Bloom, Isis, Iowa

This post by Gary Smith was enjoyable. I like it partly because he may be right about the “anxiety of influence” point (I’m well aware that I’ve given a “misreading” in the sense that Heidegger himself would never have signed off on it). But also I like his casual reference to the Herbert Hoover Library. (Smith is from the Iowa City area too, and thus is able to get away with inside references to Iowa’s only Presidential Library. Unfortunately, I only went to the Hoover Library during childhood and haven’t the faintest recollection of an Isis statue. Time to go back, I guess.)

But wow, that was a pretty good “insipid physical bulks” passage. I don’t remember writing that one, but it sounds like something I’d say.

“Graham Harman has given us an interpretation of Heidegger, a good, strong interpretation. And it is, just as Harold Bloom has taught us in The Anxiety of Influence, a mis-interpretation. A mis-reading, a misprision, the whole road. This ‘ephebe’ is thus a good disciple of his precursor. He may think otherwise, as the belated follower always would, but life is life and ‘objective’ scholarship is simply bad scholarship.

He wrote, ‘I will show that objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and insurgencies equaling those found in the most tortured human moods.’ And therein is the rub. The tool-being he so casually speaks of, this insurgency that lies beneath the manifest presence of the object is not the fit subject for a scholar/professor. This Thing is too wild and terrible for the innocent student in a classroom or a journal’s board of directors. Only a rabid poet could rightly depict it. Still, Mr. Harman has pointed to something that is mighty interesting and he has himself blithely and innocently approached the under-thing that we may know that it exists.

I’m sure he has seen the statue of Isis on the grounds of the Hoover Presidential Library. That veiled thing is what he is after. That terrible goddess. Here is a quote from Proust, ‘Quand je voyais un object exterieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince lisèrè spiritual qui m’empechait de jamais toucher directement sa matière.'”