Punk Nietzsche by Gary Neill (2010) on Tumblr
Someone writes and asks why it is that so many posts on Torpedo the Ark invariably refer back to either Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence. What is it about these two figures that first attracted you and why is it they continue to fascinate?
In order to answer this, it's important to clarify that I'm someone whose intellectual background is neither in German philosophy nor English literature. Rather, it's in art, music, fashion, and radical French politics as filtered through the imagination of Malcolm McLaren. And thus what initially attracted me to Nietzsche and Lawrence was the same that attracted me to McLaren's punk revolution; the attitude, the style, the humour, the extreme nature of their call to arms.
In order to answer this, it's important to clarify that I'm someone whose intellectual background is neither in German philosophy nor English literature. Rather, it's in art, music, fashion, and radical French politics as filtered through the imagination of Malcolm McLaren. And thus what initially attracted me to Nietzsche and Lawrence was the same that attracted me to McLaren's punk revolution; the attitude, the style, the humour, the extreme nature of their call to arms.
For like the Sex Pistols, Nietzsche and Lawrence demand an intense level of commitment from their devotees, whilst also encouraging a great level of individual freedom; they don't want you to follow them faithfully, but to lose them and find yourself.
Further, they allow outsiders to feel heroic members of a counter-cultural elite; part of a subversive secret society and part of an adventure - if not, indeed, a crusade that pits you against everyone and everything (certainly against all authorities and all orthodoxies).
Ultimately, if you're a Sex Pistol, then everything else is bollocks and of no vital concern. Likewise, if you're a lover of Nietzsche or Lawrence, then all other philosophers and novelists suddenly pale into insignificance.
That's not to argue, obviously, that there are no other great thinkers or artists with genius. But there's certainly very few who belong like Nietzsche and Lawrence to that order of genius which, in the words of Henry Miller, beats out the boundaries of human experience and widens the frontiers of life.
I'd read the questioner as posing a more psychological and personal enquiry to the blogger, I think - one that the latter may feel the need to deflect, if not evade.
ReplyDeleteLife (and the literature of life) is indeed continuously creative destruction, if that is what he is claiming.
Though I'd suggest a figure like Nietzsche is mostly fascinating for his dialogue with multiple traditions (including, but hardly limited to, Christianity, Romanticism, Platonism, German political history, European cosmopolitanism, and the iconography of saints) and all that, as an exemplary thinker of the negative, he is trying to live down/up to in himself - to the point of ultimately identifying himself with all the names of world history - this is mostly a matter of how we (contestably) read or receive him. (There are, to be sure, many Nietzsches.) Either way, any interesting individualism is immersed in its sources, i.e by what it both embraces and resists of where it comes from.
Ultimately, the finer artists bear on impersonality and irony, since they are, so to speak, both taking in more and digesting their materials with more advanced somatic systems.
What I think all this means is that the totalistic statement, 'if you're a lover of Nietzsche or Lawrence, then all other philosophers and novelists suddenly pale into insignificance' refers us as much to the sensibility, enthusiasm and literary eros of the reader as to the content of their works, not to mention to the cultural construction of 'genius' (a decidedly unpostmodern concept championed by Harold Bloom in relation to Shakespeare.
For me, today, I might insert the names of, say, Kristin Hersh, James Hillman, Wallace Stevens and Terence McKenna as movers and shakers of my tiny mind. Yesterday, it might have been David Lynch, Theodore Roethke and Samuel Beckett. Even if style somewhat implies limitation, variety really is the spice of life. (And style is all, or nearly all.)