Showing posts with label sartre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sartre. Show all posts

Thursday, February 19, 2009

It requires the author to be "dismissed," once and for all, so as finally to come into existence, to be, to "assert itself as thing without author and without reader." What Blanchot dismisses here, with an irrevocable gesture, is not just the author, but the mirage – so stubborn, though – of a “communication” between the writer and the reader. The writer is alone, irremediably alone ("Khalvat dar anjoman, solitude in the crowd," posits one of the eleven rules of the Naqshbandi Sufis: that is the solitude of Kafka, again, never alone enough and yet always infinitely alone). Vain hope of writing with a wish to be understood, or of establishing any kind of human fraternity with the other; cruel disillusion of anyone who writes with the expectation of a response, an echo. The writer writes as Giacometti wanted to sculpt: so as to bury the sculpture (as Genet tells us), and "not so that it could be discovered, or else much later, when he himself and the memory of his name have disappeared. Would burying it be to offer it to the dead?" wonders Genet, thus putting his finger on this obvious fact: the writer, the artist does not communicate with the reader or the spectator, he communicates with death; the death of others (Foucault) or else his own death, always yet to come but beyond which he necessarily situates himself in order to write. The writer: the one who is always already dead. The reader, on the contrary, lives, and thanks to him the book, "unburdened of its author," lives too: the book, the text leaves the world of the dead, whence it comes (or comes forth rather?) to participate in the things of life. And that is how the noli me legere of the book gives way to the Lazare, veni foras of the reader, the reader who nonetheless, unlike Christ, accomplishes no miracle, but simply, by his free and innocent reading, his "light yes" offered with a smile, shows (and sees) that language too lives, with its own life.


http://this-space.blogspot.com/2009/02/reading-by-jonathan-littell.html

Hmmm, what was it I was thinking? Oh, no. I was thinking of personally thinking of every story told from the point of view of it being a hell. Secretively or openly. This doesn't necessarily mean pitchforks and lots of screaming. More like how Sartre's Hell is Other People play wasn't really any more or less a hell than the average story really. And was better than lots of people's actual lives.

Was a way to get beyond my issues with not liking pitting people against one another. Writing as if already dead is something else entirely. But perhaps useful.

Right this moment is an actual moment to spend writing. I've had a back issue where sleeping is causing my back to hurt. I went to bed early tonight (9pm), by morning I've no choice but to get up because my back is hurting and getting up (so far) has made the pain stop. Today though it started hurting too bad at 3AM.

But I don't feel quite sufficiently dead enough to really write.

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http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/
I'm a sort of Strindberg. Although nowhere near like I appear here actually. But still...

I'm very lucky in that my wife is a sort of Helium. Very lucky all around in the wife I have.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

No Exit

Supposedly the best fiction Sartre wrote. From which came the phrase, "Hell is other people." If it had been me I would have chucked it. Which isn't to say it's bad. Mostly an unfortunate comment about me.

Inez is tortured through feeling rejected by Estelle and is also jealous of Estelle and Garcin getting it on.
Garcin is tortured about whether he was a coward in his life with plenty of help from Inez.
Estelle is tortured mainly in that she can't manage to get it on with Garcin for a combination of reasons: Garcin not really thinking much at all of her, Inez doing everything she can to stop them, etc.

It's very unreal. Very kitsch. But then plays seem to always be that way. And really any fiction writing it seems that's readable to me ultimately seems kitsch, or ...unreal. That seems to be crucial. The vulgar truth is just no good. One must lie...

I was forced to act just a little in a play in high school and my god I couldn't stand it. It was literally screaming inside at the kitschness of it. The few plays I've gone to see I could barely stand to sit in the audience.

Also I can't stand to watch romantic comedies where lies pile on. I have some kind of honesty conditioning... It's like A Clockwork Orange, him being tortured/forced to watch things he can't stand anymore...

But the word kitsch. Unreal and kitsch aren't the same exact thing. Words are so annoying. Nothing I say is really true. Which, again, drives me just a little nutty. Just a little.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Camus was perhaps not as smart as Sartre, but he was much the better man.

A kind of strange example of a common republican tactic. When over and over again the opposition is clearly more intelligent, there's nothing for it but to attack intelligence itself.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Good post summarizing the stuff I've been thinking about lately

Etc.
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Started trying to actually write fiction yesterday. Descended into deep depression for my troubles, ended up thinking of the levels of suicide. I don't have any normal go-kill-myself-suicide in me. I defeated that I think permanently about 18 years ago. But there is stuff like driving down the road and wishing you might wreck the car and die. (I don't wish that.) There is kind of wishing you'd just get some disease and get the pointless boring absurdity over with. Or, working at a hospital, here and there in the past having wished I was a patient, I have done those a few times. Some kind of creeping suicide. I'm in a good mood at the moment as it's morning. Takes a long day of contemplation (futilely trying to write fiction for example) to reach the point of thinking enough, compiling enough of the pointlessness, etc of it all.

But I won't ever do such a thing. No worries there if anyone happens to be reading this blog (which was essentially meant as a private matter exactly so I wouldn't have to worry about such misunderstandings. Endless misunderstandings possible through reading all this.)

But the blog was ultimately a vague experiment and it can go where it may.