Critchley on Heidegger's Being and Time, Part 4

From a series of articles published in The Guardian

The fourth Simon Critchley article on Heidegger's Being and Time has been published today on The Guardian website:

As I already tried to show, Heidegger seeks to reawaken perplexity about the question of being, the basic issue of metaphysics. In Being and Time, he pursues this question through an analysis of the human being or what he calls Dasein. The being of Dasein is existence, understood as average everyday existence or our life in the world, discussed in the last entry. But how might we give some more content to this rather formal idea of existence?

Heidegger gives us a strong clue in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time, which is a long, difficult, but immensely rewarding chapter and where things really begin to get interesting. The central claim of this chapter - which is deepened in the remainder of Being and Time - is that Dasein is thrown projection (Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf). Let me try and unravel this thought.

Simon Critchley, 'Being and Time, part 4: 'Thrown into this world'

guardian.co.uk, 29 June 2009

Read part one: 'Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters'.

Read part two: 'Being and Time, part 2: On 'mineness''.

Read part three: 'Being and Time, part 3: Being-in-the-world'.

Giorgio Agamben on Kafka and The Trial

An extract from Remnants of Auschwitz

From Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive:

In 1983, the publisher Einaudi asked [Primo] Levi to translate Kafka's The Trial. Infinite interpretations of The Trial have been offered; some underline the novel's prophetic political character (modern bureaucracy as absolute evil) or its theological dimension (the court as the unknown God) or its biographical meaning (condemnation as the illness from which Kafka believed himself to suffer). It has been rarely noted that this book, in which law appears solely in the form of  trial, contains a profound insight into the nature of law, which, contrary to common belief, is not so much rule as it is judgment and, therefore, trial. But if the essence of the law - of every law - is the trial, if all right (and morality that is contaminated by it) is only tribunal right, then execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct and lose their importance. "The court wants nothing from you. It welcomes you when you come; it releases you when you go." The ultimate end of the juridical regulation is to produce judgment; but judgment aims neither to punish not to extol, nether to establish justice nor to prove the truth. Judgment is in itself the end and this, it has been said, constitutes its mystery, the mystery of the trial.

William Burroughs and Susan Sontag on meeting Beckett

American writer and critic meet with Nobel Prize winner in Berlin

I spent some time rearranging books this afternoon. Among the shelves was an old copy of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, a collection of interviews and candid conversations with the American writer, recorded and transcribed by the counter-cultural biographer Victor Bockris. What is particularly interesting about the collection, to my mind, is the way it records not just the outlook of one of America's greatest authors, but catches an impression of his social circle in the 1970s and '80s.

Among the dinner parties and celebrity get-togethers are appearances from Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and even Mick Jagger - all of whom are more than willing to share their thoughts on art, music, literature and the counter-cultural movement. The conversations recorded provide a sharp and often entertaining insight into Burroughs's mind, and an intimate glimpse of his ever-present celebrity entourage at a particular cultural moment.

One of the sections that caught my eye, for reasons that are probably obvious, details a conversation between Victor Bockris, William Burroughs and the writer Susan Sontag. Burroughs and Sontag share their experiences and reflections on meeting Irish author and playwright Samuel Beckett in Berlin:

Dinner with Susan Sontag, Maurice Girodias: New York, 1980.

Susan Sontag: It all started like this: we were staying in this picturesque hotel in Berlin and Allen Ginsberg said, "We're going to see Beckett, c'mon," and I said, "Oh, William [Burroughs] are you are going, I don't want to butt in," and he said, "No, c'mon, c'mon," and we went. We knocked on the door of this beautiful atelier with great double height ceilings, very white. This beautiful, very thin man who tilts forward when he stands answered the door. He was alone. Everything was very clean and bare and white. I actually had seen him the day before on the grounds of the theater of the Akademie Der Kunst. Beckett comes to Berlin because he knows his privacy will be respected. He received us in a very courtly way and we sat at a very big long table. He waited for us to talk. Allen was, as usual, very forthcoming and did a great deal of talking. He did manage to draw Beckett out asking him about Joyce. That was somehow deeply embarrassing to me. Then we talked about singing, and Beckett and Allen began to sing while I was getting more and more embarrassed.

Victor Bockris: Bill [William Burroughs] says Beckett made you feel as if you would be welcome to leave as soon as you could.

Sontag: He didn't actually throw us out.

William Burroughs: Oh, the hell he didn't! See, I have an entirely different slant on the whole thing. In the first place, John Calder said, "Bring along some liquor," which we did. I know that Beckett considers other people different from him and he doesn't really like to see them. He's got nothing particular against the being there, it's just that there are limits to how long he can stand being with people. So I figured that about twenty minutes would be enough. Someone brought up the fact that my son was due for transplants, and Beckett talked about the problem of rejection, about which he'd read an article. I don't remember this singing episode at all. You see Susan says it seemed long, it seemed to me extremely short. Soon after we got there, and the talk about transplant, everybody looked at their watch, and it was very obviously time to go. We'd only brought along a pint and it had disappeared by that time.

Sontag: Allen said, "What was it like to be with Joyce? I understand Joyce had a beautiful voice, and that he liked to sing." Allen did some kind of "OM" and Beckett said, "Yes, indeed he had a beautiful voice," and I kept thinking what a beautiful voice he had. I had seen Beckett before in a café in Paris, but I had never heard him speak and I was struck by the Irish accent. After more than half a century in France he has a very pure speech which is unmarked by living abroad. I know hardly anybody who's younger than Beckett, who has spent a great deal of time abroad who hasn't in some way adjusted his or her speech to living abroad. There's always a kind of deliberateness or an accommodation to the fact that even when you speak your own language you're speaking to people whose first language it's not and Beckett didn't seem in any way like someone who has lived most of his life in a country that was not the country of his original speech. He has a beautiful Irish musical voice. I don't remember that he made us feel we had to go, but I think we all felt we couldn't stay very long.

Bockris: Did you feel the psychic push? That Beckett had "placed" you outside the room?

Burroughs: Everybody knew that they weren't supposed to stay very long. I think it was ten minutes after six that we got out of there. [...] He gave me one of the greatest compliment that I ever heard. Someone asked him, "What do you think of Burroughs?" and he said - grudgingly - "Well, he's a writer."

Sontag: High praise indeed.

Burroughs: I esteemed it very highly. Someone who really knows about writing, or say about medicine says, "Well, he's a doctor. He gets in the operating room and he knows what he's doing."

Sontag: But at the same time you thought he was hostile to some of your procedures?

Burroughs: Yes, he was, and we talked about that very briefly when we first came in during the Berlin visit. He remembered perfectly the occasion.

Sontag: Do you think he reads much?

Burroughs: I would doubt it. Beckett is someone who needs no input as such. To me it's a very relaxed feeling to be around someone who doesn't need me for anything and wouldn't care if  died right there the next minute. Most people have to get themselves needed or noticed. I don't have that feeling at all. But there's no point in being there, because he had no desire or need to see people.

Bockris: How did you feel when you left that meeting?

Sontag: I was very glad I had seen him. I was more interested just to see what he looks like, if he was as good-looking as he is in photos.

Burroughs: He looked very well and in very good shape. Beckett is about seventy-five. He's very thin and his face looks quite youthful. It's really almost an Irish streetboy face. We got up and left, the visit had been, as I say, very cordial, decorous...

Sontag: More decorous than cordial I would say. It was a weightless experience, because it's true, nothing happened.

Burroughs: Nothing happened at all.

Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker

Reading University: Beckett Conference 2009

News and developments in the world of Beckett Studies

In the summer of 2008, James and Elizabeth Knowlson contributed a vast collection of Beckett's letters, manuscripts and interviews with his friends to the Beckett International Archive at Reading University. To celebrate the occasion, an academic conference will be taking place in September 2009, and will be attended by some of the leading scholars in contemporary Beckett criticism.

In addition, talks and displays are being organized to coincide with the conference; these aim to explore the historical and cultural significance of the Knowlson collection, and what it means for future academic scholarship.
Reading University is one of the world's leading institutions for Beckett study, and holds an international reputation for its academic research resources. In the first issue of Beckett News, published this month, the university reveals further details of the upcoming conference, the Knowlson collection, and their cooperation with Faber and Faber to enhance and expand recent editions of Beckett's prose, poetry and drama:

Beckett – Living Materials:

International Conference and Research Opportunities Symposium

25-26 September 2009

Beckett Conference 2009: Humanity and Animality in Beckett

On Friday 25 and Saturday 26 September, the Beckett International Foundation is organizing a Beckett Symposium to celebrate the acquisition of the Knowlson archive. This will include a conference constituting a preliminary stage to a project on animality in relation to Beckett’s work being prepared by Mary Bryden and entitled A Beckett bestiary. The conference, Humanity and Animality in Beckett, will bring together an international line-up of scholars who will read papers over the two days. Key acquisitions from the Knowlson collection will be on display in the Reading Room and delegates will have the opportunity to handle some of these materials. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, will present the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project as a ‘work in progress’, and Bill Prosser's doodle drawings will be on display. There will also be a theatrical performance (which is yet to be confirmed) and a round table discussion of the research opportunities arising from the acquisition of the Knowlson collection. Further details of the symposium will be available on the BIF website: www.beckettfoundation.org.uk

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is an international collaboration under the auspices of the [Beckett International Foundation], the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp and the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, and supported by the Estate of Samuel Beckett and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle are the co-directors. Mark and Dirk are also collaborating on Samuel Beckett’s library, a joint monograph which examines the reading traces in the books held in Beckett’s library at the time of his death. Mark is editing a book on Beckett and publishing (British Library, 2010), with John Pilling, Andrew Nash and Sean Lawlor among the contributors.

Reading and Faber & Faber

Faber, which has acquired the rights to Beckett's prose, poetry and criticism from Calder, is republishing Beckett's works in uniform ‘Readers’ editions’, intended for the general public, and ‘Critical editions’ addressed to a more academic audience. The Beckett International Foundation is contributing facsimiles from the holdings at Reading, which will be used to illustrate the Readers’ editions. Reading scholars are very much to the fore in providing introductions to the Readers’ editions and lending their erudition to the Critical editions. Ronan McDonald wrote the preface for the new Faber edition of Endgame that was published in May 2009. James Knowlson is writing the preface to Happy days and Mary Bryden to Waiting for Godot. Mark Nixon is editing a Readers' Edition of Samuel Beckett: shorter fiction 1950–1981 and preparing a Critical Edition of the short story Echo's bones, both are due to be published next year. Sean Lawlor and John Pilling are working on the Critical edition of the Collected poems of Samuel Beckett to be published in 2011.

Reading University: Beckett News, June 2009, Issue 1 (PDF format)
Reading University: Beckett News, June 2009, Issue 1 (HTML format)

Leading Ladies: Fiona Shaw in Happy Days

The Guardian offers its list of grand stage roles for women

The Guardian has published an online gallery of leading ladies in dramatic on-stage productions, all photographed by Tristram Kenton. Included among them is Fiona Shaw's performance of Winnie in the 2007 production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days:

Particularly as he aged, Samuel Beckett wrote some extraordinary roles for women – none more so than in this almost-one-woman show, in which a senior performer must enact the human tragicomedy while buried first to her waist, then to her neck in sand.

'Great Stage Roles for Grande Dames'
guardian.co.uk, 24 June 2009

A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer

An excerpt from R. J. Hollingdale's excellent introduction to Essays and Aphorisms

From the age of 45 until his death 27 years later Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt-am-Main. He lived alone, in ‘rooms’, and every day for 27 years he followed an identical routine. He rose every morning a seven and had a bath but no breakfast: he drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and writing until noon. At noon he ceased work for the day and spent half-an-hour practicing the flute, on which he became quite a skilled performer. Then he went out for lunch at the Englischer Hof. After lunch he returned home and read until four, when he left for his daily walk: he walked for two hours no matter what the weather. At six o’clock he visited the reading room of the library and read The Times. In the evening he attended the theatre or a concert, after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant. He got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed. He was willing to deviate from this routine in order to receive visitors.

R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction to 

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Translator and scholar of German philosophy R. J. Hollingdale speculates on what Schopenhauer’s daily routine could tell us about both his character and his philosophical work:

[…] If we try for a non-emotive description we might call it the inability to abandon or modify an attitude of mind once adopted. Consider the daily two-hour walk. Among Schopenhauer’s disciples of the late nineteenth century this walk was a celebrated fact of his biography, and it was so because of its regularity. There was speculation as to why he insisted on going out and staying out for two hours no matter what the weather. It suggests health fanaticism, but there is no other evidence that Schopenhauer was a health fanatic or a crank. In my view the reason was simple obstinacy: he would go out and nothing would stop him. It is a minor manifestation of that rooted immovability of mind. […]

My purpose in flogging this point it to try to make it seem at any rate possible that, if a pessimistic attitude towards life had grown up in Schopenhauer’s mind as a result of his early experience of it, that attitude would persist unchanged throughout his adult years and down to his death; so that the cause of his pessimistic disposition could plausibly be sought in youthful experiences which, while in themselves not at all uncommon, might make on him an uncommonly lasting impression. What would then be singular about Schopenhauer would not be his pessimism itself but only the fact that it endured long enough for him to bring to its exposition and analysis the power of a very gifted adult intelligence. For that disillusionment with life which Schopenhauer expounds and tried to account for in almost all his writings was the consequence not of any unique for very uncommon occurrence but of experiences which tens of thousands and perhaps millions of other young men have undergone in our epoch, experiences which have brought the taste of ashes to their mouth and whose effects they have overcome or even forgotten simply because they lacked Schopenhauer’s immovability of mind.

R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction to

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Critchley on Heidegger's Being and Time: Part 3

From a series of articles published in The Guardian

The third in a series of Simon Critchley articles on Heidegger's Being and Time has been published today on The Guardian website:

The relation between thinking things and extended things is one of knowledge and the philosophical and indeed scientific task consists in ensuring that what a later tradition called "subject" might have access to a world of objects. This is what we might call the epistemological construal of the relation between human beings and the world, where epistemology means "theory of knowledge". Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula "Dasein is being-in-the-world". What might that mean?

If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part and parcel of my being, of the fabric of my existence. We might capture the sense of Heidegger's thought here by thinking of Dasein not as a subject distinct from a world of objects, but as an experience of openedness where my being and that of the world are not distinguished for the most part. I am completely fascinated and absorbed by my world, not cut off from it in some sort of "mind" or what Heidegger calls "the cabinet of consciousness".

Simon Critchley, 'Being and Time, part 3: Being-in-the-world'
guardian.co.uk, 22 June 2009

Read part one: 'Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters'.

Read part two: 'Being and Time, part 2: On 'mineness''.

'The ugly spirit': Burroughs and the Naked Lunch

On the fiftieth anniversary of a contemporary masterpiece

James Campbell writes in this weekend's Guardian newspaper on the 'gestation and strange life' of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a novel celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year:

Naked Lunch is a savage satire on "control" in various forms, from sexual censorship to McCarthyite anti-communism to the worldwide spread of narcotics. Half a century ago, Burroughs created Islam Inc, issuing from the Mecca Chamber of Commerce, a fundamentalist racket that sends out "nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass" to mingle with rank and file Muslims "and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties". Part of the action takes place in Freeland, a sterile Scandinavian utopia where the urgencies of instinct and hunger are removed. Scientists work to isolate the "human virus". When eventually they succeed, as they are bound to, homo sapiens can be perfected and messy old life brought to an end. Freeland is an ideal police state, in which "there is no need for police", since every citizen is under constant surveillance by every other.

The composition of Naked Lunch has its origins in what Burroughs called "routines", surreal sketches which were included in letters to Allen Ginsberg. As the pages piled up on the floor around his desk, some soiled by footprints, Burroughs saw a book taking shape. "Horrible mess of longhand notes to straighten out," he told Ginsberg, "plus all those letters to go through." Even the author of "Howl", then being prosecuted in California for obscenity, was put off by the extremism of some routines. "Can't see why they should have upset you," Burroughs wrote back. "I am impressed by my reasonableness."

James Campbell, 'The ugly spirit'

The Guardian, 20 June 2009

Faber & Faber Writers' Gallery

Rare photographs available to view online

British publisher Faber & Faber have uploaded an online gallery of publicity photographs, which feature some of their signature poets, writers and dramatists. James Joyce, Paul Auster, Harold Pinter and Sylvia Plath (above) can be found among the faces. Click here to see the Faber & Faber Flickr Gallery.

Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia

Excerpt from Primo Levi's short essay, 'Fear of Spiders'

From Primo Levi's short essay, 'Fear of Spiders':

As for my personal and slight phobia, it has a birth certificate. It is the etching by Gustave Doré which illustrates Arachne in the twelfth canto of Dante's Purgatory, and with which I collided as a child. The young girl who dared challenge Minerva in the art of weaving is punished by a foul transfiguration: in the drawing she is 'almost half a spider', and is brilliantly depicted as utterly frantic, with full breasts where one would expect to see her back and from her back have sprouted six legs, knotty, hairy, painful: six legs which, together with human arms that writhe desperately, add up to eight. On his knees, before the new monster, Dante seems to be contemplating its crotches, half disgusted, half voyeur.

Primo Levi, 'Fear of Spiders'

in Other People's Trades (translated by Raymond Rosenthal)

Happy Bloomsday!

Celebrating the life and work of James Joyce

What are your plans for Bloomsday? Over on Twitter, they're urging us to eat "ghastly things for breakfast". I'm not sure I can be tempted to start the day with "the inner organs of beasts and fowls ... thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes", but I could easily be persuaded into a pint later on. "I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click." It might only be ten o'clock but I'm thirsty already - yes, I said yes, I will, yes.

Alison Flood, 'Bloomsday Around the World'

guardian.co.uk, 16 June 2009

Today is Bloomsday, an anniversary rejoycing the life and work of writer James Joyce. It is not Joyce's birthday, mind you, but the day on which his magnum opus Ulysses is set: 16 June 1904.

So! Whether you're planning to reacquaint yourself with the Irish writer's prose - the sprawling modernist mess that is Ulysses (?) - or perhaps just joining in the spirit of celebration, here are a few links that might help get you in the mood:

• Bloomsday: James Joyce Quiz at The Guardian
• Bloomin' Marvellous! Joyce and Trieste.
• Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living
• Mark Harkin, 'James Joyce's Ulysses - why the fuss?'
• Rare Recording of James Joyce reading
• Bloomsday at Wikipedia.org
• Will Self: Psychogeography, 'The People's Joyce' in The Independent
• Bloomsday Listings at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin
• James Joyce: Literary Criticism (Courtesy of ReadySteadyBook)
• John Kidd, 'The Scandal of Ulysses' in the New York Review of Books
• Richard Ellmann, 'The Big Word in Ulysses' in the New York Review of Books
• Declan Kiberd. 'Ulysses, modernism's most sociable masterpiece' in The Guardian
• Twitter takes on Ulysses (from The Independent)
• PoMo Month: James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in the Los Angeles Times
  

I don't know about you, but the spirit of my celebration is taking the form of a cold glass of Guinness.

Critchley on Heidegger's Being and Time: Part 2

One of a series of articles published in The Guardian

The second of Simon Critchley's articles on Heidegger's Being and Time has been published on The Guardian website:

Metaphysics is the area of inquiry that Aristotle himself calls "first philosophy" and which comes before anything else. It is the most abstract, universal and indefinable area of philosophy. But it is also the most fundamental.

With admirable arrogance, it is the question of being that Heidegger sets himself the task of inquiring into in Being and Time. He begins with a series of rhetorical questions: Do we have an answer to the question of the meaning of being? Not at all, he answers. But do we even experience any perplexity about this question? Not at all, Heidegger repeats. Therefore, the first and most important task of Heidegger's book is to recover our perplexity for this question of questions: Hamlet's "To be or not to be?"

For Heidegger, what defines the human being is this capacity to be perplexed by the deepest and most enigmatic of questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? So, the task of Being and Time is reawakening in us a taste for perplexity, a taste for questioning. Questioning – Heidegger will opine much later in his career – is the piety of thinking.

Simon Critchley, 'Being and Time, part 2: On 'mineness''

guardian.co.uk, 15 June 2009

Read part one: 'Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters'.

Alfred Hitchcock and his Signature Style

David Thomson on the distinctive artistic vision of the Master of Suspense

David Thomson has written an article on Hitchcock's signature directorial style for The Guardian. The feature anticipates an upcoming showing of North by Northwest at the BFI in London, followed by other showings in selected cities from 19 June:

''There is no lesson in North By Northwest except for this: in the great and continuing crisis of life, try to behave with wit and style. The humour in North By Northwest is not just "silliness" and fanciful situations, one after another. It is an exhilarating escape from the earnest hopes for salvation in Ben-Hur and The Nun's Story. It is, to quote Henri Bergson, to know that "the comic demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple." Hitchcock believed in that intelligence, because it was cold and clear and because it reduced every decision in film-making to a question of style. In other words, nothing happened or really existed in a movie until his very sharp, idiosyncratic eye saw it - and style in his movies was how he chose to show something.'

David Thomson, 'Murder most stylish'

The Guardian, 12 June 2009

Simon Critchley on Samuel Beckett

British philosopher shares his affinity for the work of Nobel Prize winner

Well, it's going to be a Simon Critchley week after all. I've dredged the archives of Mark Thwaite's excellent literary website, ReadySteadyBook, and dug up an interview with Critchley published back in 2006. (The reality is that very little dredging or digging has been done: I saw the link in one of Mark's recent postings.) The interview, conducted before the release of Infinitely Demanding - A Political Ethics, offers an interesting overview of Critchley's work to date.

Simon Critchley also speaks about his key influences, including Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot among his favourite writers:

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer/book? What is the best thing you have read recently?

Simon Critchley: Easy question. My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can’t breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction. At the moment, I am reading lots of different things: Rousseau, as I have unfinished business with him; Pessoa in order to try and see how he complicates the approach to poetry I started in Things Merely Are; and I have Ibsen open on the desk at the moment and I’m trying to gather some thoughts on what I see as the uncanny background noise of Ibsen’s universe, particularly in Hedda Gabler and Ghosts.

Mark Thwaite Interviews Simon Critchley

ReadySteadyBook, 3 January 2006

Simon Critchley on Heidegger's 'Being and Time'

From a series of articles published in The Guardian

It's becoming a Simon Critchley week.

The British philosopher, now based at the New School for Social Research in New York, has long been a strong advocate of the work of Martin Heidegger. As it happens, I think Critchley was the first writer to spark my own interest in Heidegger's writing, although, if I'm honest, I haven't yet grappled with the works themselves - I've been content to read the summaries and interpretations of others. But anyway! Back to the point:

Critchley has begun a series of webblogs for The Guardian newspaper, in which he discusses the impact of Heidegger's thought on Continental Philosophy, and the history of Western thought. The idea is to unpack some of the stigma attached to Heidegger's difficult writing style, alongside some of his repugnant political affiliations, and elucidate the themes of his major work, Being and Time. This is no mean feat, and I don't envy him the task. But the real intention underlying these blogs is to inspire a similar interest in others, to prompt our own engagement with this controversial but brilliant philosopher. I'm already to read the next installment:

'Crudely stated, for thinkers like St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself. For Heidegger, the question of God's existence or non-existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in "becoming who one is" in words of Nietzsche's that Heidegger liked to cite. We will show how this insight into finitude is deepened in later entries in relation to Heidegger's concepts of conscience and what he calls "ecstatic temporality".

''Being and Time' begins with a long, systematic introduction, followed by two divisions, each containing six chapters. I have just finished teaching the whole book in a 15-week lecture course at the New School for Social Research in New York and I estimate that I spoke for about 2 hours a week. As they say here in New York, just do the math! Therefore, in the following 7 short blog entries, I can only give a taste of the book and offer some signposts for readers who would like to explore further.'

Simon Critchley, 'Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters'

guardian.co.uk, 10 June 2009

Simon Critchley on the Pursuit of Happiness

British philosopher publishes short essay in the New York Times

Once again, However Fallible has picked up on a great article in the New York Times. This time, it's British philosopher Simon Critchley pondering the philosophical route to happiness:

'What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?

'I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.

'But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? [...]'

Simon Critchley, 'Happy Like God'

New York Times, 25 May 2009

Dante, Beckett and the Divine Comedy

Robin Kirkpatrick mentions the profound influence of Dante on Samuel Beckett

From Robin Kirkpatrick's Introduction to Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy:

'Beckett died with a copy of the ‘Commedia’ at his bedside. Throughout his writing career he had taken, as his own alter ego, the character of the indolent Belacqua who appears in ‘Purgatorio 4’. Above all, Beckett’s concern with ‘waiting’ as a condition of human existence exactly mirrors a dominant theme of the early ‘Purgatorio’. Resisting the dualistic claims of Cartesian thought, Beckett looks, as Dante always does, at the incalculable shifts of word and physical movement that, in the experience of waiting, so vividly animate even the most indolent mind. Here, like Dante, he reclaims the body as a comic determinant of human identity.'

Francis Bacon and the Colony Room

On the recent passing of Muriel Belcher

However Fallible spotted a fascinating article in last friday's edition of the New York Times, where Geoffrey Wheatcroft pays tribute to Muriel Belcher, proprietor of London's infamous Colony Room. Belcher's drinking house became a popular underground haunt for 'writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed aristocrats and petty criminals' in the 1960s and '70s. Most notably, the bar was also a favourite of painters Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud:

'Although Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel; it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the Somme.”'

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 'Den Mother to the Louche and Famous'

New York Times, 5 June 2009

Nietzsche and the Secret History of Philosophers

An extract from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche

From Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo:

'He who knows how to breath in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible - but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! How freely one can breath! How much, one feels, lies beneath one! Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks - the seeking-out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban. Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable, of the causes which hitherto have led to men's moralising and idealising. The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare? - these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice... Every conquest, every step forward in knowledfe, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self. I do not refute ideals; all I do is draw on my gloves in their presence... Nitimur in vetitum: with this device my philosophy will one day be victorious; for that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is, without exception, truth.'

Samuel Beckett's Postmodern Fictions

Brian Finney on Beckett's place in Postmodern literature

From Brian Finney, 'Samuel Beckett's Postmodern Fictions' (courtesy of LitBlog):

'After completing The Unnamable, Beckett felt that he had exhausted his vein of self-immersive narration. The nineteen fifties were the years in which Beckett established his reputation as a dramatist with Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape. In 1950 he did begin writing a series of linked short prose texts in French that he reluctantly released for publication in 1955 as Textes pour rien (Texts for Nothing ). In 1956 he claimed that the trilogy brought him to the point where subsequently he felt he was repeating himself: "In the last book--L'Innommable--there's complete disintegration...There's no way to go on." He adds that Texts pour rien "was an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed." Apart from being wary of Beckett's constant put-downs of his own work, failure, as he wrote, is in his view the modern artist's world. As the voice remarks in the first text, "nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you." Texts for Nothing certainly does not match the virtuoso performance of The Unnamable. Yet it points forward to Beckett's last full-length novel, How It Is, by looking to form for a way out of the dead end reached at the close of The Unnamable.'

Reading for Summer 2009

An ambitious plan

One of the major appeals of my job is the free time it affords me. I work at a university library during the academic year, but as term-time staff I'm cut loose for the summer months. This enables me to happily pursue my interests and obsessions at an easy pace, and measure my days by sunshine rather than stopwatch. I have a relatively slim income, but it affords time to sit still and relax for three months of every year.

My summer hiatus begins in one week, and I'm steadily compiling a reading list to see me through the months to follow. I can already see myself wandering free through cafes, parks and pubs with good company and a good book. I can't wait.

Tentative Reading list:

• Samuel Beckett: The old chestnut. Hope to revisit the shorter fiction, the Letters, and whatever takes my fancy. I might take another look at James Knowlson's excellent biography, Damned to Fame, while I'm at it.

• Thomas Bernhard: Whatever novels I can get my hands on. I was greatly impressed by Old Masters: A Comedy, and am already pushing my way through Correction. Every synopsis of every novel he's written appeals to me for one reason or another. Marvelous stuff.

• Walter Benjamin: To inform myself. For someone with an interest in literary theory and criticism, I don't feel I know enough about Benjamin.

• Simon Critchley: Another look at Very Little... Almost Nothing. It's so rare to see so many of my major interests collected together in one place, let alone one book. Critchley's philosophical reflections on death and literature, including key studies of Blanchot and Beckett, are both fascinating and compelling.

• Arthur Schopenhauer: A philosopher who, while often flawed, is wonderfully entertaining to read.

• Friedrich Nietzsche: A grand and novelistic visionary. Just for fun, this one.

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: At last! The only real question is where to start: the poetry, drama, verse, conversation, autobiography. I'm looking forward to finding out what the German wordsmith has to offer - all in English translation, though, alas.

• Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy, at least in part for its influence on Beckett.

• Maurice Blanchot: Some of his reviews and criticism.
  

Ambitious, I know. I'm sure I won't get through everything, but I'll take each day as it comes and play it by ear. The list is nowhere near as rigid in my mind as it appears on the page: it's just an enjoyable way to pass the hours. I think it'll be fun to just sit back, flick the pages, and see what I can find.

Nietzsche on 'historical philosophizing'

An extract from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche

From Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (translated by R. J. Hollingdale):

'All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition. Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the 4,000 years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees 'instincts' in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind, and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.'

'Human, All Too Human': BBC's Nietzsche Documentary

1999 BBC film on the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1999, the BBC broadcast a trilogy of documentaries discussing leading influential philosophers of the 20th Century. Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, the focus fell on the European tradition of what is loosely termed Continental Philosophy, and discussed the life and work of three major thinkers of the last two hundred years.

The first of the episodes guides us through Nietzsche's life and work with the help of some esteemed scholars in the field. The British writer Will Self makes a brief appearance, as does the wonderful Reg Hollingdale (translator of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and other German philosophers). And while much of the documentary comprises all-too-brief summaries and the occasional oversimplification, it's still a fun and accessible guide to the philosopher and some of his major ideas.

Much of the imagery in the documentary reinforces the public perception of Nietzsche as a kind of dark romantic, conquering the mountains of some lost Caspar David Friedrich landscape; and if that's the kind of quality that pulled you toward Nietzsche in the first place, you won't be disappointed. On the other hand, if you're looking for a little more to hang your hat on, then the programme also attempts to make Nietzsche relevant to contemporary concerns and anxieties prevalent in twenty-first century culture. In short, it presents us with one of the first truly modern philosophers. Some really are born posthumously.

You can watch the documentary in full by clicking above, or find it at the source at videos.google.com.

David Cronenberg on Beckett

On the influence of Samuel Beckett on Cronenberg's film, Spider

In an interview with Film Freak Central, Canadian film director David Cronenberg likens the protagonist of Spider to Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett:

'Beckett was one of our touchstones. I really thought that Spider was more of a Beckett character--the Beckett as you say, of the prose or the novels more than the plays--I saw a vagrant or a tramp. Someone who has divested himself of almost everything except for the clothes that he wears and maybe one or two things like tobacco for his cigarettes. Then he focuses all his incredible energy and inventiveness on that--he's as obsessed and possessive of his little suitcase as we would be of our house and our car. He becomes so distilled that he becomes a microcosm of any human and at that point he becomes an existential study rather than let's say a psychological study. At that point I think--and it's totally arrogant of me to say this--but I think that we go beyond Freud to an even more basic examination of the human condition. We even did Ralph's hair so that it was a little bit like Samuel Beckett's.'

Film Freak Central speaks to David Cronenberg

15 November 2002

Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer

On the construction of Samuel Beckett as a literary brand

'Taken during rehearsals of Not I and Krapp's Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1973, the photograph isolates Beckett's head in a field of black, presenting him as a flesh-covered skull cut off from his body, from his background, from any context except that of his own head. [...] Ostensibly, the photograph treats Beckett as an isolated creative consciousness characterized by "Silence and solitude" (Haynes and Knowlson 1); thus it seems to confirm Patrick Bowles's 1958 assertion that Beckett lives in a "spiritual wilderness" and is exiled in "his own particular vision of the universe, original and uncompromising". This representation is, however, complicated by the haute couture lighting, precise staging, and deliberate costuming. These features call attention to different kinds of artistic expertise, revealing the complex network of professional work that goes into the marketing of a specific authorial image. Just as importantly, it hints at Beckett's willingness to reveal his complicity in the construction of this image.'

Stephen John Dilks, 'Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer'
Journal of Modern Literature. Summer 2006. Vol. 29, Iss. 4

I've been reading a wonderful article exploring the role photographs have played in constructing interpretations of Samuel Beckett and his work. Stephen John Dilks's essay in the Journal of Modern Literature takes a critical and revealing glance at his public persona.

To begin with, Dilks presents a step-by-step analysis of Samuel Beckett as cultural icon, starting with a commentary on what Samuel Beckett actually means to the general public: or rather, how his name and his image are construed by the mass media. Dilks gives a strong sense of the unified consistency of Beckett's image, and the characteristics it shares with a powerful brand identity in the context of the contemporary literary establishment.

Anyone who is familiar with Samuel Beckett and his work will have certain assumptions and preconceptions about what he stands for, rightly or wrongly. And it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these assumptions and preconceptions are not necessarily related to the work, as such. Rather, public ideas of Samuel Beckett circulate around images of the man himself, and his iconic status within the context of European literature and post-war theatre. These ideas are manifested publicly, through interviews, photographs and appearances.

What makes Dilks's essay particularly interesting is the way it explores the propogation of Beckett's iconic status throughout a lengthy and successful career, and suggests the ways in which the writer himself is strongly implicated in its production - even complicit:

'Having learned his trade in Joyce's smithy, in a workshop designed to allow the author to assume a position of indifference while a flock of supporters published and promoted his work, Beckett was keenly aware of the ways of the literary marketplace. With firsthand experience of the uphill scheme to sell Joyce's "Work in Progress," he was well positioned to develop, nurture, and preserve a failure-based authorial persona. As he struggled to turn himself into a viable professional writer, Beckett managed his public image as carefully as he would manage the publication and performance of his texts.'

Stephen John Dilks, 'Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer'

Dilks offers a wonderful whistle-stop tour of major biographical events in Beckett's life, and lists many of the key contacts he held within the literary establishment. These contacts, in addition to publishers, artists and personal friends, all aided and developed what could be interpreted as a celebrity image to promote and popularize Samuel Beckett's work:

'Beckett was more effective than any other twentieth-century writer in the strategic control and dissemination of a personal aesthetic and an authorial persona. As his career blossomed, he could increasingly rely on a network of loyal professionals to affirm his preferred public image. After he signed with Les Editions de Minuit in 1951 and then with Grove Press in 1953, he could depend on dedicated, full-time professional support. But, having always depended on the assistance of friends and acquaintances in the publishing industry, including literary agents, editors, publishers, and wealthy sponsors as well as, most notably, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Thomas McGreevy, and George Reavey, he continued the habit. And he developed a number of strategies to promote his public image. In the mid-1950s, when he was associated with the Left Bank, Kings Road, and off-Broadway intelligentsia, he expanded his popularity by pioneering the technique of what we might call the "non-interview interview" (an interview in which the interviewee bans verbatim quotation). He also disseminated verbatim quotations by allowing the selective publication of private correspondence. In addition, he benefited from critical commentary by a close colleague, Patrick Bowles. It was, of course, essential to Beckett's public image that he was represented as someone uninterested in developing a public image: as with the advertising campaign for "the car that sells itself" and as with the celebrity spokesperson who insists "I don't do advertising," the campaign to brand and sell Beckett took as its central proposition that the author was above commercialism and marketing.'

'[...] It is not, then, that his complicity in image-making and literary marketing makes him a "charlatan" (Bair ix); it is, instead, that his unprecedented control over his image and legacy makes his relationship with the literary marketplace extraordinarily interesting and instructive.'

Stephen John Dilks, 'Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer'

It's not surprising that an author would be interested in how they and their work are perceived by the public. But what is interesting in Beckett's case is his supposed reluctance to become involved with the trappings of fame, and indeed of celebrity. For instance, Beckett was famously reticent about the authorial intent of his novels, plays and shorter works, yet Dilks suggests that while Beckett did not communicate his thoughts directly to the public, he found other ways to make them popular:

'While he made an exception for Knowlson by granting recorded interviews over a five-month period in 1989, prior moves to control his legacy had involved the explicit refusal to allow direct quotation. The banning of explicit authorial commentary was, of course, crucial to Beckett's authorial persona. By granting non-interview interviews, as he did, for example, to Israel Shenker in 1956, Tom Driver in 1961, and John Gruen in 1969, Beckett shaped the reception and interpretation of his work while seeming to remain aloof from explicit authorial control. He had his cake and ate it too, spreading his authorial coda while expressing his reluctance to "be involved in exegesis."'

[...]

'Beckett preserves the idea that "No writer of our time has more consistently refused to comment on, or explain, his own work," as Esslin would put it in the introduction to his collection but, deferring to Schneider, he gets his ideas in circulation. In the process of turning "private" correspondence into part of the public and professional record, he authorizes Schneider's production. And, by asserting that "the mysteries are all of their own making" and "my work is for the small theatre," he reinforces the ongoing advertising campaign for the play.'

Stephen John Dilks, 'Portraits of Beckett as a Famous Writer'

Fascinating stuff.

Fine art in literature

The role of art in contemporary literature

Ian MacKenzie of The Guardian discusses the role of fine art in literature, using James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as one of his ten examples (Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters: A Comedy is noticeably absent):

'"You say that art must not excite desire", says Lynch, a school friend of Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus. He's incredulous of the claim, and confesses that he wrote his "name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles" at the National Museum. Stephen points out that Lynch's is not a "normal nature", but surely Lynch has a point: erotic art isn't meant to be anodyne; the male artist knows what he's up to when he paints or sculpts a naked woman. (Joyce later had Leopold Bloom, in 'Ulysses', contemplate the existence or nonexistence of anuses in the female statuary at the National Museum.)'

Ian MacKenzie, 'Top 10 artworks in novels'

The Guardian, 2 June 2009

'Beckett was Here': Review of Beckett's Letters

The Literary Review reviews the Letters of Samuel Beckett

Hugh Haughton on the first volume of Samuel Beckett's Letters:

'Beckett was a prolific as well as obscure minimalist and his fans and 'biografiends' have been waiting a long time for the light to be thrown from his huge correspondence. The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 is the 700-page first instalment of a four-volume 'comprehensive' selection (later to be published complete in twelve or more volumes). The correspondence, much of which was written in Beckett's elegant but almost indecipherable 'Ogham script', is edited with almost manic scruple by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck [...]'

Hugh Haughton, 'Not Yet I'

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940

Literary Review, June 2009