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‘La bonne raillerie?
12 October 2019
On La Bruyère
Fiction and the reality of forms: Conrad on James
28 September 2019
In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting — on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.
Notes on Life and Letters
Bruno Latour…
22 September 2019
… with Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon, Federico Fellini, Charles Trenet
Bateau ivre
21 September 2019
Wickedness
18 September 2019
—Sat next Miss Randal & had much talk about Lord Byron—She said Lord B. was much wronged by the world—that he took up wickedness as a subject, just as Chateaubriand did religion, without either of them having much of the reality of either feeling in their hearts.—She told me that Lady Davy once actually said to her—’well—you really ought to like me for you know I am considered the English Corinne.’ ‘Indeed (answered Miss R.) I was not aware of that—but words suffer so much by translation, it is not wonderful I should not have discovered it.’
Thomas Moore, Journal, 21 May 1821
On secrets
17 September 2019
Les secrets ne périssent pas.
Dominique Aury, Lecture pour tous
De face
16 September 2019
A French novelist of manners
6 September 2019
… imagine a French novelist of manners the curve of whose work should bestride the cataclysmic period from the execution of Louis XVI to the battle of Waterloo. Out of the savage crimes and senseless destruction of those brief years a new world was born, differing as radically from the old world which it destroyed as that strange amalgam of forces that grew out of the fall of the Roman empire differed from the civilization it overthrew; and great must have been the difficulties of the humble story-teller seeking to reconstruct the setting of his tales from the fragments of a shattered world. It is easy to see why Stendhal dealt with, and dismissed, the battle of Waterloo in the first pages of La Chartreuse de Parme, barely suffering his hero to skirt its periphery before hurrying him on to a world as yet unaffected by such convulsions!
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Seashore
23 August 2019
Ancients and moderns
21 August 2019
Is the view of nature and of social relations which shaped Greek imagination and Greek [mythology] possible in the age of automatic machinery and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts & Co., Jupiter as against the lightning rod, and Hermes as against the Crédit Mobilier?
Karl Marx, On Literature and Art
Inference
24 July 2019
Tout ce qui est se devine.
Constant, Adolphe
On machines
5 July 2019
L’automatisme pur, excluant l’homme et singeant le vivant, est un mythe et ne correspond pas au plus haut niveau possible de technicité: il n’y a pas de machine de toutes les machines.
Gilbert Simondon, ‘Prospectus’, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques
Barbican
3 July 2019
Infallible?
10 June 2019
L’infaillibilité, ils trouvent ça ridicule, désuet comme la tiare, à oublier… Mais on ne devrait pas étiqueter les reliques. Plutôt les remployer. Si un homme a pu être en certaines conditions tenu pour ‘infaillible’, c’est qu’il y a une possibilité humaine, et l’un de nous le peut. En vérité je vous le dis l’un de vous me comprendra. En quoi suis-je ‘infaillible’, quand? En ‘poème’. Son infaillibilité consiste en sa possibilité de dire juste, de toucher vrai. […] Quand un poème est bon (beau, vrai), il est infaillible.
Michel Deguy, Écologiques
BnF
6 June 2019
On stones
6 June 2019
Écritures des pierres: structures du monde.
Roger Caillois, Pierres
The ecological thought
15 May 2019
Timothy Morton on the true scope of the ecological thought.
Cast
20 April 2019
Chaque lecture est pour tous
30 January 2019
Nous sommes tous des voyageurs perdus entre les vagues et les nuages, il nous faut vite l’eau douce, les fruits frais, le sol qui ne bouge pas, et les autres, inconnus et semblables, qui sont au bout de tous les périples. Ces points fixes où l’on reprend haleine, et que les marins appelaient jadis atterrages ne sont les mêmes pour personne, et cependant sont communs à tous. Chacun y reconnaît quelque chose d’essentiel, mais aussi de fraternel; chacun lit pour soi, mais aussi pour les autres; chaque lecture est pour tous. Ce commerce se passe à l’obscur, entre le livre et le lecteur. Le livre rejette à l’auteur, parfois l’auteur au livre. Il n’y a pas de règle, à peine de choix, parce que les livres fourmillent d’appels. Certains se font entendre sans cesse, d’autres, une fois seulement. Mais qu’ils n’aient jamais de fin, qu’ils durent plus que les forêts, plus que les pierres même, cela suffit à convaincre: tous nos secrets sont là.
Dominique Aury, Lecture pour tous
London
20 January 2019
Eyes closed
28 December 2018
‘La condition préalable à l’image, c’est la vue’, disait Janouch à Kafka. Et Kafka souriait et répondait: ‘On photographie des choses pour se les chasser de l’esprit. Mes histoires sont une façon de fermer les yeux’. La photographie doit être silencieuse […] ce n’est pas une question de ‘discrétion’, mais de musique.
Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire
Wolfgang Tillmans
19 December 2018
… at IMMA
Vienna
24 November 2018
Los Angeles
28 October 2018
In Los Angeles: ‘You’re alone in the world. Do something interesting. […] Who cares if you can’t identify with Los Angeles? It doesn’t need to be made human. It’s better than that’ (Geoff Manaugh).
North London
20 October 2018
Francophonia
15 October 2018
What is la francophonie? ‘Un meuble à plusieurs tiroirs‘— with Aurélie Filippetti, Christine Ockrent, François-Xavier Bellamy and Jean-Noël Jeanneney (from 37’30”)
Cork glass
22 September 2018
‘You need to have lived here’
21 September 2018
Hard Border, with Stephen Rea, written by Clare Dwyer Hogg
Pascal Quignard: literature and the unconscious
19 September 2018
La littérature quitte l’oralité, mais elle doit aussi quitter la signification simple, de cela quelque chose de plus inconscient doit renaître.
Hazard
16 September 2018
A feast, not a fast
2 September 2018
I tend to prefer instances of eccentric interpretation to the task of chastening these by criteria of correctness. It is not so much of a libertarian attitude that motivates me as the pleasure of allowing texts to lead my thoughts, and to work them through collectively in class. When deciding among interpretative choices, I abandon the rejected or marginal ones only reluctantly. Interpretation, I feel, should be a feast, not a fast.
Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe
The Burren
19 August 2018
The blank page
16 August 2018
malgré la fiction de la page blanche, nous écrivons toujours sur de l’écrit
Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, i, Arts de faire
Limits: Serge Gainsbourg
6 August 2018
Je connais mes limites. C’est pourquoi je vais au-delà.
Roland Barthes on ‘l’homme parlant’, between freedom and constraint
4 August 2018
L’homme ne serait, à la lettre, qu’une tactique.
On François Flahault, La Parole intermédiaire
Source: Gallica (right click to enlarge)
The follies of Benjamin Constant
2 August 2018
Non, ce journal est un dépôt de folies.
Journaux intimes, 10 December 1814
mai, toujours mai…
14 July 2018
Cette fièvre de retours, sans doute ne puis-je ici que la précéder, mais en ayant tenté, et ce sera ma présomption — ou mon excuse — de l’avoir quand même esquivée.
Jean-Christophe Bailly, Un arbre en mai
In Paris
6 July 2016
In town
4 July 2018
The excellent annual conference of the Society for French Studies
The salience of forms
15 May 2018
[…] insofar as one can distinguish between form and content, it is form that reveals more about European literature’s intracontinental and intercontinental connections, and it is through attention to form that literary criticism can make a distinctive contribution to the larger study of culture, society, and history
Walter Cohen, A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present
In Glasgow
15 April 2018
Andreas Gursky…
13 April 2018
… in London
Train delayed
11 April 2018
In Newcastle, for the annual conference of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes
La lecture
17 March 2018
On ne peut donner à la domination universelle lucifère un contrepoids visible sans qu’il sacrifie à son règne.
On ne peut lui opposer un mur d’enceinte ou une levée sans que sa puissance d’extension ne la rompe aussitôt.
Cet océan est dénué de rivages.
Tout est immergé.
Poissons qui montent encore à la surface. Une goulée pour ne pas mourir.
Goulée: lecture
Pascal Quignard, Les Ombres errantes
Demolition
8 March 2018
World-mindedness
6 January 2018
It is of great importance now that writers and other artists should try to keep a certain world-mindedness… Without the literatures you cannot have a sense of history, and history is like the balancing-pole of the tightrope-walker (it looks only a nuisance, but without it he would fall off); and nowadays we very much need the longer balancing-pole of not national but world history.
William Empson (quoted in the ODNB)