The Philosopher and his Poor – Jacques Rancière, trans. Andrew Parker, (Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2003, pp. 144- 145)

Even before worked matter enters the scene, the philosopher has protected himself against this colloid. He has built a wall in the décor of rustic and peasant happiness: ‘From my window I can see a road paver on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge at all of each other’s presence.” [Sartre]

The broken glass and the bourgeois property are there for ambiance. The décor itself has another purpose. Sartre wants to show that in their separation and mutual ignorance there always exists between two workers relations of interiority; but also and above all, that these relation of a third. Thus, in the perception where the man at the window is figured as object, the two men outside become the “hemorrhagic center” of the object, each of them united with the other at the point of gaze: “The mere fact, for each of them, of seeing what the Other does not see, of exposing the object through a special kind of work, establishes a relation of reciprocity in my perceptual field which transcend my perception itself: each of them constitutes the ignorance of the Other…. They are ignorant of one another through me to the precise extent that I become what I am through them.”

Clearly the philosopher at his window, too, feels someone’s gaze on him: the ironic gaze of his privileged opponent. And he also insists that no one is going to get him to say that he is a transcendental subject constituting others in his own perception. He is not the philosopher-master; he is not the Leibnizian God of action at a distance. He is merely an intellectual on vacation, a petty bourgeois who does not know how to weed flower beds, how to crush pebbles, and against whom is already exercised the mute complicity of these workers who are ignorant of each other.

But this modesty is useless, or misleading. The philosopher’s act was not the dissolution of the stone wall in order to “interiorize” the workers. It was the erection of the wall to put them in the true element of the dialectic: not the colloid of reciprocal relations but the steel and concrete of worked matter that seals meaning in consigning backward workers to their solitudes, their turnings in place, or their aphasic dialogues. Much more than The German Ideology’s laboriously demonstrated historicity of the cherry tree, the philosopher’s rustic wall engages humanity on the road of the productive dialectic. When the two workers have entered the workshop, the philosopher at the window will give way to a more severe figure of the dialectical Third: the time-keeper, a pure representative of the Exigency of worked matter.

Lying Buddha - Ernst Auer

in the shy room

with wasted colours of

three wooden palettes

a pregnant wardrobe,

a loose cardigan
green

to wipe this uneven floor

the beads of sweat off the faces of six walls

the bride, the unhappiest bride waits

'please turn down the fake autumn of science.'
yet it would be unbearable

without the ceiling light as the sun

for one humid half-truth

for a false dawn whenever the door opens

when the buddha lies

not on the bed or the altar table

but just nine things about him.

Mongol Libation – Victor Segalen, Occidented Stèles

他日再生當
令我得之

It is here that we took him alive. Because he
fought well we offered him service:
he preferred to serve his Prince in death.

We cut his hamstrings: he waved his arms to
attest his zeal. We cut off his arms: he howled
out his devotion for Him.

We slit his mouth from one ear to the other:
He indicated with his eye that he was still
Faithful.

O

Let us not gouge out his eyes as with a coward;
But, severing his head with respect, let us pour the koumiss of the brave with his libation.

When you are reborn, Chen Heshang, do us the honour to be reborn as one of us

South - Ernst Auer

about certain warm evenings
when even the clanging of the keys could be poetry -but of course,
only before I harbour any thoughts of writing it down.

* * * * *
the vulgar sunlight of a tropical noon
the shadowless figures, waiting to cross the road
the scene of numerous passing suns reflected on the piercing windscreens is our horizon,
the clear evil of the bluest sky framed by the immobile vertical panes,
I know the height of the ceiling now.
Our habit of always associating a dog's walk with the dried black poo on the pavement...
that might be a good picture when all paintings are now shit
when we have decided on painting shit ...
for drunk viewers who need a lifthome.

Sleeves of Time – Ernst Auer

I wasn’t satisfied with the length of time

I had it altered to fit just a little better
at the seamstress across the street.

With the sleeves trimmed and tapered
to the cut of my unscheduled coffin.

In the pocket,
the other one without hole,

I left a few shillings of my time

on earth

on land

on asphalt

Auf Achse , without slight delay or long detour.

Tired Nurse

board the bus
the sight of a nurse asleep

a tired nurse
is a sign
of resignation

The tired nurse is the overturned fire engine
along the narrow bend without foresight

this should be more than about
the aura of her uniform
all weariness betrays.

Tired Nurse is not a body
but a figure inscribed on the seat.
The thick inscription marks
the temporary collapse
of another anantomy of care

René Maran, Batouala (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965 [1921]), pp. 20-21.

And didn’t it take an immense effort for him just to stand up? He was the first to admit that making that decision could appear to be of the utmost simplicity to white men. As for him, he found it infinitely difficult than one might believe. Ordinarily, waking up and work go hand in hand. Certainly work didn’t frighten him excessively. Robust, stout-limbed, of excellent stride, he knew no rival when it came to throwing a spear or an assagi, hunting or fighting.

So work couldn’t frighten him. Only, in the language of the white men, this word took on a surprising sense, signifying fatigue without immediate tangible result, worries, grief, pain, bad health, the pursuit of chimerical designs.

Aha! white men. So what did they come looking for, so far from their home, in black lands. How much better for them, all of them, to go back to their lands and never to leave them again.

Life is short. Work is only pleasing to those who never understand life. Idleness [la fainéantise] cannot degrade anyone. In this it differs profoundly from sloth [pareses].

In any case, whether you agreed with him or not, he firmly believed, and would not have given in until proved wrong, that to do nothing was, in all good nature and simplicity, to avail oneself of everything that surrounded you.