Essays

In Beiser’s map of neo Kantianism, Kuno Fischer is the figure standing right in the middle of the crossroads. He is not quite a neo Kantian in the later, school sense, yet without him, Beiser insists, the later movement would not have taken the shape it did. Fischer is the man who makes Kant exciting again for a wide public, who teaches a generation of students to see the Critique as a living drama, and who, in the process, blurs some of Kant’s strict limits in ways that later neo Kantians have to correct.

In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Hermann Cohen is the point where the movement takes on a recognisable public shape. The early figures, Fries, Herbart and Beneke, look a little like pioneers who open a path and then get half forgotten in the rush of later developments. Cohen stands at the next bend in the track, where a loose trend is turned into a school, the Marburg school, with a programme, students and successors.

Johann Friedrich Herbart looks, in a standard history of philosophy, like a side character. He is tagged as a minor realist, remembered as an early psychologist and as someone who wrote a lot about education. If he appears in the story of Kant at all, it is usually as an opponent rather than as a follower. Beiser’s reconstruction turns this picture around. Herbart sits alongside Fries and Beneke as one of the original neo Kantians, part of the early movement to rescue philosophy from speculative system building and to root it again in experience and critical method. Beiser is saying - get this guy out of the shadows and give him a spotlight. So here he is.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke sits at the edge of Beiser’s story like a slightly awkward cousin. He is part of the same “lost tradition” as Fries and Herbart, the empiricist, psychological line that Beiser traces back to the 1790s, yet he pushes some of their shared ideas so far that he almost drops out of the neo-Kantian family altogether.

We've all heard about Kant, Idealists and Romantics and think they're the wild men of philosophy and so we like to think about them because we like the frisson and hope we'll get some. But we don't know the neo-Kantians because Hegel and his fans always talk about how there's really just Kant and then Hegel and then what we have now with nothing else. But Hegelians are lying about this because they know that's not true. I guess we think this is ok because we assume they're drunk on all that frisson. But neo-Kantians did exist and were important and they should come out of the Hegelian shadows. This is what Frederick C Beiser thinks. He brings them out and says we should listen to these guys and not just the wild men and all their frissoning.

Having read Beiser on Fichte, I now turn to his account of the Romantics. He moves from Fichte to a new generation who thought his philosophy was powerful but still not enough. They wanted something bigger than a theory that began from the individual “I”. They wanted a picture of the whole universe, and of how our minds fit inside it. Whew. That's ambitious. That bigger picture is “absolute idealism”.

This is a summary of what I think top philosopher Frederick C Beiser says about Fichte in a book on German Idealism.

Frederick C Beiser is a top philosopher. His book on Hegel is a lot easier to understand than Hegel himself. I've got no languages but even reading Hegel in translation is hard. So I've read Beiser on Hegel instead and written down what I made of it.

White walls hold their breath. A bed is made into a field. A man and a woman count each other’s features as if counting were a way to keep time from moving. The lens comes close and refuses to own what it touches. Skin, hair, shoulder, knee, toes, mouth, eyes, voice. The counting is inventory and lullaby at once. It is also already the evidence for a later hearing. Desire rehearses tenderness and tenderness rehearses power. Light insists upon colour and then withdraws so that colour can continue alone. The music remembers a sorrow not yet earned. The opening is a promise that the camera will be permitted to touch everything and will rescue nothing.

A hotel arranges its corridors as if memory were an architect with an obsession for right angles. Rooms repeat with such courtesy that the body begins to suspect it has been here before even when it has just arrived. Ceilings carry stucco that refuses to age. Mirrors wait in their frames like obedient witnesses who have rehearsed their silence. Carpets hush steps into compliance. A garden holds rigid parterres as if the earth had signed a contract against weather. People move through this order with the measured caution of figures invited to a ceremony without knowing its purpose. The camera glides and the glide becomes the only form of kindness tolerated in this place. When it stops, time thickens. When it turns, certainty must adopt another posture. The hotel is the precise instrument by which a story is denied even as it insists upon happening.

A house presents itself before the people who believe they own it. Pillars speak to the floor and the floor carries their speech into the rooms without hurry. Paper doors breathe with the weather and draw narrow rectangles of light upon tatami that remember every footstep and forget nothing. A garden of sand has been arranged to persuade the eye that the sea can be made calm by attention. Stone sits with a patience that embarrasses talk. The film enters as if to apologise to these things for the time it will spend among human wishes.

Rain, before anyone thinks to name it. The screen turns the colour of churned soil and abandoned tins. Cattle drift through the opening minutes with the deliberation of clockwork that has forgotten there was once a design behind its movement. Wind presses its breath against panes and doors, repeating a message that no one in the settlement can translate. A scatter of buildings keeps company with rutted tracks that used to be roads and with fields that no longer recall labour as anything but gossip.

A film that accepts a kind of waiting that is older than explanation. The screen learns to breathe at the speed of sleep. A face that is not yet a person appears like a memory rising through water. The air has a winter clarity even when the light is summer. A town sits by the sea as if it had grown tired of being seen and had decided to be a picture of itself.

Another winter film. The room that receives it gives itself to a waiting more exact than curiosity. The light is grey and held steady. Streets are narrow. Restaurants are spare. A small office borrows a view of a wall. The camera sits and allows tables to do their work of keeping bodies within speaking distance. Two men and a woman come forward and then withdraw. One of the men makes films and talks about scripts with a seriousness that protects him from himself. The other owns a gallery and talks about money and about feeling in the same tone. The woman writes and carries notebooks and says little until her silence begins to stand in for a thought the others do not know where nor how to place.

A book opens and the room alters as if a slight subsidence. The title names crimes and love in one breath and the conjunction is already a sentence that refuses to choose its subject. We are placed inside short narratives that behave like chambers. Each chamber has a strict door and an appointed exit. Between both there is the light of voices that try to persuade themselves that they know what they are doing while another light, colder and patient, measures them without speaking.

A road accepts the day and denies the destination, imagine. Cars repeat politeness as patience becoming a monument. A sounding horn confesses that speech will not be enough. Bodies in vehicles learn that the community of travellers is only the choreography by which solitude pretends to be public.

A film , a voice speaks, a car idles somewhere beyond the frame, and the room gathers into a single attention that is neither curiosity nor suspense. The surface is calm, the words are even, the image is the world that is already ours of motorways, underpasses, a showroom with polished panels, a test track where cones and chalk marks pretend to be geometry. The film does not ask us to admire the machine. It asks that we notice how it inhabits us. The car is not an object among objects. It is the skin that moves across another skin.

A few pages survive. Rubble was the measure of a city. They were composed as if for the air, though the air that carried them was more the air of a room than the air of transmission. A town in Normandy brought low and given a new name by its own people, a name that confessed a ruin so complete that pride could only take the form of sobriety. A temporary hospital had been raised in huts and corridors. Doors were temporary refusals of walls. Visitors who came were received without charge and without questions that would make their poverty a second injury.

A winter film. The screen turns white and grey. Snow falls without hurry and the river continues beneath the stillness that pretends to hold it. A hotel receives a few guests who have not yet decided to be guests. A poet has taken a room because he feels a summons from an end that does not announce itself except as a rumour of breath. He asks his sons to come. Nearby two women shelter in another room. They drink coffee that cools too fast because the window lets the outside cross a threshold they needed to hold firm. A day is given to them and to us. The day is not an argument. It is a duration that will not belong to anyone when it is over.

A film, and it yields itself to a kind of waiting that is older than waiting for knowledge. The screen receives what it has been made to receive. A voice speaks in the manner of an announcement that pretends to have no centre. Faces come forward and withdraw. The world outside is held back for the length of a reel. What is shown is not a story that takes us in hand and leads us toward a proof. It is a sequence of certainties that already know their end and for that reason cannot end.

This is me playing with Derrida's Force of Law. Begin with a wager about value, not a doctrine about method, because the word play is usually reduced to a technique that lightens labour or a psychological garnish for motivation, while in Bataille it names a sovereign expenditure within immanence, a release of surplus that does not answer to a higher court. In the opening pages of his meditation on Nietzsche, Bataille speaks of ardour that refuses moral ends, of a burning that is not redeemed by utility, of an aspiration that seeks a summit beyond service to God or to any civic good, and he links this to laughter and to the sacred intensity that exceeds results. To remove obligation and to keep the flame is to risk unintelligibility, he writes, since common speech expects every blaze to power a machine, yet the point is precisely to defend a consummation without profit and a joy without owner.

Beckett’s Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, can be entered as a continuous rite of play in Bataille’s sense, where play means disciplined expenditure, sovereignty without possession, assent sustained at the brink where measure gives way to intensity. Each book builds a small economy that spends surplus with exact forms, Molloy turns walking, counting, and the calculus of sucking stones into a ceremony that consumes time and thought for no gain beyond continuation, Malone converts a bed, an exercise book, and a pencil into a liturgy in which listing and storytelling frame a lucid waste, The Unnamable reduces the scene to voice that goes on because going on is the only rule. Across the three movements the sacred is treated as something kept by taboo and tested in transgression, laughter protects the rite, embarrassment cleans the air, tenderness and cruelty are held in view with care so that intensity never hardens into domination.

This essay begins with a claim that guides all that follows. Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a study of lives and institutions that deny play in the richest sense. The denial shapes desire, work, courtship, and speech. It also shapes universities, where the novel sets some of its sharpest scenes. I read the book with Bataille’s idea of play as lucid expenditure that binds a circle through shared risk and shared loss. I see the same denial at work in our contemporary social arrangements. Homes and offices and platforms organise attention around return and around audit. Education has taken on that temper and has become anti play in the Bataillean sense. The cost is real.

Placed under Bataille’s lens the logic becomes a map of general economy. Desobra is the name of the community’s refusal to become work. It is the refusal to turn expenditure into accumulation. It is the refusal to turn the dead into capital. It is the refusal to turn mourning into identity. The sovereign time of mourning would otherwise become the tool of the state. It would become the ritual by which a nation feeds on its dead. Bataille calls this the worst misdirection of surplus. It is the moment when the city remains hungry after a feast and must therefore find victims. The only cure is to make rites that really end. The only cure is to keep the unworking of the rite intact.

I will use the word play to name what is at stake in Bataille’s writing on surrealism and on Manet. Play joins bodies to scenes. It binds a room. It spends a surplus that work cannot absorb. In Bataille’s vocabulary this means expenditure rather than accumulation. It means a movement toward continuity from the ordinary state of discontinuous selves. It means taboo held and then crossed under a rule, so that danger becomes knowledge rather than harm. On this ground surrealism is not a style. It is the invention of forms that let a culture without a binding myth still generate nights and rooms in which the sacred can appear without doctrine.

Eroticism is play in the specific sense that Bataille gives to excess. It is an assent to life that spends more than usefulness demands. It is a consent to risk that seeks an intensity which cannot be recovered as profit or lesson. It is a movement toward a summit where the ordinary measures fall away. To present this clearly I will introduce the main ideas from Bataille’s book on eroticism.

Play is the word I will use for what Bataille calls excess and summit. I choose it because the common sense of the word keeps the thought from turning into an abstract doctrine. Children play. Lovers play. Rituals in their oldest form are organised play. Festivals turn labour into play for a day or a week. When economies prosper, surplus becomes sport and spectacle. When they collapse, the same impulse returns as riot and dance and laughter that has no business plan.

Bataille is a writer who says he writes out of fear that he might go mad, and who confesses to an ardent aspiration that consumes him, an aspiration that cannot be translated into ordinary moral action or theological service, because it belongs to a region where obligation no longer commands, and where language itself loses its authority the moment it tries to persuade toward any useful end. In the preface to his meditation on Mr Nietzsche, Bataille sketches a solitude that follows once one no longer serves the good or God, and he laments that Nietzsche, who called for a new order of disciples, found only vulgar praise and misunderstanding, notably political misappropriations that he detested.

This essay begins with a simple claim. To understand the new politics growing inside today’s technological infrastructure we need philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner’s triple lens of rationalism, nationalism and civil society. Rationalism is a public craft of giving reasons that others can inspect. Nationalism is the standardised high culture that lets strangers work and argue together. Civil society is “that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organised,” with “membership… optional or revocable,” able “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” The three elements belong together, they tell us how arguments become binding, how a common idiom is sustained without being monopolised, and how organised counterweights keep offices separate from office holders.