Output details

The Secret Knowledge

This novel was partly supported by an AHRC grant for the practice-led project 'Quantum Suicide: Walter Benjamin and the multiverse', and by a visiting fellowship at Durham Institute of Advanced Study. In addition to my on-going questions described in relation to Sputnik Caledonia, I was specifically interested in Benjamin’s engagement with the insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), and especially Blanqui’s final book, L’Eternite par les astres, which uses atomic theory to propose the existence of other planets that repeat or alter Earth’s history.

The novel posits alternative histories in which an early twentieth-century composer (Pierre Klauer) plays Russian Roulette and either dies or survives. Benjaminian archetypes populate the narrative: flaneur, gambler, conspirator, Grubler (brooder: a type discussed in Origins of German Tragic Drama). Historical episodes alternate with present-day chapters featuring the rediscovery of Klauer’s last composition by pianist David Conroy, and the plot is driven by the question whether Conroy’s departed lover is a delusion or else evidence of multiple realities. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno appear as characters in the historical episodes, and Conroy’s musical aesthetic is heavily influenced by Adorno. In particular, this sets Conroy at odds with artistic commercialisation and middlebrow taste.

In the course of writing the book I became increasingly interested in Deleuze’s ontology, and Badiou’s critique of it. Deleuze posits the One as sum of the Many but for Badiou (in Being And Event) there is no consistent whole. Badiou’s argument is derived from set theory, whose paradoxes are alluded to within the novel, in a conversation between Pierre Klauer and Walter Benjamin. (Benjamin wrote a brief essay on the Liar Paradox). If there is no consistent whole then the search for artistic unity must lead to incompleteness or contradiction. In this novel I consciously embraced contradiction as a formal principle.