Fanon and Friends - Chien S.T.

The waiter made you wait with your hand raised - before you caught his attention. The maid thought the crows attack her twice, on separate days, because she’s a maid. The bus doesn't stop when you flag. You aren't as slow as an old man.
It is night time, the street lamps are on, the street isn't darker than your skin.

Clementine - Chien Swee-Teng

the poet of chips and beer,
interrupts our strumming and singing
like a grandpa;
asking about the last train
but he is also the poet of flowers, although I forgot what he said
when he was walking past some red tropical flowers of december
is there a difference between chicks and ladies?
no, says the poet of half-moon, as he points to the sky
the poet of the river, look at the murky brown water
was it ever green?
the same river we threw glasses, beer bottles and one chic plastic chair into
asked the poet of
flower
women
moon
and river
and out of spite, he called his best friend Harry Potter
the poet of rock.

Fireman - Chien Swee-Teng

1. It was not exactly an affair, 'I met her before him.' [Although we were young, she's my ex. She left me for a fireman]
2. 'But it's so unfair, now he gets to smell her hair'. [E, B, Am]
3. I can only see her when he is working: sleeping, slacking at the station waiting for the next disaster or putting out fire.
4. I am not a pyromaniac, but I started burning down buildings within our district, to keep him busy, so that I can see you, sending him 5 or 7 miles away from the Central Fire Station, 10 km from home, and return with a shade of charcoal, no, a layer of soot... but he is not the tired grey of the miners, he is the endless replay of the heroic firemen who died in 9/11, a simulated version though.
5. Each time we meet, one building, or one unit is on fire. Thus, the only surely fire proof day is the day he is on leave.
6. I started with the overpriced restaurant, the pawn shop where I pawned my mother's jewellery, the indie book store (where the owner pretends to be your friend), all the art galleries and museums, the spas, squatters, bars, clubs and pubs art students frequent, the playgrounds, golf course, casinos, amusement parks, public and private estates...
7. but I left the sleazy hotel alone, and the provision shop, the hardware store untouched.
8. And soon, was it a year or two, I ran out of things to burn, but the heat did not die down,
9. like her hair, like most stories it needed a twisted. No, I did not start burning random people on the street.
9.1 Burn my house, or on one occassion there was a fire somewhere although 'I' didn't start the fire, and when I got home it was my house, my apartment.
9.1.1 My flat to trap and kill Mr Fireman
9.2 Burn the fire station
9.3 Burn her apartment, Mr Fireman returns to see her with him (which is me)
9.3.1 Saving his wife and the man like a hero
9.3.2 watching the adulterous couple burn
9.3.3 both stood and watch the woman burn (to provoke the feminist readers)

Lungs - Chien Swee-Teng

Zhou returned to the village last week. We were sitting outside a tavern that was closed too early - like all the taverns in the world, he said. Zhou was drinking a jar of wine, a fat clay jar. I was sipping a bowl of plum juice. He asked me a direct but difficult question. For me, it was more difficult to answer than why banditry is axiomatic. A scholar he encountered in the city said to him, sometimes we simply like our job, we enjoy our task. Zhou asked, so is alienation or exploitation still applicable in this case? Intuitively, I said it is merely ideological, false consciousness, I used examples such as those in the assembly line, the producers are seldom the owners, and deviated to the peasants and landlords, personal preference would not change anything, the feudal structure. But I know it was not clear. He did not ask any further. I am not sure if he was perplexed or thinking. He looked away and gazed at a young lady walking by. Although I have the image of him dozing off or distracted by a new pimple on his face during class reading, I know he would be able to understand if it was clearer. I was thinking about the rice fields of the other provinces, although I have never seen or stepped into a rice field before. I was thinking about the slogan Ne travzaillez jamais! Perhaps that was the only thing I could remember. Perhaps it was because of the nightly heavy drinking. Then we both heard the cymbal, it was the middle of third watch. Then I told him a prostitute who loves her job because she is a nympho would not change the fact that the body is used or abused. Instead of seeing it as countering the notion of exploitation, it should be read as an instance of double exploitation. First, the body is abused by the brothel, and then, the body is used by herself, for pleasure. I could elaborate further until I contradict myself, but I didn’t. I was a little disappointed that I only know how to use vulgar examples to elucidate a point. Then he turned back to look at me and grinned and then began to laugh, the laughter was at once idiotic, mischievous, and drunk, his trademark laughter, it was a deep laughter, I could hear his lungs. It reminded me of a teacher who is studying the movement of ants. Then we moved on to eradicate this binary between holy and profane, introduced Agamben into the discussion, about proper use, friendship, marriage as a contract to use each other’s organ, about the notion of profanation, and its relation to Catholicism, the Romans or Greeks.

Temple Fair - Chien Swee-Teng

His surname is Song but he doesn't like to sing. How is he related to Song Jiang (宋江) and what was allegorised between Song Jiang and the Great Song (大宋). Estranged. A man and his state, the Great Song Empire (大宋帝国)! Song marginalised Song! The official is the bandit. He reads history to make up story. He ignores those who spoke to him about historical accuracy and dates. They are like those who enjoy being condemned to cataloguing books, paintings and artefacts. He was at the temple fair. He says, I met him at the crowded temple fair. Noon, he was there with her. She was bored, lacking happiness, at the mansion, staring at her reflection in the pond, longing for the return of the other man. He suggested to her the temple fair, the peddlers and acrobats. The biggest bully in town and his lackeys would harass her but he will be there to protect her. But he doesn't know martial arts. He would be beaten up. But a hero from another town might be passing by and could save her while Song savours the taste of the dust on the ground. He felt down, lacking prosperity, because in the morning someone at chasi (tea hall) judged his character from his calligraphy, from the black ink he spilled, but the picture of her in the garden framed by the pillars...I cut him off, not his head. I thought Song must either be very drunk or mad. This is Paris, fin de siècle, 19th century. What kind of Song dynasty nonsense is he trying to feed me? We are along the arcade, the long arcade, the long passageway. It stretches so long that Walter Benjamin couldn't finish writing about it. He was just too long winded, Song says. This is the age of iron and glass not wood and stone. The poet is Baudelaire, the chee hong kia, Rimbaud, the siow ging na! But our jiu is neither bee jiu (rice wine) nor ang jiu (red wine), Song says. We walked slowly along the shops, mostly shops selling jewellery and watches. I stopped and peered into a shop window. But only nude velvet jewellery busts and amputated plastic hands were on display. It was midnight. Where have they hidden the watches, necklaces and rings when the shop closed, at this time? I told Song we should give it a try one of these days. Break the glass and steal the busts, fuck the alarm. I noticed our reflection on the glass. The humidity here has flattened our hair... fucking tropical weather.

An Indian security guard, with a torch in hand, walk towards the two drunken men and chased them away from the shopping mall, "Excuse me, no loitering outside." The two men threw the half-empty beer cans it at him, and ran away.

Point Form

1. On the bus, about twelve midnight, I past an empty carpark next to a hawker centre. (actually, it was only almost empty, a white truck was parked there)
2. Faint amber framed by the dark trees surrounding the rectangular lot, this scene was quiet and still. But I, as the only passenger on top of this slow moving double-decker, was the one who could not keep still - to make an image move without moving it.
3. I thought about what I always remember, each time I see a huge empty carpark at night, what he said about twenty years ago, when the band, all the way from Seattle, was here to promote the album but did not perform, 'give me an empty carpark and I will play you a gig.'
4. The white truck is the type with a heavy air-tight door at the back - good for transporting ice, chicken, laundry or artworks. Perhaps, the type of truck that killed a French literary theorist I half understood.
5. I thought about the awkwardness of being a loquacious stutterer, all the colour-blind painters which are celebrated as unique in art schools now. I thought about the trouble of a half-literate man who has decided to write down what he is too shy, or lacking in eloquence, to say.
6. Trouble, if only it is an exaggeration to call it misery. Two hours to type a paragraph is trouble not misery.
7. Or told to write instead of telling because his son told him he is too long-winded.
8. I find the convenience of silence suspicous than virtuous.

Kafka estaría orgulloso

Casi pierdo la vida de un volantazo intentando entregar a tiempo un shampoo para piojos! Desde la Farmacia de Dios, Kafka estaría orgulloso

Theatre - Painting

‘My teacher used to be a painter, he told me he hates theatre, perhaps because of how he was treated as a scenic painter when he was working for a theatre company. But he told me it was about the dialogue. Few years later, he wrote and directed a play. The actors were talking. It was shown in a local theatre and then Europe, Brussels. He is also making films now. Amongst the people I know, he is the one who has watched the most films. But I don’t have many friends. I read in the papers that it was shown in Venice. I am happy for him. But I heard the Italians are theatrical.’

Images - Chien Swee-Teng

I heard more about the death of a dictator from a friend who has seen the video footage. Inside my head, I only have a vague image of the photograph on the front page. It reminded me of the head shots of two dead men years back. They were the sons of another dictator that was executed later by his people under the instigation of some other foreign power. The obscenity of these images is equivalent to the closed-up moments of triple X porn, and the truisms about happiness, life and death in the spiritually pornographic speech of a New Age monk or guru with an enlightened smile. It is horrible and, at the same time, ironic that these images denuding death could be published ‘uncensored’ on the morning papers, while we continue our endless debate about the moral and social aspects of categorising fictitious sex and violence in films and plays.

But I find it somewhat pointless, if not ridiculous, to think about this while sitting on an old wooden bench outside a neighbourhood clinic and smoking. An armchair critic sits on the armchair at least. The clinic is closed today - or perhaps at this time of the day. A middle-aged woman walked past me. Framed by her untidy shoulder length hair, the features of her face are slightly distorted, more akin to those photographs exposing cases of plastic surgery gone wrong than natural birth defects. I thought, but the face of the earth is more than just a case of plastic surgery gone wrong. Perhaps, what happened to her could also be the result of an accident. She noticed I was observing her. I looked away.

A rather old black cat came towards me and sat under a cracked, dirty blue plastic chair next to the bench. Despite the thinning and greying fur it should still be regarded as a black, I guess. The cat was spying on a bald-headed Javan Myna pecking at a piece chicken bone next to the green rubbish bin. I once said to the friend who told about the video footage that a bird pecking at chicken bone is a cannibalistic sight. The friend once, after seeing another bald-headed Javan Myna, lamented, ‘look at the kind of shit we are eating, even the birds are losing feathers.’ It does not matter if his statement is scientifically valid. When I threw the cigarette butt on the floor and stood up the black cat ran away, the Javan Myna, alarmed by this series of manoeuvres, took flight, leaving the chicken bone on the floor to resume the status as an unwanted litter. Out of curiosity, I looked at the board next to the closed metal shutters of the clinic for the consultation hours. Why do doctors need such a long lunch break? And next to it is a poster advertising the health check packages and the prices in larger fonts, larger than the yellowing white fonts stating the consultation hours at least.

Song for my Province – Chien Swee-Teng

Song for my Province (28.10.2011) – Chien Swee-Teng

‘The Austrain misogynist, Otto Weininger, divided women into two categories: mothers and prostitutes. Similarly, men can be classed as fathers and profligates. The fathers again can be graded into two groups: the fathers of children and fathers of “men.” Since all the former can do is beget children, not bring them up, they still have something in common with profligates. The latter not only beget children but also try to educate them, in order that they may be genuine men in the future.’ - Lu Xun, ‘Random Thoughts (no. 25, 1918)’
If it is Roman numbers and Arabic letters, the price of four slabs of meat might be better. To braise (Lor), steam (Chway), because I am patient, grille (Peng), I leave no stone unturned, to pan-fry (Chien)? the oil, but I am profound, I like it deep-fried. We love to share our concern for the price of meat but not the meat. Vegetarians love to despise us and secretly hope we die from all kinds of cancer. But they are kinder, but they are kinder than us, they love animals.
We love the girls from our hometown, fair limbs, flesh-vegetables (bak chye) it doesn’t matter if they shave – their armpits, I mean. Or faint shadow of moustache on another adorable face. I am lying.
I met a German girl, and she told me about the hairy woes on her legs and arms. We discussed Buddhism (a popular topic amongst many Westerners now) and the hairlessness of monks and nuns, and some cunts in school.
I knock on the wall like a door, I forgot to tell you that I am strong, that I am so strong that the wall cracks instead of my bones. And hairlines are born to form a distorted map of the world. But I can’t see my province from it, knowing it is not about the cartographer who prefers pounding than drawing. I live on exaggeration.
I notice a trace of my blood on the wall, few drips, not a spot or a little red dot. ‘Blood on the sheets again’, white sheet but it could be the dark virgin I bought last night, or a menstruation blood of a careless loveless 45 year old. A 78 year old lady is watching the advertisement of Japanese sanitary pad on TV. But she doesn’t say much about the Japanese occupation in 1942. This song is not dedicated to women or to criticise mothers to be. I was born to be unfilial.
I am proud of my province with a name longer than the territory, the almost invisible territory on the world map. Not a problem of scale, 1:63,360, 1 inch = 1 mile. And 1:1000000 made it worse, 1 cm is 10km, pocket size map of Sydney is 1: 15000. Kannina, I failed mathematics in school.
I am proud of my province with a bastardised name, took a cat for a lion when we only have tigers, now dead tigers of Bukit Timah, now intimate friends of paper tigers. What prince, what Hindu, what traitor, what Sang Nila, what Utama, it only reminded me of the word Kannina. For a day, after school, my classmates substituted Kannina with Sang Nila and Sang Nila with Kannina in class. And Utama for conversation in Mandarin. What Srivijayan, what Indo, what Chinese envoy, what Chinese monk, I am not a prince with mythical power or intelligence. I only would throw myself into the sea, than the crown, because of my fear of drowning. What lanchiao lord of the sea! Whose grandfather!
In school, we were told that scientists of the West said tiger and lion are classified as Cats. On my way home I looked at the skinny stray cats around the void deck. One of them, I guessed female, was licking herself. I was reminded of some poses of showgirls in United States from a movie. Science lessons in school must be a protracted joke imported from Germany. I was told that huge rats used to bully their ancestors, some came from Persia and Siam, until the great William Farquhar came to save the day. Anyway, the cheaper beer here must be ordered by the names of cats, fierce cats, black cats, tigers and lions in different language or dialect. Tiger Beer, Leo, Singha…I did not do biology and hate to visit the zoo. The most dangerous species there is considered visitors.
The conversation ended but she forgot to hang up. She did not put the phone down properly. No click. It is landline. I hear the TV. Earlier she played me a song recorded on cassette tape through the phone. In return, to continue this potlatch of muffled sound, I played the acoustic guitar and sang out of tune for her. Scratching of strings is more prominent than the plucking. She is talking to her sister now. I hear screaming, chattering, screaming of joy, bliss and innocence compounded, and laughter and chattering of joy, bliss, unfounded excitement and potential hysteria compounded. I hear a man’s voice, the father, I guessed. Is that how she behaves at home? How she speaks to her family. I put the phone down. I hear it click.
First time out of the province, on our way to Malacca, driving along the high way listening to The Rolling Stones the palm tree plantations, is it mathematical or dynamical sublime? Sorry for the Kantish question. The Rolling Stones played at the badminton hall in 1965 which is to say the The Rolling Stones played in Geylang. The Rolling Stones Live in Geylang! The two friends who went with you are dead. One of them, David an ex-cop spent the rest of his life as a full-time gambler, a hustler in the billiard saloon at the basement of Golden Mile. Now you are studying Golden Mile as an architectural phenomenon. We met him when he was jaywalking, crossing Jalan Sultan. He died of heart attack few years later.
The promise to be a man of the world - let’s return to the price of meat and related matters. Not to waste your life in a basement. The advertisement in the newspaper today inspired this provincial song, I must cite my reference. Fresh Buys, Available at 85* stores! Argentina Packham Pears – $ 1.95 US California Red Globe Grapes – 38 cents 100g China Winter Dates 350g -$2.25 per punnet Italy Angeleno Plus 1 kg-$2.95 per punnet China Yuan Huang Pears - $ 1 for 2 Spain Melons - $4.95 each China Spinach 250g - $1.10 per pack Fresh Grey Prawns (Stateless) - $1.08 100g Japan Sea Bass - $1.44 100g Australian Chilled Twee Bah – 98 cents 100g.

Future Song Lyrics - Darren Hayman

Future Song (Bracket parts unsure)

Verse I

This look nothing like it does in the brochure

The beds are double and (there) should be a four poster

We should be booked on the 19th floor

with a view of the lakes and the view of the mountains.

This girl looks nothing like the girl on the cover

She’s got acne and the braces,

she’s a (mother)

The photo shows a nymphette who could only be nineteen with big brown eyes.

Chorus

And the future is not what they said it would be

in the Sunday papers, the Seven-tiers (or 70th)

where’s my monorail, where’s my hover car, where’s my robot slave

My wife is into Elisabeth Sladen and she’s not Lesley Anne Down

But we live with disappointment in a small apartment

making do with what we found (Cheo Chai Hiang)

Verse II

They don’t make movie like they used to

They don’t make music like they used to

I don’t really feel the things I am supposed to

but my wife helps me work it thru’

Repeat Chorus

Instrumental

Repeat Chorus

For Eugene

.It was published in 1991. Printed on the cover page is the title 'Things to Translate'. Written on the same page, beneath the title 'For Eugene, in Stoke-on-Trent, 25 VIII 2003 (with all my best wishes!) Piotr Sommer' and a drawing of a stickman holding a stalk of flower - not a faceless stickman but the kind with a smiley. Piotr Sommer is the author, a Polish poet. I found this thin paperback in a secondhand bookstore about five or six years ago. Often when I open this book, I would come across the same page and read this message before proceeding to the content. Although I am not the addressee, I have read this handwritten message lying on my bed, in the living room, in school, on the bus, in the toilet. I thought about how and why the book had ended up in the secondhand bookstore? I speculated about the relationship between Piotr and Eugene. Why flowers? Superficial, merely acquaintances, Eugene has no interest in this book, and it was dumped together with some bills, statements and invitation cards piled under the coffee table with the old newspapers and magazines, after a month or so. Maybe, they were once very close, intense but the friendship has soured very badly and Eugene just couldn't stand the sight of the book. Was it misplaced and sold as a part of a bulk by a rag and bone man? Perhaps this Eugene is already dead and his family cleared everyhing in his room, including his bookshelf with a modest but eclectic collection. I thought, this Eugene could be one of the few Eugenes I know. The Eugene from sixth form, the well-loved Eugene, the much-praised Eugene, some forgotten Eugenes. Related words and names came to mind, Eugène, the French Eugene, Eugenides, eugenics. Perhaps, this Eugene is an avid but selective reader who maintains the purity of his collection like a fascist. If that's the case, I would say to the imagined (but not imaginary) Eugene that it is not 'a matter of of taste'. But rather how some people without the faculty of taste are allowed to express their opinions, and are given the rights to act on their tastelessness.

.

Fanon and Friends

The waiter made you wait with your hand raised
before you caught his attention

The maid thought the crows attack her twice, on separate days, because she’s a maid.

The bus didn’t stop when you flag. You weren’t as slow as an old man.
It was night time, the street lamps were on, the street wasn’t darker than your skin.

on ash

Indeed, if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped on something.

Chernobyl 1986 - Jorge Volpi, Season of Ash, p.10

Chernobyl 1986 - Jorge Volpi, Season of Ash, p.10

Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranski, with intense grey eyes, had just joined the Armada. Held back in school because of mathematics and spelling, and prone to bullying his brothers, he celebrated his recruitment: He was seventeen years old, and the only things that mattered to him were money and women. When a sergeant suggested he join the special labour force that was working in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and promised him extra rubbles every week, he abandoned the wide-cheeked girl whose bed he shared and went off in search of adventure.

Transported in obscure military trains, he reached his objective after three days: an improvised encampment on the Ukrainian plain. By then, hundreds of volunteers were dreaming of long hours of combat. A tall, thin sergeant explained the mission to his squad. At 5:00 A.M., an army truck drove him and four of his comrades to a spot seven kilometres from Pripiat. The moon was shining through the trees. Their orders were blunt: They were to kill every animal and clear the land – that’s right, the whole place – to free it from the plague. They were no longer soldiers but butchers. The local peasants called them liquidators.

Speranski almost wept when he shot his first deer, a doe only a few months old, but after a few weeks of constantly emptying his rifle, he barely took note of his victims. The corpses of sheep, cows, cats, goats, chickens, ducks and hounds carpeted the meadows before being doused with gasoline and burned like heretics. The liquidators had to eradicate everything the monster hadn’t devoured. Within a radius of ten kilometres, all cities and town were demolished, the trees cut down, the animal life decimated, the grass taken away. The only way to guarantee the survival of the human race was to make the plain into a desert. Mikhail Mikhailovich went about his task with the same blankness as the executioners who put his grandparents to death in the Kolyma camps. After contributing so faithfully to the massacre, Speranski found life less than attractive. Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, he would be executed for armed robbery.

Notes. India Song. Duras

- Singing of a mad beggar woman from Laos, from Savannakhet, dead children she drops along the way, walking to Calcutta.
- Not about mad woman but of Embassy love affairs, of a French woman with her lover or lovers, young attaché, Vice Consul…
- Shadow, elongated shadow of a man cast on the stone steps of the villa. Folds like a black accordion.
- Smoke, incense or mosquito coil burning or the guy smoking. It is a French film after all: ‘People of France, a good looking depressed guy smoking a cigarette is not a movie?’ - Peter, Family Guy.
- mentioned mist after the wind.
- Disembodied Voices. Didn’t see any Indian in the film, despite title. Except an Indian waiter dressed in white, even the turban. But he is not a white Indian. Didn’t see the crowd in the ballroom, at the reception, only noises, the mad woman, the gossipers, the seagulls… actually we see no one else except the French woman and her lovers. We only hear voices. No Indian songs although mentioned ‘India Song’
- Other Names of Places, Lahore, Bengal, Calcutta, the Ganges, delta and islands. Wife of Spanish Ambassador. Shalimar Gardens. Shanghai and Spain. 1937.
- Mentioned tennis court, deserted tennis court, nothing to do with Tennis Court Oath, but led to an Oath or death of another kind
- Humidity, she has Venetian blood. Loves dancing but ‘no one’s dancing in this heat. Immobility is the only remedy’, and something about slowing blood circulation. The piano, out of tune because of the humidity.
- Reflection. Played a lot with the mirror 1) came into the frame from the right, she was in her red gown, it was her reflection, followed by her person. 2) She bends over the piano, in her red gown, he walks towards her, entering the scene from the left, once again, it is man who follows his reflection. Reminded the piano is in front of the mirror. 3) Bullet hole in the mirror, from the dialogue.
- Leprosy, ‘leprosy of heart’, he shot the lepers. Couldn’t see because of the mist. Boredom, ‘boredom is personal’ Writing, ‘You write?’ ‘I used to, thought I could.’ ‘Love can be shouted’ – Vice Consul who wants to stay over for just one night. ‘Never loved…’ suspects ever really. He is a virgin. He claims. ‘The air smells of mud and leprosy’

Triangulation or, didn’t shower - Chien Swee-Teng

Triangulation or, didn’t shower
There are many triadic systems to preach on weekdays:
Three kingdoms, index, symbol, icon - imaginary, symbolic and real…
‘but only opium from the Golden Triangle is real to help me distinguish it from reality’, ‘and time and me to disappear like planes and ships into the overrated mystery of Bermudas triangle’
and Lacan like Immanuel Kant only reminds them of the word cunt, I guess. Thinking of smoking break again.
Kannina… your hair is oily, you are smelling your hand after scratching your crotch.
I know there is another triangle there. I know you are good at geometry and the letter ‘A’.

Lan Chiao Plural South - Chien Swee Teng

moss shading the red brick wall of an old army camp green, not the ill-fitting uniforms… glad that you left.
Tropical diseases itch the East of my skin, stupid Bermudas, slippers and topless grins. You want to look tanned next to a golden hair, read nothing about sunshine and anus to explain the colour.
… opposite end of the digestive tract…
We shall not send ourselves there. We must re-educate the weather here - rehabilitate the climate… up North.

Family of Past Futures - Chien Swee-Teng

Father of Philippine Printmaking

Mother of Mexican Poetry

Children of Heidegger

Son of the Minister

Mock Human Meat - Chien Swee-Teng

Eat Dog Meat
Sing Bird Song

Ah... and horizontal lines and noise of metal shutter door

No Pork on Mondays

World is One Single Scream - Rodriogo Fresán

Pan is one of those two people a week who - statistics say - throw themselves onto the rails with British punctuality just before the train's triumphal entrance.

A woman screams when she sees him jump. A woman screams when she sees a woman screaming. All at once - screams are more contagious than laughter, and there are so many screams in this story - it's the same scream that leaps from woman to woman, from mouth to mouth. The same scream makes the cars brake, and the brakes scream too at the unexpected and futile effort of having to stop all those wheels and all the steel riding on those wheels. Yes, without warning the whole world is one single scream.

interrupted

I have embarked on the study of metaphysics several times, but happiness always interrupted - Macedonio Fernandez

The Bus and the Road - Lu Xun

For more than a year now I have spoken very seldom to young people, because since the revolution there has been very little scope for talking. You are either provocative or reactionary, neither of which does anyone any good. After my return to Peking this time, however, some old friends asked me to come here and say a few words and, not being able to refuse them, here I am. But owing to one thing and another, I never decided what to say - not even what subject to speak on.

I meant to fix on a subject in the bus on the way here, but on the road is so bad that the bus kept bouncing a foot off the ground, making it impossible to concentrate. That is when it struck me that it is no use just adopting one thing from abroad. If you have buses, you need good roads too. Everything is bound to be influenced by its surroundings, and this applies to literature as well - to what in China is called the new literature, or revolutionary literature.

However patriotic we are, we probably have to admit that our civilization is rather backward. Everything new has come to us from abroad, and most of us are quite bewildered by new powers. Peking has not yet been reduced to this, but International Settlement in Shanghai, for example, you have foreigners in the centre, surrounded by a cordon of interpreters, detectives, police, 'boys' and so on, who understand their languages and know the rules of foreign concessions. Out this cordon are the common people...

Some Thoughts on our New Literature - Lu Xun

Never Any End to Paris - Enrique Vila-Matas, New Directions, 2011, p. 30

I also saw Perec himself in real life. It was halfway through 1974, the year he published Species of Spaces. I'd seen lots of photographs of him, but that day, in the bookshop on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I saw him arrive for the launch of a book by Phillippe Sollers and do very strange things I won't go into now. What is certain is that for quite a while, so impressed to be seeing him in real life, I watched him intently, so intently that, at one moment, his face was a hair's breadth from mine. Perec noticed this anomaly - a stranger was a whisker away from his goatee - and reacted by commenting out loud, as if trying to let me know I should take my face elsewhere: "The world's a big place, young man."

*Se - Giorgio Agamben p.136, Potentialities

'It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of human life was sacred, whereas for the second what is sacred is life itself).'

Assume vs Presume

presume vs. assume. Although they're used interchangeably now, to presume originally meant to assert that something is true without complete evidence; to decide something without absolute certainty. (Since absolute certainty is impossible, you could say that we presume everything, including the physical condition of the world.) To assume, on the other hand, meant to acknowledge that not all evidence was in, but to act as though something were true.

*****************************************************

In many contexts when the meaning is 'to suppose', the two words are interchangeable: e.g. I assume/presume you are coming to the party. But, as the Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage (Ed. Robert Allen. Oxford University Press, 1999) points out, 'Fowler (1926) maintained that there is a stronger element of postulation or hypothesis in assume and of a belief held on the basis of external evidence in presume.' The Oxford English Dictionary definitions are very similar. Assume is 'to take for granted as the basis of argument or action'; presume is 'to take for granted, to presuppose, to count upon'. There is a faint suggestion of presumptuousness about presume.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English which is based on recent usage evidence, provides these definitions:

assume suppose to be the case, without proof.
presume suppose that something is the case on the basis of "probability"; take for granted that something exists or is the case.

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexper...assume?view=uk

Assume has a variety of meanings. It basically means "to take up or on oneself," "to suppose or take for granted," "to pretend," or "to be taken up." The noun form is assumption.


Presume is related to and similar to assume, but it has the sense of doing it beforehand. It means "to dare or venture without prior knowledge," "to assume as believable without direct proof," "to take as a premise, subject to further proof," or "to behave arrogantly or overconfidently." The noun form is presumption.


A presumption is often taken up or assumed to be true until proven otherwise, as presumed innocent. Sometimes it has the sense of behaving in a superior manner, as in to presume upon someone. Presumption often has the sense of blind overconfidence, or going beyond the limits of proper manners. Presumptive means "based on reasonable grounds of evidence" as in presumptive heir. Presumptuous means "unusually confident or bold, often arrogant," or "foolhardy."


To assume suggest taking by one's own will or power for good or evil, right or wrong. If he assumes a position that is not rightfully his, he has arrogated or usurped it. A person can assume office either lawfully or unlawfully. When a debater assumes something, he or she may take it for granted without explaining it. If a person takes to himself character traits or a position he does not posses, he pretends to or affects the character he is assuming. A smooth talker often assumes something to be true that would be challenged if directly stated. When people claim something, they assert that they have a right to it. When they assume it, they take it.

The adjective assumed means "taken for granted" or "fictitious." When used as an adjective, assuming means "arrogant," its opposite, unassuming is more common. Something that is assumable is something that can be taken, as an assumable loan.

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000304.htm

In other words, you should not assume things when thinking or planning. You should check details and ask questions.

You can, therefore, use the word assume when speaking or writing because you are, in fact, checking. The person you are writing or speaking to is supposed to set you straight if your assumption is wrong.

I assume he will be at the meeting. (You expect the reader/listener to inform you if your assumption is wrong.)

I presume he will be at the meeting.

If the person is important to your meeting, you should never “assume” he will be there. You should check by writing or speaking.

Rabelais and his World

p. ix - no one voice/ quoted speech
p.16/ 421- formal and familiar addresses, polite as false to the familiar
p.405 - Father and Son as continuation than break
p.463 - use of numbers, symbolic
465 - language and philosophy/ideology, language and dialects, latin (classic. medieval), early French... dual language and transformation of vulgar Latin, Italianisation of French...

No Pork on Monday

His favourite stall is closed today
Most of the pork-related soup and food
A friend of my did not know why
For Sunday, I was told, the abattoir is closed
And for those that are open for business the pork isn't fresh.

That is why he is having lunch with me on every Monday

The Order of Animals

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

(also in History of Sexuality and some interviews, on the emphasis on eating than sexual taboo)

Article: Woman in China roasts puppy alive
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/woman-roasted-puppy-alive-061603091.html

Hey,

read the sanctimonious comments. What about chickens, pigs, cows and fish? Your book should've been Dog Meat not Diced Meat to irritate more people. The order of animals: pandas, whales, sharks, dogs, cats, birds, chicken, cows... endangered species, pets, poultry, cattle. Barbaric because dogs did not move up to the category of Pets in some places. Houseflies, cockroaches and lizards remain within the category of Pests in most places. Thus, public displays of sympathy for the puppy betray the fascistic inclination of the masses.

Red Herring - not about why some animals shouldn't be harmed, but rather why it is justifiable to kill (or eat) certain species. Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I know you aren't an animal lover too, and love to eat meat.

absent city - notes

The Girl p.46-7 "Extravagant References"
The girl (Laura) was born healthy. It was only with time that they began to notice certain strange signs. Her system of hallucinations was the topic of a complicated report that appeared in a scientific journal, but her father had deciphered it long before that. Yves Fonagy called it "extravagant references." In these highly unusual cases the patient imagines that everything that occurs around him is a projection of his personality. The patient excludes real people from his experience, because he considers himself much more intelligent than anyone else. The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself. She was constantly preoccupied by mechanical objects, especially electric light bulbs. She saw them as words, every time one was turned on it was like someone had begun to speak. Thus she considered darkness as a form of silent thinking. One summer afternoon (when she was five years old) she looked at an electric fan spinning on a dresser. She thought it was a living being, a female living being. The girl of the air, her soul trapped in a cage. Laura said that she lived "there," and raised her hand to indicate the ceiling. There, she said, moving her head from left to right. Her mother turned off the fan. That is when she began having difficulties with language. She lost the capacity to use personal pronouns. With time she stopped using them altogether, then hid all the words she knew in her memory. She would only utter a little clucking sound as she opened and closed her eyes. The mother separated the boys from their sister because she was afraid that it was contagious. One of the small town beliefs. [...] They did not want her to be committed. So they took her twice a week to an institute in La Plata and followed the orders given by Doctor Arana, who treated her with electric shock therapy. He explained that the girl lived in an extreme emotional void. That is why Laura's language was slowly becoming more and more abstract and unpersonalized. At first she still used the correct names for food. She would say "butter," "sugar," "water," but later began to refer to different food items in groups that were disconnected from their nutritive nature. Sugar became "white sand," butter, "soft mud," water, "wet air."

p.74 Mirror
because politics is a mirror... faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.
It swallows up faces.
But the mirror is always there. The truth is television is a mirror. A mirror that holds onto the faces.

p.116 Atomic Bomb
The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else that are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter's invention, he built an atomic plant for Peron using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Peron believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines for him that were never used.

p.121
Macedonio and the fundamental chord (guitar) the entire universe is derived

p.122 M & E
"... Macedonio fell in love with Elena before he met her, as he used to say, because they had told him so much abut her that it was as if a spirit had come to visit him. Even many of the things he had done earlier in life were to impress her at a distance and to try to get her to fall in love with him, he would say. He always thought that his passion is what made her ill, he always thought it as his fault that she died. Macedonio saw her for the first time at a cousin's house the day she turned eighteen, and again by coincidence one afternoon on a street in Azul. This second meeting proved to be definitive. He had gotten off the train because he was doing an experiment having to do with the length of thoughts. He got off there without knowing where he was was because he had already traveled the number of leagues needed for his thoughts, and had decided to send a telegram from there saying he would be coming back late. When he left the post office he sat down at a bar to have a brandy, and then walked around the corner and ran into Elena, who was looking at window of a shoe store, as if she had been placed there just so Macedonio would find her. She started to laugh because she thought it was funny to see that man dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit at siesta time, as if he were sleepwalking in a lost town in the middle of the Pampas. He looked like a seminarist going out to ask for alms for the poor parish. And I was asking for alms, Macedonio would say, because she gave me the grace of her beauty and of her intelligence, bright as the morning sun. He invited her to have tea with him at the cafe in the train station, and from that afternoon on, they were together until the day she died."

p.129-30
I know the Police Museum, with the wax reproductions of the criminals. Punk Head, Madman Gaitan... wearing the clothes they had on when they were arrested or killed (the shirt with the bullet hole in back), and the cells where they were locked up... and the instruments used by the police for centuries to hold the murderers. He used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their secrets, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers. That is why the police and the so-called justice system have done more for the progress of narrative, he used to say, than any writer in history.

p.131
Lugones Chief of Police

Trading Monologues - Mishima

Two men may talk enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across which has been destroyed.

Then at last, since they cannot bear to remain silent, their conversation turns again to the past.

Runaway Horses, p.57 (Vintage, 2000 [1970])

The Pain of Dialogue - Blanchot

It is a matter of dialogue. How rare dialogue is; we realize this by the surprise it makes us feel, bringing us into the presence of an unusual event, almost more painful than remarkable. In novels, the "dialogued" part is the expression of laziness and routine: the characters speak to put white spaces on a page and out of an imitation of life, where there is no narration, only conversation; from time to time one must give speech to people in books; the direct contact is an economy and a repose (for the author more than for the reader). Or, the "dialogue", under the influence of some American writers, can be wrought of an expressive incommunicativeness: more threadbare than in reality, a little below the meaningless speech that suffice for us in current life. When someone speaks , it is his refusal to speak that becomes obvious; his discourse is his silence: closed, violent, saying nothing but himself, his abrupt massiveness, his desire to emit words rather than to speak. Or simply, as happens in Hemingway, this exquisite way of expressing himself a little below zero is a ruse to make us believe in some high degree of life, emotion, or thought, an honest and classic ruse that often succeeds and to which Hemingway's melancholy talent given various resources.

The Book to Come, p. 151 (Stanford Uni. Press)

To read what was never written - Walter Benjamin

Historical method is a philological method, a method that has as its foundation the book of life. 'To read what was never written,' is what Hofmannsthal calls it. The reader referred here is the true historian. (Theses on the Philosophy of History)

[It is in this moment that the past is saved, not in being returned to what it once existed but, instead, precisely in being transformed into something that never was: in being read, in the words of Hofmannsthal, as what was never written - Daniel Heller-Roazen]

only young poets and old whores can appreciate

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.

[...] it has to be said that he wrote badly [...] He wanted to be a poet, and threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower. He was tenacious in a blind ,uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero's bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it give him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.

a past to come - Maurice Blanchot

"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come."

‎'drawing is a constant correcting of errors' - John Berger

The Speed of Light - Javier Cercas

p.54 - Everybody looks at reality, but few people see t. The artist isn't the one who makes the invisible visible: that really is romanticism, although not the worst kind, the artist is the one who makes visible what's already visible and everybody looks at and nobody can or nobody knows how or nobody wants to see. Probably nobody wants to see it.

p.83-4 - I already know that perfect happiness does not exist, but here I have learned that perfect happiness doesn't exist either...'

p.98 - On Pascal, no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune. [...] this is mean and false but true. The problem is with the word 'entirely. Since I've been here I've seen several friends die: their death have horrified me, infuriated me, made me cry, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't felt an obscene relief, for the simple reason that the dead man was not me.

p.214 - But what I most remember about that conversation is the end of it, perhaps because at that moment, for the first time, I had the deceptive intuition that the past is not a stable place but changeable, permanently altered by the future, and that therefore none of what had already happened was irreversible.

p.217 - Treno is now one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider consider American (from New York)

p.222- on the wall of fifteen years ago photos of baseball stars had changed, not the picture of John Wayne

p.239 - talked through the night till 'finally dawn surprised them both.'

Last page 278 - 'And how does it end?' he asked. I looked around the almost empty bar and, feeling almost happy, answered: 'It ends like this.'

Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas

p.1 - lame joke about career

p.146 - 'To write novels you don't imagination,' Bolano said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combing recollections.'

p. 169 -

'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?'

The Tenant The Motive - Javier Cercas

p. 94 - About the opposite apartment that is like a reflection, every single item

p. 123 - Reread whole of chapter one or remember
'He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamentals of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This - he later observed - did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.

Singapore Sling

Singing staring at the dirty water of Singapore River and drinking a drink, named after an island that calls itself a country and a stone age weaponry, recommended by an SPG?

"Cada uno tenía su pasado encerrado dentro de sí mismo, como las hojas de un libro aprendido por ellos de memoria; y sus amigos podían sólo leer el título"

"Each had his past shut in itself, like the leaves of a book they learned by heart, and his friends could only read the title"

10.2.1927

In that old film
there was a new imperative for the actor:

to break his silence
as technology advances

reduced gestures
when we hear sound effects
with images uninterrupted by texts

not because
his words could readjust her smile

not because
future morning sun could colour the window amber

not because
we want to hear the voice of Hitler

no longer grey,
certain spots of the kitchen were warmed
without grease.

In diesem alten Film

Es wurde ein neues Gebot für den Schauspieler:



sein Schweigen brechen

Die Technologie macht Fortschritte

reduzierte Gesten

wenn wir hören, Sound-Effekte

mit Bildern ohne Unterbrechung durch Texte



nicht, weil

seine Worte könnten nachjustieren ihr Lächeln



nicht, weil

Zukunft Morgensonne konnte die Farbe der Fenster Bernstein



nicht, weil

wollen wir die Stimme des Hitler hören



nicht mehr grau,

bestimmten Stellen der Küche waren erwärmt

ohne Fett.

trust a Tartar
on the twenty-second
we should be ashamed of all our spontaneous reactions

the Tartar is always
mistaken for my father
and a young friend

Asiatic Barbarian laughs
and so a mad professor recalls,

'This is not a song. It's more. More than just a branch of science we experiment with our lives.'

Song

the novel within the duration of a song
the hurried prose about how

a country was turned into province.

a novel the length of a song
the experience only spoken with abbreviated slang
about how

a language is now a dialect

turned,
the plane is now a ship floating above the sea of clouds.
(I turned to page six and the writer is still stuck,
writing about how his eternal novel shall begin.)

a novel written according to the length of this song
this novel could be read within its duration
or listened
with repeated inattentiveness

Shotgun Blues

In this club, I told Renzi, one can drink and drink without anyone getting upset. Look at the man over there, the fat one with the jacket on: he gets drunk every night, always by himself, and yet preserves a strange dignity. There's a story about him, I tell Renzi, a painful story. While cleaning a shotgun he killed has wife of just three months. I told him that it was doubtless an accident and not a crime, for nobody kills his wife of three months in that fashion, with a shotgun blast in the face, unless he's crazy. And besides, I tell him, the man has been literally broken since the accident. He does nothing but get drunk and says that firearms are the work of the devil. Two glasses of gin, that's right, I tell the waiter. Oh, and please bring a bit more ice. You, I say to Renzi, have no doubt read my compatriot Korzeniowski, the Polish writer who wrote in English. A renegade, to tell the truth, a romantic of the worst sort. He spent his life fascinated by that sort of character. The man has a secret. But which of us does not have a secret? Even the most insignificant person,I say to him, if he had some listeners, could fascinate them with the mystery of life. It's not even necessary to have killed a woman with a shotgun blast. That other fellow - see? - the one over there, next to that column. His name is Iriarte; he has a watch shop, is the classic type of insignificant person, and yet I am sure that when he has had enough to drink he also dreams of the great man he almost became. At some moment in his life he must have witnessed something that he needs to keep hidden. That happens to all of us. Each one of us, I tell him, has his own repertory of extraordinary moments and heroic illusions. Everyone, Renzi says to me; the difference lies in that only some are able to realize those illusions. Illusions? That depends on one's age. After one's thirtieth birthday, I tell him, we are nothing but a sad collection of illusions and of women we have killed with shotgun blasts. Besides, I tell Renzi, what a man thinks of himself is of absolutely no importance.



Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration, trans. Daniel Balderston, Duke University Press: North Carolina, pp.108-9

'those who hope to save themselves by opposing Marx’s real beard to Stalin’s false nose are wasting their time.' - Michel Foucault

Four Paragraphs in the Park

Not during the day when a tree in no other colours than green burns. On a humid night, the leaves – being two-faced – switched and betrayed its colour again like the chameleonic sky. Not bothered about the routine beauty of dusk, not fascinated with the palette of its clouds. Over-praised, over-painted, over-photographed.

It was hot not warm. You saw some middle-aged men praying publicly, half-naked, for the false respite of rain. You heard some young educated women making speeches, promising the party would change the weather. You thought they should shut up, pair up and find a hotel. The images of tropical beach resort posters from postcards and tour agencies crossed your mind.

While irritated by how eloquent and witty one could be, or fail to be, their use of certain words (such as ‘hope’, ‘belief’, ‘faith’, ‘care’, ‘future’, ‘change’ with words like ‘wish’, ‘unwind’, ‘relax’, ‘dream’, ‘holiday’, ‘plans’) either made you yawn or gave you goose bumps.

After the rain, the dark woods with dark leaves are wet – weighing a bit more. You kicked on the bits and stepped on the pieces, fallen from the trees, littering the concrete pavement. You thought about some snails you have killed. You picked and collected the twigs and sprigs as materials for a miniature park in a trite dystopia. You planted a branch as a bare tree, and related it to the tarnished name ‘Art’ and the ugly word ‘Design’.

Hai Zi 海子 (查海生) 【明天醒来我会在哪一只鞋子里】

【明天醒来我会在哪一只鞋子里】

我想我已经够小心翼翼的
我的脚趾正好十个
我的手指正好十个
我生下来时哭几声我死去时别人又哭
我不声不响的
带来自己这个包袱
尽管我不喜爱自己
但我还是悄悄打开

我在黄昏时坐在地球上
我这样说并不表明晚上
我就不在地球上 早上同样
地球在你屁股下
结结实实
老不死的地球你好

或者我干脆就是树枝
我以前睡在黑暗的壳里
我的脑袋就是我的边疆
就是一颗梨
在我成型之前
我是知冷知热的白花

或者我的脑袋是一只猫
安放在肩膀上
造我的女主人荷月远去
成群的阳光照着大猫小猫
我的呼吸
一直在证明
树叶飘飘

我不能放弃幸福
或相反
我以痛苦为生
埋葬半截
来到村口或山上
我盯住人们死看
呀, 生硬的黄土 人丁兴旺

Gu Cheng

一代人
黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛
我却用它寻找光明
A Generation
The dark nights gave me my dark eyes
I, however, use them to search for light

Maurice Blanchot on Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities' (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

The man without particularities, who does not want to recognise himself in the person he is, for whom all the traits that particularise him make him nothing in particular, never close to what is closest to him, never foreign to what is exterior to him, chooses to be this way because of an ideal of freedom, but also because he lives in a world - the modern world, our world - in which particular deeds are always about to be lost in the impersonal conjuncture of relationship, of which they mark only the temporary intersection. In the world, the world of great cities and great collective masses, it is immaterial whether something has truly taken place and in what historical event we suppose ourselves to be actors and witnesses.

'Musil', The Book to Come, Maurice Blanchot, p.138

Election - Chien Swee-Teng

'I will vote for them tomorrow. Actually everyone should. Hoping that things will progress from bad to worse... thus, forcing an eventual revolution than illusionary parliamentary reforms!'

'I shall vote for whichever party that promise to change the weather here!' (written on a hot and humid day)

'There is nothing political talking about politics when it is merely political gossiping.'

Dreaming, dreaming the night, the street, the staircase and the shout of the statue as it turns the corner. Running toward the statue and finding only the shout, wanting to touch the shout and finding only the echo, wanting to grasp the echo and finding only the wall, and running toward the wall only to touch a mirror...

The Absent City

'The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers. Torture is the culmination of that desire to know, the maximum degree of institutional intelligence. That is how the State thinks, and why the police mainly torture the poor, only the poor or the workers or the dispossessed . . . only in very exceptional cases have they tortured people belonging to other social classes, and these cases have become major scandals . . . and at the end they had to retreat before international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble from the fields, the wretched and feverish from the ghettos and the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals and politicians and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. Because, in general, the latter already collaborate of their own accord and serve as an example and adapt their lives to the criteria of reality established by the State, without there being any need to torture them. The others would do the same, but they cannot because they have been leveled and cornered, and even if they wanted to and took great pains to that end, they can no longer act like the model Japanese citizen who works fifteen hours per day and always greets the general manager of his company with the slighest of nods. They control everything, they have founded the mental State . . . which is a new stage in the history of institutions. The mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.'

'Elena thought the man was a magnet that attracted and drew the iron shavings of the soul to itself. She was already thinking like a madwoman. She felt her skin release a metal dust. That is why her body was completely covered, including gloves and a long-sleeved blouse. The only part exposed was her face, the rusted skin of her external gears.'

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima (Vintage 2000)

p. 18 'They reached the island at a spot where a single maple stood among the pines, and climbed the stone steps to the grassy clearing at the top with three iron cranes. The boys sat down at the feet of the pair that were stretching their necks upward in an eternal, mute cry, then lay back on the grass to stare up at the late autumn sky. The rough grass pricked through the backs of their kimonos, making Kiyoaki rather uncomfortable. It gave Honda, however, the sensation of having endure an exquisitely refreshing pain that was fragmented and spread out under his back. Out of the corners of their eyes, they could see the two cranes, weathered by wind and rain and soiled by chalky-white bird droppings. The birds' supple, curved necks, stretched against the sky, moved slowly by the rhythm of the shifting clouds.'

p. 30 "You remember that the story is set in Tang China. A man named Yuan Hsaio was on his way to the famous Mount Kaoyu to study the teachings of Buddha. When night fell, he happened to be beside a cemetery, so he lay down to sleep among the burial mounds. Then in the middle of the night he awoke with a terrible thirst. Stretching out his hand, he scooped some water from a hole by his side. As he dozed off again, he thought to himself that never had water tasted so pure, so fresh and cold. But when morning came, he saw what he had drunk from in the dark. Incredible though it seemed, what had tasted so delicious was water that had collected in a human skull. He retched and was sick. Yet this experience taught something to Yuan Hsaio. He realised that as long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else." [later the conversation continues to what if the lover is the whore.]

p.33 - [About the Marquis 'dispensing useless knowledge' about what wine to go with what food, the different characteristics of wines in the cellar, what wine should be served on what occasion, the type of guest etc.

On Satoko's beauty - p.67 'And her face seemed to glow and fall into soft shadow; alternating with the quick, vivacious movement of her eyes. Alertness of eye is usually considered a vulgar trait in women, but Satoko had a way of delivering her sidelong glances that was irresistibly charming. He smile followed close upon her words, as her glance did upon her smile - graceful sequence heightening the bewitching elegance of her expression.

Satoko as a Gift p.153 ' - "Oh, a bit of dust...," the Countess exclaimed, gazing at Satoko's cheeks. But just as she reached out with her handkerchief to wipe it off, Satoko drew quickly away and the speck of dust vanished. It was then that her mother realised that the dust on her daughter's cheek ahd been noo more than a sahadow cast by a spot on the window. Satoko gave a wan smile; she didn;t find her mother's mistake particularly amusing. She disliked being given a special inspection today,as if she were a bolt of silk intended as a gift.

p.163 - 'He mad e it patently clear that in a situation as this, the emptiest words were those that aroused the strongest emotions.'

p.268 - washing sin with another sin to cancel each other out.

p. 302 - Abbot and young widow scroll

p.338 - The baldness of the nun, and the wig as the last secret weapon against Stoko's decision.

p .384 - Buddhist causality and the sects p.

350 - beautiful and ugly sons of Marquis

24.3.2011

Naked, or dressed in nudity
those extensions, beyond my fingers, toes and nails (orteil/articulas)

my sympathy would be an insult.

62: A Model Kit

p.34

where people squeezed together sleep in rooms with tired furniture,

with dark curtains and a breathing in of dust and beer, [...]

I will lose you again on the street car or on the train,

I'll run in my shorts
among crowded people sleeping in the compartments
where a violet light
blinds
the dusty cloth, the curtains that hide my city.

p.57 (the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays)

My profession condemned me to hotels, which wasn't too pleasant when I thought about my apartment in Paris, set up over fifteen years of preference, a bachelor's manias, tendencies of the left hand or the five senses, records and bottles in their proper, obedient places, the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays, life without financial problems, the Luxembourg beneath the windows...

p.60 (sad smell of time)

A friend of bars and custom-houses, of refueling stops early in the morning and beds where memories wouldn't be mixed with the sad smell of time

p.114 (tunnel, spoons nail, posters)

There were few people on the Metro platform, people like gray blotches on the benches along the concave wall with tiles and advertising posters. Hélène walked to the end of the platform where the stairway permitted - but it was prohibited - entry into the tunnel; shrugging her shoulders, vaguely passing the back of her hands across her eyes, she went back to the illuminated part of the platform. That's how, almost without seeing them, you start to look at the enormous posters one after the other, the ones that violate distraction and seek their path in your memory - first a soup, then some eyeglasses, then a make of television, gigantic photographs where every tooth of the child who likes Knorr soups has the size of a matchbox and the fingernails on the man watching television like spoons (to drink the soup in the neighbouring poster, for example), but the only thing completely attracts me is the left eye of the girl who loves Babybel cheese, an eye like the entrance to a tunnel, a series of concentric galleries and, in the middle, the cone of the tunnel which disappears into the depth like that other tunnel where I would have to have entered by going down the forbidden stairs, and which starts to vibrate, to moan, to fill with lights and squeals until the doors of the train open and I get in and sit on the bench reserved for invalids or old people or pregnant women, across from the seats where undefinable pygmies with microscopic teeth and imperceptible nails travel along with the fixed and mistrustful expression of Parisians tied to salaries of hunger and bitterness that are mass produced like Knorr soups. For four or five stations there is a kind of absurd desire for madness, for a stubbornness in fixing the illusion, which might have been enough to suggest it, to take a mental step forward, to throw oneself into the tunnel on the poster so that it would become reality, the real stairway of life, and those people in the car reduced to a ridiculous size would become a mere mouthful for the girl who loves Babybel cheese, a slap of the hand for the giant watching television. Now, at the edge of the forbidden tunnel stairs, something like an abominable caress, a demand... Shrugging your shoulders, rejecting temptations one more time; you remain, Hélène, the bitter harvest of that afternoon remains; the day isn't over yet, you'll have to get off at Saint-Michel station, the people get their normal size back, the posters are exaggerated, a naked man is small, fragile, no one has nails like spoons, eyes like tunnels. No game will make you forget: your soul is a cold machine, a lucid register. You'll never forget anything in a whirlwind that sweeps away the large and the small to fling you into another present; even when you walk through the city you're yourself, inevitably. You'll soon methodically forget, with a before and an after; don't be in such a hurry, the day isn't over yet. Come on, here we are.

p.171 -2 (lost dog, streetcar, amusement park)

... in order to get to the Calle Veinticuatro de Noviembre I would have to take one of the countless street cars that paraded by like a ride in an amusement park, passing without stopping, their sides of peeling ocher, their trolleys full of sparks, an intermittent ringing of meaningless bells which could be heard at all moments and as if because of a whim, with people with hollow and tired faces in the windows, all of them looking down, a little as if they were looking for a lost dog among the bricks of the red pavement.

Interview: Balibar and Macherey - James H. Kavanagh and Thomas E. Lewis (Diacrtitics Vol 12, 1982, pp. 26-52)

pp.50-1 (Literary production)


MACHEREY:It is not a science of literature all by itself. From the outset, we refused to respond to the question: "What is literature?"

BALIBAR: But in a certain sense, we could not avoid at some moment acting as if we were giving such a response.

MACHEREY: No. On this point, I think we remained consistent. And all those who were working against us in similar fields at the time, they all raised again the question 'What is literature?,"and proposed their answers. Look at Sollers.

KAVANACH: Do you prefer the question: How can we construct a science of the literary text?

MACHEREY: Yes, but that is not at all the same question. And it is not a science of the literary text as such, as an isolated and autonomous phenomenon.

LEWIS: How would you characterize the productive analysis of literary texts?

MACHEREY: But what does one do when one speaks of literaryt exts? Are texts literary in themselves, by their own intrinsic characteristics, which distinguish them from non-literary texts? I think one must say that a text is literary because it is recognized as such, at a certain moment, under certain conditions. It may not have been so recognized before, and it may not be after. I did a lot of work on Jules Verne, at a time when no one spoke of him; now he has become an author, and everyone does his or her book on Jules Verne. He has been returned to "French Literature"; he is explained in class. But when I worked on him, he was not even a minor author; this was not "Literature."

KAVANAGH: Are texts ideological in themselves? Are there certain intrinsic characteristics that define them as ideological? MACHEREY:Ideology is present in texts as a material from which they are constructed. In this sense, it is something internal.

BALIBAR: It's ideology that is not being defined clearly. You are playing with two meanings. There is a spontaneous, idealist aspect of the term ideology, which appears again for political reasons at this moment- a period of defense of the rights of man against "systems of ideology," meaning the world of ideas more or less directly and consciously tied to politics. This sense of the term implies at once, in a contradictory fashion, something profoundly illusory and weak, and something extremely dangerous and powerful, because it holds men and women in an oppressive society. The meaning of the term ideology that we have tried to use from Marx, in the way Althusser began to specify it, was, from the beginning, totally different from this.

Bricklayers (Dialectic of Consciousness/ Hegel in Mexico p. 59)

"Nevertheless, what happened to them in the passage from one job to the other has an extraordinary meaning. The "world of men" placed them socially as "anthropological laborers," in a situation where they were "on the verge of realizing a true human form of labor, "on the verge of converting themselves into real human beings and not only because of the fact - which they will have commented upon with mocking joy - of having served for some days for this "crazy guy" who contracted them for a strange and incomprehensible activity, and paid them, to boot, with an unusual generosity. They were "on the verge," yes, but this "on the verge" stayed there, suspended, without resolving itself, like a fantasmatic emanation above the anthropological work that disappeared, in the same way that the vagrant flames of fuegos fatuos float over the graves of a cemetery. However, such being "on the verge" repeats itself and remains in the labor of bricklaying to which they returned, because in a certain sense and in a new but essential form, they continuet o be "anthropologists"on their job as house builders."

Robert Linhart 'L'Etabli (The Assembly Line)

"Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten in the indefinitely mixed memory of the working class. Other strikes, other committees, other acts will find inspiration in past strikes- as well as in ours, the trace of which I will later discover, mixed up with so many others. . . ,"

HEGEL IN MEXICO / BOSTEELS - Dialectic of Consciousness/ Revueltas

'Our individual has written a letter, he has "worked" on it, but he ignores the fact that this whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter, buying stamps and attaching them, introduc-ing the letter in the dropoff box) is inserted in a mass of human work that is common, general, total, constant, active, past, present, and historical in the most plastic sense of the word, this invisible matter in which the lines of communication are drawn and draw themselves, from the time when one of them discovered himself in "the others" and succeeded in inventing and emitting the first "signs of identity," a first scream, a first smoke signal, a first letter. The postal system reveals nothing to our individual, even though it allows him at least to be this hu-man being in whom he does not yet perceive himself, but in whom he no doubt will one day come to perceive himself no sooner than he assumes consciousness of it.'

HEGEL IN MEXICO / BOSTEELS p.47

"When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known," Hegel writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: "The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Translation

Translation from one language into another... is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side; [but] a man may employ himself in ways worse and less profitable to himself. - Cervantes, Don Quixote

'Grammar and Boxing' Introduction to Mad Toy, Aynesworth, p.13

I have tried overall to respect the "hasty writing" on which he prided himself. "Grammar is like boxing," he wrote in one of his newspaper columns. You can follow the "grammar" of punches you've been taught by a teacher of the European style, but to make a great fight, you have to throw punches from every angle. Similarly, "the people who, like ours, are under going continuous changes, draw upon words from all angles, words that set teachers' teeth on edge."

Roberto Arlt, Mad Toy, Duke University Press, 2002, p.60

Through the balcony window that faced the street, I could see a chocolate-coloured store sign made of glazed iron. The drizzle slid slowly across its convex surface. In the distance, a chimney flanked by two tanks belched out great gauzy strips of smoke into space stitched by needles of rain.

'The Bus is a Vacuum Cleaner' - Critique of a Spectacular Life Vol. II (Recto:1989), p.137

The Bus is a Vacuum Cleaner

[…] It was around the same time that he saw her again at the opposite bus stop. Through the windowpane, between the inverted letters repeating the name of the restaurant, and advertising part of its menu, he managed to notice her amongst those waiting for the only bus that passes this street. He looked at the clock hanging on the greasy wall of pale turquoise, thinly veiled by the steam from whatever that was cooking in the large metal pot. The inconspicuous movement of the seemingly reliable clock hands never betrays the fact that the Boss tuned it fifteen minutes slower.

When he looked back, the view was blocked by the bus coloured red and white. As this huge vehicle moved away, like an iron curtain unveiling a scene, but not without leaving a trail of black smoke, those who gathered around the bus stop, a moment ago, were all gone.

Perhaps, it was the stark contrast of the bus stop suddenly devoid of human presence. On this particular day, this mundane scene was almost another picture for him. For how it has occurred to him that the bus is a vacuum cleaner sucking those people scattered around the shelter like the dust he had to wipe off the windowpane.

Lenin and Philosophy

After all, this French academic philosophy, profoundly religious, spiritualist and reactionary one hundred and fifty years ago, then in the best of cases conservative, finally belatedly liberal and 'personalist', this philosophy which magnificently ignored Hegel, Marx and Freud, this academic philosophy which only seriously began to read Kant, then Hegel and Husserl, and even to discover the existence of Frege and Russell a few decades ago, and sometimes less, why should it have concerned itself with this Bolshevik, revolutionary, and politician, Lenin?
Besides the overwhelming class pressures on its strictly philosophical traditions, besides the condemnation by its most 'liberal' spirits of 'Lenin's unthinkable pre-critical philosophical thought', the French philosophy which we have inherited has lived in the conviction that it can have nothing philosophical to learn either from a politician or from politics. To give just one example, it was only a little while ago that a few French academic philosophers first turned to the study of the great theoreticians of political philosophy, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Grotius, Locke and even Rousseau, 'our' Rousseau. Only thirty years earlier, these authors were abandoned to literary critics and jurists as left-overs.
　
But French academic philosophy was not mistaken in its radical refusal to learn anything from politicians and politics, and therefore from Lenin. Everything which touches


page 30
on politics may be fatal to philosophy, for philosophy lives on politics.
Of course, it cannot be said that, if academic philosophy has ever read him, Lenin did not more than repay it in kind, 'leaving it the change'! Listen to him in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, invoking Dietzgen, the German proletarian who Marx and Engels said had discovered 'dialectical materialism ' 'all by himself', as an auto-didact, because he was a proletarian militant:
'Graduated flunkeys ', who with their talk of 'ideal blessings ' stultify the people by their tortuous 'idealism ' -- that is J. Dietzgen's opinion of the professors of philosophy. 'Just as the antipodes of the good God is the devil, so the professorial priest had his opposite pole in the materialist .' The materialist theory of knowledge is 'a universal weapon against religious belief ', and not only against the 'notorious, formal and common religion of the priests, but also against the most refined, elevated professorial religion of muddled idealists '. Dietzgen was ready to prefer 'religious honesty ' to the 'half-heartedness ' of free-thinking professors, for 'there a system prevails ', there we find integral people, people who do not separate theory from practice. For the Herr Professors 'philosophy is not a science, but a means of defence against Social-Democracy '. 'Those who call themselves philosophers -- professors and university lecturers -- are, despite their apparent free-thinking, more or less immersed in superstition and mysticism . . . and in relation to Social-Democracy constitute a single . . . reactionary mass .' 'Now, in order to follow the true path, without being led astray by an the religious and philosophical gibberish, it is necessary to study the falsest of all false paths (der Holzweg der Holzwege ), philosophy ' (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Collected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. 14, pp. 340-41).[3]
Ruthless though it is, this text also manages to distinguish between 'free-thinkers' and 'integral people', even when they are religious, who have a 'system' which is not just speculative but inscribed in their practice. It is also lucid:

page 31
it is no accident that it ends with an astonishing phrase of Dietzgen's, which Lenin quotes: we need to follow a true path; but in order to follow a true path it is necessary to study philosophy, which is 'the falsest of all
　
false paths ' (der Holzweg-der Holzwege). Which means, to speak plainly, that there can be no true path (sc. in the sciences, but above all in politics) without a study, and, eventually a theory of philosophy as a false path.

In the last resort, and more important than all the reasons I have just evoked, this is undoubtedly why Lenin is intolerable to academic philosophy, and, to avoid hurting anyone, to the vast majority of philosophers, if not to all philosophers, whether academic or otherwise. He is, or has been on one occasion or another, philosophically intolerable to everyone (and obviously I also mean myself). Intolerable, basically, because despite all they may say about the pre-critical character of his philosophy and the summary aspect of some of his categories, philosophers feel and know that this is not the real question. They feel and know that Lenin is profoundly indifferent to their objections. He is indifferent first, because he foresaw them long ago. Lenin said himself: I am not a philosopher, I am badly prepared in this domain (Letter to Gorky, 7 February 1908). Lenin said: I know that my formulations and definitions are vague, unpolished; I know that philosophers are going to accuse my materialism of being 'metaphysical'. But he adds: that is not the question. Not only do I not 'philosophize' with their philosophy, I do not 'philosophize' like them at all. Their way of 'philosophizing' is to expend fortunes of intelligence and subtlety for no other purpose than to ruminate in philosophy. Whereas I treat philosophy differently, I practise it, as Marx intended, in obedience to what it is. That is why I believe I am a 'dialectical materialist'.

Aedh Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven - Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Robert Walser by Walter Benjamin

on mood of 'convalescent' - p. 112-3 in 'Microscripts'

Robert Walser - Microscript p.49

So here was a book again, and again I was introduced to a woman. I've acquired quite a few female acquaintances by reading, a pleasant method for expanding one's sphere of knowledge, though one can certainly, I admit, become lazy in this way. On the other hand, characters in books stand out better, I mean, more silhouettishly from one another, than do living figures, who, as they are alive and move about, tend to lack delineation.

BRUNO BOSTEELS - In the Shadow of Mao: Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Homenaje a

p.244

Maoism’s first innovation in respect of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy consists in having recognized the existence of internal contradictions in a socialist country even after the initial revolutionary period, and in having responded to this unexpected fact by proposing original tactics and strategies, in particular the famous mass line, the self-critique of the party as form, and the idea of intellectual re-education.

Battles in the Desert and Other Stories - Jose Emilio Pacheco

pp.32-33

I don't understand myself. The other day, I felt great compassion while I watched the cook killing the animals, and today I had great fun stepping on crabs at the beach. Not the big ones that live in the rocks; the little grey sand crabs. They would run around madly looking for their holes and I would crush them furiously and just for the fun of it. Then I thought that in some ways was are all like crabs and when we least expect it, someone or something comes along and crushes us.

p. 69

Pedro parked the car in front of the walls of the convent hidden in the mountain's desolation. They asked if you wanted to get out, and the three of you walked through deserted corridors, hallways full of echoes without memory.

‎'Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.' - J.Swift

Roland Barthes, 'The Image' in The Rustle of Language, p.356

'I Crave, I long for Abstinence from Images, for every Image is bad' - Roland Barthes, 'The Image' in The Rustle of Language, p.356

Roland Barthes Interview (bio) from The Tel Quel Reader

p.256 - Mythologies not political but ideological, targeting the petite-bourgeoisie

p.262-63 - position as tourist diminishes the emphasis on the Japanese petty bourgeoisie,

and 'on writing' in relation to Zero degree

p.267 - on the work as awaiting and a preparation for 'socialist practice'?

In your article on Julia Kristeva's Semeiotike ('The Stranger', 19070) you write that in a society deprived of socialist practice, thus condemned to "discourse", theoretical discourse is temporarily necessary'. Do you mean to say that your work is an awaiting and a preparation for 'socialist practice'

Your question runs the risk in my opinion of reducing the plural of the subject in representing is as tending towards something unique and full; your question denies the unconscious. I accept it, however, and I will answer this: if it is absolutely necessary, to live and to work, to have a representation of an end (which is sometimes curiously called a Cause), I would just remind you of the tasks that Brecht suggests for the intellectual in a non-revolutionary period: liquidate and theorize. These tasks are always coupled together by Brecht: our discourse can represent nothing, prefigure nothing; we only have a negative activity at our disposition (Brecht called it critical, or even epic, that is, interruptive [entre-coupee], interrupting [qui coupe] history), at the end of which shines only, like a distant glimmer, intermittent and uncertain (barbarism is always a possibility), the ultimate transparency of social relations.

Notes: Gregory Elliot ‘Althusser: The Detour of Theory’

P.58 (pdf 82) - 8 Sep 2010

Marxist philosophy was dialectical materialism, the science of the laws of nature and thought. Applied to society, it became historical materialism, the science of the laws of social development.
Two adjustments were made: the negation of the negation was restored to the corpus of dialectical materialism; the Asiatic mode of production to that of historical materialism.

P.66 (pdf 91)

According to this historicism, just as scientific socialism was the theoretical expression of a class subject, so the natural sciences were bourgeois ideology –bourgeois sciences which would be abolished together with the capitalist mode of production. Contrariwise, as the theoretical expression of the ‘universal’ class of capitalist society – the proletariat – Marxism could attain to a genuine understanding of the social totality, which, according to these philosophies of praxis, was the creation and expression of humanity (of whose alienation and disalienation history was the unfolding drama). Thus, for Lukács, Marxism was the self-consciousness of the proletariat, itself the subject-object of history which would redeem all humanity in the act of emancipating itself. And ‘orthodoxy’ ‘refer[red] exclusively to method’ – the dialectical method inherited from Hegel and now restricted, contra Engels, to ‘the realms of history and society’. A ‘proletarian science’, historical materialism ‘completed the programme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, even though at the cost of the destruction of his system’.

P. 154 (pdf 179) 11 Sep Lacanian Real – Reality

The target of Althusser’s theory of ideology was the supposed messianism involved in the postulate of a disalienation with the advent of communism, a society whose deepest ‘laws of motion’ would be transparent to the consciousness of its members in an ‘end of ideology’. For Althusser, this was a chimera. He impugned any theory of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ as itself ideological, on two grounds. First, it implied the possibility of a true consciousness, whereas, epistemologically, consciousness was non-veridical by definition. Secondly, it circumscribed the social space and underestimated the objective power of ideology. For Althusser, ideology is an ‘objective reality . . . independent of the subjectivity of the individuals who are subject to it’, a system of representations dominated by a ‘false conception of the world’. Men are ‘ideological animals’. They need representations of the world and their relations to it in order to function as social agents. Ideology provides the requisite representation (which can be more or less conscious/unconscious, untheorised/theorised). Analytically a relative autonomous superstructural level of society, in reality ideology is a ‘cement . . . sliding into all the parts of the [social] edifice’. It ‘permeates’ all human activities and practices, governing the ‘lived’ relations of individuals to the ensemble of their ‘conditions of existence’. Indeed, ‘[i]deology is so much present in all their acts and deeds that it is indistinguishable from their “lived “experience”’.

P.160 (pdf 185)

the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers, theoreticians and politicians, the great materialist thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the ‘realization’ of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them – Althusser , ‘Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract’ (1966)
P.169 (pdf 194) 15 Sep

…at his ‘trial’ on 30 November 1963, Althusser finessed his critics by adopting the tactic of distinguishing between the ‘theoretical value’ of Mao’s concepts in On Contradiction and their utilisation by the CPC in the current conjuncture to sanction false political positions. His accusers, he retorted, were guilty of a ‘theoretical pragmatism’ inverse but akin to that of the Chinese, impugning genuine theory as a result of its conjunctural exploitation. Althusser upheld the authentically Marxist nature of Mao’s theses on contradiction, but abjured their deformation at the CPC’s hands, affirming the correctness of the PCF’s own international line.5 This did the trick – for the time being at least.

P.175 (pdf 200) Althusser (unsigned) – ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1966)

Is it impossible for it to regress to
capitalism?

Do we not already possess an example of this phenomenon: Yugoslavia?

Can a socialist country, then, not retain – even for a considerable period of time – the, or at least some, external forms of socialism (economic, political), whilst imparting to them a quite different economic, political, and ideological content (the mechanism of capitalist restoration), and allowing itself to be progressively neutralised and utilised politically, then dominated economically,
by imperialism?

P.190 (pdf 215)

If philosophy is the class struggle in theory, then for a Marxist philosopher to philosophise is to fight the good fight; philosophy, to borrow the title of Althusser’s interview, is a revolutionary weapon. Marxist philosophers may no longer be quite the illuminati they once were. But they can now flatter themselves that their desks have been turned into barricades (Brecht), the seminar room into a place d’armes.

P.198 (pdf 222) 16 Sep

The new orthodoxy, presented as the epitome of Marxist-Leninist rectitude, was set out at greatest length in the short Reply to John Lewis, via a juxtaposition of the respective theses of Lewis and his critic. To Lewis’s proposition that ‘it is man who makes history’, Althusser counterposes the dictum: ‘It is the masses who make history.’ Against the British Communist’s notion that ‘Man makes history by “transcending” history’ is set the scientific precept: ‘The class struggle is the motor of history.’

P.199 (pdf 223)

‘The class struggle does not go in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production in a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the ‘base’ . . . of the class struggle, and its material existence; because exploitation takes place in production, and it is exploitation which
is at the root of the antagonism between classes and the class struggle . . . all the forms of the class struggle are rooted in economic class struggle. It is on this condition that the revolutionary thesis of the primacy of the class struggle is a materialist one. When that is clear, the question of the ‘subject’ of history disappears. History is an immense natural-human system in movement, and the motor of history is class struggle. History is a process, and a process without a subject.’
- Althusser
P.231 (pdf 256) 18 Sep

‘If we look back over our whole history of the last forty years or more, it seems to me that . . . the only historically existing (left) ‘critique’ of the fundamentals of the ‘Stalinian deviation’ to be found . . . is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle, in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution and its results. A critique from afar. A critique from ‘behind the scenes’. To be looked at more closely, to be interpreted. A contradictory critique, moreover – if only because of the disproportion between acts and texts. Whatever you like: but a critique from which one can learn, which can help us to test our hypotheses, that is, help us to see our own history more clearly. . . .’ – Althusser, 1976