Funny. Amazon sends me one of those e-mails ‘Recommended for You”. Out of the 8 books they recommend me, I already own 6, and I have read 7. I have published reviews or articles about 3, and blogged about 2 others. The books are Infinite Jest, The Age of Wire and String, The Rifles, Europe Central, State of Exception, Homo Sacer and the Open. DFW, Vollmann, Agamben. The only book I do not own is Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems — and that one is, yes, high on my have-to-read list.

Apparently the software knows my taste quite well. But is this good recommendation? (Of course, the reason is that the software doesn’t know what I’ve bought at Atheneum in Amsterdam. And I think I prefer to get an e-mail that makes me smile, above eagerly awaiting what the software figures out I might like. Hmm, do I?)

Started reading through The Rustle of Language, collected shorter essays of Roland Barthes from the period 1966 – 1980. Some of these I’ve read before, a few I’ve read many times — like From Work to Text. I particularly like Barthes when breaking free of it, the structuralism of his earlier work is still present.

Having read 80 pages up till now, I’m struck by 2 things: 1. the ‘beauty’ of Barthes writing — even when glues together too many subordinate clause in one sentence, 2. how clearly al lot of what he writes fits in, well, the Zeitgeist. However ‘timeless’ and ‘abstract’ his theorizing of reading and writing may be, reading through these essays again, it becomes apparent how much it was also grounded in, let say, the ‘spirit’ of the times, and how much his ideas are tied to issues that seem to’ve been topical at the time.

Anyway, some by now ‘classic’ quotes:

‘(…) the Paradox of the reader: it is commonly admitted that to read is to decode: letters, words, meanings, structures, and this is incontestable; but by accumulating decodings (since reading is by right infinite), by removing the safety catch of meaning, by putting reading into freewheeling (which is its structural vocation), the reader is caught up in a dialectical reversal: finally he does not decode, he overcodes; he does not decipher, he produces, he accumulates languages, he lets himself be infinitely and tirelessly traversed by them: he is that traversal.’ On Reading, p. 42

‘Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flies, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49

‘The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, infelcted by Enlish empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of th “human person”.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49/50

‘(…) linguistics furnishes the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument, showing that the speech-act in its entirety is an “empty” process, which functions perfectly without its being necessary to “fill” it with the person of the interlocutors: linguistically the author is nothing but the one who writes, just as I is nothing but the one who says I: language knows a “subject”, not a “person”, and this subject, empty outside of the very speech-act which defines it, suffices to “hold” language, i.e., to exhaust it.’ The Death of the Author, p. 51

‘(T)he modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text: he is not furnished with a being which precedes or exceeds his writing, he is not the subject of which his book would be the predicate. (…) (W)riting can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observation, of representation, of “painting” (…) but instead (…) a performative.’ The Death of the Author, p. 52

‘Once the Author is distanced, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an Author to a text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing.’ The Death of the Author, p. 53

All quotes from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (transl. Richard Howard), University of California Press, Berkeley &c., 1989 (1986/1984).

& when I said that Barthes’ theory is tied to topical issues of the sixties, I mean for instance that his ‘death of the author’ also has to be seen in the perspective of the struggle against a certain kind of literary criticism, a way of teaching literature that was very much ‘under fire’ then. As long as Barthes’ theory is applied to literature and to writing as such, I have always found it very inspiring and to the point. As soon as one tries to apply it to political or legal speech, problems arise. I’d say.

3 out of these 4 function as a summary…

“The categories of modality are not founded on the subject, as Kant maintains, nor are they derived from it; rather, the subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact.” p. 147

“The modern meaning of the term “author” appears relatively late. In Latin, auctor originally designates the person who intervenes in the case of a minor (…) in order to grant him the valid title that he requires.” p. 148

“To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make live and to let die is, instead the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power. In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the other tow, a formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: not longer either to make die or to make live but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.” p. 155

“Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human — survival.” p. 156

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III, Zone Books, NY, 2002.

James Joyce Ulysses, in the first Dutch translation by John Vandenbergh, published 1969, hardcover, in cassette, together with Aantekeningen bij James Joyce’s Ulysses by the same John Vandenbergh. This is the edition that I first encountered Joyce in, around 1980 — maybe even earlier –, at the house of my grandparents, where my uncle H., (who was then about 20 years old) showed me the big blue book, telling me this was sort of a 20th century Odyssee, set in Dublin. I was intrigued of course. Became even more intrigued after seeing a page from Finnegans Wake in the Spectrum Encyclopedie.

I read Ulysses for the first time in this Dutch translation (a few years later). (I remember at that time any book translated by either John Vandenbergh or Gerardine Franken was a recommendation, like for instance Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, of which, I remember, I did not understand a word, but finished reading to the last page nonetheless).

‘Statig kwam de vlezige Buck Mulligan van het trapgat, in de handen een bekken vol schuim waarop kruiselings een spiegel en een scheermes.’

This afternoon I came across a copy of just this book at a second hand bookstore. (For the non-Dutch, this translation is not available anymore, since the Paul Claes & Mon Nys translation came on the market). Complete, in cassette, perfect condition. I bought it. (37,50). It even has the smell of the library books through which I first encountered literature. It’s as if I’ve always had a copy of this book.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be much more fun to put up some quotes from Consider the Lobster? Almost finished it & it’s such fun to read DFW’s (yeah, again I use the word fun) essays. Also a very nuanced analysis of the state of the United States, in the period 1995 – 2005. The wikipedia entry is a stub, but it has an overview of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster.

‘The traditional historical potentialities — poetry, religion, philosophy — which (…) kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences,and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seem to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden — and the total management — of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. (…) It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by deciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. (…) The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Stanford UP, 2004 (2002), p. 77.

‘In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Stanford UP, 2004 (2002), p. 80.

‘Here the etymology of the word studium becomes clear. It goes back to a st- or sp- root indicating a crash, the shock of impact. Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin: those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always “stupid”.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 64.

‘Only on the day when the original infantile openness is truly, dizzingly taken up as such, when time has come to fullness and the child Aion has wakened from and to his game, will men be able finally to construct a history and language which are universal and no longer deferrable, and stop their wandering through traditions. This authentic recalling of humanity to the infantile soma is called thought — that is, politics.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 98.

(That’s your Agamben: out of the blue referring to some very obscure mythological character (Aion, apparently a son of Kore/Persephone). Question: does the meaning of this sentence change, when you leave Aion out of it? I’d say the (poetic) network of references becomes less dense, yes. But skipping Aion, one can still get at Agamben’s ‘point’. And his messianistic (?) idea of a coming community).

‘But if quotation marks are a summons against language, citing it before the tribunal of thought, the proceedings of this trial cannot remain indefinitely adjourned. Every completed act of thought, to be such — to be able, that is, to refer to something standing outside of language — must work itself out entirely within lanuage. A humanity able to talk only within quotation marks would be an unhappy humanity that, by dint (= the effort, AA) of thinking, had lost the capacity to carry thought through to a conclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 104.

Funny, the copy of Agambens The Idea of Prose I was reading has quite a few pencil marks and notes in the margin. The chapter The Idea of Peace has a note in pencil saying ‘Kant eternal peace’ and marks the last few lines of page 81 with ‘Hegel?’ According to me this little chapter is nothing else than a short analysis of the idea of peace, through the reading of an element of contemporary catholic liturgy — giving your neighbour a hand and whishing him/her ‘peace’. He’s such a catholic, this Agamben.

Maybe this explains why I can just read Agamben. I don’t bring Kant and Hegel into play every time.

Spent part of the long weekend reading two small books by Giorgio Agamben. The Idea of Prose (1985) and the more recent The Open, Man and Animal. I will put up a few quotes later on.

I enjoy reading Agamben, especially when he’s writing these short ‘vignettes’. I enjoy his prose: his thoughts might not always be easy to get, his style is clear. If he sounds obscure, it’s (mostly) not because he writes bad academese. But I have to admit — both to those who do not like Agamben, and those who adore him — that what probably saves my reading enjoyment is that I do not read Agamben for his analysis of Heidegger, his take on Hegel, his discussion with Benjamin.

The Open is mostly a very beautiful and clearly written meditation on the difference between ‘man’ and ‘animal’. Taking it’s cue from an ilustration in a Hebrew Bible, of men with animal heads, then going through Thomas of Aquino and Linneaus to early 20th century biology. Only when Agamben comes to analyze Heideggers mediations on the subject, I lose the ‘plot’. But then, I do not care so much about Heidegger, and I’m happy to more or less skip that part (is it a sign that those chapters are the longest?). I pick up the thread where Agamben applies his insights to the contemporary condition. Do I really need to go through a heideggerian brainwash for that? Maybe some philosophers would say ‘yes’. (Agamben has to, being a student of Heidegger). I’d say ‘no’. (Not me, that is), The Open takes me on a thought-trip, that I don’t understand one passage of that trip does not bother me. Moreover, I know that spending time to learn to understand that passage, will be — for me — time badly spent.

(How can it be that I am so sure about that?).

Then, the more I read of Agamben — even without always getting it — the better I begin to see how his thoughts and philosophy cohere. The tracing of the difference between man and animal in Western philosophy directly informs Agambens contemporary concept of biopolitics and bare life. Both The Open and The Idea of Prose show how the concepts of potentiality, ‘the open’, politics and thought are connected. Reading through different books of Agamben is like watching the slow uncovering of a whole network of intersecting thoughts and concepts.

And that, I think, makes for reading enjoyment too.

Reading The Idea of Prose of Agamben this morning. Somehow I think reading Agamben is a good way to spend Easter: to at least have a little bit the feeling that it is Easter. As happens mostly these years, I almost forgot that Easter was near. When it (the feeling of time) goes on like this, in 2 years time I will forget when it’s Christmas. On on the other hand, I know the cycling calender by heart. I celebrate the bicycle, apparently. Which brings me to this quote from Agamben: “The horse on which the poet rides, according to an ancient exegetical tradition of the Apocalypse of St. John, is the sound and vocal element of language. (…) It is a sure indication of the symbolic tenacity of this image that in Pascoli at the beginning of this century (and, later, in both Penna and Delfini) one finds that the horse takes on the blithe shape of the bicycle.” (Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, 1995 (1985), p. 43). So, this celebration of the bicycle might then also be a celebration of the voice of language. Hmm, connect that to the pure joy of listening to Michel Wuyts talking while the peleton rides through the landscape, his words being propelled, so to say, by the spinning of the wheels. (Yes, philosophy is fun).