At Tales from the Reading Room, litlove has long been one of blogdom's most persistent champions of Gabriel Josipovici. There are too few of us. Recently she had the opportunity to meet the writer and found him to be "like the condensed spirit of literature". I love this expression. And based on my readings of Josipovici's fiction and criticism, and also A Life, his loving biography of his mother, the translator (of Blanchot, as well as Henri Lefebvre, among others) Sacha Rabinovitch, the phrase is apt.
For some of us Josipovici means almost too much to convey. I find I could write about him constantly, and nearly do. Just last month, Stephen Mitchelmore wrote of his first encounter with Josipovici, as far back as 1988, via a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books, an encounter that, for him, ultimately had a profound impact. My own first encounter was as a name seen in passing, across a blog here or there, a name which stuck in my mind well enough to be dimly recognizable when I spied a remaindered copy of the New Directions edition of In a Hotel Garden. I enjoyed the novel, but I wouldn't chalk the experience up as a life-changer. But then came the critical books On Trust and The Book of God, books that hit me at just the right time in my life, when I was both dissatisfied with my reading and also working through certain borderline existential (not to say banal) issues in my personal life. The implications of the arguments in these two books alone continue to strike me as hugely important. The impact on my thinking, anyway, has been enormous, and much that I have written about since then has been deeply informed by his writing. With litlove's phrase in mind, along with Stephen's remembrance of a "profound conjunction", I wanted to take this opportunity to simply offer a little thanks.
"the simplest, if perhaps least imaginative, way"
Following up on the recent Blanchot posts, this comes from Charlotte Mandell's translator's note to The Book to Come, which I've only dipped into here and there (the opening essay on Proust is excellent):
there flourish two much-beloved groups of words, whose ambiguities in fact pervade ordinary French usage, but which are here frequently and trenchantly put into play.Though at times I've had considerable anxiety about translation, I am generally not one to avoid reading an author because I lack the language to read it in the original. But it remains the case that there are times when that lack becomes a potential barrier. A crucial word might have multiple possible meanings, all of which can come into play; reading is in part about balancing that play. One doesn't necessarily decide on a particular meaning while reading. And if even lovingly scrupulous translators like Charlotte Mandell are nonetheless forced into deciding on a meaning, perhaps settling on the most prosaic sense for the purposes of expediency or consistency, something is undoubtedly lost, and who's to say that that something isn't the element that allows a work to live for the reader?
First is the simple-seeming word expérience. A good deal of the time it serves the same purposes and covers the same terrain as the word it looks so much like in English. The word however also means, in ordinary French, "experiment" in the scientific sense—but also (and here the reader is warned to be wary) in the literary or artistic sense, as when one speaks of an experimental novel. There are more than a few sentences in this book in which the translator has candidly had to guess which hand of the word was gesturing in the text. "The Experience of Proust" is also "Proust's Experiment." And a sentence that plausibly reads "The experience of literature is a total experience" might suddenly seem far richer a statement if read as "The literary experiment is a total experience," or "The experience of literature is utterly an experiment." To rescue my author from my own opinions (which seems decent chivalry for a translator), I have usually chosen the simplest, if perhaps least imaginative, way of handling this issue, that is, construing what seems most obvious at the moment, and alerting the reader, herewith, to the problem of the word's surprising range of meaning.
Careful, Painstaking, Scrupulous
Speaking of Blanchot, this paragraph, about Derrida, could as well be a good description of Blanchot:
I've written several times about the difficulty I've had with reading Blanchot, for make no mistake, Blanchot is difficult, reading him requires patience, "a patience one can gain only through reading Blanchot again and again". Indeed, so far, much of my blogging about Blanchot's criticism has been writing about this difficulty rather than engaging and responding to the actual essays themselves. Sometimes, I am sure, it comes off as so much whining. And my attempts at a more careful writing in response to his essays, as with my posts on The Space of Literature, have been difficult to sustain. But why bother reading if it's so difficult? I, for one, persist in part because of the openings that I find myself wandering into after I've worked my way through the apparent opacity. And there are those moments of great lucidity. But what's so difficult, after all? Well, describing an experience, any experience, is difficult. Why do we feel tempted to write about how we identify with characters, about the ideas, as abstracted from the experience, about various things external to the text? It's not that those things are irrelevant, but is it not in part because we find it hard to articulate what the reading experience is like? I've also argued that, in English, we perhaps lack certain necessary expressions, for all our emphasis on utility and pragmatism, we too often lack precision. A reader like Blanchot, and perhaps like Derrida, is willing to patiently go where the text takes him, and then as a writer to faithfully explore what has happened in the reading. This is almost the opposite of "getting to the point", as if a literary experience could be simply reduced to a single point.
[Derrida] is an extraordinarily precise and faithful reader. In a quite disarming way, Derrida's readings [...] can often appear to be just describing what is happening in that text. [...] It is a [...] class-room cliché to say that Derrida is 'difficult'. But we could also see this the other way round. Always remarkably careful, painstaking and scrupulous in his readings, he offers superb expositions and elucidations of philosophical and other texts that are themselves 'difficult'. Would anyone want to pretend that reading Plato or Shakespeare or Freud is 'easy'? Derrida helps us read and make sense of the great, and less great, texts of western history.This is from an excerpt from Nicholas Royle's Jacques Derrida posted recently by Rhys Tranter at A Piece of Monologue (thus some of the excisions are Rhys', some mine). I was taken by this, not because I have much investment in Derrida, who in fact I've never read, but because it strikes me as helpful in thinking about Blanchot, as I suggest above, and who is said anyway to have been a major influence on Derrida.
I've written several times about the difficulty I've had with reading Blanchot, for make no mistake, Blanchot is difficult, reading him requires patience, "a patience one can gain only through reading Blanchot again and again". Indeed, so far, much of my blogging about Blanchot's criticism has been writing about this difficulty rather than engaging and responding to the actual essays themselves. Sometimes, I am sure, it comes off as so much whining. And my attempts at a more careful writing in response to his essays, as with my posts on The Space of Literature, have been difficult to sustain. But why bother reading if it's so difficult? I, for one, persist in part because of the openings that I find myself wandering into after I've worked my way through the apparent opacity. And there are those moments of great lucidity. But what's so difficult, after all? Well, describing an experience, any experience, is difficult. Why do we feel tempted to write about how we identify with characters, about the ideas, as abstracted from the experience, about various things external to the text? It's not that those things are irrelevant, but is it not in part because we find it hard to articulate what the reading experience is like? I've also argued that, in English, we perhaps lack certain necessary expressions, for all our emphasis on utility and pragmatism, we too often lack precision. A reader like Blanchot, and perhaps like Derrida, is willing to patiently go where the text takes him, and then as a writer to faithfully explore what has happened in the reading. This is almost the opposite of "getting to the point", as if a literary experience could be simply reduced to a single point.
"At last I understand Kafka"
Since the beginning of this blog, I've been ostentatiously listing on the sidebar the books I've read in the current year, which I then convert into a mammoth end of year round-up of sorts. I don't really know why I do this, other than I enjoy lists and like keeping track of my reading. Regardless, there is a tension even in such a simple exercise as this. If I've read a book, do I claim to have read it well? Or to have understood it? Some weeks ago, I added Blanchot's Friendship to the list; given my admitted struggles with Blanchot's writing, how did I do with this particular book? I confess that I was unable to get much of anything out of some of the essays, whereas others I found myself able to read and profit from. I don't pretend to have a full grasp of all of Blanchot's major themes, but the best of the essays are remarkably supple and subtle pieces that I hope to return to again and again.
This reminds me of a passage from William H. Gass' marvelous introduction to William Gaddis' imposing novel, The Recognitions. It is one of the great introductions, and I've read it several times. Here is Gass:
This reminds me of a passage from William H. Gass' marvelous introduction to William Gaddis' imposing novel, The Recognitions. It is one of the great introductions, and I've read it several times. Here is Gass:
No great book is explicable, and I shall not attempt to explain this one. An explanation—indeed, any explanation—would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers, convenient summaries, quiz questions, annotations, arrows, highlight lines, lists of its references, the numbers of its sources, echoes, and influences, an outline of its designs—useful as sometimes such helps are—nevertheless very seriously mislead. Guidebooks are useful, but only to what is past. Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. "Okay, I get it," we say, dusting our hands, "and that takes care of that." "At last I understand Kafka" is a foolish and conceited remark.(Keeping with the theme of this post, yes, I have "read" the novel, too, some ten years ago, though I was under no illusion at the time that I was equal to the task; a second reading, in the context of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Gaddis Drinking Club group blog, was aborted about halfway through (and my only two posts at the blog weren't even about the reading itself but about introductory material). Ours was not the only well-intentioned but short-lived group blog devoted to reading The Recognitions; there was also Reading Gaddis from last year, and no doubt there are others. The book seems to inspire such projects. Lately the gang at An und für sich have themselves embarked on what looks like a fruitful group reading, which isn't too surprising given that blog's particular focus on theology and philosophy; the relevant posts are collected here.)
On modernization and its discontents
In one of my early posts engaging with Josipovici's On Trust, I opened with this passage, which actually is from his equally excellent study, The Book of God:
I find, in my intermittent attempts to take on Marx, that I am vastly more interested in his analysis of capital than I am his theories of history. The teleological view that history has certain necessary stages strikes me as deeply problematic, though not uniquely so. Marx and his successors were working within a widely shared set of beliefs, a set of beliefs that took such progress as both necessary and good. They have done great work to unpack the complicated workings of capital so that it can be seen to be historically contingent, but I'm less persuaded by the historical project itself.
But why am I talking about Marx here? I'm not sure I have, just yet, a satisfactory answer. I look on the history of modernization with unease and from a historically privileged standpoint. I want to ask questions about the overall justification of that modernization. We hold onto its inevitability and necessity as a matters of faith. We are conditioned to tacitly accept, if we don't always come right out and say it explicitly, Marx's characterization of the "idiocy of rural life". Modernization is seen as necessary in order for freedom to truly exist, in order, indeed, for us to be in a sense truly human.
And yet, I am not automatically given to anti-modernism. I wouldn't know what to do with myself in a rural, unlinked environment. I love big cities, I like basic dentistry, I like refrigerators, ice cubes, regular electricity, running water, rock music and jazz, movies, the telephone, email, etc and so on and on. I have a hard time conceiving of myself living in a different time, so used to the amenities of modern life am I. But with the real possibility of drastic climatic change as a result of global warming, such modern life may not be sustainable for long. And that's not the only reason to question the very lives we lead—that is, questions arise in the area of viability, yes, but also justification, moral and otherwise. Our lives, as we live them, are only possible as a function of massive global inequality and widespread privation, both of which appear to be necessary outputs of the capitalist system. We cannot all be modernized, even without the spectre of global warming. And, of course, now, as ever, there are those resisting attempts at modernization, just as their counterparts resist, as they always have, the wholesale theft necessary to keep the system running. Marx called this process "primitive accumulation"—the capital accumulation that was necessary for a capitalist system to get going in the first place. Capitalists needed to have stolen a whole bunch of shit in order to amass piles big enough to get the ball rolling. It was Rosa Luxembourg, I believe, who observed that this process must be ongoing—capital must continue to look "outside" itself to get what it needs—and feminist critics of Marx, for example Silvia Federici (I've just read her excellent Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which has much bearing on these matters), have observed further that this process of accumulation amounts to a war against women.
This is not the first time I've touched on these topics, but I hope it will be the beginning of a more extended and fruitful exploration of the problems.
. . . once Luther stood up and asserted the need to speak the truth as he saw it and not pay lip-service to tradition, things could never be quite the same again. We tend to see Luther's break with the medieval church, like Spinoza's with Jewish tradition, as the triumph of light and integrity over the forces of obscurantism and hypocrisy; but this is to see it from their own point of view. It is important, however, to grasp what gets lost as well as what is won in such revolutions. . .I'm interested here in this question of point of view. Because not only is it their own point of view, Luther's and Spinoza's, it is in fact our point of view. We have adopted wholesale this point of view; it would have been difficult for us not to have. Not only do we experience capitalism as natural—it's the air we breathe—but we experience progress as natural, technological progress in particular. We simply expect it to happen, as if it were causeless (though we may chalk it up unthinkingly to "innovation" or "human ingenuity", each only made possible by that natural market).
I find, in my intermittent attempts to take on Marx, that I am vastly more interested in his analysis of capital than I am his theories of history. The teleological view that history has certain necessary stages strikes me as deeply problematic, though not uniquely so. Marx and his successors were working within a widely shared set of beliefs, a set of beliefs that took such progress as both necessary and good. They have done great work to unpack the complicated workings of capital so that it can be seen to be historically contingent, but I'm less persuaded by the historical project itself.
But why am I talking about Marx here? I'm not sure I have, just yet, a satisfactory answer. I look on the history of modernization with unease and from a historically privileged standpoint. I want to ask questions about the overall justification of that modernization. We hold onto its inevitability and necessity as a matters of faith. We are conditioned to tacitly accept, if we don't always come right out and say it explicitly, Marx's characterization of the "idiocy of rural life". Modernization is seen as necessary in order for freedom to truly exist, in order, indeed, for us to be in a sense truly human.
And yet, I am not automatically given to anti-modernism. I wouldn't know what to do with myself in a rural, unlinked environment. I love big cities, I like basic dentistry, I like refrigerators, ice cubes, regular electricity, running water, rock music and jazz, movies, the telephone, email, etc and so on and on. I have a hard time conceiving of myself living in a different time, so used to the amenities of modern life am I. But with the real possibility of drastic climatic change as a result of global warming, such modern life may not be sustainable for long. And that's not the only reason to question the very lives we lead—that is, questions arise in the area of viability, yes, but also justification, moral and otherwise. Our lives, as we live them, are only possible as a function of massive global inequality and widespread privation, both of which appear to be necessary outputs of the capitalist system. We cannot all be modernized, even without the spectre of global warming. And, of course, now, as ever, there are those resisting attempts at modernization, just as their counterparts resist, as they always have, the wholesale theft necessary to keep the system running. Marx called this process "primitive accumulation"—the capital accumulation that was necessary for a capitalist system to get going in the first place. Capitalists needed to have stolen a whole bunch of shit in order to amass piles big enough to get the ball rolling. It was Rosa Luxembourg, I believe, who observed that this process must be ongoing—capital must continue to look "outside" itself to get what it needs—and feminist critics of Marx, for example Silvia Federici (I've just read her excellent Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which has much bearing on these matters), have observed further that this process of accumulation amounts to a war against women.
This is not the first time I've touched on these topics, but I hope it will be the beginning of a more extended and fruitful exploration of the problems.
On bodies and capitalism
A few weeks ago, Shelley at Read Red had an interesting post about Bodies by Susie Orbach. She has mixed feelings about the book, some of her criticisms having to do with the absence of class analysis by Orbach, or any attention to the role of agribusiness. Here is Shelley:
[Orbach] is not oblivious to the economic system and writes a good deal about how various corporations and industries are profiting from body-related commerce. But she fails to say anything explicit about what's really going on here--that it's the capitalist market, the global capitalist market, that gives rise to all these horrific, ever-increasing profit-taking assaults on bodies, women's especially. It's the elephant--and that's a damned big body!--in the room of Bodies. Everything she writes about is a creation of capitalism, yet she declines to name capitalism as the problem or any kind of mass struggle as the solution.In her defense of fat women against groups like Weight Watchers, for the false promises and for its reliance on the consistent weight fluctuation characteristic of long-term dieters, Orbach "cites some studies showing that you can be fit and 'overweight,'", which Shelley says is "a welcome corrective to the nasty, ignorant stereotypes of lazy fat people." Shelley shares a little about her own experience trying to lose weight, through Weight Watchers, while being conscious of some of the many contradictions involved. For her, she says, it's not so much about image as about how she feels inside her own body. The book, she says, has
many worthwhile points here, having to do with the commodification of bodies under late capitalism (my characterization, not hers), women's bodies especially but more and more men's as well; with the terrible destructive effects of the fashion, cosmetics and cosmetic surgery industries; with the alienation, the estrangement, from their bodies that is the experience of so many women as well as, again of late, men; and more. Orbach is in some ways quite astute about what's going on here. She incorporates recent findings in neuroscience, economic and social statistics, as well as psychoanalytic insights.I think that all of this is very important stuff. Shelley's post reminded me of this slideshow I saw a couple of months back at Shapely Prose ("home of the mordantly obese" is the site's tagline) which shows pretty well the ridiculousness of the Body Mass Index standards. From there, I spent some time reading through the blog's archives. I found it very instructive, but at times I admit I was puzzled. The site is one of many "fat acceptance" blogs (the fatosphere). My puzzlement was primarily at the far reaches of this acceptance. That is, I think there's a difference between body acceptance, which I believe is important, and simply accepting without question poor diets, poor food choices, and excessively sedentary lifestyles, all of which we do not have complete control over--which I imagine is part of the point of the acceptance movement; so often fat people, as well as poor people, are attacked as if they only needed to make better decisions and they wouldn't be in their current position, as if our lifestyle choices are not substantially conditioned by exposure to mass media, and more generally by the larger problem of living in an unhealthy capitalist society. I had some questions, but I'm generally reluctant to begin commenting at a blog that's new to me, particularly if I'm about to ask a common question--surely such points are already addressed somewhere on this very site, right? And I especially despise the stereotypical male commenter who swoops in to tell it like it is, as if the bloggers and regular readership have never heard of dominant arguments. Masculine argumentation I can do without. So, I don't want to be that guy. Happily, many feminist blogs, of necessity we can be sure, have commenting rules and guidelines, and even FAQ sections. The excellent well-known blog I Blame the Patriarchy, for example. Anyway, if you're curious about these matters, I recommend taking a look at the Shapely Prose blog, if you don't already. For starters, here is the link to their FAQ section, which provides many links to interesting topics, such as Health at Every Size and The Fantasy of Being Thin.
On generic masculine language
Returning to Freud for a moment, one thing that stands out from his writing is the sexist language; e.g., "according to them, man is wholly good", and so on. This isn't surprising. He was writing in 1929, and everyone wrote like this. It was always "man", always "he" or "his", etc. Though I've always avoided this myself, my take on it used to be that it was primarily a quirk of the language, and I admit that I felt that people often read too much into it (I believe the sexist language I'm sure I used, if only to myself, was that people overreacted). In certain instances, perhaps I wasn't wrong. It might not be worth getting too upset about the generic "he" in a lot of older writing (not that it's up to me to decide, which is why I've never much argued the point). But I guess it depends on what the writing is about. In Freud, as in Nietzsche, it's the inquiry into origins and the bold claims about human nature that drives the point home, finally, so that I can see it better. Perhaps it helps that I come to their writings late, already believing in a female-centered view of human cultural development, and already interested in exploring what has been left out of the dominant historical narratives (namely, women). For not only do they use the masculine generic pronouns, not only does "man" stand in for "human", but in the context of these claims, we are told about the actions of men, who among other things have wives and, possibly, mothers. Wives and mothers who apparently have little agency of their own. They are certainly not interesting, except insofar as they can be seen to have had effects, probably negative effects, on men.
I have elsewhere already criticized Freud and Nietzsche for their near-exclusive focus on men in this regard. In that post, I noted that it seems that Marx and Engels come off much better in their work on origins. And yet, they certainly do not get a free pass. In another post, I observed that a reason we're only lately getting around to some decent understanding of such areas as childhood development is because science has for so long been the province of men, and science and philosophy have privileged the adult, male standpoint. History, too. Men did things, and that was that. It is my belief that we need to focus more on women, and gender, if we hope to understand anything about how we got here, and if we hope to find better ways to live.
I have elsewhere already criticized Freud and Nietzsche for their near-exclusive focus on men in this regard. In that post, I noted that it seems that Marx and Engels come off much better in their work on origins. And yet, they certainly do not get a free pass. In another post, I observed that a reason we're only lately getting around to some decent understanding of such areas as childhood development is because science has for so long been the province of men, and science and philosophy have privileged the adult, male standpoint. History, too. Men did things, and that was that. It is my belief that we need to focus more on women, and gender, if we hope to understand anything about how we got here, and if we hope to find better ways to live.
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