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An article where the writer casually references Sontag, Bresson, and Calasso!? Another ‘stack added to the list. I also wonder if you have any thoughts on Knausgaard in relation to “reality hunger” or on Anna Kornbluh’s recent book about “immediacy” (or if you’ve written about either of these elsewhere). Feel like they connect thematically to a lot of the stuff you’re saying here.

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Still haven’t gotten around to Knausgaard (alas), but I did read Immediacy. For the most part I agree with Kornbluh, but I think her book is more diagnostic than it is curious about where this impetus to reduce and de-mediate is coming from. I was like “Yes! Yes!” until the end when I was just like “Okay but where’s the rest? Where’s the why?”

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I think you’ve hit on the main issue with the book. When discussing Knausgaard, for example, she only focuses on the style of immediacy without wondering why he’s chosen this style. It’s actually a very conscious choice that allows him to investigate some of the same questions you talk about in this piece, like the connection between narrative, liberalism, and fascism. I’m just bringing it up because if you only read Kornbluh’s chapter, you probably think Knausgaard isn’t worth your time, but there’s so much going on there!

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This is so good. As with so many of your posts, it prompts a desire (in me anyway) to follow the threads of so many different lines of thought. The current moment is such a totally crazy one; I mean, it almost seems to induce a form of craziness.

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Oct 24·edited Oct 24Liked by Patrick Nathan

Great piece. Reality Hunger changed my life- I think because it gave me permission to do what I really wanted to do: to tell stories about reality. The connection between neoliberalism and the image (Debord would say the Spectacle) seems to me to have to do with subjectivity vs objectivity: in the case of an image, and in the case of the neoliberal subject, there is a privileging of appearance / externally defined function over the internal, personal, subjective human experience. Under capitalism, appearance and behaviour are focussed on obsessively. Art, innovation, and original thought, on the other hand, arise from deep subjectivity: the complex, invisible internal self. That's why being a mystic is so subversive in the current climate.

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finished this and said “wow,” rly smart!

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(Robert) Bresson was right and (Susan) Sontag was wrong, at least in her journal. In her published writings she hangs many of her ideas on Nietzsche's or Paul Valéry's aphorisms which she finds supple enough. Robert Bresson used natural sound as music, the sound of windshield wipers against a page of Racine, in Andre Bazin's words. No music is a good limitation for films and limitations produce good art in any era. The fault today lies somewhere else, in some diminishment of the cultural habitat perhaps.

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