spurs

Nietzsche or reveal what he was secretly up to. Derrida proceeds as though this carefully constructed web of loosely connected words and meanings were fortuitous, and just happened to correspond remarkably well with what Derrida wished to say about Nietzsche's style. Technically, his argument doesn't depend on any of these chance associations, and if they cannot be said to be merely ornamental or secondary in the text it is because they are bent into the service of an implicit metaphor of the truth as an ocean and style as that which cuts through and moves along her surface. Though the rock that breaks the waves is the only meaning attached to éperon, Derrida ensures that nautical imagery contaminates the entire lot. The rock is linked to the prow of a ship, which like a spur moves the boat forward, while like the rock it divides the oncoming waves. Derrida sets up an allegorical space that isn't quite Nietzsche's, and when he finally arrives at Nietzsche's metaphor of Truth as a woman truth will necessarily appear as a siren, and it will become both dangerous and foolhardy rushing straight toward her, as is done by philosophers and scientists without style, who lack any appreciation of distance and the play of surfaces. The veil that conceals, which was previously attached to 'sail', and the verb 'to spurn', which was attached to 'spur', have already been used to inscribe ideas of femininity and seduction into the association cluster built around éperon and voile. As new sets of associations are added, the old ones are not abandoned, but become more heavily motivated. The density of connection between the words and images Derrida chooses to bring together (the style/ stiletto that cuts the waves and dances like them, the veiled/ sailing woman truth, who glides along the surface and beckons forward with what she hides and promises, etc) and the astounding correspondence between the entire nexus and the vision of truth and philosophy presented by Nietzsche's writing all seem to belie the idea that their encounter is fortuitous. Through cross contamination and the folding of images into one another, not to mention a choice of objects (woman and ocean) that already present inexhaustible sets of associations, Derrida makes what is arbitrary seem necessary. Though the basic coherence of the image of the philosopher and his relation to truth is never abandoned, and the strong connection to Nietzsche's original texts is never lost, the number of ideas and images present in that one idea of the truth as woman/ siren proliferates to the point that they cannot all be held in mind at the same time, though they are all present in one another and do all work together to create a single tonality. Ideally, as with Kant's sublime, comprehension should break down, not because of the difficulty or obscurity of the ideas involved, but because of the number of parts that need to resonate all at once for the whole to function.

Tolstoy, fiction, and history

I've now finished War and Peace, which did not disappoint. Besides my disapproval of Natasha's susceptibility to Anatole Kuragin's charms, my only other major reservation is the way that the Nikolai Rostov-Princess Marya-Sonya triangle was resolved by basically silencing Sonya from the last several hundred pages of the book and having some other characters reflect that it's all right since she's a "sterile blossom" anyway. Marya, if anything, is more of a sterile blossom than Sonya, but it suited the narrative so much more to have her marry Nikolai that I think Tolstoy had to basically annihilate Sonya in order to avoid the uncomfortable cruelty of this decision on the author's part.

This criticism ties into a broader concern that I might someday want to write about in more considered detail. It's the question, essentially, of what moral obligation we have to fictional characters. I think this question isn't normally addressed in aesthetics because aesthetics is normally written from the point of view of the audience rather than the creator of a work of art. I think an author does enter into some sort of ethical relationship with his characters, though sorting out just what this relationship is is rather complicated. You can certainly put your characters through difficulties that would be unethical to put real human beings through. However, I think there's some connection between the way we should treat real people and the way we should treat fictional characters, which is, to borrow Kant's maxim, that we should treat them as ends in themselves and not simply as means to other ends. In other words, we shouldn't use fictional characters any more than we should use real live people. One of the things I love about Chekhov is that he gives all of his characters, even the minor ones, an autonomous life that one feels extends beyond the story. His plots are less tidy than, say, Ibsen's, because his characters are more important to him than the story he wants to fit them into. One of the reasons Tolstoy's novels are so rich is that his characters, too, normally seem to extend beyond the stories in which they occur. Which makes it particularly striking and odious when the author suddenly seems to mistreat them for the sake of the story.

Since writing my last post, it's come to my attention that a lot of what I was saying had some similarity to Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which I didn't realize until a couple days ago was centrally concerned with Tolstoy and War and Peace. I still haven't read it, so it might be a bit foolish of me to venture further words on Tolstoy's theory of history, but I feel I should put something down, however ignorant.

The main thought is that Tolstoy's view on history parallels the view he aims at in his fiction, which is essentially a God's eye view. I wrote last time about the bemusement with which he looks on various human endeavours, and the sense that the most truthful perspective (perhaps the only truthful perspective) is the one sub specie aeternitatus, which both Tolstoy and his characters seem to achieve only by glimpses and intimations. He seems to disparage historians too for lacking this perspective. Any account of causes and effects in history relies on gross over-simplification and an obtuse arbitrariness as to when to start and end the causal chain one deems relevant. Truly seen, i.e. divinely seen, everything is interconnected, and there is no beginning or end to human affairs, so that singling out any historical narrative is essentially an act of falsification.

How, then, are we to tell history? It seems Tolstoy's answer is that we should tell it something in the manner of War and Peace. That is, rather than look at the isolated actions of the grands hommes of history, we should zoom in and out, sometimes looking at the words and deeds of generals, sometimes at peasants, sometimes at masses of people in huge movements, sometimes at the intimate moments of individuals. Tolstoy's process of selection is ultimately as arbitrary and over-simplified as a historian's, but with two additional virtues. The first is that he has the authorial irony to acknowledge the limitations of his account within the account itself (hence the necessity of the historiographical digressions), and the second is that he has the authorial irony to present each perspective as limited in its way, and through the constant shifts and contrasts to present each perspective as contingent as well. He might not give us the full picture any better than the historians, but at least he helps us see how much we're missing.

All this also led me to reflect on Nietzsche. I think there's a fair amount in Tolstoy that Nietzsche would find sympathetic (I write this in ignorance of whether Nietzsche ever wrote anything about Tolstoy). In his middle period in particular (I'm thinking primarily of Human, All-Too-Human), Nietzsche seems keen to demolish the notion of free will, and to present a conception of human agency as inextricably caught up in causes and processes that are far too large for us to comprehend, and certainly far too large for us to arrogate to ourselves any claim to be acting autonomously or freely. Nietzsche also shares Tolstoy's perspectivism, his sense that we can't present the absolute truth of a matter, but at best can only offer varying perspectives.

Given these similarities, I'm struck by their very different takes on the figure of Napoleon. Tolstoy is witheringly dismissive of Napoleon's role in history, presenting at each point a person swept up in the events--less free to make his own decisions even than the people he was commanding--who nevertheless has the arrogance to think that all of his good fortune is due to his own genius and his misfortune is due to chance, and to persuade historians of this fact as well. Nietzsche, on the other hand, often talks up Napoleon as one of the political manifestations of his free spirits who make their own laws, etc. I can't help but feel Tolstoy's characterization of Napoleon is perhaps closer to the truth, and even closer to Nietzsche's own conception of will and causality. In fact, it's something I'm not entirely clear on within Nietzsche's work, how on one hand we seem not to have free will and on the other hand, history and character are determined by a struggle of wills.

I suppose the solution is that the will Nietzsche writes of isn't the same thing that most people would think of as personal agency. I don't have a single will that I direct at whatever purposes I adopt, but rather am a bundle of competing wills, both creator and creature, and I must first submit my own wills to some guiding law before I can impose that will on the rest of the world. Which is one of the reasons Nietzsche has a complicated admiration for asceticism. But by that criterion, was Napoleon really a Nietzschean free spirit? I don't see any reason to think that Napoleon's success came from some successful inner struggle. Was it that Nietzsche admired him because he was less burdened by conscience, was more an embodiment of the cheerful blond beasts of yore, who did what they wanted without worrying about the consequences? If so, should this admiration be at all qualified by Tolstoy's sense that Napoleon wasn't actually the agent of his many actions and successes? I suppose the best you can say for Napoleon is that, unlike most modern people, the competing wills within him didn't choke one another, and he exhibited an unusual clarity of purpose as a result. But this clarity of purpose surely wasn't due to the sort of liberation of spirit that Nietzsche most admires.

I guess really I ought to have re-read some Nietzsche before writing all that.

More responses

And then reading through the other stuff you wrote... I should note, first, that I say less in response than I maybe should. It's not that I don't find what you say interesting--completely the contrary--but that I don't feel I have much to contribute. I could say, "Wow, I should read Proust," but then I'd find myself saying that a lot. But I do really enjoy getting this overview of your reading.

You mention someone objecting to Berkeley by saying you can't really live his philosophy, and you say you're not thinking of Johnson. I wonder if you're thinking of Hume, who wasn't talking about Berkeley so much as his own sceptical conundrum. I can't remember the exact quote, but basically he says this can all seem deeply perplexing in the study, but as soon as you put the book down and step outside, you can't possibly go about the business of living while taking this scepticism seriously.

Your mention of Proust letting his characters shine through in their individuality, not letting the narrator control them too much, reminds me more than anything of Chekhov. It's the thing I think I most love about Chekhov: he's so generous to his characters. In Ibsen, the characters are caught up in this tragic momentum where they can do nothing to alter their course. In Chekhov, it feels like the plot meanders because the characters have so much freedom to be themselves, as if the author doesn't want to exert the control he'd have to in order to tighten the momentum of the tale. And yet, for all that--because of that, because the wills of the characters are put front and centre and aren't held back--his plays have tremendous tension.

I wonder about this thing about theory cheapening literature. I'm maybe not quite sure what it means, that is, what counts as theory in literature. Would Anna Karenina be better off without its opening sentence, or does that not count as a theoretical explanation of the themes of the novel? I suppose also Proust was writing before much postmodern experimentation had come along. Can Milan Kundera really be called out for theorizing about his own novels while he writes them? I suppose you could object to it, but in Kundera it's a very deliberate narrative strategy rather than simple clumsiness or preachiness.

That's so cool that your published work has earned you fan mail! What was the paper on, and what were the responses like?

As for Foucault and Nietzsche, you bring me back to the course I took on Foucault back in Toronto. I remember a friend of mine saying what he found weird about Foucault is the way that, in Nietzsche, the stuff about genealogy, will, power, and the like all has a kind of spiritual import--it's as if Nietzsche wants to sublime his soul--and in Foucault it all becomes political. Which is the reverse of what you might expect: if you simply described the two thinkers and were asked who you thought influenced whom, you might think that the more down-to-earth politically minded thinker came first, and he was succeeded by this guy who took those practical ideas and ran with them to create a project for the self-overcoming of mankind.

All that said, I seem to remember being told that the Nietzschean influence on Foucault's early work was rather slender (though I've only read bits of Les Mots et les Choses, so what do I know?). I think the suggestion was that, with his essay on Nietzsche, and following it up with Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, Foucault entered a "genealogical" phase, and that his earlier work had been more characterized by "archaeology" and his conception of ruptures. Les Mots et les Choses, for instance, characterizes massive changes in the structure of thought, but doesn't seem to characterize them in terms of will or power enacting this shift.

You wonder why Eric A. Havelock gets almost as much mention as Proust in our tags. I think it's because I've been a little more consistent and diligent in my tagging than you have. But fear not, this post will get a tag for Proust and none for Havelock, so Proust will quickly be leaving Havelock in his dust! I'm also pleased to see Wittgenstein climbing up there. I didn't mention him at all for the first few months, which felt odd. Not that it was deliberate or anything.

Gosh, and now it's past my bedtime. It's Friday, but I'm not going to post either of these today because I'd really like to write to you about Wittgenstein and deconstruction, and I don't want to have sent out a couple posts before I do that. (If I do, I worry that the next time I find a moment to sit down with this blog, I'll be responding to your response to my stuff on thought and language and will run out of time again.) I don't know why I felt the need to flag this. Call it a peculiar sense of honesty--I'd feel oddly deceptive if I led you to believe that I'd just written this as soon as I posted it.

(It's now Monday evening and I can truthfully tell you that I'm writing this last sentence just before I click "Publish Post.")

Foucault, Genealogy, History

A couple of months ago I read a pretty convincing book on 'Foucault's Nietzschean genealogies'. It's no longer fresh in my mind and it was recalled to the library so I don't have it on hand to consult, but last night I read the most important essay Foucault wrote on Nietzsche - "Nietzsche, genealogy, history'. Foucault is almost remarkable in his generation for NOT having written a book on Nietzsche. At the same time, he's perhaps the most consistently Nietzschean. As the book I just mentioned (by Michael Mahon) argues, the main project that took up most of Foucault's career was a genealogy of morals. His essay on Nietzsche presents an extremely familiar and straightforward Nietzsche. He focuses mainly on the untimely meditation on the uses and misuses of history and the genealogy of morals, and he doesn't take many liberties with his interpretation. At times it feels like he's just paraphrasing Nietzsche. At the same time, when he's outlining what the aim of genealogist is, appropriate methodology. etc., you could forget he was talking about or through Nietzsche and imagine he was just explaining his own books, from the history of madness to the history of sexuality. The essay does place a lot of unnecessary emphasis on a dubious distinction to make its most basic (and obvious) point - it tries to distinguish the words 'Ursprung' and 'Herkunft' (or 'Entstehung')... the problem being not that he's wrong about what the words mean in German, where they come from and what distinction could be made, but rather that, as Foucault himself makes plain, Nietzsche actually uses Ursprung with both the negative meaning Foucault wants it tied to and the 'good' concept that Foucault is associating with 'Herkunft'... not that it matters all that much, since the concepts he is dealing with are indisputably present in Nietzsche.. 'Ursprung' is used by Foucault to designate a set point of origin that determines something once and for all, a mythical beginning before the fall or pretty much any a-historical/ trans-historical essence, where as 'Herkunft' is used to designate origin as a slow process of coming into being and transformation that shows all the accidents of history that explain how something got to be what it is at this moment, without any pretense of knowing what it will be or any particular interest in what it once was, except insofar as that contributes to its current state of being (or rather becoming). Of course, Nietzsche's anti-platonism is kind of old hat, and among historians in general, there is a general awareness of the dangers of creating a teleological narrative, of trying to eradicate chance and make everything leading up to the present seem inevitable (As a side note, something in both Bataille and Klossowski, that I haven't really explored enough is the conflating of chance and necessity of embracing chaos as a necessity - everything leading up to this moment being necessary not because a carefully laid out plan is being followed through but because allowing all the possibilities of chance to unfurl is necessary, because if all the things leading up to now hadn't been possible there would have been no chance, chance being life and becoming... not that this is exactly what's said by anyone anywhere, but it is pointing in the right general direction - necessary and inevitable are not the same, and there is a strong connection between the necessary and the arbitrary, the two are not mutually exclusive and this is part of the meaning of the eternal return - which has nothing much to do with Foucault). Anyway, Foucault and Nietzsche are unite in denying an essence of man, in looking into the construction of the self and in believing that beliefs, values and basic assumptions of all kinds are historically determined, that institutions, ideas, words and so forth do not necessarily keep their original meanings, that they are invested with new meanings by those who turn them to their own purposes, and both believe that this history is mainly driven by struggles for sovereignty and domination. Both believe that explaining values held by society today means revealing shifting constellations of force. Neither believes that there is some truer absolute system of values that has to be rediscovered or finally obtained that is being obscured by this interplay of forces and investment of institutions and ideas by interests. Neither wants to have anything to do with transhistorical constants like 'human nature'. In his book on Nietzsche and Foucault, Mahon at some point notes that Nietzsche is never closer to Foucault than in the passage in Genealogy of Morals where he talks about the different meanings societies have given to punishment, which he ties to an analysis of the word 'Schuld' - punishment initially being repayment for a debt, the joy that the creditor got seeing the debtor suffer being recompense for the property loss or pain inflicted, with a very belated idea of a person being punished because he was responsible for his actions (guilt being linked to responsibility), and punishment as a deterrent. I've never found the passage particularly convincing, but the basic idea of the same punishments being used by different societies with different intentions and different justifications inevitably makes you think of Foucault's book 'Discipline and punish' (which is a bad translation - it should be 'punish and surveil'), though Foucault is interested in shifting penal practices and what that says about intentions, and, of course, he actually does a lot of research and doesn't speculate as wildly... as you can see with the 'Schuld' and 'Herkunft' distinction, he isn't reading too much into a word and its origins (the idea that 'repayment' is a straightforward joy in the suffering of another), he's using those words as a logical way of maintaining a very clear conceptual distinction... of course, now that I think about the violence he does to 17th century theatre and renaissance paintings to make statements about how society deals with madness, I retract what I just said - Foucault goes at least as wild as Nietzsche on occasion, making baseless claims, and however much use he makes of the archive, he is guilty of considerable distortion and simplification. But still...

Vicious circle

More than usual, i'm going to have to accept a certain level confusion and incoherence talking about a couple of books about Nietzsche. First a couple of words about the book that isn't the subject of this entry - that I don't really mean to talk about, not here, not yet. Earlier in the summer I read Bataille's 'On Nietzsche', which is a baffling book of which Nietzsche is more the theme than the subject. Occasionally in the book Bataille mimics Nietzsche, adopting his style, especially through aphorisms. Occasionally he interprets and explains Nietzsche, sometimes he argues with him, often he develops his own idea at length, ideas that are related to Nietzsche tangentially or not at all (when they aren't in direct opposition to Nietzsche - though Nietzsche is held in reverence above all other thinkers and writers). Parts of the book are a sort of journal, in which he's chronicling his daily life near the end of the second world war, amid strange evacuations and dislocations, much of it focusing around an affair with an unnamed woman, who's probably someone else's wife, an affair that doesn't seem to have a possible future. The books not fresh in my mind, and I'm not sure what the value of it is. I was planning to go back to it once I've read another book of Bataille's that might help me make a little bit more sense of some of his central ideas. I'm not sure why I bring the book up exactly, except to make a distinction between two different sorts of difficulty. Finishing Bataille's book, I would have found it difficult to write much, except, of course, focusing very specifically on certain illuminating passages, because the book is mystical and obscure. I've just finished Klossowski's book 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle', and I know I'm going to be a bit jumbled, and that my understanding isn't quite what it should be just because it is the sort of dense, difficult work that needs to be read through a few times carefully, whereas I only had time for a single quick read-through. It does seem to me to merit all the praise and attention it's received over the years - it is the product of decades of writing on Nietzsche - it influenced and was influenced by just about everyone. I don't know how much you know about Klossowski... Polish... he comes out of the College de sociologie, along with Bataille, Leiris and Certeau. He wrote a couple of well-known and strange novels, and of course his book on Sade. That Bataille actually got Klossowski started on Nietzsche shows through, perhaps, in his interest in embracing chance - making chance necessity and placing that near the heart of the eternal return. A certain closeness to Deleuze comes about in the interest in the relation of forces (I know there was a sort of cross-fertilization there. Deleuze's book on Nietzsche comes out in the early sixties, and the actual book version of the vicious circle comes out near the end of the same decade, though Deleuze had read Klossowski's earlier essays, which were subsumed by the book, and he was heavily influenced by the vicious circle in some of his later writing).
Anyway, at the heart of the book is Nietzsche's revelation of the eternal return at SIls-Maria, and the texts that are most carefully pored over are posthumous fragments (there's also a certain amount of correspondence brought in - the published works are taken into account, but kind of secondary... I think I'm going to jus sort of list off some of the main things that he draws out of Nietzsche's writing:
- the self is a sort of meeting point of a multiplicity of impulses... in previous posts we have begun to touch on thought in relation to language and whether there is anything prior to language... here thought is largely a translation of impulses into language (or codes of everyday communication). Image turns into idea turns into concept. Before language comes a tonality (which is a slightly unexpected translation of Stimmung, though 'mood' does lose some of the musical resonance of the German), or an intensity..
- All that happens and all we do derives from the meeting of and conflict between competing impulses. Impulses and energies have no goal or aim beyond themselves, they mean nothing. They cannot, however, just endure, remain... energy is always in movement and always aims to increase.
- Consciousness needs a goal or an aim, and must interpret its own impulses in such a way that they are given one - one that would correspond to the further excitation and increase of that impulse.
- The various strengths of different impulses determines which ones will win out, the self is not a separate and stronger arbiter that can change this and make decisions about it, it is a result of impulses, that interprets, and can choose to will what is already a necessity.
- The eternal return of the same is an event that stands for everything that can ever happen and ever has happened - it is embracing the entire set of all possibilities (numerous but finite), including those that have led to the formation of the self that recognizes the eternal return. It is the recognition that the eternal ebb and flow of impulses that constantly circles in on itself is without meaning or end, and that life requires it constantly be given a meaning through fabulation... it is possible logically and theoretically to believe in determinism, but in order to live it is necessary to act as though will and choice exist (and on some level to believe it)
- Recognition of the eternal return must be forgotten, and rediscovered. The words, the signs of the experience can persist but the actual experience of recognition can't.
- there are two ways an impulse can develop (here my distortion and confusion is definitely picking up pace and things that don't belong together are getting mixed together)... there's a vertical development of the individual impulse being strengthened... the cultivation of the individual/ the exception, of intensity... or the horizontal gregarious flow that strengthens the group at the expense of the individual (sort of like entropy, except not). Here I really should stop, since I'm aware I'm veering off course. I'm not sure I should be talking about impulses here where all the discussion of the cultivation of the exception at the expense of the norm cuts in, where society should exist for the individual rather than the other way around. To be honest, discussions of Nietzsche's thoughts on health and sickness, on conspiracy, on real masters verse apparent masters, those things are straightforward and easy to follow in Klossowski's book, but what's most important and most interesting really are the most difficult aspects - and I know I'm only starting to unravel the actual explanation of the eternal return - each moment being in a sense the goal of the whole, the need for fabulation, etc. I hoe I get a chance to come back and clarify the whole thing before long... but I'm pretty sure it won't happen before Christmas, and even then, I know there's other stuff I kind of have to read. I'm horribly behind where I'm supposed to be, and I'm stuck in a system that puts a premium on quantity of things touched on rather than depth of understanding (though had I made use of my time this summer, I could have devoted a month to understanding this one thing or something else really well, rather than simply goofing off and not doing anything productive at all - the system maybe a bit perverse, but I guess it does actually aim at both - massive quantities balanced by a few things that it is assumed that you will pay more attention to, which is somewhat sensible. It's my own fault I've spent a lot of time not working in any way shape or form - surface or depth).

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).

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?

humour and horror, comedy and tragedy

Thanks for your thoughts about the humour and horror stuff. First off, you ask if I actually like and watch horror much. I think part of my growing fascination with horror is that it's something I never really indulged in much, but not because I didn't have a taste for it, but rather because I didn't have the stomach for it. As a kid and teenager I knew I couldn't handle spicy food, and it was only in my mid-twenties that I slowly discovered that I could now handle spicy food and really enjoy it. Similarly, what little horror I saw as a kid deeply traumatized me and gave me nightmares, and even now I get really spooked by effective horror (my girlfriend takes much amusement at my getting the willies). But, like with spicy food, my palate's gotten duller, so I can handle the stuff without too much trauma, so I've started to explore more. And part of what fascinates me about this question is precisely the fact that I seem to be so deeply affected by horror. What is it about this stuff that troubles me so much?

I think another thing that fascinates me about the topic is simply that I'm fascinated by and enjoy humour and also find it dangerously precarious. It's a very thin line between humour and creepy. It's one of the things I admire about black humour as well as authors as diverse as Chekhov and Roald Dahl: they leave you unsure whether you ought to laugh, and that in itself is quite effective.

I actually do remember that scene you mention from Mulholland Drive and remember finding it tremendously effective. I think part of what makes it work is that the guy himself is so bizarre (such a Lynch character) and yet he's clearly very nervous and the way he tells the story builds up incredible tension. And this being a Lynch film, you haven't the least idea what's going to happen when we look around the corner. But what we see is just a tacky-looking beast and that instantly deflates the tension. A friend of mine who's a real horror connoisseur told me about a complaint that Stephen King had about the difficulty of building suspense in horror: the suspense is easy, but actually showing the monster is almost inevitably a let-down. You show the audience a thirty-foot tall man-eating slug and the audience says, "oh, I was kind of expecting a three-hundred-foot tall man-eating slug." The scene in Mulholland Drive seems deliberately to play on this, to say, "okay, whatever you were expecting back there, it's better than what I could show you, so let's just play up the humour instead."

It also raises a further question: Lynch films aren't generally classified as "horror," but I'd say there's certainly an element of horror in them, or at least the uncanny, which is to horror what suspense is to mysteries.

I think you're right that most horror almost inevitably teeters on the edge of humour. Both deal with the grotesque, and especially for an audience that knows it's dealing with fiction, and a postmodern audience most especially, it's hard to do the grotesque without devolving into giggles. But it is possible. And usually humour and horror are easy to distinguish, especially when it's not in fiction but in real life.

Anyway, a few thoughts about comedy and tragedy in the Symposium. I wonder if I can tie this back into some of the stuff I said about Eric Havelock. The theatre was traditionally one of the main repositories of Greek wisdom: both Plato and Aristotle quote the tragic poets almost as much as they quote Aristotle when they want to illustrate a point. In that sense, Platonic philosophy is in competition with theatre as much as it is with the rhetoric of the sophists for the claim to being the dominant mode of thought and discourse in Ancient Greece. And just as a dialogue like the Phaedrus tries to demonstrate philosophy's superiority over rhetoric by showing how Socrates is a better rhetoritician than the sophists, the Symposium seems to want to demonstrate that philosophy offers better drama than the dramatists. Fitting, then, that Alcibiades should enter at the end and declare Socrates to be the champion. And at a party celebrating Agathon, too--cheeky!

As for why the dialogue is predominantly comic rather than tragic, I wonder if that's because Platonic philosophy is itself more comic than tragic, or at least it's rational and optimistic where tragedy emphasizes irrationality and pessimism. With the blessings of philosophy, nothing that befell the House of Atreus should have happened. Nor Oedipus, nor Medea, etc. Nietzsche's main complaint about Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy is that he brings a sunny rationality onto the Greek stage, thereby killing the--for Nietzsche--much more profound tragic yet cheerful spirit of pre-Socratic Greece.

I worry all these thoughts are already obvious to you. Though I suppose there are worse things to do than state the obvious. Like state the misleading or patently false.