There is some burden I am carrying that I do not need to carry.
How to deal with your own opinions? Turn them into ‘art’?
Attribute them to a fictitious character (such as yourself)? Express them
incognito? Write them down but ironically,
as if within permanent quotation marks? – Is there much difference between these
options? – It is as if you were so wary of your opinions that the last thing you could envisage doing with
then is just saying them, in a conversation with other human beings, and
hearing the opinions of those other human beings in turn, and having a discussion
on that basis.
They draw on the figure of the Mighty Oz to show how
religion appears: a phantasm dreamt up by elderly men hiding behind curtains in
order to scare the masses. But what if all thinking were the product of Oz-like
mechanisms? And if so, where is The Toto who will smell out the illusion and
pull the curtain aside? (The Wizard of Oz
is always a film. – Does it even make sense to try to get behind the screen?)
H., in her phone call, told me there had been snow over X.
This awakened many memories and many dreams.
An artist who is too far ahead of her time is no longer
really in time at all. It does not make sense to imagine that we are somehow
trying to catch up with the work of the avant-garde – still grappling with the
insights of Finnegans Wake, or the Nouveau roman, or OULIPO. Artists are no
more the antennae of the race than they are its wagging tail (or its organs of
excretion). The time of art is in itself (in-itself; in art). This is not an idealist statement. It does
not presuppose the autonomy of the aesthetic, or the existence of ‘art’ or ‘time’.
The generalist scratches the surface. The specialist
scratches the depths.
Make a list of the people you, in spite of it all, knew. A
rich gallery even if you just concentrate on, for example, those at the École –
or even your colleagues and pupils in Saint-H. (Your heart gives a little
leap when you think of this – perhaps this is why people write down their
memories? And why should you deny
yourself the pleasure of memorializing it? You are no different from other
people: you are just as narcissistic as they are. You are not going to cease
being narcissistic simply by pretending not to glimpse into the lake of memory from
time to time. Echo can look after herself.)
Eagleton in the LRB: ‘Mauss and Durkheim were of that
classical school of intellectuals in which one was expected to know everything,
and the extraordinary versatility of Mauss’s work harks back to Goethe rather
than forward to Giddens. His knowledge stretched from classical antiquity to
psychology and political economy, the sacred texts of India to Celtic law and
Scandinavian mythology. As a professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes,
and later at the Collège de France, he published on Germanic migration and the
habits of the human body, death and the expression of feelings, violence,
totemism, Bolshevism, the nation, magic, seasonal variations of Eskimo
societies, modern politics, art and mythology and a good deal more. As a
student at the Ecole Pratique, he delved into Sanskrit, Hebrew and
Indo-European comparative linguistics. What has survived most Imemorably of
him, however, are two anthropological masterpieces: his “Essay on the Nature
and Function of Sacrifice”, co-authored with Henri Hubert, and “The Gift”.’
- This reminds me of the allure – I want it back, I WANT IT
BACK – of reading the programme of the Collège de France posted up in a
corridor of the Sorbonne as I saw it in the autumn of 1979.
I could become an interviewer.
The surrealist shorts I saw in the rue Saint-Jacques.
‘Who now still reads Karl Jaspers?’ Martin Jay begins his
review of Suzanne Kirkbright’s biography of the philosopher (LRB, 8 June). Well, we psychiatrists do,
or at least we older ones did. His philosophy may have been expressed in
‘turgid idiom’, but his psychiatric masterpiece, General Psychopathology (1913), was not. Most Anglophone readers
think it worth buying for the fifty-page introductory chapter alone. If
Jaspers’s philosophy was preoccupied with those ‘aspects of the human condition
that defied rational understanding’, then it is unsurprising that he was so
well suited to the exploration of mental illness. His work is outstanding for
its vivid and penetrating descriptions of the seemingly alien experiences his
patients struggled to communicate. Jay emphasises the value Jaspers accorded
relationships and this is most evident in his insistence on psychiatry as an
interaction between two individuals, rather than simply as the exercise of
trained observation. His comments may be even more important now, as psychiatry
risks drifting into an impoverished and mechanistic scientism. - Tom Burns, Warneford
Hospital, Oxford. - Or, quite simply, the link between philosophy and the hospital. Or, even more simply, the psychiatric ward. (The odd yearning at the sight of G., seen from the road on returning from the glorious beech woods today.)
Culture: the stars by which we navigate. Needed only by
night.
‘Fare lonely like rhinoceros’ (an old translation of an Old
Buddhist adage). It does not need to be like that, though a tough skin is
always useful for society.
Drop the burden, whatever it is.
Drop the burden, whatever it is.
