Richard Marshall on Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse

A reflective essay published in 3:AM Magazine

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

A still from Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011)

From Richard Marshall (3:AM Magazine):

“In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.”

Some catastrophes are unknown. Some are unknowable.

Knowledge of catastrophe is limited by our imagination which is not limitless. For Nietzsche we think only in the form of language and are trapped by prejudices inherited from this to believe that distinctions of subject/predicate, cause/effect, noun/verb and so on are ontologically grounded, that they are in some tight isomorphic relationship with reality. Not only do these prejudices isolate us from knowing the world, we are isolated from ourselves too. The practices and conventions that give us practical guidance to make sense of our own linguistic meaning, sans Wittgenstein’s over-optimistic assumption that such meanings must be shared, all those personal idiolects, adjusted vocabularies and syntax that detach us from any default convention in order to respond to local circumstance leave us with fragile, lonely and private worlds.

Tarr’s film dwells for as long as it can with two characters whose isolation is stripped down to an abject extreme. The regularities of their trapped behaviours – feeding the horse, being dressed and dressing, eating squalid potatoes, drawing water from the well, these are repetitive sequences of primitive solutions to the universal problem of how to coordinate and communicate beliefs and actions. And the catastrophe that unfolds, the storm blowing like the ash of a burning universe, is a dark matter that dissolves each grim uniformity, every regularity, and in so doing wrecks any scantily dressed default understanding of reality, self and communication. Tarr portrays this as an event that occurs across an extreme boundary. It is a catastrophe that remains beyond them. It dissolves the world into pitch.

History goes on only to the limit of our comprehension because it is about us. A history that wasn’t our history would be incomprehensible. The world that isn’t our world too. Physics is included in this, for physics is guided by the overweening belief in truth as its ultimate value. And all values come from us. If not, where else? This philosophical position is historicist, archeological, anthropological and genealogical. It is the soul of Nietzsche’s nihilism. Husserl similarly was a nihilist when he declares geometry a human device linked to our practical needs and activities. So too was Marx a nihilist when he said that to understand science we had to understand its social genesis. Nihilism isn’t a belief but is rather the default process of modernity.

Our measurement of value is the life. Where catastrophe strikes the values we live by become disorientated, blind, and stupid. Nothing survives the transvaluation of values because the catastrophe strikes at the very heart of the life that is identical with its values. Here is an example of Nietzsche’s thought that we are trapped by linguistic form. Language makes it seem that there is a life and attached some values. But this is wrong, according to Nietzsche. Life and values are one and the same thing. In a boring sense, the relationship is analytic.

Tarr produces the sense of dread that accompanies the catastrophe. It covers the land – which is always the land as you know it, the land as it used to be, the land in which there was hope of its future spreading out. The momentous opening of the film, the extended shot of the horse as will, powering along through the landscape, dominating the world in a freedom of movement that asserts the ‘this is this’ identity of noun and verb, this is the affirmation of life asserting its own continuation and on its own terms no matter how disorganized, incoherent and crazy. Here is a life and its world and in its furious energy and movement everything is going one way – this way, not that way. And if that includes waste, degeneration, decay and death, well, in the vast momentum of the film’s opening there’s no hint of fear that we are not free to remain young, that no institution can abolish age, nor vice nor disease nor any sense that to do so would be to abolish us. Every value is there in that impressive object, its gigantic shape and process so aligned to establish what infernal will has imposed and made. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse
• The Soundscapes of Béla Tarr
• The Melancholy Worlds of Béla Tarr
• László Krasznahorkai, War and War
• The Guardian interviews László Krasznahorkai

The Essays of Schopenhauer: E-book

A selection from Parerga and Paralipomena

Screenshot from essaysofschopenhauer.com

From essaysofschopenhauer.com:

This website presents six essay extracts from Schopenhauer's last work entitled 'Parerga and Paralipomena', a collection of philosophical reflections first published in 1851. A further eighteen essays are available in both paperback and e-book formats at a small cost. This unique and comprehensive curation is a must have for anyone interested in learning more about Schopenhauer's ideas and literary style.

Schopenhauer's depth of insight into the human condition influenced a long list of famous thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Hardy and Charles Darwin to name just a few. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Spinoza's Guide to Living Well
• Homes of German Philosophers
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer
• Beckett and Schopenhauer
• Samuel Beckett and Quietism

The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi

A review from Open Letters Monthly

Giacomo Leopardi

From Luciano Mangiafico (Open letters Monthly):

Hard to imagine a bleaker prospect for the future: you are a writer of genius, but you are trapped in a small village in the retrograde 19th century Papal States. You are unable to leave the household that is run by a cold, fanatically religious mother and a father who, having been through the turbulence of the Napoleonic period, is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. As the son of a nobleman, it was not proper for you to attend public schools, so priests privately tutored you until you knew more than they did. You then read systematically through your father’s library, learning several classical and modern languages, and ruining both your eyesight and your already fragile health in the process. You are a hunchback, suffered from many real and imaginary maladies, were derided for your scholarly pretensions, and your hope of finding a soul of the opposite sex who would reciprocate your love was virtually nonexistent.

You were cut off by distance from the centers of European intellectual life, such as Paris and Weimar, your only means of communications was letters, and yet and yet…despite all odds, you became one of greatest Italian poets and philosophers, a living link between Rousseau and Nietzsche. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi
• James Campbell, The Library: A World History
• Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems (Paperback)
• The Waste Land Project
• Ginsberg's Cold Summer Borscht

Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey

'2001 is a nonverbal experience'

A still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick

From skibinskipedia.org:

Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film — the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a “star-child” drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called 2001 “the first Nietzschean film,” contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?

Stanley Kubrick: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to “explain” a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film — and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level — but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium
• Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: The Exhibition

Nietzsche's Daily Habits

An extract from Curtis Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche

Sils-Maria, Switzerland. 2004. Photograph: Patrick Lakey

Sils-Maria, Switzerland. 2004. Photograph: Patrick Lakey

Friedrich Nietzsche’s House, Sils-Maria, Switzerland. 2004. Photograph: Patrick Lakey

From Curtis Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche:

With a Spartan rigour which never ceased to amaze his landlord-grocer, Nietzsche would get up every morning when the faintly dawning sky was still grey, and, after washing himself with cold water from the pitcher and china basin in his bedroom and drinking some warm milk, he would, when not felled by headaches and vomiting, work uninterruptedly until eleven in the morning. He then went for a brisk, two-hour walk through the nearby forest or along the edge of Lake Silvaplana (to the north-east) or of Lake Sils (to the south-west), stopping every now and then to jot down his latest thoughts in the notebook he always carried with him. Returning for a late luncheon at the Hôtel Alpenrose, Nietzsche, who detested promiscuity, avoided the midday crush of the table d’hôte in the large dining-room and ate a more or less ‘private’ lunch, usually consisting of a beefsteak and an ‘unbelievable’ quantity of fruit, which was, the hotel manager was persuaded, the chief cause of his frequent stomach upsets. After luncheon, usually dressed in a long and somewhat threadbare brown jacket, and armed as usual with notebook, pencil, and a large grey-green parasol to shade his eyes, he would stride off again on an even longer walk, which sometimes took him up the Fextal as far as its majestic glacier. Returning ‘home’ between four and five o’clock, he would immediately get back to work, sustaining himself on biscuits, peasant bread, honey (sent from Naumburg), fruit and pots of tea he brewed for himself in the little upstairs ‘dining-room’ next to his bedroom, until, worn out, he snuffed out the candle and went to bed around 11 p.m.

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Emrys Westacott on Friedrich Nietzsche
• Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche
• Brian Leiter on Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Loneliness and Solitude

Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi

Cynthia Haven on Farrar, Straus & Giroux's new 2,600 page edition

Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi

A review of Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi, from The Book Haven:

Poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is too little known in the U.S., so I read with pleasure about the Farrar, Straus & Giroux publication of Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, the 2,600-page edition of his complete notebooks. It will be some time before I can get around to the work itself, so I have to content myself with Robert Pogue Harrison‘s review over at the Financial Times here. We’ve written about Robert, the radio host for Entitled Opinions, here and here, among other places. He’s one of the most interesting writers at Stanford.

In his words, Zibaldone “is as important as the Notebooks of Coleridge, the Journals of Emerson, the Diaries of Kierkegaard, and the posthumous notes of Friedrich Nietzsche, first made available to the public under the title The Will to Power.” [Read More]

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Samuel Beckett's Book Collection

George Hunka on a recent survey of Samuel Beckett's reading habits

Samuel Beckett reading in his Paris apartment

From George Hunka (The Theatre Bar):

The books with which a writer chooses to surround himself may be a far more interesting clue to his own writings than the biography — what he read is more germane to the work than what he ate, what clothes he wore, whom he slept with. And perhaps it’s not necessary that he read all of the books on those shelves: he found them, at one time or another, of interest to himself or of relevance to his own creative endeavor.

So now we have Samuel Beckett’s Library, published late last month by Cambridge University Press, a census and study of the books that remained in Beckett’s library at his death, by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon. For those more interested in the work than the life, the book is an essential text, and even partakes of an intellectual biography itself. Along with the continuing series of letters (two volumes published, two more to follow), one can trace Beckett’s growth and maturity as an artist through the various marginalia (and even non-marginalia; see below) that he leaves along his reading trail. “As Maryanne Wolf argues, ‘the experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind,’” Van Hulle and Nixon write in their introduction. “It is impossible to look ‘inside’ a reader’s or a writer’s mind with hindsight, but its transformations are partially retraceable on the basis of reading notes.”

A census — a simple list of the books in Beckett’s library — is included as an appendix, but they tell us only as much as a simple list can tell us. Van Hulle and Nixon differentiate between different kinds of reading traces — marginalia, dog-eared pages, non-marginalia (phrases and references that occur in Beckett’s work but are not marked), and extractions (passages copied verbatim from a printed text into a notebook). Among these non-marginalia in Beckett’s work are phrases and passages from Charles Darwin and William Shakespeare, phrases and passages that struck Beckett so sharply that their marking was unnecessary and testimony to his excellent memory.

There are both recognitions and surprises to be found. Dante, Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer are obviously present — and so is a single volume of Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “showing several dog-ears” but no written marginalia. (There is none of Ionesco’s plays in the library, only a single novel; Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double is present, but unmarked.) Darwin, as mentioned above, was read and re-read. So were several volumes of secondary literature — surveys of literary and philosophical history provided Beckett with the starting points for his own individual explorations. Van Hulle and Nixon are particularly good on Beckett’s indebtedness to Mauthner and Wittgenstein and managed to unearth “one of the most surprising books in the extant library: Olga Plümacher’s Der Pessimismus,” a book from one of the writers in Frank Wedekind’s circle and now likely to become the basis for a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation or two. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett's Bookshelf
• Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956
• Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
• Samuel Beckett's Library

Hyperion Journal finds a new home

January issue is available to read online

From Hyperion:

Hyperion is no longer published by the Nietzsche Circle but is now housed on the Contra Mundum Press (CMP) website. The issue is dedicated to Italian director Elio Petri, and features excerpts from CMP's forthcoming edition of Petri's writings, translated into English for the first time.

Also included are translations from Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, and Italian, as well as essays and reviews on art, cinema, dance, literature, poetry, and theatre. There are two texts by world renowned actor Lou Castel, and an essay on theater by distinguished Italian writer and translator Maura Del Serra. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press talks to The Brooklyn Rail
• Contra Mundum Press
• Contra Mundum Press awarded grant
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy

A new title from Bloomsbury

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

From Bloomsbury Publishing:

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?'

Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed.

Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux. [Read More]

Contributors: Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University), Saul Anton (The New School & Pratt), Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta), Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen), Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University), James Corby (University of Malta), Chris Muller (Cardiff University), Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University), Fiona Hughes (University of Essex), Janice Sant (Cardiff University), Marie-Dominique Garnier (Université de Paris-8 Vincennes-à-St-Denis), Mario Aquilina (Durham University), Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• A Tour of Slavoj Žižek's Apartment
• Documentary: Examined Life (2008)
• Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes

Shelley Frisch on Translation and Kafka

An interview with Words without Borders

Shelley Frisch. Photograph: Frank Wojciechowski

From Words without Borders:

Our "Translator Relay" series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. Ross Benjamin passed the baton to Shelley Frisch, who has published widely on German literature, film, cabaret, and the political and linguistic dimensions of exile, as well as on translation; her book on origin of language theories, The Lure of the Linguistic, was published in 2004. Her many translations from the German include biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, and Kafka, for which she was awarded a Modern Language Association Translation Prize. Frisch also co-directs international translation workshops with Karen Nölle.

[...]

Tell us about a current, or future, translation project that you’re excited about.

For the past decade, I’ve been working with Kafka biographer Reiner Stach, who will soon be finishing the third and final volume of his mammoth work. The first volume was published in English in 2005, the second will be coming out this spring with Princeton University Press, and I am working on the translation of the final volume while Reiner Stach writes it (let’s hope his editor goes easy on revisions…). The full set will run more than 2,000 pages; critic Michael Dirda called its lively, enlightening, and beautifully crafted presentation “an enthralling synthesis” in the pages of the Washington Post. Although I have entertained fantasies that the final volume will be briefer, all indications are that it will not be. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Episode 8
• Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake published
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• Primo Levi on Translation

Simon Critchley on the Tragic and its Limits

An interview with The White Review

John Douglas Millar (The White Review) interviews philosopher Simon Critchley:

To Critchley, one attraction of tragedy lies in ‘its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation.’ Since the beginning of his career he has been concerned with the antagonism between literature and philosophy, telling me earlier this year that ‘Literature was always my passion. It was what philosophy was meant to serve in a sense . . . Literature was served by philosophy rather than the other way around.’ His work on tragedy may be read in this light, and can also be seen as a model for reading the present state of permanent war in which we find ourselves. In the following interview we discussed the significance of tragedy for him, his use of collaboration as a working method, and how his latest obsession has lead to the new book. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Continental Philosophy
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• The Big Think Interviews Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Friedrich Nietzsche and Moral Nihilism

From one of a series of lectures by Dr William Large

William Large on Friedrich Nietzsche and moral nihilism (link via 3:AM Magazine):

In popular culture, the philosopher Nietzsche is usually associated with moral nihilism. We might define nihilism as the absence of the highest values. Associated with moral nihilism is moral relativism. Moral relativism is the belief that all values, precisely because there are no higher values, are merely the expression of personal preference. Ironically, however, is it exactly this kind of moral viewpoint that Nietzsche is criticising. Rather than being a nihilist he is an anti-nihilist. Nihilism is a diagnosis of the decadence of Western culture, rather than a position that Nietzsche wants, and still less, wants us to aspire to. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Friedrich Nietzsche on Dangerous Books
• Emrys Westacott on Friedrich Nietzsche
• Human, All Too Human
• Nietzsche and the Secret History of Philosophers
• Nietzsche on 'historical philosophizing'
• Human, All Too Human: BBC's Nietzsche Documentary
• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche
• Friedrich Nietzsche: A Perspectivist Thinker

Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

A new title from Columbia University Press

Peter Sloterdijk

From Columbia University Press:

In his best-selling book You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk argued exercise and practice were crucial to the human condition. In The Art of Philosophy, he extends this critique to academic science and scholarship, casting the training processes of academic study as key to the production of sophisticated thought. Infused with humor and provocative insight, The Art of Philosophy further integrates philosophy and human existence, richly detailing the foundations of this relationship and its transformative role in making the postmodern self.

Sloterdijk begins with Plato’s description of Socrates, whose internal monologues were so absorbing they often rooted the philosopher in place. The original academy, Sloterdijk argues, taught scholars to lose themselves in thought, and today’s universities continue this tradition by offering scope for Plato’s “accommodations for absences.” By training scholars to practice thinking as an occupation transcending daily time and space, universities create the environment in which thought makes wisdom possible. Traversing the history of asceticism, the concept of suspended animation, and the theory of the neutral observer, Sloterdijk traces the evolution of philosophical practice from ancient times to today, showing how scholars can remain true to the tradition of “the examined life” even when the temporal dimension no longer corresponds to the eternal. Building on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and other practitioners of the life of theory, Sloterdijk launches a posthumanist defense of philosophical inquiry and its everyday, therapeutic value.

About the Author

Peter Sloterdijk is professor of aesthetics and philosophy at the Institute of Design in Karlsruhe and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Recently named one of the world’s top intellectuals by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines, his numerous works include Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation and the best-selling Critique of Cynical Reason. Karen Margolis is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A graduate in mathematics from the London School of Economics, she coauthored The Technology of Political Control and has published fiction, memoirs, poetry, and translations. [Read More]

Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs

A page from Blanchot's corrected proof of L'Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation)

A page from Maurice Blanchot's corrected proofs of L'Entretien Infini, showing changes made by Blanchot. MS Fr 497. Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund, 2009.

A 2010 news story from the Harvard Gazette:

As a novelist, literary theorist, journalist and philosopher, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) had a profound impact on the thinking of dozens of philosophers, novelists, and writers. Until recently, however, it remained unclear how Blanchot’s thinking had evolved over his lifetime. A famously reclusive figure in the literary world, it was believed Blanchot had destroyed most of his personal papers before his death.

With the Houghton Library’s recent acquisition of corrected page proofs of Blanchot’s major 1969 work L’Entretien Infini (“The Infinite Conversation”), however, scholars should soon be able to shed new light on Blanchot’s changing political and literary attitudes.

The pages were salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper, and contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs – some of which consist of small slips taped over pages, while others are multiple pages in length.

The proofs, along with several other Blanchot manuscripts, came up for sale in March 2009. Hoping the material might find an institutional home where it could be preserved and made accessible to scholars, Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Christy McDonald approached Leslie Morris, Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts with the idea of purchasing the items. [Read More]

See also: A conversation about the proofs of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini at Houghton Library [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Corrected Proof: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• J. G. Ballard Manuscripts at British Library
• Manuscript page of Don DeLillo's Libra
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts
• Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Friedrich Nietzsche on Dangerous Books

An extract from Assorted Opinions and Maxims

Georg Friedrich Kersting, 'Man Reading at Lamplight' (1814)

From Friedrich Nietzsche's Assorted Opinions and Maxims, translated by R. J. Hollingdale:

Dangerous books. - Somebody remarked: 'I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful.' But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible. - Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognisable.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Franz Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'
• Emrys Westacott on Friedrich Nietzsche
• Human, All Too Human
• Nietzsche and the Secret History of Philosophers
• Nietzsche on 'historical philosophizing'
• Human, All Too Human: BBC's Nietzsche Documentary
• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche
• Friedrich Nietzsche: A Perspectivist Thinker

The Melancholy Worlds of Béla Tarr

Harvard Film Archive profiles the Hungarian filmmaker

A still from The Man from London (dir. Béla Tarr, 2007)

From the Harvard Film Archive: 'Béla Tarr (b. 1955) is the ultimate auteurist’s auteur, an artist who ascended from a cult director little known outside of his native Hungary to one of the most revered figures in world cinema today, all the while stoking an enflamed cinephilia among his growing legion of passionate followers. His 1988 film Damnation offered the first full expression of the unique style defined by Tarr across the four extraordinary features he directed since then, all sharing brooding black and white cinematography, elaborately choreographed extended tracking shots, a hypnotic rhythm and enigmatic stories imbued with a sense of impending doom. In each film Tarr pushes these unmistakable qualities to a seemingly insurmountable extreme, giving way to the mesmerizing monumentality of his audacious seven-and-a-half-hour epic Sátántangó and the stark minimalism of his brilliant summary work The Turin Horse, Tarr’s latest and declared last film.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse
• The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai
• Hari Kunzru on Krasznahorkai's Hipster following

Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art

An article for The Brooklyn Rail

Al Held, 'The Big A' (1962)

Philosopher Simon Critchley shares his thoughts on contemporary art: '[...] despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Francis Bacon: Five Decades
• Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

The Talks: Woody Allen

'The whole thing is tragic'

Woody Allen

From The Talks (link via 3:AM Magazine):

Mr. Allen, do you truly believe that happiness in life is impossible?

This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have since I was a little boy; it hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that’s it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself.

I think it’s safe to say that most people would disagree.

But I am not the first person to say this or even the most articulate person. It was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene O’Neill. One must have one’s delusions to live. If you look at life too honestly and clearly, life becomes unbearable because it’s a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit. [Read More]

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The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi

Alex Stein talks to the Egyptian-American aphorist, poet and essayist

Yahia Lababidi

From Onesuch Press: The Artist as Mystic is a set of lyric conversations between aphorists Yahia Lababidi and Alex Stein. These conversations constitute what Australians call a ‘Songline’—a set of sacred songs that allow the reader/listener to navigate through an unknown terrain, in this case, populated by the tortured and ecstatic souls of the poets; Kafka, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kierkegaard and Ekelund.

The tortured poets are masterfully evoked in this very fine work of biography and criticism. But these writings are more than the sum of notes on a page, they are song. The Artist as Mystic passes the test of all great writing, not only to delight, but to leave us knowing something of the subject, and ourselves, that we hadn’t considered before.

Praise for The Artist as Mystic

Few writers pay such passionate due to their literary forebears as Yahia Lababidi, and in these conversations he summons up the great seers—among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Baudelaire—with an immediacy and a vividness that make them seem his, and our, contemporaries.

John Banville

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005 and the Franz Kafka Prize 2011

I have never encountered a book like The Artist as Mystic and I'm still not convinced that any modern person could be as reflective and erudite as Yahia Lababidi. But whether Lababidi is real or fictitious, the pleasures of this book are undeniable. It provides intimate insights into writers such as Nietzsche, Kafka, Kierkegaard and Rilke and offers the deepest intellectual rewards of its own.

David Bezmozgis

Author of The Free World

Yahia Lababidi has no patience for easy bows and judicious curtseys. He gives intimate brotherly address to the writers who have made him and, doing so, recovers the sense of mattering--the passion--that has always fired the deepest reading, and the writing that lasts. Much heart here, but also a shrewd experienced acuity and an irresistible grace of expression.

Sven Birkerts

Author of The Other Walk: Essays and The Gutenberg Elegies

About Alex Stein

Alex Stein is an essayist, aphorist, and illustrator whose recent books include Made-Up Interviews With Imaginary Artists (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009) and Weird Emptiness (Wings Press, 2007). He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and works at the University of Colorado’s Norlin Library.

About Yahia Lababidi

Egyptian-American Yahia Lababidi is an aphorist, poet, and essayist. He is the author of a new poetry collection, Fever Dreams (Crisis Chronicles Press), an essay collection, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, and a collection of aphorisms, Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press). Lababidi’s work has appeared in several anthologies, and been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, Slovak, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, and Italian.

Website

Onesuch Press: The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi

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Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse

Slant Magazine on the DVD/Blu-Ray release of Tarr's final film

Promotional poster for The Turin Horse (dir. Béla Tarr, 2011)

A review by Budd Wilkins (Slant Magazine): 'The final film from acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse is an almost perfect encapsulation of the stylistic hallmarks and thematic preoccupations that have marked the director's work, at least since the beginning of his collaboration with novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai. The film opens in poetic-philosophical mode with a literal tabula rasa: Darkness fills the screen. A disembodied voice relates an incident, perhaps little more than an apocryphal legend, a footnote from the history of philosophy concerning the collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche after compassionately embracing a beaten horse in the streets of Turin. "Quiet and demented," so we are told, Nietzsche lived out the last 10 years of his existence. The anecdote concludes somewhat inconclusively: "Of the horse, we know nothing." This quizzical narration contains all the simplicity and ambiguity of one of Kafka's fables, opening up vistas of ethical and ultimately metaphysical speculation. Likewise, the atmosphere of existential enervation that accumulates over the course of The Turin Horse suggests the bleak and barren topography of a late Samuel Beckett play as filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Ultimately, precisely what relation the film's subsequent events bear to Nietzsche and his philosophy remains resolutely open to viewer interpretation.' [Read More]

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