"Self-Portrait in the Studio" by Giorgio Agamben, Kevin Attell (translator)
a review of a late-life memoir of one of our greats
Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben, Kevin Attell (translator); 220 pages, Hardcover; Expected publication: October 6, 2024 by Seagull Books; ISBN: 9781803094656 (ISBN10: 1803094656); Language: English
…It is said that the old have only one string left to play. And it is perhaps an untuned string that produces what Stefano used to call the “wolf’s note.” But that single untuned string sounds more fully and deeply than the whole instrument of youth…
It was my teacher Gordon Lish who first introduced me to the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community published in 1993 was the first book of his I tackled. Since then I have read the vast majority of his published books. Agamben is 82 years old at this writing and it absolutely felt in this book as if he were writing a memoir to honor his old friends and influencers, many of whom have already died. I loved reading it, and it was one of those books that I wish didn’t have to end.
…The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt…
In any Agamben book there are always numerous phases and paragraphs to highlight or make note of. Much can be learned by considering his point of view, and Agamben has helped me immensely when it comes to writing my poetry.
…those who dedicate themselves to the study of a writer or an object end up developing a feeling of superiority towards them, almost a sort of contempt…
I have yet to have that exact experience as I am generally humbled to have had the opportunity to even get that close to a writer I have admired, even from a distance. I am not sure what Agamben means, but perhaps it will become clearer to me the further I progress in my studies. Reading is a lifelong obsession for me.
…Maturing is letting oneself be cooked by life, letting oneself blindly fall—like a fruit—wherever…
Young people have no idea what aging incurs. There are countless ups and downs regarding health and lived experience. Letting oneself be cooked by life becomes a choice, especially involved in understanding the aging process.
…In her diaries, Etty Hillesum writes that a soul can be twelve years old forever. This means that our recorded age changes with time but the soul has an age of its own that remains unchanged from birth to death. I don’t know the exact age of my soul, but it surely cannot be very old, in any case not more than nine, judging from the way I seem to recognize it in my memories of that age, which have remained so vivid and sharp. Every year that passes, the gap between my recorded age and the age of my soul widens and the feeling of this difference in an ineliminable part of the way I live my life, of both its great imbalances and its precarious equilibriums…
I suppose the age of my soul, the most vivid and sharp memories I carry with me today, came about during the age of six or seven. The feeling of falling in love, being faced with an adultery, learning I was lacking in confidence, the fear of exposure as someone “less than” were all somehow made manifest beginning at this time in my life.
….in the words of Simone Weill: only human beings who have fallen into the most extreme state of social degradation can tell the truth: everyone else lies.
I guess the question becomes what might be considered the most extreme state of social degradation? Anytime shame is involved, feeling degraded must occur. I am still working on how far we might enter or how close to the abyss my partner and I might risk attempting. Ignoring or not taking on the degradation that society imposes on certain behaviors and ideas is paramount to our success in creating anything of import.
…Impatience is the reason we write; impatience is the reason we stop writing. But the fruits—impatience prevents us from gathering them. And this is good. Patience is perhaps a virtue—but only impatience is holy. An impatience that becomes method. Style, like asceticism, is the fruit of a restrained impatience…
It is true that I write everyday and impatience is likely behind this action, or lack thereof.
…So arduous is the task of the poet—being skinned alive in order to sing…
This is a nice way of looking at what has happened to me throughout my life. Makes the pain perhaps worth it and the skinning more tolerable. My song is felt and not simply recorded.
…Anyone who hopes to write philosophy without either explicitly taking on the poetic problem of its form is not a philosopher. This must have been what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote “one should write philosophy only as one writes poetry.” This, in any case, is how it has always been for me: I became a philosopher in order to deal with a poetic aporia that I could not get to the bottom of. In this sense, I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet, just as, conversely, many works that are thought to be literary instead rightfully belong to philosophy…A philosopher who does not pose himself a poetic problem is not a philosopher. This does not, however, mean that philosophical writing has to be poetic. Rather, it must contain the dispersed traces of a poetic writing, must in some way exhibit its farewell to poetry…
This may be why Agamben is such a joy for me to read. Generally speaking, that is. Other times he can make my head spin. But he does write beautifully.
…as with the time machine invented by Faustroll, the time of reading stops “in a deadlock between past and future which must be called the imaginary present,” where succession is reversed into regression and what takes place is not a progressive reading but the becoming of a memory. One does not read the book: the book sounds itself out through a series of separate and unforgettable memories that emerge from an immemorable point outside of time…
Gordon Lish taught in his fiction-writing classes that we were to make “made time.” It took me several years to fully understand that concept, but as whole worlds, my worlds on the page being created, I began to see what he meant more clearly.
…There is no mammal that grows as slowly as the human, nor one that becomes an adult so long after being born. Since our development is so retarded, human parents must take care of their little fetuses for years (while other animals abandon them relatively soon), they must band together to build houses and shelters and progressively give form to that exosomatic civilization that distinguishes the human species from other animal species…Only a being condemned to a state of prolonged immaturity could have invented language…
Well, in a way, I am glad. But it isn’t flattering to know this truth? I do understand that remaining free and self-sufficient would be preferable to being a part of the herd, but it is extremely more dangerous, and would certainly provide less time for writing or even playing with words.
…In our society, everything that is allowed to happen is of little interest and an authentic autobiography should rather occupy itself with facts that did not…
Breaking the rules makes for a far more interesting story. Following along with what is expected of us tends to become a bit boring. Jeopardy, at least on the page, is preferred.
…the only possibility of creation passes through destruction…Man has no other substance than this: the infinite ability to survive change and destruction…
The great philosopher Gilles Deleuze maintained that we were always in a state of becoming. So the tearing down, or total destruction of ideas, words for things, societal mores, and a host of other delectables is paramount to the creative act.
…But if I now had to say where I finally put my hopes and my faith, I could only confess in a lowered voice: not in the sky above—but in the grass. In the grass—in all its forms, the tufts of slender blades, the soft clover, the lupin, the borage, the snowdrops, the dandelions, the lobelia, and the calamint, but also the couch grass and nettles in all their subspecies, and the noble acanthus, which covers part of the garden where I walk every day. The grass, the grass is God. In the grass—in God—are all those whom I have loved. For the grass and in the grass and like the grass I have lived and will live.
Think how important the grasses are to every living thing. I just saw a bunny hide in his grassy home. Walking barefoot through the grass feels nearer to god.