Bubblehammerblog

I was anticipating a flurry of emails from readers asking for an explanation of the protracted silence on this blog, the last post being nearly a month ago. Surprisingly, I find that this has not happened. So to anxious readers who have perhaps composed a message and for one reason or another not sent it, to those who are merely reticent because of past experience, and to others who have been enduring patiently, I offer my apologies.

The reason for my silence is that I've been re-reading Heidegger, renewing an aquaintance with that most difficult of philosophers who I abandoned in frustration over a quarter of a century ago. Now I'm no longer burdened with the distractions of being young, and while I'm reluctant to claim to be any wiser, I have picked up along the way a few mental dispositions that seem to be making this second encounter less fraught and more fruitful. The chief among these is undoubtably persistence. Heidegger himself frequently reminds his readers of this - persist in this endeavour, he declares, and then step back a moment.

And why do I think that studying Heidegger is worth the all perplexity and prolonged effort it entails? Because I persist, that's why.

My initial project, begun some time ago, was to make a survey of the state of contemporary Western philosophy. I might have added 'since Marx', because the truth of the matter is that what I set out to look for was some inkling of a renewal of Marxism, or at least an opening for a politics of emancipation for these times. Because in an emotional respect the past three decades or so have been marked by an accumulating sense of loss.

I came upon Marxism as a barely educated teenager. My ancestors were industrial workers, miners, steelworkers, soldiers and sailors. I learned nothing at school. If I later became one of that vanished tribe, the working class intellectual, it was because I was chivvied off the streets, while serving an apprenticeship in shoplifting and petty theft, by Trotskyists from the Labour Party Young Socialists, who put into my hands pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky, introduced me to the habits of reading and discourse, opening up the world and its history. It was from these sources that I first experienced the soaring exhilaration that can be had from ideas. Something similar might befall a young man today, but his recruiters and mentors would more likely be fascists.

The emotional charge from all this remains. As Ginsburg says, 'I get sentimental about the Wobblies'. Hearing the Internationale can bring about a searing rush in the breast. Watching the scene from Bertoluci's Novecento, where the workers and peasants raise above them the impossibly gigantic red banner is almost unbearably intense. Before long there will be no one left able to access these emotions.

A vivid memory comes to mind: around the mid 1970s I was leaving a dole office, having signed on for unemployment benefits, as I very often did at the time. I was carrying a copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Outside the dreary building there was as usual a parade of sellers of various revolutionary newspapers, each calling out their title and a brief positional slogan - 'Socialist Vanguard. Supports the Irish Worker's Struggle.' One of them spotted my Rilke, and he pointed to it and said to me, 'Bout the only decent thing to come out of fucking Germany in the thirties, that was.'

In that moment the longhaired Workers Fist seller and I shared a unique solidarity, a kinship, possible only in an singular epoch perhaps, a time when another Europe was being glimpsed. I can see him now, his grin sending static through his beard, my own smile reflected in his mirror shades. Never saw him again. The Workers Fist feller would've been able to call this from memory:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrible.

...

So, a lot of attention has been expended on difficult texts. For a little light relief I'll DJ a few riffs that might serve as a jingle or ringtone on the theme of the current condition of Western philosophy.

You can't barge far in philosophy today without coming upon the slippery Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek. Not only is he a conspicuous presence, quoted and referenced on an array of political and cultural topics in prestigious journals like the NLR, the LRB, and the NYRB, while he's less than 60 years old there's already an institute founded for the study of his work and times - the lively and entertaining International Journal of Zizek Studies

He's startlingly erodite and an engaging performer. You can see him in action on YouTube, for instance in the clip of his closing remanks to the 2006 'Future of Communism' conference at Birbeck. He looks every bit the engaged intellectual, an exotic species rarely found in this country outside of the psychiatric facility. Hirstute, of course, as he delivers he pokes and mauls the air in front of him, welshcombs his grey mane and tugs furiously on his misshapen teeshirt. I took to him immediately.

There's a rumour he's done a beer advert in Slovenia, and I wouldn't be taken aback were he to appear on Jonathan Ross's couch, but it would be a mistake to take him for a nouvelle philosophe type wanker. His origins are in the Slovenian stalinist era punk movement, and he remains active in an agitprop (does that word still exist?) arts collective, NSK (Neue Slowenischer Kunst).


Zizek says he's a dialectical materialist, which is alright with me, though Hegel is clearly his main man. Odd juxtapositions are a speciality. Reading Zizek is exhilarating, he writes much as he speaks, and if you imediately get the sense you're being unmercifully provoked, it seldom gets tiresome. Some chapter headings from The Parallax View (2006) will do for now:

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit.
The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One.
The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie it.

His other main man is Jacques Lacan. It seems that Zizek's avid promotion of Lacan is responsibe for a major ongoing revision of the view, formerly held in Britain and the US, that psychoanalysis is as dead as Marxism. Zizek's efforts have paid off particularly in America, where Lacan now figures prominently in culture and film studies. See for instance Lacan in America

I wasn't familiar with Lacan, so I read some popular short introductions - Looking Awry, an Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, and Lacan for Dummies - all by Zizek.

A common experience with Lacan, particularly among anglophones, is that he's painfully difficult to approach, both in terms of language and concept, other than through interpreters like Zizek. Cunningly perhaps, Lacan chose not to write any books, preferring to present, over a period of decades, series of lectures, which clearly contained a measure of performance, delivered before audiences of the cream of France's intellectual and artistic elite. Over the years the lectures have been transcribed and published. He made notes, though he presumed that only himself and his son-in-law would be able to decipher them. There are baffling neologisms, odd coinages, algebraic constructions, mathemes and graphemes. Zizek suggests you might read Lacan the way you would Mallarmé.

Again, what immediately strikes the anglophone sensibility is Lacan's repeated declaration that he is primarily a clinician, and his intention is to set the practice of psychoanalysis on a firm scientific basis. We assume that by this he means that he wants to make psychoanalysis more effective in alleviating human suffering. Given Freud's less than inspiring summary of the objective of psychoanalysis - that of turning profound despair into ordinary misery - Lacan's refoundational project appears to amount to creating a psychoanalysis that really works.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been now practiced for the past forty years, particularly in France, and in Argentina, where apparently it reigns supreme. But I've yet to come across news from those countries of the emergence of a new and effective cure for despair. There's an interesting acrticle HERE by Dylan Evans, a former Lacanian psychoanalyst, and author the widely read Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, that deals with this point.

But you see, as Zizek would quickly remind me, this way of looking at Lacan misses the mark, being merely an instance of what Heidegger calls 'technological framing'. Another reason to read Heidegger...

(Incidentally, all the books mentioned, and many more, can be had on Scribd in pdf format. This is a sort of YouTube for documents, and excellent resource for those who don't mind reading books on computer terminals.)

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