I don’t usu­ally write about my per­sonal life on this blog. When I started it, in fact, I swore I wouldn’t; plenty of people were talk­ing about their lives on the inter­net and they were doing just fine with­out me. But today I’m making an excep­tion, because today I’m moving out of Chicago. Even­tu­ally I’ll end up in Seat­tle, but first I’m going back to Bolivia and then prob­a­bly to Vir­ginia and then…well, it gets com­pli­cated from there. Anyway, a node of latent melan­cho­lia has found its way to the sur­face and made me prolix, so con­sider your­self warned.

I came to Chicago in 2001, a week before 9/11.

Well, the finale to my little reverie on Elif Batuman’s LRB arti­cle is now fully two weeks in arrears, and I regret to inform anyone who cares that it will remain so for a bit longer. I sup­pose I should take all the blame upon myself, but I’d like to think that part of the fault is John Latta’s.

He opened his post last Friday with the ques­tion “So who is Roberto Bazlen?” inspired it seems by a ref­er­ence to Enrique Vila-​Matas in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that lead him to a book by Vila-​Matas (this one) that spoke of Bazlen thusly:

Bobi Bazlen was a Jew from Tri­este who had read every book in every lan­guage and who, while pos­sess­ing a very demand­ing lit­er­ary con­science (or per­haps pre­cisely because of this), instead of writ­ing pre­ferred to inter­vene directly in people’s lives. The fact that he never wrote a book forms part of his work. Bazlen, a kind of black sun of the crisis in the West, is an extremely curi­ous case; his very exis­tence seems to signal the true end of lit­er­a­ture, of the absence of output, the death of the author: a writer with­out books and there­fore books with­out a writer.

Latta learned more (and also about Félix Fénéon, who has been reborn on the inter­net as an anony­mous col­lec­tive here*):

Before his Nobel Prize was announced I had never heard of Jean-​Marie Gus­tave Le Clézio, and judg­ing from the notices that fol­lowed the news, nei­ther had many other Anglo­phone read­ers. (Though I did learn recently that writ­ing was his third choice of voca­tion, after sail­ing and archi­tec­ture, his futures in which were doomed, respec­tively, by poor eye­sight and a weak grasp of math­e­mat­ics. And in the search for a pho­to­graph to top this post I have also learned that he thinks the inter­net might have stopped Hitler. I wonder how Keith Gessen feels about that?)

Le Clézio receives his award in Stock­holm on Wednes­day, and so it seemed appro­pri­ate that my igno­rance would be bat­tered, just a little, by the dis­cov­ery yes­ter­day of a decades-​old review of War, his sixth novel.

In my pre­vi­ous post on Elif Batuman’s review of Eliz­a­beth Roudinesco’s Phi­los­o­phy in Tur­bu­lent Times, I called atten­tion to Batuman’s claim that “what’s ‘at stake’ here, to use a term beloved of the phi­los­o­phy of com­mit­ment, is the con­tin­ued exis­tence of such a phi­los­o­phy.” For an answer to that ques­tion that remains purely at an intel­lec­tual level, I don’t think I could do much better than Joshua, who argues in the com­ments that:

For me, the con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance of what is called con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy is tied to the (unfor­tu­nate) recog­ni­tion that rad­i­cal sec­u­lar­ism — that of Sartre, for exam­ple — is still not (and may never be) a sat­is­fy­ing premise for most people. The artic­u­la­tion, or the vision, of a post-​secular, post-​Enlightenment human­ism seems at the heart of Hei­deg­ger­ian post­struc­tural­ism (by which I mean: Lev­inas, Der­rida & Agamben).*

But what intrigued me about Batuman’s essay was that she wasn’t con­tent to remain at the level of ideas. For her, the prob­lem raised by the pass­ing of the con­ti­nen­tal philoso­phers is a prob­lem about life–not just any life, but the life of the would-​be intel­lec­tual.