Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

Note: This article was originally written for another website where I hope it will still appear in a shortened and substantially different form.

Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity” –Søren Kierkegaard

‘Humanity’ – that endless rant we hear time and again through the loud speakers of radio, TV, social media and casual conversations. There is no single day that goes without someone advocating a bit of humanity; it doesn’t matter which country you choose, which armed conflict, which sectarian division, we hear it over and over, no less in the felicitous notion of ‘crimes against humanity’  whose definition is limited by strict practical-legal boundaries. According to the dictionary definition, ‘humanity’ (hyoo-man-i-tee) has been defined as 1) all human beings collectively; the human race; mankind 2) the quality or condition of being human; human nature 3) the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence. Throughout history, nevertheless, humanity has been understood in manifold ways and the concept itself, on which we rely today, abstract as it is, arose sometime between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it constitutes by no means a given fact, part and parcel of the history of mankind. Truth being said, ‘values’ such as goodness, kindness, good judgment and ‘humanity’ itself are not inborn qualities in any human being or group, unless we are understanding humanity as the uninterrupted continuum of Western education – the kind of education whose aim is not to teach, but to develop such values in people.

This is how humanity has been long associated with the ‘study’ of what academics have termed and perhaps not without irony, ‘the humanities’: a household name for the otherwise ‘useless’ and rather loose assemblage of various disciplines and fields of knowledge that are thought of as ‘unscientific’ and lacking the precision of ‘exact’ and ever more reputable sciences such mathematics and physics, as if, the study of mathematics and physics wouldn’t constitute in itself a human or humanistic enterprise to be more precise, but a wholly practical endeavor pursued in order to dominate the natural world – not without the inherent melancholy in that this has been so far, the greatest broken promise of the modern world. If we put asides the currents of historical definitions ‘humanities’ as the study of ‘humanity’ and ‘human values’ can be tracked back to the classics of Greece and Rome – not only the Platonic academy and its sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, but also the Sophists schools, the Orphic cults, the Homeric bards that preceded and also everything that followed uninterrupted until the late Middle Ages. At least in from the Platonic academy onwards, the study of humanity, it figures, also included the study of science.

This ‘classical’ education, considered a means of intellectual training in the broadest possible terms, covered at once the study of philosophy, history, material culture, logic and foreign languages – what they called in the Roman Empire ‘liberalia studia’ available to both boys and girls offspring of free men and extensively discussed by Seneca The Younger. The subjects included in this study would become the standard liberal arts of Roman and medieval times and comprised the basic curriculum of ‘education for the sake of education’ in late Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Pagan writer Martianus Minneus Felix Capella defined the liberal arts in the 5^th century AD as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy; they were then split in the medieval University into the Trivium – grammar, logic, rhetoric – and the Quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, astrology and astronomy – establishing the importance of the full spectrum of the liberal arts as the foundation of civilized and educated citizenry, all of the above rooted from times immemorial down to our own times in the teachings of Plato and his master Socrates.

It wouldn’t be compelling to reconsider lengthily the nature of this education if it weren’t for a telling passage in Plato’s Republic that discusses the nature of this education that stands for the very foundation of what we consider civilized and educated and indirectly, liberal, inquisitive and open. In the Republic (379a) Plato speaks for the first time of ‘the speech of the Gods’ or better said ‘theology’, that for being the earliest historical use of that notion known to date, comes not entirely devoid of surprises: ‘but this very thing – the patterns or norms of theology, what would they be?’ Then this is followed by an all-encompassing discussion about the role and nature of education, pointing out that for the sake of the youth, poets should adhere to strict norms and that heresies of the likes of Hesiod, Homer, Heraclitus and the Sophists will not be tolerated – ‘The true quality of God we must always surely attribute to him whether we compose in epic, melic or tragic verse’ – because they are a threat to the founders of the state, who must know and enforce the patterns on which the poets must compose their fables, for it has become clear that the rulers of the city are graceful In the eyes of the deity and therefore, the true quality of God being only that which coincides exactly with the interests of the city.

In another earlier passage (377b-c) the political impact of this ‘theology’ is more evidently manifest: ‘Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they grow up?’ The answer to this question is univocal and by no means supported in the classical virtues of argumentation, persuasion and discussion – ‘By no manner of means will we allow it. We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our story makers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject. And the stories on the accepted list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories rather than their bodies by their hands. But most of the stories they now well we must reject.’ In what follows, they go on to discuss what kind of stories might be deemed acceptable or not.

Hannah Arendt is truly illuminating on the import of Plato’s ‘theology’ (‘What is authority?’ in ‘The Portable Hannah Arendt’, Penguin 2000 pp. 494) when she argues that Plato was the first to become aware of the enormous and strictly political potential in stories, tales and alas mythologies. The fact that it was him who coined the term ‘theology’ in this educational-political context referred to the founding of cities in the Republic is very suggestive because this new theological god is neither a living god nor the god of the philosophers or a pagan deity; it is a political devise according to which cities may be founded and the rules of behavior for the majority laid down. Moreover this ‘theology’ teaches how to enforce these standards absolutely even at the risk of committing injustice – for example the death penalty – with the argument (615a) that ‘for all the wrongs that they had ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn tenfold for each’ – meaning ultimately that even those who caused injustice either because of law or war would receive their punishment during their lifetime (615b-c) and that this was beyond the scope and consequence of the law – the state comes first. Socrates, who was ultimately wronged under the same policy tried to reverse this awful state of affairs by claiming that ‘It is better to suffer wrong than do to wrong’ (Gorgias, 469b-c) and then he went to prove it rationally but he failed and thus dealt a deadly blow on moral philosophy from the moment of its very birth.

This is the background against which the liberal arts and the different versions of Western education were engendered – as means for the free or educated classes to enforce their interests on the great majority. The definition and scope of what later became theology as the discipline of reasoned discourse about God and not merely mythologies was not rooted in these passages but in another set of passages in the Republic (506d-511e) that deal with the proper method to distinguish between false mysteries and divine truth – of course falling under the rubric of false mysteries anything that could contradict in anyway the founding principles of the city. The great political import of Plato’s ‘theology’ was nonetheless never forgotten and accordingly, Christian theology did not for one moment forget its Platonic background as it is evident in St. Augustine’s versions of hell and purgatory and the speculations of both Origen and Clement of Alexandria after suffering. These political principles in the education of the ruling elites remained more or less unchallenged through history and are still prevalent today. Its tools however, the so-called ‘humanities’ have come under fire for a long time now since the Age of Reason and the rise of ‘scientific history’ in the 19^th century, time from which they have fallen prey to disrepute and harsh criticism because of their unscientific claims that they themselves have tried to revert by adopting ‘scientific methodologies’ – this applies for each and every field of knowledge, theology included.

In this spirit of reason and truth, the social sciences rose to life in the course of the 19^th century with a therapeutic task in mind – to cure the unscientific nature of the humanities applying to them the same rigorous treatment until them only afforded to the always so respectable exact sciences; this process gave birth to an unexpected flow of new disciplines that wouldn’t have been successful in finding a hall of fame in the grandeur of academic discourse, hadn’t they appealed to the scientific flair demanded by the reasonable men of their times – sociology, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, etc.  This felicitous momentum coincided with the last grandiose vernissage of European culture: An assortment of civil and international wars and Imperialism and Colonialism in their climax, planted the seeds of the bloodiest totalitarian movements that grew happily into mythical trees in the nicest palatial gardens as the European greedy attempts to monopolize the natural resources of the entire earth went on unmolested.  The spectacular demise of the humanities for the sake of ‘true knowledge’ sheltered upon the wings of Plato’s selfsame theology paved a self-defeating way to pursue progress in lieu of ‘mere knowledge’. In this age of progress – that among other achievements burnt dozens of libraries in the course of imperial and civil wars – nothing more disgraceful than having the epitaph of philosopher over one’s grave, that, in case he was lucky enough to have one.

One must be always a scientist, because science does something after all, no? It serves as means to an end, it has a purpose. The ‘humanities’ that deal with ‘humanity’ are totally unnecessary since what we need is people who can do things, who can build things and above all – who can add a peg or two more to the endless chain of accumulation of capital. Humanity, that humanity embodied by the liberal arts has become nowadays nothing but a form of education available only to the few privileged who need not worry about pursuing ‘careers’ that will bring bread home. I should correct myself – this has been the situation always ever since the days of the Platonic Academy, however this has significantly deteriorated overtime on the basis of the transformation of man ‘homo sapiens’ into the ‘animal laborans’ – heritage of the Industrial Revolution – who is entirely dependent on the produce of his labor; people who are not engaged in labor are no longer considered a functional part of society and consequently, such as pre-historical man, must survive on labor alone. There’s no space for work (e.g. works of art of literature) or action (of the political and social kind); one is ultimately condemned to labor so that even a college professor and an artist or a politician must see their activity not in the light of a vocation but only as a job, raw labor that cashes a pay check and then home.  ‘Creative minds’ cannot flee this structure, that is why there are (in the spirit of the functional division of labor) chairs in universities, artists-in-residence, fellowships, stipends, state galleries, art communities and studios. Everything wants to make sure than there is no distinction whatsoever between works and jobs. Nothing can be left at the fringes of society – indeed a Platonic dream.

What kind of individuals are those riddled with questions and doubts? What happens with their ill spirits that leads them to seek no (functionally tiered) glory, pleasure and gratification other than knowledge? How can one dare pursue anything for its own sake? Everything must have a reason, a wherefore, a destination, an aim and most ultimately, a compensation – even truth. Popular wisdom can put it best in ‘everything happens in the world because of a reason’. Nothing is haphazard. The human condition of the animal laborans has been severed from the humanities and not without a reason – the animal laborans is by no means homo sapiens. Since it is clear that being human is not a profession then there’s clearly no argument in favor of the humanities unless they constitute the political education of the wealthy; however since it is not possible to be a professional human, it is possible to be a humanities professional – a liberal arts professor in one of our prestigious universities. The great majority of this academic job holders wind up as members of an ‘intelligentsia’ and erect themselves into cults from within academic halls packed with initiates and converts. 

We learnt much about the modern university – e.g. the modern Platonic academy, from Icelandic philosopher Páll Skúlason (‘The Nature and Purpose of Academic Thought’, 2006 http://vefir.hi.is/pall/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=34&Itemid=8) who claims that because the university is a place of academic or theoretical thinking, it is not political, religious or commercial. It seems that according to him the only interest of the university is to understand and explain; even further, he makes an ‘useful’ distinction between problems of reflection and problems of life – there is no place in the university for problems of life.  He is not saying anything outrageous but merely stating out the obvious. According to Skúlason (former rector of the University of Iceland) scholarly detachment is a moral virtue that it can turn to the vice of indifference once the scholar ceases to think of himself as part of society and of his scholarship possessing social context. Northrop Frye in his essay ‘The Knowledge of Good and Evil’ (in ‘The Morality of Scholarship’, ed. Max Black, Cornell University Press, 1967 pp. 9-10) points critically to one particularly important case: ‘Psychology is a science, and must be studied with detachment, but it is not a matter of indifference whether it is used for a healing art, or for motivational research designed to force people to buy what they neither want nor need, or for propaganda in a police state’. The limits of this detachment have never been less clear because it is a seriously complicated matter to define such limits when firstly, scholarship derives its method from scientific formal logic and not from human pursuits, and secondly, when there exists such overriding contradiction between training for the job market and educating for understanding in the total absence of ‘problems of life’. I am highly skeptical over the meaning of humanity found in this kind of academic study and the obvious relatedness of the humanities to educate civilized citizenry.

Scandalous as it is, this has not been always the case – for Lessing, a German dramatist of the Enlightenment, humanity meant experiencing the world in anger and laughter, experiencing the artifacts and works that complement our life on earth only in regard to their effect in the world – relating study and the activity of either reading or producing art and works of literature to the most obvious problems of life. The new trend has little to do with the death of God, for it was not the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics who declared him dead but rather the professors of theology in the academic chairs, and their disappointment is more a disappointment with the broken promises of the modern world than it is a disappointment with religion per se – still a dominating force in public discourse everywhere. This disappointment however is neither novel nor solvable – already in an Assyrian tablet from 2800 BC unearthed in Iraq, we read the following inscription: ‘The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a tablet, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching’. This pessimism translated into apathy and powerlessness is rooted not only in man’s inability to make himself at home in the world but also in the technological possibilities afforded by the previous century that dealt a deadly blow on the human imagination because we have become unable to imagine or describe all what we are now able to do. Instead of relating to the actual life problems of the day, fleeing into the comfortable zone of academic detachment seems the most feasible option for these young men and women that enter the world educated for everything but citizenship.

During her last public appearance before her death (Bicentennial Address, 1975) Hannah Arendt ran ahead of the times and left us with a cunning warning for our current situation: ‘We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands”. People are no longer able to move in the world of thinking and therefore are also impaired in the world of the real – social and political, and feel the pressing need to flee the world of human affairs because they have been indoctrinated in two suspect versions of truth – 1) That truth is correctness of fact in the style of ‘if this is correct or accurate, then it must be true’ 2) That truth is the result found at the end of a thought process; both of them promoted by reckless elitist Platonism in politics, by the life cycle of the animal laborans and by infinite economic disparity.

Education no matter what its content is should not be the measures of measures to learn how to act in the world but rather the provider of critical tools for people to decide what these measures are. Necessary measures in any case if we look at 2011 with paucity of mind and assess the recent political and historical developments that might radically transform the social texture of our world: The Arab uprisings spreading to every corner of the Middle East, the scandalous corruption of the media and the world superpowers exposed to the public, the communication possibilities enabled by the internet and the powerlessness of traditional armies to combat in the highly decentralized warfare of our times. Regardless of what young men and women want to do with their lives – either academic or not, education must be entirely independent of preparation for the job market, worthwhile mentioning at this point that a great percentage of the people enrolled today in graduate schools in business programs will probably never find a job after graduation. To achieve this, it is to no avail to keep building new universities or providing endless funding for scholarships; it is those institutions that have perpetuated for centuries the model that must be combatted. The model of the Western university must be challenged from bottom to top.

Greek and Western philosophy in the traditional sense and theological politics is of no help here, for like Eric Voegelin pointed out (in ‘The New Science of Politics’, c. II, ‘Representation & Truth’ in ‘Modernity without Restraint’, University of Missouri Press 1999, pp. 139) in relation to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, ‘Aristotle had no illusions on this point. To be sure, like Plato, he attempted a paradigmatic construction of a social order that would express the truth of the σπουδαιος (the morally perfect man) in Politics VII-VIII; but he also asserted with firm regret that in none of the Hellenic poleis of his time could there be found a hundred men who were able to form the ruling nucleus of such a society: any attempt at realizing it would be utterly futile’. The self-defeating project of classical philosophy as a foundation for politics, education and morality has found a home in the modern political arena where political officers of the Western countries say for example that the Middle East cannot be changed, without adding of course that this has to do with the fact that such political education as that demanded by Plato and Aristotle on the free men of the cities is the exact equivalent of today’s ivy league – an ivory tower where only the elites are educated to dominate the majority through despotism of power, capital and information; in this spirit there is too little these philosophers can help us with, as we are facing almost entire generations of disenfranchised youth willing to subvert the order of truth and politics raging over the entire earth.

The possibility of leaving the realm of academic and scientific thinking – barely qualified as thought – is not only instrumental but elementary in halting the oceans of frustration that have fueled terrorism and channel them through truly legitimate and transparent political processes – hardly the case in the Middle East today for example – that the people themselves have been unable to realize because of the clearly apolitical and narrowly defined scope of the education they have received if at all, to what the Platonists of our times – international think tanks, NGO’s and political officers – reply condescendingly arguing that they’re not ready for change, that we have to wait, that it’s not time yet, while they continue unmolested abusing us and them by depriving us not only from education but from the whole specter of rights.  Many of these disenfranchised youths are led by another true successful multinational – global terror – to express their frustration appealing to supposed ancient traditions and ‘classical’ interpretations of religion that are nothing but the other side of the strictly modern opposition between radical universals. This global terror is no less part of the despotism of capital, power and terror that the respectable leadership promote and no one better than philosopher Agnes Heller to have put this in words in an interview with Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita (09.07.05): ‘The people behind global terror are themselves global capitalists, just like Hitler was supported by German industrialists and financiers. Anti-capitalism merely serves as a slogan to direct massive resentment against the rich and to wage a racist or religious war. Many of them are frustrated intellectuals – young people who want to be remarkable in a very unremarkable world, with big ambitions but little talent, or whose careers were hindered for other reasons’. Whoever thinks that this should not be addressed, must be too deluded to understand the gravity of the rupture in the social texture of the world today cause by the political nature of education.

I propose to begin with adopting a yet fresher definition of truth that I have drawn from British philosopher and theologian Philip Goodchild: Let us make a proposal for truth as a power and as its own power instead of correctness or fact or the result of investigation – truth as an attitude and a principle. This truth does not engage in particular projects or agendas; it defies no opponents and never exercises violence. Unlike the critical reason of philosophy (indifferent to problems of life obviously) it does not aim to undermine other truths or to master the future or representations. It is the force of itself because its orientation is precisely a mode of orientation. It is a knowledge before knowledge (and not thereafter); it expresses actual problems so that one might begin to think, it demands investment in experience and adapts imagination to experience rather than to concept. Its true power is nothing but awareness. In the old sense, authority had been since times immemorial (by both Plato and the Biblical prophets) the guarantor of truth, today however, we do not have to ask the question of what authority is but rather like Arendt did, of what authority was! We can no longer fall upon old experiences common to all and the gravity of the demands of peoples all over the world express this faithfully. The old canons of state, capital, media and government must be replaced by new ones and this is nothing but a very slow process, however it must begin at the beginning – not with yet another re-enacting of perfunctorily established institutions such as the university and the government. Truth is a public power, and that is what we the people, must rely on, for anybody who comes today from the position of defunct authority to offer us a truth he has, kind as he might be, he’s no less deceived than we might have been once. 

"Textile Production of Space" by Oona Lochner [translation]

On Thursday, 24.02.11, my belovedmost friend, the painter Katherina Olschbaur, presented her painting catalog, published by Basis Wien (Vienna), at Musa- Startgalerie, in Vienna, for which I was the translator of the texts included, from German into English, for this beautiful bilingual edition. Find here my English translation and immediately below the original German text. Here under the catalog cover, the work on cover is "Eier oder Zitronen?", 2009, 130 X 160 cm., oil on canvas.

Edition Basis Wien 

Ausgabe No 6 : 

Katherina Olschbaur

englisch/deutsch, 32 Seiten 

mit Texten von Oona Lochner und Brigitte Felderer

Übersetzung: Arie Amaya - Akkermans

Idee: Lioba Reddeker

Graphische Gestaltung: Toledo i Dertschei, Carlos Toledo

Lektorat: Helene Baur, Verena Lindner

Fotografien: Martin Bilinovac

ISBN: 978-3-9503027-0-7

Textile Production of Space


Oona Lochner

How are our notions of space developed? Traces of this question are visible in Katherina Olschbaur’s painting up to her series „Hülsen“ [Hulls] (2005-2007), through which, based on the human figure, she experiments with the concurrence between fullness and void. Pieces of clothing act as a substitute for the actual actors, yet the textile symbols are always bereft of head and hands, henceforth, the quintessential elements of the portrait, such as mimicry, gesture and the clay colours of human flesh are absent too. The textiles instead, release themselves from their role as accesoires and become an instrument of their own, through which the bodies emerge out of the empty space. The idea of textile materials serving to shape forms, as Olschbaur had already formulated here, is intensified in her more recent work.

In her display windows series, the vertically draped cloth width acts as an anthropomorphic symbol. As they are coming to life, the displayed consumer goods are suddenly turned into a theatrical embodiment of themselves and the display window becomes then the floor for nightly dancers and the perfect arena for the orchestration of a conspiracy. Enveloping the empty space in their broad pleats, the cloths billow into human bodies, while at the same time remaining unmistakably in the forms of the textile material that provides concise information about the style of their mounting and draping. Olschbaur also recreates this so lively tension of identities between representation and textile material in a series of paper works titled „Grossmutter Gespenst“ [Grandmother Spectre]. A floral patterned cloth is shaping itself out of the repeatedly empty space into an ever so new form; yet, the position of its bearer remains empty, as the abbozzatura of the composition is fading out into the white flatness of the sketchpaper. While we may surmise that the cloth lies now here over a tripod, now there over a chair, the place that marks the draping of the pleats still remains unclear.
Architectural elements also come into play to enact Olschbaur’s rather vague innuendo of space. The rear wall of the display windows is more often than not, designed as an ornamental lattice, but the frames and the salient ridges frequently consist of only a few lines or a narrow strip of colour. The margins of this raree show repeatedly come to an end already inside the canvas, so that only a strip of colour remains around the moulded space, abstract and without a close-up effect. The illusory space of the painting encounters here unmediatedly its own material bearings and thus becomes fully recognizable as something constructed and arbitrary; hardly a reliable point of reference for the viewer.

In the same fashion, Olschbaur’s „Interieurs“ also wander in uncertainty, for here too the boundaries of the inner space are only ambiguously delineated. Alignments, doors or windows are mismatched pieces that refuse a definite interpretation of their actual location. All too often the volume of the furniture appears to be the only spatially defined element, placed haphazardly into a formless environment. The topographical ambiguity, however, is carried over into the objects as well, when sofas and lamps rise out of the floor, or when, framed by scenery-like architecture, a hole turns into the central piece of an interior. On the one hand, the hole captures a certain moment of total loss and free fall, so that, on the other hand, along with the sidewalls, the floor recedes too. As a place of absence, it is above all a negative dimension that, like the „Hülsen“ [Hulls] or the bodies of textile, it possesses volume only as a shrouded form.

The shrouding into empty space will reach at long last into the walls, as they fold on and on within another interior and move backwards into the depth of the pictorial space. The architectures, by all means fragmented, meet now the textile vocabulary of pleats, loops and crumples and, once again, take up the issue of the relationship between pictorial space and the material surface of the image. While the pleating of the textile material still takes place inside the image; a creeping suspicion affects the viewer with in that it could reach out of the canvas, so that it becomes constrained and brings out the spatial dimension less than it is closing it up and shaping it. It is precisely this overlapping cut through the layers of what is real, that forms the basis of the series „Schreine“ [Shrines]. Here space is dissolved into abstract fields of color that resemble the swelling of drapery, yet the symbols remain constantly flat. Beginning with richly adorned altar cloth, sharp creases spread over the whole length of the canvas, which appears suddenly itself creased, pouting and opening up. Katherina Olschbaur brings together and at the same time transforms the material nature of her medium and its power for illusion at the very limit between space and textile, and while at that, she questions anew the possibility of the production of space in painting.

Original text here: http://katherina-olschbaur.blogspot.com/2011/02/textile-production-of-space-oona.html

For more information on the works of Katherina Olschbaur, visit http://katherina-olschbaur.blogspot.com/search/label/Malerei

Without Quotations: Impossible Writing

Without Quotations: Impossible Writing[1]

"On keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it."

"Writing. It's corrupting to write with the intent to moralize, to elevate people's moral standards."

"Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little-ego building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall with through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said. My "I" is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane men, critics, correct them - but their sanity is parasitic on the creative fatuity of genius.[2]"

-Susan Sontag, Diaries, entries from 1958

Writing, to begin with, I must add, is not something that I really wanted to do anyway, not because one would not feel the immediate attraction to the written word, after all, that’s all where Judaism –whether one has accepted it or condemned it, has derived all its strength from, after the manner of that morning prayer: “The world is sustained by three things, the Torah, the worship and the acts of charity[3]”, however the study of the Torah, of the written law, precedes them all. It is there, in the written word where faith has started to begin with. The fact of writing had become already too early, into a surrogate for geography and why not, for love, love is always associated with places where we have been happy – “Talland House in Sussex became in Virginia’s imagination more than just a large square building new the sea in Cornwall. It is where she sites, for the whole of her life, her idea of happiness… Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house[4]” –Or unhappy. “This time, unhappy love, sempiternal, has an additional declension[5]”. And unless we are speaking of Christian agape, love as passion is never abstract or disassociated from the vast vaults of locatedness in memory and time. “However satisfying writing is – that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control – it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving[6]”. This presumptuous activity, in which labor and action and production are virtually indistinguishable from each other, is certainly one great replacement for love and of particular importance when such love is beginning to pick up flight or going up in flames. One doesn’t choose to write, it just happens when the resources to cope with the world as it was, run out, and then it was absolutely necessary to resist reality after its own fashion, to remake the world: “None of the following essays was, I hope, written without awareness of the facts of our time and without awareness of the Jewish fate in our century. But I believe and hope that I have not in any of them taken up a position on the basis of those facts alone, that I have not accepted the world created by those facts as necessary and indestructible[7]”. It is impossible here to ‘technically’ decide whether the resource kept at bay here is anywhere in between transformation and avoidance. This writing of course is well different from transcription, the tireless labor of historiography and journalism in recording the heroic deeds of man as in Homer or simply decoding the rough bundle of events that the way we live now, is made of. “The harrowing effect of Schulz’ prose is to construct the world anew, as from fragments that exist after some unnamable disaster[8]”.

People often point a finger and not unreasonably so, that if one’s going to write anyway – and this is point, this is no longer the journals one used to jot down in cafeterias at the age of thirteen while he was learning how to smoke and even worse, how to love without embodiment in the flesh, how to love without defying the metaphysics of the worlds below and above, it is no longer anything in the category of “Memories of a Catholic girlhood” – a commeasurable degree of understanding and hence of comprehensibility is demand, a simple relatedness to the world around oneself is more important perhaps than the aesthetic appeal which only oneself might have access to. “Focus on the forces around you more than the books in front of you[9]”. What has become of ourselves? It is the question that first gets asked during labor and pangs of birth of anyone who write, at whichever age it happens, rather and who are we becoming, for we cannot find out who are for as long as we are alive. The introspection however, albeit it always hints at a certain style of auto-biography at work (and each and every work of literature and philosophy is self-revealing and involuntarily disclosing in this respect) is not located in the endless contemplation of oneself in a mirror but reveals itself more as the innocent child staring into his image in the stream of water but more occupied with the vertical blueprints of the skies passing rapidly and hanging him from the feet into this bifocal suspension in which time flows much more rapidly than it was thought but yet not enough to interrupt the slow physicality of the world. For many, it is a recipient against death and there are many kinds of death, far more enormous than the mere exhaling of the soul out of its own breath, when the composition of reality is indistinguishable from the mere facts of sharing in the natural cycles of the earth. At the same time, writing and literature, though instrumental in freedom, cannot achieve any of the ultimate political ends of the Polis, that is, to deter death. “There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time. Health is on good terms with Death. It knows that when the Grim Reaper comes he will remove his stone mask and catch the flickering torch from the anxious and weary and disappointed hands of Brother Life; it knows that he will dash it on the ground and extinguish it, but it also knows that only then the full brilliance of the nocturnal sky will brightly glow. It knows that it will be accepted into the open arms of Death. Life’s eloquent lips are put to silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: “Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother.[10]”

There’s no such a thing as not fearing death whilst one writes, or not fearing altogether – at the possibility of self-effacement. Throughout the idle hours, it becomes impossible to be content at the contemplation of the deity, and all the hours before and after something is consummated as writing – the ultimate alternatively solipsistic and yet concrete possibility, are dead vacuity, all the philosophical terminology must be avoided, it is an ululation, a close-up on buzzing bees, unnecessary background noise while the pears and the mangos at a standstill remain locked in the canvas waiting for a yet richer frame that will describe them in their namelessness. All the names for all things are nothing but invented mindless gaps between one inert titillation and the next. The guilt becomes unbearable, the more elaborately he happens to exist, all the more increasingly devious and unavoidable the guilt. It is a protracted and exaggerated by the common fatuity in which the lines between the imagined and the desirable are juxtaposed and replace the world with all its treasures, with the willingness to live within, from without, externally constrained, such as olives pressed against puremost oil that was already sifted. Yet everything mortally bearable and incomplete: “Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks[11]”. It has to do with this re-affirmation, for, giving in to the abandonment, to the curious and cruel logic of what is not understood would be equivalent of resignation and therefore of the mindless acceptance of the fact of death; this violent will, to be raptured, to be destroyed, to live in such a criminal reckless way, it is a poor surrogate for secular sanctity, the abeyance of aberrant destinies, owned up to and otherwise, it is a parsimonious replacement for freedom, for the kind of freedom that doesn’t accept the boundaries of politics, that doesn’t see itself as a birth right, there’s something absolutely exclusive and solitary in this. He writes because he wants to live, but he’s unable to find out a way that is either right or wrong. A dwelling in the lower places, the Midrash would say, a fixed situatedness free from the geography from which in turn one has been excluded by simple observation. “Let me then be destroyed. For that is the only way I may have a chance of surviving. Let those feelings uniquely call forth sexual love, my life’s passion and pain, my learnt desirability figured out of primeval undesirability, let them prevail… This time I want to do it differently. You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what is it that I wanted and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I might desire again. I would be the Lover, and barely the Beloved. I have not yet told the whole of this story. This time, unhappy love, sempiternal, has an additional declension.[12]”

There is no permission to do any of this, it cannot be achieved, the transgression itself is an alphabet of murder, it must violate some rules, certainly those of life and death, increasingly those of order, there will be a lot of undialectical damage, inflicted upon too many directions, returning, flying overhead, landing stealthily, leaving him in possession of nothing but himself at a point in time when he cannot be and have at the same time. Dreams come in handy: “A hundred and thirty-five years ago Rahel Varnhagen jotted down the following dream: she had died and gone to heaven, together with her friends Bettina von Arnim and Caroline von Humboldt. To relieve themselves of the burdens they had acquired in their lives, the three friends assigned themselves the task of inquiring into the worst thing they had experienced. Rahel thus asked: Did you know disappointed love? The other two women broke into tears, and all three thus relieved this burden from their hearts. Rahel asked further: Did you know disloyalty? Sickness? Worry? Anxiousness? Each time the women said yes, they cried, and again all three were relieved of their burdens. Finally Rahel asked: Did you know disgrace? As soon as this word had been spoken, there was a hushed silence, and the two friends took their distance from Rahel and looked at her in a disturbed and strange manner. Then did Rahel know that she was entirely alone and that this burden could not be taken away from her heart. And then she awoke[13]”.

The personal confessions, those of the epistolary and sentimental kind become rather useless, for every confession is a betrayal[14] that is why so many bonds become fatuous and break before a language has been achieved. This sort of freedom, emancipation if you want, cannot be achieved by charity, cannot be achieved by sympathy, cannot be achieved by condescending love or by forgiveness even, either by the world or people once one loved; it has to be endured on one’s own, and it is not an endurance more than the passage of time is. One has to resort to the rigor of a discipline, the voices of the street are too loud and philosophy in turn is too blind. Discipline in writing is a dangerous perspective in which the personal Protestantism amalgamates with the public Judaism of fathers and of promises broken in unsafe rhythms of faith. “He found no way – not even Nietzsche’s example – of bringing his inner emotional turmoil into his philosophy, his discipline, his art. Philosophy remained cleverness, a game, but not a stage on life’s way, it remained aesthetic without an oeuvre, as did everything and everyone else for him[15]”. Writing, both resourceful and a recourse, though spiteful, remains a way of life, a sort of living as if without music and resorts endlessly to the ideal silence of the modern aesthetician that finds the ultimately pleasure in finding his oeuvre dismembered, severed from the world, ripped into shreds and vanish into oblivion, a kind of smug even more intolerable and arrogant than writing for the sake of imparting moral instruction in a Socratic manner. The path should be otherwise, always prioritizing freedom over beauty. Intimate is not always necessarily the nearest or the most credible, as much as it is a departure from the genius into the abyss of the visionary, the prophet. This interior labyrinth, free from the eternal dullness of confession and sincere enough to live in the first persona, being narrator, narrated and story-teller simultaneously. The fear can never be completely dispelled lest truth be annulated and deprived of its magic powers that be, and this fear is not necessarily the Victorian inability to live and the author that perished from love more than it is the certainty of the presumptionlessness of history and thinking for life. Life, such a horrible and pretentious ridiculous word when used in literature and philosophy. The suffering writer must die, he is of no use for truth, and he might as well teach Bible in Sunday school, the real ailing is not personal suffering that stands in radical opposition to universality and to human communication, for, the suffering subject is always ever so absent, it has become an object. It is but the complete lack of foundations in the edifice of knowledge, from where all anger and thus egregious potential of living and reality is derived. “Philosophers who blame philosophy for the ills of civilization have themselves lost the ability to perceive the difference between thought and being, thought and action. It is they who expunge the difference between fantasy and actuality, between the megalomania projected on to reason and the irreverent forces which determine the outcome of actual conflicts. They have inflated the power of philosophical reason, conferring on it a suppositious dangerous potency. It is the philosophers, not reason, who thereby degrade the independence of political realities and contingencies. Terrified of their own inner insecurity at the border between rationality and conflict, between the new academic political Protestantism and politics as the art of the possible, they proceed as if to terminate philosophy would be to dissolve the difficulty of acknowledging conflict and of staking oneself within it. To destroy philosophy, to abolish or to supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resource-less to know the difference between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realization. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience. This ill-will towards philosophy misunderstands the authority of reason, which is not the mirror of the dogma of superstition, but risk. Reason, the critical criterion, is forever without ground.[16]”   

“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not[17]”.

---

[1] Dedicated to my lifetime friend and inspiration, Katherina Olschbaur

[2] Susan Sontag, “Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963”, Penguin, 2009

[3] Jewish liturgy prayer

[4] Hermione Lee, “Virginia Woolf”, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, pp.22, in Janine Burke, “Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art & Writing”, Allen & Unwin, 2009, pp.186

[5] Gillian Rose, “Love’s Work”, Vintage, 1997, pp.69

[6] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.54

[7] Hannah Arendt, “Widmung an Karl Jaspers”, in “Sechs Essays”, Heidelberg, 1948

[8] John Updike, “Introduction” in Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass”, Penguin, 1979  

[9] Wayne Cristaudo, Letter, 2011

[10] Franz Rosenzweig, “Understanding the Sick and the Healthy”, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp.103

[11] Michael Cunningham, “The Hours”, Picador, 2000,  pp.15

[12] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.66&69

[13] Hannah Arendt, “Juden in der Welt von Gestern: Anlaesslich Stefan Zweig”, in “Sechs Essays”, Heidelberg, 1948. Paraphrased from the letters of Rahel.

[14] Rahel Varnhagen

[15] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.103

[16] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.118-119

[17] Silouan The Athonite 

Research Note for 100 Jahre Jüdische Denker

German-Jewish writers of less renown with archives filed in Jerusalem. Most of them died in Israel. I'll try to fill in some bibliographical information.

Peter Alternberg (pseudonym of Richard Engländer). 1859-1919. Austrian writer, newspaper editor and publisher.


Richard Beer-Hoffmann. 1866-1945. Austrian poet.


Moshe Yaakov Ben Gabriel (formerly Eugen Hoeflich). 1891-1965. Austrian writer.


Walter Calé. 1881-1904. German poet.


Albert Ehrenstein. 1886-1950. Austrian writer and poet.


Carl Ehrenstein. 1892-1967. Austrian writer and poet.


Paul Engelmann. 1891-1965. Czech German-speaking philosopher and architect.


Yona Fink. 1906-1964. German painter and writer.


Rudolf Fuchs. 1890-1942. Czech German-speaking poet and translator.


Frieda Hebel. 1914-199?. German poet and writer.


Gustav Landauer. 1870-1919. German writer.


Eugen Mayer. 1882-1967. German poet.


Ernst Müller. 1880-1947. German writer.


Gerty Spies. 1897-1997. German writer.


Gerson Stern. 1874-1956. German poet and writer.


Arie Ludwig Strauss. 1892-1953. German poet.


George Strauss. 1896-1975. German writer.


Manfred Sturmann. 1903-1989. German poet.


Yehuda Louis Weinberg. 1883-1960. German poet.

A response to Yoav

Yoav's comment:

Ari, כה יעשה לי אלוהים וכה יוסיף I Wish I could have time to learn your culture In the way you study mine, but your point of view is still too narrow. by all means study hebrew, study it's literature and history, not to say nationality, but be ready to accsept that your blog is just a darft, pages in the notebook of a detective that is trying to solve a case. I don't know the german source but Zach and Amichai did translate LS poems into hebrew and it would be interesting to compare your translations.

I must say that I've heard about most of the people you've mentioned in this post but I must say that their affect on the israeli society only began in recent years.

While I was writing my thoughts I thought about things I've told you.
I think that atleast some of your inconvenience with Hebrew would be solved if you use Babylon more often, perhaps the most useful thing when you translate or write or loves or fights is self-doubt

My Reply:

Yoav,

I think there's an important point to be made in regard to this such 'study of culture'; I agree that my vantage point is fashionably narrow and even at that I am not trying to look at it from the lenses of the German language (in fact an impossible task) but through a 'mediator' that one could call "der jüdische Erbe Europas" (the Jewish heritage of Europe)... I believe this to be important because the 'culture' is so foreign yet so close home. For an example, Margarete Susman had an uncanny erudition of a great part of both the German, German-Jewish and Hebrew literature of her time, and remained after her own fashion one of the best and perhaps only serious critics of Hebrew literature and of Israeli "Judaism" in the 20th century... not without leaving the grandiose halls of the German language.

I certainly study Hebrew and its literature, although there's a great chunk of the contemporary authors that befind me as sympathetically boring, more than anything I've taken a certain interest in all kinds of religious poetry. The language itself is another matter, because more than often I found that things taken for the granted in Israeli Hebrew are actually rather complex constructions, altogether there's this claim going around among some linguists that modern Hebrew is a European language (and so does uphold my own advisor who is a theologian) that is in my opinion groundless... but it's neither a Semitic language to the degree of purity that a typological classification would demand. Ghilad Zuckermann is perhaps one of the few Israeli linguists to have studied seriously this phenomenon of the Semito-European character of Hebrew. You can see the great amount of phono-semantic matching done during the genesis of the language... there's just so much Greek flying around in the air, so that the morphology remains quite a mystery (you might perhaps want to see the work of Outi Bat-El on the prosodic morphology of Hebrew, she lectures at TAU on Optimality Theory). The syntax is entirely Western (and therefore the inner life of the language) with the exception of a certain morphological and therefore prosodic access to parataxis that the syntax does have. Just like in the German language I'm an advocate for linguistic purity, reason for which I indulge myself in such lack of fluidity in Hebrew, almost unconsciously refusing to use the state-of-the-art neologisms.

I don't think one should study a language's "nationality", in fact I find the cunning of the term very troubling and unbefitting to our age. And this is where my cultural criticism starts, not only that of Hebrew-speaking culture, but of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel itself. Those of us speaking about the nation, are undoubtedly speaking the language of the 19th century and of the Romantic period... the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology. Therefore Israel can't stand on its own in the history of contemporary culture, it is the missing link in the understanding of the roots of Modernity... because out of this paradoxical national narrative "we" as Israelis have entirely become cultural parvenus. You see it in the book reviews being written, the movies made and especially the flavour of the recently published literature. Guilel agrees me with me that one should go back to Ahad Ha'am and to Judah Magnes, to some extent to Buber (whose philosophy I don't like very much), in order to understand that the possibilities of an authentic Hebrew culture (and not the culture of the State of Israel, for there has never been such a thing as the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany or of the Austrian Republic, just culture in the German language - with the exceptio of alas! the period between 1933 and 1945) are not in the love of the nation or in the lack of it, but rather in something more radically individual and universal such as the love of the world. Something makes me think that so much would be achieved if Israelis could see themselves as a phase in the history of Jewish culture, which is not the history of Zionism.... but rather eighteen centuries of contribution to European civilization and just as much to the near East. The Galut culture is definitely not what one needs today, but it can't be disregarded just so much.

I agree the blog is a draft of something that is not, but I've never aimed to be a Hebrew writer and after other than having studied Biblical Hebrew back in my heyday, I basically taught myself the language. Maybe I'll solve the puzzle one day, I don't know... but it's important for me to keep a great degree of this 'Occidental perspective', lest I want to lose myself in "authenticity", another term I believe to be outdated. Luckily the world of culture is one in which there's no such a thing as outsiders, unless one were to define it by nations. I know some of the translations of Amichai which are truly beautiful and want entirely something else from Lasker-Schüler than I do, notwithstanding I like him very much überhaupt. I also found not long ago a book with translations of Rilke, but I was very disappointed. When I introduced Margarete Susman and Mascha Kaléko at the Hebrew University no one had a clue, but it is so typical of that place... the last German imperial university. All those poets are certainly by no means Hebrew, but some of them did have a Hebrew mind actually, an almost Biblical touch for their own languages... and it is from the sources of this "hidden tradition" that one could look forward to a Hebrew culture that doesn't look at its predecessors as mistakes of other spiritual age. I'm by no means meaning to strip the value of 'your' Hebrew culture, nor pretending to cure its ailings with 'my' German culture, I'm simply saying that this Israeli culture is in fact suffering from ills no different from those of the whole Western world, to which it is undoubtedly indebted for so many misnomers. This isn't a literary or a cultural position, but a entirely diremptive and therefore philosophical perspective.

I don't think I can speak about other thinkers, because my opinion is that there're really no thinkers who were ever influential in Israeli society ever, to the degree that there was a Goethe cult in Germany or a whole full-fledged Derrida school in France. Israel has so far produced no philosophical schools and no philosophers of great renown, other than some Jew here and there who decided to make his home there, people like Yirmeyahu Yovel and Shlomo Avineri.. who belong still to the generation of the Holocaust and whose narrative has stopped being binding for just too many people. That there's a living culture here I will not deny it, but that there's a spiritual crisis in the country that neither religion or secularism can heal any longer... is something that doesn't need any proofs. It is the living reality of the street.

Translating, Translators

Now for a change a switch to English after four exhausting days of Hebrew-izing myself, I don't think it's stupid to try your hand at a language which isn't natural to you - after all English is perhaps the only language that truly melts in my hands and allows me to do with it everything I want, but it was an exercise of several years. In a way reading back I notice a kind of ontological problem, that of having that Derridean grammatology quite overdeveloped - For Derrida the world is a text, and there's no 'other' text (unlike the 'alterite' of Levinas) therefore interpretation (hermeneutics) is not only the only possible language but also the only possible world; this in order to say that I use the grammar of anarchy in any language, certainly in English (long burdensome German sentences) and no less in German (with thematic mutilations, like the style of Celan)... but I guess there's something about developing one's particular style and insofar as it is understandable (meaning interpretable) then it should be OK. The writing in Hebrew and the attempt at translating is of course so much part of the philosophy as anything else, like the collecting pictures, letters, postcards, advertisements; or the orgiastic drinking and the religious diremption.

Like I wrote in a letter to K., I think there's a serious problem with aesthetics - the most fundamental concepts of the world are beyond doubt offsprings from aestheticizing, after all philosophy had its origins in a contemplative position that the modern age has overturned in every possible way, yet the principles are unmovable. Surrealism like in the case of Achim Von Armin ("the everyday world is the surreal world") opens the first possibilities for this overcoming of aesthetics by placing the surreal feature of private art in the public world (in German, the public world also connotates an 'open' world, like in Simmel's model of Modernity and alas! Heidegger's), therefore blurring and destroying the boundaries between thought or art and life. Yet this 'destruction' is a dangerous devise, for it opens the gates to the abyss of negative Gnosis (anti-epistemic knowledge but very much pistic) that one finds so easily cunning in religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism no less than in the imminent confusion between the religious and the secular in our times, the Death-of-God culture. Two artists come to mind when I try working out a solution - the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the painter Charlotte Salomon, representatives of the modern Expressionist movement. For Else and Charlotte there are no boundaries between life and thought, between word and world.... and the misrecognition or rather non-recognition of these boundaries is where the anti-mythical thinking is at stake. At the same time the overcoming of the boundaries might lead as well (and in fact did) to the elimination of certain concepts that assure the place of man in the world; for example through overcoming the concepts of politics and education, therefore throwing man into the totalization of both secularity and religion but from a negative and upside-down angle.

Now we return to the language problem. Habermas was one of the few philosophers in our age who attempted to define the limits of our world from a perspective outside language and greatly failed, not by antinomies but rather by linguistic tautologies that belong in the sphere of logical semantics and not of philosophy. My disagreement with G. on this point is beyond argument, I'm unable to accept as diremption a philosophy whose main concern is self-explanation (this attitude is so very anti-philosophical) and that wants to tackle the 'basic questions'. As a remarkable problem of continental philosophy is the inability to address such questions, if anything, out of the collapse of the metaphysical language that the late modern age discovered. This collapse is thought to have been placed in the abyss of Auschwitz and I believe that it is as old as the rise of the Copernican world (with Kant as its philosophical ambassador); albeit I disagree with Löwith and Voegelin on placing it as early as the Gnostic movements of the middle ages. Their mistake is two-fold, first they damnate Modernity way before the rise of the typical modern consciousness (with Leibniz and Descartes, of whom there's no mention) and second they also fail to notice (like Jacob Taubes did in a rather negative way) that the source of the Gnosis is the Pauline theology, but consequentially speaking the ill doesn't start there... too many other elements have to collide as well. Metaphysics and Christianity are not guilty for Auschwitz, here I'm entirely secular: This was an act committed by men and they must be held responsible for it, it's not a philosophical mistake or a theological consequence. To think it to be so, is at beast naive. Philosophy should be made -using a Kantian cliche- within the limits of language alone! So that Heidegger might have been totally right in pointing out language as the house of Being. But I'm not too interested in 'Being', because finally the concept itself is a metaphysical antinomy.

That's why I cling onto the Hebrew, because what is at stake is the variegance of the line that divides philosophy from Hebrew (and I want to say Hebrew, not Jewish thinking)... and perhaps I might be likely to believe that the idea of 'Hebrew thinking' is feasible but altogether misunderstood in the modern age. I don't think it's possible to have a Jewish philosophy (and by this I don't mean a theological philosophy of Judaism) in a language other than Hebrew.... only thus, one could be able to conversate with the tradition. All other attempts are at best an apocalyptic momentum of Western thought with nicely quoted Biblical passages. That the language doesn't like me too much is certain, and I'm so grateful Yoav and Nimrod have pointed out to me how it works: It is not a matter of not knowing how to write at all but of recognizing there's much more to the grammar and the spelling that one would dare hear. I know this to be true from the letters of G. and K., notwithstanding the appalling beauty of their phrasings there's a certain touch of un-grammativity that makes the language unnatural. This by no means eliminates the beauty and is a very technical matter, but restrains the language so to speak from its natural potentiality to describe the world in its own terms.

Margarete Susman I've found to be one of the greatest writers to be translated into Hebrew, her poems are just made out of chunks of a kind of Bible of culture. Arendt is a different matter, her poems can hardly sound interesting no matter how hard one can rework the eliptic and paratactic phrasings. Else Lasker-Schüler was certainly invented just so that she could be translated into Hebrew, but the Hebrew necessary for this is not epic (like Susman's) but rather a strange mixture of Bible and everyday language - living up to the breach of boundaries in her whole artistic concept. My language experiences another problem... it has a certain synthetic plasticity that I suspect comes from the Greek ear, and I no longer experience it in English precisely because of my knowledge of Hebrew (in German it's impossible to think without this classical plasticity, unless one could be a genius experimenter like Lasker-Schüler and Celan, yet in some of the greatest moderns like Rilke it is overflowing as well... Brecht is an exemption, he's his own kind of poetry by himself but very German at the same time). This plasticity I think doesn't come willy-nilly, but belongs very well in the history of modern Hebrew and many of the early poets were not entirely bereft of it, except alas! the poets that had a good grounding in the religious texts of Judaism. Even the so-called Canaanite poets (a literary school) indulged in this plasticity (the Aristotelian separation between content and form foreign to most poetic experiences of the Near East) and the last traces are there already in the writers of the 'State of Israel' generation.

Some later authors did overcome this position but I find their literature myself quite uninteresting... in fact it strikes me as less Hebrew than I would like Hebrew to be. There're very many exceptions of course, and I truly admire the themes of the everyday world so typical of a great deal of contemporary Hebrew poetry (and prose), which nevertheless I can't drink from, because my concern with diremption is very unbecoming to that form of narration which I tried my hand at in English when I was younger. Literature becomes history in the Benjaminean sense, a path-finder in the dark of the chasm between receding concepts and the invisible institutions they left behind.

A letter

I received this beautiful, beautiful letter from my beloved Lara... one of those strange beings that comes so close to my world and yet is so far in every respect... almost five years our friendship still going on, two poems I dedicated to her once... the first one I loved very much, the second was perhaps too much pained by other people and didn't quite 'arrive' there where I wanted. It's perhaps one of the most beautiful letters I've received in a long time, with the exception of the Passagen from the two despot rulers of my kingdom, of which I might be able to speak only in the axe of living.

Ari

I apologize for the length of time that has passed.
The prologue you sent to me, was perhaps my favourite thing you've written in a while. I have always loved best the times when you write and I can hear your voice speaking in my head as I read. I've always loved the times when I could feel your heart through what you write. I suppose I rely on your heart voice mainly because I can't keep up with your brain voice... I'm not tuna blathering either. You do write with two very distinct voices. It takes me great concentration to keep up the more intellectual bits of you, but your heart I can follow with ease.
Like I said in the text, I was deeply touched by the kind of things you said. I think that the true times of friendship occur when we are just being ourselves, without prefaced thought to what the other person might be thinking of our words.( I say words, because what else has there ever been?) You have given alot to me, without knowing I suspect, I really should tell you sometime, because I'm sure you won't have the fun of reading about it in the front of a book, like I have.

My thoughts are with you, tuna though I am.

Fondly,
Lara