From Word To Word

Over the several weeks since I completed it, Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television has kept me thinking about what it means to appear publicly, particularly through the media, but also in the many other places where we are asked to “make an appearance” in a formal sense, to deliver a conference paper, for example, or to give a sermon, or to teach a class.  More specifically, it has kept me thinking about the conditions, often unspoken and unrecognized, under which we agree to make these kinds of appearances.

Bourdieu argues that, “by agreeing to appear on television shows without worrying about whether you will be able to say anything, you make it very clear that you are not there to say anything at all but for altogether different reasons, chief among them to be seen,” and while he is referring to television specifically here, his argument is more broadly applicable.  Whenever we are asked to appear, whenever we are asked to make an appearance, we are confronted by this question of whether the conditions of our appearance will enable us to say anything, will enable us to do anything but be seen.

Throughout On Television, Bourdieu discusses several factors that silence those who try to say something by appearing through the media, and central among these factors are time limits, which he says “make it highly unlikely that anything can be said.” This is one of the reasons that On Television takes the form it does.  It was originally delivered as two television lectures for which Bourdieu imposed his own strict conditions.  He was allowed to speak as long as he liked without interruption by advertizing and without editing or censorship of any kind.  Bourdieu agreed to appear, in other words, but only under conditions that he believed would allow him to say something rather than just be seen, which meant in large part insisting on having sufficient time.

Jacques Derrida says and does some similar things in Echographies of Television, arguing that “the least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time.”  The central part of this book, the interview with Bernard Stiegler, was also to have been shown on television, though the broadcast never took place, and Derrida agreed to appear in this way only after asking for a right of inspection, a right to inspect the conditions under which he would appear.  Though he says that he had no illusions about his right of inspection being able to guarantee that anything would in fact be said or that what was able to be  said would not be misappropriated, Derrida insists on the principle of this right, on the principle of at least trying “to reconstitute the conditions in which one would be able to say what one wants to say at the rhythm at which and in the conditions in which one wants to say it.  And has the right to say it.  And in the ways that would be least inappropriate.”

I agree with this argument, and I am very concerned with the conditions under which I have to appear in various senses, but I am discovering that the right of inspection is not available to most of us in the way that it is available to Bourdieu and to Derrida.  These thinkers are able to insist on this right only because they already possess a certain status and a certain influence that allows them to negotiate the conditions of their appearance from a position of relative power.  The vast majority of us, however, in the vast majority of the situations where we might appear, are not operating from a similar position.

For example, I recently had the opportunity to appear on a local Christian radio show as a participant in a panel on ethics, but I knew immediately that it was not an opportunity that would, in Bourdieu’s terminology, allow me really to say anything. The constraints of time and of the moderator’s questions and of the station’s political position would have made it very difficult for me to say anything worth being said. I would have liked to do as Bourdieu and Derrida did, to have negotiated a different way of appearing, but I lack completely the kind of influence that would allow me to make such demands.  To appear in a way that would have allowed me to say something was simply not possible for me in that situation, so I decided not to appear at all.

This is not to say that opportunities do not exist that would allow me to appear under conditions that I would find more acceptable.  I was also recently approached by a parenting show on the local university radio station to participate in a discussion on fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  I was initially very skeptical again, and I have no guarantee that I will not be disappointed in the event, but my conversation with the host was a very positive one, and I felt that I would be permitted the time and the space to say something worth saying, so I decided that I would appear on the show.

The problem, therefore, is not that there will never be a place where we can appear under the kinds of conditions that Derrida calls least inappropriate.  The problem is that most of us have no power by which to insist on these conditions, and so our right of inspection amounts almost entirely to a right of refusal, and if those who have something to say must constantly refuse to appear, than the only ones who will appear are those who are interested merely in being seen.  In this way, our right of inspection as right of refusal will most often serve to reinforce a media culture that is concerend primarily with being seen rather than with actually saying something, and though I think this cost is perhaps necessary, it is nevertheless a vastly heavy one to bear.

I do not very often remove subscriptions from my blog reader, even if they have gone silent for months at a time.  This is partly just laziness, but it also reflects a foolish hope that whoever had been writing in the first place will find the time and space to write again.  Of course, this hope remains unfulfilled in almost every case, so I was startled and pleased this morning to see two posts on Void Manufacturing, which has not posted anything since January.

Void Manufacturing posts mostly interviews and articles from major thinkers, usually contemporary and always from the political left.  What attracts me to this particular blog, however, is not so much its content, though this is often very interesting also, but the ways that it reimagines intellectual writing and publishing outside of traditional institutional and academic systems.  I have always been alarmed at how most thinkers, even those who are otherwise very radical, even those whose thought has a vested interest in engaging a broader public, have been content to think and to write and to publish so entirely through traditional academic channels like conferences and journals.  While these channels have their place, certainly, they remain exclusive and self-referential to a degree that inhibits or even prevents the ability of the broader public to engage with the thinking that is taking place through them.

Most online journals do very little to address this problem.  Many of them have fees for some or all of their content, and even those that do not are still clearly more concerned with speaking into the circularity of the ongoing academic conversation than they are with opening this conversation to the public.  They are on the internet, but not of it.  They are available through the internet, but they have refused to avail themselves of the opportunity that the internet offers, an openness to new and broader audiences.  Void Manufacturing, however, does go some way toward opening the conversation, in several ways:

First of all, the content is free, and this factor cannot be undervalued in an age where information and ideas are increasingly being shared without direct cost.  Any thinking that is serious about engaging the public must find a way to give itself to the public freely, not only with respect to its cost but with respect to restrictions on its republication and distribution.  Intellectual thought must give itself up to the public in order to engage with it effectively.

Second, the posts are open to comments and questions, even if they are not ones that will necessarily be seen or addressed by the author whose thinking has been posted.  Thinking that wants to engage the public must be open to having itself engaged in return, because this is how the public is encouraged to begin thinking itself.  People come to thinking by being able to question and to converse with those who are thinking already, and the ability to comment is a small gesture in that direction.

Third, the material is often topical.  It posts what the thinkers of our time have to say about the economic crisis or about the war in Iraq, which engages people on the questions that are significant to them but in ways that are more considered and more reflective and more critical than traditional media can allow.  In order to engage the public, intellectual thought must demonstrate that it provides a relevant and productive alternative perspective on the issues of our time, and this means speaking into those issues specifically.

Fourth, the posts are often interviews, so that the thinking is presented in the form of a dialogue.  It is my firm belief that a thoughtful conversation is the most effective way to understand ideas, and the strength of a well conducted interview is that it approaches this kind of conversation and engages the readers or listeners in it, even if they cannot participate directly.  This dialogue is open in a way that a lecture or an essay is not, and it is one of the most effective tools available to the kind of thinking that recognizes the importance of interacting with people beyond the confines of institutional academia.

Now, Void Manufacturing does not by any means accomplish all of these thing perfectly, especially not during a nine month hiatus, but it does represent an attempt to open a dialgue between intellectual thought and the broader public, so I am an advocate for what it is trying to accomplish, and I am glad to see that it has returned.

It is the responsibility of power to love.

Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.

Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.

This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.

This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.

I am a bit backlogged, I must confess.  I have finished reading several books over the past few months, and I would like to write about them, some of them more than once, but these are not the kinds of posts that I am able to write in a few minutes, and so I now have a small stack of books on my desk, all awaiting my attention.

At the top of the pile, a book that I finished more than two months ago now, is Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be.  It was given to me by Dave Humphrey, either this past Christmas or for my last birthday, I cannot now remember which, and it was a welcome gift, because I had heard a little about Kearney and was wanting to read him for myself.

The book begins with an admirable clarity.  “God neither is nor is not but may be,” Kearney says.  “That is my thesis.”  He argues for this thesis by making what he calls an eschatological reading of several biblical texts, a reading that opposes the onto-theological tradition that understands God in terms of existence or esse, as the God who either is or is not, with a reading that proposes an understanding of God as possibility or posse, as the God who may be.  Kearney articulates the substance of this position more concisely than I ever could, so I will quote him several times, and at length.

“God will be God at the eschaton, ” he says.  “That is what is promised.  But precisely because this promise is just that, a promise, and not an already accomplished possession, there is a free space gaping at the very core of divinity: the space of the possible.  It is this divine gap which renders all things possible which would be otherwise impossible to us – including the kingdom of justice and love.  But because God is posse rather than esse, the promise remains powerless until and unless we respond to it.  Transfiguring the possible into the actual, and thereby enabling the coming kingdom to come into being, is not just something God does for us but also something we do for God.”  In other words, God will come to be, but is not yet.  In the present time, God remains what God may be, remains possibility, and the transformation of this possibility into actuality requires us to respond to what is possible in God.

This response to God’s possibility, in Kearney’s view, becomes our primary responsibility to God.  Our duty is to decide the possibility that is God, again and again, in order that God will be transformed from possibility to actuality.  As he says himself, “It is the divine perhaps, hovering over every just decision or action, that ensures that history is never over and our duty never done.  The posse keeps us on our toes and reminds us that there is nowhere to lay our heads for long.  God depends on us to be.  Without us, no Word can be made flesh.”  Kearney’s claim here is radical.  It makes humanity responsible for the being of God, for the incarnation of God.  It makes God dependent on the decisions of God’s own creations.  It makes the future fundamentally undetermined.  It makes the nature of the coming kingdom of God rely on the decisions made by frail people here and now.

This radical reunderstanding of God and of humanity’s responsibility to God, says Kearney, is the condition of a hope for the future.  “The posse keeps us open to hope,” he says, “even if it is a hope against hope, in other words, the hope that in spite of injustice and despair the posse may become more and more incarnate in esse, transmuting being as it does so into a new heaven and a new earth.”  The hope here is that the God who may be will more and more come actually to be, as we respond to the possibility that God opens in us.  The hope is always that the possibility of love and justice and grace will become ever more the actuality of love and justice and grace.

There is much that I appreciate about Kearney’s argument.  I agree that the God of existence, the God of onto-theology, does not satisfactorily account for the God that is portrayed by the Bible or required by theology or encountered by experience.  I am attracted to the idea that God is a God of possibility rather than existence, and I am attracted even more to the idea that this possibility places an unending responsibility on me to make God be in the world what God desires to be.  I am moved by the hope that is in this possibility.

I am not convinced, however, that Kearney’s idea of God as possibility actually escapes onto-theological existence.  I will not go into the details of my reservations because I am aware that this question is not one that everyone finds compelling, but my main argument would be that Kearney’s understanding of God as possibility that is ideally coming more and more to be, really only defers existence into the future, to the time when it will become actual.  Such possibility escapes existence, perhaps, but only for a time.  It is constantly slipping into existence, moment by moment, and so is already under the sign of existence.  Far from escaping onto-theology, it finds its culmination there, precisely as it moves from possibility into actuality, precisely as humanity makes actual the possible God.

I would suggest that any God who is truly founded in possibility, any God who truly escapes onto-theological existence, is a God whose possibility never becomes actual, either because it remains always still to come, as in Jacques Derrida’s messianism without a messiah, or because it comes to being in such a way that being does not recognize it, as in Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon.  As soon as the possibility of God become actual, either now or in the future, either in this time or in some time to come, it becomes subject to onto-theology, to presence, to being, and becomes fraught with all of the problems that this entails.  This means that Kearney is suggesting, not an alternative to existence at all, but merely a teleology that defers the existence of God to a future and coming time, even if this time is only the end of time.

The problem here is not God as possibility.  The problem is that this possibility is being understood as always anticipating an actuality which then becomes the limit and completion of God, becomes the end of God as possibility.  This is why it is necessary, I would suggest, to begin seeing the possibility at the heart of God as a possibility that never require an actuality, at least not in any of the ways that would be available to human understanding, because the purpose of this possibility is not to make itself be at all, but to make us be in its place.  It does not require being.  It requires us to be as its possibility would make us to be.  It is neither what is, nor what is not, nor what may be.  It is what brings us to be as we respond to its possibility.  The responsibility that the possibility of God lays on us is not to make God come to be, which will never be possible in any case, but to bring ourselves to be in the ways that we can only be as we respond to the possibility at the heart of God.

I have been thinking lately about the nature of the work of art in the age of what I will call digital replication.  This thinking has led me in some disparate directions that I cannot possibly follow all at once, so this post will probably be the first of several that follow a loosely related set of ideas.  I have no real conclusion in mind, not yet, so consider this the textual corollary of thinking aloud.

As my title suggests, I have been thinking this question of digital replication through Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  I first read this essay in a university theory class, then read it again some time later in order to better understand a friend’s article, and then read it again just recently as I was preparing to write this post.  It is a marvelous essay, and I will return to it in a moment, but I think that I should probably begin where so much of my thinking seems to begin, over a cup of coffee with Dave Humphrey.

Actually, on the night in question, I think I was drinking an oatmeal stout rather than a coffee, and I was listening to Dave theorize about why I prefer to search out books in yardsales and thriftstores rather than just to buy them online.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had already begun to answer this question some time ago in a post on dying texts, where I made a distinction between the physical book, which was falling apart as I was reading it, and the work of writing, which was embodied in many such physical books and in other forms as well.  I began to wonder whether my fascination with rescuing discarded books was an expression of a kind of fetish for the physical book, not in and of itself, because I am reader rather than a collector of books, but as the singular place where my own story intersects the story of the work of writing.  In other words, perhaps my fetish is with the book as the physical marker of a literary experience, as one of the elements that produces this experience, as a tangible synecdoche for this experience.  It is not that I am confusing the literary work with the form in which it happens to be embodied, but that my experience of the literary work is so dependent on it being embodied in one form or another that this form itself becomes an inextricable part of my experience.

This explains, I think, at least in part, why I love used bookstores and yardsales and thriftstores, because the books that I find there have stories that began far before I found them, so the intersection of their stories and mine is far more interesting.  They have inscriptions on their titlepages, and makeshift bookmarks, and notes in their margins, and coffee stains, and the pricetags of long forgotten booksellers.  They also have the story of where and when I happened to stumble upon them, the story of how their stories and mine happened to become entangled.  I love these stories about books.  I love them as much as the stories that the books contain.  I love them because they inform my reading of the literary work that they share with me, because they help make that reading and that experience what it is.  My fetish, in other words, is for story of the physical book as an element in the production of my literary experience.

Of course, every book, whether bought new from the mass bookseller or used online or digitized for my electronic reader, every book will have such a story, but some of these stories will be more interesting than others.  If a friend and I both place an order for copies of the same book online, their stories, at least for us, are practically indistinguishable from each other, and they are also practically indistinguishable from any number of other such orders placed by people around the world.  We will all have had our different reasons for placing that order, of course, but each copy of that book will have been published in the same place, shipped in the same ways, ordered from the same forms.  There is a story here, certainly, because there is always a story, but it is a story that is hardly worth telling, at least not without stomach churning levels of irony or boredom or both.

As I was thinking these things with Dave, sipping on my stout, I found myself recalling the opening section of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where Benjamin analyzes how the ability to reproduce the work of art has altered our relation to the work of art as such, so I dug out the essay when I returned home.  It is, as I have already said, a marvelous bit of thinking, and I would like to spend a great more time on it than this present space will allow me.  The central ideas for my own purposes, however are these:

Benjamin argues that the age of mechanical reproduction and it ability to produce innumerable physical copies of an original work of art “withers the aura of the work of art.”  By this he means that reproduction undermines the work of art’s authenticity and jeopardizes its authority as an object, because “it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”  He still maintains the idea of the original, arguing that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art” lacks the original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” but he argues that the aura, the authenticity, and the authority of this original is undermined by mass reproduction.

His reasons for this are fairly simple.  He first argues that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.”  He then suggests that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and therefore distances is also from the original work of art.  This distance, obscuring the singular history of the work of art, also withers its authority and authenticity, its aura.

One interesting implication of this line of reasoning is that it opens the possibility for reproductions to take on the kinds of authority and authenticity that were once reserved for the original.  If, as Benjamin says, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced,” then a reproduction certainly obscures the authenticity of its original through the distance that it imposes between itself and the historical singularity of its original, but it also becomes a historical singularity in and of itself and becomes capable of founding its own authority and its own authenticity.  In other words, the ability to produce copies of the work of art makes possible the kind of fetishism that I was describing earlier.  It reduces the value of the original, because this original is no longer the only place where the work of art finds a form, but it opens the possibility that the copies will become originals of a sort as they take on their own history, and this history may actually increase their authenticity beyond that of their original, if they are signed by the author, for example, or owned by a celebrity.  Mechanical reproduction, therefore, devalues but does not eliminate the original, and produces many physical copies that can themselves obtain value as they take on a singular history.

All of this brings me to a possibility that first occurred to me as I was sitting there with Dave over my pint, though I did not then have the benefit of Benjamin’s terminology to articulate it: if the age of mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility that a copy might take on its own authority and authenticity, the age of digital replication ends this possibility definitively.    The reason for this is that the digitized replication is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy.  These replications are always indistinguishable.   They always substitute for one another perfectly.  There is, in other words, no original, or perhaps there are only originals, and none of these originals are subject to history in a way that can mark them as singular and therefore authoritative or authentic.  History leaves them untouched, unmarked, so they are incapable of taking on the aura of authority or authenticity.

This means that the digitized replication can never become a fetishized object in the way of the mechanical reproduction, because it will never be possible for its story to become singular and to intersect with the story of the reader.  I will never find notes in the margin of an etext or a signature on the cover of an mp3 file.  I will never find their stories in a thriftstore or a garage sale.   In the mode of their physical existence, they are as different from the book as the book is from the oral recitation.  This new mode of existence, I think, needs to be the subject of some serious reflection, and I hope to do some of this reflection in future posts.

For the moment, though, I will close with a confession of sorts.  While I am not certain whether digital replication is essentially better or worse than mechanical reproduction, I must admit an intense nostalgia for the stories and the histories that mechanical reproduction enables.  My own understanding of the literary experience is so entirely wrapped up in the physicality of the book and in the history that produces it as an authentic and authoritative object, even if for no one but myself, that I cannot imagine reading apart from these things, and I can only see the digital replication as a kind of loss, whatever benefits it might also have.  Perhaps these are the questions that I will need to explore next.

I have written several times on the image of the threshold, both in a more or less philosophical mode (On the Threshold and  The Door, the Threshold, the Between) and also in a more poetical mode  (On the Scaffold), and I ran across a passage in Roberto Bolano’s 2666 that seemed a particularly beautiful description of this image and the moment of its experience.  I will not offer any discussion or analysis, just Bolano’s own words.  They are sufficient to themselves, I think, as sufficient as words can be.

“From dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who have just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time is not more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats.”

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.

I wrote on the image of the threshold a few months ago, and I have been wanting ever since to supplement this discussion with a few passages from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  There is much that I would like to explore in these passages, but I will not take the space and the time that I would like.  Even so, this post will be much too long.  I apologize in advance.

In a section on the image of the door, Bachelard says this: “Outside and inside are both intimate spaces; they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.”  Though he does not use the word ‘threshold’ explicitly here, his language of the borderline surface between the inside and the outside of the door is clearly linked to this idea, and the connotations of this passage lead me in two directions.

The first and most obvious direction is to the passage that I quoted from Heidegger in my earlier post, or, more exactly, to the passage that I was too lazy to quote in that post but eventually included as a comment at the request of one of my readers.  However, since it is a particularly significant passage for me, and since I will be referring to it very closely here, I will quote it properly this time.

The section comes from an essay called “Language”, which can be found in Poetry, Language, and Thought. In it, Heidegger is discussing a poem by Georg Trakl called “A Winter Evening”, and he is analysing the line where Trakl says, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.”  The larger passage reads as follows:

“The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.”

The relation between this passage and Bachelard’s is in the pain that they both ascribe to the space between the inside and the outside, though their description of this pain is not identical.  Bachelard says that the pain is on both sides of the borderline surface, a pain that derives from the readiness of the inside and the outside to be reversed, from their readiness to have their hostility exchanged.  His interest is in how the inside and the outside of the doorway relate to one another as exchangeable and reversible intimacies, rather than on the between of their exchange itself.  In fact, he is not even willing to say definitively whether there is such a between.  “If,” he says, “there exists a borderline surface,” and only then, under the sign of this hesitation, does he suggest that such a surface must be “painful on both sides.”

In contrast, Heidegger insists absolutely on this space of the between, saying that its dependability is what in fact enables the outside and the inside to relate as such.  While he is like Bachelard in affirming the interchangeability of the outside and the inside, which he describes as penetrating each other, and while he is also like Bachelard in assuming the pain that this interpenetration produces, he does not share Bachelard’s hesitation to name the between of this relation precisely as the between.

Bachelard’s understanding of the between also differs from Heideggers’ in that it seems to be produced by the reversal of the inside and the outside, by the exchange of their hostilities, where Heidegger seems to say that the between precedes the relation of the inside and the outside.  His between is characterized by its dependability, by its injunction not yield in either direction, in its capacity to settle into the threshold.  This between, far from being provisional or dependant on the relation between the inside and the outside, is the dependable space that makes this relation possible.

In fact, in Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard is not describing the threshold at all, but the between which is sustained by the threshold and which settles into the threshold, because it requires the hardness and endurance that it provides.  In Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard has no threshold, only a between, which perhaps explains why Bachelard’s between remains so tentative, marked only by the pain that it suffers on both sides, because his between lacks the ground of a threshold to bear and support it.

The second direction that Bachelard’s passage leads me is to Jacques Derrida and his work on the relation between hostility and hospitality.  Derrida argues that these two things are inseparable, going so far as to join them together with the neologism ‘hostipitality’.  Derrida touches on this idea in several places, including an essay called “Hostipitality” that can be found in Acts of Religion, a chapter on absolute hospitality in The Politics of Friendship, and a short work called On Hospitality.

It is Bachelard’s phrase about the inside and the outside being always ready to exchange their hostility that reminds me of Derrida’s idea of hostipitality.  There is in his words the idea of an openness of the one to the absolutely other, of the inside to the outside, of the outside to the inside, a readiness to be reversed, to be interpenetrated, even though this exchange, this giving of the one to the other, this openness of the one to the other, this hospitality, is also, always, a hostility.  The inside and outside are ready to exchange their unavoidable hostility like the gift of hospitality, there, right there, at the door, on the threshold, in the between.

It is because of these Derridean overtones that I find Bachelard’s words to evocative, I think:  “They are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”  The possibility of a true hospitality finds profound expression here.

There is much more that I would like to say, but I have already written more than enough, so I will just include two further quotations from Bachelard.  Treat them as an envoi.

“How many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of doors, for the door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.”

“There are two beings in a door; a door awakens in us a two-way dream, that is doubly symbolical.”

Well, since I did promise Dave Humphrey that I would provide him a list of the fifty books that I think are most relevant to our time, and since I have already dodged this request on one occasion, and since he has reminded me of this situation more than once, here, at last, with many reservations, is my list.

Reservation the First: Though I have become more aware of the art of the list since I read Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, this list will have no art whatsoever.  It will be alphabetical by author’s surname, without specific commentary of any kind.

Reservation the Second: I have not yet read very much in my life, and I can obviously draw my list only from those books that I have read, so this list will be hopelessly deficient.

Reservation the Third: I cannot possibly compare literary works with philosophical works, so I have divided the one list of fifty books into two lists of twenty-five, one for literature and one for philosophy.  I know this is arbitrary, but will do it anyway.

Reservation the Forth and Most Serious: I am still completely uncertain of the criteria that one would use to determine which books are relevant to our times or any other times, so I am not sure how useful any list of mine will actually be.

However, for Dave’s sake and for the sake of anyone else who might conceivably care, these are the fifty books that I would say are relevant to our times.

Literature
Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot
Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones
Albert Camus The Fall
Albert Camus The Plague
J. M. Coetzee Foe
Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Simone de Beavoir The Blood of Others
Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Fydor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Fydor Dostoevsky The Idiot
Alaxandre Dumas The Count of Monte Christo
William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
William Golding Pincher Martin
William Golding The Spire
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka The Trial
Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano
Dow Mossman The Stones of Summer
Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Hundred Years of Solitude
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse
Roland Barthes Mythologies
Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project
Maurice Blanchot The Instant of my Death
Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship
Martin Buber I and Thou
Michel de Certeau The Practise of Everyday Life
Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida The Politics of Friendship
Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge
Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred
George Grant Philosophy in the Mass Age
Martin Heidegger On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality
Soren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity
Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being
Georges Perec The Species of Spaces
Desmond Tutu No Future Without Forgiveness

The gesture, the act that I perform for the other, is sacramental.  Though it is nothing in itself, neither is it purely formal, and when it is performed in the proper spirit, it becomes what it always purported to be, comes to bear what it always claimed to bear: a giving. This moment of becoming, of coming to bear, of giving, is not and cannot ever be seized or grasped, because it is inaugurated and accomplished only by a proper spirit. Neither can this moment be guaranteed, because the giver and the recipient of the gesture are incapable in themselves of producing or grasping the proper spirit through which it finds its accomplishment. Nevertheless, the sacramental nature of the gesture resides within any act as its potentiality, and this potential underwrites the very possibility, not of ethics as such, but of ethical response in the world.