Perhaps my calm has a lot to do with accepting defeat. I wish I could write a lot more, but journals are not meant for philosophical fictions. I only hope for good news from Daisy, not even good news but miracles worked out from below. News from London, as if during the war, from London only good news could come through. Bad news from Berlin. The more I read about Laxness, the more I am convinced that it is in the criticism and “educated” reading of literature that the most radical political hermeneutics is at home – no one knew this better than the Jewish Marxists, Lukács, Benjamin and Bloch. The acts of literature – reading, writing, criticism, theory – are a lot closer to what a critical interpretation of the world would demand from readers; here all the most contradictory methodological tools are at play and they survive through the strife with pointed knives as they discover how a sentence can become present in a world or another. What is the philosophy of Auschwitz if not this “reading and writing” as experience, as non-instrumental and non-Kantian notions of “knowing a world” (and definitely anti-Heideggerian too, for Heidegger severed completely thinking from knowing and this is a Kantian movement) and as plausible experiments to write under the borderline conditions that writing itself requires? Writing not as the structural activity in which anthropologists are unable to distinguish in their analyses a genius novel from a shopping list. I mean here writing as a primal activity, writing as a “margin” of life, as a second-hand creation of oneself within the prosaic world where God is no longer naming things. If writing were mere story-telling (and story-telling is not just a “mere” anything undermined by academic discourse in the sense of what Páll Skúlason writes about practical problems and knowledge problems) then there could be no moral value or value at all attached to philosophical opinions; writing is a creative enterprise in the sense that the author can re-create life, de-construct in order to construe (it is a mistake to think that deconstruction is only shattering the building, although this might be an idea very widespread among the groupies of Heidegger and the theologians of the post-human anything) and to rescue himself and the surrounding from the butterfly effect of “traveling light” through the world as if a hotel lobby with anonymous guests.
Z.B.: But the memory of the past and trust in the future have been thus far the two pillars on which the cultural and moral bridges between transience and durability, human mortality and the immortality of human accomplishments, as well as taking responsibility and living by the moment, all rested.
Guy Debord: The controlling centre has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology
Daisy´s religion: The church is closed but the glacier is open
Kundera: To write, means for the poet to crush the wall behind which something that “was always there” hides… Spokesmen for the obvious, self-evident and what we all believe, don´t we? Are false poets, says Kundera
Juan Goytisolo: “If one lives only in the present, one risks disappearing together with the present”
Z.B.: Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn… For the exile, breaking rules is not a matter of free choice, but an eventuality that cannot be avoided… And in the absence of thought, the skating on thin ice which is the fate of fragile individuals in the porous world may well be mistaken for their destiny… Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immorality – of refusing help to a person in danger.
Z.B. Grand Finale: The job of sociology is to see to it that the choices are genuinely, and that they remain so, increasingly so, for the duration of humanity.
What to do when the family home becomes a hell and no longer a home? What to do when you always knew this and that the facts of the world are in charge of reminding you the accuracy of your intuition?
Note from Steiner: In writing the Ursprung, Benjamin was reading Lukács´s History & Class Consciousness; it was striking and, in a sense, validating, observed Benjamin, that Lukács, operating from wholly political premises, should have reached epistemological conclusions very similar to those he himself was not expounding. This is explicated in letters to Scholem from that period… The reader that Benjamin envisaged for the serious part of his work was, literally, posthumous.
What a postwar professor said about Benjamin´s Ursprung: “Geist kann man nicht habilitieren”
On tragedy (Steiner): Tragödie and Trauerspiel are radically distinct, in metaphysical foundation and executive genre. Tragedy is grounded in myth. It acts out a rite of heroic sacrifice. In its fulfillment of this sacrificial-transcendent design, tragedy endows the hero with the realization that he is ethically in advance of the gods, that his sufferance of good and evil, of fortune and desolation, has projected him into a category beyond the comprehension of the essentially innocent though materially omnipotent deities (Artemis´ flight from the dying Hippolytus, Dionysus´ myopia exceeding the blindness of Pentheus). This realization compels the tragic hero to silence, and here Benjamin is strongly influenced by Rosenzweig´s concept of the meta-ethical condition of tragic man. The Trauerspiel, on the contrary, is not rooted in myth but in history.
Note: This meta-ethical is certainly a copyright of Kierkegaard and by tour de passage it is an essentially über-political movement that hails more to the end of the world as an individual than it does toward the configuration of any life in public whatsoever.
Note: Warburg killed Benjamin, killed him more than death could
Note on Benjamin´s citability: At last I understand the hermeneutic passage when Rosenzweig says “das jüdische ist meine Methode, nicht mein Gegestand”; both were engaged in a Jewish movement similar to what I had thought of once when thinking of translating Eveline´s ark: To write a Talmudic commentary to life from the sources of modern thought. (just a moment after I wrote this, I realized that this is precisely what Steiner expounded just a few lines later)
The grand finale of Steiner´s prologue to the Ursprung: The publication of this monograph in English, in 1977, under this imprint, is pregnant with ironies. What English-speaking reader has ever glanced at the plays and allegories which Benjamin would, though indirectly, resuscitate? Where could he find them? The mandarins and aestheticians with whom Benjamin seeks his quarrels are long forgotten. The German-Jewish community of which he was a late ornament lies in cinders. Benjamin himself died a hunted fugitive. Had he lived, Walter Benjamin would doubtless have been skeptical of any “New Left”. Like every man committed to abstruse thought and scholarship, he knew that not only the humanities, but humane and critical intelligence itself, resides in the always-threatened keeping of the very few. Trauerspiel is beautifully apt: a presentment of man´s suffering and cruelty, made bearable through stately, even absurd form. A play of sorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment