Review
John Cunningham reviewed Letters #4 at MetaMute.
Communism and nihilism make for a particularly disjunctive synthesis given that the former has been linked to a redemptive teleology of history and the latter to a belief in nothing. This collapse of transcendent meaning in the face of scientific and philosophical enlightenment led to philosophical responses such as Nietzsche’s ethical flailing towards the Übermensch. Letters’ nihilism is more lucid because it inheres in the evacuation of meaning as it is produced through the domination of social relations by the real abstractions of contemporary capitalism. The qualitative and particular aspects of the world are dissolved in this (check out all those gentrified vegetables at the ‘farmers’ market’) but so are categories such as history and affect. Nihilism is less a problem of philosophy than a product of capitalism.
Such a nihilism is a mimetic transference of the emptiness produced through ‘real abstraction’ into a nihilist laughter at the sheer absurdity of ‘no exit’ and the failure of pro-revolutionaries to recognise it. But within this, Letters retains an all too human sense of the limitations of being trapped in capitalism. Thankfully, this is a nihilism of a broken down humanity rather than some anarchist Übermensch. My idiot savant question to Letters Journal is: ‘Why bother doing a journal if you’re a nihilist communist?’ My guess is that it’s as good a way as any to not participate within an anti-capitalist milieu that’s all too close to the imperative within contemporary capitalism to put any nascent potentiality to work. Maybe the central paradox of Letters is that its own activity suggests other possibilities that a too rigorous application of a sense of ‘no exit’ would close off. With ‘Doing nothing’ as a critique, it nevertheless retains mobility within the ‘no exit’ of the present and continues to pose difficult, often unanswerable, questions. Ultimately, Letters Journal’s worth rests on a reiteration of this negating indeterminacy, anti-political critique as a negation that circulates and never rests except to do nothing. Exit/No Exit.
Why bother doing a journal if you’re a nihilist communist? I don’t know. I suppose it is my fate.
Or maybe I am not a nihilist communist. Maybe I am a theocrat attempting to push religious ideas into the so-called ‘anti-capitalist’ milieu by means of subterfuge (or, if you prefer Joyce, silence, exile and cunning…).
Or maybe I am trying to contain myself, and the closest I can come to ‘doing nothing’ is making the journal.
Or maybe producing a journal read by so few is the greatest pursuit of ‘doing nothing’ of them all, like building piles of dirt in the woods the day before a rain storm.
