“Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening."

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community (extract)

I repeat, for Bataille, the question: Why "community"? The answer he gives us is rather clear: "There exists a principle of insufficiency at the root of each being..." (the principle of incompleteness). Let us take note that what commands and organizes the possibility of a being is a principle. It follows that this lack on principle does not go hand in hand with a necessity for completion. A being, insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a substance of integrity. The awareness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted. Left on its own, a being closes itself, falls asleep and calms down.

Kafka

Again I’m struck by the notion that mankind is completely insignificant. Reading Kafka’s diaries must have something to do with it. There is something glorious, a feeling of the world’s meticulously epic nature, unembellished, completely lacking in grandeur, when reading Kafka. Kafka always feels to me as one whose writing is to be read as that of a dead writer, but that this sensation was there even when he was still alive, even when he was writing it. In my life, at this moment in time, Kafka is to be read while listening to John Maus, to Ariel Pink, to Popol Vuh. Death, death, death is in them all. These musics, though so much more than just this, nevertheless always point to death. They point to lost times, lost worlds, and the cosmic. Yes, that’s what Kafka reads like to me. He makes man kind so strange, so fairy tale-like, that one feels as though this is a different species being documented here, with defunct behaviours and customs. But no, this is mankind and it is still the same. The attention Kafka gives to customs, to social etiquette and to systems is never incidental. He is fascinated by them – legal documents, enumerated tables, lists, manners, the lot. But he seems to always struggle with these systems. Struggling, it seems, not against them, as it may at first seem. The longer I read Kafka I come to realise that what I’m witnessing is not a man raging against confinement but, rather, truly fascinated and perplexed by this confinement – these endless confinements – and trying to understand them and their workings, not simply free himself from them. One gets the impression that Kafka engages with these systems not as his restrictors but as the very prism through which he may reflect upon his own consciousness at all.

Looking at things in such a way, the insignificance, the insectness of mankind, doesn’t seem to sweep everyone along with it. If anything, the meagreness of the multitudes seems to give the individual even more significance. I don’t know why I’m saying this, it just seems to make sense right now. Perhaps this is because in its complete form the above sentence would read: ‘the meagreness, the insignificance of mankind seems to me to give the individual even more significance, because this individual is me. And it is always “me”’.

The piety of difference

The vastness of a memory’s sky, comforting in its infinite distance from the present, bathed in the beige foam that washes all my dreams. And what is it that evades me in each and every one? Myself, myself, I have never found myself. But then, I was never there. That which is dreamt is a slice of 80s Americana, a neon Hollywood Americana, a childhood memory that passes through golden fields of wheat lit by a sepia sun, where the colours of the air are made up of brown, yellow and a sandy blue, just as much as it passes through the rocky, dry baking roads of Israel and the lone flowers blooming in the desert’s oven air. For even my memories of Israel are not real and seem more informed by the image of Israel as sold to me through television and films than by my own experiences. Could life in the north have been like those movies? Eilat must’ve been a very different place to the rest of the country. And is there not a part of me that for this reason feels that I have not had a true experience of Israel? Rather than feel as though I have had a unique experience, growing up in a unique place among the various places of the world (not more special, just different, just as every place has some difference about it, small though it may be), I feel as though lacking before a genuine experience of Israel. Let it be said that difference is not a given. Everywhere is the desire for sameness – a reactive desire, yes, Deleuze and Nietzsche did not overlook this. This desire dictates my memory, the construction of my own narrative. For if, in spite of his brilliance, Deleuze took comfort in the fact that difference is in everything and saw in it a testament of the world’s eternal salvation and source of hope, then he was but a false prophet and a priest. He may not have been any better than the modernists. Deleuze may not have believed in the idea of dialectic resolution, but he did away with it only at the expense of his own integrity: he did not need to believe in a final resolution because he substituted for it the belief that salvation is already here, happening at every moment, in every human being and in every thought. Yet the truth of difference does not preclude the danger that the Same is forever winning, forever has the upper hand, and that we have not yet even begun to see the horrible potential of The Same and the great degradation to which it can lead.

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Todd Solondz is one of my new favourite film-makers. This film nails so many things I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe it’s mostly that the experience of school as a place of unthinkable cruelty resonates strongly with me. School can be a place of almost surreal degrees of distress, and the fact that it is such a distant experience makes it easy for to forget. The fact that childhood is normally designated as a formative stage, a phase of non-sense because it is still forming the order, sense, rationality and even civility of adult life, of the supposedly fully formed human being, allows it to be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. And yet, imagine the horror conjured up when trying to imagine a world where grown ups are as openly cruel to each other as kids are on a regular basis (and of course we are cruel to one another, but in ways so refined that any semblance of dirt and foul play is washed away from them). A world of name calling, of constant picking on and bullying, a place of violence, where it is absolutely normal to break into physical altercations and display your discontents publicly.
But it’s not just this experience the film shows. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. And perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for that suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to reign in the chaos and ill discipline of the child, and turn him into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get at her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, in the meantime, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely formative and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, practically grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it.

“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do, and the way I perceive so many others to live their life: forever waiting for that point in the future where they will finally be themselves, thinking of what we’ll be when we finally figure ourselves out and can start truly living life.

Two very interesting articles on Tarkovsky's Mirror.

On Deleuze and Bergsonian time in Tarkovsky.

And an interesting analysis of Mirror

Of Tarkovsky and the uncanniness of history

We are in the midst of a strange time in history. Well, perhaps this isn’t strictly true, at least not in as much as every time in history is a strange time. A sense of history, of history in the making – that is what’s truly strange. What’s changed for, then, what lies behind me write such an entry, is that I am beginning more and more to feel a sense of history in everything I see. A sense of removal from current events and of an outside perspective looking in. Not quite complete, of course. Not enough, that is, that I can see the precise motivations behind every act and tribulation taking place or that I could have the answer to the world’s problems. Even the best history books, no matter with how much hindsight they are written and how well documented their subject matter it, cannot help but try and impose some sort of sensible narrative on past events. Simply put, I get an overwhelming sense of us hurtling blindly through time, tentatively grasping for some sure-footedness and certainty in what the future holds for us and - for those of us fortunate enough to be involved in such matters – trying to steer history and the fate of empires in one direction or another. Maybe it’s reading history books that puts one in this mind-frame of a sense of history. Adam Curtis’s recent 3 part documentary for the BBC is a good example of something that might instil this sense of history, which is also a sense of awe, and of horror. Regardless of how accurate or insightful his presentation actually is, it performs a magical service by injecting a chain of events from the past 60 years with the same distance and sense of history as learning about the Roman Empire or the two World Wars. It takes huge events, events so large that occur on an unfathomable international scale, events so large, complex and all-pervasive we barely even notice them as events, and breaks them down into digestible components, draws lines between them, makes connections and links dots, so that suddenly we believe we can see something that has actually been in the making for at least a few decades. We suddenly believe that we can spot ideological shifts over the past few decades and actually make narrative sense of them. In an uncanny way (uncanny in the Heideggerian sense), it makes me feel as though I’m watching the machinations of human society reduced to a nature documentary about insects, with David Attenborough explaining their behaviour as part of a dance of life that simply must be so, with every insect falling into a predetermined role and having its behaviour dictated from the start. It makes me feel, when I watch mankind, that no-one understands their own debt to history, to the circumstances and context in which they make their decisions, and that it can only ever be so. Things could never have been any other way.
More so, however, what Curtis’s programme does is not merely leave us at a specific point in the past, as though history has stopped there. Slowly, without us realising it, the events which he is trying to analyse gush forth and spill right into the present. Suddenly, we are shaken and jolted out of our everyday existence, only to look around us and understand that we are in the midst of something that’s taking place right now, something that’s been building up throughout time, that has not yet ended, and that will not end for a while. The uncanny invades our everyday existence and our relationship to our own present and future. It is the historian’s role to piece together the past, but it is the philosopher’s role to both take apart and piece together the past, future and present.


Is it the philsopher’s role, though? Perhaps it is the artist’s. Themes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Much like my above ruminations on the nature of history and of nostalgia, Tarkovsky here appears to operate in a similar fashion. We have memories of the past interspersed in the present, flashes of images, all silent, flaring up indeterminately and with no real chronological sense. Even in scenes of conversation, the camera never focuses on a particular speaker but drifts slowly through the house, from detail to detail, as though to suggest that the significance of the memory haunts the totality of one’s environemtn, every object in the room rather than being concentrated in one person. No, not the totality, for that word would suggest a closed circle. Rather, every object and every instance has the potential of entering and making up a memory or a narrative, itself an open and inexhaustible field of signification.
The preoccupation with the meaning of the film is a mistake, as Grigory Yavlinsky notes. The film is so deliberately opaque that even if some of the scenes are in fact based on Tarkovsky’s childhood memories, they do not actually refer to or represent these memories as such. If anything, the structure of the film tells us that even those memories upon which the film is supposedly based are not Tarkovsky’s own, in as much as he has no direct access to his memories or to a coherent sense of the narrative of his own life. The film, in that respect, becomes something else the moment it is put on film. It resists meaning and interpretation so strongly that it can’t help but become one’s own film as soon as one watches it. The powerful emotions it might stir in some are new each time, as it can only provoke feelings of awe and wonderment, of mystery, and of the overwhelming realisation that we are lost and insignificant in the endless gush of history, which never stops changing and exerting its force on us, and which has always already moved on to pastures new while we still try to make sense of what’s just happened.

No matter how many different names Tarkovsky toyed with during the making of the film, the fact that he settled on Mirror is telling. The film itself might act as a mirror to whomever watches it, not in the sense that someone might suddenly be confronted with themselves as they are, but in our inability to ever fully grasp ourselves. This is not the only time a mirror has played a part in Tarkovsky’s films. Solaris, too, sees a planet attempting to communicate with a space station’s inhabitants by entering their subconscious and replicating what it finds. More than an attempt at self-healing, it perhaps depicts the manner in which we are confronted with the inevitable return of themes, dreams and memories that play a role for us throughout our lives and which are ultimately unassailable.