I Would Prefer Not To

"He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him - more, he provokes it ..."

This happens to be Nietzsche writing of Jesus, but it could well be someone commenting on Bartleby the scrivener. Both figures belong to the same type: that of the enigmatic redeemer who sets himself apart from his fellow man and makes himself untouchable and unknowable. 

Bartleby is one of the most discussed figures in American literature, but I find it hard to believe that he is also one of the best loved. For my part, I hate him. I would prefer not to have to explain this dislike or make any further critical analysis of this monstrous and motionless character, but, for the record ...

I hate Bartleby for much the same reason as Judas came to resent Jesus; the former felt in some sense let down by the latter and recognised the denial and subterfuge inherent in the latter's teaching. And so, despite his feelings of love and loyalty, he betrayed him: with a kiss. Bartleby too is ultimately a fraud and a moral fanatic who leads us not towards new life or greater health and happiness, but to suffering, misery and death.

Thus, like Bartleby's employer (and the narrator of his tale), I can't help feeling a  profound repulsion for the scrivener, who, clearly, is a decadent, suffering from some form of incurable disorder. His very presence is a curse and he sucks the joy out of life, just as he casts a general air of gloom over the office premises he refuses to leave. 

Bartleby's ideal is stasis: he is driven by a will to inertia, or what Freud terms a death drive. Thus he seeks to reduce all tension and avoid all conflict; to return, ultimately, to a state of inorganic objecthood: unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring, uneating, unliving. Surprisingly, Deleuze of all people finds this admirable and amusing. Not only does he think of Melville's book as a comical text, but he describes Bartleby as an anti-hero who, with his five-word formula, manages to suspend all operational logic and indicate the very limits of our world.

Deleuze seems to regard Bartleby as that first perfect nihilist whom Nietzsche spoke of and anticipated. But surely Nietzsche's thought of affirmative destruction and an active negation of the negative, is something very different to Bartleby's passive-aggressive 'negativism beyond all negation' ...? 

Deleuze is not wrong to describe Bartleby as Christ-like - "stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty" - the question is whether we think that's a good thing or not. Is it desirable - or even possible - to collectively imitate Bartleby and live as he lives, die as he dies? He surely provides at best a practice for the individual, but not a politics. Thus Deleuze is mistaken to locate a new model of fraternal alliance and immanent utopia in the story of Bartleby the scrivener. He has been seduced by the latter's suffering and martyrdom, but as Nietzsche points out, we should never confuse pain and showmanship with philosophical profundity.

And so, to conclude, Bartleby is not the physician of culture or the "doctor of a sick America" that Deleuze believes him to be. He's just another pale-faced case of retarded puberty and an apolitical idiot, with an instinctive hatred of reality and a morbid fear of being touched. What we need is someone who can teach us how to live in physical relation to one another; not just curl up and die in a corner, or hang naked on a cross.

On the Love of Boys

Despite his keen philosophical interest in their sexual ethics and techniques of the self, Foucault always maintained that the ancient Greeks do not in fact offer an attractive or plausible model for us today. No people, he says, can ever find the answer to their own social problems in the solutions found by another people at another time.

However, without wishing to necessarily advocate pederasty as a vital moral and educational institution, I can't help feeling a degree of sympathy with the following speech by Phaedrus:

"I would maintain that there can be no greater blessing for a boy than to have a worthy lover from his earliest youth; nor for a lover than to have an object worthy of his affection. Life's guiding principle for those who intend to live virtuously cannot be instilled either by family or by class or by wealth or by anything else so effectively as by love. 'What principle is that?' you ask. I mean the principle which inspires shame at what is contemptible and desire for what is noble; without these feelings neither a state nor an individual can accomplish greatness or anything fine.  

                                                                                         - Plato, The Symposium, trans. Maria Thanassa, 2013.

So, whilst it's not for me to argue that it might be advantageous for adolescent youths to have mature male lovers overseeing their physical and intellectual development in the gymnasium, surely this is preferable to teenage gangs roaming the streets stabbing and shooting one another, or mugging their fellow citizens ...?

Of course, even to suggest this is controversial in an age that lacks social and sexual etiquette and the confidence to act with authority; not to mention a time which is as terrified by the thought of paedophilia as the ancient Greek world was of immoderate behaviour. Ultimately, there's no point fantasising the recreation of Classical culture, for we are, as Nietzsche says, no longer made of the right material. 

Too Old to Live, Too Slow to Die

Adam Ant has a new album out. It's his first in a very long time and it has a very long title. I wish him all the best with it, as I retain a lot of fraternal affection for Adam.

However, he's being slightly disingenuous when he pretends that rock 'n' roll is all about sex, style, and subversion, with a dash of humour for good measure. Because it is also about youth, speed, and untimely death. 

I'm not saying that's a good thing. But that's what rock 'n' roll is: a romantic and rebellious suicide cult in which spectacular failure is valued above benign success and dangerous excess is the rule, rather than a code of health and safety. An aged rock star - to paraphrase Nick Land writing about philosophers - is either a monster of stamina, or a charlatan.  

As it's you Adam, in all your punk-pirate splendour and your madness, I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt ... You don't embarrass yourself and those who loved you in the manner that Rotten does.

  

The Boy Looked at Johnny ...

Some of the sweetest lines written about Rotten were penned by Sebastian Horsley in his 2007 memoir, Dandy in the Underworld:

"Johnny Rotten was Rimbaud reborn in Finsbury Park. He had all the unmistakable signs - the charismatic aura, the dandy's narcissism, the canny look of the holy tramp ... he even had the Gorgon's glare - the metaphor for the hypnotic power of vision, genius or madness." [57]

As Horsley rightly notes, Rotten was, in his punk heyday, flawless and blazingly beautiful: a true star who hated all other stars for failing to shine with his own intensity and integrity. Beneath the safety pins and the sarcasm, was a pure heart and a fierce intelligence and in the summer of '77, when he was being attacked in the streets of London by razor-wielding thugs acting in the name of queen and country, I hung on every word he said and adopted every gesture, every pose, every sneer. He articulated what a generation felt and he embodied how we wanted to look.

And for many years, I continued to hold Rotten in high regard and to have great affection for him; even though I was much closer in spirit to Malcolm and ultimately chose the latter's anarchic good humour and chutzpah over Lydon's increasing self-righteousness and self-indulgence.   

But it's got to the point today, I have to admit, where I can no longer stand to hear or see him. It's not merely that Rotten's lost his voice, his charm, and his sense of style; it's not even those butter adverts, his increasingly oafish behaviour, or that unseemly incident at the Mojo Awards in 2008 involving a young Welsh songstress.

For me, the final straw came with his embarrassing appearance on Question Time last year, in which he offered a few ridiculous platitudes and shamelessly played to the gallery as he looked to exploit popular sentiment. Rotten, sadly, has become the embittered, bullying, rambling and reactionary pub bore whom only morons could possibly find entertaining.

Where once we looked in awe and could not take our eyes off him, there is nothing to do now but look away ...  

The Banality of Evil

Yale University Press, 2010

I don't like Terry Eagleton: not as a literary critic, not as a cultural theorist, and particularly not as a Marxist theologian addressing the question of evil, which he thinks of as a metaphysical desire to negate being. 

This simple and straightforward definition of evil - rooted in Freud's notion of the death drive - is not one that I share. But then I'm one of those postmodern individuals whom Eagleton vehemently despises and so lack the moral depth to understand the "true destructiveness" [15] of evil, or appreciate the need for redemption. Nor do I believe that "Hell is the final victory of  nihilism over idealism" [78]; that there can be "no life outside God" [78]; or that there is "good reason to believe that the devil is a Frenchman" [93]. 

In fact, I find Eagleton's casual xenophobia, aggressive misogyny, and bluff-empiricism not only irritating, but offensive. He comes shamefully close at times to being a Little Englander, exasperated by clever foreigners who always complicate matters and terrified of "filth-dabbling feminists" [84] who "strike at the root of all social and sexual stability" [80].   

It's this - the phallocratic regime guaranteeing stability and the firmness of his erection - which Eagleton wishes to safeguard from evil; the latter now understood as that which emasculates and challenges all order. He tells us, for example, that the witches in Macbeth deserve to be burned because they practise a form of chaos magic, lacking in rhyme or reason and without any clear aim: "They are radical separatists who scorn male power ... whose words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed identities." [80-1]

As the above makes clear, it's not just social and sexual stability that Eagleton wishes to protect, but also ontological stability: he wants human being to be fixed and immutable. Such essential continuity is to be cherished rather than lamented, he writes, for only self-identical men and women are capable of leading lives rich with purpose, meaning, aspiration and achievement - unlike the damned who are decentred and incapable of finding fulfilment in life.

Eagleton speaks at length about these evil ones who lack souls and move around like zombies,"leeching life from others in order to fill an aching absence" [71] in themselves. Thus his language insistently draws upon (and reinforces) all the old metaphysics of presence, plenitude, and authenticity. Evil is now characterized as a form of lack or deficiency of being and its "seductive allure is purely superficial" [123].

Again, it's depressing and disappointing stuff from one of 'Britain's foremost intellectuals'. One can't help but wonder if, in his intellectual dotage, he even cares any longer about serious critical thinking - or even, for that matter, the problem of evil. For at the end of chapter two he suddenly makes the unexpected confession that evil "is not something we should lose too much sleep over" [130]. If only his publishers had been bold enough to put this line on the cover they'd have saved us all a lot of time and effort.

Eagleton should probably have concluded his study at that point. Instead, he adds a third and final chapter and it's here that we get to watch with wide-open eyes of amused astonishment as he oscillates frantically between two poles of delirium: Christianity and Marxism.

Eagleton cannot decide whether he believes in Salvation or Revolution - or both - because he can never quite decide whether people are essentially good, or originally sinful. As a Marxist, he wants to believe that men and women are conditioned into evil by a system of "vested interests and anonymous processes" [143]. But as a Catholic he can't help reaffirming the view that that evil is "a condition of being as well as a quality of behaviour" [152].

And so, whilst we are determined by historical forces and therefore innocent at a certain level, Eagleton also maintains we are corrupt and that any revolutionary optimism must be tempered by religious pessimism. What we need, he decides, is a new political faith founded upon a more realistic reality principle (not too sanguine, not too gloomy); one that will finally enable the passing of "reliable moral judgement on the human species" [153].

This, of course, is Eagleton's ultimate fantasy - to establish a tribunal over which he and his God can preside and pass verdict. It's this disgusting mania to judge and to find guilty that, ironically, I think we could characterize as evil. And the noble task of philosophy and literature remains what it has always been: to have done with judgement.  

In Praise of the Supermodel

It is often said by critics of the fashion industry that a young woman on the catwalk provides a bad role model in allowing herself to be commodified as a hollowed-out object, trading on her looks.

But perhaps woman-as-beautiful-object has found a way to turn her own emptiness and reification not only into something that works to her material advantage, but ultimately provides a symbolic form of resistance to the phallocratic order, by subtly exposing how all notions of essence, truth, and identity are based upon deceit and delusion.  

        

For the supermodel is neither an ideal being, nor a natural phenomenon. She is, rather, an artificial creature born of mirrors and make-up, whose mask-like face expresses neither sensitivity, nor true feeling. On the contrary, "her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression ... beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile" [Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95].

Rather like the leading ladies from Hollywood's golden age, Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia, and Christy are no ordinary women of flesh and banal sexual status, but mythological beings "around whom crystallized stern rituals and a wasteful profusion which turned them into a generation of sacred monsters" [ibid]. They don't enchant us because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and frigidity. Their lack of human warmth and ever-changing appearance, ensures they remain unknown and unlovable; like mysterious and elusive lesbians.

Thus it is that the supermodel is never really with us: she just suddenly appears, struts her stuff, pouts and strikes a pose, turns, and then vanishes - immediately eclipsed by the girl who follows.      

The Greatest Joy of All

One of my favourite scenes in Lawrence's Women in Love comes towards the end of the book, when Gudrun presents her sister with three pairs of the coloured silk stockings for which she was notorious.

Ursula, as one might imagine, is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings', she says, and Gudrun echoes this sentiment. This comes as no big surprise, as throughout the novel the Brangwen sisters often discuss clothes with the same intensity of excitement as they recount their latest experiences of the heart. 

What is surprising, however, is that Lawrence will later chastise George Bernard Shaw for his remark that clothes arouse our desire and not the exposure of flesh, which, in many cases, has quite the opposite effect. For Lawrence, this reveals Shaw to be a flippant and vulgar thinker and he sternly declares: "The man who finds a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a savage."

But actually, Shaw has a point and an important point at that; one developed by Roland Barthes who argues that woman is desexualized "at the very moment when she is stripped bare". It is only via a whole spectrum of adornment (i.e. the furs, the gloves, the shoes, the frilly underwear, the expensive stockings, the jewellery, etc.) that the living body can be projected into the symbolic category of  erotic objects and thereby made magical and alluring.

Thus, far from 'savagery' - and I'm assuming here that Lawrence means by this primitive naivety - fetishism is a sign of human sophistication; a happy exchange of nature for artifice. And so whilst the simplest of men may admire a woman's bare and blotchy legs, the more cultured are likely to admire her legs only when they are made lustrous by nylon. As for those rare individuals who are refined to the point of perversity, such persons are interested only in the stockings themselves and have no real concern for limbs.

Lawrence would probably describe the first type as healthy; for they have naturally directed their desire towards the nakedness of woman. The second type he would doubtless think of as having their sex in the head - though this would surely have to include the Paul Morel type, the Mellors type and, indeed, his own type.

As for the third class, i.e. those who - like the Brangwen sisters - get the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings and whom Lawrence thinks of as crude and savage, well, personally, I have nothing but the highest regard for them. It might just be that those who have recognised that passion not only ends in fashion, but begins there as well, have something to teach us all.  

 

Passion Ends in Fashion

Michel Houellebecq is right: We're a long way from Wuthering Heights. 

Our obsession with love and the forming of human relationships is today evidence only of a certain loyalty to the past. All our feelings are completely artificial and our nights are "no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy". Sex is a form of nostalgia.

After the naked excess of the orgy - which was all about bodies and organs and gross acts of penetration - there comes the masked ball in which desire for the flesh has been replaced by a passion for fashion and dressing-up has become more exciting than stripping-off. We can witness this in our popular culture and I would suggest that Carrie Bradshaw tells us a good deal more about ourselves today than Cathy Earnshaw.

For whilst her significantly older friend, Samantha, still faithfully subscribes to the myth of sex and sexual liberation, Carrie - despite the residual romanticism of her character - is keenly aware that a finely crafted pair of shoes is likely to last longer and bring more satisfaction than a relationship with a man. 

Ultimately, even Mr Big can't compete against Manolo Blahnik and you can't help wondering whether Carrie didn't marry the former simply so she might wear the Something Blue satin shoes designed by the latter ...?    

Non Placet

Having just finished reading the Derrida biography written by Benoît Peeters (trans. Andrew Brown), I was reminded once more of the time in 1992 when four Cambridge dons brought shame upon themselves and their University with a decision to oppose the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

The fact that this ignominious decision was supported by numerous other academics in an open letter to The Times which accused Derrida of being, at best, a clever trickster whose writing style not only defied comprehension but threatened the very foundations of scholarship, only made things even more embarrassing for those of us who, whilst belonging to a British intellectual tradition, were excited by the challenge French theory presented to traditional models of thought and methods of reading.   

Thankfully, when put to a wider ballot, it was decided by 336 votes to 204 to give Derrida his degree. But of course, the old prejudices and stupidities continued to circulate and erupt from time to time and even some of the obituaries written following his death in 2004 contained an ugly, jeering tone full of resentment and in stark contrast to Derrida's own profoundly beautiful writings of mourning and commemoration.  

Snow

It's snowing and I hate it: the ice-cold wetness and the silent whiteness that isolates the soul and surrounds the heart with frozen air. 

It makes one think of poor Gerald stumbling towards his death amidst sheer mountain slopes; the terrible snowy landscape offering promise of eternal rest.  

This Be the Post

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do. 

From my mother I get: 

My urgency, my phobias, my obsessive character, my estrangement from the world and my prejudices (I do not eat tins of tuna, buy things from a market stall, or trust Cockneys). In a word, from my mother I get my complexity.

From my father I get:

My passivity and lack of worldly desire or ambition, my inability to prosper and almost Christ-like unconcern for those things belonging unto Caesar. In a word, from my father I get my saintliness.

Perversion Makes Happy

Someone recently asked me why I no longer characterize my work as a form of libidinal materialism, preferring instead to now label it as a perverse materialism. Well, firstly, I wanted to move away from the whole politics of desire shtick, particularly as associated with Deleuze and Guattari. 

Secondly, the concept and practice of perversion, understood as a quest to find joyful thoughts and feelings not made profitable by any social end and which deviate from the straight and narrow, is something that has always appealed. Even as a young child, I hated any kind of norm or convention and would often wear my clothes inside-out.

I think Barthes is right when he argues that the pleasure potential of perversion is always greatly underestimated by moralists who fail to understand that it does not corrupt or make sinful, but, quite simply, makes happy. 

     

Dare to See the World Through Deaf Eyes

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ... 
It's not so bad.

Perhaps we should all try like Larry to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear and dare to see the world through deaf eyes. Perhaps we'd find the silence beautiful. And liberating as well as instructive.

For to live in a soundless, speechless world without birdsong or the insistence of the human voice, is not to live without contact or to be loveless: we do not become fish simply because we surrender our ears and enter a mute but amazingly dexterous world of sign and physical gesture.

But, of course, most people will never concede the point that the profoundly deaf are neither disabled nor stupid. For audism is deeply-rooted within our culture and draws philosophical support from what Derrida has identified as phonocentrism: i.e. the belief that the voice is the privileged medium of truth and meaning and that hearing is the deepest of all the senses, sound acting directly upon the great affective centres of being.

Until we deconstruct, or, if you prefer, curb our enthusiasm for this metaphysical prejudice, then we will continue to remain enthralled by orality and continue to discriminate against those who cannot hear and find the idea of reading lips offensive and humiliating. 

A Short Lesson in Queer Theory

One of the things that Lawrence disliked Whitman for was the latter's obsession with the notion of One Identity. That is to say, Whitman's compulsion to embrace everyone and weave everything into himself until, at last, the entire universe had been absorbed and personalised and made Walt Whitmanesque.

Whitman's great mistake was confusing his watchword Sympathy with the Christian Love-ideal. Thus, rather than respect the pathos of distance between things and celebrate otherness and plurality, Whitman calls for universal merger. Instead of feeling with, he tries to feel for and, in this way, compassion gives way to egoism. 

Broadly speaking, I agree with Lawrence's reading of Whitman and think we should remain alert to the danger presented by the will-to-merger. But, having said that, one of the joys of queerness is that it enables one to cruise and drift transpositionally between  fixed subject-formations, so that one might indeed become-Eskimo or become-woman: not in an historical or ethno-biological sense, obviously, but as a question of style.

I'm really not interested in assimilating anyone's soul. And I'm not asserting, like Whitman, that I am X, Y, or Z. Rather, I'm saying: I am not I and that X, Y, or Z are never truly themselves either. Thus we should not fetishize, eulogize, or ontologize notions of self or identity; be they based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. 

This, of course, brings me into clear opposition with Lawrence, as well as Whitman. But that's okay. For if Lawrence once meant so much to me, these days I can't help feeling his will-to-integrity is as suspect as Whitman's will-to-merger. For me, utopia begins when we stop talking about souls and refuse to be bound by stupid binaries.    

On Irony

Nietzsche warns that habituation to irony, like habituation to sarcasm, can spoil the character and turn one into a snapping dog 'which has learned how to laugh, but forgotten how to bite'.

No one wants that to happen. So we must therefore exercise caution and be alert to the dangers of cynicism. But I'm certainly not prepared to abandon irony, as many advocate, in the name of a new sincerity. For irony remains not only an important means of gaining critical distance from the object of analysis, but is also, as Barthes writes, 'the question which language puts to language' and that expands the latter by playing with its forms.

In other words, irony need not make one smug and superior and it need not be the narcissistic product of a thought which has collapsed inwardly and become fatally self-enclosed. At it's best, irony can make happy and set free. And it can help us recover something mistakenly believed to be its very antithesis: passion. For in becoming playful, we find once more the lost intensity of childhood.

Living Dolls

Thanks to the work of American Pygmalion Matt McMullen, sex-dolls have come a long way during the last two decades. In his obsessive desire to recreate as closely as possible the appearance and feel of  living female bodies, he has developed a range of silicone love companions complete with articulated skeletons, synthetic skin, real hair, and three fully penetrable 'pleasure portals'. 

But, ironically, just as McMullen's RealDolls become ever-more life-like, so real women are becoming ever-more doll-like, due to advances in cosmetic surgery and pressure exerted by our culture for conformity to a deep-throated and large-breasted, but small-waisted and pubicly-hairless ideal formulated within the pornographic imagination.  

And so we come to the case of Valeria Lukyanova; the 21 year old Ukrainian model and internet sensation. Miss Lukyanova - or the Russian Barbie doll as the press like to describe her - is, for us in 2013, what La Cicciolina was for Baudrillard in 1993: a marvellous incarnation of sex in pornographic innocence. 

With her customized body and "realer-than-real curves worthy of an inflatable doll", Miss Lukyanova is both transsexual and transhuman and, as Lawrence would say, she exists beyond desire, cut off from any mystery or allure: even her nudity is no more enticing than that of a dolls. 

All of this casts an interesting light upon the sexual revolution espoused with such passion and conviction by an earlier generation. We were promised that "the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force" would be particularly favourable to women and yet they've ended up having silicone implanted into their breasts and submitting to Hollywood waxing, labiaplasty, and anal bleaching.     

  

Anti-Oedipus

Blood is thicker than water, so they say. Which is true enough, but why should viscosity and a certain heavy stickiness be privileged over fluidity and sparkle? Why should family bonds be thought of as so much more vital and important than friendships formed?

There is always something suspect about those who fetishize the blood and pride themselves on their genetic inheritance. I would never put siblings before strangers simply on the grounds that I share parental DNA with the former and it seems to me that non-familial connections are the source of real joy in this life.

And so when she said her sister was dearer to her than anyone else, I had to conclude that she was all too human in her incestual primitivism and probably a fascist at heart.  

Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.

Me and Zena x Saatchi Gallery Paint Can Ring

Zena McKeown's Paint Can Ring, which features as part of her Saatchi Gallery Collection, is a tiny piece of perfection: smart, witty, and lovely to look at, it puts to shame many of the expensive artworks displayed in the gallery itself and reinforces my belief that today what really excites our imagination can invariably be found in the gift shop, rather than the main building; that the latter merely serves as an alibi for the former.

In other words, we traipse round art galleries and museums bored out of our skulls, merely because it affords us the opportunity and the pleasure of shopping. Who needs aesthetic transcendence or edification when you can purchase postcards, t-shirts, and novel designer items that brilliantly capture and express who and what we are as a people?    

Coincidentally, the ring - in my mind at least - also nicely anticipates the Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Manifesto, featuring Jessica Chastain, that I love so much. Miss McKeown is thus to be commended for not simply being on trend, but ahead of the game with this design.  

Epilation

The policing and removal of female body hair is practised in every phallocratic society for a number of reasons - from religious phobia to cultural fashion - using a wide variety of methods. 

In the Western world, women have been obliged to shave legs and underarms for over a century. But it is only recently that they have also been expected as a matter of porno-social convention to remove hair from the pubic region like an Arab woman; not as an act of Fitrah, or in the name of hygiene, but due to changing ideas of what constitutes desirability.

I have to confess, I remain a little troubled by this trend. 

For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the aesthetic to the practical and perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.'  

Eat the Rich!

Westminster Council are considering cutting benefits paid to obese claimants who refuse to lose weight and enrol on authorised fitness programmes. Evidence, one might suggest, that if Tory politicians and their rich paymasters hate the poor and the unemployed, they positively despise the poor and the unemployed who also have the audacity to overeat. 

For as Baudrillard pointed out thirty years ago, when obesity was almost an exclusively American phenomenon, the super-sized display the truth of the very system that produced them; its greed, its empty inflation, and its lack of shame. 

The obese accept the challenge thrown down by contemporary capitalism: 'You want us to consume? Ok, we'll consume everything until we are no longer fit to work and we swallow you and all your money.' 

When there's no hope of revolution or active resistance, then there can only be a passive-aggressive (and potentially suicidal) response to the violence and obscenity of the culture we are all a part of. Obesity, in other words, is a fatal strategy: an ironic transpolitical counter-challenge to the morbidity of the fat cats. 

Unnatural Alliances

I have always been a big fan of unnatural alliances, formed, for example, between Beauty and the Beast, Pygmalion and Galatea, or the Owl and the Pussycat, who went to sea in beautiful pea-green boat. 

For the great and intoxicating truth is that once desire has been deterritorialized from its traditional object and aim, then it is free to reterritorialize on all kinds of strange attractors, in all manner of perverse new ways. 

In other words: we can form erotic relations with anything and everything and love achieves its consummation not when boy meets girl, or even boy meets boy, but when entirely heterogenous terms and territories are brought together. 

Thus the advocates of gay marriage are, I'm afraid, nowhere near radical enough in their thinking. What they should be demanding is an end to all anthropomorphic representations of sex: for freedom begins not when everyone has the right to be married in a church, but to be married to a church if they so wish.

Tell that to Pope Benedict XVI.

Senescence

People - especially women over 35 who hold degrees in psychology - like to talk about spiritual growth and personal development, but are much less keen to talk about biological ageing.

Partly, this is because the violent changes to molecular and cellular structure over time invariably result in deterioration and death and no matter how priests, poets, and philosophers might like to dress it up, there's nothing fun about growing old and no one dies with dignity. In fact, death is the ultimate loss of dignity: a shipwreck into the nauseous, as Bataille so charmingly puts it.

The precise etiology of senescence is still largely undetermined and the process seems to be complex. Nevertheless, you can see it every time you look in the mirror, or, as here, by simply placing a series of photographs side by side showing the full ravages of time and decade after decade of fading youth and the failure of homeodynamics.  

Dandelions

The body is always looking to exert itself and escape the overcoding of the organism. And it does this in a number of ways that range from the spasm of orgasm, to the sudden yawn or burst of laughter. D. H. Lawrence understood this as a painter, which is why so many of his figures seem to have given themselves over to 'unselfconscious physicality and abandon', as Keith Sagar puts it.

Thus, when in a watercolour entitled Dandelions Lawrence depicts a man urinating on some flowers, he is not simply trying to shock those for whom biological functions are embarrassing or degrading, but also attempting to show how such a simple act might be conceived as expressive of the intensive forces of bodily sensation.

And so perhaps there was something not only touching about the drunk young woman pissing outside the tube station last night, but also liberating.