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What is an artist-philosopher, Jonathan? Is he or she both of those things, or perhaps neither, but a different sort of creature altogether?

Both and neither. My idea of an artist-philosopher takes as one of its points of departure Nietzsche’s self-conception in the last years of his life. So on the one hand an artist-philosopher would be a philosopher for whom his life is his work, and whose work is an experiment in living. But on the other it would be an artist whose work is not just ‘philosophically informed’, indeed not even importantly that, but which puts philosophy into practice and inquires philosophically through practice, where the practice might reveal a sense of the philosophy that the philosophy ‘by itself’ is blind to. The artist-philosopher is an old story, but it’s a ‘new species’ one sees more and more in the art world, artists with selective knowledge drives working not for the store of knowledge but putting it into service for living well and leading better lives. Perfecting oneself as a form where the form is an ongoing process, not as if perfection is achievable – that would be unhealthy – but forever ‘to come’. The constitutive role creative transformation, or rather self-creative transformation, plays in comprehension. But this is not the romantic conception of the philosopher or artist subject, not the legislator poet-artist of 19th century romanticism, not the activist art ‘praxis’ of late 1960s Western Europe, not a ‘political’ art which seeks to negate itself as art in an aesthetics of disappearance into the social, whatever that is. It is work which puts into question notions such as the subject, the legislator, activism, negation, aesthetics – and which does not acknowledge any hierarchy between art and philosophy in doing so. If it is art, if it is, then it is art which rejects an order of dependency which would see philosophy legislate the priority of a theoretical and abstract conception of concepts over their practical derivation. If it is philosophy, if it is, then it is philosophy which does not grant art sovereignty over the sensuous.

But the question of course is the extent to which such work can be said to be ‘untimely’ and atopic if it can only be carried out in a necessary complicity with the institutions of the art world. And it must be remarked that the art world is more open to these questions than is the institution of philosophy, which perhaps goes some way to explaining why so much philosophical research is being carried out in art schools and art departments, and why speculative philosophy finds as much scope in the practice of art as it does in that of philosophy. In my view if these questions do not become of increasingly more import for philosophy it is because philosophy in the institutional guise of scientistic objectification is wilfully blind to speculative practice. And conversely if art institutions are more and more welcoming of such questions then one must at least remain vigilant regarding the philosophical veracity of the responses they legitimate institutionally.

Some of your art projects consist in performative readings. Can you tell me how a performative reading is different from just a reading? Also, why are they often marathon readings? What does length add to the performance? I’m thinking of your Spinoza project. Can you tell me why you chose such a dense metaphysical text; is anyone outside philosophy departments still taking 17th century philosophy seriously?

A performative reading performs the problem of which it speaks. To read performatively is not to perform the text, and it is not simply to read a text ‘about’ something, it is to put into practice and therefore into question what the text is ‘about’. So Spinoza Lector, where I (joined by any other) read Spinoza’s Ethics out loud over 24 hours, is not simply to read Spinoza, it is to put into question what he says, principally “No-one knows what a body can do”. Spinoza is a philosopher of the affect, and one of the things that is performed in reading his philosophy of the affect out loud over such an extended period of time are the forces which act on the body during the reading, and the effects of such forces on one’s understanding of what is being read. Affects acting on the body become acted by the body, putting the concept of affect into play. It’s an instance of the becoming sensible of the meaning of the text. It’s what Jean-François Lyotard calls (in his forward to Joseph Kosuth’s Collected Writings) ‘actualising’ the text, under “the responsibility of the mouths and eyes of the flesh”. The work stages an encounter not just with Spinoza’s text and what he writes about affects, as if ‘affect’ were merely a concept, but with the affects themselves in the reading of them, and how those affects work on the body in the reading of them and affect one’s conceptual understanding of them.

As for whether anyone takes 17th century philosophy seriously, Spinoza is certainly of contemporary relevance, and it’s due in large part to Gilles Deleuze. I would turn the question around, and say that with any great philosopher – and this goes for artists too, in other words any great thinker – the task is to make ourselves contemporary with them rather than to place that demand on them. And in Spinoza’s case that relevance is in how he de-transcendentalises basic concepts of conduct in favour of the empirical. The Ethics is a book of concepts where the concepts cannot be understood outside of how they must be put into practice in order to be truly conceptualised. So the transcendentality of the concepts of good and evil – that is the moral conception of them – is displaced by their pragmatic functionality as in good or bad – that is the ethical conception. Concepts are seen differentially rather than oppositionally. By the way, the original idea for reading Spinoza’s Ethics out loud comes from Deleuze, who in a two-page essay (‘What voice brings to the text’) dreams of hearing the Ethics being read by the actor Alain Cuny. He thought that having an actor read the text would dramatise the concepts, put them up for inspection and perception. I disagree. I think that the way they can be perceived, or better sensed, is in oneself reading them out loud. It’s quite some undertaking to listen to oneself reading whilst at the same time trying to understand the text being read, where one might say that one’s understanding is externalised by one’s reading, and one can quite easily go under in doing so, especially after 18 hours trying.

I’m also interested in something Spinoza himself says about reading texts out loud. In his Theological-Political Treatise he talks about reading words ‘from the margin’, and he gives as example words which the manners of the day do not permit to be heard in public, words which may once have been read freely but which come to be regarded as obscene. There was no need to alter Scripture he says, “but in concession to the weak-mindedness of the common people they [he’s talking about scribes] introduced the custom in public readings of substituting more acceptable words for sexual intercourse and excrement” [Complete Works, p487], and the scribes marked these words in the margin. What is ‘the margin’ in this sense of Spinoza’s text? The project touches on the pleasure of reading out loud, the physical sensation given by being read to, and the pleasure afforded by speaking the words of another. All matters of the voice being bodied.

How does your audience react, do you have people at the wee hours still attending the readings? And what about the resulting comments on comments on comments on Spinoza, do you find that interesting from a philosophical or an artistic point of view? How would you answer to the common objection that contemporary art of this sort, which I think is also a rather scholastic exercise, has little bearing on our world and our lives and also lacks maybe the aesthetic and emotional quality that part of the public expects from an art work?

We certainly do have people present throughout the night. And by ‘we’ I mean me and my collaborator on this project Kristien Van den Brande. Some stay for the entire 24 hours, others come and go over the same time span. One of the things about the Ethics that we put into question is not just whether ‘anyone can read it’, as Deleuze maintains, but whether it is as he argues a text where it does not matter at what point you enter it. This is inevitably one of the points of discussion. If you stage something like this in a gallery open for 24 hours then you’ll have people wandering in at different times. It’s not that they might have questions consequent of not having read or listened to earlier parts, but that they might have an insight precisely because they have not read or listened to earlier parts. Also, if they know their Spinoza or their Deleuze then they might see the Ethics as a book of different rhythms or intensities, and read it accordingly. Spinoza writes according to what is termed the ‘geometric method’, which allows one to read the Ethics as a musical score, where different parts can be read in specific ways. The scholia for example can be seen as lessons of life and one might seek the voice to read them out loud as such. One could read them as affirmations of the joy of life against the more rule-bound and logical propositions prefiguring them. So the ‘objection’ as you put it that an art piece such as Spinoza Lector lacks an aesthetic quality is misplaced – it may well be difficult to ascribe to it the ‘quality’ of being aesthetic – if being aesthetic can be described as a positive quality – but not impossible. And the ‘emotionality’ of the piece can be located at the level of reading, the way in which one’s voice is modulated by the affects acting on the body during the night as one endures the night reading out loud; or how one might be swept up by the text or thrown from it in reading out loud not just something one might disagree with or simply not comprehend, but by how the text is composed or arranged, and the way different parts of it are written. One must read, or rather is expected to perform, each part no matter what one’s feeling about this or that part might be, but then this opens up the possibilities of voice.

By ‘comments on comments’ you’re referring to the fact that we record and transcribe the entire 24 hours of reading and discussion, and it is the transcription of that that is read at the next iteration of Spinoza Lector, which of course generates its own set of comments and discussion, which in turn are transcribed and read at the next iteration, and so on. Well, philosophically the interest is in what the text of the Ethics becomes in its re-iteration, and the changing place of the book in the text generated by reading it. It is not just that the Ethics occupies a smaller and smaller space each time, but that parts are misread or missed out or repeated, and these mis-readings and misprisions then become a constitutive part of the transcribed version of the book – to be repeated at the next reading. And some parts are read out loud in a language other than English – German in Berlin for instance, and Flemish in Brussels – and these translations too become part of a single and unified transcription of the book. From what you call an ‘artistic point of view’ the interest is in the form of the work. I work from the standard English version of the Ethics, which is the Shirley translation published by Hackett, running to 194 pages, and our transcription too keeps to that pagination. Which means that some pages become very dense, whilst others – those corresponding to the ‘wee hours’ – are sparse and even blank. And this will have some bearing on how the text can be read out loud. There is also the dialogue with other ’24 hour’ works, such as Andy Warhol’s book a for instance, or Douglas Gordon’s installation 24-hour Psycho; pieces determined by the contingency of the length of their format, such as Warhol’s super-8 films and Bruce Nauman’s videotapes; words dictated by format, as in John Cage’s Indeterminacy or Michael Snow’s So Is This, and more recently certain of Kenneth Goldsmith’s temporally determined transcriptions.

Let’s talk a little about your current project at ODD. Your residency included almost daily screenings of film, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, Alexander Kluge’s 9. hour-long News from Ideological Antiquity and Andrei Ujică’s Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Why did you choose communism as a theme for this series of screenings? Did we not have enough of it already?

Yes we have without doubt had enough of communism. And this is why I wanted to ‘read’ it again. I wanted to read communism without the ‘ism’, in its plurality, displaced from its politicised and ideologised articulations. Discussion about communism, especially in France since the delusions of Mai ’68 have been seen for what they were, has led to the sorts of ideas which I would wish to explore. I’m thinking of the writings of Maurice Blanchot (‘On an approach to communism’, ‘Marx’s three voices’), Jean-Christophe Bailly (La Comparution), Jean-Luc Nancy (various writings on being-in-common), Jacques Rancière (on equality, on democracy), and Jacques Derrida (Spectres of Marx): community without leader, politics without the party, the state without nationhood, unions of states without internal borders, gathering without togetherness, association without the collective, being-in-common without identity, the conjoining and disjoining of the disparate without dissolution, the possibilities of ‘welcoming’ and hospitality and dissidence and refuge and foreignness with all these ‘without’s, difference with equality, dispersion with rights, mobility with freedom – and the relation of all these to the promise of democracy, the risk and chance of democracy and the indetermination at its heart. And perhaps above all the prospects and opportunities for exploring these problematics in art, the potential of art as the one ‘in common’ where all such questions can be given time and space to seen and heard.

So I decided to read communism through film – I am making a film – films at the intersection of art and politics, and films comprised of different sorts of material, whether that be newsreel or archive footage (as in Ujică’s film or Ben Lewis’ The King of Communism), monuments of fallen communist leaders (Laura Mulvey’s Disgraced Monuments), fiction as philosophy/philosophy as fiction (Godard) or, as in the case of Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity, a film drawing together many different forms of material, including film itself. Kluge’s film is a film of Sergei Eisenstein's Notes on a project to film Marx’s Das Kapital. Kluge’s film asks What is it to make a film on a film unmade? And you cannot ask that question of Eisenstein’s Notes, says Kluge, without unfolding another one, namely If capital could speak, what would it say? And to unfold that question you must raise it from the perspective of those to whom capital speaks. The film is an assemblage of personae. It assembles various voices and characters and unifies them into a whole. And this is partly why the film draws its material from anywhere and everywhere. Kluge sees no hierarchical distinction between high and low culture for instance, documentary or fiction, news or fairytales; there is no principled differentiation between genres or disciplines. His films are democratic spaces in this regard, or what he would call the public sphere. He is an artist-philosopher in that he gives form to beings as a whole, and to the whole of being. This is one of the tasks my footage confronts me with: how to unify material from disparate sources, different times, and of various voices.

Your project is entitled The Fall of Enthusiasm and in the ‘open letter’ which you address to Romanians you mention “the pathology of enthusiasm”. What does that refer to? Do you equate enthusiasm with socialism or maybe with revolutions and dreams of building a new society in common? Do you think enthusiasm at the societal scale is still possible and would that be a good thing considering where it has often led in history?

Actually I address the letter to Romanians “and other enthusiasts of democracy”. The last time I was in Romania was in November, to install work at MNAC in a show entitled Dispositions in Time and Space. Iohannis had just been elected President. There was a newspaper one could find everywhere, and its headline was ‘Entuziasm!’ Enthusiasm does seem to be intimately linked to the politics of socialism. Which perhaps is one reason why my project has been about enthusiasm from the start – at which moment I was more convinced of the virtues of a new society ‘in common’ than I am now, and than I was after I returned from my very first trip to Romania in 1988. Very early on, back in 1990 I think, I obtained the right from Mosfilm to use some of Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film Entuziazm – which we also screened in the gallery space. I wanted it for its rhythm. The sub-title of that film is The Donbas Symphony. The Donbas is precisely the area being fought over in Ukraine as we speak. One might say that it is the last frontier of Europe, the final chapter of the encounter between the former West and its East which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 ‘revolutions’ of Central and Eastern Europe. But of course, we cannot say ‘final’, who knows what will happen. But what we can say is that what is taking place in Ukraine is one way in which the Romanian revolution, the last and most bloody of the 1989 revolutions, has yet to end, because it is being played out along the same fault line, and is a response to the same promise – or threat depending on which way you look at it – the promise of the idea of Europe, to which it could be said that a majority of Ukrainians have responded enthusiastically, but which the European Union will take a long time redeeming not least because of the way the ruling elite in Russia have resisted it on behalf of Ukraine.

The work at MNAC too deals with enthusiasm – it includes a digital print poster entitled ‘Direcții ale dezvoltării cercetării ştiinţifice în lumina hotărârilor ce succed căderea entuziasmului Congresului al XIV-lea al Partidului. Anunţ mortuar ca platformă a integrării cercetării cu producţia – „Club Electroputere“ Craiova’. A useless confrontation between the genius and the tyrant. §5 ‘The Inadequacy of the Chance Encounter and the Need to Go Beyond It’, The Swerve of Freedom After Spinoza. The title is a re-wording of the notice for a programme that was scheduled to be broadcast on Romanian television the evening of 25 December 1989. That programme was never shown. The poster is a re-working of the obituary page from The Times newspaper of 27 December 1989. That page is split between the obituaries of Samuel Beckett and Nicolae Ceauşescu. (The work can be seen on ODD’s website.) The Swerve of Freedom After Spinoza refers to the book ‘to come’ I have been working on for the past couple of years, of which Spinoza Lector (discussed above) is also a part. You asked whether Spinoza is taken seriously today. Yes, there has been a resurgence of interest in his theories of democracy, freedom, the state, and the relation of these to religious thought. He was one of the first philosophers of democracy, democracy as the most natural and rational form of state, democracy as the freest state for the philosopher, and argued for the freedom to philosophise unconstrained by the edicts of religious dogma – which went hand-in-hand with religious freedom and toleration – because such freedom is essential to the flourishing of political society. (Spinoza’s family were first Marrano refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition, and then they were expelled from France; Spinoza himself was ex-communicated by the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam when he was 23, a ruling which has never been reversed.) Although having said that, his theory of democracy was exclusionary: of women and foreigners for example. The book – well, two books, one art, one philosophy – examines Spinoza’s thought on these matters for its contemporary relevance. The ‘Contents’ page of the book can be seen at MNAC.

The ‘pathology’ of enthusiasm refers to the affective nature of the concept as it is figured in Kant. On the level of ethics, enthusiasm is unhealthy. It’s like an infection. Ethics, for Kant, must be free from any determining pathos. But on the level of aesthetics enthusiasm is a powerful driving force for the imagination, it is sublime. It’s the tension between these that interests me, and how one might regulate their economy and the passage of one to the other. Spinoza sees enthusiasm to be the cause of religious zealotry, of servility to Scripture over belief in it. Your own Cioran says of enthusiasm that it is “a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters”, and that the worst crimes are committed in its name [De l'inconvénient d'être né]. An altogether more positive conception of enthusiasm is held by a major thinker of communism and its contemporary possibilities, Alain Badiou. If Badiou had his way then there would certainly be more public disasters. For Badiou, enthusiasm is the very intensity of politics. Politics is one of his four truth procedures, which each happen to have a single affect. Enthusiasm is the affect through which one experiences the truth of politics. Politics is the collective plus enthusiasm. Were Badiou’s theory to be put into practice, the collective plus enthusiasm would equal disaster. It is enthusiasm which infects Badiou’s descriptions of the empirical reality his politics wishes to change. So to that extent one answer to your question is ‘No’, enthusiasm would not be a good thing. This was one of the motivations for the performative reading I gave at the opening of Dispositions at MNAC, where I read out a passage I had re-written of Badiou’s re-writing of Plato’s myth of the cave, ironising the enthusiasm of Socrates’ interlocutors. I might add here that I couldn’t help noticing after the inaugural meeting recently of the Facebook discussion group concerned with the possibility of forming of a new centre-left political party or movement in Romania (Discuții pentru înființarea unui partid/mișcare de centru-stânga), when some of the people involved in that meeting came back to ODD to carry on the debate within the parameters of my project, that there was no unanimity on what such a party should be or aim for. This is not a criticism. For me the task is to embrace that heterogeneity. And perhaps enthusiasm is precisely what blocks that.

You have brought with you some 70 hours’ worth of film footage, some of it shot clandestinely in Romania in 1988 and ’89, and also some which you have not seen since you first made it. What do you plan to do with it?

I have footage from various visits over a period of more than 25 years, including as you say film shot clandestinely, and footage shot whilst being followed by the Securitate or trying to get away from them. That footage is precarious and at times filmed without being aware of what it was we were filming – in the sense that we came here not knowing what we might see nor whether we would be able to film. In the event nothing could have prepared me for what a communist ‘society’ is. And I could not fathom a certain passivity on the part of the people. I also have footage from the revolution – an event that was not prefigured or even hinted at in the journeys over the preceding 18 months or so. The final footage was gained in the summer on the Mobile Biennale in Oltenia, and during my time at ODD. The footage exists in a number of formats, including super-8 and 16mm film, and various mainly defunct gauges of video, and some of it I have not viewed since shooting it, and some I did not know I had shot or had no recollection of having shot. The time has come to gather the footage together and inspect it for its possibilities for shaping and giving form to my ideas on change, freedom, enthusiasm, nationalism, the idea of Europe, the promise of democracy, whilst at the same time reflecting on the impossibility of making a film across such a long period of time, something which will take the form of a fictionalised exchange between two characters whose relationship has failed. I’m being assisted in this by two works, one I have already mentioned, Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity, a film about a film unmade; the other is Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, a book about a book unwritten. I wanted to inspect the footage in public, hence my spending two weeks at ODD viewing it in a gallery space open to the public. The hope was to look at the artist as a witness from the point of view of the witness, to displace oneself as witness by viewing the work through the eyes of another as it were. The debates and arguments that were had along the way certainly helped in this regard. The next stage is to edit the footage, also in public.

Can you sum up your experience at the revolution for us?

This came up recently, at an event at Seneca Anticafe, devoted to the photographs of Niek Hermans taken during four days of the revolution. I was invited by Anticafe (well… I invited myself – at the suggestion of Vlad Alexandrescu, who was to speak at the event and who a few days before had come to visit me at ODD) to engage in conversation with Niek about those days. We arrived in Bucharest around the same date. At Anticafe Niek remarked on the optimism and happiness of the people. But I was not so sure about that. I contended that it was not one big party. In fact it was at times very difficult and trying. Whilst people were generally encouraging of me to film, sometimes extremely keen to be filmed, and interested and questioning, there were occasions when one was stopped on the street by what appeared to be ordinary citizens – although it seems strange to invoke such a notion in the midst of a revolution from authoritarian communist dictatorship – who would demand to know why I was filming and what I was doing there. They would pressure me to produce my passport, which I never did. It has to be said that I would often take off in the opposite direction to that being taken by journalists, and would find myself in quite desolate areas where there were not many people. We stayed for some weeks after the revolution – I was there with my collaborator at the time Julian Woropay. And the longer we remained the colder it became – to the extent that one could hardly feel one’s fingers when holding the camera. Part of our intention in tarrying was to gain a sense of the place beyond what would be shown by journalists, whose work was dictated by different imperatives and who were working to different time frames of course, with a very different understanding of the present moment.

But I must say a word here about something else Niek Hermans remarked. The event at Anticafe took place the day of the murder of the journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Before the discussion started I asked Niek whether he thought of himself as a journalist when taking his pictures of the revolution. Most definitely he said. Niek began his presentation by saying that he considered the pictures on show as “images of hope”. My view is that any image made freely by a journalist is an image of hope, regardless of its ostensible content. It’s one way of understanding Alexander Pope’s “Hope springs eternal” . The next sentence in that text (Essay on Man) begins “Man never is”. I would say that man ‘is’ through the images he makes. Images are the ‘to come’ of our lives. Niek’s images are not simply documentation. If they were they would not embody hope. It is only as a document of the ‘to come’ of our lives that his images are images of hope, ‘of’ in a doubly genitival sense: they show hope and they are born of hope. The journalists at Charlie Hebdo were gunned down because they put up images caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. For most if not all Muslims any image of the Prophet Muhammad is forbidden. But such images were not always banned. It was only with the development of media to disseminate images more widely that images began to be conceived in certain ways. The institution of Islam, what today we would call the political institution of it, because it is ‘younger’, could only be achieved by creating a difference to other religions, principally Christianity of course, and the way in which Christianity imaged itself presented itself and conceived itself through images. Dissemination has always been perceived as a threat by authoritarian regimes; such regimes wish to reserve to themselves the right to dictate what images mean and what an image is. In order to dictate what an image means you need a theory, at least minimally and no matter how impoverished that theory is, indeed even if it is denied that the ban is theoretically derived. This is where such a ban involves itself in performative contradiction. Such a ban rests on an absolute distinction between word and image. But no such distinction exists. There is no such thing as a pure image, just as there is no such thing as pure word. The ban on images of the Prophet Muhammed could not be ‘argued’ without at least the presumption of a theoretical conception of what that image means and indeed what an image, any image, is. And that theory does not just fall from the sky. It emerges out of images and because of images and co-extensively with images – in short: as much as image as word. The ban on such images is the expression of a prejudiced understanding, or lack of understanding, of the distinction between word and image. And it is this unexamined merely inherited ‘understanding’ which is the very comfort of those upholding the ban on images. To assert of such people that “the one thing we can be certain of is that they're not comfortable”, as Will Self did recently in Vice, is mistaken [Vice (UK), 9 January 2015]. Images of the Prophet Muhammed created by the journalists at Charlie Hebdo are, as images, free speech. They are images of hope because they hold open the distinction between word and image for possibilities of both.

What was it about Romania that inspired you to come here again and again, rather than let’s say Czechoslovakia? How did you get to show your 1988 shooting in the European Parliament at that time?

Why Romania? Contingent reasons. The original motivation for making a film in Romania of Romania was the programme of ‘Sistematizare’ being carried out by Ceauşescu. There was a lot of talk in the English press about the destruction being wrought. I was an undergrad student of film and philosophy at the time, and it seemed like a good idea to take a leap and see whether one could make a difference and how. My friend Julian, also studying film as art and who had a degree in architecture, drew my attention to the situation in Romania. What was happening there appeared to me to be more than anything else a chance, a chance for a kind of film that had not been made before, a chance to discover what it was I wanted. Before setting off we researched the country’s architecture and cultures extensively, visiting the Romanian Library in Freiburg, various other archives, Romanian and Hungarian émigrés across Europe, architects, historians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, poets. Once there we travelled all over the country shooting footage of demolitions, deprivation, damage – and as well of the people and the land, and of everything and nothing. The closer we got to Bucharest the more likely it became that we’d be followed. And sure enough in Sibiu it began. After that we were trailed and intimidated constantly. We had an arrangement with the chaplain of the British Embassy in Bucharest to carry the footage out of the country. Some of what we shot was confiscated by the Securitate, some taken from us at the border. It was Julian who had the contacts to get what remained played in the European Parliament, something we thought would draw attention to what we came to see as the plight of the people, and assist in raising interest in the project to enable us to return. It was only whilst in Bucharest during the revolution that I became seriously interested in the concept of change. The journeys prior to that were acts of resistance and self-formation. After the revolution I set about traversing Romania’s borders, those I had not already crossed – first into Ukraine to Cernauti in search of Paul Celan (1990), then Moldova for the Transnistria dispute (1992). This coincided with commencing a PhD in Philosophy, on ‘Responsibility and Representation’.

Whilst studying for my doctorate I interviewed Jacques Derrida. It was 1994 and he had just published Spectres de Marx, and before that a book on Europe and democracy, L’autre cap, and had recently held a seminar on nationalism. One of the questions I asked him concerned philosophical idiom, I raised it with specific reference to Romanian philosophy, because from what I understood Romanian philosophy had been translated into French far more than into any other language. I was interested in two related problems: the problem of the border, that is the necessity of traversing it but without destroying it: but why not?; and the problem of the responsibility of translation and whether certain Romanian texts of philosophy had been translated because they could be understood to be responding to the promise of Europe, Europe as something like an Idea in the Kantian sense or an Husserlian ideal. I inquired whether Constantin Noica or Gabriel Liiceanu, or other Romanian philosophers, had been covered in his seminar. They had not. (Which obliged me, I felt, to leave their names out of the published version of the interview [Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6, 1997].) This gave me the idea of making one of the characters in my film a translator, whose relationship with her lover on the other side of the border is fraught because she refuses to translate his work. Their relationship would be played out through a series of letters. But it is only when the border between them falls and is finally broached by ‘the idea’ and ‘the promise’ redeemed, and they can speak more easily and more frequently in person, that their relationship ends.

How do you assess Romania’s evolution after 25 years, what would be your biggest disappointments and perhaps satisfactions or hopes?

Well, you might take the final part of my response to the last question as a clue to my thinking about this. But I must say I feel I have no right to express ‘disappointment’ or ‘satisfaction’ in Romania’s evolution. Instead I want to turn the question around and say something about the part played by Romania in the supposed ‘evolution’ of Europe, and in the UK’s self-conception and the UK’s understanding of the idea of Europe. What interests me right now is how the proper name ‘Romania’, or rather ‘Romanians’, and in a more explicitly racist way ‘gypsies’, has come to stand for something in the UK, and about this I can state that I am disappointed, indeed saddened. For what is being argued and fought for in my name as a UK citizen, but not a European citizen, is a contravention of the idea of Europe and the betrayal of its promise. ‘Romanians’ has come to name a problem, namely the freedom of movement across Europe’s internal borders. There is a growing feeling in Britain that the openness of its borders to the peoples of other countries in Europe is being abused, and it is ‘Romanians’ above all who are crossing the border for the ‘wrong reasons’.

The major power in the current coalition government, the Conservative Party, is promising an ‘In/Out’ referendum if it wins the forthcoming General Election: should we stay or should we go. And they wish to make it a condition of our staying in Europe that one of the founding rights of European Union citizens, one of the ‘Four Freedoms’ of the EU – the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the member states – is compromised if not negated altogether. And there appears to be a lot of popular support for this step. And this saddens me and angers me. It is my hope, but not my expectation, that the ‘right to move freely’ for all peoples of the EU is argued for, committed to, and adamantly upheld by the UK and every other EU member state. And if the UK should leave the EU because the rest of the EU insists that this right is non-negotiable then it will be a catastrophe.

Also can you tell me a little about your youth in Britain? You played us some great music at the New Year’s Eve party which sounded quite contemporary even though some of it might be form the 80s (was it Public Image Ltd.?).

Thank you for saying so. Yes, I began with Public Image Ltd’s Careering, a version recorded live on TV for ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ in 1980. This is no accident. Not only do I love the track – it’s about careering “across the border” by the way – and that performance of it in particular, but I had just a few days before seen the effect of playing it in a bar. It stirred people to move. But the reason I played it in that bar is because of the circumstances. I went out filming at about 3.30 in the morning on Christmas day. As you know, Ceauşescu was executed on Christmas day, and I was in Bucharest that day, twenty five years ago, filming. And walking around Bucharest on this occasion I was thinking back on that day. For about two hours I did not see a single soul on foot, despite the fact that ODD is quite near the centre and I was heading towards the centre. Then I heard music emanating from somewhere and decided to find out where. It turned out to be a bar called A1. I walked in, saw that a laptop was being used to play music on YouTube, and without asking put on Careering. I played that track because it was the first one that came to mind when thinking about the freedom to play whatever music one likes. People started to dance. A young guy jumped up and I proceeded to alternate with him deejaying until 8 in the morning. After three hours he turned to me and said “I’m getting paid for this!” I had no idea. But that I could simply wander in and play music unchallenged, and then be encouraged to continue, was fantastic. Talk about freedom. It’s how I put the playlist together for the party we had here at ODD. I played all sorts of music, from punk to free jazz, funk to house, soul to dubstep – and remixes of one by the other – Gay Marvine’s of Right there in the socket by Shalamar, Pilooski’s of Send him back by The Staple Singers, Andy Kidd’s of Stormy by The Supremes, Too Many DJs of Kylie Minogue and Joy Division – even some Northern soul, Dean Parrish’s I’m on my way, which I remade a couple of years ago with the artists Haroon Mirza and Ross Birrell – basically anything with a dance rhythm, rhythm breaks down generic distinctions. Why did I think first of Careering? Because of something that John Lydon the lead singer of PIL said – that he preferred going to soul clubs and dance clubs than to punk clubs. He found them to be places where people from different musical subcultures, people who were not supposed to get on with each other, had a great time dancing together. He’s talking about the time he used to frequent a club called Lacy Lady. I too used to go there. There was a great DJ by the name of Chris Hill who played different kinds of music on the one dance floor. I think of that place now as nothing less than the democratisation of music, the clearing of a space to mix different musics without distinction. You cannot supress rhythm!

Bucharest and London
20 January 2015