Il convient que la poésie soit inséparable du prévisible, mais non encore formulé.

René Char, Partage Formel

Deux Vérités de Marguerite

In France they still Love Literature with two capital L's. The ultimate proof are the Quarto editions on Gallimard. With those you get a load of essential texts of one writer in one book. The paper is ultra-thin but you get more than 1000 pages for a reasonable price.

So I was thumbing through the Quarto of Marguerite Duras and in the introduction she was being quite honest about being a writer. She said - and I am quoting from memory here - that "the essential thing about being a writer is daring to write. I have written incomprehensible things and they were read."

Two truths if there ever were truths. I mean, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, while still among the living, all they did was write, write, write. They were frequently accused of being opaque and rightout incomprehensible, and - this is what it is all about - they probably were, if you observe the thousand-plus interpretations that are to this day (and probably for many years to come) plaguing the blogosphere alone. I mean, I was reading Badiou's take on Deleuze (La Clameur de l'Être) and thanks to Badiou I now feel that I understand even less of Deleuze than before.

But I guess that it is what writing is about: Write now, think later.

Second truth, then. I remember reading Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol. V. Stein - a long time ago that was, tempus fugit - and to this day I still could not possibly fathom what that book is about (I even suspect that, with all the additional knowledge I have acquired since then about France's cultural climate at the time the book was written, I now will understand even less if I decide to re-read it). Bearing in mind Duras' quotation I am bound to believe that even the writer herself did not know what it was about.

A few years ago for me there would not have been any point whatsoever to reading an incomprehensible book. Now it has become a challenge. When incomprehensible (or seeming to be), literature becomes pure language again, the ground zero of writing, mere signs, signifiers and symptoms waiting to be deciphered, like hieroglyphs by an Egyptologue. Meaning leading to other meanings, "a Thousand Plateaus" of Meaning.

Why settle for one meaning if you can have all the truths in the world? Or how nihilism and holism are just two sides of the same coin.

Ground

"All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. (...) But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it."

Don DeLillo, from: The Names

I have now read three novels by Don DeLillo: White Noise, Underworld and The Names. And out of those reading experiences re-emerges the essence of what makes a great writer. The great writer, in essence, does not write about the so-called great themes of life. He does not write about (on) love, hate, loss, sex, health, madness, politics, ethics. No, the great writer writes about the things that escape the incidental, the surface look. He writes about what is beyond all those grand themes. He writes about what is beneath. He writes about the things under these things. He understands.

The great writer (Borges, Dick, Ballard, Pynchon) mentions, employs and deploys all these great themes to keep his story going and he may even say very meaningful things about them. But he does not position them as the essence of his story. His story is about the phenomena that are always there, so omnipresent that we tend to forget the realm of their importance. The noise, the murmur in the background (in White Noise), waste and junk, the things we use and then throw aside - and then are stuck with (in Underworld), language, the words we use, the way we express ourselves (in The Names).

In parallel you will see emerge other important undercurrents in Borges (language, myth, knowledge), Dick (reality, believe and make believe), Pynchon (science, history) and Ballard (violence, dis-ease, man against nature). It is not the believe in, the knowledge of, the science of, the myth about, the language with which that are important. No, it is the believe itself, the science and the knowledge themselves, language itself that need explanation, inquiry. It is not what those mechanisms produce, no, it is the mechanisms themselves that a great writer concerns himself with.

It is no coincidence, then, that the sentence that emerges as most important from those DeLillo's three books is the eternal "What does it mean?". The truly great writer does not care for surface, symptom or attributes. They all come second, they are a means. He is looking for the first causes. He is trying to unforget. He may not immediately find what he is looking for. Of course, he does not find what he is looking for. That is why he writes.

Vita Ontologica

"The task that confronts thinking today is, in a way, unprecedented. An entirely new mode of thought is now called for. This new thought is easier than conventional philosophy, but harder too, because it demands more careful use of language."

Martin Heidegger

Needless to say that I do not in the least agree with Richard Rorty, who, in this documentary, describes Heidegger as "a bad man who wrote an interesting book". Heidegger's challenge still stands today, more than ever. And it is about time we lived up to it.

I am inclined to think that, although we do live in a postmodern age, most people, and more importantly, most postmodern criticisms, still continue to express themselves in the vocabulary of modernism. It is not because they use all this postmodern terminology that they think differently.

Because, if they are so postmodern, why do they feel obliged to think up new concepts all of the time? After all, is there anything more enlightened than coming up with new concepts? It is much more of a challenge to think new thoughts with the concepts that are already there and that (seem to) have been exhausted.

The biggest problem of postmodernism, then, is perhaps the fact that no-one at all any longer dares to think a tabula rasa. And tabula rasa does not mean another heap of new concepts. No, it means thinking up new meanings. One must think beyond, not 'after' modernism. Mors ontologica is only a fact when you choose to accept it as such.

So there is still hope, perhaps even more than ever. The work is never done. History may have ended, but history is just a concept. The world is ruled by people, not by concepts. Language may speak us, but one still can - no: must - choose by which language one is spoken.

More thoughts on reading Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot is one of those writers who leaves you with more questions than answers (see below). As such he is definitely the writer you have to read and try to understand if you are yourself an aspiring writer. Wikipedia warned me that reading Blanchot is a thoroughly disturbing experience and it most certainly is.

I have already written here that he uses very simple words, but his writings, that are mostly about language, writing and words themselves, are very difficult indeed. They approach Heidegger at his most obscure (Sein und Zeit was the book that had the greatest influence on his thinking). My knowledge of French is excellent, but reading Blanchot is like having to learn that language all over again. As it is, I wonder how much of the content can ever survive a translation. I have read a part of it in Dutch and then it becomes even more difficult, because he often translates terminology of Hegel and Heidegger in French, that, in turn, then gets translated in Dutch. So you have already two levels of shifts in signification.

There is nothing much that I do not like about Blanchot. Before WWII he was extreme-right and moved in the circles around the Action Française of Charles Maurras (A thing that people who have been born after WWII often tend to forget is that the French extreme-right actually had lots of political leverage and was not considered 'wrong', like it is in our time). He even wrote pieces against the Jews. Nonetheless he helped to escape those same Jews from persecution during the war. After the war, politically, he moved to the left, eventually ending up on the extreme-left. As he got older he became more and more reclusive and by the end of his life Derrida was the only person he still met regularly.

And you understand that desire to become a literary hermit when you read his books. I write 'books', but most of his writings, even his novels, are deep and difficult and often philosophical meditations on what language is and what it means to write. He constantly writes in seemingly paradoxical sentences and I can imagine that his writings are for most people, just like Heidegger's, unreadable and hermetic.

Still, I can not imagine a writer that has left, in such a short time, such an impression on my own thinking. After reading De l'Angoise au Langage, Comment la Littérature est-elle Possible and La Littérature et le Droit à la Mort (It took me three weeks to really read those texts and we are talking about a mere hundred pages here) I just could not write a sentence for days. Blanchot forces you to rethink every concept you were used to. Even if you do not agree with him, you will be changed. And that, after all, is what literature should do.

???????

"What is wrong with you, is wrong all the way through you" - Cormac McCarthey

Can a place be condemned by the words spoken in them?
Science is truth, the rest interpretation. Alas.
Beware of the seekers of the light of truth. They may burn your face along with theirs.
No energy is ever truly wasted. But time is.
Can language bend time? Can words?
Your final word can be the beginning of a whole new world for the other.
Is a word dead when spoken? Or does it begin to live then?
Is a word dead when written? Or does it begin to live then?
Can something ever be truly committed to written language? Or does it forever live on in the mind?
Is writing a duty? Is it a curse?
Can a face express an idea? Or only an emotion?
Is there such a thing as the grammar of being?
Can understanding stand between us? Does it seperate us?
Can too much signification kill a word?
If the pen is mightier than the sword, how mighty is the word?
Eros and Thanatos? Or Eros, Thanatos and Logos?

What the Fuck?!?

So according to some luminaries the Dutch language desperately needed an 'irony sign'. What does this mean? That most people can no longer distinguish an ironic subtext? (Probably) Or that language is now for the remainder of its existence condemned to irony? (Even more probable).

It seems to me that I am going to be around long enough to attend the actual death of language. Not too much to worry about then, since we have already attended the death of all meaning.