There’s a novel. Oh not a novel exactly, not exactly, you couldn’t quite call it that, it doesn’t have any of the usual features, no plot, for instance, and precious little in the way of setting, but I’ll call it a novel, for the sake of, for the sake of what exactly? No matter, no matter, it is what it is. I’ll start with what I can see, it’s a good enough place to start as any, or at least I think so. There’s a voice, or several voices, it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, or they’re all different, or they’re all the same precisely because they’re different, it’s not important, things like difference and similarity and identity don’t have any meaning any more. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about who the voice is, what the I of the novel is, the novel obliterates all is-ness, all ontology falls away in the vague mist, it doesn’t make sense to talk about what the novel is about, there is no room for about-ness either, no space for intentionality, or rather, there’s all the room in the world, an infinite space, but it’s empty, all void. I said I’d talk about what I can see. A voice, then. Or several voices. In a grey mist. It talks about itself. Or sometimes it talks about other people, or it talks about itself on the command of others, except the others are also itself. All it knows is that it must go on, it has to talk about something, except there’s nothing to say, but if it can say the right thing, if it can arrive at some truth it can be silent, but there can be no truth, so it must go on. Every attempt to talk about anything in particular is thwarted, it’s impossible, there can be no signification, there can be no significance. There are flashes of figure and background, a torso in a jar, a family in a cage, a Worm, but they melt away, they were only imagined, or rather, they were only real, the phenomenal world is only a matter of conjecture after all, especially in a novel, where nothing is real in the first place. It asks questions but gives no answers. What is the self, what is fiction, why do artists create, why do we speak, what is meaning, what is existence, meaningless, all meaningless. How am I to even start talking about this book? I could talk about other works, I could talk about Dante, I could talk about Joyce, I won’t do that, it wouldn’t help. I could be Lacan and say that the novel is about the horror of the Real, about subjects without subjectivity, about the unconscious structured like a language and the reality that lies outside language, I could be Deleuze and say that the novel is about difference and repetition, about eternal recurrence, about the multiplicity of the individual, about a subjectivity trying to refer to itself as an Oedipal whole and continually failing, always bursting out into multiple personalities, deterritorialising itself into Mahood and Worm and the others, the them, reterritorialising back into the arborescent structure of the self, insisting that it must say something about itself before it can be at peace, failing because there is no self, or I could be Schopenhauer, and say that the novel is about the Will, always reaching out for something, something it can never quite reach, speaking as willing, futilely willing the end of the Will, or I’m sure if I put my mind to it, if I used all my cunning, I could be Marx, I could talk about the subject alienated from himself, but it wouldn’t help, none of it would get me anywhere, I’d get lost in the words, they’d devour me. The novel is the death of criticism. Criticism is the attempt to draw meaning from a text, the novel has no meaning, its meaning isn’t even that there is no meaning, it points to nothing, the critics stumble over themselves trying to work out what any particular thing means, they’ve made a category error, the novel isn’t for them. It’s written in an emotionless tone but its effect is an emotional one, it is written in abstractions but it’s incredibly visceral, it’s for the reader not the critic, in writing this I’m making the same mistake, I shouldn’t have written anything, except maybe ‘read The Unnamable‘ in big letters, no matter, I’m like the Unnamable myself, I must go on, I must keep on speaking. The emotional effect. It’s like being shaken by the shoulders and slapped around the head, it’s like being a child again, being lost, but the most terrifying thing of all is the ending, I didn’t expect it, the formlessness of the novel is frightening at first, but I get used to it, I settle into its flow, I lose all hope of conclusion, I don’t expect any teleology, everything will go on exactly as it has been before, a wandering that can never end. But it does end, something catastrophic happens, something eschatonic, and the catastrophe at the end is more shocking than everything that has gone on before, at first I am plunged into a novel about nothing, without a distinct narrative voice, one in which the unity of the subject is not assured, but then there’s a door, not a door looking out onto some vague sea, a resolutely symbolic door, it’s not that there’s nothing, that would be too concrete, too definite, there is something, it’s always out of reach, there is hope, there is redemption, it’s not for us, or not yet at least. Meaninglessness is easy enough to accept, after a while, it’s everywhere, we all secretly know it, to be confronted with some vast and distant and transcendent truth is what really scares us, I face it, I cringe from its glare, it is out of reach, the novel is over, I go on.
It’s like being shaken by the shoulders and slapped around the head, it’s like being a child again, being lost, but the most terrifying thing of all is the ending,
same way i feel when i read your posts except replace 'terrifying' with relieving
DRUXXX posted:
lol yeah im sure the novel ahs no meaning
ehav you actually read it
DRUXXX posted:
i dont know about the death of criticism but your 'critique' could be the death of a 8th grade composition teacher
ok clearly you havent actually read it n/m
deadken posted:
there isn't a subject in the normal sense of the word but its not a void either i dont think.... it splits itself off into multiples and then recentres itself.... its like a body without organs, a plane of possibilities, except that all of its becomings are incomplete, they're failures, and the true goal is an un-being, a silence, a void that hasnot yet been reached..... i agree that beckett is a mystic but not that he's a nihilist, i think he really does believe in something and something important but he doesn't know what it is yet..... beckett is a very humble writer and thats rare as fuck
the point of beckett is to show that unbeing is not really possible, at least within the frame of subjectivity. this is the old kantian trope but its displayed well in his work and allows us to explore its emotional depth and suchlike.
i didnt say beckett was a nihilist himself, but that he was a mystic FOR our western nihilism
deadken posted:
i havent read any schelling so i cant talk bout Grunds but they put me in mind of a tusky lil dr seuss character, a relative of the grinch perhaps.... merry boxing day
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zizeks-Ontology-Transcendental-Subjectivity-Phenomenology/dp/0810124564 read this, the ebook is on fvckverso
franz_katka posted:
i really like beckett sometimes. i also really like adorno's "trying to understand endgame" sometimes also because it also addresses this point of intelligibility-yet-meaninglessness that i think is so essential to the political dimension of beckett's work with this mimesis of the capitalist ratio which is itself internally intelligible yet completely meaningless. so yeah. i guess what i am saying is that you are doing an adorno thing sort of.
beckett succeeds in overcoming meaninglessness via (a sort of) meaninglessness i think in a really interesting way, he circumvents the postmodern condition of co-option into nihilism, outmaneuvering through a direct confrontation with the precise coordinate of the subject that the nihilism hinges on
babyfinland posted:
yeah, i absolutely agree. there's a really interesting sort of mimesis in beckett insofar as it's a reflection of a meaningless that resists naming. like, it's a mimesis that produces a reflection that is appreciably different than the object of reflection. i see a loose resonance to irigaray's theories of language, esp. in her mimesis of freud in this sex which is not one with the double movement of a simultaneous recapitulation and rejection of phallocratic language. we have beckett recapitulating the meaninglessness of the western rationality but also rejecting its meaninglessness in favor of intelligibility-yet-meaninglessness, i think, because of the absurd context he creates for it.
babyfinland posted:deadken posted:
i havent read any schelling so i cant talk bout Grunds but they put me in mind of a tusky lil dr seuss character, a relative of the grinch perhaps.... merry boxing dayhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Zizeks-Ontology-Transcendental-Subjectivity-Phenomenology/dp/0810124564 read this, the ebook is on fvckverso
this has been on my list for ages.... i wanna nail ontology Down so i can do some grapplin' w/ badiou....
babyfinland posted:
that stuff about deleuze is dumb and you dont mean it youre just farting off. rude.
deleuzian wafflin' is my speciality. chicken and deleuze and waffles
deadken posted:
word me too
franz_katka posted:babyfinland posted:yeah, i absolutely agree. there's a really interesting sort of mimesis in beckett insofar as it's a reflection of a meaningless that resists naming. like, it's a mimesis that produces a reflection that is appreciably different than the object of reflection. i see a loose resonance to irigaray's theories of language, esp. in her mimesis of freud in this sex which is not one with the double movement of a simultaneous recapitulation and rejection of phallocratic language. we have beckett recapitulating the meaninglessness of the western rationality but also rejecting its meaninglessness in favor of intelligibility-yet-meaninglessness, i think, because of the absurd context he creates for it.
is this the operation of communism vis a vis capitalism
DRUXXX posted:
real talk tho dead ken i actually liked the op a lot. i was just jivin' you a little bit. i think your 'critique' did what it was supposed to do because it expressed, more than anything, the feelings the unnameable gave you. i love literature, but i hate all the pretentious shit people write about literature. i think it should be about feeling. (or that might just be the way i justify to myself the fact that i really do enjoy reading martin amis books lol)
its not a critique really more an appreciation/understanding..... whats great about beckett is that he never really lays out concepts like say celine or even joyce, he embodies them, he's detatched but very visceral... the trilogy provides fertile ground for the kind of theoretical discussion bf's engaging in + while i think thats interesting at the same time it will always be very limited in relation to the totality of the work.... beckett defies total understanding, it must be felt.....
martin amis is awful tho 4realz
babyfinland posted:
i only read kindle. it deterritorializes the self of the books by eliminating their discrete objecthoods into a digitalized multiplicity within a single portal or something DUrr DUrr french
no no if you want to deleuzesplain the kindle you need to say virtuality a lot
babyfinland posted:
is this the operation of communism vis a vis capitalism
i don't know. communism is bad.
franz_katka posted:babyfinland posted:
is this the operation of communism vis a vis capitalismi don't know. communism is bad.
lol woot
babyfinland posted:franz_katka posted:
i really like beckett sometimes. i also really like adorno's "trying to understand endgame" sometimes also because it also addresses this point of intelligibility-yet-meaninglessness that i think is so essential to the political dimension of beckett's work with this mimesis of the capitalist ratio which is itself internally intelligible yet completely meaningless. so yeah. i guess what i am saying is that you are doing an adorno thing sort of.beckett succeeds in overcoming meaninglessness via (a sort of) meaninglessness i think in a really interesting way, he circumvents the postmodern condition of co-option into nihilism, outmaneuvering through a direct confrontation with the precise coordinate of the subject that the nihilism hinges on
You might say he.... Annihilates The Real