Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought, an Essay by Douglas Glover at The Brooklyn Rail

Sep 062011
 

Herewith a link to dg’s distillation of 30,000 years (give or take) of Western philosophy. The idea for this essay came from reading Witold Gombrowicz’s wonderful little book A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. DG thought six hours seemed a little long and tedious and that he could condense all the important points into about fifty minutes. This essay is a version of the lecture dg gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts last January (in the event, he was not able to get ALL of philosophy into the time slot), including his own incredibly helpful diagrams and sidebar comments which clear up the complicated points.

dg

Plato was right when he said that we can only know what we know already, that knowledge works by identity. What we cannot know, cannot access, we also cannot experience, and yet this unknowable is all around us, lies inscrutable and threatening behind everything we do know, crouches even within our hearts in a place Freud called the Unconscious. Mostly we cannot escape the feeling that it is watching us, waiting to trip us up, or sometimes bless us. At the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein threw up his hands and wrote that we must remain silent about the things whereof we cannot speak, by which he meant a long list of absolutes including God, the Good, Beauty, etc. But that sort of realism has never stopped humans whose imagination is prolific in inventing dream meetings with the Other. The history of our philosophies has been a history of such dreams.

via Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought – The Brooklyn Rail.

The Haiku and the Novel, is There a Difference?

Feb 172011
 

Here’s a fascinating review of an even more fascinating book. All of you are familiar with Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author.” I like here the potential contrast between the haiku and the novel, which contrast never actually eventuates apparently.

 

Part II returns both author and work centre-stage. Barthes investigates the emergence of writing as an intransitive activity, determined not by its object but by a “maniacal” urge in the author’s body. It focuses on the “operations” by which he (the writers considered are all male: Flaubert, Kafka, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Proust, etc) passes from the desire to write to creating the work. We learn about the minutiae of authors’ habits: where they write, when, at what rhythm or speed (“at a gallop”, in Proust’s case). For the writers Barthes discusses, the space of writing offers a retreat from worldly preoccupations: Flaubert asks for no more than a quiet room with “a good fire in winter and a pair of candles to light me at night”, whereas Proust favours the bed: “you can work, eat, and sleep in it”. Similarly, the time at which they choose to write often suggests a withdrawal from the world. While Barthes cites Paul Valéry as an example of an early morning writer, he devotes most space to those who wrote at night: Flaubert (sometimes), Rimbaud (once), Kafka (joyous at having written “The Judgment” in one night-time sitting) and, of course, Proust (always). The latter’s “complete inversion of day and night” leads on to a broader discussion of inversion in general as the source of a “perverse pleasure”: perhaps the reason why night work enjoys such privilege in Barthes’s imagination.

via The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes reviewed by Mairéad Hanrahan – TLS.