Yellow Fever (Notes on the Politics of Asian Girl Fetish)

Bérénice Lim Marloe as Sévérine 

There's something about Asian girls. They're cute. They're smart. 

They have a kind of thing going on.

A friend asked who was my favourite Bond Girl ...

When I replied it was the character Sévérine, portrayed by the beautiful French actress Bérénice Marloe in the 2012 film Skyfall, she smiled and said that this exposed my Asian Girl Fetish (Marloe's father is of Cambodian and Chinese descent) and that this in turn indicated I had politically suspect views and subscribed to a number of pernicious racial and sexual stereotypes.

This may or may not be true, but it kind of made me wish I'd answered differently - although if, for example, I'd named Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), couldn't this be said to reveal my Nordic Girl Fetish and indicate subscription to an equal number of stereotypes, perhaps even more pernicious and politically suspect in character ...?          

However, happy to play along, I asked what she meant. And she explained that many men who identify as members of the so-called alt-right have a particular penchant for dating women of SE Asian origin, despite their fantasies of white supremacy and purity of blood.

Not surprisingly, this topic has caused heated debate on various white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites and demonstrates to many commentators that there's an amusing level of erotico-ideological confusion within the alt-right world. But, as Audrea Lim points out, there is, actually, no real contradiction in this Asian fetish when one realises how it arises at the intersection of two popular racial myths:

"First is the idea of the 'model minority,' in which Asian-Americans are painted as all hard-working, high-achieving and sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. If Asians are the model minority [...] then perhaps that opens the door to acceptance from white supremacists.

      The second myth is that of the subservient, hypersexual Asian woman."

For many misogynysts, across the political spectrum, the sad fact is that most white women are - thanks to feminism - simply too much trouble; i.e., too unwilling to serve and to pleasure their menfolk. Asian girls, in contrast, are so much more amenable - and - whisper it - far more uninhibited in the bedroom. This idea - deeply ingrained within the pornographic imagination - has its roots in America's post-war experiences in the bars and brothels of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Thus it is that the alt-right Asian fetish combines these ideas and "highlights a tension within the project of white supremacism as America grows more diverse [...] The new, ugly truth? Maintaining white power may require some compromises on white purity".

May require, indeed, sleeping with the enemy ...

See: Audrea Lim, 'The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish', New York Times (Jan 6, 2018): click here to read online.

On the Inspiration of Touch: An Afterword on the Question of Delicacy in a Molecular Age

The beautifully delicate structure of graphene

Image by AlexanderAIUS on Wikipedia

Someone wrote to say how much they enjoyed the recent post on the Lawrentian notions of touch and tenderness and to agree on the need for delicacy and lightness of hand. But I fear that they have a rather more utopian understanding of these things than I do and thus misconstrue my position. 

To be clear: I'm attempting to problematise Lawrence's work and would agree with Steven Connor that delicacy isn't the ideal binary opposite of grasping or rough-handling. In other words, it's not an entirely innocent form of contact, nor is it completely free from the exercise of power within the world. Further - and this might rather offend some Lawrentians - the term delicacy might even be said to refer to a form of touch that is more mental (more abstract) than other heavier, less refined forms of tactile sensation; a form of touch-in-the-head.

Conner notes:

"Delicacy involves work on a scale that makes it a matter of mind, work that approaches the condition of weightlessness [...] work that seems untouched by human hand [...] work that refines the idea of work."

If weightlessness is one of the defining features of delicacy, so too does it involve "the apprehension of altered scale". To touch something delicate in a delicate manner, is ultimately to draw closer to the invisible world of the tiny object which can be viewed only through a microscope. This has become increasingly true in an age of molecular science, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. For what is more delicate, for example, than a sheet of graphene; a carbon allotrope consisting of but a single layer of atoms prettily arranged in a hexagonal lattice?

The fact is, power is not simply "mitigated in delicacy" and we are obliged - like it or not - to recognise that "our world is one in which delicacy itself has become a modality of power." In a crucial passage, Connor writes:

"Sensitivity used to be at the opposite end of the scale from power, which needed to make itself blunt and insensible to maintain its power. The rise of biopower means that power involves, no longer the brute manipulation of life, but insinuation into it, infiltration and manipulation of the miniscule balances that maintain systems.
      Power used to be applied. That is to say, it needed to be brought up against its object, which would either resist, buckle, or be displaced by the pressure. Such meetings, impressions or collisions take place on the outside of things [...] Now, it is not that there are no comings together, no bearings down, no adversity any more. It is that it is no longer quite clear where the outside of things is to be found. In the age of interface which is now upon us [...] everything is at once inside and outside everything else."      

In other words, there is now a promiscuous and paradoxical intermingling of all bodies, all objects, large and small. And delicacy is just a more subtle form of violation; a method of overcoming the natural reticence and resistance of the Other. For serious readers of Lawrence, this means they must perform a radical reappraisal of the ethics and erotics of (phallic) tenderness. Simply put, the world of Lady Chatterley is long lost and the lightness of her lover's touch can no longer be so clearly distinguished from the hand that wields power.

See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 267, 268, 280 and 281.

Note: those interested in reading the post to which this forms an afterword can click here.

On the Inspiration of Touch

Michelangelo: Detail from Creazione di Adamo (c. 1512) 

What Tommy Dukes refers to as the inspiration of touch is an idea that continues to fascinate and intrigue. For if we must still think of the soul, then let us think of it not as some kind of immortal essence located in a mysterious region of the body, but, rather, as something that exists momentarily in the contacts formed between a body and its external environment.

In other words, the soul is a flash of interchange between objects and not an an intrinsic quality belonging to either. This is illustrated, for example, in Michelangelo's famous fresco, The Creation of Adam (c. 1512) - at least as I interpret it.

For rather than conceive of Adam as a useless lump of clay just waiting to be animated by the all-powerful index finger of God's paternal right hand, I prefer to imagine inspiration is born between the two as entities who unfold into being within a democracy of touch. Unequal as objects perhaps, but equally objects nevertheless upon a flat ontological playing field.

It's often pointed out that, as a matter of fact, the two hands don't actually touch. But that's ok. What counts is the active reaching out of fingertips and that magical space and spark created between them that we might think of as the shimmer of possibility that lies betwixt things and forever beyond the grasp of any single entity.   

And what also counts, as Steven Connor rightly indicates, is the delicacy of the shared touch; it has to have a certain lightness and softeness. People with greedy, heavy hands who believe they must grab life by the throat and tear open the flower bud are essentially soulless. Connor writes:

"Delicate and subtle things have a life of their own, and call, not for grasping or prodding or palpation, but for caress [...] for in the caress, there is an approach or address to another skin capable of sensation, capable of its own experience of the borderline between thought and feeling. To caress an object in the world is to treat it as though it possessed such a sensitive skin."

Arguably, another word for this sensuous, subtle form of touch is tenderness - a term privileged by D. H. Lawrence in his late works and elaborated into a provocative ethic that encapsulates his ideal of blissful bodily interaction that is free from any will to dominance or exploitation. One might hold the other, but, at the same time, one must hold back from holding the other too tightly. 

It is interesting to note how the French philosopher Michel Serres develops this notion of reserve in his work, suggesting that humanity - in the best sense of the word - is defined not by its power to manipulate and destroy, but by its ability to show self-restraint and recognise limits. To exceed limits and to seek to exercise control over others - to refuse either to let them go or let them be - is to fall into a fatal form of ego imperialism (à la Clifford Chatterley).      

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 262-63. 

 
Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser and William Paulson, (University of Michigan Press, 1997). 

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (Continuum, 2008). 

Note: to read an afterword to this post that develops the idea of delicacy and problematises Lawrence's notions of touch and tenderness, please click here.

On the Myth of Maternal Impression (with Reference to the Case of Joseph Merrick)

Joseph Merrick (aka the Elephant Man) 

Photo from c.1889

I remember being amused by the suggestion made in David Lynch's mawkish and moralizing movie The Elephant Man (1980), that Merrick's unfortunate condition may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy. 

At the time, I thought this was just a cinematic fantasy, or a typical piece of Hollywood hokum. But I eventually discovered that the folklorish idea of maternal impression (or what is sometimes referred to with the German term Versehen) is a genuine - though long-discredited - theory of inheritance from a world before genetic science. It was particularly popular in the 18th century.

Basically, this superstitious concept rests on the belief that a powerful mental stimulus experienced by a woman-with-child could produce an impression on the gestating fetus, thus causing the newborn baby to be marked in some manner. Or as my friend Simon Solomon would say, a psychic disturbance or trauma is realised on the physical plane as some kind of birth defect or congenital disorder (thus demonstrating that mind and imagination shape matter). 

Whilst we now know that this is essentially nonsense - that a woman frightened by a cat is extremely unlikely to give birth to a child with whiskers - there is of course evidence to suggest that physical or psychological illness in the mother can affect the fetus in adverse ways, as can the consumption of alcohol or the smoking of cigarettes, for example.

So, ladies, don't over do it on the vino when pregnant and lay off the fags; but, please, don't worry too much about any perverse longings, being attacked by monsters, or coming into direct contact with animal skins ...   

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77. 

Lily and the Brontës

The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire 

with Lily Cole (inset)

As a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society, the recent fuss concerning the appointment of the very lovely model and actress Lily Cole to a prominent role within the forthcoming bicentenary celebrations for Emily Brontë, has, technically, nothing to do with me. What the Brontë Society choose to do (or not to do) is entirely a matter for trustees to decide (although one would like to think they also consider the views of ordinary members, which is not, regrettably, always the case within literary societies).

However, as someone who cares a good deal about Emily - her novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), has been discussed on this blog on several occasions [click here, for example, or here] - and as someone who hates snobbery and bigotry, I feel that I should say something ...      

Miss Cole, who first graced the cover of Vogue aged 16 and who was also named as Model of the Year in 2004 by the British Fashion Awards, is not just a pretty face. She has 'A' levels (at A grade) in English, Politics, and Philosophy. And she graduated from Cambridge in 2011 with a double first in the History of Art. She has since shown herself to be a canny entrepreneur with a strong social conscience; along with (rather predictable) humanitarian and environmental involvements, she's a founder of impossible.com a social network and gift economy website.

So, as I say, not just a pretty face ...

In fact, I would've thought she'd make an ideal creative partner to any literary society and can't see why her appointment has been criticised in some quarters. To describe it as an insult to the memory of Emily Brontë, is, ironically, to bring shame upon the latter's name. This isn't merely a triumph for the modern obsession with celebrity or an attempt to be trendy. For Cole wasn't chosen because she once modelled for many of the top fashion houses, or once acted on-screen alongside Heath Ledger - but because she's clearly a strong, independent, intelligent, and talented young woman, just like one of the Brontë sisters.           

Nick Holland's decision to quit the Brontë Society in staged outrage is up to him. He might be an expert on all things Brontë, but his presumptuous claim to possess superior insight into what Emily might think about Miss Cole's appointment is simply ludicrous and reveals his own resentment towards those whose fame and success is greater than his own rather than any mediumistic abilities.

Miss Cole's considered response to Holland's provocative nastiness and rank stupidity proves that the Brontë Society have made a smart move in enlisting her and allowing him to leave. I'm only sorry the D. H. Lawrence Society didn't first attempt to enlist Lily as a member and representative. 

Readers interested in joining the Brontë Society should visit their website: click here. 

Readers interested in joining the D. H. Lawrence Society should visit their website: click here.

There's an Insulting Stereotype For That

The British Gas campaign that encourages consumers to rely upon local tradesmen - whatever the job - rather than attempt to fix things themselves, is probably the most irritating and offensive ad on TV at the moment. 

It opens in a store with some poor bloke holding a plunger, filthy from head to toe, clearly having tried - and failed - to clear a blockage in his plumbing system. The other people queuing at the till look on disapprovingly as the young woman serving - Sarah - informs him with a suppressed smirk: "There's a local hero for that." He glances at her with impotent rage, knowing full well that, whilst she's obviously a complete cunt, there's nothing he can do or say. 

In the second scene, another unfortunate fellow is in the shower, having trouble with the water control; as he presses a button, the bathroom lights go out. A woman - presumably his wife or girlfriend - carries on brushing her teeth at the sink in the dark with superior indifference, whilst also smugly reminding him: "There's a local hero for that."

In the third scene, an attractive woman sits having dinner in someone's flat. She's dressed as if on a date, wearing her favourite little black dress and there are wine glasses on the table. But her useless boyfriend is struggling to flush the toilet - clearly having broken the handle. Like Sarah, she pulls a knowing face before sliding her smart phone to him under the bathroom door, saying: "There's a local hero for that."

Later, in a scene that returns us to the above apartment, we finally see one of these local heroes. And, surprise, surprise, he's one of those friendly, helpful black characters that advertisers and TV executives love. Not so much a magical negro - for he's not there to impart ancient tribal wisdom - more a house nigger who can be trusted to fix things and provide service with a smile, before letting himself out the door and exiting the white-bread lifestyle into which he's been temporarily inserted. 
        

In brief, we have 30 seconds of insulting bullshit: thank you British Gas.  

To watch the British Gas 'Local Heroes' ad on YouTube, click here.   

Notes on the Case of Peter Hitchens Versus Lady C.

Peter Hitchens (2017) by 65c56 
deviantart.com

I.

Not for the first time when reading an essay, article or - as in this case - a book review by the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, one is left feeling exhausted and a bit bewildered; not quite knowing how or where to begin fashioning a response. And not entirely convinced it's even worth the effort. For Hitchens is a man of firm moral conviction and thus extremely confident as well as forthright in his beliefs. He knows what he thinks and he thinks what he knows is true. 

However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.  

Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...


II.

Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.

In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.   

Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion." 

This is a surprising remark. For one might've imagined that Hitchens - a man once described by James Silver in The Guardian as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" whose columns contain "molten Old Testament fury" - would rather like elements of portent and prophecy. And it's difficult to imagine Hitchens caring about the dictates of fashion, eagerly pursuing all the latest literary fads and trends as he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight, but there you go! His views are reactionary, but never square.


III.

As for the trial of Lady C., Hitchens seems to believe things were rigged from the start. That there was "scarcely a chance" of the jury deciding that the novel should remain banned, "and almost everyone involved knew it". I don't know if that's true. And I don't really care. For ultimately the right decision was reached. Not because the work has redeeming social and literary value, but because ancient obscenity laws drawn up by those grey ones whom Lawrence terms censor-morons brought greater shame upon us as a people than their abolition. 

I suspect that saying this is enough for Hitchens to lump me in with all those liberals, libertines, and libertarians whom he so despises, even though, for the record, I don't think of myself as any of the above. Nor do I live in a square, paint in a circle, or love in a triangle; there's absolutely nothing Bloomsbury about me. Or Fabian socialist. Like Lawrence, I grew up in a working-class community and if I speak up for him and his writing it's for reasons other than those imagined by Hitchens. It's not because I'm a sandal-wearing vegetarian, naturist or health nut; it's because I feel a sense of solidarity with Lawrence and regard his enemies as my enemies.    


IV.

Hitchens describes Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "frankly rather terrible book". And, interestingly, many of Lawrence's own followers seem to agree; often acting as if a little embarrassed by it. But a novel isn't a fixed object. It's a literary machine that invites you to enter the space that it opens up and invest it with external forces; to send it zooming in new and unexpected directions. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that there are no bad books per se, only poor - by which I mean lazy, reactive and judgemental - readings.

And, despite Hitchens insisting that Katherine Anne Porter's 1960 essay on the novel is a supremely honest and courageous reading, I'd place 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper' in this poverty-stricken category. For all it boils down to ultimately is a superior woman shaking her head in condescending despair over poor Lawrence and his artistic inferiority in comparison to the real literary greats, like Tolstoy, James, and Joyce. And the novel itself ... well, that is nothing but the fevered day-dream of a dying man, or "the product of a once-fine author's sad decline", as Hitchens puts it with a little more compassion.    

As Nietzsche taught, however, whilst strength preserves, it is only through sickness that cultures develop and that we as a species advance. Thus, even if true - even if Lady C. is the product of a diseased imagination and a body corrupt with tuberculosis - we need these works for what they paradoxically teach us of the greater health.  


V.

Eventually, even Hitchens has to admit that the book does, in fact, contain "some moving and thoughtful passages [...] though they are mostly about the industrial ravaging and gouging of the English countryside and the wretched consumer society coming into being after World War I." However, as he then notes: "The idea that these miseries might be redeemed by adulterous sex in an old hut on an army blanket, by twining wildflowers in one’s pubic hair, or by capering naked in the rain is far-fetched."

This, I think, living as we do after the orgy, is hard to deny. Also difficult to deny is that Lady Chatterley's Lover contains "blots and scabs of anti-Semitism", as well as troubling elements of racial bigotry, sexism, misogyny and lesbophobia. But, again, it's Lawrence himself who teaches that the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it and not merely use these things in order to judge a work and condemn an author. And, to be fair to Hitchens - although he clearly has no interest in saving this particular tale - by offering us a far more sympathetic reading of Sir Clifford than Lawrence encouraged, he invites an interesting reappraisal of the work (one that I have myself also considered: click here).       


VI

Finally, we come to the 'night of sensual passion'. Hitchens seems as baffled by the redemptive possibilities assigned to anal sex within Lady C. as he is perplexed by the importance given to red trousers. But that's because he's ignorant of the wider body of Lawrence's work and fundamentally hostile to the philosophical project of which it's part. Which is fair enough; he isn't and doesn't pretend to be a Lawrence scholar. But it does rather lessen the force and validity of his criticism.

For Hitchens, like Freud, "shame and hypocrisy" are crucial social components; they protect, he says, the boundary "between normal, respectable life and the sordid and dirty". Lawrence disagrees. Not because he desires the latter or despises the former, but because he sees the possibility of a new innocence that lies beyond such a false dichotomy, or what Marcuse terms the fatal dialectic of civilization. 

I'm sorry that Mr Hitchens didn't find a way to enjoy this novel; find a way, that is, to impose his own abrasions upon its surface. And I'm sorry that, unable to ban it or to burn it, he seems determined to foreclose the text and its pleasure with his intransigent moral conformism, his political and social conservatism, and his refusal to allow his body to pursue its own happiness just for once. Despite this, rather perversely perhaps, I retain a fair deal of respect and admiration for Peter (as I do for his much-missed brother, Christopher): May the peace that comes of fucking be upon him.       

See: 

Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online. 

Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.

Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above. 

Schlegel's Hedgehog

German poet, literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, was, like other romantics, a big fan of the fragment.

In an oft-cited section of his Athenäums-fragmente (1798), he asserts that, if it is to be distinctive in form and purpose like a tiny work of art, then the fragment "has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog" [206].

Further, it must maintain itself in prickly opposition even to those fragments in close vicinity to which it might otherwise seem in some kind of relation, thereby reflecting Schlegel's view that the world is made up of isolated objects within a chaotic universality of infinite possibilities and perspectives.  

As someone who is also passionate about fragmentary writing - more due to my background in modernism and postmodernism, rather than romanticism - I feel obliged to say something about this; particularly as I feel there's something fundamentally false about Schlegel's view.

Firstly, whilst hedgehogs might lead relatively solitary lives and can, of course, roll into a tight spiky ball for defensive purposes, they are no more isolated from the surrounding world than any other creature; if they were, they'd die. So, if nothing else, the above Igel analogy doesn't hold water as far as any self-respecting naturalist would be concerned.

Secondly, whilst I concede that objects are always at some level withdrawn and don't exist purely in terms of their external relations, for me the beauty of the fragment is that it (potentially) contains all things within it on the one hand, whilst being forever open ended on the other. Indeed, I would say the perfect fragment always inconclusively concludes in an elliptic manner with a set of three dots and that they only really sparkle, like stars in a constellation, by becoming part of a new (intertextual) practice of some kind. 

Ultimately, the fragment is that which allows language to discover its own ephemeral destiny. They appear, but before we can hardly even begin to make sense of them they shoot lines of flight towards the horizon of their own disappearance, showing a beautiful indifference towards their own origin, their own end, or their own Schlegelian self-perfection as an enclosed work of art.

Each thing - be it fragment or hedgehog - streams in what D. H. Lawrence terms an intertwining flux of relations and the business of art is reveal and expand these relations, not isolate itself from the circumambient universe. The only way we might discover some kind of salvation (or belonging) is to accomplish a pure (or quick) relationship between ourselves and other objects of all description and for me it's fragmented or aphoristic writing which, as a literary genre, best facilitates this. 

Note: I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville for encouraging me to read Schlegel and write this post.

Further Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

The metal porcupine on Freud’s desk in the study 

of his Hampstead home, now the Freud Museum. 

Photo: Nick Cunard.

In his sublime essay 'The Porcupine's Illusion', the prickly-named George Prochnik (great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam) claims that, 'when it came to his own liaison with America, Freud yearned for the warmth and communal support America promised, but then felt needled and otherwise violated in consequence of whatever proximity he did attain'.

On Prochnik's reading, Freud's apparent repression of his debt to Schopenhauer - only admitting in 1925 to having come to the philosopher 'very late in life', despite thrice name-checking him in 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and Schopenhauer's theory of the will being widely regarded as prefiguring the psychoanalytic concepts of repression itself, the death-drive and the centrality of sexuality to psychic life - was motivated by Freud's scientific ambition to purge psychoanalysis of its merely philosophical contours.

An undertaking which, if true, backfired with spectacular irony, since Freud's sole public recognition in his lifetime came from the award of the Goethe Prize for services to literature. In this context, Freud's Schopenhauer complex 'became one of distance and propinquity. How much influence was required to prevent one's pen from freezing, and how much would result in one being stabbed full of holes by the writerly quills of intellectual predecessors?' Here, the porcupine problem takes on the lustre of an inter-generational Bloomian anxiety concerning how well one can bear the stab to one's pretensions of originality.

Noting that, as a rule, 'it may be said that a man's sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that "so and so" is very unsociable, is almost tantamount to saying he is a man of great capacity', Schopenhauer strikingly posited a negative correlation between the hunger for closeness and human intelligence. One endowed with sufficient intellectual warmth in himself - an interesting concept in itself when thinking types in Western culture tend to be seen as cool and remote, while emotional people are viewed as warm - would have sharply curtailed inter-animate needs, so that the heat of thought might be conceived of as a kind of libidino-cerebral surplus, a vector to the inhuman. Or, those who seem like cold fish may be always already the hottest properties ...

On his reportedly arduous hike from Putnam's mountain cabin that he was sharing with Ferenczi and Jung, the porcupine to which Freud was led by two sailor-suited young women turned out to be a fly-blown, reeking corpse. His spiny mythos would be incarnated in an over-determined rodent, death irrupting into life, as though the ambivalent truth of humanity's barbed love arises where Eros and Thanatos collide.

This would surely be enough of a psychologically sobering denouement all by itself. But the still more resonant afterword, as Prochnik vividly recollects, relates to the bronze porcupine gifted to Freud by Putnam, which can now be found on permanent display at the Freud Museum in London, where Freud died in 1939. As he attests - and in some weird and wonderful metamorphosis that pierces the skin and makes the soul sing - its quills, when rippled by the fingers, emit a 'melodic, harp-like sound'.

Our painful proximity, which implies the interpenetration of vitality and oblivion, yields to poetic music.

Notes

George Prochnik, 'The Porcupine Illusion', Cabinet, Issue 26 (Summer 2007): click here.

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

To read my own take on Schopenhauer, Freud and the porcupine dilemma, click here. 

Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma

Freud's metal porcupine (12 x 16 x 8 cm) 
Image Credit: Freud Museum (London)

In a series of reflections published in 1851, the German philosopher Schopenhauer discussed (amongst numerous other topics) the prickly question of human intimacy by making reference to the predicament faced by the Stachelschwein.

In brief, the so-called porcupine dilemma is this: it might be preferable to move closer to others of your own kind and advantageous to share body heat when the weather outside is frightful, but, if you're covered in sharp spines, then it's not so easy to do so without (unintentionally) causing or receiving serious injury.

And whilst people are not porcupines and lack quills, we nevertheless find it just as problematic getting up close and personal with others - no matter how desperate we may be to do so. In the end, the best individuals can hope for is a compromised form of relationship that calls for caution on both sides if they are to avoid mutual harm. We can smile at one another but never really touch, obliged as we are to always keep a safe distance.

This - as Freud later realised - helps to explain our frustrated sense of social isolation and why sexual relations so often end in tears. We are driven by inner needs and external conditions to seek out others, but quickly discover just how intolerable these others are thanks to the many disagreeable qualities and natural defence mechanisms they possess. The best that anyone might hope for, concludes Schopenhauer (pessimistically), is that they can generate their own heat and thus remain entirely self-sufficient; thereby avoiding the risk of either pricking or being pricked by other people.

Freud - as indicated above and who has as interesting and as close a relationship to Schopenhauer as he does to Nietzsche - exploited this tale of the porcupine in his own psychoanalytic work, directly referencing it in a key section of his 1921 text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 

In fact, if the story has become widely known in the English-speaking world - where it is commonly termed the hedgehog's dilemma - it is largely because of Freud's reading, rather than familiarity with the original text by Schopenhauer, who is today a shamefully neglected thinker, but to whom we owe a great deal.      

Notes

The metal porcupine pictured above was a memento of Freud's trip to the USA in 1909. Thought to have been given to him by the American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Freud kept the handsome beast with its razor sharp quills on his desk for the rest of his life. 

See: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 31, Section 396. 

For further reflections on this question, by Simon Solomon, click here. 

Hedgehogs Versus HS2

Hedgehog: Photo by Gillian Day 

According to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the hedgehog - a once familiar creature found in parks and gardens all over the UK, but now in serious decline due to destruction of habitat - is a secretive animal that gives nothing away and likes to keep itself to itself.

We wonder, he says, what a hedgehog has to hide; why it refuses to share its knowledge of the undergrowth; why it so distrusts mankind:   

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

And whether we choose to think of the prickly otherness of the hedgehog in terms of divinity or in the natural language of species difference, the fact is this shy little nocturnal slug-eater is right to distrust (and despise) humanity.

For despite our pretended love for all things bright and beautiful / all creatures great and small, we laugh as they are killed beneath the wheels of our vehicles, happily concrete over the spaces in which they used to find food and shelter, and watch with savage indifference as they are pushed into extinction.   

Thus it is that a House of Lords Select Committee recently ruled in favour of HS2's proposal to build a lorry park in an area that is home to the last remaining hedgehog stronghold in London. There are thought to be between 20 and 25 adults living in the Regent's Park site (right next to the Zoo) and they produced a litter of 17 young in the autumn of 2017.

But the HS2 bosses don't care. And neither do the politicians who don't want any disruption to their £57 billion rail network. Alternative options were given very little serious consideration and so the future of this long established population has been unnecessarily compromised in the name of progress, profit, and improved transport links.       

Shame on all those involved in this decision ...

Notes

Paul Muldoon, 'Hedgehog', Poems 1968-1998, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for bringing this story to my attention.

On the Scintillation of Being

Sagus93: Every man and every woman is a star (2014)

(Acrylic on canvas 140 x 70 cm)

sagus93.com 

Every man and every woman is a star, says Crowley in The Book of the Law (1:3) and I suppose by this he references the singular nature of human being; the fact that, at the very last, one is not only unique, but also isolate and alone, beyond love or any personal relationship.

That's certainly how I've always understood the remark, in a very Birkinesque manner. But perhaps we might consider the idea of astro-ontology - or what Baudrillard refers to as the scintillation of being - in a bit more detail ...   

People like to think of stars as luminous objects reliably twinkling in the night sky. Look up, and there they are! But it's worth remembering that most of the individual stars in the universe - including all of the stars outside our own galaxy - are invisible to the eye, even when we gaze into space through powerful telescopes.

And, strange as it may seem, our own sun also retains something of its invisibility or, if you like, essential darkness ...

Count Dionys, the initiated occultist of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Ladybird (1923), teaches that true fire is invisible; that it burns with its back to us and is therefore always hidden from view. The golden light of the sun is, he says, only epiphenomenal; "the glancing aside of the real original fire".

This being so, continues the Count, even the sun is black: "It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible. [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-turning away of the sun's directness that was coming to us."

He concludes that we have, therefore, a mistaken understanding of the world - and of love. That just as the "true living world of fire is dark", so too true love is "a throbbing together in darkness" and not something luminous or fully visible. What he terms white love is only an ideal surface effect. 

I don't know if this constitutes good science (I suspect not). But it nicely anticipates those object-oriented forms of philosophy which are full of strange speculations of this nature and concerned with the play of reality and the essential illusion of the world.

If nothing else, it's always amusing to think what follows from the fact that light from the stars can continue to shine for billions of years after they have disappeared from the heavens (that things - including people - are never quite what they seem).


See:

Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, (Red Wheel/Weiser, 1976). Or click here to read online.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Ladybird', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

The above work by Lawrence can also be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.

When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)

Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;

Retract your claws,  

Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.

Philosophers - particularly French philosophers - have always loved cats. And so it's not surprising to discover that Derrida had a feline companion named Logos; or that the only pussy Foucault enjoyed petting was an all black cat called Insanity.

Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.

Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get  a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit). 

David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.

As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?

In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.      

Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.     

See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here. 

Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).  

Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.

   

On the Ecstasy of Forms: A Note on Punk Fashion and the Sex Pistols as Pure Event

Vivienne wearing a Seditionaries Destroy shirt  

as designed by herself and Malcolm (1977)

For me, the reason that the punk fashions created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood still astonish and disconcert is because they perfectly illustrate what Baudrillard terms the ecstasy of forms. That is to say, a phenomenon in which objects are seduced by their own self-enchantment and run wild according to an anarchic (and often ironic) kind of logic beyond aesthetics, politics, or morality.

The above shirt, for example, modelled here by Westwood, is one that invites but paradoxically resists any formulation or judgement, becoming a fascinatingly ambiguous garment worn at the wearers' own risk. For who who can predict how it will be perceived by those who are confronted by it and how they'll react: with laughter ... confusion ... violence?

It's obviously offensive. But no one can quite say how, why or to whom it's offensive. It's inexplicably provocative, just as other designs - such as the bare tits t-shirt - are inexplicably obscene. Ultimately, zips, straps, swastikas, safety pins, sex organs, postage stamps, inverted crosses and slogans from May '68, don't convey anything; those who foolishly look for the meaning of punk are wasting their time.

They have failed, as Baudrillard would say, to grasp the fact that punk fashion "expresses a situation in which people no longer even believe in signs as a real difference but are playing at difference", just as they are playing with identity and gender.

The queerness - and the energy - of these (empty) forms seems to come from our culture, our history, our reality, but at the same time provide an escape from such. Which is why the Sex Pistols were an event, rather than just another boring rock band; they came like a fatality, without explanation or cause, and remain an event that no one has been able to rationalise or fully exploit and from which it's impossible to conclude anything.

As it said on the front of the tour bus, the Sex Pistols were going nowhere - but they were going nowhere fast. For punk was an accelerated moment, a pure speed, not a progressive movement leading us by the hand into a rosy future: there was No Future and so, ultimately, they could only succeed by imploding (Baudrillard speaks of events absorbing their own continuity), leaving no trace apart from the secondary effect of parody which occupied the space they left behind.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Dropping Out of History' and 'Catastrophic, but Not Serious', interviews in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 36-45 and 46-65. The line quoted is from the latter interview, with Robert M. Maniquis (55), but I have utilised Baudrillard's thinking throughout the post. 

No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

Xanthippe

I: The Nietzschean View of Marriage

Nietzsche famously declares that all great philosophers are instinctive bachelors who dislike marriage as well as that which might persuade them into it. For a free spirit, the prospect of settling down to a domestic life with a little woman by their side and a pair of slippers by the bed is anathema. They dream of living on mountain top or in those unexplored realms of dangerous knowledge. Home sweet home strikes them as a kind of cosy prison built in the name of Love. 

And Nietzsche even provides us with a convenient list of unmarried philosophers to prove his point; a list that includes Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer - and, of course - himself. None of these thinkers ever wed and, what's more, it's almost impossible to imagine them married.

A philosopher who has tied the knot, concludes Nietzsche, belongs to comedy - as the case of Socrates proves. Whether the latter wed ironically in order to demonstrate this point, as Nietzsche claims, I don't know. But the fact is, Socrates - an undoubtedly great philosopher - did marry and I'd like to say a few words about his wife ...

II: The Blonde Horse

Xanthippe was an Athenian from a possibly noble (certainly privileged) family, who, despite her name, is believed to have had flaming red hair. She was also much younger than her husband, to whom she bore three sons. Plato portrays her in the Phaedo as a devoted wife and mother, but she is described in other works - such as Xenophon's Symposium - as difficult and argumentative.

Socrates, however, is said to have found these latter characteristics attractive and crucial to his own development as a philosopher; perhaps less so after she allegedly emptied a chamber pot over his head in a fit of jealous rage, although even this he accepted with philosophical grace, saying: "After the thunder comes the rain."

This, and other stories of her violent temper, have rightly or wrongly left us with the impression that Xanthippe was - to put it crudely - a bit of a bitch. Indeed, her name has now come to mean any sharp-tongued and assertive woman. In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio famously compares Katherine to Xanthippe. More recently, the sarcastic and rebellious teen character played by Dylan Gelula in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is named after Socrates's wife.

Ultimately, who's to know what kind of woman Xanthippe was - or why she agreed to her parents suggestion that she marry an ugly, elderly, penniless philosopher who spent a good deal of time drinking with his friends whilst pursuing his love of wisdom (and young boys). Nevertheless, she stuck with him to the bitter end, which shows fidelity on her part and indicates that he must have had something about him that she found lovable.

Happy New Year from the Ghost of Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Sticker

Redbubble Ltd. 

When asked during an interview in January 2006 with Antoine Perraud what it meant to wish someone Happy New Year, Baudrillard amusingly replied that it was "a collectively remote-controlled symbolic ritual that has its place in a [...] cost-free sphere". 

In other words, an empty gesture without value; a seasonal greeting from another time which, just like Merry Christmas, tries to desperately recreate a social bond or, more accurately, evoke nostalgia for such, via an exchange of disintensified signs. All the high days and holidays that we so want to enjoy and make special, invariably leave us feeling lonely and inadequate; hostages to our own lives of consumption.    

Having said that, Baudrillard hates to be thought of as a pessimist or a nihilist in the pejorative sense of the term.

And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has "nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality", we might simply call evil.

And so, in wishing readers a Happy New Year, I suppose I'm wishing them the courage to become complicit with l'intelligence du mal.

See: Baudrillard, 'The Murder of Reality', trans. Chris Turner, essay in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David. B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 266-71.