos expériences de ces choses s’entremêlent. Par exemple, mis en abyme attirent l’attention sur le travail du réalisateur et de l’écrivaine. Mais, ils attirent aussi l’attention sur l’acte de répétition, dans représentation.

Le nom, Hiroshima, est synonyme de la catastrophe ; mais, à la fin du film, Hiroshima est synonyme avec les deux amants—‘Hi-ro-shi-ma’, dit-elle. ‘Hi-ro-shi-ma. C’est ton nom.’ ‘C’est mon nom. Oui.’ Il dit. ‘Ton nom à toi est Nevers. Ne-vers-en-Fran-ce.’ Regardez, le négatif de ça— ‘Ne-vers-en-France’. Ne / vers / en / France — not / towards / in / France. C’est une contradiction dans la langue, qui ne sera pas réconciliée.

Alors, Hiroshima mon amour est frustratant à cause de nous vivons le rapport entre les histoires comme de la frustration ; comme de la douleur. La rencontre entre l’histoire personnelle et l’histoire Mondiale est contradictoire, est opaque, mais c’est le matériel de nos vies. Et si la forme du film crée l’illusion d’un présent éternel ; l’être-là de la chose—c’est une imitation de la fonction de la mémoire elle-même.

*

Hiroshima, the name, symbolizes the fear of forgetting; Nevers, the name, symbolizes the necessity of forgetting. The pain of contradiction between the two is necessary in the path which leads from personal subjectivity toward a sense of collective history. For within both histories there lies an irresistible urge to repeat the violences of the past—the violence of love, the violence of war. The mises en abyme are thus used to call up the very act of repetition within representation.

The name Hiroshima is, at first, synonymous with catastrophe; but by the film’s end, Hiroshima becomes synonymous with the two lovers themselves. ‘Hi-ro-shi-ma,’ she says. ‘Hi-ro-shi-ma. That is your name.’ ‘That is my name. Yes,’ he says. ‘Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in-France.’ Look at the negation hidden within it—‘Ne-vers-en-France.’ Ne / vers / en / France — not / toward / in / France. It is a contradiction within language itself, one that will never be resolved.

Hiroshima mon amour is frustrating because we experience the relationship between the two histories as bodily frustration itself; as pain. The encounter between personal history and world History is contradictory, is opaque—but it is the very material of our lives. And if the form of the film creates the illusion of an eternal present, a pure being-there of the thing—this, too, is an imitation of the function of memory itself.

I had pulled him across me in my sleep, thinking that he had malaria, and was dying; that we were in the jungle, and that a crowd of people were surrounding us, crying, begging me to let him go.

This hadn’t woken him—he was still sleeping, had slept through the night. And now he was living, kissing and lifting my neck to press into the back of me, so that I could feel him well enough. I could, but couldn’t say it, could only breathe in and out.

Being touched came before sun, before disappointment, before all the rest, I thought, as I watched a small, childlike hand extend out from under the bed. A stubby forearm followed, and a shoulder, and a head of tufted black hair.

I felt his touch roughen as the girl crawled out from under the bed and stood beside us, dressed in the linen of my sheets and curtains. I tried to hold him inside of me, to breathe or stare through the rising sun, and hoped that she would go back, or else stop smiling.

This smile was radiant and free; delighted that she had found me, and in such good company.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said. I shook my head as he moved sweetly to bite my cheek.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said, louder and more boldly. I shook my head again and took his hand into my mouth, glaring. My chest tightened and cracked, ack-ack-acked with anger. With my head still on the mattress, I beckoned to her; here, here. She moved closer, her eyes widening. Here, here. Closer and lower as she kneeled, her round cheek almost to mine.

‘Hand me my glasses,’ I said. She reached carefully towards the table and placed them in my hands.

‘Thank you,’ I said. Now seeing clearly, I grabbed her by the roots of her hair. She shrieked, but I held on tight.

‘You leave me alone,’ I hissed. ‘You leave me alone, you leave me alone, you leave me alone, you stop coming here stop hiding under my bed watching me watching me with him you leave me alone you’re nothing you’re done do you understand you need to leave me alone you’re just a stupid little girl.’

Rip rip rip, with every phrase I pulled again and she was wailing now. The sound of it woke him up. Sliding out of me, he cried, ‘What are you doing!’

I had clumps of bloody hair in my hands. He prised my fingers from her, one by one, until we could see the nail marks on each square of soft flesh. She, gaping and matted, tripped to the door like an animal, unable to look at us, then went banging and squealing down the stairs in her school shoes. Then, quiet. I breathed out and turned back to him for a kiss.

He looked at me, sick. ‘She’s just a girl,’ he said. ‘She’s just a girl; you didn’t have to pull her hair.’

Can We Consume Our Surplus? Or, The Influence of Furniture on Love,

is the title of a paper given by John Maynard Keynes to a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles in November 1909. At 26, Keynes (not yet the century’s most important economist) was himself an Apostle—meaning that he was part of a small, select group of university men, who would meet to debate the good, the right, and the beautiful.

One of these men was George Edward (G.E.) Moore; ten years older than Keynes, and the philosophic head of the group. In Moore’s most famous book, Principia Ethica (1903), he had argued for the impossibility of defining the good in ‘natural terms’ (i.e., classifying a thing as good because it brings the most happiness). Instead, we must understand goodness through its embodiment in various states—states of pleasure, beauty, friendship, and knowledge. In this understanding, ‘goodness’ remains whole, unreduced to parts.

At the end of Principia Ethica, Moore singles out two reliable apparitions of the good:

1. Meaningful human relationships and their pleasures;

2. The love and appreciation of beauty.

These apparitions go skipping and jumping through The Influence of Furniture on Love.

Keynes begins his address, like all debates, with a topic.

The influence of furniture upon love is a subject which ought properly to be treated in an historical way by the Moderator.

He builds an image of Cambridge as present historical situation, moving between judgements of its colleges, their rooms, views, and suitability for intellectual work.

The shape of the rooms, however, seems [most] important to one’s calmness and the flow of ideas in work…It is difficult to be at ease in a very high room or in one which is crowded with a great variety of objects.

This is all play, though, before he can return to the question of greater seriousness:

In what sort of rooms does one fall in love? Take this room, for instance. Could any human being hope to fall in love here? There is nothing very aphrodisiac, is there? Chintz within walls of pale and green. This room is cool and reasonable.1

Besides it is not secret enough. Few rooms in King’s are. But consider some of the rooms in trinity, dark and secret. It is in them that I should choose to fall in love.

And yet, he notes, it is unwise to do so in one’s own room. This would be hazardous; at some point, love will make the room less joyful, more disconsolate.

Better to fall in love in other people’s rooms and enjoy yourself in your own.2

This suppressed, melancholic point is quickly left to the side, as Keynes turns to the necessity of acquiring beautiful furniture.

[Perhaps] our furniture is, after all, very unimportant…But I don’t think it is quite true. Our furniture may be the best we can do, and yet we may deserve something much better. My poems do not really do my feelings justice. My landscapes even do not truly suggest the influences of nature to which I am most sensitive. Why should the opposite be true of my furniture?3

Here, Keynes hits upon the other half of his title—can we consume our surplus—and executes its lovely confusion of personal and aesthetic economies.

Furniture is important to love, because it creates the conditions for certain kinds of love to emerge—let’s say that this is his thesis. In this brief invocation of poetry and landscape painting, however, Keynes is revealing that his is an argument about aesthetic forms in general. And, I think, about love and goodness—the experience of each as both surplus to form and integral to its understanding.

*

While Keynes is delivering The Influence of Furniture on Love, he is in the midst of a year-long romantic involvement with the painter Duncan Grant. As the paper continues, he will begin to name other members of the group as evidence for his case. He does not name Grant, who was a member of the Apostles and was likely in its audience.

The previous year, Grant had written to Keynes:

How much I want to scream sometimes here for want of being able to say something I mean. It’s not only that one’s a sodomite that one has to hide but one’s whole philosophy of life; one’s feelings for inanimate things I feel would shock some people.

Ten years on, Grant will paint Keynes sitting in a low-slung chair, intensely focused on finishing a letter. Perhaps apocryphally, this letter is addressed to the United States government and is a request for financial assistance to the British government, made as a representative of the National Treasury.

In 1936, Keynes will write his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Here, he will argue that free-market economies do not self-correct—that they are volatile and must be modified through formalised government intervention. Even if a free-market economy appears to be in a state of ‘equilibrium’, its stability is false; it will not ensure a population’s full employment.

Keynes’s critique of classical and neoclassical economics is thus predicated on the question of inevitable surplus, and the inability of those models to account for experience. As he writes in his first chapter,

I have called this book the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, placing the emphasis on the prefix general…to contrast the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic thought…[for] its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.4

But in this paper, our paper, Keynes is 26 and in love.

He says, [m]y poems do not really do my feelings justice. My landscapes even do not truly suggest the influences of nature to which I am most sensitive—and this functions as a sly, intimate naming of the artist through his preferred form.5 The meeting of the two—Keynes and Grant—happens below the surface, in an aesthetic register which executes Moore’s conception of the good with a kind of strange, parodic conviction. But really, this is a winking ode to the beloved and is thus entirely personal.

In its insistence on the right decoration, The Influence of Furniture on Love garbs itself in the description of contingent beginnings. And yet, structurally, it is reproducing the lovers’ shared understandings, shared consumption of the world—that is, everything that comes after; whatever fills a room.

Works Cited

Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Macmillan, 1936.

–––. “The Influence of Furniture on Love,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 24, no. 1, 2017, pp. 104–12.

Moore, George Edward. Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press, 1903.

When Friedrich Nietzsche describes ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals, he does so with the taste of metal:

— But let us return: the problem of the other origin of ‘good’, of good as thought up by the man of ressentiment, demands its solution. —There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, —is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’1

Ressentiment can be distinguished from quotidian resentment by its relation to vengeance—a desire for retribution which seeks an eagle’s eye for one of the lamb’s, etc. Vengeful desire also has the greater danger of being ontologised, as I look to make ressentiment essential to the self-concept of my own existence. I have suffered, this is fundamental to who I am, my suffering must be issued back, towards my abusers. Most importantly, ressentiment allows me to condemn all the world, while keeping myself unscathed.

*

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945) is not an ontologically resentful book. Its heroine, Linda Radlett, is too sovereign, moves with too much enthusiasm, for any such bitter seed to grow. We begin with an image of Linda’s family, as recalled by our narrator, their drab cousin Fanny:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh…There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing so poignantly sad as old family groups.2

It’s impossible to replicate the richness with which Mitford represents these early scenes of childhood at the aristocratic homestead of Alconleigh; as that, they are almost unequalled in Anglophone literature. For novelists working in this tradition, there is one major question: how will they reconstruct the movement between intimacy and alienation (with reader, themselves, and world)? In The Pursuit of Love, her masterpiece, Mitford lands on the side of intimacy, with some veneer of cool separation. For this, she is often compared to her close friend, Evelyn Waugh—but Waugh’s edges cut quite different shapes.

Linda Radlett, like Mitford herself, is born into the English aristocracy and comes of age between the wars. She is ‘a delicate, as well as a highly nervous child’—as, following the death of her cousin’s pet mouse, ‘Enormous tears [poured] into Linda’s plate. Nobody cried so much or so often as she’.3

She is not structurally morose, however, as these

…tears would be forgotten as if they had never been…The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.4

This is not to say that Linda is without private sorrows—Mitford’s genius, however, is in the fact that we are never shown them. She is, most wonderfully, tough. Through all the erring course of Linda’s life, through failed love affairs, war, and familial betrayals, she refuses to ontologise the pain of failure into bitterness.

Similarly, Mitford’s light-seeming style offers its characters something like affectionate, ironic forgiveness (without ever forgetting their many, many sins). At its best, her transformation of shredded life into comedy has something of Jane Austen’s genius—in which, Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘each movement must tell to the utmost…bound…denied the relief of all hints, repetitions, suggestions.’5 ‘It is thus,’ Woolf wrote,

with a thousand differences of degree, that in English Literature Jane Austen writes a novel. There comes a moment, “I will dance with you,” says Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the whole weight of the book behind it.

This weight comes from a sense of determinacy, from the ‘ligatures’ which surround her characters; they are ‘bound, and restricted to a few definite movements…[Austen], in her modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death.’6

As Bridie had said, in the elevator-shaft smokers—‘Of course, everything can be forgiven.’ Then, almost winking. ‘But nothing is forgotten.’

That’s exactly right, I said, leaning forward happily. Nothing is forgotten.

*

And that is why The Pursuit of Love is a comedy—all the erring and real terrors of Linda’s inimitable life will be reconciled into her continuous, messy affirmation of life itself—while remaining a formal problem for the author herself (whose life it is, too).

This affirmation is best expressed in Linda’s paratactic speech. Here she is, describing her second husband, Christian, who she has briskly and unwisely fallen in love with while married to her first:

‘Well, he’s heaven. He’s a frightfully serious man, you know, a Communist, and so am I now, and we are surrounded by comrades all day…The comrades don’t like anarchists, isn’t it queer? I always thought they were the same thing, but Christian likes this one because he threw a bomb at the King of Spain; you must say it’s romantic.’

Fanny, our narrator, interjects: ‘Yes, but darling, tell about Christian.’

‘Oh, he’s perfect heaven…You can’t think what an extraordinary man he is, so detached from other human beings that he hardly notices whether they are there or not. He only cares for ideas.’7

The entanglement ends badly, as Christian enters the Spanish Civil War, falls in love with a more sensible woman, and Linda finds herself stranded at the Gare du Nord. There, she chances upon a French Duke, Fabrice, and becomes his mistress. She will die, at the end of the book, during the birth of their son. Her death is sudden, matter-of-fact, and without foreshadowing:

The doctors who said that Linda ought never to have another child were not such idiots after all. It killed her. She died, I think, completely happy, and without having suffered very much, but for us at Alconleigh…a light went out, a great deal of joy that could never be replaced.8

Linda feels no prior awareness of her own death. She does, however, dwell on the shared death of her generation; their absorption into history. As Fanny observes,

Her mind was entirely on the past.

‘It’s rather sad,’ she said one day, ‘to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well have never lived at all, I do think it’s a shame.’

‘It may become a sort of literary curiosity,’ Davey said.

…

‘I don’t want to be a literary curiosity,’ said Linda. ‘I should like to have been a living part of a really great generation. I think it’s too dismal to have been born in 1911.’

‘Never mind, Linda, you will be a wonderful old lady.’9

Reading The Pursuit of Love, as Zoë Heller describes so well, we ‘find ourselves glimpsing the skeletons beneath the skins of these gorgeously alive people’.10 This is because Mitford’s lightness of style carries within it all the brevity, changeability and tragedy of seasons. While she has been much-critiqued and dismissed for her ‘brazen indifference to big ideas’, and ‘minute attention to the sex and love lives of the privileged upper class’, it is this attention which makes her characters a study in the exteriorised pursuit of life—even if their interiors are neither ‘fleshed out’, nor made a site of formal experimentation.

We are not given much insight into anyone’s inner lives—indeed, we often suspect that these people are constituted by little more than repeated social engagement and mimicry (and isn’t this the point!—what else could we possibly be?). However, there can be no doubt of their reality, which is made flesh-and-blood in each encounter, every memory of a scene, in drawing room or square. And Linda is more mystery and flesh than any; her foibles are given total clarity, but so too is her naïveté; a naïveté which is complicated by the knowingness of the ‘second Linda’—her author. Linda is more lamb than eagle, repeatedly swept up by the force of terrible feeling, and deserted—and yet, she never falls into the trap of making something like ressentiment the structure of future feeling.

Of course, this is inextricable from her aristocratic upbringing. But, as Gilles Deleuze points out in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), ressentiment belongs as much to the ruling class as to the oppressed—to ‘the dominators…once the regime [or epoch] comes under the sway of forces which are reactive.’ He goes on to correct our most common misreading of the will to power:

…If it is true that all things reflect a state of forces then power designates the element, or rather the differential relationship, of forces which directly confront one another….to ‘want or seek power’ is only the lowest degree of the will to power, its negative form, the guise it assumed when reactive forces prevail in the state of things.11

Mitford’s family, filled with some of England’s most virulent fascists, took up a form of reactionary-aristocratic politics which was itself structured by ressentiment—by a desire to freeze experience into identity, and to protect false, whitened innocence from the illusion of infection and decay.

But in refusing to consolidate suffering into identity, Linda renounces innocence and thus remains in motion, via the movement of Mitford’s inimitable, continuous style. The Pursuit of Love, in all its its naïveté and irony, is thus structured by a traceable (and, I think, hopeful) ethical position. That is, by the defence of a life lived without the moral economy of ressentiment as comfort or reward.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 2002.

Heller, Zoë. Introduction. The Pursuit of Love. Penguin, 2010.

Mitford, Nancy. The Pursuit of Love. Penguin, 2010.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, Volume 1. The Hogarth Press, 1966.

Hungry and walking through Princes Park, I decided that I would cook the chicken again. By the road, there was a big chocolate spaniel sloping and dancing his way towards the fountain and the intersection. I was convinced that this time I would have to watch a dog die. The alternative would be running after him, again, until the deflation of, there’s nothing really wrong, no mistake. The drama was your creation; except it wasn’t, because dogs do die.

When Pippin died, my father so gently placed his body on the bed, and we lay our heads on his chest. He was buried at the end of the garden, and for the first time I understood what a spirit was. In dreams and in the doorways, I loved him and so he stayed.

Three years later, we found a new dog for our parents. Odo was, we were told, professorial and quiet—a scholar, we thought. We didn’t consider that some scholars are barking and impassioned. He and I spent a lot of time together, and for my last months in Brisbane, I was his mother. Now, when I dream about Pippin, or Odo, I dream about them together; as one dog. When it first happened, I thought that this was a shameful thing—that I had simply replaced one with the other and erased all the particulars of the separate loves. I don’t feel that way anymore.

Earlier this week, I dreamt that Pippin/Odo and I were passing through a city together. We sat on a stone floor and watched a film, and I realised that he was dying. He didn’t know, and I didn’t want him to be scared, so I sat quietly, feeling his body sicken and fail, but knowing that he didn’t feel any pain. He was my very good friend, and I wanted him to enjoy the movie.

In The Seventh Seal, we are—and are not—responsible for the deaths of others; but we are always responsible for their lives. Much is made of the chess game between Death and his Knight, but the body of the film is that other thing; a little fat baby loved by his parents, the vicissitudes of love and marriage, or the young woman strapped to a ladder and burned.

The Knight, with his past of untold violence, can only give himself to death after first rejoining the world of the living. He lives long enough to reunite with the woman who loved him, then peacelessly (head in his hands) faces the necessary sacrifice so that others might go on. Not as total redemption, but as continuation. This runs contrary to our fantasies of the end being absolute, a wipeout, where the idea of dissolving at-once means not having to think the reality of catastrophic process.

In their final play, Death asks the Knight,

Did you gain by the delay?

Yes, he replies.

I am glad.

Before, stretched out on the grass, the Knight had said, I will remember this hour of peace. The dusk, the bowl of wild strawberries, the bowl of milk, Joseph with his lute.

Punching into my left breast, holding still, I started to cry.

Like all Ingmar Bergman films, The Seventh Seal is about the historical position of the artist. In his introduction to the published script, Bergman wrote,

…it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values’, ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case.

In comparison,

Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false.

His obsession with the sacramental is a nostalgia for any kind of moral-aesthetic imperative, shared with others. I would play, Bergman says, my part in the collective building of the cathedral. But of course, Bergman’s greatest works are a protracted encounter with his own, most keenly felt, wounds. And the result—an extraordinary aesthetic presentation of the encounter—is an account of life under ‘late modernity’ which has only been equalled a handful of times.

After the death of God and the moving scales of the last century, what can the artist do? It is near-impossible to bypass their reproduction of self as individual life; so instead they remain fixed on this life, while looking for something which could absorb and digest its alienation into a shared object of glory—or anything shared, at least. Even if the thing shared is real pain, prior to its degeneration.

A friend has suggested that I preface this…with an apologia pro vita sua…[in step with] the growing tendency nowadays to present theoretical work with a declaration of one’s personal as well as one’s academic qualifications and interests: “I” write “as a woman”, “as a Jew”, and so on.

My trajectory displays no such logic. If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish.

Against the self-image of the age, it has been within the philosophical tradition, which for me includes social, political and religious thought, that I have found the resources for the exploration of this identity and lack of identity, this independence and dependence, this power and powerlessness. My difficulty is not addressed in any rejection of that tradition which would settle for only one side of my predicament: lack of identity, dependence, powerlessness, or any account of otherness which theorizes exclusively exclusion and control.

…This is my apologia…the only way I can approach my life is by attempting to explore how the difficulties with which I engage may articulate that life…This results in what I call the facetious style—the mix of severity and irony…1

This is Gillian Rose’s introduction to 1993’s Judaism and Modernity, the final collection of essays published before her death. An apologia pro vita sua, as genre, asks that one ‘defend their own life’. Doing so from the point of asserted, already-realised self-identity, would be a betrayal of Rose’s entire philosophical project. So, this preface not only refuses a clean beginning; it also repudiates a posture of defensiveness—why should I be on the back foot? It says. Her apologia instead becomes a defence of the difficulty of articulating identity’s realisation, rather than a defence which begins with its object, identity, already confirmed.

And this takes place, as she tells us, in the facetious style. Facetious, of course, usually means the unserious approach to a serious object; playfulness, from facetus in Latin—‘witty, elegant, fine, courteous’. Or facetiae in the catalogues of antiquarian booksellers—a euphemism for erotica. If the facetious style, for Rose, is this ‘mix of severity and irony’, then it is the synthesis of her two preferred philosophical modes, which maintains the prior forms’ demands of truthfulness to contradiction, to suffering, to diremption; to the broken middle; and in its irony remains faithful to participation in the tragedy and the comedy; to being a player in the world.

This is another opening at the close—the beginning of Rose’s final public lecture before dying, which gave us the name for this event— ‘O! untimely death. / Death!’. So, there is the title, the ‘original’ quotation from King Lear, with punctuation.

And here is how Rose transforms it for her epigraph:

These are the two versions, together.

Here, Rose brings punctuation back to the letter—she has concretely literalised it. Reading the line prior, the punctuation is articulated as stoppage, and emphasis—as pathos. ‘O! untimely death. / Death!’ It is the essential aspect of the unsaid, which forms what can be said into emotional coherence. In Rose’s rewriting, the unsaid is reduced (but also expanded) to the letter; with the result that a line begins to be drawn between punctuation, its determinacy within time, and the presencing of death. But the most basic effect is that, from the beginning, we are forced to pay attention to the relation between a symbol of puncture, and its re-realisation in language.

And this has already taken place before the paper’s introduction, which Rose then begins: ‘I may die before my time.’ She doesn’t literalise her punctuation anywhere else, but at points in this reading I am going to. So, ‘I may die before my time.’ Here, full stop, new line. Quote:

Anachronism is customarily taken to mean the retrospective misplacing of time…[but if it] may be taken to mean the relation between the time one nominally inhabits and the actuality of any other, then is not the future the supreme anachronism?

For the future is the time in which we may not be, and yet we must imagine we will have been. The focus here is not the promiscuous ecstasies of verb-tenses transporting finite beings about in time, but the not, the time in which we may not be. The pathos of syntax, its punctuation, sets time against eternity, the indicative against silence, the determinate against negation.2

Punctuation is the pathos of syntax, for Rose; the point which makes negation clear, while giving the rhythm of what is closest to breathing, bloody life. If determinate negation is the Hegelian truth that ‘out of experience, however negative, something emerges’, then the literalised puncture makes clear that whatever ‘emerges’ is a living thing; that it is not absorbed, colonised, by silence.

After punctuation sets time against eternity, Rose can re-begin in repetition. She writes,

‘I may die before my time.’ Full stop. New line.

‘I may live before my time.’ No full stop. New line.

Then, a judgement: The second reflection [‘I may live’] overcomes the pusillanimity of the first: the idea of “living before my time” expands my mind beyond the confines of “dying before my time.” It makes the lesser or greater bourns of my time within eternity negligible.3

This expansion is the reason for the full stop’s absence in the second line, contrary to the first’s periodisation of the death clause. But I find myself resisting Rose’s judgement—is the first a cowardly reflection? There is little time to reflect, as repeating with change, Rose continues,

‘Where there is nothing, there is God.’ No full stop. New line.

‘I may die before my time’. No full stop. New line.

Now, the expansion of the first repetition has infected the second; the unpunctured assertion of ‘living before my time’ has bled into the dying—thus, no full stop. And there is a revelation here, which is that, in Rose’s judgement of pusillanimity, she was, perhaps, ironising herself. For, said without melodrama, in the indicative, ‘I may die’ comes closer to strength. I do not wish to die before my time, I do not fear it; I try not to imagine it. But I may. And so, I work, and love, and live on in intensity and pain. Perhaps most evidently, I address my own death in writing; I particularise, to universalise.

Although this formal play has much in common with Jacques Derrida’s work on the full stop, and the ellipsis—with their privileged relationship to infinity and death—Rose is using the text, facetiously, to prosecute her critique of ‘death as pure negativity’ in thought following Heidegger. I’m going to leave my own critique of Rose’s reading to the side, because I think it’s worth continuing along her path. But each time that death is invoked as ‘nothing’, in this essay, we must remember that her polemical mark is that tradition.

In this vein, Rose repeats once more, now amending herself with a question:

Before my time—my time? How can I claim to own a time when death is nothing? Since if death is nothing, then life is nothing, for the idea of death cannot confer the significance of the limit on life. The life which is calibrated by that shared limit loses its vitality. I cannot live, if death be nought, but neither can I die if life be not aught.4

Her facetious style makes itself doubly known, as Rose makes a pun—on aught and ought. In this passage she uses ‘aught’, with an ‘a’, meaning ‘anything, something’, but also containing that sense of vital force, long life, eternity. But when spoken, as this paper originally was, ‘aught’ becomes exchangeable with ‘ought’, which is modal, with its implications of ownership, possession, what is ‘owed’ to another—I ‘should’ do something. Or, for Hegel, the ‘ought’ which raised to purity becomes the bad infinity, an ideal beyond actuality. This is Rose’s accusation, aimed at the poststructuralists—that the concept of ‘death as negativity’, following the reading of Hegel taken up by Alexandre Kojève, collapses life into the bad infinity of the totalising ought; a resignation to fallen-ness before death. One cannot, for her, be ‘absolute for death’, be under death’s sentence, for this would ‘void life of all value’—making it indistinguishable from death, and thus dissolving our implication in mortal, ethical seriousness.

It is at this point that Rose falls into her own verse construction:

The inability to die has become the work of philosophy.

For philosophy cannot let death go free;

And so it robs us both of our time and of our eternity.

Instead we have the death of philosophy.5

The ‘death of philosophy’, for Hegel, means recollecting philosophy’s entire history, critiquing its presuppositions, and thus producing its self-moving, speculative future—this is the realisation of spirit in our present return to the past letter. Within an individual’s life, recollection takes up an entire personal history, absorbs its constitution in error, recasts self into narrative, and dies. This progression is not always neat—for the ‘individual’ ‘life’ is not neat; it is also the lives of others; who undertake the process of representation for and with us.

Our lives are a series of repetitions of this movement. In this way, every true recollection of error before the emergence of new self-difficulties, becomes a kind of preparation for the final narrativizing which will happen without us. An essential part of tarrying with your own death is thus the contiguous tarrying with the deaths of others; which as an ethical decision also means being conscious of the theft of life under capital; the turning of lives into value-forms, frozen into deaths-before-death. Letting death ‘go free’ would also mean letting go of bourgeois assertions of limitlessness, a life of infinite progression, that great fiction—you can be whoever you want to be, which has made meaningless the death of ‘civilised man’.6

In his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously writes that,

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative…on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.7

Which is exactly what I think Rose is doing with her punctuation; she is converting the negative into being, in language—not as suspense, or consolation, but to maintain death as a determinate actuality of writing/reading/listening—basically, of communicative symbolic relation—without collapsing into an invocation of silence, or silence itself. Instead, we have the pathos of a line being taken from silence into articulation—for, ‘to be ahead of all departure must surely require the most excruciating practice of anachronism’.8 This is in keeping with her later assertion that, even if death is nothing, ‘something is spiritualised in oratory.’9

In her Introduction to 1984’s Dialectic of Nihilism, Rose writes that,

Since my text is to examine [the] borders of impersonality and personality, of reason and law, I shall retain gender distinctions as they are found in the tradition. When Philosophy visits Boethius in the imperial prison, when Rousseau brings Sophie along to complete Émile’s personality, when Zarathustra goes to visit her with his whip, it is at the crux of gender that philosophy—love of wisdom—, the republic, and the legal fictions of personality explode.10

These fictions explode into the question of their own existence; ‘of the relationship between philosophy, justice, and individual identity.’ Michel Foucault, for Rose, refuses to countenance the explosion—in his work, she says with her usual sting, ‘The notion of sexuality has been destroyed along with the notion of sex.’11 What she means is that she cannot place a Foucauldian notion of sexuality in relation to ethical self-understanding. Her answer is to summon up this ‘recollection’ of the tradition; to catalogue the occasions upon which philosophy, law, and identity have come into conflict.

This emerges again in Rose’s critique of Kantian marriage as,

a right…over a person. This right to the “use” of a person against every other person proves that the definition of individuals as persons, as ends in themselves, presupposes that they be treatable as things, as means. Marriage is assimilated here to Roman dominium (absolute property)…This fusing of…absolute property with modern subjective rights may as well reveal the ambition which had lead reason to appoint itself as judge in the first place.12

The ‘discovery…of law in the state of nature’13 so easily finds its union with the bourgeois conception of ‘rights’, with the possibility of ‘recognition’—let’s say, I am a woman, I have fought for my right to be recognised, and today I get to be the University of Melbourne spokesperson for Lockheed Martin. I get to speak and be seen—I get to choose to marry the University of Melbourne spokesman, sorry spokesperson, for Elbit Systems.

This self-definition treats both the concept of ‘rights’, and that of ‘recognition’ as two wonderfully clean-cut possessions in the actual world. There is no grappling with how my subjectivity as a woman has changed itself in accordance with ‘exterior’ law, how it will continue to change, but also how I will reproduce the law, in its possession of me, my possession of it. Certainly, there is no ability to take ethical responsibility for the deaths which function to assure me that my identity is ‘real’, valid, sterile. This is not a bold point, but part of a speculative re-reading, re-writing of sexual difference would mean that this definition of the ‘woman-as-recognisable-individual’, created out from naturalised laws of dominium, has to die. The woman has to die.

So…that she can continue to live as the difficulty of historically-produced symbolic category, rather than as the glossing over of diremption—continuing to live otherwise, through a relation to spirit which can recollect all trauma, shame, violence, vengeances and loves of experience, and work to turn them into sustenance—but also, responsibility. Rose would call this ‘mourning’. When she says, ‘I may die before my time’, the indicative belongs to the shared mourning of the city—the city is where we meet; and meeting, we wound one another. But without the wound there is no relation.

Wounds, however, are not determined equally. There are wounds which realise themselves as limits on the actualisation of a life—which, under patriarchy and capital, continue to reproduce sexual difference as a kneecapping of becoming—these include getting pregnant, becoming a mother, having children—but also the ‘right’ to create yourself as value form, to externalise, to make an object (which is yourself), and then be haunted by that object in the effort to be recognised, infinitely. A wound can bring about a new beginning, but a true limit casts us out into empty repetition. Adhering to the logic of the line brings about the non-death of failing to act; seeing yourself sitting in the crotch of Plath’s fig tree, starving to death, watching the fruits wrinkle, go black, and fall, because you can’t make up your mind on the risk most worth taking. A life, in this allegory, is a branching narrative whose potential depends on the very-real deaths of possibility which will take place, either way. For all its truth, you cannot fall into the nihilism of that knowledge. You have to refuse.

When Rose writes in response to Maurice Blanchot, that ‘One death is the continuation of power (that is, after all, the meaning of “possibility”)’,14 she is drawing on the word’s Latin root, posse, to have power. I can only hold to this assertion if I also know that ‘possibility’ is the flailing illusion, array of choices, given under capitalism, which whispers, you have access to the infinite. This process might call itself possibility, but as it makes death meaningless for Weber, it makes life meaningless for me. And yet, alongside it, within it, possibility remains the impure capacity for action that my death gives me. This is not easy; it contains the grappling with an expanded subjective horizon which is so horrifyingly felt, alongside newfound power, when a group attempts to grasp self-consciousness—there is no contentment, total sublation of pain, which comes—only the feeling of being torn apart, while knowing that you would not, cannot, return to the prior state. The new horizon is a horror, that is what Plath’s work, for example, shows us. Becoming, within this world, is the coming-to-consciousness of diremption, of inner-difference, which is at once an entry into reason, and the closer proximity to a pathos of madness.

But you cannot look away, cannot inure yourself from pathos, because you would be placing yourself in the position of Goethe’s ‘beautiful soul’, the sickly woman, who begins in childhood illness; with ‘natural curiosity and a voracious reader, [and a] concrete learning matched by a solitary, erotic God-relationship.’15 The beautiful soul ventures out, and is challenged by her encounters with nature, with the sweat of human endeavour—but she does not learn her lesson, cannot ‘change her appreciation of the external from the sensuous or merely aesthetic to the sacramental’.16 Eventually, her body fails her and she collapses into childhood ailment once more.

Although the beautiful soul aspires to moral perfection, she is incapable of implementing it in the objective world and is thus an inflated ‘form of moral subjectivity, detached from the necessities and perils of objective existence’,17 with a constitutive contradiction between pure self and that self’s need to externalize. In her resistance to need, as Hegel writes, she ‘is disordered to the point of madness’,18 wasting herself in yearning, pining away in consumption—she thus surrenders to being-for-self. This is a different kind of madness, which cannot handle or sustain its implication in otherness. In The Broken Middle, Rose thinks the beautiful soul with and against Carole Pateman’s 1988 book, The Sexual Contract, and her conclusion is , as Asaf Angermann summarises, ‘that it is precisely the sexual contract that retains the beautiful soul within her internality, barred from external practical implementation.’19

Rose ends her final lecture with a reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, writing that the cycle takes up a ‘syntax of determinate negation’, and thus ‘calls on our endurance of the negative, and, hence, its movement.’20 When she does this, as I gestured towards earlier, she is describing the process which she herself has just enacted—for the endurance of the negative is the endurance of its repetitions.

This, now, will be her final repetition:

This death is not nothing.

I may die before my time.

Written without full stop, one would expect an intensified identification with the sense of reckless life, of open-hearted experience—but the re-institution of punctuation brings back the severity of reason—for, if I take up a series of gruelling intellectual or creative projects, it can only be because I have a sense of this death as something which is possible; which is the end of the sentence and thus within the framework of the real, but whose punctuation does not cannibalise all the meaning which came before.

My time and yours

Time to praise all others—

Placeable and unplaceable time21

No full stop; the paper ends without punctuation. This is not the open-ness of pure intellect living forever, but an infinitude of anachronism; of time both ‘placeable and unplaceable’. This would be the real defence of a life, holding to anachronism, rather than surrendering to those other, different deaths; the ones which come prior; the ones which assume their own total control.

I wrote this for yesterday’s MSCP seminar on Audrey Wasser’s ‘Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism’, which was published in New Literary History last year. It’s a brief, unwieldy response to Wasser’s text, and to her ‘move beyond Romanticism’ in literary criticism (mostly using Pierre Macherey and Louis Althusser), which looks instead to ‘knowledge production’ and the limit of the critical object as produced by shared cultural-institutional conventions.

Thanks to the MSCP, to Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey and Caitlyn Lesiuk for organising, to the other respondents (Merlyn, Caitlyn, Eloïse Mignon, Jonathan McCoy, Jess Marian, Thomas Moran, and Will Bennett)—and to Wasser, for her patience and careful attention.

On a Thursday afternoon in May, I sat by the office window, thinking that I should read Hegel—Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Section A, ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’—because you should know it by inches, Henry had said, if you’re going to teach it.[1]

There was a light wooden ledge, which ran under the glass panes and covered the old heaters. I read there for an hour, with my elbows set against the wood, and my legs rubbing the metal. The exact sensation of my knees, which were burning, seemed to have something in common with the look of the sun as it splayed through the leaves of the gum tree rising above the lawn. Gums are not deciduous, but it was warm and orange from the presence of its friend, a shedding plane tree to the side.

At this desk, I had written for months without writing poetry, and hadn’t felt it as lack. But then this sun fell and faced me, and I wrote a poem for the first time since December. It went,

Knees square

to the gas

heater, until one

sore hot circle

travels up

my thigh,

and into the

light

of the gumtree,

sunning after lunchtime.

Can tights melt,

if too hot?

Not before the open window,

and air like

a sheet of paper

slipping from the sky,

from the tree,

my leaf.

And because of where it fell, when it fell, this poem was about reading Hegel. I know this, because I had sat, on other days, and looked at trees, and not been compelled to write it. The poem is also not about reading Hegel; it’s about legs, sun, tree, a leaf. The feeling of an opening, then a closing, as the experience was reproduced by the movement into representation.

This opening was dependent on the specificity of reading a ‘work’; it was also dependent on the strangeness, the relative mystery, of the work’s relation to the sensuous experience of my immediate environment and the feeling of being touched by something like slipping difference, before the turn to determinacy—crucially, before trying to teach the thing. Afterwards, I wrote a note in the margin: how to think difference towards strength, and truth, without killing its livingness?

Later that day, I attended a workshop given by Rita Felski, who has famously argued that the ‘negativity’ of literary scholars has robbed us of our pleasures. Now, we are caught in a politics of ‘negation’ rather than ‘relation’, most manifest in our ‘rewriting’ of texts towards what Felski calls ‘unflattering and counterintuitive meanings’.[2] As counter to the ‘counterintuitive’, we are left with intuition: If only critics could just lie back and feel—again. The problem is, of course, that the surrender to feeling (to a ‘discourse already constituted’[3], as Pierre Macherey would say) is not a return to truth without interception—nor can it be the sole processual moment of criticism. Criticism as activity is a leaning forward—I lean towards you over a drink, at a party, pushing a question after a seminar—criticism is, as Stanley Cavell writes, an appeal.

Teaching is also an appeal, and a critical activity; in the metabolising of textual difference, you emerge (apparently unified), able to offer an intelligible form of the object to others, to students. Presenting a written lecture on a novel, even as it continues in questioning, revisions, and so on—the work is produced as comprehensibility; suddenly (it may even come as a surprise to you) there is a unity to all the confusions that came before.

In your essay, ‘Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism,’ you avoid the affective, personified representation of criticism that I have just entertained. Instead, you keep strictly to your categories, so that they may be reproduced, and shared. Criticism, for you, is the activity of producing an object which can, within certain rules, be known and interpreted. Reading is the receptivity internal to criticism; the state where we are equally vulnerable to the interpretable and the uninterpretable. In reading, we find those aspects of textual encounter that ‘might not be immediately, or even eventually, assimilable to a model of mind…[for]something may happen when we read that is different from a mental experience, and that does not guarantee that understanding will ever take place’.

This is because language is not transparent; it resists interpretation. If language were transparent, criticism would not exist, and we would have the ‘shared mental faculty’ and ‘frictionless communication’ of an alien universal understanding, or something like infinite resonance.[4] Reading, then, is the friction-maker—as you write, ‘Reading…would be the name for the resistance to criticism: for the blindness that inheres in vision and for those gaps and contradictions that necessarily make up the fabric of critical discourse’, and which mark the literary text ‘as a real object’.[5] It is the site of greatest difference, where the text’s traversing conflicts materialise to plant something in the critic, to drive the prosecution of their estranged relationship to language, in language.

In teaching, I produced the Phenomenology as a critical object. But what was happening in that poem, in my representation of the scene around it? I used it, and am returning to it now, because I see it as an unhappy stand-in for this conception of reading, as the internal receptivity of criticism—not as pure intuition, not as something divorced from conceptual knowledge, but as the un-masterable, crossed-lines predicate for activity, for the possibility of determination which emerges out from the specific conditions of the encounter—as something which was, in its beginning, a sensuous-aesthetic experience without apt discursive translation.

[1] ‘I didn’t say, “by inches”,’ Henry said. I know, I changed it to sound better. ‘So, it’s a lie.’

[2] The Limits of Critique, 1.

[3] A Theory of Literary Production, 6.

[4] ‘Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism,’ 479.

[5] Wasser, ‘Why Read, Macherey?’, 8.

timeless,

motionless.

Yet time seems to be passing,

drop by drop.

Each minute,

each second,

weeks,

years,

I distinctly remember…

Jane B. par Agnès V. is a 1988 film, made by Agnès Varda for Jane Birkin. It is a life-portrait, which Varda filmed over the course of a year—for the duration of its production, she lived in Birkin’s house, and made its contiguous twin piece—Kung-Fu Master, in which Birkin falls in love with her daughter’s 15-year-old friend.

I’ve noticed, Varda begins, in photos and interviews, you never look at the camera. Why?

Birkin laughs and leans back in her chair. I don’t like the hole! She says. Through the window behind her, we can see the streets of Paris.

Look at it.

It’s embarrassing.

Why?

It’s too personal. Like staring at someone. And she looks straight into the camera.

La maja desnuda [The naked Maja, 1797–1800] and La maya vestida [The clothed Maja, 1800–05] are both paintings by Francisco de Goya. Varda has Birkin replicate them.

When she is naked, the camera moves along the line of her outstretched body; her toes, to her nipples, to her just-smiling mouth. You feel that Varda must really love her, love her beauty, to film it like this.

When Birkin is clothed, you notice first the darkness of her pubic hair beneath white gauze. In Goya’s representation, this was the feature which forced the paintings into public infamy—the female nude wasn’t meant to be hairy.

In Varda’s recreation, Birkin is also Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534), with female servants tending to her background. Titian’s nude is, like Goya’s, infamous—in this case, for the position of his model’s hand; for the intimation that this might not be modesty, that she might be touching herself. Touching herself while—unlike her antecedent, the Dresden Venus (c. 1510)—looking at us. Her gaze is less straightforward than that of Manet’s Olympia (1863), less ironic than that of Maja; it remains a little coy, and soft. More inviting.

Later in the film, Birkin will switch positions and become one of these other women, trawling in the background. This isn’t, I think, just an invocation of the ‘invisible’ working woman—although it is that too. It is more a representation of the fact that the body which lies there doesn’t only exist in relation to the eye of the painter, who is a man. She must also exist through the dispersed vision of other women. Otherwise, she couldn’t be created as icon.

Varda can maintain the intersection of the icon and the real because she understands this relationship between Birkin and other women—the ones who imitate, but who will-not-be-her. The imitators, sad as we are, are privy to a kind of freedom—not feeling the press of our own naked image, and being able to labour on an object which isn’t all deadening self-representation, or mystification.

Without memory, this would be a total death; Birkin’s head now appears in front of a slideshow of childhood photographs. I wanted to be like my big brother Andrew. My sister Linda was more girlish. She was pretty. Once they disguised me as a girl to give flowers to the queen.

We see images of her first marriage, first film role, then Gainsbourg; Je t’aime…moi non plus begins to play as she walks towards us from the Eiffel Tower. Now alive and moving, the camera pans out, and we see that she is sitting next to an African street-vender, who is selling jewellery from a splayed scarf. Varda asks her to empty the bag; she tips it out, and it is beautiful with loose papers and weary black leather. Find anything out…?

Even when you show it all, Varda replies, you reveal very little. But you were revealed by the men you loved…I can see you as a muse.

I was told Muses never die, but some die of boredom…

At least you’re immortal.

I’m immortal, but dumped! He [Gainsbourg] had the nerve to die young!

Immortal but dumped—Varda remembers,

Once, when I was a teenager, a drowned woman was found in the Seine. She was so beautiful a death mask was made. Copies of the mask were produced. ‘The Unknown Woman of the Seine’ sold well. I bought one.

…Had she been happy to kill herself? Or had someone in the morgue forced her mouth into a smile for the mask?...I wonder if the only true portrait is the death mask. A frontal view of a motionless face. That’s all that remains of someone. A motionless face.

The face of the woman fades, and Birkin fades back in, smiling. And then Varda, sitting seriously, looking at the camera for a few seconds. Looking back at her.

Of Jane Birkin, I know her body best. I know how it looks underneath sheer, cream coloured fabrics; I know how her breasts sit in a tiny dress. This nakedness has a strange relationship to style, to clothing. In Nudities, Agamben says that, nudity belongs to time and history, not to being and form. He means that there is something un-seizable (un-formalisable) about the representation of the naked woman; even when we see her, completely, we look for more nakedness. So we have to freeze the image, stop movement. Sartre reads this desire as an attempt to strip the body of its movements as of its clothes in order to make it exist as pure flesh; it is an attempt to achieve an incarnation of the Other’s body. Movement, he thinks, is the thing which hides the body—more than makeup, clothes, and so forth. This is the thing, though—stopping movement really does create form; like images, or commodities, which are both constituted by, and subject to, fetishism.

Towards the film’s end, Birkin walks between a beachside installation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana sculptures. Their fleshy, bright-blooming papier-mâché breasts recall her own stuffed school-bra, and subsequent reconciliation, via Gainsbourg, with being flat-chested. Not only did he dislike breasts, he was afraid of them. He liked flat girls, girls he’d sketched at art school.

Defining yourself in opposition is necessary to having an identity at all; on Sunday, I was sitting with you, most beautiful, in the park again. You were vulnerable, tiny, and a precious thing, and I was tough skin. That’s the problem, we said. Where’s the movement between us, I thought we were both.

During the 1970s, Saint Phalle wrote a letter to the artist Marína Karélla, in which she recorded a failed suicide attempt:

Dear Marina,

During these years in St. Moritz, I fell in love with a glacier…I must have walked there a hundred times. Then I wrote a film script about it. The subject was an artist and his preoccupation with time, accelerated time, metaphysical time, the merging of times.

In the end, the artist walks onto the glacier, knowing his youth there will be both captured and eternal.

I became fascinated with the idea of committing the perfect suicide…I went for days fantasizing about what would be my last meal. I would take great care to wear lots of very warm clothing, makeup, have my hair done in the afternoon…

We are naked to nothing more than the executions of time. The appeal of an artist’s suicide, for Saint Phalle, is that the execution comes at the right time; when the subject is young enough to be worth preserving. The image stops, cold.

The Birkin bag is one mystical preservation of the woman herself. As probably the most successful mass-produced luxury commodity of the last century, it is still living. The bag which Birkin tips onto the stairs beneath the Eiffel Tower is not this bag. Her bag, with its papers and overflow, gets to die, because it is made of memory.

Varda understood that filmmaking calls up the deaths of the same people it creates as living. Her portraits are moving, and vivid, because there is only really one line—or four black lines, a frame. A different image, this image is very calm.

Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) begins,

Three years is a long time to leave a letter unanswered, and your letter has been lying without an answer even longer than that. I had hoped that it would answer itself, or that other people would answer it for me. But there it is with its question—

This is an intimate beginning; we feel the anxiety of the author’s time, which has already passed, and which passes as she writes. Especially, shamefully, as she has delayed; put off the answering.

But there it is with its question—How in your opinion are we to prevent war?—still unanswered.

And now, less intimate, more abstract—the beginning of Three Guineas as an Essay About Politics. But before that—for its first three sentences—it sounds more like an epistolary novel; or a note which I might have written, or held in my hand.

Woolf begins with this letter, which sits without being forgotten—and she creates it as a problem of time. The letter, as a real thing, which exists, which is unchanging, reminds her that time has passed, and that she is beholden to both—beholden to time, beholden to the letter. These two things create Her, whose delayed beginning brings self-consciousness: there are reasons why it is particularly difficult to avoid misunderstanding. A whole page could be filled with excuses and apologies; declarations of unfitness, incompetence, lack of knowledge, and experience: and they would be true.

But one does not like to leave so remarkable a letter as yours, she says, unanswered. Therefore let us make the attempt; even if it is doomed to failure.

In the attempt, she makes her unknown questioner flesh. She imagines him as a married barrister; he perhaps went to one of the English Public Schools, then Oxford or Cambridge. He is, like her, a member of what she calls the educated class.

Moreover, we both earn our livings. But. . .those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.

And in this, the first difficulty of communication between us appears.

Woolf describes the ellipsis with all the earnest distance of a lovers’ correspondence, at odds with this otherwise curt, detailed rejoinder. This feeling of the romantic comes from, I think, the relation of the ellipsis to solitude; to a sense of one’s seemingly isolable relation to time and meaning. I say something, I don’t say something, I feel the weight of consciousness pressing, my heart wakes me up, beating hot gasping fast.

The disjunct between the essay and its first intimacy comes, in part, from the trace of the work Three Guineas was meant to be; The Years (1937). Woolf intended for the two to be fused—her novel-essay—but writing it made her sick, and thus the split.

The Years is a family’s history in the raw, fifty years in single days and their seasons. From the first sentence, first season, 1880—It was an uncertain spring—the book is plagued by ellipses, while its characters play off each other in the repetition, quotation, of old correspondence.

"Coward; hypocrite, with your switch in your hand; and your cap on your head—" He seemed to quote from a letter that she had written him. He paused. She smiled at him. "But what was the word—the word I used?" she asked, as if she were trying to remember.

Of course she remembers, without the gulf or the gap, as the two cross back into real intimacy, into overlapping speech and teasing. For a moment, not-elliptical.

In contrast, one character observes the end of an evening—

Time was passing; if they stayed much longer she would miss her train. Surreptitiously she noted that the hands of the clock were close on eleven. The party was bound to break up soon; it was only the prelude to another party. Yet they were all talking, and talking, as if they would never go.

Talking. . . talking . . . The letter, as soon as it is written and read, makes time clear. And in doing so, it reveals hesitant or torpid speech as another kind of ellipsis, the one which circles the gulf, without looking down. And there we are, re-produced between the two. Between us, we make time. That’s why there are around five hundred ellipses in The Years, and only one in Three Guineas. Hesitancy being the stuff of life, and the first thing to be answered.

And, as Three Guineas ends in the present-tense,

Now, since you are pressed for time, let me make an end; apologising three times over. . .first for the length of this letter, second for the smallness of the contribution, and thirdly for writing at all. The blame for that however rests upon you, for this letter would never have been written had you not asked for an answer to your own.

After Woolf suicides, her husband, Leonard, edits her diaries for publication. The most sensitive information, on their sexual lives, on her most anguished, cruel periods, is replaced with ellipses. Many have despised him for this decision—but I think I understand. Another, desperate way of continuing the communication, with a kind of bitter fidelity to what the ellipsis meant for his wife—most of all, that which I want to say, that which I can say, but not quite, not yet. For most people, this effort doesn’t continue past death. For Woolf, it will last for as long as she is read.

I’m putting it here, because it has something to do with the MSCP course that I’ll be teaching from the 19th of June—System/Eroticism. There are only so many words— politics / revolution / experience / History / negativity / eroticism / love / art / writing—so you repeat them, you go back to them.

In La revolution du langage poetique, Kristeva does not quite confront us with an idea of history—rather, she offers up the antagonisms, and therefore the possibilities, latent in the intellectual matter of the prevailing philosophies of history since Hegel. Hegel was to be the end—his and our completion—he wasn’t. Then, the emergence of dialectical materialism, and another end without completion. Communism might measure its progression in centuries, but for now it’s easy to feel stuck in its constitutive historical contradictions; difficult, too, to feel for the opening of Being outside of capitalism. Our subjective conditions are now shattered with greater extremity than the poststructuralists, for the most part, thought possible. There is to be no easy reconciliation of the pieces of ourselves, and of our communities, that neoliberalism has split. Today, I want to think about possibility from the position of the split, and posit a reading of history in Revolution, and in Kristeva’s 1972 essay, “Bataille, l’experience et la pratique”, comparing, in each text, her appropriation of Bataillean negativity towards the re-definition of the non-unitary historical subject.

After Hegel, the problem of negativity is always the problem of History, and of telos; after Marx, it is also the problem of practice. Taken together, telos and practice produce two questions: the first is that of vision—does revolution appear possible? The second is that of access to the vision—who gets to see revolution’s possibilities; how do they see these possibilities; and how do they represent them to others. Taken together, therefore, telos and practice produce the question of representation. In this period, Kristeva represents her approach to history as at once teleological and non-teleological; a conception of monumental history that is co-existent with the linear tracing of production. This monumentality predicates itself on a transhistorical “creation”—primarily, writerly exceptionality—which occupies its own temporal line of negativity. Alongside this, Kristeva takes up the contradictions of Maoist history—and her continued commitment to the word itself; to “revolution”, holds its own hope for an end. Thus, while many scholars have read Kristeva’s work as an outright rejection of teleology, I don’t think this quite does justice to the complexity of the Kristevan operation.

So, I’m going to use “L’experience et la pratique”, and Revolution to read the conflictual shape of history and the role of Bataillean negativity in Kristeva’s sacrifice of telos; a model of history driven to exhaustion, in the hope of rebirth. For to place the textual enactment of negativity in parallel with the splintering violence of political revolution, to create a new discourse of revolutionary meaning, Kristeva must blow up the procession of theory and re-realise its political potential in the moment of transgression. She, therein, makes her practice the destruction of practice.

i. Bataille, l’experience et la pratique

It is with some reluctance that I invite Phillipe Sollers in; but he, and the climate of Tel Quel in the 1970s, are fundamental to this reading. “L’experience et la pratique” was written for the 1972 colloquium on Artaud and Bataille—“VERS UNE REVOLUTION CULTURELLE”—a crucial event for the review’s development; a moment to make itself anew, towards a Maoist constitution of the political subject, through the figures of literary transgression (ffrench 191). As Sollers writes in “Pourquoi Artaud, pourquoi bataille”, his aim was “pour faire bouger les contradictions” (9: ffrench 192). Yes—the contradictive fluidity, perhaps the paradox, of creating a politics around the subject of literary excess.

This is also the central concern of Kristeva’s essay, which she begins by drawing a line in history:

since the bourgeois Revolution, the essential adventure of literature has been to take up again, dissolve, and displace Christian ideology and the art that is inseparable from it.

Christian ideology is, of course, Hegel. The “negation contained in Christianity” is Hegelian negation; its sublation, its uniting of “the subject with supreme theological authority” the unity of Hegelian spirit, at the completion of Absolute Knowledge. To write literature after Hegel, now means,

The stressing of rupture, dissolution, and death by means of a problematic that is at once funereal, macabre, and ‘decadent’…or else by means of the dissolution of the fabric of language itself—the last guarantee of unity (237).

The challenge is to make this dissolution affirmative, to continue the channelling of Hegelian abstract negativity which, although Hegel turned from it in fear of madness, remains for Kristeva the only force capable of changing the symbolic order.

But the Marxist project, as Kristeva sees it, possesses neither the intention nor the means to continue this task in politics (La Semiology 88). She writes:

Marxism inherits from Hegel an ambiguity with respect to the ‘active subject’ within the concept of practice. Classical Marxism does not bring out the ‘active subject’…and slips toward a concept of practice that resembles a practice without a subject. It is only Maoism that surpasses this limited concept of practice by accentuating ‘personal experience’ (257).

According to this argument, Hegelian negativity, captured by the telos of becoming, nevertheless opened up the possibility for its own future materialism, but Marxist humanism, unable to countenance depense, abandoned the “ground” of the negative, and reinstituted a “practice without subject”, which, by Hegelian definition, could not be teleological. And so, Kristeva moves towards Mao, whose concept of history leaves cyclicality behind—for him, the tension between productive forces and the owners of the means of production does not create an inevitable incentivization of proletarian revolution. Contradiction is the blood running through Maoist process; and revolutionary war resolves its passage in only more blood, only more contradictions. Contradiction is the matter underlying the existence of Maoist history, and yet its thought remains perhaps paradoxically directed towards the telos of the communist state; “datong”, in Mandarin—the “great unity”.

Although Kristeva does not name monumental history in this text, its representative is her subject—that is, Georges Bataille; self-defined other to Hegel. Kristeva reads Bataille’s erotic “affirmation” as vital non-completion of the “affirmative moments” first postulated by Hegel (239). Bataille is Hegelian other insofar as he takes Hegel’s path in “reverse”, rediscovering “negativity in that repressed moment of absolute knowledge that is inner experience”; in laughter; in orgasm; in the non-discursive; in a desire that thinks itself as annihilation, rather than the constitution of self-consciousness (239).

Kristeva describes Bataille’s sovereign subject as,

the one for whom the tale, in other words, the representation of a series of events, is not an ‘objective story’…but a narration, a fiction. What does this mean?

This means that Kristeva is substituting a subject of negativity for the subject of negation; sovereignty for telos. This is the bringing about of monumental history—and of a writing that understands itself as the channelling of negativity—as the sovereign operation which, Kristeva tells us, demands a literature that opposes itself to a “novel” which takes “itself seriously” as an “attempt of mastery”. This mastery is the mastery of the objective story of History, and therefore of representation. The tone of the paper is triumphant, for Kristeva is announcing the possibility of an affirmative transgression, which destroys-and-then-renews each concept of teleological mastery that it touches. And yet, this conceptual move also has the effect of sacrificing telos and reinstating its structural authority—Kristeva has taken the sovereign subject, and the free social group, and placed them in the position of the end (Creech 64).

ii. Revolution

Let us now turn to Revolution, and its elaboration of this problem in Kristeva’s designation of negativity as the “fourth term” of Hegel’s dialectic, which “may be thought of as both the cause and the organizing principle of the process” (107); that “liquifying and dissolving agent that does not destroy but rather reactivates new organizations and, in that sense, affirms” (108). As in the 1972 text, Kristeva once more invokes the mutability of Maoist contradiction, and Bataillean transgression, to ostensibly amputate Hegelian negativity from its subjective telos; the movement of Becoming that “subordinates the conflictual state” denoted by negativity to the “immediate disappearance of the one into the other” (Lechte 19, qting Kristeva).

She also offers an explication of monumental history, confined to a footnote in “The Mirror and Castration Positing the Subject”. Interestingly, the explanation is not her own, but Sollers’:

The theory of textual writing’s history may be termed ‘monumental history’ insofar as it serves a ‘ground’ in a literal way, in relation to a ‘cursive,’ figural (teleological) history…Writing ‘that recognizes the rupture’ is therefore irreducible to the classical (representational) concept of ‘written text’…It makes the rupture the intersection of two sets (two irreconcilable states of language)” (252).

Of course, Kristeva’s reading of Mallarmé and Lautréamont follows these principles—for her, the semiotic element of those texts, directed towards their own materiality, is historical—it is the carnival of fin de siècle capitalism, and the possibility of its overturning, and re-making. Monumental history, here, posits itself as less the glorification of individual artistic creation, and more an acknowledgement of that creation’s semiotic challenge to “the existing historical forms of the symbolic” (139). But this can only come from an inner space of literature that “ruptures the linearity of representation” and “event” and becomes a “space of practice” (170).

Because of this, I think we can take these “two irreconcilable states of language” as also two irreconcilable forms of history; their antagonistic copresence enabling a form of theory that can position itself as rupture, as monument. Here, the operation begun in “l’experience et la pratique” is made clear—Kristeva’s is a form of history that represents itself as the “ground” of teleology; and in being that ground, harvests its own form from the avant-gardist works that are its object.

I want to now turn to Revolution’s last chapter, “Furieux d’intelligence”, in which Kristeva once more builds out from the position of “L’experience et la pratique” and specifies the kind of narration described there, as the recit. She writes that, after the irruption of poetic sovereignty has been encoded into ideology and social myth,

that poetic sovereignty be considered childish and that Bataille proposes to leave “the children in the house”, so as to continue the experience of process outside of the familial shelter. But the children would have already turned the house upside down. After their passage, the “récit” could be taken up, this time by escaping the house: “a récit”, a polyphonic novel that introduces the poetic rupture in each constituent node of (subjective) history, at the same time that it attempts to discover the logical relations that link each element of this semiotic rhythm to subjective and socio-historical continuity (448; translation my own).

This approach to the récit gives us another way, I believe, of thinking through Kristeva’s representation of her own approach to history. We must not forget that one of the defining features of the récit is its strange relation to memory; anglophone readers often attempt to substitute the term with “short story” or “novella”, and fail to grasp its root, the Latin recitare—to repeat from memory. The Bataillean recit, as in 1941’s Madame Edwarda, for example, is wont to truncate its own ending—through this form, Bataille is able to, to quote Kristeva, “affirm the themes of eroticism in order to dissolve them, through a rupture of the ‘characters’ and of logical sense” (247). I would therefore argue that Kristeva’s model of history takes much from Bataille’s fictional form—as described first in “l’experience et la pratique”—

The role of fiction as experience, in Bataille’s sense, is thus to lift, in whatever society, the repression weighing upon the moment of struggle between process and thesis, a particularly threatening moment dissolving social and subjective relationships but guaranteeing in this very way its renewal” (262).

The récit is other to the novel of “seriousness”; it takes itself seriously and not-seriously; it cuts its own mastery off and denies its own completion in favour of representing the dissolution of subjectivity. Something similar is at play in Kristeva’s approach to monumental and linear history; her effort to relieve the weight of the struggle between process and thesis results in a conceptual, and formal, movement that dissolves its object, with the promise of a renewal which may never come—because the object in question is telos; the ‘objective story’ of synthesised history. Transgression, unlike synthesis, does not necessarily promise restoration—it poses itself as alien to that process.

iii. The leap

Echoing Kristeva, the question we must ask today is one that the theorists of the 20^th century did not resolve: that is, how do we keep open the question of revolution in-text, and therefore in history; in ourselves? Can we cling to possibility through a theoretical discourse of transgression; can we recuperate a revolutionary telos that keeps the antagonism of subjective heterogeneity at perennial eyeline?

In using Bataillean negativity, Kristeva is able to drive the structure of an idea of history—Hegelian, Marxist, Maoist, in this case—to its own exhaustion. This processual harnessing of excess, wherein analysis becomes dissolution, pulls her work towards the traversal of the avant-garde adventure (ffrench 125). Such an analysis locates the writer of theory as the subjectivity of the exception; the “position at the limit”; which resists recuperation within a social dialectic. But this is also Kristeva’s fidelity to her own historical situation; her keen sense of what it might mean to create something qualitatively new of practice, in the form of theory.

Practice is a breakage—as Kristeva tells us, “…the capitalist mode of production produces and marginalizes, but simultaneously exploits for its own regeneration, one of the most spectacular shatterings of discourse” (RIPL 13–4). She is entirely right, and it’s for the horror of this statement that we must believe in the possibilities of a space between poststructuralism and Marxism; perhaps less in the Althusserian line of a “process without a Subject”, or the Derridean assignation of a Messianism, and rupturous event to Marx’s thought, and more the acknowledgement that there is always, has always been, something “other” in Marx, “other”, too, in Hegel. This would entail the positing of a subject, who may not unitary, who contains the unrepresentable, who may even believe in their own exceptionality, but who nevertheless undertakes praxis.

The other night, I was watching Park Chan-Wook’s film Decision to Leave. At the film’s end, one lover, a murderer, tells the other that it is possible for him to go back to his life, to his marriage and work in law enforcement, before the “shattering” that she engendered. After saying this, the murderous lover buries herself in sand, drowning as the tide rises. The other roves across the beach and attempts to find her—but she is obscured beneath his feet. He does not know, and so despairs. He moves through the ocean, searching for her; the waves cover him as he cries out. The film’s last words are a recording, from the dead woman: “Your voice,” she says, “Telling me that you love me.” In death, she is revealed as entirely material, and entirely unknown; he cannot reach her by intention. Negativity is the lover; the ground; the ruin; the shattering. It is the overflow of intimacy—something that we know is beyond us every time we really love, every time we are lost in the act of sex. And—it is the seeming incapacity of teleological thought to hold onto the singularity of the voice, the voice that says, “I love you”, which invites Kristeva’s insertion of heterogeneous negativity, and would, of course, lead her further into psychoanalysis.

The very concept of negativity may appear irreconcilable with the rational, humanist subject of Marxist thought. But we might also think here of the way that Engels defines the “historical event” in an 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch:

This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed” (“Letters on Historical Materialism”, Marx-Engels Reader, 761).

Negativity, here, the incipient power of a class, “works as a whole, unconsciously, and without volition”. Negativity’s emergence might be an event that we can neither refuse, nor choose, to face. The thinking of negativity might allow us to remember that a suppressed communism is the movement under the sand; immanent to capitalist process, rather than an ideal aim or lost origin. It may also allow us to see class struggle anew—for, more than ever, the subjects of class demand re-theorising.

Kristeva finishes Revolution thus: “Une nouvelle taupe agit et ronge toute these.” The mole which is negativity has always ranged, but now, more than ever, we can posit no new thesis without the acknowledgement of its movement. However, we will not be able to find the “as yet unrealized, collective…decentred cultural production of the future, beyond realism and modernism alike,” if we do not simultaneously attend to its cannibalisation of radical thought; and, perhaps in contradiction, its capacity to open up the future possibilities of that same thought, across representation and being (Jameson 11).

X L

Anne Ernaux is a French writer; she was born in 1940, and in 2022 she won the Nobel Prize for literature. I read her Things Seen (2000) for the first time that year, stepping onto a tram towards Prahran Market. I know—can see—myself leaning against the metal bar, holding my new, small book in one hand. I know the coat I wore. I can see that different, rounder face.

The French title of Things Seen is La vie extérieure—the outer life, or the external life. It is composed of journal entries; mostly brief, vigorous studies of Parisians in stations and shops and airports. And then, occasional extractable phrases—like Stories are a need to exist, on April 8, 1993—a kind of construction which will take its happy place in didactics, or panel discussions, or grant applications. The title of Ernaux’s Nobel acceptance speech—I Will Write to Avenge My People—seems to have something of this. It is taken from an early diary entry, sixty years before, she says.

I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers…would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty…

So, the title is a half-lie—its desire, its pull, began as an illusion which would be dispelled over the course of Ernaux’s life. But in its dispelling, it became a truth—through Ernaux’s desire to break with writing well, to take up the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness, contra-Woolf, contra-Proust, contra-Flaubert, she represented everything that happened to my girl’s body. Her representation of the body, as discovery, brought the work into politics. But because it began with the initial formal impulse, this politics was insurgent, rather than self-conscious.

Ernaux’s decision to take on a ‘flat’ affect is a political one; The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing…

When she writes about the life of her father, she will flatten the ‘I’ so as to elude the reader’s bourgeois condescension—there will be no gaudy representation of suffering to flatter her audience into pleasure. And yet, the body of her work is nothing like bare, sober extraction—instead, her ‘I’ is an exploratory tool that captures sensations: those which memory has buried…

The prerequisite of sensation has for me become both the guide and guarantee of the authenticity of my research. But to what end? Not to tell the story of my life nor free myself of its secrets but to decipher a lived situation, an event, a romantic relationship, and thereby reveal something that only writing can bring into being and perhaps pass on to the consciousness and memories of others.

There is only one difference between this ‘bringing into being’, and similar, emptier claims to the representation of sense in life-writing. The difference has two movements—first, Ernaux’s genuinely philosophical grasp of desire, consciousness, and memory; and second, the total subsumption of those ideas into form. This, like her politics, is insurgent (the form is actually the beginning; the ideas rise from it, but are also covered by its shape).

In June 2023, I read Getting Lost (2001), the diary of Ernaux’s affair with a Soviet diplomat, and used a passage in Grubbery:

About this article: I constantly struggle against the urge to do nothing because I see everything that needs to be done. I cannot imagine a timetable, a slow succession of words and sentences that fill up time. I have no patience…Awareness of the pain which this will represent, and already does. And the horror of writing an article…

Here, she is describing how it feels to live, between meetings with her lover. Outside of time, and agonised by it, she experiences the production of writing not as an escape—that joy and rupture into artistry—but as a one-thing-after-another ordering (of pain). Something strange is happening here, between desire, sense, time—and the problem of an ‘end’.

Two years ago—writing something I felt ill-prepared for, something which would surely reveal me as naked, and inept—I cited Ernaux for the experience itself, and for the feeling of its time. Some months later, I would read Simple Passion (1991), in which Ernaux takes her weary diary entries, and turns them into a pitiless, spare account of the affair. In September 2023, I quoted three of its passages in Grubbery. This is the first:

It occurred to me that writing should aim to do the same, to replicate the feeling of witnessing sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.

I think it’s important to note that she writes this in response to watching pornography. For the writer, this suspension means holding up an object which is part-frozen in time, but which is still an ‘intercourse’, still something moving up against, and hurting, and pleasuring. The ‘time’ of the text is not actually static, or isolable from the time of the reader/viewer—but it can be replayed, the bodies moving back and forth in narrative—while its witness’ anxiety remains arrested, without release in the form of any moral judgement.

I also quoted these:

[f1] I often like to weigh up a strong desire against an accident of which I am either the instigator or the victim, or an illness, or some other tragedy. Knowing whether I would agree to pay the imaginary price of disaster is a sure means of assessing the strength of my desire, possibly also of challenging fate: ‘I don’t care if the house burns down so long as I get to finish writing this book.’

…

Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every scene right, the same minute attention to detail. I could even accept the thought of dying provided I had lived this passion through to the very end—without actually defining ‘to the very end’—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing the book.

If sexual desire brutalises the steady passage of time, then this idea of ‘an end’ ensures that time still passes well enough for representation to take place. That Ernaux sees the end of one desire (the affair) as comparable to the realisation of the other (the writing) is very interesting—because only one is the final movement.

Elsewhere in the text, she writes,

I feel no sense of caution or restraint, nor do I have any doubts, finally. Something has come full circle. I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors. There is only beauty, passion, desire.

Ernaux grew up after the Second World War, proximate to a generation of French intellectuals whose Marxist (and Sartrean) inheritance was built out from the Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s model of desire is a re-interpretation of Hegel; his desire is a dialectic of recognition—it is not only that we desire other people; it is that we want they want (we desire the desire of the other). And we want that desire to be reciprocated, so that we might feel fully human. Jacques Lacan will take this and run towards There is no sexual relationship, and desire as continuous lack structuring the empty centre of consciousness. Lacanian recognition, especially in love, is misrecognition—the desires cannot match up, but we will pretend, for our whole lives, that they do (and thus that we are compatible at all). We are arrested in the time of desire, which will only be completed in death.

Ernaux knows all of this—in A Girl’s Story she describes first studying philosophy— Her first essay…casts her into a nameless anguish: can a distinction be made between an objective and a subjective mode of knowledge? The girl who in former years wrote essays with ease now becomes obsessed with a task that seems to her utterly terrifying. She is seized with panic at her inability to find and develop ideas.

This is it—the problem of Ernaux’s work, and the reason for its singularity. This first terror will, eventually, be the thing that draws from her the fullest development of ideas, within a form of writing which is at once entirely subjective (the ‘I’), and entirely objective (the facts of living it observes).

And it is because of this that Ernaux-ian desire is unlike the philosophical desire which is clearly kept in mind. When she writes that, I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors, this is a dialectical statement, and, again, she knows it.

For Kojève, history was nothing more than the persistence of error—the conclusion of the dialectic, and the end of history, constitutes the end of human error. Following this, Ernaux is placing her work, and its formal effect on the moment under recollection, at the end of the dialectic—at its resolution. The end has already happened, in its writing. All that is left is the record of sensation, which holds (at a level often beyond immediate signification) the residues of philosophy, morality, and politics. Sublated, all the errors of life and the concept.

Do desire, and representation, actually function like this? I don’t know. But part of what is maintained in the product of Ernaux’s work is the knowledge that although there might have been a misrecognition in the human-to-human relationship of desire, a kind of recognition can take place in writing.

Between people, you can trust another person, and allow them to handle you towards their desire. In that, a part of yourself is given over to this bigger thing, and you will want to be recognised for who you were/are, before and during them. You will want their desire to make you human, and they will want the same. This becomes more complicated when recognition is explicitly mediated on the level of ideas. The strength of the relation would depend on the reciprocity of that level; a trust which comes from not using the other’s thought as a means.

The problem with explicitly ‘theorising’ recognition, or any concept, in life-writing, is that it takes the author’s knowledge of their (intimate) present for granted. Ernaux poses herself against those self-narratives which seek to bring to light a dominant truth…to ensure a continuity of being. She does this, because that kind of writing always neglects to consider the following: our failure to understand what we experience, at the moment we experience it; the opacity of the present, whereby every sentence and every assertion ought to be riddled with holes.

The present is the time of misrecognition; it even contains an absence of meaning. But its errors multiply the future possibilities of writing; the possibility of meaning.

This is why she says, I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing. Because it is not only a question of narrative control—it is a question of error, and of who gets to re-form the errors of desire (which we enter into, over and over again) into a satisfaction which could never be achieved in the experience described. Or who can.

Angela Davis’ An Autobiography (1974) is in six parts—1. Nets; 2. Rocks; 3. Waters; 4. Flames; 5. Walls; and 6. Bridges.

Parts 1, 5, and 6 detail the FBI’s hunt-and-capture operation throughout 1970, Davis’ subsequent incarceration in 1971, the trial, and her eventual release in 1972.

The final chapter ends,

I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work. Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it…

But first the grass, the sun…and the people

I’ve hesitated to write about Davis, because of the extractive laziness which emerges so eagerly from the work of white radicals. Davis says _____ on prison abolition; Davis implicates XXXX in the future of the struggle; we take thinkers like her apart, and put those parts towards experimental theory, or some bad autofictional riff, or the stiff play of essays read aloud in lecture theatres.

But we still need to come to grips with Davis, beyond her palmed-off inclusion in syllabuses and conversation. The Autobiography is a good place to start. Its fourth part covers the peak of her involvement with the Black Panther Party, while undertaking a PhD in Philosophy at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Parts 2 and 3 cover her earlier education, and right now, I want to talk about Part 3: ‘Waters’.

Each new beginning has an epigraph, and this one comes from Federico Garcia Lorca.

I go into genesis’ landscape of rumblings, collisions, and waters…

Garcia Lorca was one of the Generation of ’27, and was assassinated by Francoists in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. I don’t know the poem, but that line reads like a compacted, better obverse of Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’.

Yesterday all the past. The language of size

Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion

Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;

Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

…

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;

Yesterday the classic lecture

On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

…

‘But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.’

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets

Of the evening paper: ‘Our day is our loss. O show us

History the operator, the

Organiser. Time the refreshing river.’

….

To-morrow, perhaps the future

….

To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing

To-morrow the re-discovery of romantic love

…

To-morrow for the young poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion

…But to-day the struggle

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,

The masculine jokes; to-day the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Auden’s syntax is fussy and listicled like a school debater, but I had read ‘Spain 1937’ aloud to Henry, under the tin roof going 40 degrees, and it was my favourite until ‘The Letter’ (1928), because I thought that

The year’s arc a completed round / And love’s worn circuit re-begun

was perfect.

But that is another question altogether. What is important here is that Davis’ writing of her life allows for the breakaway of another kind of thought.

Part 3 — I go into genesis’ landscape of rumblings, collisions, and waters…

In September 1961, Davis begins her first term at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. Herbert Marcuse taught at Brandeis from 1954–65, and sometime around 1962/3 Davis approaches him, and asks for a bibliography of sorts; a beginners’ reading list for philosophy. He tells her to begin with the pre-Socratics and work her way up. They meet every week, and eventually she asks to join his seminar on Kant. She writes,

The most challenging and fulfilling course was the graduate seminar that Marcuse conducted on the Critique of Pure Reason. Poring over a seemingly incomprehensible passage for hours, then suddenly grasping its meaning gave me a sense of satisfaction I had never experienced before.

Davis grew up on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, named for the KKK-directed bombings of Black homes. She was a clever and an angry child, fully aware of the animosity of her white neighbours, but frustrated by the sense that she could not place their instances of hatred into a system of coherence; one which might reveal their actual source.

The satisfaction of philosophy’s difficulty becomes, here, an opening out from the stopped-up anger of her childhood. By itself, this might have been a false catharsis. But Davis had also, already, come to communism as a late teen. She describes her first encounter with The Communist Manifesto thus:

Like an expert surgeon, the document cut away cataracts from my eyes.

Davis will write through these occasions of coming-up-against-something-new, until she stops a contemplative passage dead with an episode of racial violence. These episodes do not dominate the structure of the text, but they are fundamental. In the beginning, they come as punctures after a particular kind of victory, which should function to assimilate Davis into white respectability (e.g., graduating college). Later in the text, she shows with even-handed clarity the development of these violences into the all-out assassination of Black leaders.

But that is all to come. After graduation, Davis leaves for Berlin, and studies at the Frankfurt School. She remains politically active, but watches from afar as Black caucuses form in the United States, across the unions, churches, political groups, and universities. This small section of time—between the assassination of Malcolm X in January 1965, and the Watts riots in August of that year—forces Davis’ hand, and she chooses to leave her studies, because I was so far away from the terrain of the fight that I could not even analyze the episodes of the struggle…I wanted to continue my academic work, but I knew I could not do it unless I was politically involved. The struggle was a life nerve.

And so, she goes to the University of California San Diego to continue her work with Marcuse. This is the part titled ‘Flames’, and this is its epigraph, from Henry Dumas’ ‘Black Paladins’:

fire eaters from the sun

we shall lay the high white dome to siege

cover screams with holy wings, in those days

we shall be terrible

Dumas was killed by a cop in 1968, and for this reason much of his work was published posthumously— ‘Black Paladins’ is better known now for Joseph Jarman and Don Moye’s 1979 recording of the poem, as spoken-word jazz track.

I read An Autobiography while listening to Nikki Giovannis’ half-sung poetry recordings from the 1970s. I listened to ‘The Way I Feel’ (1975) first while grocery shopping; picking up a steak, and some pears, and then bread for the morning. There had to be food, because it was necessary that the retreat into emaciation be stopped short; because that kind of non-feeding takes something from your brain, while totalising its contents into something that appears meaningful in asceticism.

The problem is, of course, that asceticism doesn’t exist anymore; and that it, like minimalism, bears its holder towards something reactionary, something with the taste of white supremacy.

If there is to be any clarity, then women atrophying their thought and bodies is a kind of giving up which no one can afford. If the work is going to be rich, and if it is going to transmit something which the work or maker themselves cannot understand (yet), then you need energy, to make it. That transmission has something to do with the experience of pleasure,

and me, I like pleasure.

Giovanni likes pleasure too. I like her poem ‘My House’ best, although I like it better read aloud, and even better read to music, and even better while I’m cooking, or thinking about someone, even though I’ll never really understand it.

i only want to
be there to kiss you
as you want to be kissed
when you need to be kissed
where i want to kiss you 
cause its my house and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you
when i want to hug you
as you like to hug me
does this sound like a silly poem

i mean its my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in
carpet stores gathering 
patches so i could make
a quilt
does this really sound
like a silly poem

i mean i want to keep you
warm

and my windows might be dirty
but its my house
and if i can't see out sometimes
they can't see in either

english isn't a good language
to express emotion through
mostly i imagine because people
try to speak english instead
of trying to speak through it
i don't know maybe it is
a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house
and i'll make fudge and call
it love and touch my lips
to the chocolate warmth
and smile at old men and call
it revolution cause what's real
is really real
and i still like men in tight
pants cause everybody has some
thing to give and more
important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me 
happy
so this is your poem

In 1970, she writes a protest poem for Davis. This is part of it:

Giovanni’s politics have a sly, vaguely Democrat step—in 2020, she read a poem called ‘Dream’ in support of Biden’s presidential bid. But the sensual quality of her work, and its closeness to a politics (which isn’t fully political), does something musical and strange when read alongside Davis’ work, and its logic of a philosophical communism. Their contradictions are the same; their end-forms are completely different, but they are still so, so close. And in their gap, another thing, a something else.

Sontag has this essay on Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, where she writes that ‘All art may be treated as a mode of proof’, different from analysis, as ‘Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal.’

The thinker who can write well about their own life understands that the form of the life is proof of something. Their feelings can be cut out, or historicised as a manifest form of production, or contradiction, or as assemblages of discourses, as emergences, as insufficiencies.

For me, the faith in form means knowing that there is always this other thing, which is more—which is formless, because it is a completeness which I cannot possibly recognise—which, with my whole life behind me, I won’t be able to recognise.

But for Davis, this completeness is not unknowable—it’s the struggle, and the belief in a world that might remake itself; even beyond her lifetime— she wants to know that it’s possible.

And all Giovanni wants is a house that feels like a house, and a body that feels like a body; she want to know that it’s possible, because she plans to live in them both. That concern remains the same.

I.

Johanna van der Linden’s Heavy (2024) drapes as plastic skin from looped chains; pink like silk and sweet lip fish, in the sun it smells something awful. Two days before, someone had said— ‘There’s an idea of a love which is light, rather than heavy. You know, like the Christina Rosetti poem’—that is,

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

But ‘there are two forms of heaviness,’ she said. ‘Heavy like you are filled with something—a meal, or like an apple tree with fruit,’ or ‘the heaviness of anxiety, which William James says is nothing other than a keeling over, or a disabling of movement.’

The lines of Rosetti’s poem cling to one other like the thinnest blistered skin, still dangling from its original site—the body. Van der Linden’s Heavy is a skin that has been severed, from site and original, organic material. She suspends it from mild steel links, attached to the rafters. It hangs raggedly over one side, and flows down the other, until it stops, pooling around the small form of Nest (2025).

II.

Nest is one of six etchings in ‘Residual Sanctum’; its lines and contrasts are the most pronounced of the set. It is both tripartite structure and collage—we see a version of the Lamentation, a Christ-figure made nesting doll unto himself, repeated three times over, stacked vertically in a composition which undermines its own separation. Christ’s body parts overlap and repeat, and as we move from the first level, down into the third, van der Linden’s line work becomes less fine, cruder, as though a memory of Christ has taken over from the original object of mourning. Or, as though he has been absorbed into another kind of matter; into the bodies of the indistinguishable figures (are they figures, or expanding lines of bricolage?) which surround him.

The uncertainty of these surrounds, and the muddied limits of the Christ body, create a lamentation which has an object, but no subjects—what figure, here, could lament his death? In all the noise of composition, nobody is left to grieve, and so the work of lamentation is displaced onto the audience. In a crass moment, I am reminded of the split of an Instagram explore page, into thirds. Every moment of prolonged mourning is there thwarted by an overlay of repetition; images of bodies are replaced by another, and another, and thus a total, final degradation of victimhood.

This, too, is reminiscent of Jusepe de Ribera’s 1633 representation of the scene, in which the bodies of the lamenting are, though jewel-hued, swallowed up by darkness. Here, darkness is the commotion of repeated form, which itself evokes the stained, uneven lines of Heavy, in a relationship to actual material which continues throughout van der Linden’s work. The sharpest points of Nest—stigmata and small, dark nipples; near-indistinguishable from each other—are a denser configuration of the black marks which stain the latex work; thus, the little boxed etching functions like a private container for a grief whose symbolic representation leaks out at the base, and then rises.

III.

Who is like to god? (2025) and Fold (2024) refract and triangulate the pinks of Heavy towards different purposes. Who is like to god?— god in the lower-case, that is—the etched god, rather than the Absolute—is a question answered by the title of another work—little saint michael (2025). The Archangel Michael was God’s favourite angel, the first made in his image; he, ‘of celestial armies prince’ (John Milton, Paradise Lost VI 25–58) took on the souls of the dead, and made his body the ‘armoury of God’ (302–35). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Michael brings Adam to vision—the same sight denied to Eve—‘purged with euphrasy and rue / The visual nerve, for he had so much to see’ (XI 412–45).

The angel’s sword is the central diagonal of little saint michael, and the work’s only easily discernible object. A ragged bronze spike pierces its upper third, and two others stick out from the wall beside; despite their shared sharpness, spikes are unlike the sword. The sword institutes the law of God; it directs the etching’s form. The spikes are an intrusion, and a danger; but they are also a frame.

Who is like to god? is similarly framed and supported by three spikes—this etching is bright and celestial pink, separated into thirds which only just fall short of vertical alignment. The image of Michael is here continued and estranged in repetition; his face is at once less distinct and feminised, and the collaging of Nest is continued towards a different focus—the strength of the angelic body in movement; his beautiful, muscular legs; serene eyes surveying the punished.

In contrast, Fold resists the impulse towards repetition; its pink is warm and flesh-like. Genitalia or an arachnid, tree roots large and obscene, roses and cream, pleats of matter. ‘Above, the soul sings of the glory of God’, Deleuze says, ‘inasmuch as it follows its own folds’ (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 3). But the path of the fold isn’t for following—its ‘communication stretches out indefinitely’ (Monadologie P61). Deleuze reads the fold in Paul Klee’s work as the spontaneous line, the act of a curve’s inflection, the vein which surrounds ‘living beings held in the mass, such that the marble tile resembles a rippling lake that teems with fish. Sometimes the veins are innate ideas in the soul, like twisted figures or powerful statues caught in the block of marble’ (4). Van der Linden’s work, generally, has this quality; here is paper, like a block of marble, like latex skin cracked and silken-fluid. And yet, Fold is less twisted-up than her human figures; its abstraction comes closest to the presence of Heavy; it is disquieting for its proximity to animal silence.

IV.

Pieta (2025) appears as a cooler, more Classical object altogether. Here, there are neither stigmata nor nipple-points, and the Christ body can be mourned in its re-imaging. The arms which hold him must be those of the Virgin—but is that her face? Or the face of a disciple? The scene of the Pieta should be of mother and son, alone—but these figures are multiple, and their identities are uncertain. Furthermore, van der Linden creates slits in the composition, which serve to re-insert the work’s image back into itself. These are incisions in a scene of time, whose faces are now turned to themselves (as inverse; as mirror), as much as they are turned to Christ.

In identification, I thought of Leonard Cohen’s discussion of love—that activity whereby,

you can embody man and woman, when you can embody heaven and hell, when you can reconcile and contain, when man and woman becomes your content. In other words, when your woman becomes your own content, and you become her content, that’s love. And you recognize the full equality of that exchange…it is night and day, and it is the moon and the sun, and it is the land and the sea, and it is plus and minus, it is heaven and hell: it is all those antinomies, but they’re all equal.

The faces of Pieta are exchangeable in their moment of approach towards the dead body—and in this, their love becomes the love of the mother for her lost son; their content is shared, and their posture, kneeling, holding, bending—is the same.

In Falling (2024), the stretch of time between heaven and hell is another moment of terrible equality, in which weightlessness is created by the crushing forms of others. These bodies, in unwilling embrace, also have the reluctant bearing of labourers—they strive, and move, towards something, along the work’s equator; a horizon line through its middle. These figures are positioned along the line, facing horizontally, looking left—backwards, rather than forwards, they reverse linear progression, even as they fall. Autonomy has no purchase here, as their legs are intertwined and bound to the same horizon which cuts them in two. Metal hooks crowd the work’s base, like leftovers, or bodies and chains fallen to the side. S-shaped and dark, they are the snake and the shackle.

The human body is its own justification for suffering—it would not exist, as it is, without pain. The repeated images of the Holy Trinity, and of Christ’s body, in Catholicism, are the extension of this truth in absolute representation. In returning to the essential repetitions of Catholic iconography, van der Linden’s work is a citation of pain—as that thing which places us within history, and within a history of representation.

V.

Van der Linden might be too-easily slotted into a current corpus (!) of visual artists looking to define themselves in the terms of conceptual ‘embodiment’. Her work, however, stands out for its resistance to making any one ‘claim’ about the body, its shackling, its transgression. It is, instead, the proof of the body as a site of the shackle, and of its wound, realised through a clever, subtle use of near-Baroque technique in practice and composition. This is a light touch which downplays, then carries, the weight of the impious image, as continuation and antinomy of the first practice of belief.

In Alice Munro’s 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway, heavy, violent men wrap their arms around younger women, and the whole world is seized, and transformed.

In one story, a Latin teacher falls asleep on a train, and dreams that

…she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it…

Later, she remembers.

Kallipaereos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months now. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else, and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

That is what happens.

Munro’s second husband was a serial child abuser, who groomed and assaulted her youngest daughter, Andrea. I read the daughter’s account of the abuse, and of Munro’s complicity, before reading the mother’s work at all. It was only after seeing her book, Runaway, at my parents’ house, that I decided it might be interesting. It might be interesting.

Jonathan Franzen’s introduction to the collection is called “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” Its tone belongs to that kind of Savvy American Writing, which is sophisticated but humanist, in that it talks about a kind of literature that can save my soul, which is the soul of America, and Bush.

What makes you the evil one? Munro writes so well about the hinge of a single meeting, and the hold that one interaction can have over an entire life, and of the cruelty of error, when it makes friends with chance. She writes about mistreated women who seek out, and reconfirm, their own abuse. Children seem opaque to her.

There is a question, here, about the writer’s way of sublating their own inconsistencies, and cruelties, in representation. Munro loved a man who did terrible things and loved him because of his capacity to do them. She mediated the horror of this fact through her writing, and so her literature is the by-product of a betrayal.

When I was 16, I watched Walerian Borowczyk’s La Bête (1975), and for a year I thought about it all the time. Its plot—a large, monstrous creature stakes his presence in the life of a beautiful, naïve aristocrat, by murdering her lamb, and then penetrating her, brutally, in a forest—was easy enough to understand. Its relative tragedy—that the beast is a man; that he loves her—appealed.

I wasn’t troubled by these aspects, but by something else—I had come up against a weirdness in form, in which the violence of each scene was divorced from—or actively undermined—any attempt to represent the emotional experience of the violence, of the assault, and of its eroticism. The film’s two main sounds—jaunty chamber music, and the snarls of the beast—also bent themselves towards a feeling of the non-connected. This was seductive. It was too abstract, but seemed to contain something else, which was more real, and truer than other things I had seen.

Before leaving Melbourne for Christmas in Brisbane, I watched Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1973) for the first time, and in doing so realised that La Bête started as a short film; as one of the immoral tales. Watching it again, as part of an assemblage, its disquieting aspect resolved. The relation changes again, with time.

Luara wrote in the SRB that,

AI produces a ‘[Andrea Long] Chuian’ female: a subject tantalised by the promise of offloading the dirty labour of desiring onto someone, or, more accurately today, something else – the code canalising the app, the algorithm designating the feed, the interface smoothing the experience, and the fabric of economic relations overdetermining them all…Perhaps the very smart machine will do the work of desiring this life that I cannot bring myself to want.

Maybe in the figure of the sexbot, the camgirl, the parasocial NPC gf, we find not our potent agency reflected back to us, but rather its overdetermination by our fear of wanting something more specific and more supportive of our lives than the feeling that, just for a moment, we lack nothing. There’s a kickback, a moment when the sexbot becomes less a vessel than a mirror to our emptiness, one which leaves us running in shame to Femaleness. We might find the symptomatic effects of this flight, for example, in students’ lack of desire to read and discuss a text with others, or maybe in the pervasive cultural decline of desire for one’s life. We might identify its effects in the stupefied anticlimax of finally ‘pulling out’ of a three-hour-long scrolling session to find life right where it was left, only now even less desirable, less giving, less rich in infinity.

But if we outsource our desirous capacity to improvise our own responses to the problem of the unknowability of what this life wants from us – responses only we can make – we careen into circuits and ruts fashioned by the false promise of an easy way out, and find ourselves rushing to offload the only challenge that individuates us…. AI proffers satisfaction without risk, and it conflates this satisfaction with wholeness, promising a completion that would inoculate us against the horrors of egoic injury human others inevitably occasion. In doing so, AI holds out the illusion of an identity and existence that could sustain itself free from the injurious work of love – a labour that demands sociality, a sociality that is necessarily dangerous and fraught. In sociality both the impossibility of love and its necessity inhere.

A few days before leaving, Ellie read me Whitman’s ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’. Later on I sent part of it to Jasper,

The first day I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale, an archivist gave me the wrong box, and I was in trouble. The documents were from the Bataille collection, which was right, but they were ephemera, not direct, and not mine. In one envelope was an unmarked triplet of paintings, re-printed on small cards, by Leonor Fini. I was interested, but ironic; of course, I thought, Bataille would have loved these disintegrating, teeming bodies. But now, I think about these paintings often, and I don’t know why—is it the memory? The significance of the day itself, and the discomfort of misunderstanding, amidst a kind of pure glamour? Is it half-feigned, a meaning which tries to pull itself out from the mundane, proving its own real-ness over and over again?

I try to be generous; the worst thing would be to diminish the joy of it. Agnes Varda defines inspiration as the conditions which ignite desire—'motives, ideas, circumstances’. Ignition, the brightness of desire, its year-in-creation must always be the next, for the child of the century and their farce without speech.

In Flights, Olga Tokarczuk describes the river of her childhood, the Oder.

Standing there on the embankment, starting into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.

True and not-true, maybe, not a question of nobility, but of a reality (a sociality) which cannot ever be static, and of the kind of representation which might be able to come to terms with this, in a moment of union, which I think we still want.

Because, as Lukács writes that in his 1965 Preface to Writer and Critic,

With its form of organisation, its science and its techniques of manipulation, modern life moves relentlessly toward reducing the word to the mechanical simplicity of a mere sign. That means a radical departure from life…

Sentence by sentence, drip-drip-drop, the wearing-down of the stones. Again, again, home and/or/our home, a resistance, to hold the everyday pains of the non-mechanical.

Oh, relief! That there is still hurt, and frustration, and petty wide eyes. We still live!

Happy new year! The sun sets, and I’m glad it does.

Lil

On Sunday, I bought a spatchcocked chicken on special at the Woolworths on Lygon Street. $8 for a spatchcocked chicken, and I let it come to room temperature while I sat outside with Henry, and we talked about the day.

After that, I sliced some anchovies and pressed them into butter with fresh parsley and oregano from the edges of our garden, which has been overgrown for a while, but we’re cutting it back. I spread the butter over the chicken, thinking about how I said to you that roasting a chicken always felt like eating a baby, and how I used to cry when I held their bodies over the sink. This chicken was splayed open, very easy. I cracked some pepper, and some more salt.

When I took it out, it was perfect, which I knew because of the movement of the flesh under the skin when I pressed it. I made a sauce over the stove, with eggs, parsley, olive oil, and some vinegar. It thickened under soft heat and whisking, and stayed smooth and perfect on the countertop.

In the other apartment, I would lean out the window and watch my neighbours across the lane while they cooked. Two couples, and a man who, bent over his kitchen bench, read sheets of printed copy. I was cooking lentils, or chicken, or sausages, or something like that, with wine and all these cold cigarettes. I ate a loaf of bread every day; I drank a bottle of milk; I walked up the hill and looked down. The city, it seemed to me, was full of people.

In Housmans, I bought a 2015 issue of the New Left Review for a pound, to read Jameson’s review of Life and Fate:

Reality itself must be compressed, and uncomfortably thrust back on itself, living on top of itself, in order for genuine relations to exist: our own parks and surveillance cameras, the gated communities of the isolated rich only give us a handful of separate individuals, at a distance even from themselves. The bourgeois world gives us families in apartments and cars, in intermittent juxtaposition; even their wars are little more than deadly vacations.

In opposition to this are the ligatures which kill total solitude; human raw material, whose actuality you become aware of again, like a child, in different places.

When Tori visited, it snowed. Snow reveals that the world is a book. It covers over signs, effaces letters, erases lines. Snow is virgin, like a blank album. A return to the dangerous silence of the morning of creation. The meaning of the earth is erased. Not covered over, but removed. Before God marked on the earth the graphics that allow us to know it, it was thus, like a page. Like a sea, like a desert (Michel Serres, Cahiers IX).

Like sea, like desert, like Tori looking outside and saying, Oh. We left the house once, for loaves, and came back, and didn’t leave again until the evening.

In ‘The Art of Fiction’—her essay on E.M. Forster—Virginia Woolf writes,

That fiction is a lady, and a lady who has somehow got herself into trouble, is a thought that must often have struck her admirers. Many gallant gentlemen have ridden to her rescue…[with] a great deal of knowledge of her, but not much intimacy with her. Now comes Mr Forster, who disclaims knowledge but cannot deny that he knows the lady well.

If he lacks something of the others’ authority, he enjoys the privileges which are allowed the lover. He knocks at the bedroom door and is admitted when the lady is in slippers and dressing-gown. Drawing up their chairs to the fire they talk easily, wittily, subtly, like old friends who have no illusions, although in fact the bedroom is a lecture-room and the place the highly austere city of Cambridge.

This came after London’s modernism, which screeches, and the train from Glasgow to Kings Cross, on the bluest day I’d seen, and something like an experience of that greater sense which is present in everything—to not know every place; to not know every person, or every thing—to know a few, well enough; to give a sense of it all.

But outside of the city, I ran through Hartham Common and it opened out into mystery. In the mist, I understood that this was a Romantic reading, and the right one. I called Mum and told her; I touched the head of a beautiful cow; I caught the train back into London, and was angry again.

There was no more waiting than you’d expect, between the trains, boarding another—I don’t have that kind of hunger in the same way anymore, but something different, that thing closer to loving pleasure, or knowing that when I talk like this, I know what I’m after—i.e., a car that’s warm; another kind of shelter.

Love,

Lil

I wrote this before going to Montréal two weeks ago; it’s slim, but I’m publishing it so that I can write the next one. I went over the stones, and came back towards the moon, o my mirror grey antipode.

Je hais Marie, et quand je vois son portrait, je m’agenouille.

Mallarmé writes that in a letter to Henri Cazalis

—I hate Maria and when I see her portrait I go down on my knees.

It’s like Leonard Cohen says in ‘Diamonds in the Mine’—

Well, you tell me that your lover has a broken limb

You say you’re kind of restless now and it’s on account of him

Well, I saw the man in question, it was just the other night

He was eating up a lady where the lions and Christians fight

Just after Land Forces, I dreamt that I wrote a newsletter about state violence, and did it with ease—this didn’t happen, and for the next few weeks, I almost stopped dreaming.

The Seventh Function of Language, which J+ recommended, and which I then saw in J-’s office, fictionalises murderous post-structuralists. In one scene, Julia Kristeva listens to her husband, Philippe Sollers, talk about his writing practice. She reflects,

that phobia does not disappear but slides under the tongue, under language itself, that the object of the phobia is a proto-writing, and, conversely, all use of words inasmuch as it is writing, is a language of fear. ‘The writer: a phobic who succeeds in making life a metaphor in order not to die of fear but to come back to life in the signs,’ she thinks.

…Sollers stands silently. Kristeva visualises the mouthful of coffee forming a sort of stagnant pool in her stomach. The danger has passed, but the skin is still there. The nausea remains at the bottom of the cup. Sollers says: ‘I have a talent for differences.’ Kristeva drains the cup in a single gulp.

I read Sollers’ fiction for the first time, and hated it; I hated its transparency, its love of itself, and its love for the veil.

The Samurai is Kristeva’s book about living in Paris, and being in Tel Quel, with Sollers; in love, the flow of first feeling. Soon after she arrives in France:

(‘How do people live in Paris?’ wrote Mama, suddenly affecting elegance. They protest. They think things are ‘impossible.’.

It isn’t a very good book; all its weight comes from the relative significance of the players. The most affecting relationship isn’t that of Sollers and Kristeva, but rather between Kristeva and Roland Barthes. She describes their first encounter, during his lecture on Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

An unexpected meaning was gradually emerging, one that had nothing to do with homosexuality or the duplicities of high society but was related instead to the painful ear of jealousy: ‘the sound of a call’… ‘the purr of the telepone’… ‘a woman’s voice singing’…

Finally the aural memory changed into a colored surface— ‘the pink complexion of a seaside flower’—but it was still a metaphor for the one sensuality, that of the Narrator, iridescent with love.

In this way, [Barthes] was saying, love is time made tangible. It is not a matter of organs, or even of minds on fire, but a pact by which words turn into perceptible memories. Words that remember having once been perceptions of sounds, colors, scents. Proust in love invents a story to make the Narrator, enamored of Albertine, relive that transport of the mind and senses that is passion’s true element.

Elsewhere, I was touched while reading about Kristeva’s practice as an analyst, and her treatment of a mute boy—she would sing opera with him, and gradually he began to speak again. For her, this is the curative intrusion of the semiotic.

This music, which runs through us, is a force radically different to reason—my horrible shiver upon reading the wrong words, over and over again—your anger at me—my incapacity to answer it with anything satisfying. With music, desire doesn’t seem quite so triangular anymore.

Rather more like, the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are all flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes.

See you soon!

Lil

One must just begin, not waste time on doubting.

It is no easy matter.

One must not spend too much time.

One must just begin, and then it would turn out all right.

One should embrace the eternal philosophy (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments).

I didn’t realise that The Broken Middle was about my life until I read the first chapter after we spoke, and realised—I had taken up words without knowing that Rose handled them first. Except, not strong enough, I could only handle them for a second while kneading the stretched skin of my own neck.

Whereas Rose is calloused and smart enough to begin with a beginning that is always also the end, and her sharp-voiced critique of the implicit, yet astonishing, assumption that any ‘development’ could not occur without stumbling blocks or ‘surprises’—that development does not presuppose aporia but excludes it.

Here comes the problem of the abstract tripping down Lygon St; you said that I move into abstraction because it offers an escape from agency, and you said my abstraction is fine, as long as it maintains a sense of the particular!

And so on Thursday I was blue because I didn’t go to hot pilates. Instead, I sat in a cafe on Sydney Road, and watched a middle-aged couple. Both of them wore hearing aids, and without speaking their conversation was a series of gentle touches to each others’ chest, which became harder and more barbed over time. They smiled through the aggression, or was it aggression, maybe it was a purposive kindness, but either way a conversation with them is different to a conversation with you. Their communication isn’t like ours—

Or like René Girard’s mimetic desire, a triangular borrowing:

Chivalric passion defines a desire according to Another, opposed to this desire according to Oneself…Don Quixote and Sancho borrow their desires from the Other in a movement which is so fundamental and primitive that they completely confuse it with the will to be oneself.

We borrow so much that it must be stealing—ideas, pens, selves, and so on. But more importantly, Girard writes that,

Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is the continuation of literature…The value of a critical thought depends not on how cleverly it manages to disguise its own systematic nature or on how many fundamental issues it manages to shirk or to dissolve but on how much literary substance it really embraces, comprehends, and makes articulate.

And I just think that’s awesome.

I was very interested in Oscar Schwartz’s piece on alternative maternity in The Paris End. I liked his description of Sydney: ‘some fecund cyborg’. He briefly mentioned Fleishman is in Trouble—the book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which she turned into a television show with Jesse Eisenberg, Clare Danes, Adam Brody, and Lizzy Caplan. I read the book, and it reminded me of why I shouldn’t read fiction; it’s all too hard; too much like the whole world—fiction makes alien your feelings, and begins the experience of re-recognition; you see them all over again, with a fresh cut(!) of revelation.

It isn’t good for my constitution, I say to Jasper, and he laughs.

Your constitution!

In an interview, Caplan reflected on the series’ ending, when Danes (missing bitch wife), reunites with her husband, who for the most part experiences women as a series of mysterious flashing images:

I remember when I was reading about the book that a lot of readers of the book have that question. “Do they get back together? What happens? What happens?” And I was thinking, “Guys, don’t you see what this is about? It’s about like, the whole fucking world!”

It’s about the whole world! Like John Cassavetes’ movies—Shadows (1959) was, and Too Late Blues (1961) was too, although Shadows was about our whole world, except for the crucial fact that it was also about New York, race relations, and jazz—things that our circles don’t know much about, not really.

There’s also Anne Carson writing about Parkinson’s (a minute ago you were 25):

…

A minute ago I was 20 and my face was round fruit tropics sun gleaming blue everyday

but things change you know, then you’re 23 and you get all grey and the skin starts peeling, because ageing doesn’t work how it used to, it’s sped up now like flows like production but it’s slower too, like fingers of the sun on new guitar strings.

In memory, it might be more like:

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so that he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

But now feels closer to the voice of the pilates instructor, as she says, Maybe you move into this pose…Maybe you feel your body heavy against the floor…

In Revolution: An Intellectual History, Enzo Traverso writes that,

…all revolutions transcend their own causes and follow their own dynamic that changes the ‘natural’ course of things. They are human inventions, which do not reveal any ineluctable occurrence but rather build collective memory as the landmarks of a meaningful constellation. The belief that they belong to the regular and cumulative time of historical progression was one of the biggest misapprehensions of twentieth-century left-wing culture, too often burdened with the legacy of evolutionism and the idea of Progress.

It works differently for Rose (hers is a different kind of history):

The Revolution in the revolutions of 1989 has not ‘destroyed’ Marxism so much as it has dismantled post-war state-Socialism. We have been given back the last two hundred years - in life and in letters. All the debates, all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been re-opened as well as the opportunity to resume examination of the connection between liberalism and Fascism from which post-warstate-Socialism has proved such a dangerous distraction

The revolutionary YES! is dead; our maybe is now the truest sense of the possible—but holding the maybe bruises like contradiction, or a bitten tongue, something that might never be said.

Still! Hurts less than a rubber bullet in the guts.

Love,

Lil

John Forbes’ poem, ‘Ode / “Goodbye Memory”’, ends like this:

              Goodbye memory

                         & the way the mind groans

over its trivia throwing the scrapbook into

the sunrise thinking look how I shine convinced

the day riots before I even glance

the mind spoils even the hamburger, training words till

they’re all reflex & cooing for tormen…

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