The Lonesome Crowded Steppe

“…perhaps you'll emerge in the high depression of Gobi, you'll feel at home there.”—Beckett, Texts for Nothing.

“La steppe, la prairie déserte, la monotonie des hauts plateaux, les collines écrasées de ciel sont le point de départ et d’arrivée de notre liberté, de notre solitude et de notre solidarité onierique avec la planète difficilement rouge et ses populations mortes-vivantes.
“Commune Anita Negrini
“Commune Petra Kim
“Cellule Maria Schrag”
—Manuela Draeger, Herbes et golems. 

“Ici Breughel, il fait très noir, répondez.”—Volodine, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze.

Among the readings of Blanchot Libertson offers in Proximity, the most illuminating for post-exoticism is the one that’s organized around the two dis-organizing, de-orienting spaces Blanchot finds in Kafka’s writing: the burrow and the desert. The burrow brings into suffocatingly close proximity that which it would wall out; the desert is that de-located space that gives one no place to rest, only restless, de-located wandering.

The post-exotic prison cell, like Kafka’s burrow, is an interiority intricated with an exteriority; the solitary prison cell is also a fraternal insurrectionary cell, if only in the hollow space of literature. Blanchot’s Kafkan desert is the spatial but in-ordinate and a-cardinal correlate of the time of the other night: “to be here or ici in the desert is already to be aillieurs” (Libertson).

The steppe (and the taiga, and the journey of la flambulance, and black space, and the Bardo) are post-exoticism’s deserts. As the other of closure, the desert is already inside the prison cell, inside carceral last redoubt of post-exotic anti-capitalism. Blanchot, on Borges: “For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space [the enclosed space] will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” Linda Woo, in Ecrivains, is at the same time confined to a cell and onierically projected into the Mongolian steppe. In the cell, Linda Woo declaims a lesson of post-exoticism to a dead, long-gone prisoner who was once confined in the neighboring cell; on the steppe, Linda Woo declaims that same lesson to some distracted nomads, who are much too far away to hear her.

Such company as the steppe and the cell afford are more like dispossession than companionship: the dead neighbor, the deaf nomads. Even the deeply sympathizing sur-narrateur or –narratrice of the Linda Woo chapter of Ecrivains is almost too close for company: “C’est une femme magnifique. Elle pleure, il n’existe entre nous la moindre différence, rien jamais ne réussira à nous séparer, ni temps ni espace, je pleure avec elle.” And again: “Elle prend la voix de Maria Iguacel. Soudain elle est Maria Iguacel. Moi aussi.”

[that last bit doesn’t quite work, does it? It occurs to me that what I’ve elsewhere called “quasi-intra-digeitc narration” in Volodine and found so unique to him is already happening at the outset of Beckett’s Mercier et Camier: “Le voyage de Mercier et Camier, je peux le raconter si je veux, car j’étais avec eux tout le temps.”]

The lonesome crowded steppe: what I meant to say was something else entirely. The revolution is put out of work in post-exoticism, and at the same time, worklessness is crowded with figures. How baroque and full are Volodine’s post-decease, after-the-end spaces. In this, he departs from Beckett, at least in so far as Beckett is understood as the writer of exhaustion. No doubt, there are many empty wilds in post-exoticism, blacknesses that recall the Beckettian stage. But (and maybe this was true of Beckett, too?) those spaces are not uniform, indifferentiated. What post-exotic novels keep uncovering, as they go on speaking after speaking has ceased, is an insight Libertson credits Freud with: the death instinct is not a longing to return to a previous, inanimate state; it's a source of problems and questions, a source of repetitions (Deleuze's Freud), it's "a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life" (Libertson's Freud). Hence the lonesome crowded Mongolian steppe of Herbes et golems; two thirds of the book consist of nothing but (imaginary) names of the (imaginary) grasses of the steppe.

all together now: shamanize, philologize

I only recently realized that "chamaniser" is actually a French verb, not one that Volodine made up. And, intriguingly, it seems to be something you do alone: the Reverso dictionary sez that to shamanize means "chanter et danser comme un chaman, mais seul et hors de toute fonction sociale."

Which is of course not how the post-exotics "shamanize"; "elles chamanisaient ensemble," it's said of Dondog's grandmother and her friend Jessie Loo:

"Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses."

It's social in another way, in several other ways, but among them, this: Volodine's Bolshevik variant of shamanism constructs a narratee (a sympathisant/e, in Volodine's terms*), for whom interrogating the enemies of the people and shamanizing together are just what you do. Are just what is to be done. in the struggle against misery. 

*the sympathisant/e": in the intervew in which Volodine expands on this term, "sympathizer," he identifies it as the term the police and the journalists used during Germany's leaden years in the 70s, "to characterize those likely to appreciate the rhetoric and actions of the Rote Armee Fraktion." And thus, post-exoticism addresses itself to that narratee, the sympathizer: "My narrators always address themselves, over the heads of the police who force them to speak, to listeners who are friends and accomplices, real or imaginary."

BUT: "sympathetic" is also a term of art in hypnotism, and therefore in shamanism, at least to the extent that shamanism was theorized by Western-European ethnologues coming out of those traditions rooted in hypnotism and Mesmerism. 

Occupy the Bardo

In Volodine’s Bardo or not Bardo, characters who wander the black space of post-decease existence attempt to resist both rebirth and accession to godhead. In one chapter, Schmollowski the assassin of bankers and Dadokian the mad banker (deemed mad because he attempted to overturn the system by giving away the entire wealth of his bank) meet in the Bardo and become fast friends. A comic duo, like Didi and Gogo. Each is delighted to be free of the tedium of existence—the having to eat and shit, the waiting for death, the life made ridiculous by knowledge of certain but indefinite death.

Schmollowski suggests to Dadokian that they simply stay where they are, in this indefinite black space:

--Le Livre [the Tibetan Book of the Dead] propose une seule méthode [of avoiding reincarnation]. Il suggère qu’on s’anéantisse dans la Claire Lumière. Et ça, ça ne me plaît pas.
À moi non plus, s’indigne Dadokian. S’anéantir!...Ils ont tout prévu pour nous détruire complètement!...
--Moi, je pense à autre chose, dit Schmollowski. Il faudrait essayer de construire ici un monde habitable. Vous comprenez, Dadokian? Il faudrait réussir à se maintenir indéfiniement dans le Bardo.
 --Ici? Sur le tas de sable?
--Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin. On pourrait construire un réfuge agréable, un paysage… J’ai bien étudié le Livre. Nous sommes ici ni dans l’espace, ni dans le temps. La plupart des images viennent de notre imagination. Si on s’arrangeait pour les stabiliser, pour les matérialiser autour de nous, on réorganisirait le Bardo à notre convenance… (ellipses in the original, emphasis mine). 

Some of the ensuing comedy has to do with the clash between Dadokian’s essentially bourgeois notion of settling and Schmollowski's more nihilistic ideas. Dadokian's Bardo would include a beach, “une petite station balnéaire”; Schmollowski demurs, saying “j’ignore si on réussira à fabriquer un paradis.” Schmollowski’s notion of a “monde habitable,” a "paysage" seems more post-exotic than Dadokian’s, more stringently Volodinian: Volodine, in a 1997 interview: “Cette déchirure permanente que vit l'humanité, c'est quelque chose qui me hante, qui a rapport avec cette volonté d'écrire, de crier, de créer quelque chose qui est le reflet de tout ça, un refuge possible, hors de tout ça. Mais le refuge est un peu cauchemardesque, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire.”

The nightmarish refuge: there’s an accord between post-exotic black space and Blanchot’s Kafkan desert. This applies to post-exoticism as a whole; the entire novelistic edifice is a nightmarish refuge, at least on the intra-fictive level of the accomplishments of “the post-exotic writers,” that indeterminate, quasi-anonymous and legendary mass; for them, post-exoticsm is “un base de repli” and “une secrète terre d’acceuil” (Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze).

Libertson, in Proximity, on Blanchot’s desert:

There is no “right way” in the desert because its “time without decision” and “space without location” describe a universe without negation, without presence, without accomplishment, and without power: a universe inadequate to manifestation. The only phenomenality in this dimension is the mirage: the spectacle of a location out of its location, “in the middle of nowhere,” the spectacle of subjectivity’s inherence in the exterior, and above all the proximity of the image, which can neither be seized nor let go, and whose only intentional access is Blanchotian fascination.

Hence, to Dadokian’s question “Ici?”, to the question of where they'll locate their habitable world, Schmollowski responds, “Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin.” (This post isn't a thesis about Buddhism, only about post-exoticism).  Occupying the Bardo would take place, if at all, “ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin,” in Schmollowski’s words, because, in Blanchot’s words, the desert is “not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production [engrendrement].” There, subjectivity is “in the outside,” and cannot locate itself (nor build a beach resort, a paradise), but can only wander.

Land and Freedom, Degree Zero

Le comité de soutien aux ivraies respecte les herbes sauvages, les herbes de la steppe immense sous le ciel, les herbes de la prairie immmense, les herbes des hauts plateaux immenses sous le ciel, les herbes de la toundra.—Communiqué du comité de soutien aux ivraies, “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples.” 

Some of the shaggås in Manuela Draeger’s collection of shaggås, Herbes et golems, liberate the steppe by naming the wild grasses of the steppe and the tundra and the prairie in a non-hierarchical, non-Linneaen way, “dans une langue accessible et populaire qui sans concession s’oppose au latin de l’ennemi, au latin des églises de l’ennemi, des dictionnaries agricoles de l’ennemi.” A fictive polemical commentary on the “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples” points out that the the poetic list of wild grasses opposes not only settlers and their attendant agricultural-civilizational transformations of the earth, not only the agronomic and scientific knowledge of grasses that will lead to their increasingly efficient despoliation, but the committee’s poetry is even opposed, if more mildly, to the nomad’s minimal cultivation, and finally to the entire ungulate-and-human system that first dominated the Earth. The committee is thus against both the nomos of the Earth (in Carl Schmitt’s sense: enclosure, partition, rule) and against Deleuzo-Guttarian nomadic distribution (of featherless bipeds, anyway).

Land and freedom without possession; land and freedom beyond anthropic interests.

quasi-intra-diegetic narration

You can't not notice post-exoticism's formal strangeness, its frenzy of invention of genres ("mais pourquoi une telle frénésie?" asks the literary-journalist-interrogator in Le post-exotisme). But then again, approaching post-exoticism by way of narratology might not get you to post-exoticism's most affecting powers: its sober compassion for the end of the world, its scabrously literal interpretation of the impossibility of death, its love for (its recognition of the necessity of) "la lutte contre le malheur."

But.

What the hell is happening to narration in Bardo or not Bardo*? It's amazing.

In the first chapter, a narrator relays dialog tags and descriptions and &c,; from the very first sentence, it's a standard literary mise-en-scène: "Les poules caquetaient derrière le grillage...". But there's also a narrator/"exploratrice"/"describer" in the scene, existing in some ways on the same fictive level as the other characters, but ignored by them. (She's named Maria Henkel, but she's sort of a bird, rather more bird than human, and the characters take no note of her, the way you don't with beautiful avian women in post-exotic narratives). I'm already making all this sound much creakier and clunky and boring than it is.... She's nothing other than a narrator, but she's not the narrator and neither is she an "intra-diegetic narrator" in the way you'd know from Heart of Darkness (it's always Conrad with narratology....) Yeah but also, she's not contesting the narrator, her presence doesn't cause any problems about reliability or what the reader can trust the way some metafictional turns might.

z.B: here are the narrator and Maria Henkel, in quick succession; I haven't spliced this together, this is how it is on the page:

...Strobusch haussa les épaules. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionnait. Il était écrasé par le poids de la responsabilité qu'on lui avait confié.
--Strobusch se rapproche les oreilles de Kominform sans prendre garde aux tache de sang, décrivit Maria Henkel. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionne...

You could say there is some sort of nesting; someone relays to us the tag (the narration tag?) that marks Maria Henkel's narration: not just the em dash but the "décrivit Maria Henkel." The patterning is musical but it's hardly regular. (And no one in the scene notices that she is "describing"--is her "describing" an aural phenomenon? a written-down one? It's certainly writing, in the general, Of Grammatology sense, but she doesn't seem to be generating a text that exists in the world of the story.)

The more you (by which I mean I) try to formalize the rules for the shifts from one narrative strand to another (the more you propose that "one is nested in the other" or "the verb tenses differ"), the more you not only find that the patterns break or alter, but, worse, you start representing the narratologist's consternation as the reader's experience. For a reader, it's a musical experience, a sort of sub-representational cognizance of pattern (where pattern is the only occasionally discordant accord of different narrative faculties). The reading experience is not an epistemological riddle, which is where a lot of Volodine criticism that's attentive to structure ends up (viz Saint-Gelais, for all his strengths).

(Maybe it's worth recalling here that one of the loveliest and least Linnaen of narratological works is Genette's; for every category Genette sets up, Proust confounds it, and soon you realize that the categories have been created only to fail to describe Proust's indescribable narration.)

Edited to add: But where I want to go with this is: It's like a more stoic, less denuded, less excoriating experience of the impossibility of writing than in The Unnamable. At least part of the impossibility of writing, for the unnamable, is a generalized situation of quotation (but here I'm garbling Farbman's book, which I don't have with me): one wakes up in a language not one's own; writing has already begun. Bardo or not bardo is like that, but tilted toward gorgeous profusion rather than dispossession, or a dispossession that is a gorgeous profusion. (In Beckett, someone speaks in the unnamable's place, and one can't help volunteering a little anxiety for the unnamable on that account. In Volodine, the someone creates an echo-y repetition; someone says, after the narrator, "moi aussi, moi aussi" (in the Linda Woo chapter of Ecrivains), or someone, let's call her the narrator, says, of the quasi-intra-diegetic narrator, "Elle s'appelait Maria Henkel, comme moi."

#

*The French book has this English title, Bardo or not Bardo. It took me forever, but finally the centime dropped: the title is a play on Hamlet's "to be or not be," that's why it's in English. The reason it took me so long is something Brian Evenson points out: the similarity is evident to Francophones, who tend to hear the English sounds "to be" and "bar-do" as spondees, but for Anglophones Hamlet's "to be" is an iamb. Evenson said this without using the metrical terms, though. It's in the collection Volodine etc - post-exotisme poétique politique, forthcoming.

hurrah! greetings to la flambulance

Apparently Corbis owns the image of the burnt-out Litovsky prison in Petrograd, set on fire in the February Revolution in 1917. In its place, just imagine this on fire:

The photo Corbis has isn't the picture I wanted to put here anyway; in Corbis’s photo, the smoke-blackened stone looks more permanent than ever. Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreaming shows a Soviet postcard of the event; the caption reads, "Hurrah! Greetings to Freedom!" Stylized, intricately curling art-deco flames pour out the prison's windows and fill the sky. In that postcard, the flames appear more eternal than the prison.

I hesitate about gathering together all the images of flames in post-exoticism; I think of the boastful competence of the journalist Blotno, in Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. He's so certain that "les thèmes animalières" are a key, so certain that his having noticed the animals in post-exotic texts gives him a kind of authority: "Nombreux sont les auteurs post-exotiques qui insèrent une présence animale aux cours de leurs narrations,” says Blotno. He’s technically correct but somehow he seems all wrong, with his emphasis on the thematic, with his sense that animals have been “inserted” into the narratives. Or, it’s the rightness itself that’s wrong, the pomp and authority—wrong, that is, from the perspective of post-exotic contempt for intellectual collaboration with authority.

Even so. It’s not wrong to attend to the images in post-exoticism. (See Volodine’s letters to Ruffel in Ruffel’s monograph, and Maria 313’s lecture in Ecrivains.) Numerous post-exotic surnarrateurs pause before something like the paradoxical permanence of flames in that celebratory Soviet post-card: “la pétrification de la durée,” is what one prisoner discovers in this ceaseless fire. “La flambulance,” it’s often called: a way of traveling, a kind of strange persisting in existence, a temporal anomaly in the heart of fire. A practice that sometimes combines self-immolation and transmigration, and, obviously, ambulation and flames.

The perspective, though, isn’t that of the jubilant onlookers, or even the jubilant arsonists outside the prison; flambulance is petrified duration as experienced from within the heart of the fire:

Soudain, la téléphone sonne…. C’est Gardel, un révolutionnaire qui appelle depuis sa cellule, ou il est en train de s’immoler par le feu, et qui, à cette occasion, découvre la flambulance: le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.--Le post-exotisme

Just as the Breughel of Le port intérieur isn’t the Breughel of Nuits blanches en Bhalkhyrie, maybe the image isn’t the same from one book to the next. In Des enfers fabuleux, a sort of trickster monk lures a young boy from a miserable industrial city into traveling the cosmos by means of la flambulance: the boy escapes his miserable poverty, but only at the price of eternal torment. In Voix d’os, a “murmurat inédit en 777 mots,” the paradoxically petrified duration that is revolution is long since over, but a narrator recalls “les paroles que nous avions prononcées au cœur des flammes.” There are numerous other examples, including Draeger’s Onze reves de suie, and the much more malign bombs of Les aigles peux, the unseen flames that burn the city in a terrifying air war; and the terrible photos of the factory-girl activists executed by being set on fire, in Avec les moines soldats.

The more I pile these up, the more I sound like Blotno. (Who, coincidentally, asks his smart-stupid question, a surnarrateur of Le post-exotisme tells us, on the very day of Wolfgang Gardel’s suicide “par le feu” in cell 234.) Just two  such images, then: Gardel’s flambulance, a method of transmigration accidentally discovered in the midst of self-immolation ; and the flames of the burning, desperate spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines soldats.

Gardel’s act recalls the news photograph of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, his upright stillness in the midst of intense, engulfing flames. As well, the wrathful deities encountered on the eighth day of the bardo are haloed by flames: in the French translation of W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s translation, the book Volodine would have had, the great mandala of the wrathful deities is reproduced, showing these flames, and in the words to be recited on the eighth day is a description of the wrathful deities on fire : « (Emanant des deux diètes) de radieuses flammes de sagesse, brillant… » None of this means that post-exotic  flambulance is something Buddhist, and not only because of post-exotisme’s self-proclaimed heresy and atheism; the Bardo Thodol is less an important Buddhist text than a ubiquitous Western one, especially in the immediate post-68 days. (In Olivier Assayas’ Après Mai, the main character keeps picking up books on Mao, and then in one shot he’s holding the Bardo Thodol.)

All I wanted to say about Gardel, before that digression, was that there’s another dimension to la flambulance; apart from the obvious echoes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and protest in Gardel’s act, there’s a broader current of revolutionary destruction, even before 1917: Bakunin, "The passion for destruction is a creative passion.” And maybe flambulance has a connection to the strange temporality of revolution, in this pétrification de la durée.

But with the burning of the spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines-soldats, it’s otherwise. It’s as though the poles are reversed; here is no auto-destruction, and no anarchic creative destruction. This fire is (I think) deployed by the enemy, and la flambulance is a desperate exigence: the dying girl appears at the heart of an invisible fire, she's menaced by unseen flames (unseen because they burn in another world, and maybe also unseen because that’s their sinister nature). She receives a name from Brown, then she sees that he weeps for her, and then she vanishes, or rather, turns back, runs back into the unseen fire in the other world. All la flambulance can do is prolong her magical existence (and let her appear before a sympathisant) without reversing her fate or delivering her unscathed into a new world.

Francois Bizet does post-exoticism a tremendous philological service in pointing out that the girl-spider-creature of Lutz Bassmann's Avec les moines soldats, to whom the operative Brown gives the name Natacha, is from another text: Outrage  à  mygales, a radio piece by Volodine…

I thought this was going to be the place I wrote casually and thus interestingly; this has all the tedium of scholarly prose and none of its achievements...

notes

Excerpts from a Volodine interview (titled “L'écriture, une posture militante”) which appeared in La matricule des anges, in 1997. 

La place de la politique est aussi omniprésente dans vos fictions. Est-ce que vous tenez pour sûre la perte des idéologies?
Ne parlons pas de moi. Mes personnages ne considèrent pas du tout que les idéologies soient perdues. Ils sont mus, ils sont totalement habités par des idéologies radicales, extrémistes, égalitaristes. Ce qui est en face d'eux, ce n'est pas la perte d'une identité révolutionnaire; ce à quoi ils sont confrontés, c'est la disparition des conditions permettant à l'utopie généreuse de se concrétiser. C'est la défiguration du rêve généreux qui les fait souffrir.

And, later, regarding the fact that post-exoticism’s characters move in an extremely hostile world:

Cette situation d'hostilité les oblige à construire un monde virtuel. Cette distance, ça serait la façon la plus objective de décrypter le sens du réel?
En effet, la distance permet de refabriquer quelque chose d'original avec le réel. Mais je ne procède pas à un décryptage, il s'agit plutôt d'une attitude hostile à l'égard du réel, d'une observation méfiante. Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque. Il y a une vibration, une tension qui traduisent une urgence agressive dans la prise de parole. L'écriture, quel que soit le sujet du livre, devient une posture militante, un geste de combat contre le monde ennemi.

The Refusal of Death

“…it is over and still it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”—Molloy.

I haven’t yet understood something very basic, something I think a lot of people have long since understood: how it is that the end doesn’t end, how the end can be involuted. For example, in Beckett’s trilogy especially, though also in Blanchot’s L’Arret de mort. It must be something very basic to narrative—to all narrative. I can conceptualize it philosophically better than narratively/literarily. Although you’d think the one understanding would illuminate the other.

For Blanchot, the impossibility of death is closely related to Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time, to the distinction between death as ontological possibility and death as material actuality: these two deaths never converge. Ray Brassier,* Nihil Unbound: “But to say that death ‘is’ precisely insofar as it is never actual is to say that though Dasein is already dying, it can never actually die, since death is its transcendental and hence unactualizable condition of (im)possibility.”

The impossibility of death, though, doesn’t mean immortality. Beckett’s unnamable can’t stop failing to stop going on, but that “survivance parlante” (as Blanchot calls the unnamable) isn’t the same as an immortal soul. Herschel Farbmann: “In its restlessness, the dead body—the corpse-image—is, in Blanchot’s analysis, the image of the absence of the subject of that death and not, in any way, an image of the subject of the experience of death.”

In Volodine, the impossibility of death is sometimes along these Blanchotian-Heideggerian lines. In Ecrivains, the chapters of which so often end on words of ending, such as rendomir, se pender, etc, the writer Bogdan Tarrassiev is obsessed with a very Beckettian problem: how to come to the end of writing. But the impossibility of death also happens (or fails to happen) on a world scale in post-exoticism, to all of human life on Earth. In the death throes of humanity, or even after its death throes, a survivance parlante goes on narrating post-exotically, goes on talking. (Is it Des enfers fabuleux that ends at the seaside, where it’s revealed that the narrator has been speaking this book to the only creatures that still live, to crabs and other tidal life?)

But sometimes Volodine seems to embrace a bolder, more contrarian but also more naïve impossibility of death—a kind of furious utopianism. Closer to Nikolai Fyodorov’s “common task”** than to Dasein’s task. So, for example, Volodine in this interview: “Personnellement, je ne supporte pas l’idée de la mort, que cette mort applique à mes proches ou à moi-même… Et c’est avec le poids de ce refus, cette répugnance, que depuis toujours je transforme littérairement la fin de mes personnages en un moment de réalité ou de rêve où leur vie se prolonge. Je puise dans l’imaginaire pour annuler et ridiculiser la mort…” He’s not flat-out crazy: “Reste que l’insulter la mort n’apporte qu’une satisfaction passagère. Le néant existe, il est horrible… il est la réalité, et, on se rend compte que la parole, en face de la réalité, ne peut rien.”

I meant for this to be about la flambulance and post-exoticism’s attack on the real. Next time

*It's weird for me to quote Brassier as if he were Heidegger's approving explicator. His point is something else: attempting to assert finitude, Heidegger's philosophy finds itself saddled with "something like an actual infinity" because it can't think a time before or after Dasein's temporalizing. (Enter Dasein, temporalizing...).

 **mankind’s task of perfecting himself so that he stops dying and so that he can also resurrect all the previous dead. What I know about Fyodorov comes from Jonathan Flately's tracking of his influence on Platonov’s Techenvgur, in Affective Mapping. And Stites's Revolutionary Dreams.

post-exoticism decoded

In one of his contributions to a book of Volodine criticism entitled Défense et illustration du post-exotisme  en vingt lecons, in the essay "A la frange du réel," Volodine writes:

Sur les trois ou quatre mille pages [!] que nous avons aujourd’hui publiées, on peut mettre en évidence des tonalités bien différentes, mais je crois qu’on aurait du mal à déceler la moindre contradiction idéologique. Il y a des pages baroques, fantastiques, lyriques, des cris et des murmures, mais toutes obéissent à une seule et même vision de la société et de l’histoire. … aucune voix post-exotique ne s’écarte d’une philosophie de jusqu’auboutisme politique, d’une philosophie fondée sur l’insurrection et l’égalitarisme. Cette unité idéologique est voulue, cette philosophie n’est invoquée par hasard. La communauté post-exotique s’est constituée sur une base militante radicale bien précise.

Reading Volodine criticism, I sometimes think the consistency of post-exotic ideology hasn't been fully appreciated; book reviews that blandly evoke "the tragedies of the twentieth century" seem to pass over the centrality of revolution's tragic defeat in post-exoticism (even if Volodine himself sometimes uses that phrase, the tragedies of the twentieth century, revolution's defeat isn't just one tragedy among the others, for post-exoticism).

On the other hand, I'm cautious about writing in a such a way that "la sympthatisante, c'est moi." Because post-exotic jusqu'auboutisme is so consistent and so frank ("Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses."), because its extreme-leftism is so upfront, it seems silly to decode it. I might end up writing a leftist equivalent of a history of Hogwarts, a kind of ponderously academic fan-fiction, fully immersed in the world of the fiction.

On the other other hand, I think post-exotic texts produce narratees (sympathizers) for whom chamanizing and interrogating the enemies of the people are just what you do. Are just what is to be done. That narratee needs no persuading, so post-exoticism never stages debates, never poses problem-tales about whether something else ought to have been done instead.

One could wish Volodine hadn't used the word "insurrection" there; to American ears, at least, it recalls insurrectionary anarchism. The revolution (and the party) so obscurely* evoked in post-exoticism seems to me to have less to do with spontaneous actions and more to do with "the totalising temporal imaginary of revolution that so marked the visions and strategies of the modern left" and "an advancing, unifying and largely homogeneous planetary movement of liberation." (Alberto Toscano, "Logistics and Opposition").... Then again, so many of post-exoticism's clashes are between ultra-leftists and party stalwarts, but always within the horizon of "la revolution mondiale."

["obscure" only to the extent that revolution is never narrated in post-exoticism.]

post-exoticism, antidote to Left melancholia

In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, but not the rationality of the ambition. Transition, to capitalism, shadowed by the enumeration of crimes, through a ‘transitional justice’ that is both an exorcism and a prevention of any attempt to repeat that doomed exploit.

and:

Revolution is only tragic from the standpoint of a commitment to its drive, process and aims.

Alberto Toscano, “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy, July/August 2013.

Post-exoticism never debates revolution; there are no post-exotic novels of ideas. Instead, there are post-exotic texts about post-exotic writers, texts shot through with a revolutionary discourse stripped of any historical reference to our world but made all the more haunting for that. We learn about the post-exotics only in a mass, obscurely; we're told that the post-exotic writers participated in “the war for egalitarianism and the punishment of the pogromists;” that they “rose up to destroy unhappiness, root and branch” (Ecrivains); that their post-exotic writing joined in the “bare-handed plot…against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations" (Le post-exotisme).

The disaster of revolution's defeat remains obscure in post-exoticism. It is not narrated, and, for all that post-exoticism is suffused with a poetic, tragic discourse ("la lutte contre le malheur"), its texts are not "about" revolution (they do not tell its story), though they're about almost nothing else. Post-exoticism writes the defeat of revolution (a long defeat, for example from the founding of the Cheka all the way to 1989, not the abrupt failure of Germany 1919) but without ever recounting the incidents of the defeat. It writes revolution's defeat in such a way that it answers Toscano's criticism: post-exoticism evokes the depth of the fall and the justness of the ambition, the magnitude of the suffering and the rationality (even if doomed) of undertaking a global lutte contre le malheur.

(To the extent that post-exoticism harks back to the Soviet Union, it refers us to our own past [and present]; to the extent that it harks back to “la revolution mondiale,” it refers us to a past we never had, not really, even though anti-colonialism was global, even though communist revolutions were all over the world but only in staggered, uncoordinated ways. But in a way this is worse: revolution there succeeded on a scale never seen in our world, and it failed all the more.)

Even if, as Toscano says, revolution is tragic only from the standpoint of a commitment to revolution, I am not sure that is the novels' standpoint. Commitment to revolution is the standpoint of the characters and writers of post-exoticism (but with this latter, we enter the vexed ground of post-exoticism's borders: in a way, one can say with certainty that Volodine shares his characters' commitments, but only because "Volodine" is interior to the fictional edifice of post-exoticism, in that he writes pseudonymously and speaks publicly only as a spokesman of post-exoticism.) Post-exoticism is addressed to sympathizers, but those may not be its actual readers. But within the closed (fictional) world of the (fictional) creation of (fictional) post-exotic texts, where to write is to struggle against the universe of capitalism, there, the failure does not occasion Left melancholia but amor fati. Freed of anxieties, calculations, doubts, regrets; in some ways, the exemplary post-exotic bearing is that of this atheistic monk from Bardo or not Bardo: "Il se fiche tranquillement de tout sans éprouver d’anxiété nihiliste."

post-exotic anarchism II

L'homme qui s'adressent aux mineurs est le coordinateur des secours, un ingénieur brutal, Kamatchkine, avec qui Moreno et Lougovoï ont été plusieurs fois en conflit pour des raisons syndicales. Ils n'ont pour lui aucune estime et lui, de son coté, les déteste pour leur anarchisme.--Volodine, Bardo or not Bardo.

Post-exoticism's heretical Buddhists seem entirely different, to me, than its defeated communists. It's a question at all, their similarity or difference, because of their frequent co-occurrence & strange entanglements, as in the above quoted passage, where these anarchist miners trapped in a mine (these miners who also have had dealings with "reseaux de soutien à la lutte armée") become dissident Buddhists of a sort, for a little while.

(Or, it's a question at all because, despite the strange entanglements--"revolutionary shamanism" and the respect afforded the unrepentant revolutionary who takes refuge at the lamassary in the first segment of Bardo or not Bardo--despite those entanglements, it's not as though post-exotics are doubly, comfortably ensconced in some disenchanted world after "the end of grand narratives.")

Throughout Bardo or not Bardo, there's the the peculiar fact that heresy (for example, atheism) hardly goes against Buddhism. It almost seems like Buddhism perfected. Here, in Des enfers fabuleux, a foundling named Wikeyoon has been brought up in an Arctic lamassary known as Wookarone:

À dix-sept ans il reçut enfin les dernières verités, une compréhension globale du monde. Rien n’avait de substance, sinon le terreur d’être. Dans ce néant, Wookarone n’était qu’un pivot secret, cher à ton couer Wijeyekoon, mais remplaçble, à l’égal de millards d’autres miroitements de réalité. Vous suivez? Et Wookarone était seulement une légende, un alignement de rochers basaltiques que balayait le vent glacial, à la lisière d’un océan sur lequel marchaient les ours, onze mois sur douze. 

But the defeat of the revolution is not a "last truth," and revolutionary activity doesn't come to an end in post-exotic books, even though they're set after the end.

Solovki, utopia

Somewhere in his monograph on Volodine, Ruffel says that what makes Volodine difficult for those who try to fit his work into a utopia/dystopia scheme is that the camps, alone, are utopian, and everything outside them dystopian, and that this is so contrarian it's often not even noticed.

He's right: "Nous avions fini par comprendre que le système concentrationnaire où nous étions cadenassés était l’ultime redoute imprenable de l’utopie égalitariste, le seul espace terrestre dont les habitants fussent encore en lutte pour une variante de paradis" (Le post-exotisme).

Ruffel goes on to cite a contemporary documentary film about the Solovki prison camp, saying that here you can see that a variant of anarcho-communism was actually carried out in the early days of the camp, as nowhere else in the Soviet Union. --Or something like that; I don't have the book with me.--Not having seen the film, I can only imagine that Ruffel means something about prisoners sharing their rations or some other kind of mutual aid; it can't have anything to do with the prison administration or the deaths and executions.

I think he's wrong, maybe not about sharing rations in Solovki prison, if that's what he meant by his scandalous remark, but about the aptness of the example, the fit of the analogy between post-exotic prisons & ration-sharing in the early gulag. Wrong to look for a correlate in our world, because post-exotic utopia isn't even in the world of post-exoticism.

This is the strange thing about the "egalitarian utopia" of the post-exotic camps & prisons: it's not achieved, it's not a positive (an actual, or actually recounted) utopia. It's completely inactual, in the world of the fiction; either still to be struggled for. Or meditated upon, as in this passage I quote once a week or so, from Écrivains:

Une fois ecrasés et condamnés, reprend-elle, les écrivains du post-exotisme se sont obstinés à exister encore, dans l’isolement des quartiers de haute sécurité et dans la clôture monacale définitive de la mort… Leur mémoire est devenue un recuil de rêves. Leurs marmonnemants ont fini par façonner des livres collectifs et sans auteur clairement revendiqué. Ils se sont mis a ruminer sûr les promesses non accomplies et ils ont inventé des mondes ou l’échec est aussi systèmatique et cuisant que dans ce que vous appelez le monde réel.

Like Ruffel, I need a naive reader to trump, for my point to be legible at all. I keep finding it remarkable that the post-exotic writers don't "invent worlds" in which the defeat is reversed, but worlds in which the failure unfolds just as before.

Maybe it's not remarkable at all. Blanchot writes, of Kafka: "L'art est d'abord la conscience du malheur, non pas sa compensation. La rigueur de Kafka, sa fidélité à l’existence de l’œuvre, sa fidélité à l’exigence du malheur lui ont épargné ce paradis des fictions ou se complaisent tant d’artistes faibles que la vie a déçus."

l’échec, l’écriture, repetition, immortality

Oui, nous sommes liés au désastre, mais quand l’échec revient, il faut entendre que l’échec est justement ce retour. Le recommencement, comme puissance antérieure au commencement, c’est cela, l’erreur de notre mort.—Blanchot, L’éspace littéraire.

dream of the burning child

A double failure: the creation of a dissident literary “edifice” that affirms the failure of revolution, and a “struggle against the universe of capitalism” that takes place in and as the failure of writing. Writing after the end, the post-exotics exhibit amor fati but not resignation. The fictional worlds invented by the (fictional) post-exotics affirm their defeat, but that doesn’t mean peril and hope are long past. Long after the end, they write for the future, although perhaps nothing of them will reach the future except a Beckettian survivance parlante (the phrase is Blanchot’s, referring to Beckett, in that essay in which every time Blanchot says Beckett he nearly always means that which goes on unnameably on, that which goes on speaking when speaking has ended). Post-exotically, then, the survivance parlante that post-exoticism sends to its future is  “a corpse on the march toward the nothing”  or “a pair of conscious lungs…talking lungs.”

In post-exotic books, the revolution returns in the condition of its ruin: in its defeat or its disastrous victory, in its dispersal into fragments or its deformation into monstrous state powers. This return—this temporary, imperiled repetition of a vanquished form of life— is an idyll like that of the dream of the burning child, and it’s a return brought about in and as literature.

In Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, a dead narrator’s “tantric” practice of whispering post-exotic texts is said to prolong the existence of the “worlds we had intensely built and defended,” although—like a dream—it prolongs that existence only temporarily, by just “[o]ne hour longer, two and a half hours longer, one night longer." In Écrivains, we are told of “the post-exotic writers” who “went on existing in the high-security prison sectors or in the definitive monastic closure of death” where they “invented worlds in which the defeat was just as systematic and bitter as in what you call the real world.”

Post-exoticism recalls the dream of the burning child, both in the imperiled prolongation of the post-exotic worlds for just “one night longer,” and in the post-exotic writers’ exact, exacting repetition of the end. As in the dream, what one loves has come back again, but this return is fragile, temporary, and in no wise a reversal of fate, in no wise a compensatory fantasy presence that negates the absence. The absent has returned as absent.

still more failure

Their writing is miserably “published” in handwritten exemplars of two or three,  or it is recited to the dead,  or murmured or whispered,  or tapped on pipes in prison cells.  The texts sometimes approach a vanishing point of near immateriality (save for the materiality of the signifier): texts murmured or whispered, or, still more spectrally, “suspended in a sigh” of Lutz Bassmann, post-exoticism’s final narrator. And at other times the post-exotic texts are abjectly physical, if fragilely so and therefore still approaching material ob-literation: Fred Zenfl’s penciled works in Des anges mineurs; the birdshit-spattered performances of Dondog’s plays in Bardo or not bardo. Even the first sentence of the first actually existing post-exotic book  (Volodine’s own first novel), describes a typically abject post-exotic book-within-a-book: “Le livre traînait dans les déjections et le sang, il fallut, pour l'ouvrir, décoller au racloir la paille qui avait durci et coagulé le long des pages.”

In The Unnameable, the unnameable narrator can't lift his hand from his knee to write, writing is impossible, it's a failure, and yet the unnameable can't stop failing to stop going on writing. That syntax--the unnameable can't write, can't speak, the others speak in his place, and yet he can't stop failing to stop going on-- post-exoticism's engagement with mortality and defeat is something like that. The characters' engagement with revolution (the defeated, failed, long-past revolution) is something like that, even or especially when it's in the form of writing post-exoticism in their cells.

But this isn't it. I keep meaning to get around to post-exoticism's intransigent rebelliousness, its ongoing attack against the real (Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque.) I keep meaning to getting around to distinguishing post-exoticism's failure from resignation and from Left melancholia.

The journalist Blotno, interrogating the post-exotic Yasar Tarchalski, in Le post-exotisme, regarding the many forms invented by post-exoticism "in the 70s":

Pourquoi une telle frénésie? [asks Blotno.] Oh, dit Tarchalski, ils prévoyaient l’horreur qu’allait représenter la clôture à la perpétuité, ils s’organisaient en fonction du futur.

And:

Sous-titrer un livre « romånce », c’était déjà, en soi, une démarche d’adieu violente à votre univers.

But these quotations explain nothing, especially ripped out of their layered context. That future referenced by Tarchalski, too, was in the past. Still, the post-exotics attend to failure (of revolution, of the world, of writing) with such compassion and stoicism that they don't allow themselves the luxury, the inattention, of resignation. And to that extent, there is a future in post-exoticism, a future other than sheer endlessness of failing to stop failing to stop going on.

In We Monks and Soldiers, in one of the segments on the Tong Fong Hotel, Brown asks Cuzco why they do it, what purpose their Organization serves, and Cuzco says, in part, "Humans are nearing the end of their agony. We're here with them, that's all."

Just so, when the post-exotics persist in existing in the closure of death (Ecrivains) and they "ruminate on unachieved promises," their engagement with revolution's failure can't take refuge in any complacency about "the end of ideologies" or "the dangers of all fanaticisms," nor in any Left melancholia. (Recent Bassmann is almost programatically, bluntly against mournful Left nostalgia, especially in Danse avec Nathan Golshem.)

spoiler alert

What is affirmed, in the (fictional) post-exotic writers’ affirmation of failure? Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze and the "Discours aux nomades et aux morts" chapter of Écrivains each stage a double failure: the creation of a dissident literary “edifice” that affirms the defeat of revolution, and a “struggle against the universe of capitalism” that takes place in and as the failure of writing. The task of my own project my own failed project would be was to have been to understand the positivity of the post-exotic affirmation of failure. 

There is a futural, generative immortality to post-exotic failure.

When the prisoner Gardel, in Le post-exotisme, by immolating himself in his cell, accidentally discovers la flambulance (the post-exotic method of using flames to prolong duration and to transmigrate from one life to another), Gardel repeats Freud's discovery that the death instinct is not a longing to return to a previous, inanimate state; it's a source of problems and questions, a source of repetitions (Deleuze's Freud), it's "a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life" (Libertson's Freud). [Here, too: Brassier's Deleuze's Freud.]

Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exotic narrator, the one to whose breath the struggle has been confided, the one who dies in the last pages of Le post-exotisme (as in the first pages of Le post-exotisme) is a survivance parlante, as Blanchot described Beckett's unnameable. Bassmann's breath becomes a last breath, a weak and rattling one, mixed with the air of the prison and unable to make the post-exotic book resound except so feebly that post-exoticism's last book is "à peu près sans auteurs et sans auditeurs, pour rien." So, too, the dead post-exotic writers who "go on existing in the closure of death" in Écrivains, they are also survivances parlantes: "Leur  respiration n’a plus servi qu’assurer leur survie en tant que corps inutiles, en tant que poumons avec conscience, en tant que poumons bavards."

annals of revolutionary heteronymy: Vladimir Mazin, Irina Kobayashi

[Vladimir Ossipovich] Lichtenstadt was condemned to death, then pardoned; he spent ten years in prison at Schlüsselberg [in Petrograd] ... 

One morning in March 1917 the prisoners of Schlüsselberg were called to the courtyard by guards bearing weapons. They believed they were going to be slaughtered; they could hear the cries of a furious crowd surrounding the prison walls. Actually, this crowd was deliriously joyful; it broke down the doors, the blacksmiths with their tools at the head of the crowd, to break the prisoners' chains. ...On the day he got out of prison, Lichtenstadt and the anarchist Justin Jouk took charge of the town of Schlüsselberg. ... After the death in battle of another prisoner, Lichtenstadt adopted the dead man's name and called himself Mazin, to remain faithful to his example.--Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

*

Irina Kobyashi Kobayashi  trépassa la même année, d’une hémorragie que quelqu’un avait provoquée sur sa personne tailladant les poignets jusqu'à l’os. Comme toujours lorsque l’un de nôtres était assassiné, nous constituâmes un collectif portant son nom. Sa voix vibra avec la nôtre, dans la nôtre. Sa mémoire continua à exister, a remuer des souvenirs pour que nous pouvions nous approprier, et elle continua à fabriquer des images où nous nous déplacions avec bonheur, des rêves qui niaient le réel et qui le subvertissaient. … Plusieurs d’entre nous disparurent a cette époque : Jean Khorrasan, Verena Nordstrand, Rita Hoo, William Lethbridge, Vassilissa Lukaszczk. Comme pour tous ceux qui les avaient précédé dans la liste des morts, nous leurs rendîmes hommage. Dans le quartier de haute sécurité, les survivants ont toujours considéré qu’ils pouvaient servir de support vocal et physique à l’intelligence de ceux qui ne répondaient plus aux appels.--Volodine et al, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (gross emphasis mine).

Lutz Bassmann, Ellen Dawkes, Iakoud Khadjbakiro, Elli Kronauer, Erdogan Mayayo, Yasar Tarchalski, Ingrid Vogel, and Antoine Volodine (the eight authors listed on the second frontispiece of Le post-exotisme) needn't have read Victor Serge. Needn't have been thinking of Lenin and all his heteronyms, either. It's in the logic of the thing: not only do clandestinity, subversion, and friendship make it self-evident that one would write in the name of another, particularly in the name of the dead friend comrade, but it's also in the logic of fragmentary writing: "any fragmentary text already had an indeterminable, that is, always future relationship with the other or with others... any fragmentary text was already a text with multiple authors; it was by definition a collective text that might be signed in a gesture of irreducible singularity by each and every indeterminable other..." (Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing). They needn't have read Blanchot, either; it's not a question of influence (in the case of Blanchot) or reference (in the case of Serge).

Reader contest: Where is this phrase, in what post-exotic text: so long as there remains a voice and a fragment of love...? Extra difficulty: it's probably not been translated into English yet.
                                                                                                                                                               

post-exotic anarchism

Catégorie littéraire, oui, mais on pourrait parler avant tout de construction littéraire, puisque derrière ce mot un peu pompeux et terminant en ‘-isme’ je crois qu’il n’y a pas énormément de théorie mais beaucoup de pratique, de pratique de l’écriture. De construction littéraire justement. Effectivement, au début des années quatre-vingt-dix c’est apparu ce nom, ce terme qui me permettait de m’écarter de cette étiquette que j’avais souligné, j’ai toujours refusé pour mes livres, qui était celle de science-fiction.* La première fois que j’ai utilisé ce terme, c’est à la suite d’une question de journaliste, qui a demandé ce que j’écrivais, dans quelle catégorie littéraire justement je me rangeais, et par boutade j’ai inventé immédiatement quelque chose, et j’ai dit j’appartiens à l’anarchisme post-exotique.

Or was it: Effectivement, au début des années quatre-vingt-dix c’est apparu ce nom, ce terme qui me permettait de m’écarter de cette étiquette que--je vais souligner--j’ai toujours refusé pour mes livres, qui était celle de science-fiction. 

Volodine, interviewed by Alain Veinstein, on Du jour au lendemain, [Radio] France Culture, 8 September 2010. My own faulty transcription. Apologies.

Edited to add: This isn't to say that Volodine or the other post-exotic writers are anarchists, fundamentally, secretly anarchists at heart. Obviously, Volodine made a decision to prefer the empty '-isme' of post-exoticism to 'anarchism.'

The victims of mass execution in "Demain Aura Été un Beau Dimanche" are all "sans parti," but that's not a considered position, a rejection of the party form; they're workers and beggars, and the label "sans parti" just underlines how incredible their executions as counter-revolutionaries are. The wildcat activists in We Monks and Soldiers, the two factory girls, don't belong to the Party and the Party isn't thinking about recruiting them anytime soon, but there, too, I wouldn't want to subsume them under a label of anarchist. It's not as though they had a program, a canon of anarchist theorists. (Nor does "not in a party" mean "anarchist.")

Still... For me, when I read post-exoticism, I always read there an intense sympathy for the heroes of revolution and for the party renegades and doubting agents and wildcat activists like the two factory girls, even in the somewhat satiric account of the showy blustering hero in Les aigles puent, whatever that's called...

Here's the thing: there's still a relationship in disavowal leave-taking. It matters what one disavows is affirming the defeat of, and how one affirms it. I read the hatred for Social Democrats "straight," relatively un-ironically (in Lisbonne, derniere marge, for example), and the affirmation of the defeat of post-exotic revolutions as something quite different. [For example, the post-exotic writer-dissidents retreat to prison or death, in Ecrivains, to "meditate on unachieved promises"--of communism, surely (or radical egalitarianism, or whatever it's called in that world) and not to meditate on the false promises of liberal democratic capitalist societies.] The affirmation of the failure of the revolutions is something closer to the following, from Jorian Murgrave, rather than to any kind of flat, liberal "all ideologies are dangerous":

--Tu verras toi-même, expliqua Greko. Tu penses bien que ce serai trop beau si quelque part sur cette planète on pouvait se réfugier à l’abri de napalm et des coups de sabre. A mon avis, ton monastère n’est qu’une saloperie de plus parmi tous les pièges de Terre. Tu comprends? C’est perdu d’avance, nous n’y arriverons jamais.
*
Je marche droit, tu penses, ce n’est pas à moi que l’on aura l’idée d’apprendre comment marcher droit. J’ai avancé donc en droite ligne pendant cinq jours, avec ce maudit monastère devant les yeux. Mais il y a toujours autant d’obstacles et la distance ne change pas. C’est comme si le paysage se déformait et se reformait sans cesse.
--Comme dans les contes?
--Tu parles d’un conte de fées! … Une saloperie terrienne de plus, oui. Un piège, je suppose. Ils essaient de maintenir à distance.
Greko se tut, les mâchoires soudain crispées, têtues, l’œil acide, cruel, un œil d’épervier traquant sa proie. Jorian comprit que devant eux se dressait la haine de Terre, l’hostilité de Terre, et que ce refuge impossible appartenait à un monde qui avait décidé de les rejeter jusqu’à leur dernière minute, et qu’il faudrait encore se battre contre Terre pour survivre dignement.

Hard to say what I mean for those quotations to prove; somehow, I think there are certain saloperies terriennes that are close to post-exoticism's heart, saloperies though they they ultimately prove to be. There are ways, doomed ways, to look for a refuge from the napalm, ways that post-exoticism's underpeople have to try, and there are some other ways--finding yourself a comfortable perch near those in power, collaborating with the police--that just don't enter into it.

And since this is just devolving into Causabon-like notes to myself, private, obscure, here's something from an "undergraduate" paper on Wittgenstein: the thread running through Wittgenstein’s many statements on negation, reversal, and asymmetry in Philosophical Investigations is something like: there is not (or not only) an empty or mechanical reversal, but a variegated grammar of “not” and “un-“ and of reversed propositions, reversed perspectives, a grammar that has grown up with our nature.

Post-exotic faits divers

We called this post-exoticism. It was a construction that had a rapport with revolutionary shamanism and with literature, a literature written down or learned by heart and recited, because sometimes the [prison] administration would forbid us any paper for years at a time; it was an interior construction, a fallback position, a secret welcoming land (une secrète terre d’acceuil), but also an offensive that participated in the plot that some were waging bare-handed against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations. To Bassmann’s lips, alone, that struggle had now been entrusted. It was suspended in a sigh.  —Antoine Volodine*, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (my own rough translations).

WHAT IS POST-EXOTICISM? Insolent question, all the more so for being asked on the day of Bassmann’s death, but that this question comes up here at all demonstrates that, half a century after Maria Clementi’s Minor Angels, the sympathizers, on the outside, have not...—Volodine, Le post-exotisme (broken-off sentence in the  original).

Open Letter Books will publish a translation of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (sample here, including the same passages I translated above, and with better choices than mine). And they plan to publish translations of two other post-exotic books, by Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann. Dalkey Archive, too, is translating Volodine.

*Attributing the book to "Volodine" is problematic, since it has a second, paratextual, supposedly fictional frontispiece attributing authorship to eight heteronyms, where Volodine is just one name among others.

Le post-exotisme begins and ends with Bassmann's death--with the death of the last post-exotic narrator, the one to whom the struggle has been entrusted--and it doesn't necessarily loop back to before his death, not exactly.

More soon.


Nous avons appelé cela le post-exotisme. C’était une construction qui avait rapport avec du chamanisme révolutionnaire et avec de la littérature, avec un littérature manuscrite ou apprise par coeur et recitée, car parfois pendant des années l’administration nous interdisait de posséder du matérial de papeterie; c’était une construction intérieure, une base de repli, une secrète terre d’acceuil, mais aussi quelque chose d’offensif, qui participait au complot à mains nues de quelques individus contre l’univers capitaliste et contre ses ignominies sans nombre. Aux seules lèvres de Bassmann cette lutte maintenant était confiée. À un soupir elle se trouvait suspendée.


QU’EST-CE QUE LE POST-EXOTISME? Insolente question, fort mal venue en ce jour où meurt Bassmann, mais dont le surgissement à cet endroit démontre qu’un demi-siècle après Des anges mineurs, de Maria Clementi, les sympathisants, à l’éxterieur, n’ont pas...”—Le post-exotisme, (broken-off sentence in the original). Volodine has a way of sometimes breaking off his sentences a-grammatically, sometimes even ending them with a full stop rather than an ellipsis; Wagneur comments somewhere that this makes Volodine’s words into a “trou noir.”

Blanchot on Borges

it's all a tangle today. 

The burrow & the desert, Libertson points out, are spaces of proximity and errance in Blanchot. For Volodine, these are the cell and the steppe, or the cell and "black space." As with Blanchot's (Kafka's) desert, the post-exotic black space is differentiated--in Manuela Draeger's Herbes et golems, sections of the book are devoted to long poems that consist of nothing but names of grasses of the Mongolian steppe; invented, post-exotic names; non-Linnaean, non-hierarchical names: the empty space of the steppe is differentiated, but not in accordance with our familiar schemes for representing / containing difference, such as division into genus and species. (And Bardo or Not Bardo, too, is a marvel of putting black space en scene, letting characters wander in a nothing that is not quite nothing.) 

The two spaces, the cell and the steppe... often, in Volodine, one finds oneself in both spaces at the same time, or they're abruptly near, or capable of transforming into one another. (In Écrivains, Linda Woo simultaneously declaims in a prison cell and on the steppe.) Perhaps because, as Blanchot writes in the essay on Borges, a place without an exit becomes infinite. But also because errance begins at home, so to speak: "Mais supposons que, dans cet étroit éspace [apparently, this space is/could be notre chambre, notre vie, our bounded world?], soudain obscur, soudain aveugles, nous égarions."

*

No one forces the unnamable to speak, he/it says somewhere in The Unnamable. Someone forces the post-exotic writer-dissidents to speak, sort of (the police, the torturers). And yet, the police don't matter, maybe they've already stopped mattering before the book begins. The post-exotic writers resist by yielding to this survivance parlante (Blanchot's phrase, in his essay on Beckett) this remnant that won't cede, that goes on speaking when it has stopped. 

There's a disjunction between the harm done in being confined to the finite prison (a prison administered by jailers, visited by literary-critical journalists, etc) and the resistance that is sought (found) in the differentiated black space of the steppe or the bardo. I'm not getting this right at all, because it sounds like I'm talking about the physical and the mental; it's not "you can jail my body but my mind is free." It's something else. The post-exotics really are in prison, in the bad infinity, as Blanchot says in the Borges essay, in the literary infinity: "For the man of the desert and the labyrinth... the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so because he knows it is not."

At the end of Le post-exotisme, when the literature of post-exotisme has  achieved itself* has come to its end (has ended "itself," s'achevait) in its last book (Le goudron final Retour au goudron), and Lutz Bassmann is dead--the book began on the last day of his life and now he is dead-- there is still narration, still a voice that goes on past Bassman's death. Bassmann has been "devoted to the error of a journey" (Blanchot in the essay on Borges) that "necessarily lasts a little longer than his life."

*do I even know French? not really. 

what is to be done with all these notes

In Lutz Bassmann’s Danse avec Nathan Golshem, Nathan Golshem reflects with some regret on his choice—made in the instant, under torture—to pretend to be an itinerant storyteller and litterateur, one Gurbal Bratichko. Under the beatings [which are not narrated], Bratichko proved himself an inexhaustible font of useless stories [but these aren't narrated, either; we learn about them, but we don't read them]. These stories are pure inventions, without any interpretive path back to the actions of Golshem and his comrades. Talking and talking, Bratichko achieved Ingrid Vogel’s wish, in Lisbonne, derniere marge, to write a literature indecipherable by the police. Bratichko speaks to his torturers, volubly, but he is a man without secrets, “a poet, that is to say, less than nothing.”

But this is Golshem's regretful reflection: 

“…il avait toujours été tourné vers l’action… la palabre littéraire, quand il n’avait pas de relation directe avec la propagande, lui avait toujours paru méprisable.” 

N names

Dans Un navire de nulle part, Jane Austen est introduite parce que Jane Austen rime avec Lénine. En réalité Jane Austen est le pseudonyme d’un des sur-narrateurs ou sur-narratrices qui sont à l’origine de la prose post-exotique, dont, je le rapelle, nous ne connaissons que des fragments.—Volodine interview; emphasis mine.

As a pseudonym (or heteronym), Austen rhymes with Lenin in another way; “Lenin” was one of several names used by the man christened Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, who signed his articles (I’m relying on Lars T. Lih’s biography of Lenin):  K. Tulin, Vladimir Illin, Vl. Illin, and then in his own underground newspaper Iskra, he signed with what became his habitual signature, “N. Lenin.” Lih notes that a contemporary of Lenin’s recalled that “In Pravda, [Lenin’s] articles were signed with the most diversified combinations of letters, having nothing in common with his usual literary signature, such as P.P, F.L -ko, V.F., R.S., etc., etc.”

(I love the N in “N. Lenin,” which is just so suggestive: nobody, Niemand, nikto/никто. As well as no, non, nein, nyet/нет. And it’s the first letter of the word “number” as well as the letter (in English, only?) that stands in for all numbers: n. It suggests both infinity and anonymity: “etc., etc.” as Kamenev says of N. Lenin’s n names.)

I seem to be drifting into my own habitual literary signature here: the akribisch dissection of an extra-literary remark of Volodine’s, more or less violently wrenched by me toward an interpretation that emphasizes post-exoticism’s political and historical points of departure (in communism, in anarchy, in revolution). It was Volodine himself who brought up Lenin in this context, and then, too, in nearly every post-exotic text, heteronymy rhymes with the Resistance (army of shadows), and with clandestinity and subversion in other politcal and historical contexts, too. (But yes, the Resistance; Beckett’s network was named Gloria; so, too, a character in Le port intérieur). But for all heteronymy’s obvious entanglement with clandestinity, that is not heteronymy’s only resonance in post-exotic literature.

(Or maybe one could make a distinction between secrecy, the weapon of the state, and clandestinity, from below…? But I dislike that kind of good/bad conceptual doubling. It might be Lenin’s kind of doubling [“but there is spontaneity and there is spontaneity,” Lenin writes, i.e., a correct spontaneity and an incorrect one, a historically propitious and an unpropitious one; this a formula he uses throughout What Is to Be Done?—“there is politics and politics,” and so on. {Not to mention, there is What Is to Be Done and there is What Is to Be Done, Chernyshevsky and Lenin, the novel and the tractatus…}] It might be that post-exoticism’s kind of repetition is closer to Blanchot’s non-dialectical conceptual doubling than to Lenin’s: in L’éspace littéraire Blanchot writes about the night and the other night, he writes about la double mort. In these doublings, one part of the pair isn’t wrong or illusory; the relation is not opposition [it’s not even a matter of terms and relations in the general economy, as I read or imagine Libertson’s voice pointing out here], and profound experience inheres in the ordinary, not in something exalted, not in something that’s reached only by dispensing with or seeing through the “false.”)

But I was saying: heteronymy isn’t only a function of clandestinity. In describing post-exoticism’s heteronymy from the outside, one ends up falsely emphasizing falsity: in book reviews and blogs and in other branches of the literary-police complex, in recounting post-exotic heteronyms, in literary-critical comments on their profusion and their similarities, in all this one falsely builds up a picture of the heteronym as deceit, illusion, trickery. This is the kind of thing that makes Viart point out, with a certain verve, that the post-exotic community is “in fine, one lone man.” That’s okay, as far as it goes, but heteronymy, besides being clandestine, is another way of sharing-out voices.

For example:

In Proximity, Libertson explains what I think is the guiding force, or anyway the inter-layered organization, of his book as a following out of something that’s already there in the texts signed Levinas, Bataille, and Blanchot (but which I don’t think we noticed before Libertson, and certainly not after, once all those names became normalized as tributary to Derrida’s):

“The anomaly which haunts these disparate and exceptionally private texts is the following: each of these thinkers has the capacity and the inclination to speak in the voices of the other two thinkers. This inclination is perceptible not only in the occasional thematic or lexical congruencies which link these texts, but also at the most solitary level of their definitions and predications.” (emphasis mine.)
And again: “….within this very privacy and marginality, each of these thinkers remains involved with the other two.” (emphasis mine, again.)

It would be going too far to call this heteronymy, but conceptually, what Libertson is pointing out here is closer to post-exotic heteronymy than it is to filiation or influence. (What Libertson points out is nothing like filiation, which in a way is another reason Proximity's "method" accords so well with post-exoticism; in post-exoticism, the most frequently foregrounded relations are grandmothers, not parents, and fraternal/sororal/comeradely bonds rather than filial ones; even romantic love, not absent here, often slides into the fraternal, with apostrophes to “little sister” and “little brother.”)

Heteronymy is the way that, at the most solitary level, the post-exotic writers speak (write) in one another’s voices; it’s not the disguising of voice A under heteronym A' (a trick just waiting to be unmasked by a critic). Rather, in writing heteronymically, the post-exotic writers (so often in solitary confinement, but here I mean the writers within the novels, or “in reality,” as Volodine refers to it in the quotation at the start of this post)—in writing heteronymically, the post-exotic writers take up one another’s voices, are intricated with the others: hence, the so-frequently collective authorial signature (the eight authors' names on the "interior" frontispiece of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze; or again, within that book, the “signing” or claiming of certain works by collectives named for the dead, such as the “Collective Ingrid Vogel.” To take just two examples of a plethora of heteronymic practices in post-exoticism.)

*
There are two Breughels in post-exoticism, and two books named Des anges mineurs (but one could have used so many examples here: Balbaians, Schlumms, Ingrids, Marias, and not only by twos.) But it can't be said that there Breughel and there is Breughel in post-exoticism. In La femelle du requin, an interviewer remarks on the two different publication dates attributed to Des anges mineurs: 1997 1977 in the list at the end of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, and 1999 in the version published by Seuil. In response, Volodine offers a different precision: there are two works named Des anges mineurs: "il y a un romånce écrit par Maria Clementi en 1977, et les narrats en 1999." (Nice, the elision of the author’s name that second time.)

All of this is just a propadeutic to re-reading the very funny and profound “La stratégie du silence dans l’ouevre de Bogdan Tarrassiev,” a chapter in Écrivains in which the writer Tarrassiev achieves the damned success of the minor writer; he is a writer of unread novels whose name is nonetheless familiar “puisqu’on l’associe à un tic d’auteur très aisément caricaturable: c’est ‘le type qui appelle tous ses personnages de la même manière.’”

how it is, again

In the previous post, I approached the question of a last book signed by Volodine (and/or a last post-exotic book, since the publication of subsequent post-exotic books wouldn’t necessarily mean that Écrivains was not the last one)—I approached it from a fanboy perspective, with the kind of nutty hermeneutic precision one sees on TV-show fan sites (and a fan’s obsessive anxiety: will it continue, or was this one already the last?).

Despite that list of last words, it’s not certain that Écrivains is somehow more final, its endings more punctual and less interminable, or that this book is more concerned with endings than are the other post-exotic books. Or if yes, then it’s a matter of degree rather than of kind, and even within Écrivains’ several (seven) endings, there is a range, from the finality of  the final chapter’s “il se pend” to the recursive nature of “rendormir.” In that range, where would one place the word finir (final word of the chapter “Comancer”)?

Nor is it certain that Volodine’s “today, I write in order to end” means the writing will come to an end; as in Blanchot’s remarkable passages on préhension persécutrice…

(I, on the other hand, might never start; I write here in order to hurry after a perpetually receding beginning. In this I’m like Volodine’s helpless Kouriline, in Écrivains, a writer who is hardly suited to writing, he’s not even especially literate; his projected work has a title he’s in love with but he has no idea how to write the thing. Me, too; me either: mine is After the End, which title I continue to like despite the fact that everyone writing about apocalypse seems to come up with it sooner or later, and despite, too, the fact that Lionel Ruffel already worked this idea out in his Le dénouement.)

(But I am not writing about apocalypse, or about post-apocalypse; despite their end-of-the-world décor, Volodine’s books accord ill with the conventions of post-apocalypticism, because they’re so indifferent to notions of apocalypse: the uncovering, the last revelation. They unfold in a milieu in which revolution has long since died, but to say this it’s necessary [for me, not for Volodine] to understand that death in a Blanchotian sense: having fallen from the power to die, revolution cannot die. This is the strange “harmony” and the “utopian” character of camps and prisons in Volodine; this is what is monastic about the enclosure of death into which the post-exotic writers retreat [cf the “Discours aux nomades et aux morts,” in Écrivains, and this why the carceral is the last redoubt of utopian egalitarianism in Le post-exotisme.] But beginning the narrative instance after the end of revolution does not mean the erasure of revolution, in a triumph-of-capitalism sense, and it’s far, too, from a Benjaminian, messianic always-still-to-come of revolution [farthest of all from Negri’s sense that kairos is now]. The revolution in Volodine is not a power [not any longer]; post-exoticism is revolution’s vie non-vie, its mort non-mort, to take up some Volodinian phrases which appear in both the Femelle du requin interview and Le post-exotisme.)

An attempt to gloss these terms, vie non-vie and mort non-mort, though that attempt is de trop, comme on dit; already the interview and Le post-exotisme explain them. Still: in Proximity, Libertson, like Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, writes about a Freud who tends to fall behind his own discoveries in the philosophy of difference, tends to return those discoveries to a logic of opposition and negation:

Freud’s difficulty in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is his tendency to pose reality and pleasure principles, repetition and death instinct in configurations of opposition, and his reluctance to point out and explain their inextrication from, or communication with each other—a communication which is required by the logic of differentiation which is their condition. … the death instinct is not a return to inanimation, but a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life (22). 

You know who else discovers that the death instinct is a tendency toward the differentiation that produces and exceeds life? Gardel, that’s who, in the second lesson of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. The jailed revolutionary Gardel is in the process of immolating himself in his cell, when he thereby discovers la flambulance: “le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.” What is that migration but differentiation, individuation, ceaselessly repeated?

*

Maybe Écrivains isn’t the last book, but it might be among the saddest. Volodine has a version of Blanchot’s “impossibility of dying,” often made grotesquely humorous in books like Bardo or Not Bardo. Again, to go back to Libertson (who is probably the thinker I mean every time I write the name “Blanchot”): “Involuntary prehension is one index of a most fundamental Blanchotian moment: the notion of a reality without power. This reality, whose dimensions are suggested by the burrow and the desert [for Volodine, the cell and the steppe, or the black space of the bardo], and whose mode of manifestiation is indecision and erreur, is not without differentiation.” That’s where Bardo or Not Bardo unfolds, in differentiated black space, where characters face the exhortation to stop being reborn, face it or rather turn repeatedly away from it, in indecision and error, in obtuseness or fatigue.

But I was saying, Écrivains might be among the saddest of Volodine’s books; alongside the black humor, there are moments when a nothingness surges up, a nothingness about which it’s not intimated that individuation might go on within it, passing from one body to another as in la flambulance. (There's no reason to think Kouriline's death will issue in a voyage like Gardel's, even if there's no reason not to think it.) In an interview with Jean-Didier Wagneur, in the longer version of it that’s in écritures contemporaines, Volodine remarks on his resistance to the notion of death. It’s a peculiarly atheistic resistance; against mortality, he doesn’t oppose the certainty of a religious belief. But then in response to the question “quelle est votre image de la mort (non celle de vos personnages),” Volodine answers, in part, that his stories insult death, that he allows himself that pleasure, but that such a pleasure is only transitory, and that “le néant existe, il est horrible, il est indicible…”

*
LATE EDIT: But how did I overlook this?

C’est très important, et même fondamental, de savoir vers quel text on va, vers quelle phrase, vers quel moment, comment se fera la dissolution de tout, comment on arrivera à la nuit, au noir, au silence. (Volodine, La Femelle du requin interview, 2002.)

How It Is

How It Is, Comment c’est, Beckett’s pun on commencer. 

“Comancer,” the childishly misspelled title of a child’s first literary work (which work appears, a bit of realia, in Volodine’s Écrivains).

In an interview with La femelle du requin, published in 2002:

[Interviewers]: Vous êtes plus optimiste actuellement, puisque vous pouvez dire “on verra ça dans d’autres livres”, alors qu’à une époque vous disiez: “j’écris chaque livre comme s’il devait être le dernier…”

[Volodine]: J’ai déjà écrit le dernier livre…

Will one recognize that last book as the last (assuming it’s still to come, hasn’t yet been published)? And will any other books follow the last one? That would seem only fitting, because so Beckettian, like Molloy’s obsession with the last but one but one.

And in an interview in SubStance, published in 2003:

My first story was written before I knew all the letters of the alphabet… it had a title, which was ‘Commencer,’ spelled ‘Comancer.’ After that, I had to write in order to continue. Today I believe that I write in order to end.

In Écrivains, in the chapter called “Comancer” (which includes the text of Comancer), the focalizing character, under questioning by violent crazy fellow-revolutionaries in an asylum, keeps returning in his memory to this scene of initial poesis, the child’s discovery of writing, the novel entitled Comancer.

…et il se rapelle qu’au temps où il écrivait encore, à une époque où il n’avait pas délaissé l’écriture pour la camisole de force, il avait songé a clore son édifice littéraire, évidement dans un context romanesque où celà s’imposerait, sur le verbe “finir” ou “terminer”….

All this quoting. I feel like a thief. 

Edit: last words and/or sentences of each of the chapters of Écrivains: 
rendormir; 
conclure; 
finir; 
"Enterré à Boutovo, région de Moscou;" 
[this chapter concludes with a text that is something like a suicide note, penned by a writer who killed himself, though it is signed by a fictional character and is discussed as the writer's last work, "Opus 25"]; 
"à la fin, et quand je dit la fin c’est vraiment la fin, seule compte l’image;" 
"Et ensuite, il se pend."