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<font face="Century Schoolbook L">(Mystical-anarchist Critchley over
Gray's 'Godless mysticism' en 'passive nihilism'. 3600 woorden.)<br>
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style="color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; outline:
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font-style: normal;">Simon Critchley</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>on<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span
class="book_title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
0px; font-family: crimson_700_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
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line-height: inherit;">The Silence of Animals</span></h2>
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font-family: crimson_700, serif; font-size: 20px; font-style:
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inherit;">John Gray’s Godless Mysticism</h3>
<abbr class="published" style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding:
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color: rgb(154, 154, 154); cursor: inherit;">June 2nd, 2013</abbr></header>
<div class="article_body article_text" style="margin: 0px; padding:
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Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Hoefler Text', 'Times New Roman',
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">HUMAN BEINGS DO NOT just make killer apps.
We are killer apes. We are nasty, aggressive, violent, rapacious
hominids, what John Gray calls in his widely read 2002 book,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Straw Dogs</em>,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">homo rapiens.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>But wait, it gets
worse. We are a killer species with a metaphysical longing,
ceaselessly trying to find some meaning to life, which
invariably drives us into the arms of religion. Today’s
metaphysics is called “liberal humanism,” with a quasi-religious
faith in progress, the power of reason and the perfectibility of
humankind. The quintessential contemporary liberal humanists are
those Obamaists, with their grotesque endless conversations
about engagement in the world and their conviction that history
has two sides, right and wrong, and they are naturally on the
right side of it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Gray’s most acute loathing is for the idea
of progress, which has been his target in a number of books, and
which is continued in the rather uneventful first 80 pages or so
of<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight:
inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Silence of Animals.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>He allows that<em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>progress
in the realm of science is a fact. (And also a good: as Thomas
De Quincey remarked, a quarter of human misery results from
toothache, so the discovery of anesthetic dentistry is a fine
thing.) But faith<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight:
inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>in progress, Gray
argues, is a superstition we should do without. He cites, among
others, Conrad on colonialism in the Congo and Koestler on
Soviet Communism (the Cold War continues to cast a long shadow
over Gray’s writing) as evidence of the sheer perniciousness of
a belief in progress. He contends, contra Descartes, that human
irrationality is the thing most evenly shared in the world. To
deny reality in order to sustain faith in a delusion is properly
human. For Gray, the liberal humanist’s assurance in the reality
of progress is a barely secularized version of the Christian
belief in Providence.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">With the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in mind,
Gray writes in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Black Mass</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(2007):
“Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.”
Politics has become a hideous surrogate for religious salvation,
and secularism is itself a religious myth. In<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Silence of
Animals,</em>he writes, “Unbelief today should begin by
questioning not religion but secular faith.” What most disturbs
Gray are utopian political projects based on some faith that
concerted human action in the world can allow for the
realization of seemingly impossible political ends and bring
about the perfection of humanity. As he makes explicit in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Black Mass,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>he derives his
critique of utopianism from Norman Cohn’s 1957 book,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Pursuit of
the Millennium.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>What
Cohn implied but Gray loudly declares is that Western
civilization can be defined in terms of the central role of
millenarian thinking. Salvation is collective, terrestrial,
imminent, total, and miraculous. What takes root with early
Christian belief, and massively accelerates in medieval Europe,
finds its modern continuation in a sequence of bloody utopian
political projects, from Jacobinism to Bolshevism, Stalinism,
Nazism, and different varieties of Marxist-Leninist, anarchist,
or Situationist ideologies. They all promised to build heaven on
earth and left us with hell instead.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Black Mass,</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Gray
persuasively attempted to show how the energy of such utopian
political projects has drifted<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>from the left to the
right. Bush, Blair, and the rest framed the war on terror as an
apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century
of untrammeled personal freedom and free markets. During the
first years of the new millennium, a religious fervor energized
the project of what we might call “military neoliberalism”:
violence was the means for realizing liberal democratic heaven
on earth. The picture of a world at war where purportedly
democratic regimes, like the USA, deploy terror in their alleged
attempts to confront it is still very much with us, even if
full-scale, classical military invasions have given way to the
calculated cowardice of drone strikes and targeted
assassinations.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Carl Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary
democracy led him towards an argument for dictatorship. Where
does Gray’s loathing of liberalism leave him? He identifies the
poison in liberal humanism, but what’s the antidote? It is what
Gray calls “political realism”: we have to accept, as many
ancient societies did and many non-Western societies still do,
that the world is in a state of ceaseless conflict. Periods of
war are followed by periods of peace, only to be followed by war
again. What goes around comes around. And around. History makes
more sense as a cycle than as a line of development or even
decline.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In the face of such ceaseless conflict,
Gray counsels that we have to abandon the belief in utopia and
accept the tragic contingencies of life: there are moral and
political dilemmas for which there are simply no solutions. We
have to learn to abandon pernicious daydreams such as a new
cosmopolitan world order governed by universal human rights, or
that history has a teleological, providential purpose that
underwrites human action. We even have to renounce the
Obamaesque (in essence, crypto-Comtian or crypto-Saint-Simonian)
delusion that one’s life is a narrative that is an episode in
some universal story of progress. It is not.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Against the grotesque distortion of
conservatism into the millenarian military neoliberalism, Gray
wants to defend the core belief of traditional Burkean Toryism.
The latter begins in a realistic acceptance of human
imperfection and frailty. As such, the best that flawed and
potentially wicked human creatures can hope for is a commitment
to civilized constraints that will prevent the very worst from
happening: a politics of the least worst. Sadly, no one in
political life seems prepared to present this argument, least of
all those contemporary conservatives who have become more
utopian than their cynical pragmatist left-liberal counterparts,
such as the British Labor Party.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;" align="center">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The most extreme expression of human
arrogance, for Gray, is the idea that human beings can save the
planet from environmental devastation. Because they are killer
apes who will always deploy violence, force, and terror in the
name of some longed-for metaphysical project, human beings
cannot be trusted to save their environment. Furthermore — and
this is an extraordinarily delicious twist — the earth doesn’t
need saving. Here Gray borrows from James Lovelock’s Gaia
hypothesis. The ever-warming earth is suffering from<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">disseminated
primatemaia,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>a
plague of people.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Homo rapiens<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>is
savagely ravaging the planet like a filthy pest that has
infested a once beautiful, well-appointed, and spacious house.
In 1600, the human population was about half a billion. In the
1990s it increased by the same amount. And the acceleration
continues. What Gray takes from the Gaia hypothesis is that this
plague cannot be solved by the very people who are its cause. It
can only be solved by a large-scale decline in human numbers
back down to manageable levels. Let’s go back to 1600!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Such is the exhilaratingly anti-humanist,
dystopian, indeed Ballardesque, vision of a drowned world at the
heart of Gray’s work: when the earth is done with humans, it
will recover and the blip of human civilization will be
forgotten forever. Global warming is simply one of the periodic
fevers that the earth has suffered during its long, nonhuman
history. It will recover and carry on. But we cannot and will
not.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;" align="center">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Where does this leave us? Although Gray is
critical of Heidegger’s residual humanism (animals are poor in
world and rocks and stone are worldless, Martin insists), he is
very close to a line of thought in a collection of Heidegger’s
fragments published as<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Overcoming
Metaphysics</em>. Written between 1936 and 1946, these are
Heidegger’s bleakest and most revealing ruminations, in my view.
At their center stands an all-too-oblique critical engagement
with National Socialism filtered through the lens of his willful
reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger concludes his meditations with
the words, “No mere action will change the world.” The statement
finds its rejoinder in the title of Heidegger’s posthumously
published 1966 interview with<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Der Spiegel</em>: “Only a god can save us.” For
Heidegger and Gray, there is no god, unfortunately, and we
cannot save ourselves. It’s the belief that we can save
ourselves that got us into our current mess. If political
voluntarism is the motor of modernity’s distress, then the task
becomes how we might think without the will.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">This takes us to the compelling critique
of the concept of action in Gray’s work. Whether Arendtian
fantasies of idealized<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">praxis</em>, liberal ideas of public engagement and<em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;"></em>intervention, or leftist delusions about the
propaganda of the deed, action provides consolation for killer
apes like us by momentarily staving off the threat of
meaninglessness. The radical core of Gray’s work, unfashionable
as it might seem, is a strident defense of the ideal of
contemplation against action, whether the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">bios theoretikos</em>of
Aristotle or the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">ataraxia<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>of
the Epicureans. As Gray says in the final words of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Straw Dogs</em>,
“Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">But Gray’s ideological masterstroke is the
fusion of his quasi-Burkean critique of liberalism, underpinned
as it is by a deep pessimism about human nature, with a certain
strand of Taoism. More particularly, what engages Gray is the
ultra-skeptical illusionism of Chuang-Tzu, magnificently
expressed in the subtle paradoxes of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Inner
Chapters.</em>Chuang-Tzu writes, “How do I know that to take
pleasure in life is not a delusion?” The answer is that I do not
know and furthermore it doesn’t matter. Pushing much further
than the furtive Descartes in his Dutch oven, Chuang-Tzu writes,
“While we dream we do not know that we are dreaming, and in the
middle of a dream interpret a dream within it.” He concludes,
“You and Confucius are both dreams, and I who call you a dream
am also a dream.” There is no way out of the dream and what has
to be given up is the desperate metaphysical longing to find
some anchor in a purported reality.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Homo rapiens</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>must learn to give up
the destructive and pointless search for meaning and learn to
see that the aim of life is the release from meaning. What
interests Gray in the mind-bending paradoxes of Chuang-Tzu is
the acceptance of the fact that life is a dream without the
possibility, or even the desire, to awaken from the dream. If we
cannot be free of illusions, if illusions are part and parcel of
our natural constitution, then why not simply accept them? In
the final pages of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Black Mass</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Gray
writes: “Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing oneself
from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of
death and renewal.” Rather than seek the company of utopian
thinkers, we should find consolation in the words of “mystics,
poets and pleasure-lovers.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Such is the consoling company Gray keeps
in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The
Silence of Animals.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>There
is much here that is familiar to readers of Gray, such as the
critique of progress and the constant tilting at liberal
humanism. There is also much that is welcome, such as the robust
defense of Freud as a moralist based on Philip Rieff’s classic
interpretation, which is wielded against Jungian obscurantism,
the triumph of the therapeutic, and the desire to fill the
Freudian void with grisly specters like the collective
unconscious. But what’s new in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Silence of
Animals</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is
Gray’s argument for what he calls “godless mysticism” based
largely on a reading of Wallace Stevens (it’s true that Stevens
makes a couple of cameo appearances in Gray’s<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The
Immortalization Commission<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>from
2011). Stevens is the still point around which the world turns
in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The
Silence of Animals</em>.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Each of the three parts of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Silence of
Animals<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>is
framed and guided by quotations from Stevens; what seems to draw
Gray’s attention is the sheer austerity of his late verse, for
example the 25 poems included under the title “The Rock” in the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Collected Poems<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>in 1954, the year
before Stevens’s death. Stevens’s poetry self-consciously moves
between the poles of reality and the imagination. In his most
Wordsworthian mood, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the
two poles would appear to fuse or be held in a creative balance:
imagination grasps and transfigures reality. But in the very
late poems, a hard, cold, contracted reality takes center stage.
The power of imagination appears to be impoverished. The season
of these late poems — always important for Stevens — changes
from the florid and Floridian landscapes of the earlier verse to
the harsh, unending cold of the Connecticut winter.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In the final poem in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Palm at the
End of the Mind</em>, “Of Mere Being,” Stevens speaks of that
which is “Beyond the last thought,” namely a bird that sings
“Without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign
song.” Stevens seems to be saying that things merely are: the
tree, the bird, its song, its feathers, the wind moving in the
branches. One can say no more. For Gray, “The mere being of
which Stevens speaks is the pure emptiness to which our fictions
may sometimes point.” That is to say, in accepting that the
world is without meaning, a path is indicated that takes us
beyond the meaning we have made.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Paradoxically, for Gray, the highest value
in existence is to know that there is nothing of substance in
the world. Nothing is more real than nothing. It is the
nothingness beyond us, the emptiness behind words, that Gray
wants us to contemplate. His is a radical nominalism behind
which stands the void. In this, as he is well aware, Gray is
close to Beckett. We are condemned to words, but language is a
prison house from which we constantly seek to escape. Rather
than any comforting dogma of the linguistic turn, Gray is trying
to imagine a turn away from the linguistic. Human language
should be pointed towards a nonhuman silence.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In his very last poems, Stevens comes
about as close as one can get to giving up poetry in poetry. It
is poetry of the antipodes of the poetry; the hard, alien
reality that we stare at, unknowing. All we have are ideas about
the thing, but not the thing itself. Desire contracts, the mind
empties, the floors of memory are wiped clean and nothingness
flows over us without meaning. In a very late lyric that Gray
does not cite but which he might, “A Clear Day and No Memories,”
Stevens writes:</p>
<blockquote style="margin: 0px 24px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit; quotes: none;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;
border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style:
inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: 1.4em; text-align: justify;">Today the air is
clear of everything.<br>
It has no knowledge except of nothingness<br>
And it flows over us without meanings,<br>
As if none of us had ever been here before<br>
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,<br>
This invisible activity, this sense.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">It is “this sense” that Gray wants to
cultivate in us, this turning of the self away from itself and
its endless meaning-making and toward things in their
variousness and particularity. The point is to undergo a kind of
movement from the limitations of the human towards a greater
inhuman realm of experience that can be had in the observation
of plants, birds, landscapes, and even cityscapes. Stevens
continues, with another “as if” (and whole books have been
written on his use of hypothetical conjunctions):</p>
<blockquote style="margin: 0px 24px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit; quotes: none;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;
border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style:
inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: 1.4em; text-align: justify;">As if nothingness
contained a métier,<br>
A vital assumption, an impermanence<br>
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Poems are words chosen out of desire, but
words that don’t create anything permanent. In creating
illusion, they assume impermanence. This is what Stevens sees as
the métier of nothingness: its work, its craft, its supreme
fictiveness. It is abstract. It must change. It must give
pleasure.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Gray’s godless mysticism would retain the
forms of askesis common to religious forms of mystical practice
(fasting, concentration and prayer) that attempt to nullify the
self. But this would be done not in order to attain a higher
experience of “Self” [<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">sic</em>] or some
union with god, but rather to occasion a turn towards the
nonhuman world in its mere being. A godless mysticism would not
redeem us, but would redeem us from the need for redemption, the
very need for meaning. A redemption from redemption, then.
Meaninglessness would here be the achievement of the ordinary,
the life of the senses. This line of thought gets very close to
what the philosopher Eugene Thacker has called a mysticism of
the inhuman, a climatological mysticism expressed in the dust of
the planet.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;" align="center">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">There’s an unexpected local hero in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Silence of
Animals</em>: J.A. Baker (1926–1987), author of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Peregrine</em>,
a book that, to my shame, I didn’t know prior to reading Gray.
It is the record of 10 years spent watching peregrine falcons in
a narrow stretch of Essex countryside between Chelmsford and the
coast. I happen to know that landscape quite well, or once knew
it. It’s a minimal, flat landscape of neat fields, mudbanks,
estuarial systems, and vast skies with huge clouds shuttling
from west to east. In intense lyrical descriptions, Baker sought
to escape the human perspective and look at the world through
the eyes of this predatory bird, “Looking down, the hawk saw the
big orchard beneath him shrink into dark, twiggy lines and green
strips […] saw the estuary lifting up its blue and silver mouth,
tongued with green islands.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Baker was not crazy. He knew that there is
no way out of the human world, and no way he could become a
peregrine falcon. What interests Gray is the discipline (for
Baker, an askesis of time, place and repetition: many days,
months, and years spent returning to the same small strip of
countryside) involved in peeling enough of oneself away in order
to try to look outwards and upwards. Contemplation here is not
some Hamlet-like, inward-facing attempt at stilling the self’s
commotion. It’s the outward-facing decreation of the self
through a cultivation of the senses. What’s being attempted is a
non-anthropomorphic relation to animals and nature as a whole,
where the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Gray’s godless
mysticism asks us to look outside ourselves and simply see. This
is a lot more difficult than it sounds.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;" align="center">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Schopenhauer, usually read in abridged,
aphoristic form, was the most popular philosopher of the 19th
century. Epigrammatic pessimism of his sort gives readers
reasons for their misery and words to buttress their sense of
hopelessness and impotence. Few things offer more refined
intellectual pleasure than backing oneself into an impregnably
defended conceptual cul-de-sac and sitting there, knowing and
immovable. It’s the thrill of reading Adorno or, in a certain
light, Agamben. Such is what Nietzsche called “European
Buddhism.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Sometimes I think John Gray is the great
Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is
a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly
reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal
humanism. Counter to the upbeat progressivist evangelical
atheism of the last decade, Gray provides a powerful argument in
favor of human wickedness that’s still consistent with Darwinian
naturalism. It leads to passive nihilism: an extremely tempting
worldview, even if I think the temptation must ultimately be
refused.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">The passive nihilist looks at the world
with a highly cultivated detachment and finds it meaningless.
Rather than trying to act in the world, which is pointless, the
passive nihilist withdraws to a safe contemplative distance and
cultivates his acute aesthetic sensibility by pursuing the
pleasures of poetry, peregrine-watching, or perhaps botany, as
was the case with the aged Rousseau (“Botany is the ideal study
for the idle, unoccupied solitary,” Jean-Jacques said). Lest it
be forgotten, John Stuart Mill also ended up a botanist.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">In a world that is rushing to destroy
itself through capitalist exploitation or military crusades —
two arms of the same<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Homo rapiens</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>—
the passive nihilist resigns himself to a small island where the
mystery of existence can be seen for what it is without
distilling it into a meaning. The passive nihilist learns to
see, to strip away the deadening horror of habitual, human life
and inhale the void that lies behind our words.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">What will define the coming decades? I
would wager the following: the political violence of faith, the
certainty of environmental devastation, the decline of existing
public institutions, ever-growing inequality, and yet more Simon
Cowell TV shows. In the face of this horror, Gray offers a cool
but safe temporary refuge.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Truth to tell, the world of Gray’s passive
nihilist can be a lonely place, seemingly stripped of intense,
passionate, and ecstatic human relations. It is an almost
autistic universe, like J.A. Baker’s. It is also a world where
mostly male authors and poets seem to be read, although
Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind. As Stevens writes in his<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Adagia,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>“Life is an
affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of
places and that is the trouble.” Gray, like Stevens, seems
preoccupied with place but, unlike Stevens, appears untroubled.
What Gray says is undeniable: we are cracked vessels glued to
ourselves in endless, narcissistic twittering. We are like moths
wheeling around the one true flame: vanity. Who doesn’t long to
escape into an animal silence?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Of course,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">love</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is the name of the
counter-movement to that longing. Love — erotic, limb-loosening
and bittersweet — is another way of pointing outwards and
upwards, but this time towards people and not places. But that,
as they say, is another story.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Author’s Note: This essay builds from
certain formulations that the reader can find in<em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">The Faith of the Faithless<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>(Verso, London
and New York, 2012). See Chapter 2, pp.109-117.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: center;">¤</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;"><a
href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=917"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;"><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style:
italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: inherit;">Simon Critchley's last book was<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>The Mattering
of Matter. Documents from the Archive of the International
Necronautical Society<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(with Tom McCarthy,
Sternberg, Berlin, 2012) and his next book is<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>Stay, Illusion!
The Hamlet Doctrine<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(Pantheon, New York,
2013).</em></a></p>
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