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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Outside Looking In « Previous | |Next »
February 29, 2004

Gary, glad to read that you are on the ball, although I guess that turning that word into red for me spoke for itself. I agree with you that reading most modern philosophy books is a waste of time. I can handle Adorno, Bataille, Benjamin, those sort of guys but most other stuff leaves me cold, even the secondary texts on these guys. When I read Adorno, for instance, this is particularly true of him, I discover that my previous readings were shallow, partly blind, or only half readings. This means that I get more from his writings – the same writings – each time I go to them. They seem to get better and better.

Hey, shit! I’m sorry if I sounded like I was hassling you. I know you’re busy with the pollies and their pollywaffle. It’s a job and it sounds like a shithouse one at that but everyone needs bread. ‘Give us this day our daily dread and forgive us our trespasses.’ While the contemporary philosophers are irrelevant, the pollies are positively pernicious. There’s an aphorism by Canetti that describes both groups well:

‘The last of the month, I climb down into my ruins, a ridiculous lamp in my right hand, and I tell myself the deeper I go: it’s no use. What faith can lead to the core of the earth? Whatever you, whatever another, whatever each of us does – it’s no use. Oh, vanity of all strivings, the victims keep falling, by the thousands, the millions; this life, whose holiness you want to feign, is scared to no one and nothing. No secret power wishes to maintain it. Perhaps no secret power wishes to destroy it, but it does destroy itself. How should a life that is constructed like a bowel have any value?’

Canetti continues, describing the peaceful comfortable day of the average academic philosopher:

‘The peaceful day some people experience is hypocritical. The torn-up things are more true. The peaceful ones envelop earth with the leaves and slowness of plants, but these nets are weak, and even if they are victorious, the fleshy destruction continues under their green covers. The powerful man swaggers about with his biggest stomach, and the vain man is iridescent in all the colours of his innards. Art plays a dance for the digesting and suffocating. It gets better and better, and its legacy is guarded as the most precious good. Some people delude themselves with the idea that things could come to an end, and they calculate catastrophes on top of catastrophes. But the deeper intention of this torment is an eternal one. The earth remains young, its life multiplies, and new, more complicated, more distinct, or more complete forms of wretchedness are devised. One man pleads with another: Help me, make it worse!’ (The Human Province, p. 107)

I’m hanging out with the guys and gals with iridescent guts; you’re hanging around with the ones with the very biggest bellies – and sagging tits too (I think that’s how one of your chiefesses described them in a different context some time ago). Canetti and Adorno are at one on this: those who have truly resigned are the ones who proclaim a way forward when none can be found. The phillies and the pollies have both resigned. They just get terrific superannuation and a three-ring circus to play in.

In the meantime, what do we do? Answer: we write. This isn’t a proposal; it’s a description. We Write. But who do we write for if not for the fat guts and the colourful gizzards? According to Karen Blixen, God is whoever it is you write for when you don’t write for them. And I’m writing this on a Sunday! It must be an act of devotion! I’m writing to the same guy Bukowski was writing to when he wrote his poems that weren’t really for people to read. Sure, you can read them, but it’s like reading other people’s mail.

Klossowski gives me the words to say what I want to on this question – hang on, I’ll just look up when it was that I talked about Klossowski… here it is… it was… ‘Klossowski On Art’ (January 15) [In red please, Gary]. Just as an aside that is doubly virtuous because it allows me to say something else about Balthus, the name ‘Klossowski’ is pronounced ‘Kuas’ and not ‘Klo’. According to Balthus, it’s a very old Slavic name meaning ‘corn cob’. It also exists in Russian. His father hated being called ‘Klo’ (Balthus In His Own Words, pp. 17-8). Anyway, the idea I get from old Pierre Corn Cob is the distinction between expression and communication. The first is to do with phantasms, the second to what is imposed from outside. In art the two become mingled because expression is always couched in stereotypes – symbolic modes of communication. Modernism, as distinct from other periods in art is the time when the phantasm pretty much gives up on expression in order to attack the stereotypes.

Canetti gave up but he didn’t stop writing, and what he wrote broke new ground in terms of literary form. I’ve called the material I quoted an aphorism but the term doesn’t fit completely comfortably. Adorno possibly captures this new form best in describing the material in Benjamin’s One-Way Street. He wrote of Benjamin’s work that, rigorously conceived, it ‘excludes not just fundamental themes but all analytical techniques of composition, development, the whole mechanism of presupposition, assertion, and proof, of theses and conclusions. Just as the uncompromising representatives of the New Music tolerate no “development”, no distinction between theme and elaboration, and instead require that every musical idea, indeed its every note, stands equally near to the centre, so too is Benjamin’s philosophy “athematic”. It too is dialectic at a standstill to the extent that it admits of no period of development but rather gains its form from the constellation of its particular enunciation. Hence its affinity to aphorism’ (On Walter Benjamin G. Smith (ed) p. 14). I’m inclined to look on books like Bataille’s On Nietzsche in this way, as well as the volumes of ‘jottings’ by Canetti.

To mine, this is what lies behind the disagreements I always have in reading groups and seminars. Academia, even now in its corporatist and post-modernist form, relies on fundamental themes, analytical techniques of composition, development, on presuppositions, assertions, and proofs, on theses and conclusions. That’s why Benjamin was never allowed into a university. That’s why we’re outside. I live off a woman with some crumbs from academia on the side; you mix the female source with some funds for working with pollies. We’re birds of a feather. Mostly we’re locked outside the cage. But then, being locked out is a bit like being locked in, isn’t it?

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