The accursed share

Over the weekend, I read Georges Bataille's 'the accursed share'. Bataille is always fun to read. There is nothing obscure or difficult about his prose. He has a nice style. He's bright and lucid and interesting. This particular book has fun discussions of human sacrifice among the aztecs, the thirteenth Dalai lama, potlatch in North American native American tribes, etc. etc. All the same, it was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn't as revelatory as 'literature and evil'. I already knew the basic argument, and i expected his development of the argument to take me unexpected places, but no, it was mostly what I thought it was. Other people seem to have gone further with it, and Bataille himself adds interesting stuff to it in later writing.
He starts with the premise that economics errs by trying to isolate economic activity from everything else in life, and he sets out to create a 'general economics'. Wealth is similar to energy in natural organisms or organic systems... I realize I'm going to end up presenting a lot of this kind of short hand, because it's familiar enough to me that it often doesn't feel like it needs to be spelled out. You'll remember, maybe, that when I was talking about 'literature and evil', I already talked about the opposition between spending and accumulating... according to Bataille, in some societies spending is a positive good in opposition to bourgeois society since the reformation and particularly since the industrial revolution. So in feudal society, nobles were expected to ostentatiously waste wealth and working was a base activity. According to Bataille, the creation of wealth always leads to a certain excess that needs to be destroyed. Wealth can be invested and put toward the creation of more wealth, but expansion always has its limits (and he puts this in parallel with the balance of creation and destruction in nature, the eventual satiety of ecosystems, the inability of organisms to grow indefinitely or make use of everything they consume - thus the need for excretion). There's a definite Malthusian element in the whole argument as people are considered as a resource, and he uses this dynamic to discuss human sacrifices, and the world wars that destroyed so much of what was created and accumulated through the industrial revolution. Drinking, wasting time, anything that doesn't produce is an expenditure. For Bataille, Cathedrals and all of the adornment of Catholicism is sacred precisely because it is pure expenditure, because it is ostentatiously not for a pragmatic purpose (and wastefulness contributes to the sacred nature of sacrifices as well).
Before continuing with his argument, I will make an aside and point out that there is a sick and irrational belief in western society (and not just in Western society) that growth is always necessary and good. Even if the increase of population isn't always seen as a positive good (balancing the recognition that the world is getting overpopulated and the desire to have a large enough younger population to support the aging population), it is always seen as a tragedy if we do not continue to grow quickly enough. As labor can be made more efficient, it is not thought that this should necessarily lead to everybody working less and enjoying more leisure time with the same amount of goods, instead it is believed that we should produce more goods as the only possible way to keep employment at a reasonable level, and we should make sure that we get people to consume those goods. We need ever larger markets so we can keep people working... and why? We're increasing the strain on the environment, not making ourselves happier (people are more stressed out - women are working as well as men, and they are both working long hours. who needs it?).
Anyway, that's related to Bataille, but not something he is saying. He takes it more or less for granted that all things tend to try to expand until they are confronted with an excess that needs to be released. An example he doesn't bring up, at least not on an individual level is the ultra-successful business men who become philanthropists, and start devoting a large amount of there energy to spreading largesse, to unburdening themselves of what they had initially worked so hard to accumulate - sometimes at the expense of some of the people they later try to help. (I'm not claiming that all successful philanthropists did something shady to acquire their fortunes, that many aren't inspired by pure altruistic motives, or that when they start devoting time to spending they aren't continuing to accumulate - this last part generally goes without saying - but it does seem to be true that for many, spending becomes as important as earning... and the spending often seems more of a sacred task than the earning ever was).
Anyway, I'm not going to go through all the societies and examples Bataille gives to show how this works. I just want to jump ahead to the ending which is sort of the strangest part of the book - because it was written at the height of the cold war, and it deals with the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It would be possible to read part of the section dealing specifically with the Soviets as apologetic, since he to some extent rationalizes things like collectivization (all the while admitting that the process was brutal and inhuman, just not incomprehensible - incomprehensible not being the same thing as 'right' or 'good' of course). He goes to some length to point out the success of the soviets in developing a backward economy that in no way conformed to the sort of society that Marx thought could become communist - he points out that the Russians won Stalingrad before the Americans had made their presence felt in Europe. He also points out the logic of denying the individual in the name of the collective - opposing freedom with justice... in other societies excess was not systematically channeled toward the members of society who were in want (internally or externally). After a passage talking about war again, Bataille shifts to talk about the Marshall plan, and he more or less comes out with a very European view of the Soviet Union as having a healthy influence on the U.S. For the purposes of winning the loyalties of the rest of the world away from the Soviets, the U.S. ends up making the most positive, productive use of its excess of any society ever. Bataille clearly does favor the U.S., but doesn't desire a victory for either side (not that he says this quite so bluntly), For me it is kind of inevitable that in reading something like that I do think of the fact that there was no marshall plan for eastern europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a lot of the checks on the worst excesses of capitalism fell away completely in the nineties (not that it hadn't started with Reagan), and there was no more need for America to show a moral rather than just a material superiority of capitalism - not that the eighties and even earlier hadn't been filled with channeling money to brutal regimes in South America and shamelessly destroying the environment - I'm not really sure that things changed all that much, but still...
I could add all sorts of speculation, but for some reason these sorts of theories always start to seem less compelling to me once they are turned toward world politics. The connections between pure expenditure and the sacred were interesting, as were the more ethnographic or focussed discussions of various societies, countries and religions - and, of course, it was interesting to take the basic idea and use it to shed new light on Weber and the protestant ethic - the sudden moral imperative to accumulate and not to waste that went along with the iconoclasm of the early protestants, etc.

logic and language

I don't want to talk much about language... I think the questions you brought up will be discussed at length over the summer when I'm talking about Locke, Condillac and co. Still, I feel like I can't not give a cursory response. When I spoke of Language as an imperfect vehicle for thought, I actually thought I was saying something that couldn't possibly cause any objection... I'm sure you think, as I do, that language enriches thought, gives us the ability to think more things and more complicated things. I'm sure you and I can agree that in articulating a thought we often change that thought for the better, making it clearer and more refined. I do not mean to suggest that there is or should be a better vehicle for thought, and I don't regret the absence of some ideal thought vessel. I suspect that you and me both have an unusually strong faith in what language can be made to express and joy in making it express things. What i meant is simply that language cannot communicate thought directly - the fact that you can have trouble putting a thought into words, the fact that there is no adequate vocabulary to express certain sensations or experiences, even the fact that things thought simultaneously and interconnected cannot be expressed simultaneously, all of this is what makes it possible for romantic thinkers like Rousseau to long for a pre-lapsarian language, a language before babel which would be perfectly transparent and instantly communicate thought as thought. The point is more or less what was written about the dictionary of received ideas - thoughts have to be made to conform to given vocabulary and syntactic structures, and this alters them (sometimes for the better). This gives pathways, patterns of thinking that can be a limitation or a barrier as well as an indispensable aid. Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as (though, obviously, since communication is possible, they don't always end up recognizable, and the most ordinary, everyday thoughts are often perfectly communicable). 'Imperfect' can actually be a desirable trait, since what is 'perfect' is often what is complete, finished, closed. I always refer back to the Cartesian distinction between animal and man (not that I buy the animal end of it), where man is defined by his instinct being 'imperfect', in other words not dictating how man should act or react in given situations, thus necessitating evolving behavior. It is because man is 'imperfect' that he is capable of invention. In this sort of scheme, 'imperfection' is equivalent to having free will, and being 'perfect' means being determined once and for all... of course, part of the 'imperfection', which is opacity, derives from the ambiguity that even the most lucid stylist can't help but creating at points. By lucid stylist, I mean the ideal philosopher who wants language to be transparent. I suppose 'imperfection' is also 'literary' - the fact that the qualities of language that a literary writer delights in (the materiality of language, its capacity to mean multiple things at one and the same time) are present, if often unacknowledged, even when the philosopher writes. This is a fact that the continental philosophers embrace, and sometimes sort of obsess over.
As to language being illogical, I feel somewhat less able to back up that claim. I was partly talking about the arbitrary nature of signs and the fact that convention trumps logic in all languages... in the seventeenth century, the grammar of port-royal attempted to show that language was modeled on logic, and that we speak and think using the same structures. Chomsky thought of this grammar as being a forerunner of his own generative grammar. The argument largely breaks down - I'll give some reasons in another post. Esperanto as a language without history may be created to be perfectly rational, and may have no exceptions to its rules, but it will still be required to make arbitrary choices about what its rules are, what words will have to have multiple meanings or functions (no language can have such a broad vocabulary that it can avoid this), what meanings and functions will be grouped together, etc... Everything I say from this point on relating to this is said with huge reservations (and I can't exactly remember what Lecercle said or how he said it - I'm sure I was careless in expressing it in the original post you were questioning). Remember I gave Bergson's definition of humor as the mechanical grafted onto the living? Well, language has to adapt to a living world, and if it is treated as a rigid, inflexible structure that is not capable of adapting to a situation, absurdity will result. I understand that it isn't illogical to adapt to circumstances, but logic, like language, can be treated as an abstract set of formulas - real logic can be replaced by textbook logic, just as real language can be replaced by textbook language... Ionesco's play 'the bald soprano' is a good send up of books for foreigners learning English. So I suppose that in part the word 'illogical' would here not genuinely mean 'illogical' but rather 'irreducible to a set of formulae and necessarily relying on certain arbitrary decisions determined by convention'. The nonsense relying on the 'illogical' nature of language would be 1) delighting in the frustration of rigid formulas 2) pretending arbitrary decisions were not arbitrary and providing spurious justifications for them 3) playing with groupings in the form of homonyms and homophones and words with multiple functions. I could expand on this, but why would I bother? This isn't really my topic. It's just part of what I think was in the Lecrcle book (though god knows in trying to explain what I wrote when talking about Lecercle, I've almost certainly strayed very far from what he actually wrote.
What else? I haven't read Wittgenstein, and I won't have a chance to any time this year, though I hope to read a bit of him next year. Your interest in him makes him appealing, and he pops up very frequently in books and conferences. Raluca has been reading some stuff on Wittgenstein, because she is working on a poet who was influenced by him. I can't imagine how happy it would make me to get to teach a class on Dostoyevsky, but that will never happen. I'm going to try to get a class on 'savages' for next year, but that isn't likely, and even that isn't what I would most want to teach. There's no possibility for teaching the stuff I'd most like to. As far as what you were saying about what Wittgenstein does, all I can say is that it sounds appealing. Though, to return to the very beginning of this post... I don't know quite how to put this, and it has nothing to do with Wittgenstein and more to do with the idea of seeing things through a different lense, casting a different light on the world or whatever... and what you said about 'clearly this has to be nuanced, because if that were what he was trying to say why wouldn't he have just said it exactly like I just did' (or words to that effect). I actually get incredibly frustrated with things I can't put into words, and tend to love anything that gives straightforward lucid explanations that ring true. I love things that add to my own ability to put things into words. On the other hand, I do think art can be used to help explain and understand he world just like philosophy can, and I have trouble separating the two. Music is probably the most direct and sensual of the arts, the one I have the least intellectual reaction to and enjoy the most for its own sake - but even music is something I enjoy talking about and trying to explain, and when I try explaining it, I'm always talking about something more general than just music.

I heart Wittgenstein

So I've been teaching the Philosophical Investigations this term, which gives me an excuse to re-read the book from cover to cover for the first time in a few years, as well as a chance to read for the first time the new translation that came out last year (which is really just an update and improvement on the original Anscombe translation). It's been great fun, and naturally I keep discovering new things, either things I hadn't noticed before, or connections I notice for the first time in passages that were already familiar.

One of the things I’ve found striking--and the thing I wanted to comment on--is how much I can see Wittgenstein's influence on the plays and other forms of make-believe that I create. There's a wonderful sense of absurdity in Wittgenstein that I think you'd love (have you ever read him?). Not so much outright jokes (though there are a few, depending on your sense of humour) as a pervasive sense of the world looked at askew, so that everything seems bizarre, out of place, ridiculous. And that's married with a very patient attitude toward the absurdities: Wittgenstein wants to nurse them gently rather than push any of them too hard.

There's a fair amount of debate about how to read Wittgenstein, ranging from people who think the best we can do with him is treat him like he was an analytic philosopher with a penchant for obscurity and try to tease tidy philosophical theses out of him to people who think his unique literary form serves a unique philosophical method that we ignore at our peril. As you can imagine, I fall more toward the latter end of that spectrum. My reading tries to take seriously his claim that if we were to advance theses in philosophy it would be impossible to debate them because everyone would agree to them, and so tries to find ways of reading Wittgenstein as not advancing theses.

To a large extent, I think the way to read Wittgenstein is as offering what he calls "objects of comparison." At §144 of the Philosophical Investigations he writes: "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things." For instance, Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a pupil who constantly gets things wrong in following out mathematical rules and can't be induced to do it "right." Wittgenstein doesn't tell us "the rules we normally take to be grounded in necessity are grounded in nothing stronger than our tendency to teach and learn in similar ways, so that, for the most part, we can teach people by getting them to see what we mean, but there's no way we can compel understanding." Rather, he finds the right absurdities to help us toward this view. (This claim obviously needs to be complicated: if all he's trying to do is get us to see the thing I wrote explicitly above, why didn't he just say so?). He sets the world we know against a world that's thrown weirdly askew, and the comparison leads us to see the world we know in a different light, in a way that dispels our philosophical confusions (or tries to do so).

It struck me that, though I don't do philosophy this way, it does reflect the way I approach my plays to a large extent. The well-chosen scenario is one that presents a fictional world that casts a jarring light on the real world. I'm not looking for the scenario that tells us what the real world is like so much as the one that gives us a point of comparison, or a perspective, on the real world such that we see it differently. And, in fact, this seems a not-bad sketch of what literature aims to do generally. Or one thing that literature does.

In this respect, it occurs to me that Wittgenstein interestingly blurs the old distinction between philosophy and literature. If philosophy is supposed to state claims directly and literature is supposed to cast light on matters obliquely by way of comparison, what Wittgenstein writes is more like literature than philosophy. This might explain why he's often greeted with such confusion and irritation within the halls of professional philosophy. What would Plato think?

nonsensical responses

First I'll try to say a bunch of things in response to your posts. Then, time permitting, I'll try to write a separate post about Wittgenstein. I mean god, I've been contributing to this blog for nearly half a year and I haven't talked about Wittgenstein yet. What's wrong with me?

First of all, I have to wonder to myself how you read books so fast. You're constantly complaining about how lazy you are and how little work you've done, and yet every week you're commenting on a new book you've read. It's a good month for me when I read a single book, and I don't really think I'm lazy, much as I castigate myself from time to time. In my case, I think there are two main reasons: first, I'm a slow reader, and especially with academic books, I read at a pace of something like five to ten pages an hour, so reading a full book in a week would be a full week's work, and I rarely manage a full week's work. And that's for the second reason, that I have a talent for taking on all sorts of extraneous commitments. I wouldn't really have it any other way, but it does add to the stress levels. Writes the guy on the bus back from London having spent the day sitting in on rehearsals for Tom's a-cold, which opens in a week and a half.

Now, to work roughly from oldest to youngest. Reading your last three posts I was reminded on a number of occasions of something I think you've remarked upon more than once, that we seem to be interested in many similar things even though we look at them through the lenses of rather different intellectual backgrounds. The language and nonsense stuff is a prime example, since it features significantly in my thesis too. Actually, it's maybe more of an anomalous case, since it's not just our interests that overlap here, but even our reading somewhat. I'm supposed to manage to get my head around Derrida at some point. Not sure I will, but I'm sure talking to you about this stuff can't be a bad start. So maybe I could begin by posing some clarificatory questions.

You talk about the rules of language being clearly not logical. I'm not entirely sure what this means, influenced as I am by Wittgenstein's claim that ordinary language is in perfect logical order. Do you simply mean that grammatical rules seem often to have exceptions, or do you mean something stronger than that? If you mean the weaker claim, I suspect that's a bit of a red herring (I'll get on to what I think is not the red herring shortly) because a language without grammatical exceptions isn't free of the sorts of ambiguities you seem to take as paradigmatic of illogicality. Esperanto, for instance, is a language without grammatical exceptions (I believe--I don't actually have more than a passing familiarity with constructed languages), and it seems like there are people who can communicate with it quite fluently, but it also seems (again, speaking out of ignorance) that speaking Esperanto doesn't radically alter the features of language that tempt us to call it an imperfect vehicle.

If you indeed mean a stronger claim that language of any kind--grammatical exceptions or not--is somehow an imperfect vehicle (you talk about language as a "flawed vehicle for thought"), I'm curious how you might spell that out. Flawed in comparison to what, for example? If the struggles we have with language aren't accidents of our language, but structural features of all possible languages, then can this count as an imperfection? Can we articulate what it is we're unable to do that our imperfect language somehow hinders us from doing?

I don't mean to deny that language often trips us up in various ways. I'm just questioning whether we can coherently talk about these snares as "illogicality."

I said I thought that grammatical exceptions were a red herring. What I don't think is a red herring--and something I believe is familiar to readers of Derrida as much as to readers of Wittgenstein or Cavell--is the fact that words can always be projected and used in new contexts, and no rules can lay out in advance how that projection can work, and if we operate with a sense that the boundaries of the concepts defined by our words are rigidly fixed in advance, we are likely to stumble on all sorts of confusions that make for a playground of nonsense. Lewis Carroll is one of the great masters of this genre. I'm thinking of the bit about "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today" as taking the word "today" to refer to the present day, whatever that day might be, fixed by the present moment rather than the moment of utterance. That's maybe not the best example, since there's more at work than just the notion that concepts need rigid boundaries, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

A few other things on other topics:

Regarding trans-humanism, you seem to share my sense that on one hand, this is obviously perverse, but on the other hand, there's something quite compelling about its logic. Again, more so for someone like me, a vegetarian and aspiring Buddhist, than you, with your punk sensibilities, but I'm glad you seem to share my sense of it. Again, I think of Nietzsche, this time in terms of his emphasis on instincts and his sense that unhealthy creatures come to distrust their instincts. Abolitionism seems to represent this notion perfectly: people who so distrust their own instincts that they can talk themselves into rejecting everything they are naturally. Though I was struck by your remark that you find enhanced intelligence less tempting than enhanced happiness. What thinking person hasn't wished for a little more sharpness of mind? Sure, godlike intelligence and happiness might render us other than human, but that's where the "trans" in "trans-humanism" comes from: from their point of view, if human nature as given to us doesn't sit well with our trans-human future, so much the worse for human nature.

I enjoyed the stuff on Flaubert and received ideas. When I was reading Bovary last summer there was frequent reference in the footnotes to the book, though I never quite knew what it was (having skipped the introduction to get right into the novel). It sounds like a delightful idea. It also reminded me of some stuff I've been reading about Heidegger and das Man. There's some debate about the extent to which das Man in Heidegger is meant to represent the bland conformity of adopting shared norms like driving on the same side of the road, etc., and to what extent it's meant to represent the pernicious conformism of thinking what everyone else thinks, etc. One suggestion is that the two easily bleed into one another, and I find a bit of that in your discussion of Flaubert. I've been working on a paper on Wittgenstein and Heidegger and precisely the question you raise with Flaubert about how we can break out of the habits of thought we've inherited without breaking out of the constitutive grounds for expressing thoughts coherently at all. You won't be surprised to hear that I think Wittgenstein is more successful in this respect than Heidegger. My next post might touch on this.

And lastly, I identify powerfully with what you say about complaints that there's nothing new to say being the complaints of people who can't think of anything new to say. I'd never have put it the way you put it, or even really thought it without your help, and I think it's inspired. Though it also reinforces my sense that I'm not really destined for the life of the scholar. I'm really not sure what there is to say that's new. Not because I don't believe it's possible, but because I feel like I'm able to think with people who inspire me but lousy at striking out on my own. I think my slavish devotion to Wittgenstein comes from the sense that I have nothing to say that could take me beyond what he's already said so well.

Transvaluations

Yesterday I finished reading a book on Nietzsche's reception in France ('Transvaluations' by Douglas Smith). I wouldn't have expected to say this, but, more than anything else I've read over the past year, I would recommend you read it if you get a couple of days. It starts off pretty much as you would expect... The first people in France to read Nietzsche were Wagnerians who were mainly interested in things like 'the Birth of Tragedy', were quick to embrace anything nice he said about Wagner and Schopenhauer, and quick to denounce everything else as symptoms of his madness. Maybe the second reading of Nietzsche was a predictably decadent symptomology, treating all his ideas either as stemming from or causing madness, and would sometimes suggest that his madness was contagious, that reading too much of him and getting into his writings might drive you mad. With the ill-will between the French and Germans at the turn of the century, Nietzsche could be embraced for a while as a German who praised France and denounced Germans, but he then started being condemned as a typical representative of militant German thought. This first part of the book, which is sober, scholarly and a bit dry, pretty quickly gives way to one of the best overviews of twentieth century French thought that I've ever read (which isn't actually saying all that much), and the focus on Nietzsche just gives coherence to what would otherwise spin out of control. Smith tries to stick to monographs of Nietzsche, but to make various thinkers reception of Nietzsche intelligible, he has to go on digressions to explain the overall bodies of work of a lot of the thinkers that dealt with him, or explain intellectual trends that shaped their readings. As a sort of further structural principal, he takes as a more or less constant theme an opposition between the Will to Power (as a linear, teleological view of history associated with voluntarism and the Ueberman - though the last man is another teleological offshoot) and Eternal return (non-linear, and non-teleological, as a more deterministic philosophy), as contradictory aspects of Nietzsche's thought which can only be reconciled with great difficulty, if at all. He believes that Eternal return has traditionally received more emphasis in French readings of Nietzsche than in German or Anglo-American readings, though he thinks that two early German attempts to foreground eternal return were Karl Lowith, who has a thematic reading, and Jaspers, who focuses more on intentional contradictions as an important part of Nietzsche's thought, which is more methodology than a set of stable, positive propositions. Smith thinks that Lowith and Jasper's readings didn't have much of an afterlife, unlike their French counterparts, Henri Lefebvre (an excentric communist whose writings on revolutionizing everyday life foreshadowed a lot of what the situationists would later write), and Georges Bataille, whose reading is comparable to Jasper's. To skip ahead a bit, he shows the evolution of Deleuze's use of Nietzsche from 'Nietzsche and philosophy' in the early sixties to 'Difference and Repetition' about a decade later - his first book an anti-Hegelian tract focusing largely on Nietzsche's thought as being based on the interplay of competing forces, his later work being more anti-Platonist and looking to show a denial of original essences. Both of them do take the concept of eternal return as a central tenant, the second being largely influenced by Klossowski's book on Nietzsche... I'm not going to explain any of this in further detail here, because I have to read almost all the books I'm mentioning this summer, and I'll have occasion to make this clearer, and show how what this fits into the evolution of Deleuze's thought in general. At the end of the book he talks first about the influence of Heidegger's two-volume book on Nietzsche, which even Derrida was initially critical of as being overly-reductive. Heidegger paints Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, who merely reversed Plato's hierarchy of the world of being and the world of appearances, not managing to escape this opposition (he also sort of ignores the whole element of 'becoming' in Nietzsche's thought). Derrida, of course, points out that Heidegger fools himself in thinking that he has himself escaped from metaphysics, and points out that such an escape is impossible. When talking about metaphysics, even to condemn metaphysics, one is always using the language of metaphysics (which has become sort of a truism, but needed to be said at the time), and he shows Nietzsche as a more radical thinker than Heidegger when it comes to his relation to the history of western philosophy. When I was visiting you in Oxford, I told you a little about Derrida's discussion of truth as a woman in Nietzsche. This is another thing I'm going to have to reread and talk about later in this summer, but the basic ideas that truth, like one of the three definitions of the feminine that Derrida locates in Nietzsche, is itself through a complex interaction of veiling and unveiling, which Nietzsche can only approach through the mobilization of tropes. All language, including philosophical language is understood as an army of metaphors, metaphors being non-self identical, etc. etc. Like I said, I'll save that for later in the summer, but the central realization is that... well, if you go back to the Symposium, where Socrates and eros come to resemble one another, both representing the philosopher, the wise man, having wisdom does not desire wisdom. The wholly ignorant man, not realizing that he lacks wisdom, doesn't desire wisdom either. Philosophical ignorance is a self-aware ignorance that is capable of pursuing ignorance. Heidegger doesn't realize he is a metaphysician. Most metaphysicians don't realize there is a problem with being metaphysicians. Nietzsche would have the honor of being the rare philosopher who is aware of his situation, trapped in a system whose shortcomings he has been able to identify... Derrida is also the most interested in the concept of play in Nietzsche... it's surprising how many French thinkers (almost all of them) bring up the section in Twilight of the Idols on how the real world became a fable. Anyway, the last phase addressed in the book is the interest after Derrida in style and language in Nietzsche, the most prominent example probably being Sarah Kofman's 'Nietzsche and Metaphor' (Sarah Kofman is best known as a writer, she's one of those writers whose place in the canon of 20th century literature seems, to me at least, uncertain. She's kind of a major writer).
This summary took more time and space than I foresaw. I was planning to get through this summary quickly and devote most of my entry on the part I skipped, which is the strangest part of the book, the part on Nietzshe and decolonization. It's the strangest part of the book because, first off much of the chapter seems to have little relevance to Nietzsche. Before talking about Bataille and Lefebvre, Smith had explained a lot of Hegel, and in particular Kojeve's reading of Hegel (which every book talking about twentieth century French thought talks about. In talking about Decolonization, he goes back to Hegel for a while, building up to Sartre, who had nothing interesting to say about Nietzsche, at least nothing that came out in this book and nothing I've come across, but who was the most prominent spokesman against colonization in France. Sartre's reliance on Hegel is clear, and his praise of third world empowerment movements, most notable negritude, treats their writing as the negative moment in a dialectic, which will become irrelevant once their political goals are accomplished. Franz Fanon is more nuanced and interesting than Sartre, and he does take up concepts like active forgetting from Nietzsche, and the use he makes of a couple other Nietzschean ideas sort of justifies putting him in the book (sort of, but not really. Nietzsche was one influence among many, and not one that Fanon wrote about directly). Smith also talks about Camus and Levi-Strauss, he's a little all over the place in the chapter, here more than anywhere else in the book. You kind of get the sense that his reason for writing the chapter, apart from filling out an overall history of French thought, which he never admits he is writing, is to lead into a totally a-historic finish to the chapter where he seems to want to enter into these debates himself to show how Foucault's reception of Nietzsche has everything that was lacking in all these other people talking about the relationship between Europeans and the rest of the world. The book as a whole also ends with Foucault... while most of the book manages to avoid any teleological progress from ignorance to wisdom (Bataille and Klossowski come across as probably Nietzsche's best commentators, the first writing at the end of the thirties, the second working with Bataille but continuing to develop his thought on Nietzsche until 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle' which comes out in '69), Foucault really comes across as a moral - Nietzsche brought to light and made politically as well as intellectually useful.
I shouldn't end like this if I want you to take my statement at the beginning of the entry - that it would be a helpful thing for you to read - seriously. But as I said, in spite of these flaws, you really would come away with a stronger notion of twentieth century French thought (minus major figures like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas of course).

Cullers on Flaubert

I'm sure you know that parody of pedantry in one of Dickens' novels (I can't even remember what book it's in) where a schoolmaster asks his class what a horse is. One of the boys raises his hands and starts talking about the horses on his uncle's farm and the schoolmaster says that, no, that isn't what a horse is. Another boy gives the correct answer, which is something like "an animal with four legs". I'm thinking of this in part in connection with Lecercle''s book on nonsense. The joke works in part because of the contrast between practical, direct knowledge derived from experience, which is denied any value, and the more useless, academic knowledge of which arbitrary traits have been deemed the appropriate ones to relate for a dictionary definition - the details the schoolmaster is looking for are every bit as arbitrary, every bit as divorced from the essence of what a horse is (assuming there is an essence of 'horse', a 'the what is it' of the horse which is fully self-identical and not comparable to anything that is not a horse). I'm kind of assuming the tie to Lecercle's nonsense is clear, though perhaps I wasn't explicit enough talking about the arbitrary nature of linguistic rules and facts of language made apparent. I don't know whether you're familiar with the 'dictionary of received ideas that Flaubert decided to write at some point. He conceived of a dictionary much closer to definitions like the boy gave. Each entry would contain the things that people say on a certain subject, so that the definition, for instance, of Catholicism would be "it has had a positive influence on the arts". The definition of 'palm tree' is "it gives local color" (I assume this entry had a lot of influence on Victor Segalen, who in his 'notes on exoticism is constantly railing against palm trees as a cliche used to give a sense of being an exotic place - pure decorative backdrop that is unconcerned with confronting readers with anything genuinely challenging, strange or outside their experience. Segalen, who became fluent in Chinese, learned the history and art forms of China, wanted nothing less than to use China or Tahiti - which he also visited and wrote about - as colorful backdrops for romance or adventure, and he wanted nothing less than to make the place he was writing about transparent. He used what he knew about China to give himself and his readers a lingering sense of just how little they understood or were capable of understanding the place). More radical than the 'horse' definition, Flaubert's definitions intentionally avoid truly essential identifying traits, so the definition of Basque is "they make the best runners". Some definitions are stupid not because they are not true - the definition for Hugo is "he should have stayed out of politics", and this isn't a great example since it is sort of stupid, but perhaps someone could have a legitimate reason for declaring this, but what makes it stupid is that it is learned by rote and then passed off as an original opinion. Some of the best definitions contain more than one possible response. For the printing press, "one may either say that it is a marvelous discovery, or, if someone else has got his word in first, maintain that it has done more harm than good". Then, of course, there are the over the top entries, like Peru which is a country where everything is made of gold. One of the most important aspects of the book should be that mixed in with all of the obvious nonsense, almost everyone, or possibly everyone, should find some opinions, ideas or statements in there that he himself has voiced at one point or another. This comes from a deep conviction on Flaubert's part that cliche is so solidly built into language and our thought patterns that no one can escape it. I think that in Flaubert there's already the germ of an idea that Guy Debord will elaborate, and which is sort of there in what Deleuze writes on Kafka - and which is definitely in Brecht in a slightly different form, namely that dominant thought patterns or ideology can't successfully be criticized in a language coded by those thought patterns, in language which can recuperate everything it is used to say. The only true criticism comes from distorting the language and making its structures evident. What brings Flaubert closer to nonsense (and Deleuze is sort on his side, though not Debord or Brecht), is the fact that this is not a political statement. There is no real desire to create another or a better language. There is, I think, a certain real frustration with the difficulty of thinking independently, rather than merely repeating, allowing language to think through you (language, or discourses you've taken in, or the conventions and expectations of an art form). How can you communicate if you violate expectations, when language only works through accepted convention. What can be said that would have any meaning for me or for anyone else if I don't use recognized, inherited forms?
This all sounds banal and obvious - and it sounds banal and obvious, because it doesn't sound new, because it is repeating recognizable ideas. I don't really have any patience with people who say or think that it is impossible to say or write anything new - for thousands of years it has seemed to people that everything had already been said, and this is because everything they could think of saying HAD been said, and they personally didn't have the independence of mind to think of something else, to think of what might still be said. There's always something else, something new, a different form that can be found. People periodically come up with things that appear as revelations. If I'm talking about all of this while talking about Flaubert, it isn't necessarily because of Flaubert... it's because the academic books I keep reading come back so often to the same things, and occasionally I do feel a bit trapped by academic discourse. I sometimes get really sick of always coming back to Saussure, to metaphor vs. metonymy, to essence vs. accidence and pre-lapsarian language. Sometimes I do feel like I'm reading and writing in circles, and I'd have more fun just reading or writing a good old-fashion story - or stick with Flaubert's novel and ignore whatever other people might have written about him.
With Flaubert more than just about any other writer, I tend to get annoyed reading what people write about him. You read so many things that could convince you he was the most boring writer ever... later this summer I'll have to read 'the temptations of Saint Anthony' for the first time, and I've read descriptions of the book, almost all of them making it sound unreadable (there's no real story, just temptation after temptation being paraded in front of the saint - most of them abstract things, including various heresies and ideas that don't sound tempting at all. Though the descriptions of the book are painful - and apparently when Flaubert read his first draft to friends before he was published or famous they told him it was awful - but then occasionally someone will excerpt a lengthy passage from it, and the passage is funny and enjoyable to read. There is such a tendency to 'explain' Flaubert - to make it clear what one main idea drove him and shaped his writings, so that once you have the theoretical concept, you don't think you have to actual go and read the practical application of that idea. In Flaubert's case, the desire to write a book about nothing makes it easy to reduce him to a dreary nihilist who did everything possible to torture his readers. But of course, Flaubert is an ironist (the latest book I read on Flaubert contained a discussion of Kierkegaard's 'Concept of Irony', oddly enough), and more importantly, he is a humorist, however dry and understated his humor might be. Humor cannot be reduced. It is not, as Bergson defines it, the mechanical grafted on the living, though this is far from the worst definition it has been given. It s something much more elusive (and I realize that in our discussion of horror in relation to comedy I tried to explain it, and will certainly grope towards explanations again in the future). I think in writing about literature people should never try to explain WHAT an author or a book does - as though there is one thing. You should only ever talk about some of the things a book or author or passage does, and better yet some possibilities for thought or creation that a book or author helps to open up - which may sound semantic, except, when I write academic stuff, I usually don't write about an author or a book, I usually use certain books and authors to help me write about something else. And I think this is the only respectful way to write about books.
I will, though, quickly say one of the things I appreciated in the book on Flaubert I just read (by Jonathan Cullers - and there were a number of good things in it). Near the end he started to dismantle an idea of Flaubert as a nihilist, as an author who sees nothing but stupidity in the world and uses irony to dismantle everything that anyone feels or believes. Though the things that appear sacred to Emma Bovary or Frederic from Sentimental Educations are shown up as sentimental nonsense, Culler does a convincing job showing the existence of a very real sense of the sacred in Flaubert - the sacred and the sentimental being categories set in opposition. He largely uses Salammbo and three tales to do this. He mainly shows the sentimental as being in some way motivated, and the sacred as arbitrary and self-sufficient. I'm not going to try to reproduce his argument, though it is perhaps what was most satisfying in the whole book. It feels like another topic. I will say that I think he missed one of the most clear and moving examples of, maybe the sacred, but certainly the moving and immune to irony... he considered Charles Bovary a figure of fun, as sentimental and as deeply implicated as his wife, but I disagree. Charles, unlike his wife, could not be disillusioned. When he found out all his wife had done, it changed nothing for him, and his mourning was genuine. As the character that opens and closes the book, he maybe pathetic, but he is also beautiful. When he is laughed at by the other children at school you feel for him and sort of love him, and when he suffers for his wife and not for his own humiliation, you feel the same. All the irony in the world can't undermine feeling that isn't based on expectation or on wanting to see oneself in a certain way - love that is, in a sense, unmotivated. It should be noted, and Culler does note this, that the end of sentimental educations is weirdly touching as well, and it is in a sense the fact that the most genuine emotional scenes have been put through a test of the most scathing, uncompromising irony ever, a will to strip away and mock every inflated temporary feeling, every cliche romantic notion, every self-serving, self-aggrandizing or sloppy sentimental notion imaginable - it is because something survives in tact and is still moving that it has as much impact as it does.

trans-human nonsense

A few clarifications and comments... first off, with the Lecercle, you seem to think that when he calls nonsense a 'conservative' genre he does so disapprovingly, which is palpably not the case. He doesn't consider it a failed attempt at subversion, he doesn't think it is conformity out of lack of original or independent character. He makes no assumption that the desirable end of literature should be to challenge rules. It's worth asking why he mentions the point at all. Perhaps in the back of his mind he is thinking of Deleuze's 'minor literature', for which he takes Kafka as the prime example, which does intentionally distort language, perhaps he is thinking of nonsense as something similar to the ritual transgressions that interested Bataille, whose function is in part to stabilize the social order, or perhaps he is objecting to the romantic cliché of the writer as revolutionary - perhaps the writer's role is generally much more innocent and playful than many writers or people who care about writing realize or want to admit, and perhaps that isn't a bad thing. I don't know what he was getting at, but I do know that it wasn't in the normative quest for an alternative, and he clearly did regret the fact that nonsense literature had to pass away with the end of the Victorian Era. On a side note of no importance, in regard to 'happiness' - 'happy' being a two-syllable word, it doesn't violate the comparative rule, which states that two-syllables sometimes use 'more', and sometimes '-er' (and in its more explicit formulation states that two-syllable words ending with the letter 'y' invariable take '-er'. 'More fun' does violate it, but Lecercle makes the same point as you do about rules being mere guidelines, and claims nonsense very often creates nonsense by pretending there are no exceptions, (so that a character pedantically insisting that everyone should say 'funner' when the reader knows this is wrong would be an uninspired but sort of typical nonsense ploy), or pretending that the rules are always logical, when they clearly aren't. This along with refusing figural meanings for words and creating confusion through homonyms and so forth are all meant to be ways of calling attention to language as a flawed vehicle for thought, but Lecercle wants to make clear that this isn't done in some nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian divine language that was perfectly transparent. I think, and this isn't exactly something I remember Lecercle saying explicitly, but I think one of the points he implicitly made is that in responding to characters who are so lacking in common sense, as much as the reader enjoys it, he naturally becomes a representative of common sense, filling in his own mind the logic that is missing. In a similar manner, when confronted with characters for whom language is so problematic, the reader necessarily becomes comfortable with his own linguistic facility (though I don't feel comfortable with this last statement - maybe I'm forcing unforgivable banalities on Lecercle). Anyway, the book is sort of worth reading I guess, though it wouldn't be at the top of any list of recommendations I could make.
As for self-knowledge and the way we spend our time, suffering and the like... I'm well aware that I wasted this whole year. This summer has to be different if I don't want to end my career early and in ignominy (and if I want to regain some modicum of self-respect)... which is neither here nor there. I guess all I can say about the Pearce thing you were describing is that the position he is taking seems, on the one hand, so blatantly wrong-headed and obscene that there isn't much to say about it (a world without black - the end of life). On the other hand, we do naturally strive to reduce suffering - it is part of life to do so - and what are you going to do if you find a way to remove it? Even if it's kind of cheating? Who has the strength to turn it down (whether we are talking about drugs or electrodes or anything else? I ask the question, but to be honest, I do think the answer is a lot of people. I think a surprising number would find strength to insist on not sheltering themselves from pain and unhappiness. What frightens me more is the possibility of 'augmenting intelligence'. Whatever that might mean or involve, that sounds much more like an end to humanity to me.

our trans-humanist future

The real thing I wanted to write about was a talk I saw last Monday by a guy called David Pearce, who's one of the leading thinkers in the trans-humanist movement. Trans-humanists seem to combine a factual, predictive claim with a normative one. The factual/predictive claim is that humans are increasingly developing technologies--from gene therapy to cybernetics--that allow us to tamper with "human nature" and design the humans (or trans-humans) of the future rather than leaving it up to biology and fate. The normative claim is that this is a great thing and that we ought to get on it pronto.

You can read a nice, brief manifesto from Pearce, which pretty much covers the talk he gave, here: http://abolitionist.com/. The upshot is this: suffering is bad and when we have an opportunity to alleviate suffering--either our own or that of others--we should do it; we will soon have the means to abolish suffering of all sentient life on earth; we should do what we can to speed the arrival of this abolition of suffering. In terms of abolition, he offers things like wiring up our brains so that our pleasure centres are always activated (an option he thinks isn't that feasible since it would remove our incentive to do anything else, so any community that chooses to do this would soon become extinct and other, less happy communities would persist), designer drugs that make us happier without dimming cognitive capacity (he's not just interested in alleviating suffering but also heightening our cognitive abilities), and genetic engineering. He looks forward to a future where beings will experience bliss and cognitive abilities on a level that dwarf the upper ceiling for contemporary humans. He also wants to extend this to animals. He's a vegan and thinks that animal suffering is terrible. Not only does he think we should stop using animals for food, but also we should stop carnivores from eating other animals. We could do this either by growing vat food that we can feed to them or re-wiring their brains so that they no longer have a bloodlust or whatever.

My first reaction to all this was an aesthetic one. I could imagine Nietzsche sitting next to meet pulling his hair out. One of the things I admire about Nietzsche is that he's pretty much the only philosopher who manages to make responsible use of ad hominem arguments. In essence, Nietzsche's arguments usually aren't along the lines of "A says x, but x is wrong for these reasons," but rather "A says x; now what would make someone say x? Is that the sort of person we should want to be?" I think an ad hominem argument is quite appropriate in the case of the abolitionist movement: what kind of a person are you that you think suffering is so absolutely awful that we should go to obscene lengths to eliminate it? I mean, I'm not fan of suffering myself, but come on, man up a little!

This is particular interesting to me as someone who's quite interested in Buddhism. Pearce claimed his arguments were very much in keeping with Buddhist thought, but I disagree. Buddhism famously preaches that all life is suffering and preaches the way to bring about the end of suffering, so in that sense you might see a connection (ignoring for the moment the subtle but important differences between the Pali word dukkha and the English "suffering"). But the Buddha also preaches equanimity in the face of not just suffering but pleasure. The idea is that both suffering and pleasure are impermanent and so we need to learn to greet them with equanimity rather than react to them with intense aversion or craving. It seems to me that the abolitionist movement reacts with intense aversion to suffering. Buddhism might be criticized for its complacency in that it aims to accept the world as it is rather than to change it, but in this sense it's definitely not in keeping with abolitionism.

The talk also seemed to blush over some of the sticky points. For instance, Pearce claims that eradicating suffering isn't a matter of becoming contented vegetables, but on the contrary allowing us to pursue our projects at a much higher level. But I question whether my aims and ambitions would be the same if I lived without suffering. Suffering isn't just a contingent matter of things going badly and suffering bad moods. It's a necessary feature of wanting things. If I want something, there's always the possibility that I won't get it. If I don't get it, I'll be upset. Often, I'm willing to risk that distress because striving for things when there's no guarantee of success is part of the challenge in life, and a great deal of the pleasure in life comes from overcoming obstacles. If the obstacles are taken away, so is the pleasure of overcoming them. I'm not saying Pearce wouldn't have an answer to this, but I think answering it isn't as easy as he seemed to suggest.

Part of the challenge for me, though, is to explain why I might be against abolishing suffering. Surely, whenever I see someone suffering, I would like to ease their suffering if I could, and I wouldn't want to increase their suffering (I speak from my own case here). That's true, though that's also a response to a world where suffering is inevitable and pervasive. I don't know if saying that I want to alleviate any suffering I encounter entails that I want all suffering to cease. And it's also true that I don't want to alleviate all suffering, not even in myself. There are certain kinds of unhappiness and pain I really could happily do entirely without. But, for instance, I think I'd lose my interest in philosophy and writing if I didn't find myself questioning the world and my place in it in ways that aren't always cheerful.

My last, cheeky though was inspired by Douglas Adams. Pearce proposes that we re-wire carnivores so that they don't kill herbivores. If the aim is to eradicate suffering, isn't it morally just as acceptable to re-wire the herbivores so that they enjoy being eaten?

self-knowledge and rules

This has been a maddeningly depressing week, and I've literally wanted to cry more days than not. I also resolved to keep a minute-by-minute accounting of how I spend my time, partly out of curiosity, and partly in an attempt to explain to myself how I manage to get so little done. The results weren't as illuminating as I'd hoped, but hopefully keeping track over time will help reveal some things. For instance, I spent less than 20 hours working this week, which I think is scandalous, but I wasn't surprised. The real question is where all the other hours went, and sadly I didn't discover some big culprit lurking around, but rather a hundred little ones, each of which ate away at my life a half hour at a time. One surprise was that I spent nearly 10 hours getting from place to place. This isn't New York, so it's not like things are spread apart. In fairness, my bike was broken for the first half of the week, which slowed things down, but still.

It was a curious exercise, keeping track of time like that. It was inspired by a New York Times article I read the previous Sunday (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all) about people who found various ways to measure their lives in great detail, and the kind of discoveries they made. One consequence of keeping track of time was that, of course, I became much more self-conscious about how I was using my time. I think normally I'd spend more time on e-mail, for instance.

The hope with this project, as with the projects I read about, is that it will give a kind of objective self-knowledge that's not influenced by various personal desires or biases. It made me think there could be an interesting project in cataloging the various forms of self-knowledge we deem worthwhile. This is the self-knowledge of the social scientist, not the introspective artist. My thesis deals with self-knowledge in a roundabout way, but neither the self-knowledge of the artist nor of the social scientist, but rather the self-knowledge of recognizing our place in the world and how the world is constituted for us (to put it very briefly). All these forms of self-knowledge are supposed to bring us insight of a kind. Are they related, though? And are the insights similar or different?

Anyway, I just want to quickly respond to your latest post before writing a new post about the thing I wanted to say. I feel I should have lots to say, since of course my thesis deals with the philosophy of language in a way, and nonsense in a way, and touches on the Derrida/Austin/Searle triangle. I'm not really sure what I want to say, though. Maybe I should raise some question about rules, since that's also central to my thesis. You say Lecercle talks nonsense as a conservative genre because it reinforces the rules it toys with. I'm not sure what alternative he has in mind. Am I really being reactionary or conservative if I abide by grammatical rules? I thought that was just a requirement for making sense. I can be reactionary and conservative in the way that I play chess if I abide by traditional principles and play a very risk-free game, but I'm not being reactionary and conservative by abiding by the rules of chess and not using my pawn like a knight, for instance. Playing by the rules of the game isn't reactionary and conservative, it's constitutive of playing the game in the first place.

One of the things that I think is interesting about Carroll-like nonsense isn't that it violates or reinforces grammatical or other rules, but rather draws our attention to their contingency. Well, three points, really. First, our rules are somewhat arbitrary: why we can't say "curiouser," why we drive on the left in England or the right in North America, these things could just as well have been otherwise and the world still would have made good sense. Second, laying out these constitutive rules isn't itself a move in the game. Here I'm starting to sound all Wittgensteinian. But, for instance, saying "multi-syllabic adjectives take 'more' rather than the '-er' ending" (which, by the way, isn't always true: e.g. "more fun" and "happier") is simply explaining the framework within which we can say things. The things we say can be conservative or innovative, but explaining the rules for saying them is neither. I know, this distinction isn't as sharp as I've just drawn it. And third, a lot of pseudo-disputes in philosophy come from taking our arbitrary conventions to be factual statements of deep truths. Kripke famously claims that "the metre stick in Paris is one metre long" is a claim that is both a priori (you know it without having to look at it) and contingent (the metre stick in Paris could have been another length). This sort of reasoning leads to a whole slew of metaphysics about possible worlds rather than a reflection on linguistic conventions. I'm rambling, and not in a particularly clear manner, sorry.

But to tie this all into some sort of a knot, the kind of self-knowledge I was talking about in my thesis involves a proper understanding of our relation to our conventions. I talked about this in a paper recently, which deals among other things with Heidegger on das Man, where he seems to confuse conformism and conformity, as Lecercle maybe does as well. It's conformism to share the opinions of the top critics because you have no opinions of your own, and that's a bad thing. But the conformity of driving on the same side of the road as everyone else isn't just not a bad thing, it's the only sensible way to live with others.

Philosophy of nonsense (a book report)

"He therefore concedes that consistently concomitant events can induce us to to bridge the logical gap between inverse propositions"
The sentence is actually clear and I'm not sure I could find an equally economic way of saying the same thing using less pompous language, but the sentence is in reference to the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland - specifically the moment where after Alice has confusedly claimed that "I say what I mean" and "I mean what I say" are the same, the mad hatter following up by protesting "you might as well say 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'". When the dormouse adds his example "you might as well say 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same as 'II sleep when I breathe'", the gets in a jab at the mouse, stating that for him they really are the same thing... thus, according to Jean-Jacques Lecercle, implicitly invalidating his own previous objection to Alice's statement by acknowledging that in some cases terms in sentences of this sort can be reversed without damage to meaning or logic. I just picked that sentence, because applying heavy academic language of that sort to silliness of that sort seems to me to enact the nonsense it is supposed to be dealing with. In the short blurb on the back of Lececle's book 'the philosophy of nonsense' the question is asked "why do Lewis Caroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic textbooks?" (I'm not sure why they couldn't choose 'dry' or 'dull' instead of putting both terms in). Instead of mining Alice for useful examples for discussions of logic and linguistics (though he does quite often use Alice to discuss logic and linguistics), Lecercle tries to find an underlying principle that explains the connection between nonsense books (which mainly just means Alice in Wonderland), and philosophy of language. He basically explains that for nonsense to work, an emptying of the semantic function of language has to be compensated for by an excess of syntactic regularity... he can point to the things like the recognizable morphology of all the made up words in Jabberwocky, i.e. the fact that though words are made up you can tell what word is an adjective, a noun or a verb, and you can even tell what tense the verb is in (furthermore, acceptable English combinations of phonemes are employed, so words are formed that could exist and make sense in English). He also talks about hypercorrection - exceptions in the language not being acknowledged, or the refusal of certain characters to understand anything but the most literal meaning of words employed ("I see you what you mean" "then you have better eyes than most"). It is because of the focus on structure and rule that the work maintains coherence in the midst of absurdity, and it is also because of the focus on structure that logic and language are problematized and discussed in a way that is particularly useful for anyone who is interested in studying how propositions can be judged and how language functions.
He uses nonsense to look at linguistic pragmatism, pointing out that the cooperative principle of discourse is roundly rejected in favor of an agonistic principle of discourse... I don't think I'm going to discuss that, though in a way that was one of the more interesting and convincing parts of the book - it led to a reading of the Alice books as almost Bildungsromans in which Alice had to learn that in the real world the dictates of polite conversation (never praising oneself or attacking others, etc. etc.) had to be replaced by an understanding of conversation as competition, with a focus on scoring points or disproving the claims of an opponent... he tries to give examples of Alice becoming increasingly effective as a conversational sparring points, good at at least deflecting the conversation or changing the subject when she can't win (he also frames this using Caillois' terms for different sorts of play, going from the more childish noncompetitive to the more adult competitive form).
In the end he tried to show nonsense as a reaction to the school system in Victorian England... I'm giving a chaotic account of it, partly because I can't make up my mind about what to take out of it or how to classify it. There's definitely over-reading and some unconvincing argument... Lecercle is a French University professor who teaches English. He's written on Deleuze, he makes frequent references to Lyotard, Lacan and Derrida, at the same time his main focus of study is English literature - he reads a lot of poetry and analytic philosophy. At one point he talks about a debate between Derrida and Searle, which began with an article Derrida wrote on Austin in 'margins of philosophy', searle wrote a response in the magazine glyph, which Derrida responded to with his book limited inc - anyone picking up this last book will find a summary of the whole debate. Here as elsewhere, he refers to a text without actually telling you what's in it, and it isn't all that clear why he mentions it. He simply states he won't take sides and his subject is something else entirely. He's worse about this when talking about linguistics or straight philosophy of speech texts that he expects the reader to be familiar with... luckily in most places you can still follow him pretty easily and ignore the references he is making... most of the time his style is simple and straightforward and he includes a lot of very nice passages from Alice and occasionally from other texts. He does seem to be genuinely neutral between analytics and continentals, and admires both groups (the text his own text obviously owes the most to is Deleuze's 'logic of sense', which is also largely about Lewis Carroll... I expect to be discussing that here soon). Anyway, what hasn't come out here yet is that, amid the places he seems to be over-reading, or just saying things that feel somewhat evident, he does have some beautiful and compelling sections. It's actually a pretty well-known and important book, especially for someone who is working on the sorts of things I've been working on lately.
At one point he mentions that the only solecism in Alice in Wonderland is "curiouser and curiouser", which has a privileged position as the very first words of the second chapter (again the importance of rules not being broken, and when they are attention being called to the infraction - he considers nonsense a conservative, even a reactionary genre, which strengthens rather than subverts the rules it toys with). This passage irritated me more than anything else in the book... in part because in order to strengthen his argument he tries to point out that the mistake, which the narrator points out as a mistake, calls attention to the strangeness of English rules governing the formation of comparatives - words of more than two syllables always take 'more' in front of them, words of two syllables usually take the -er ending but sometimes take more. He claims that curious is a two syllable word, and then says that it has an uncertain status between two or three syllables because of the schwa in the middle - I'm sure he's actually studied English phonetics and I haven't, but, whereas 'curieux' in French can be described this way (he wrote the book in French) is there any ambiguity in English? Don't we all pronounce curious as a three-syllable word? I know it is pedantic, and it doesn't really hurt his argument, but that sort of thing throws me off.
I also took exception to discussions of nonsense as a genre, though he wasn't the one who made the classification. Other than Alice and Wonderland, the 'genre' seemed to be mostly short poems, including a lot of limericks, maybe one or two super short stories - more or less prose poems. The Alice stories seem to be in a category all or there own. What you can accept or enjoy for a few lines and what remains interesting as an extended narrative are tow wildly different things, and they need to be explained in a different manner. At the same time, when he claimed that nonsense disappeared in England at the end of the Victorian era, I couldn't help thinking of Douglas Adams and Monty Python as obvious candidates for successors (to his merit, he included a wonderful bit of Churchill recounting learning Latin in school which worked well as a lovely bit of nonsense, but it was precisely in order to show the relation of nonsense to English schools in the late 19th century).
The conclusion where he talked about the hunting of the snark was a nice bit of literary criticism... nothing astoundingly new, but I had to teach the Aenead this semester and reading the hunting of the snark as the perfect classic epic is particularly pleasant at the moment - where the weapons should be described in great detail we get a description of the bakers luggage, which doesn't actually make it aboard the ship - the prophecy, the descent into the underworld... nonsense really is fabulous.