“What do we mean when we call coffee ‘white’ or ‘black’?” the trim, fit-looking thinker asks, with his trademark love of travelling against the intellectual grain. “Is ‘white’ coffee actually white, in any sense which goes deeper than its simply not being black – or rather, to delineate this condition more precisely, its being not-black? And if it is not, to what degree does this fraudulent variety of whiteness (whiteness arrived at by way of a suppression of the black) differ from the condition-in-general of white itself – white proper, white as transcendental concept?”
Amid the fruit-plates and finger-food of a TV green room, with all its ghosts of schmoozes past, this comes as heady talk indeed. But Ivan Lego is a man who, quite literally, wears his philosophical convictions on his sleeve. In keeping with his war against “chromatic absolutism,” Lego pursues a strict policy of dressing only in off-white tones, right down to his Italian loafers – a look that’s already spawned a legion of faun-decked Lego wannabes among male fans, not to mention a frisson of not-so-cerebral admiration among his female followers.
“White-as-concept presents itself to us not merely as that which is purely present but also as that which is purely at -present,” comments the in-demand thought-smith, as a stooping sound jockey fusses over the placement of his lapel mike. “It purports to have no past, no history, constituting rather the past or history of all other colour, colour’s universal point of departure – the uncolour which is privileged to stand outside the processes of colour, that is, exists prior to these processes, the tabula rasa on which they inscribe themselves (are inscribed), the site from which all colour is absent – the site, above all, from which black (conceived of as the irreducible epitome of the not-white) is absent.”
One thing that isn’t absent from Ivan Lego’s life these days is the attention of a frenzied media. The runaway success of Empty Pages has seen to that. The profound and controversial blockbuster is the first ever work of literature to eschew the traditional medium of language – and, judging by its supersized splashdown into the mainstream, it won’t be the last. Lego wrote the book nights, and during rare moments of downtime stolen from a hectic day job as Head of the socioliterology department at the University of ——, where his commitments include running a unique undergrad programme devoted to the study of his own thought. From the deans and dons of book-chat, the Professor’s bold-as-brass novelistic coup has received something almost unheard of in the literary world: universal acclaim. It has been hailed as everything from “a hymn to silence, a paean to existential nudity” to “post-modernity’s piece de resistance.” And in the lofty ivory towers of the academy, the book will have done no harm to Lego’s reputation as philosophy’s provocateur par excellence – the novel is, Lego concedes dryly, “not unprovocative.”
But it’s the book’s wildfire success with the broader public that has caught most culturati by surprise. Fuelled by months of pre-publication buzz, the book cracked bestseller charts in only its second week of release, racking up unprecedented sales for a work packing such a heavyweight philosophical punch. Empty Pages has rapidly become the publishing event du jour, and the book to own this summer. With its meteoric ascent into the pop ionosphere, Ivan Lego has hit the fame learning curve running. Reprintings of his previous books – all six of them – have been rushed onto the shelves. Endorsement offers have flooded in – offers that Lego, so far, has stylishly let through to the keeper. Just this week, the book’s foreign-language translation rights went under the hammer for an undisclosed – but reputedly vast – sum. (In an irony the philosopher relishes, competition to secure these rights was intense, despite the fact that the book contains – barring the two words of its title – no translatable text. Lego calls the top-dollar foreign rights deal “more a franchising issue, clearly, than a prelude to any act of translation per se.”) Inevitably, there’s already talk of a hush-hush big-buck movie deal – but don’t expect Lego to confirm the rumours. Sequel whispers also abound.
Unsurprisingly, the media-savvy Professor takes all this brouhaha in his stride. “In a crucial sense I sit here as a ghost,” he says laughingly of the sudden when-you’re-hot-you’re-hot attention. “The author is dead. The word is dead. Empty Pages in a fundamental sense does not exist, and so strictly speaking it is absurd for me to sit here” – he takes in the green room with an elegant sweep of his long, lean arm – “and pass myself off as the work’s author.”
The cream-clad thinker pauses, choosing his words carefully in the pre-show hubbub. “Nevertheless,” he adds, “the sense in which I did not write the book differs radically from the sense in which anyone else did not write it. Ivan Lego – that is to say, the intersection of codes, rules and discursive practices which form the content of the name ‘Ivan Lego’ – is indeed the author of the book’s lack of authorship, the writer of its lack of writing. Given that there must be an author’s name printed above the book’s title – and a face depicted on its rear cover, and a payee with respect to the vending of the translation rights – it isn’t wholly illogical that this author-function should devolve to myself.”
Lego’s rapid-fire philosophising offers a timely reminder that Empty Pages is much more than a book full of … well, full of empty pages. Although Lego has been known to make light of the book’s trademark wordlessness (“Like most overnight successes,” he has quipped, “this book was written overnight”), behind the work’s apparent simplicity lurks a theory that even the braniacs of academia have struggled to comprehend. Lego’s so-called theory of “meanability” decrees, in its soundbite version, that “every writing or speech act is an act of semantic genocide.” Long before he unveiled it to the masses, this complex and contentious theory had made Lego a figure of no little controversy in the dog-beat-dog world of international philosophy. His in-your-face climb to the top of the philosophical ranks was an often gruelling journey – achieved, recalls the rueful genius today, at “considerable personal cost.” But after years of paying his dues – and then some – in the gown-and-dagger brat-race of academic politics, it’s little wonder that Ivan Lego has handled his emergence into the pop-culture limelight with such aplomb, playing the press and the paparazzi like a Stratocaster. Having conquered the halls and cloisters of academe, coping with the stresses of overnight stardom was always going to be a comparative no-brainer.
Not that the hype has focussed entirely on the virtues of Lego’s mind. More than one pundit has already dubbed him “the thinking woman’s sex bomb” – and, watching the dapper sage work a smitten and largely female talk-show crowd, it isn’t hard to see why. To put it mildly, Ivan Lego is not your average-looking egg-head. Some style-watchers are already crediting him with making the mind sexy again, and heralding the emergence of a new highbrow chic.
But the modest Professor is swift to reject the “sex-symbol” tag, calling it “a linguistic terrorist by which I refuse to be taken hostage.” And as for those outfits, Lego prefers to stress the philosophical implications of his cutting-edge wardrobe, leaving it to others to haggle over questions of hipness.
“If whiteness constitutes itself as an entity constituted by virtue of its opposition to its own opposite,” the reluctant star says wryly, “that is to say by virtue of its being its other’s other (that is to say, black’s other), isn’t white therefore an inscription too, an inscription itself, a product constituted by reference to the otherness of its other (and incapable of constituting itself by any other means). To put it another way, is not the idea of black always already a fundamental presence in the idea of white? A presence always already rendered present by virtue of the very invoking of its absence?”
And that bodacious bod? While the svelte and toned thinker doesn’t obsess about matters physical, he will, when pressed, credit his abtastic physique to daily doses of Hatha yoga, combined with a bad-carbs-out-the-window diet that embraces free-range meats, pesticide-free vegetables, and “very little” dairy.
Despite the fandemonium that rages around his new creation, Ivan Lego still has no plans – as yet – to throw in his prestigious day job. But watching the relaxed novelist sign yet another shyly proffered copy of Empty Pages (“It’s nice,” he jests, “to be able to write something in it”) it’s easy to forget that even today, Lego still has his critics. At the University of ——, a minority of observers have come forward to brand his administrative style “arrogant” and “autocratic.” Incredibly, not even Empty Pages itself has escaped the brickbats of the naysayers. Witness the book’s rowdy official launch last month – later broadcast on the television show ArtsBeat – from which at least one vocal heckler had to be forcibly removed. Not long afterwards, the heat surrounding Lego’s book turned positively scorching, when areas of the University had to be evacuated after a public burning of Empty Pages by a radical student group went awry, touching off a massive scrub fire that took fire-fighters several hours to tame. Add to that a now-notorious series of death threats, which Lego continues to receive at a rate of about one a week, and it’s clear that the book’s ascent to literary immortality hasn’t all been one-way traffic.
But today, sitting atop the dizzying heights of the best-seller lists, a centred Ivan Lego exudes a Zen-like indifference to the slings and arrows of the book’s few critics. Laughs the philosopher, “To condemn a blank book is of course a logical absurdity. There is nothing in it to condemn. Ultimately the book’s detractors are condemning only themselves, laying bare their own narrow preconceptions of what a book should be.”
So how will Lego’s concept of the “textless text” impact future trends on the publishing scene? On that question, industry honchos and meeting-takers are still scratching their heads. As hot a property as Empty Pages has turned out to be, copycat projects have no automatic guarantee of success – witness the now-notorious failure of last month’s all-blank ad campaign by automotive giant Sannoë. (The company splashed out big-time on a series of entirely empty billboards and magazine spots, looking to parlay some of the heat surrounding Lego’s creation into some sweet coffer-medicine of their own. The ads flopped dismally, and heads rolled.)
But as long as the airwaves keep crackling with talk of Empty Pages – which these days seems to come from the unlikeliest of sources, from movie stars falling over each other to claim they’ve read it, to stand-up comics riffing and sassing on the topic of “quiral nudity” – there’s little doubt that Lego’s brainchild will continue to have legs.
One thing that doesn’t have legs, however, is speculation about the author’s private life. On that verboten topic, the laid-back prophet remains very much a closed book. He steadfastly refuses to discuss details of his background and childhood, deeming them “irrelevant” to his work as a writer. And given his firm intention to keep his private life just that, don’t expect him to go spilling any serious beans about his romantic attachments any time soon. All he will say on that subject is that he is, at present, “happily single.” Asked to expand on that, the post-modern master of language treats interviewers to a hefty slice of the silence that is fast becoming his intellectual stock-in-trade.
In his life, as in his novel, Ivan Lego is more than happy to let others fill in the blanks. But it seems safe to say that on the romantic front – as on any other front you care to name – things are looking up, up, and away for the stylish super-brain who has proved that silence isn’t just golden … it’s a goldmine!