On Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Another Post in Response to Simon Solomon)

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

A common form of corporal punishment for boys and junior officers in the British navy was being bent over the breech of a cannon in order to be caned or whipped on their exposed buttocks. This practice - painful, but not disabling - was euphemistically known as kissing (or marrying) the gunner's daughter and Adam Ant once wrote a song alluding to it [1].

 

II. 

I thought of this when Simon Solomon recently admonished me for providing an 'unsourced reference taken from the heavily doctored Will to Power and as such non-canonical' [2]. 

It wasn't so much that I felt I was about to receive a light beating, but I did feel I was being tied to Nietzsche's canon - i.e., those works which were written and published by him in his lifetime [3] - and forced to pledge love and loyalty only to his authorised books.

And I have to confess that, just like Captain Renault, I was shocked - shocked I tells ya! - to be reprimanded by Herr Solomon of all people; an independent scholar whose reading of Hölderlin in terms of schizopoetics and things that go bump in the night [4] is unorthodox to say the least. 

Indeed, some - including those of a more Swalesian mindset - might even describe it as heterodox, i.e., a work that not only deviates from older, more conventional readings, but wilfully perverts them. By his own confession, Solomon's passionate appreciation (and translation) of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin involved fucking the latter up the arse in order to produce some kind of monstrous offspring [5].      

 

So, for Simon to invoke the canon and insist that I play by the academic rules and show my obedience to (and conformity with) the law that governs what is and is not an acceptable text, is, I think, a bit rich.  

III. 

Having said that, I accept that there are seminal texts - i.e., works which are highly influential and possibly lay the foundation for future study - but I'd not even call these texts canonical (and what is seminal work for me - such as Sade's La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), is merely a white stain on the history of French literature for others).  

 

Ultimately, to invoke the canon and wish to uphold it, is to give support to those texts which, as Barthes would say, come from culture and do not break with it; texts which are linked to "a comfortable practice of reading" [6]; texts which have authority and have achieved the status of timeless classics; texts which are meant to contain eternal truths.

As a white European heterosexual male, I'm not obsessed with deconstructing, decolonising, expanding, or queering the canon; I simply don't wish to be strapped to it and thrashed by those who think I should show a little more respect to the Political Father.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adam Ant, 'Marrying the Gunner's Daughter', from the album Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (Blueblack Hussar Records, 2013). Not one of his best songs, but click here if you fancy giving it a listen.  

 

[2] See Solomon's comment dated 27 November 2025 and posted at 17:14:00 on Torpedo the Ark in response to a post titled 'On (Not) Taking a Stand' - click here. And see note 3 below for why Solomon is right to be wary of material extracted from The Will to Power.  

 

[3] Ecce Homo can also be included as part of Nietzsche's canon; for whilst it was published posthumously in 1908, he had completed writing it in 1888. 

      However, the book of notes assembled from Nietzsche's Nachlaß (i.e., literary remains) by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche working in editorial collaboration with his friend Peter Gast and titled Der Wille zur Macht (1901) is an entirely different kettle of fish and references to this work should be treated with a certain amount of caution. 

      His sister's claims that this was the magnum opus Nietzsche had hoped and planned to write can certainly be dismissed and some Nietzsche scholars have gone as far as to describe it as essentially a philosophical forgery. Nevertheless, the significantly expanded second edition containing 1,067 sections (1906) has been translated into English - most famously by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910 for the edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Oscar Levy and by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in 1968 - and the book remains one often consulted by readers of Nietzsche (albeit a non-canonical text as Solomon says).

      Readers who would like to know more about the publication history of Nietzsche's work might like to see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 

 

[4] See Solomon's 2020 book Hölderlin's Poltergeists: A Drama for Voices, published under the Irish spelling of his name as Síomón Solomon (Peter Lang, 2020). I have written extensively on this book on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

[5] In the book cited above, Solomon writes enthusiastically of what he describes as Deleuze's bum banditry, a reference to the way in which the latter liked to approach certain other thinkers from behind and below. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.  

[6] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 14.

      Like Barthes, I prefer texts that discomfort and impose a state of loss; texts which unsettle "the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories" and bring to a crisis our relation with language itself (texts a bit like Nietzsche's, in fact - including his non-canonical writings).   

 

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.

 

 

Egon Schiele's Portraits on Paper: Poignant, Provocative, or Pornographic?

Egon Schiele: Moa (1911) [1]

Gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper 

(48 x 31 cm)

omertiroche.com

 

'I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolours of an erotic nature. 

But they are always works of art.' - ES

 

 

I. 

 

I have already shared my thoughts on Herr Schiele as grand Austrian pervert and as someone who didn't treat poor Wally Neuzil very kindly: click here and here respectively.  

 

But, having just returned from an exhibition at the Omer Tiroche Gallery featuring some of Schiele's portraits on paper produced during the period 1910-1918, I thought it might be a good time to say something additional on a figure whose work remains almost as startling now as when first shown.

 

As it says in the exhibition press release: 

 

"The featured works [...] showcase Schiele's remarkable ability to capture and explore the raw emotion and vulnerability of his subjects, pushing the boundaries of modern portraiture with unparalleled intensity and insight." [2] 

 

Whether we might describe these depictions of the human figure as poignant, however, is debatable. 

 

For personally, I think of poignancy as a fairly gentle (and often unintended) stirring of emotion that is very much an individual response; something usually triggered with but a pin prick of detail (Barthes refers to this as the punctum). 

 

Schiele's pictures are, in their unparalleled intensity, just a little too full-on and violently assault the viewer; almost one feels stabbed in the heart. That's not a criticism. It's simply to challenge the use of the term poignant to describe his depictions of the human figure; provocative and a little grotesque, certainly, even at times a little obscene, but poignant ... I think not (or at least: not to me). 

 

 

II. 

 

And by obscene, just to be clear, I refer to a transparent staging of desire; to the way that the above figure, named Moa (an Old Norse word for mother), is overwhelmingly present making it impossible to ever step back and view her with perspective or objectivity (the gaze has been eliminated).

 

In other words, just as there's no poignancy in Schiele's picture, there's no trace of seduction; the veil is rent, the curtain lifted, and everything is explicit and in your face or made shamelessly hypervisible, as Baudrillard would say [3]. 

 

It may be going too far to say that Schiele violates his (often very young) models, or that we as viewers are made complicit in a crime of some kind, but, there's definitely something illicit (and troubling) going on here; way beyond anything produced by his mentor Gustav Klimt.    

 

Does the fact that Schiele's work is obscene also make it pornographic? 

 

Possibly: the judge who sentenced him to jail for a month in 1912 for public immorality and had one of his works burnt certainly thought so; and the writer of the gallery press release also doesn't hesitate to say that his portraits were, at times, "bordering on the pornographic" [4].

 

But it's a word that is too closely tied to sexually explicit material and thus detracts from the philosophically more interesting concept of obscenity as briefly discussed above, so it's not one I would choose to use here.      

 

 

III. 

 

This small exhibition of 14 works is absolutely worth going to visit if you have the chance. It runs until 2 May at Omer Tiroche; a Mayfair gallery, founded in 2014, which specialises in art from the modern, post-War, and contemporary periods.  

 

And speaking of current London exhibitions well worth checking out ... click here for a post on Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking at Shapero Modern (6 Mar - 4 May 2025). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Moa (1911), is one of a series of portraits Schiele painted of his friend and cabaret dancer, Moa Mandu. Interestingly, she was the only model he ever identified by name. Unfortunately, not much is is known about Moa, other than the fact she was originally from Bosnia, had large and very beautiful dark eyes. It is believed she was introduced to Schiele by fellow painter (and mime artist) Erwin Osen.

 

[2] From the press release for Egon Schiele: Portraits on Paper (14 Feb - 2 May 2025) at the Omer Tiroche Gallery, 21 Conduit St, London, W1. This text can be read in full on the gallery's website: click here. 

 

[3] My undersanding of what constitutes the obscene is informed by Baudrillard's thinking on this concept. For him, ob-scenity extends beyond the realm of sexuality, encompassing the visual field and the transparency of knowledge and he refers not only to that which usually takes place offstage, but to that which is also against-scene, undermining the conditions necessary for meaning to emerge, thus making it unthinkable.  

      See what Baudrillard writes on the obscene in Passwords, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2003), pp. 25-29. And see also the entry by Paul A. Taylor on the obscene in The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard G. Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), which can be read online by clicking here.

 

[4] From the press release for Egon Schiele: Portraits on Paper ... click here.  

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

An Open Letter to Simon Solomon from Stephen Alexander

 

Stephen Alexander / Simon Solomon

Dear Simon,

Thank you for your remarks on a recent post entitled 'Yabba Dabba Doo!' (28 Feb 2025). 

As I think you deserve a somewhat longer (and more considered) response than the comments section allows - and as the Little Greek suggested the following remarks may interest a wider audience - I've decided to publish them here in the form of an open letter ...    

Firstly, to answer your question regarding Barthes and nihilism, I suggest you read Shane Weller's essay entitled 'Active Philology: Barthes and Nietzsche', in French Studies, Vol. 73, Issue 2 (April, 2019), pp. 217-233. You can find a revised version of the essay on Kent University's Academic Repository:

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/71559/1/Barthes%20and%20Nietzsche%20%20THIRD%20REVISED%20VERSION%20-%20Clean%20version.pdf 

As some readers may not have the time or inclination to read the above text in full, here's the abstract which, I trust, will allow them to see why Barthes might indeed be considered a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense:  

"While the importance of Nietzsche to Barthes has long been recognized, with Barthes himself being the first to acknowledge it, this essay argues that Nietzsche's influence lies behind almost all of the major aspects of Barthes's mode of reading and writing in the 1970s, a mode that Barthes describes as 'active philology'. At the heart of this active philology is a cancellation of meaning that makes of Barthes's later critical practice a form of active nihilism in the Nietzschean sense. Exploring the various facets of this active philology in order to highlight the ways in which Barthes both follows and deviates from Nietzsche, this essay proposes an understanding of Barthes the active philologist as the incarnation of what Nietzsche terms the 'last nihilist' - and, crucially, one for whom any kind of Nietzschean overcoming of nihilism is anathema."

Even without reading Weller's essay, I would've thought, Simon, that the phrase La mort de l'auteur - title of a famous essay written by Barthes in 1967 - provides a huge clue as to what drives his critical approach ...

Secondly, you're right, Nietzsche does say in The Anti-Christ that the word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding and that in reality "there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross" [1]. But if you were to continue reading the same section of the above work (39), you would find the following important lines:  

"It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a belief [...] the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian. ... Even today such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times. ... Not a belief, but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things, a different being." [2]

As ever with Nietzsche, there are lots of subtle twists and turns and one has to be wary about taking a line, a paragraph, or even an entire section as providing his definitive position. He puts it this way; he puts it that way; then he puts it another way entirely. The point is one can be a Christian, providing you don't turn a practice into a doctrine; i.e., it's about imitating Christ not following the teachings of the Church.     

As for De Profundis and other matters ... I don't see why I should accept this tear-stained text as more valuable than Wilde's earlier writings; you may find what you describe as his repudiation of aestheticism magnificent and moving, but I see it as a loss of style. 

And as for his ludicrous self-identification with Christ (with the latter conceived as a Romantic hero and artist), well, what is that if not simply another pose? I'm surprised you're taken in by this mix of self-pity, resentment, and bloated rhetoric. 

I'm also surprised that you don't seem to see the irony in quoting the part of Wilde's letter in which he takes a pop at those whose "thoughts are someone else's opinions [...] their passions a quotation" [3].

And not only do you quote from Wilde, but from Nietzsche and Jung too - even as you seem to object to my referencing authors; or perhaps your remark about being an 'anyone-ian' betrays a misunderstanding of how proper names function within a text.

In brief, the proper name contains within it a series of associations (and connotations) that I’m calling upon in order show how 'my' text unfolds within a much wider philosophical and literary history and an intertextual space. When I say 'as a Barthesian', for example, I’m not identifying with Barthes as an extratextual being, but evoking a certain style of thinking and writing.

Using proper names is also, of course, a way of dispersing and disguising the self; like Nietzsche, I want to be able to declare myself 'all the names in history' - onymic ambiguity rather than unified authorial presence is the aim. 

Anyway, hope these remarks answer your questions and address your concerns. 

SA  

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 161. 

[2] Ibid. 

 

[3] Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. Written in 1897, the complete and corrected text wasn't published until 1962 when it was included in The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Harcourt, Brace & World). The line quoted can be found on p. 479. Note that a scholarly edition, ed. by Ian Small, was published as De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, by Oxford University Press in 2005 (Vol. II of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde). 

Becoming-Robot With Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik: Robot (1990) 

Mixed metal with lightbulb 

55 x 12 cm

 shaperomodern.com 

 

I. 

 

Last week, as mentioned in a recent post [1], I paid a visit to the Shapero Gallery on Bond Street, in London's Mayfair, to see the Modern Muse exhibition, featuring works by various twentieth and twenty-first century artists. 

 

Prints by all the usual suspects were included - Picasso, Warhol, Hockney, and (groan) Banksy - but there were also works by artists with whom I'm rather less familiar, such as Nam June Paik, whose lightbulb-headed robot giving a friendly wave hello made me smile at least. 

 

For whilst traditionally a muse is conceived as an inspirational female figure, either mortal or divine, that seems a bit narrow and I think and we should open up the concept to include animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, including machines.

 

After all, we're not ancient Greeks. And surely, like Paik, we can all find inspiration even in a rusty robot assembled from wires and scrap metal. In other words, an automaton might serve as a muse just as easily as Venus rising from the waves - especially if, like Paik, you believe technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.  

 

 

II. 

 

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a South Korean artist who is often considered to be the founder of video art. He is also the man who coined the phrase electronic superhighway and foresaw several of the technological innovations (in communications and social media) that would shape the digital age.

 

Originally a classically trained musician, he was pals with John Cage (whom he met whilst studying in West Germany) and became part of the the international avant-garde network of artists and composers known as Fluxus. 

 

Paik moved to NYC in 1964 and it was there he began to experiment with a variety of media, incorporating TVs and video tape recorders into his work. 

 

His infaturation with (often radio-controlled) robots also began around this time, though it wasn't until 1988 that he unveiled the mighty Metrobot [2], followed in 1993 by a number of robot sculptures for the Venice Biennale [3] that emphasised how East and West were now connected via technology.  

 

And then, in 2014-15 a (posthumous) solo exhibition entited Becoming Robot was held in New York at the Asia Society Museum, exploring Paik's understanding of the relationship between technology and society and, more specifically, how technology will impact art, culture, and the human body in the future [4].

 

 

III. 

 

D. H. Lawrence would hate, loathe, and despise Paik's work. 

 

For Lawrence, the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are" [5]. 

 

Thus, as a reader of Lawrence, I also have reservations when Paik talks about the inadequacy of skin and the need to encase the body in technology so as to better interface with reality. 

 

Interestingly, however, he qualifies his transhumanism by conceding that even the most advanced cyborg requires a strong human element in order to guarantee modesty and safeguard natural life. 

 

And what is modern man's most human aspect - lacking as he does a soul - other than his skin? 

 

What's more, far from being inadequate, the skin has never been so vital and so present within critical and cultural theory as today:

 

"The skin asserts itself  in the erotics of texture, tissue and tegument played out through the work of Roland Barthes; in the concern of Emmanuel Levinas with the exposed skin of the face, as the sign of essential ethical nudity before the other [...] the extraordinary elaborations of the play of bodily surfaces, volumes and membranes in Derrida's concepts of double invagination [...] the concept of the fold in the rethinking of subjective and philosophical depth in the work of Gilles Deleuze; the fascination with the intrigues of the surface in the work of Baudrillard; and the abiding presence of skin in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, from the arresting evocation of the opened out skin of the planar body at the beginning of his Libidinal Economy through to the Levinsian emphasis on the annunciatory powers of skin at moments through The Inhuman. Most strikingly of all [...] there has been the prominence of the skin in the meditations on place, shape and the 'mixed body' of Michel Serres. Across all this work, as ubiquitously in modern experience, the skin insists." [6]   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See 'You Don't Have to Be Yayoi Kusama to Make Pumpkin Art' (25 November 2024): click here. 

 

[2] Metrobot is an electronic public art sculpture designed by Nam June Paik. At the time of its unveiling in 1988, it was his first outdoor sculpture and his largest. Since 2014, it has stood in front of the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. 

      The gold-painted aluminum sculpture is 27 feet in height and resembles a box-shaped humanoid robot. It's cartoon-style facial expression (and large red heart) are made from neon tubing behind clear plastic covers. On it's outstretched  left arm is an LED informing the viewer of such things as the time and temperature. On Metrobot's stomach is another display feature, showing full-colour videos. And, finally, a payphone is built into its left leg.

 

[3] La Biennale di Venezia is an international cultural exhibition first organised in 1895 and hosted annually in Venice, Italy, by the Biennale Foundation. It includes events featuring contemporary art, dance, architecture, cinema, and theatre (often in relation to political and social issues). 

 

[4] An eight minute video of the exhibition made by Heinrich Schmidt for Vernissage TV can be found on YouTube: those who are interested are invited to click here.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161.

 

[6] Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 9-10. 

      Readers who are interested in the subject of the skin might like to see the post entitled 'Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre' (7 August 2018): click here.  

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Although Daniel Steuer's English translation of Byung-Chul Han's book Absence was only published last year, the original German text appeared back in 2007 [a], and so we can rightly think of it as one of his early works; more philosophical and less political in tone as it explores the Western obsession with essence in contrast to the Eastern (and deeply foreign) notion of absence.    

 

As Han rightly says: "The concept of 'essence', which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics." [1] From ancient Greeks like Plato to German idealists like Kant, essence is the key and be yourself the melody. What is outside and inessential can stay there and remain that way.

 

Even Heidegger, argues Han, "despite his best efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind [...] remained a philosopher of essence" [4]. In wanting to let things be he wants things to remain true to their own essence. Ultimately, Dasein both dwells and endures. It does not wander too far from itself (even if it explores the odd woodpath from time to time). 

 

But in Daoism, the wise man is without fixed abode and never stops wandering; evading all substantive determination and having no stable identity, he leaves no trail or name behind him. Daoist wandering may not be the same as Zen Buddhist non-dwelling, "but the negativity of absencing connects the two" [5]. 

 

Ultimately, the "fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way [...] The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces" [5]. Westerners talk about finding the way, but by that they really just mean finding themselves; the Eastern wanderer, however, becomes the way and doesn't hope to find anything (walking with neither intention nor direction). 

The Western philosopher wants his soul to blossom; the Eastern thinker, like the flower, doesn't have a soul (and remains nameless). They also remain rooted in the material world and care for the body; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired. Oh, and they also remain silent, still, and inactive.  

 

I have to admit, all of this appeals to me very much - and I say that as someone who has been hostile to (and dismissive of) Eastern thought in the past. It seems to me to that absence and emptiness and meaninglessness may very well lead "not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy [...] being without direction or trace" [13]. 

 

Kant - and those idiots who think happiness is all about being stuffed-full and satiated; all about having purpose and direction - wouldn't like this, but I do. Like Laozi, I'm happy to lead a life "without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God" [14] - to be, as the Sex Pistols once sang, pretty vacant [b] and to find in this freedom, not spiritual deprivation [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

This is interesting: 

 

"Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. [...] The negativity of these thinkers brings them closer to absencing and emptiness, but [...] Far Eastern thinking [...] is alien to them [...] The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction." [16]

 

This special kind of reconstruction is worldly immanence - "the 'this-is-how-it-is' of things" [16]. 

 

To be fair, I think Deleuze gets this when he transforms no-where into now/here. And when Derrida insists il n'y a pas de hors-texte - for isn't that similar to the Daoist notion that there is nothing above, beyond, or outside of the immanence of the world ...?

Anyway, the point is this: immanence is a crucial concept - as is "the painful charm of transience" [19] which allows for the development of an art and poetry of blandness, in which things fade out and blow away (again, this reminds me somewhat of Roland Barthes's theory of neutrality). 

 

 

III.

 

If essence is difference and a way of keeping things clear cut, then absencing is a form of indifference; one that un-bounds and makes indistinguishable. It's hard to see the outline of a white flower against a snow-covered backdrop (or a black cat in a coal cellar as others would say). 

 

The East is messy - things flow into each other: "Nothing imposes itself. Nothing demarcates itself from other things. Everything appears to retreat into an in-difference." [22-23]  The West, by contrast, likes strong boundaries and distinctions and closure.

 

Han continues:

"In-difference also fosters an intense side-by-side of what is different. It creates an optimal degree of cohesion with a minimal amount of organic, organized connection. Synthetic composition gives way to a syndetic continuum of closeness in which things do not come together as a unity." [23-24]

The cathedral is a space that is perfectly enclosed; even stained-glass windows are designed to keep the natural daylight out, which is why D. H. Lawrence preferred them in a state of ruin, exposed to the elements, etc. [d]

 

Han, however, seems to prefer a Buddhist temple that is "neither fully closed nor fully open" [26]. The spatiality of the latter "effects neither an inwardness nor a being-exposed" [26]. Doors of white rice paper are preferable to colourful stained-glass windows and standing light without direction is preferabe to a divine radiance from above that is intended to illuminate everything:

 

"The standing light, which has become fully indeterminate, in-different, does not emphasize the presence of things; it submerges them in absence." [27]    

 

It's almost as if white standing light brings a special type of darkness. You don't get that with modern glass architecture which marks the triumph of transparency. 

For Han, then, the Buddhist temple is preferable to the Christian cathedral; the Greek temple; and the shiny American skyscraper of glass and steel. It's not just a question of spatiality and light, but asymmetry; "an aesthetic principle of Zen Buddhism" [29] which "breaks up presence into absencing" [29].

 

I suppose some might say that it's all a question of how one sees things. And this brings us on to the question of eyes:

 

"According to Hegel's philosophical physiognomy, the eyes should be surrounded by the elevated bones so that 'the strengthened shadow in the orbits gives us of itself a feeling of depth and undistracted inner life'." [30]

 

But Eastern eyes, of course, are flat:

 

"Hegel would explain this in terms of a lack of inwardness, that is, an infantile spirit that has not yet awoken to subjective inwardness and therefore remains embedded in nature." [30]

 

But what does Hegel know about the beauty of the absencing gaze ...?

 

 

IV.

 

D. H. Lawrence thought there was nothing more bourgeois than the unfading flowers of heaven. But the Kantian lover of the beautiful would probably delight in such; their "imperishable splendour would most likely [...] make him happy" [33].

 

For sure, he'd not like it if they were revealed to be fake flowers - their artificiality depriving them of "their teleological, even theological, significance" [33] - but their everlasting nature would only intensify his love for them. Plato too dreamed of a divine form of beauty that "neither emerges nor vanishes, neither increases nor decreases" [33]. 

 

But for someone who views the word from a Far Eastern perspective, the most beautiful thing of all about a flower is its transience; the fact that it loses its petals without any hesitation and is content to disappear. For such a person, the bare stem or twig is as beautiful as a flowering plant or tree in full bloom. 

 

In other words: 

 

"In the sensibility of the Far East, neither the permanence [Ständigkeit] of being nor the stability [Beständigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness [...] not full presence but a 'there' that is coated with an absence [...]" [33-34]   

 

The Japanese call this wabi-sabi - the art of impermanence that "combines the unfinished, the imperfect, the transient, the fragile and the unassuming" [34]. Even your favourite Clarice Cliff milk jug is made more beautiful by a tiny crack or chip; and every silver bowl is improved when it loses its sheen and begins to darken [e].    

 

Han writes: 

 

"Satori (illumination) actually has nothing to do with shining or light. This is another point on which Eastern spirituality differs from occidental mysticism, with its metaphysics of light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however, is a religion of absence." [35]

 

In the West, people almost want to be blinded by the light; a light either from some transcendent source or an inner light that emphasises the presence of things. Han - like Tanizaki - seems to admire the magic light of absence; a light that does not disturb or dispel the darkness; a friendly light. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, a few brief notes on (i) food, (ii) flower arranging, (iii) rock gardens, and (iv) theatre ...

 

(i) It's funny, but one of the complaints of English people is that Chinese food leaves them feeling empty inside five minutes after eating. Han provides a possible explanation: "Emptiness and absence also characterize the cuisine of the Far East." [39] Rice is the perfect example of this; lacking colour, lacking taste, offering no resistance (providing nothing to chew).

 

"Far Eastern cuisine appears empty also because it does not have a centre [...] The meals lack the centre or weight of a main dish and the closedness of a menu." [40]  

 

Further, in the West we like to cut food up with a knife and fork; in the East they assemble food with chopsticks.

 

(ii) The Japanese art of flower arranging is known as Ikebana - which means bringing flowers to life: 

 

"It is, however, an unusual kind of invigoration, because the flower is cut off from its root [...] The flower is invigorated by dealing it a mortal blow. [...] This raises it above the process of slow withering, its natural death. The flower is thereby removed from the difference between 'life' and 'death'. It shines with a special vitality, a flowering in-difference  [...] that has its source in the spirit of emptiness." [40-41]

 

The flower radiates with an unnatural (and transient) vitality; the shining of absence. 

 

(iii) If you have ever walked round a Japanese rock garden, you might have come away feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn't much to see. But that's the point; they are designed as gardens of absence and emptiness. 

 

However, despite their absence and emptiness, "they radiate", says Han, "an intense vitality" [41] and visitors must learn to appreciate the flow of the lines raked into the gravel and the darkness of the rocks. 

 

The Japanese rock garden is another method of paradoxical invigoration: "It invigorates nature by completely drying out its soul" [42] and placing it in a state of satori. 

 

(iv) Traditional Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku) is also radically different to the world of Punch and Judy, showing that the latter is not the only way to do it. The Western puppet theatre animates characters via funny voices; in Bunraku it's all about the gesture and the puppets remain soulless figures.    

 

Similarly, Noh theatre is a theatre of absence: the costumes and masks worn by the living, human actors are designed to make them look like puppet figures. Even when an actor appears on stage without a mask, "the uncovered face is expressionless and empty" [44]. 

 

And the narrative composition of Noh theatre also adds to the sense of absence; its hard to tell what is real and what is dream - what is past and what is present - things appear only to then disappear once more (probably best not to worry too much about the plot in such cicumstances) [f].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The German edition was published as Abwesen: Zur Kultur und Philosophie des fernen Ostens (Merv Verlag, 2007). In this post, page numbers refer to the English edition (Polity Press, 2023).  

[b] 'Pretty Vacant' was the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to watch the official video for the song (which was shown on Top of the Pops) and/or here to read my post written on the track and published on TTA on 30 July 2108.   

[c] Is this also Han's view? It's hard to know. For whilst here he writes that the world "has no narrative structure" and is therefore "resistant to the crisis of meaning" [14], sixteen years later he will publish a book entitled Die Krise der Narration (2023) in which he seems to argue strongly in favour of narratives that anchor us in being and subscribe to a form of Catholicism informed by Martin Heidegger. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to access the first part of a three-part post on this recent text. 

[d] See the post 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargolyle ...' (16 April 2019) in which I discuss Lawrence's thoughts on religious architecture: click here.

[e] Han at this point refers us to Tanizaki's famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933). I have mentioned this work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark (click here, for example) and it partly formed the basis for a paper delivered at Treadwell's Bookshop in September 2023 on occultism in the age of transparency (an extract from which can be read by clicking here). 

 

[f] For the record: I find all theatre irritating and tedious; I do like the tranquility of a Japanese rock garden, but enjoy also the colourful chaos of an English wildflower meadow; and, if obliged to choose, I'd prefer to have steak and chips for dinner than a bowl of egg-fried rice. 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part One)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

The subtitle of Byung-Chul Han's new little book is In Praise of Inactivity [a]. But it's important to understand at the outset that he uses this term in a positive philosophical sense. That is to say, he conceives of inactivity as a negative potentiality; the ability to do nothing.

 

But Han is not merely encouraging us to be idle in the laid-back and whimsical manner of Tom Hodgkinson - although, to be fair to the latter, I feel I was perhaps a little harsh on him back in 2012 [b]. Nor is he encouraging his readers to learn the art of immaculate perception so they can look at life without desire [c].     

 

He wants us, rather, to engage in a form of deep attentiveness that is central to the vita contemplativa [d]. To perform less: to consume less: to be still and silent a little more, so as to radiate in our own starry singularity and not merely keep rolling on and on like a stone subject to mechanical laws.    

 

 

II. 

 

In a line that would delight the witches of Treadwell's, Han writes: "Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence - even its own magic." [1] 

 

Inactivity, he goes on to say, is an intensity - an unseen power that is crucial to Dasein's existence (not a weakness, an absence, a lack, or a defect). And philosophical reflection - or thought in the Lawrentian sense of the term [e] - is born of this intensity. 

 

Only machines don't know how to rest or reflect; artificial intelligence is born of activity, not inactivity. They - the machines - may be very good at organising and coordinating chaos, but they don't know how to give style, which is why they may drive society forward, but they'll never give birth to culture:

 

"History and culture are not congruent. Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything." [3]   

 

 

III.

 

Han is basically reviving an old set of terms and values, such as festivity and luxury, whilst rejecting those terms and values that define our present (utilitarian) world order: efficiency and functionality. Freedom from purpose and usefulness, he says, is "the essential core of inactivity" [5] and the key to human happiness. 

 

Which is fine - this remains an important teaching - but it's nothing new. And one can't help wondering if Han doesn't spend far more of his time endlessly re-reading those authors whom he privileges rather than contemplating life (and the natural world) directly. 

 

For whilst there are plenty of DWEMs in his book, there are very few live animals; even the hesitant wing of the butterfly is a reference to an elegy by Schiller (via Walter Benjamin) rather than to an actual insect and I miss the sound of bees buzzing and birds calling in his writing. 

 

Unfortunately, when you enter the space of thinking opened up by Han, it feels like one is entering a magnificent library or a cathedral rather than an "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [f], or a jungle with "tigers and palm trees and rattle snakes" [g] and all the other wonders hatched by a hot sun. 

 

I think it was Sartre who once said of Bataille: 'He tells us to laugh, but he does not make us laugh.' And I kind of feel the same about Han: he tells us to dance and to play, but he fails to make us feel either lightfooted or lighthearted. Likewise, when he gathers us round the camp fire - a medium of inactivity - we are not warmed.   

 

 

IV.

 

I suppose the problem I have is that Han is just a bit too much of an ascetic philosopher. 

 

Thus, whilst he wants to revive the notion of the festival, he insists nevertheless that festivals must be "free from the needs of mere life" [7] and tries to convince us that it's better to fast than to feast; that the former is noble in character and helps initiate us into the secrets of food.  

 

What is inactivity, he suggests, other than ultimately a form of spiritual fasting. 

 

I have to admit, I don't like this idea of going to bed hungry and going to bed early; nor, for that matter, do I want to go to bed cold, as I've done that too often in the past and it doesn't make life any more vital or radiant. 

 

Nor does it make it easier to sleep - the latter being  a medium of truth for Han (as for Proust and Freud): "Sleep reveals a true internal world that lies behind the things of the external world, which are mere semblance. The dreamer delves into the deeper layers of being." [9] [h]

 

Again, that's not the kind of idea - or language - that I'm comfortable with. I simply do not believe that sleep and dreams are "privileged places for truth" [9] - even though I love a good nap as much as anyone.    

 

However, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the idea that boredom - as that state of inactivity which allows for mental relaxation - is something we should cherish (even whilst coming from a punk background in which being bored was just about the worst thing that could befall one). 

 

I understand now that boredom isn't half as boring as the distractions invented to relieve us from boredom and that the less able we are to endure boredom, so our ability to enjoy life's real pleasures or do great things decreases. As Han says: 

 

"The seed of the new is not the determination to act but the unconscious event. When we lose the capacity to experience boredom, we also lose access to the activities that rest on it." [17]

 

And so it is that now I admire those who, like David Puddy, can just patiently sit still during a flight without having to flick through a magazine, watch a film, or start a conversation [i].    

 

 

V. 

 

Blanchot, Han reminds us, places inactivity in close relation to death: as the utmost intensification of the latter. 

 

And so too does he suggest that art also requires an "intensive relation to death" [12]. It is death, for example - not the will to knowledge or self-expression - that opens up the space of literature and writers can only write thanks to their inactivity and their proximity to death.

 

And the best writers, as Roland Barthes recognised, are those who dare to be idle and do not continually affirm their authorship of a text, or constantly promote themselves: "They give up their names and become no one. Nameless and intentionless, they succumb to what happens." [15] 

 

In an interview for Le Monde in 1979, Barthes marvelled at the simplicity of a Zen poem which perfectly expresses what it is he dreams about:

 

Sitting peacefully doing nothing

Springtime is coming

and the grass grows all by itself [j]   

 

It's a nice thought that inactivity has a "de-subjectifying, de-individualizing, even disarming effect" [15]. That, in other words, it allows us to disappear and leave nothing behind us but a smile like the Cheshire Cat ...

 

 

John Tenniel's illustration of the Cheshire Cat beginning to 

vanish in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865)

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The book was originally published as Vita Contemplativa: Oder von der Untatigkeit (Ullstein Verlag, 2022). All page numbers given in the post refer to the English edition. 

 

[b] See the post entitled 'How to be an Idle Cunt' (29 Dec 2012): click here. 

 

[c] See the post entitled 'The Voyeur' (29 April 2013): click here. 

 

[d] This Latin phrase - popular with Augustine and the scholastics - comes from the ancient Greek concept of βίος θεωρητικός formulated by Aristotle and later developed by the Stoics. In English it is usually translated simply as contemplative life.   

 

[e] "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness [...] a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas". See D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81. 

      I discuss Lawrence's philosophy of mind with reference to this poem in a post published on 4 Dec 2015: click here.  

 

[f] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 53.

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 165.  

 

[h] Click here for a post on sleep and dreams published on 6 Feb 2015. 

 

[i] David Puddy is a fictional character on the situation comedy Seinfeld, played by Patrick Warburton. He is the on-and-off boyfriend of the character Elaine Benes. Click here to watch the scene I'm thinking of in the season 9 episode 'The Butter Shave' (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1997).  

 

[j] See Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), p. 341. Han quotes this haiku on p. 15 of Vita Contemplativa.  

 

 

Further reflections on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be found in part two of this post - click here and part three: click here.