Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click 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.   

No Hugging, No Learning (Torpedo the Ark 10th Anniversary Post)

 

 

I. 

 

This post - post number 1977 - marks the 10th anniversary of Torpedo the Ark [1] and, fear not, there's no Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones putting in an appearance here [2]. Instead, I'd like to offer a few remarks on one of Larry David's guiding principles: No hugging, no learning ...

 

Over the past decade, this motto - pinned to the wall above my desk - is something I've always endeavoured to live up to whilst assembling posts for Torpedo the Ark: for if no hugging, no learning worked for Seinfeld during 180 episodes spread over nine seasons, why shouldn't it also help ensure that this blog maintains an edge ...?

 

 

II. 

 

To me, the first half of this phrase means avoiding the fall into lazy and cynical sentimentality in which one attempts to manipulate the stereotyped set of ideas and feelings which make us monstrous rather than human - or, rather, monstrously all too human [3].

 

Like D. H. Lawrence, I suspect that most expressions of emotion are counterfeit and more often than not betray our social conditioning and idealism, rather than arising spontaneously from the body:

 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [4]

 

Today, when someone starts twittering on about their feelings or the importance of emotional growth, you should tell them to shut the fuck up. 

 

Likewise, when some idiot comes in for a hug - never a good idea, as this scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm makes clear [5] - best to push them away or, at the very least, step back and politely decline their embrace.     

 

 

III.

 

As for the second part of the Davidian phrase - no learning - I don't think this means stay stupid; rather, just as the first part of the phrase challenges the idea of emotional growth, this challenges the idea of moral progress; i.e., the belief that man is advancing as a species; becoming ever more enlightened and ever closer to reaching the Promised Land. 

 

At any rate, Torpedo the Ark has never attempted to give moral lessons, pass judgements, or improve its readership. There's plenty to think about and, hopefully, amuse on the blog - and lots of little images to look at - but, to paraphrase something Malcolm McLaren once told an infuriated tutor at art school: There's nothing to learn! [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Torpedo the Ark was set up by Maria Thanassa, who has continued to oversee the technical aspects and daily management of the blog. The first post - Reflections on the Loss of UR6 - was published on 24 November 2012. 

      I am sometimes accused of being an anti-dentite on the basis of this poem, but, actually, that couldn't be further from the truth. If anything, having an attractive young female dentist veers one in the direction of odontophilia (a fetish that includes a surprisingly wide-range of passions).

      And so, whilst my tastes are not as singular as those of Sadean libertine Boniface, I cannot deny a certain frisson of excitement everytime one is in the chair, mouth wide open, and submitting to an intimate oral examination or violent surgical procedure. Hopefully, I expressed an element of this perverse eroticism in this post, based on an actual incident, but inspired by a reading of Georges Bataille.       

[2] Punk rockers will know that I'm alluding to the track '1977' by the Clash, which featured as the B-side to their first single, 'White Riot', released on CBS Records in March 1977. Click here to play.  

 

[3] Punk rockers will also know I'm thinking here of the Dead Kennedys track 'Your Emotions', found on their debut studio album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, (Cherry Red Records, 1980). Click here to play and listen out for the marvellous line: "Your scars only show when someone talks to you."

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence's late essay, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", which can be found in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 311.

 

[5] This is a scene from the second episode of season four of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Entitled 'Vehicular Fellatio', it first aired on HBO in September 2009 and was written by Larry David, dir. by Alec Berg. The irritating character of Dean Weinstock is played by Wayne Federman. There are, as one might imagine, several other scenes in Curb that concern the consequences of inappropriate hugging; see, for example, this scene in episode 8 of season 6 ('The N-Word') and this scene in episode 10 of season 11 ('The Mormon Advantage'). 

 

[6] According to fellow art student Fred Vermorel, when a tutor snapped at Malcolm: 'You think you know everything', he was left speechless when the latter replied: 'There's nothing to know!' Arguably, this is going further even than Socrates. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 53, where I read of this incident.  

      

B is for ... Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

B is for ... 

Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

 

 

There are many French things that I love beginning with the letter B - from a big bowl of bouillabaisse served with crusty baguette slices, to Brigitte Bardot on the beach in her bikini [1]. 

 

Even four of my favourite French writers have surnames beginning with the letter B - Messrs. Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes and Baudrillard - and this perhaps explains why it is that I can never think of one without also thinking of the others [2].  

Obviously, as a 19th century poet and critic, Baudelaire knew nothing of those who came a century after him. But it might be interesting to briefly recall what Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard said about the author of Les Fleurs du mal ... 

 

 

Bataille on Baudelaire (Désirer l'impossible) 

 

In his essay on Baudelaire in La Littérature et la Mal (1957), Bataille says that the former desired the impossible as a response to the utilitarian demand that we be reasonable as well as make ourselves useful. It is in this desire for the impossible and a useless expenditure of energy, that man discovers his authenticity and poetry locates its task. 

 

This, of course, is a Romantic vision; but it is one that Bataille in his own quest for the impossible - i.e., a simultaneity of contrary experiences - continues and yet exceeds. 

 

 

Barthes on Baudelaire (La Vérité emphatique du geste)

 

Whilst it's true that he only produced one sustained piece of writing on Baudelaire - and this on a relatively marginal aspect of the latter's work, namely, his failed theatrical projects - Baudelaire nevertheless remains a point of reference throughout Barthes's oeuvre. 

 

Indeed, as one commentator has recently pointed out, the phrase quoted from Baudelaire's Exposition Universelle (1855) concerning 'the emphatic truth of the gesture in the important moments of life' is one that "punctuates Barthes's published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority" [3]. 

 

Baudrillard on Baudelaire (L'Objectivation absolue de l'art)

 

By his own admission, Baudrillard's relationship with the world of art has always been one marked by a certain ambivalence: "I come from a moralist, metaphysical tradition, a political and ideological tradition that has always been wary of art and culture in general [...]" [4]

Nevertheless, he is obviously interested in how art from Baudelaire to Warhol has been involved in staging its own disappearance and meeting the challenge posed to it not only by an age of mechanical reproduction, but by consumer capitalism which turns everything into merchandise (i.e., objectifying everything in terms of market value).

 

It was Baudelaire, says Baudrillard, who first came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of offering a defence of the traditional status of the work of art based on aesthetic value and seeking art's salvation in and on its own terms - art for art's sake - Baudelaire calls for an acceleration of the processes unfolding within modernity and for art's absolue objectification:

 

"Since aes­thetic value risks alienation from commodity, instead of avoiding alienation, art had to go farther in alienation and fight commodity with its own weapons. Art had to follow the inescapable paths of commodity indifference and equivalence to make the work of art an absolute commodity." [5]

      

This, says Baudrillard, is what a work of art should be; "it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity and unreality that are found in commodities" [6]. 

 

The reason Baudelaire still interests and seems so relevant today is not because of his poetry, but because via his ironic logic the work of art was able to sparkle in its own venality and become "a pure object of marvellous commutability" [7].   

 

 

Notes

[1] Readers may recall that I wrote about the history and politics of the bikini in a post published in August 2016, which was illustrated with a photo of 19-year-old Bardot wearing her two-piece swimsuit on the beach at Cannes in 1953: click here.

[2] Of course, there are other reasons apart from an onomatological coincidence as to why these four writers are closely related and it would make for an interesting philosophical and literary study to trace out their shared ideas and concerns.   

 

[3] Douglas Smith, '"La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie": Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture', Irish Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21 (2021), pp. 99-121.  

      In this essay, Smith examines the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes and attempts to answer the question of what that might tell us in turn about the former. He does this by tracing out the manner in which Barthes deploys the quotation from Exposition Universelle and by paying particular attention "on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes)". 

 

[4-6] Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008): click here to read online. 

      This paper was given as a lecture at the Whitney Museum (New York) in 1987. It also appears in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2005), pp. 98-110.

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Melancholia to Bare Life)

The MIT Press (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

Neue deutsche Denke are a bit like buses; you wait ages for one to come along, then two or three arrive on the scene. Byung-Chul Han is one such thinker; part of a generation that also includes, for example, Markus Gabriel [a] and Armen Avanessian [b]. 

 

Han is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is (according to his publishers) one of the most widely read theorists writing today, both inside and outside the Academy; the author of over twenty books, including (in English) The Burnout Society (2015), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017), and The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2017).

 

But the text I wish to discuss here is an essay on love entitled The Agony of Eros (2017), in which he argues that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself ...

II. 

 

The Agony of Eros comes with a foreword by Alain Badiou, whom, readers will recall, published his own little book on love - Éloge de l'amour - in 2009, in which he argued (after Rimbaud) that love needs re-inventing as an opportunity - not for pleasure, so much as for a new form of self and (communist) society; for love provides one possible source of resistance to the obscenity of the market. [c]   

 

I have to say, for me, attaching this foreword is mistaken. Han doesn't need a formal blessing from Badiou, the old man of French philosophy, and doesn't need his text to be vouched for by someone who uses the phrase true love three times in the space of a single page and insists that this authentic form of experience is an affirmation of alterity and a radical refusal of the norms of globalised capitalism. 

 

I mean, come on ...! Reading this almost makes me immediately put the book down. I'm sure Badiou sincerely clings to such fantasy, but I'm hoping Han is going to offer a slightly more sophisticated take on the topic - though I already have my doubts, if, indeed, it's true that he essentially offers a strong reading of the former's own political thesis concerning the revolutionary potential of love.  

 

Anyway, let's find out ... Note that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's own.

 

 

III.

 

Melancholia

 

The crisis of love - taken as a given - is not due, argues Han, to greater freedom and unlimited possibilities, but to an "erosion of the Other [...] occurring in all spheres of life", along with its corollary, the increasing "narcissification of the Self" [d].

 

Now, that might be so, but it's hardly a new or original observation. D. H. Lawrence was saying much the same thing a hundred years ago [e]. And, without referring directly to his work, Han acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean Baudrillard by adopting the phrase l'enfer du même to describe the situation we now find ourselves in [f].        

 

We need to escape from this hell of the same and encounter the atopic Other in all their negativity, otherwise we are are heading for depression, says Han. But this escape might not be a particularly pleasant experience; for it seems that "only an apocalypse can liberate - indeed, redeem - us from the hell of the same, and lead us toward the Other." [3] 

 

To which one might ask: Is it really worth it?  

 

All this talk of healing and cleansing via a disastrous event, a terrible experience, or a sacrifice of the self, makes one wonder whether Han's been watching too many films by Lars von Trier and listening to too many operas by Richard Wagner [g].

 

Do we really want to reinvoke "the proximity of eros and death" [5] in order to liberate ourselves from narcissistic captivity? Does it really require courage to dream of the lovely Ophelia, surrounded by fallen flowers, "drifting in the water with her mouth half open - her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover" [6], or is it not simply plunging back into the same old Romantic (and Christian moral) idealism whose formula reads: salvation via catastrophic fatality ...? 

 

Over to you on this one Síomón ... 

 

   

Being Able Not to Be Able

 

Han says we are living in a neoliberal achievement society dominated by the can-do frame of mind; one in which citizens are self-motivated and self-exploiting. Foucault thought this an improvement upon disciplinary society and in his later work adopted a sympathetic attitude towards neoliberalism and the civil liberty it allows. 

 

But Han disagrees and thinks Foucault naive in his uncritical assumptions and failure to notice "the structure of violence and coercion underwriting the neoliberal dictum of freedom" [10]. Neoliberal freedom is the freedom of auto-exploitation and the will to achieve ends with the subject wearing themselves out.     

 

Han wants people to recognise their limitations; to see that love is a relationship "situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability" and ultimately finds expression "as a kind of failure" [11] and certainly not as sexual success. Indeed, Han seems to look to a time that is after the orgy when we revalue "dignity, decency, and propriety" [13] as methods of maintaining distance and thus preserving otherness. 

 

A time that is also post social media. For by means of social media, "we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance [...] to create proximity" [13]. But this simply results in "making the Other disappear" [13]. In other words - and in words that Heidegger might have approved of - the total abolition of remoteness "does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it" [13] [h]. 

 

So, the best thing lovers can do is keep apart - in every sense - and realise that love is not about enjoyment or the generation of pleasant feelings; nor is it about "inconsequential emotion and arousal" [13]. It is, rather,  "something that wounds or incites passion" [14] and often ends with injury.

 

I have to admit, I rather admire this model of love with built in negativity; "nourished by what doesn't yet exist" [16]. I'm all for secrecy, silence, and seduction rather than the guarateed satisfaction of needs. Indeed, I've been writing in favour of delayed gratification and the deferral of pleasure for years: click here, for example.        

 

Bare Life

 

The negative model of love, conceived in terms of injury and transformation, is, says Han, in danger of disappearing completely thanks to love's "increasing positivization and domestication" [18]. We no longer fall in love and risk madness, but enter into a relationship of mutual consent in which we are allowed to stay the same and seek only "the confirmation of oneself in the Other" [18].

 

Love has become a mixture of hedonistic calculation and stress relief; lacking all transcendence and transgression, there is nothing fatal (or even dangerous) in it. The modern day lover prefers bourgeois good health over "sovereignty and freedom" [19]. For Han, this is not the good life as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, but threadbare existence; life of comfort and convenience; the sort of life longed for by the Letzter Mensch who invented happiness. 

 

Again, I smile at all this as it reminds me of what I was writing a decade ago - in the essays collected in Erotomania (2010), for example. But I don't believe I ever arrived at the (neo-Hegelian) conclusion that "Love is an absolute end unto itself." [22] Probably that's because I always remember Lawrence saying that whilst in love one must give, one must never give oneself away and that it was all too easy to die for love - the hard thing being to live for it. 

 

Of course, Han is talking of death in a psycho-symbolic rather than a biological sense and he is thinking of Bataille when he insists that "The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience" [25]. Which, again, might be the case, but it all seems so overblown and old hat - as Houellebecq would say: "We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..." [i]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and writer based at the University of Bonn. He regards himself as a thinker in the post-Kantian tradition concerned with metaontology and metametaphysics. Gabriel has spoken out against government measures taken in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, believing them to be unjustified and a step on the road towards a cyber dictatorship (or virocracy). 

      See: Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

 

[b] Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, artist, and theorist who has held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia and Yale University. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. His concept of hyperstition also designates a method for the actualization in the present of ideas or fictions from the future. 

      See: Hyperstition (2015) a documentary film on time, narrative, philosophy and theory by Christopher Roth in collaboration with Armen Avanessian: click here for a trailer on Vimeo.   

 

[c] See In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou (with Nicholas Truong), trans. Peter Bush, (Serpent's Tail, 2012). 

[d] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Love, trans. Erik Butler, (The MIT Press, 2017), p. 3. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[e] See for example what Lawrence writes in his 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 329-336. 

      These lines give a good idea of how Lawrence anticipates Byung-Chul Han and the French theory he relies upon:

      "Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute [...]

      Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self-interest. [...] It is inevitable  when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. [...] The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow [...] what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness. 

      But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing." [335]     

 

[f] L'enfer du même is poorly translated by Erik Butler as 'inferno of the same', which - apart from sounding like some cheesy disco - thereby misses the fact that Baudrillard was explicitly playing on Sartre's famous phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres, commonly translated into English as 'Hell is other people'. I have therefore modified Butler's translation in this post. 

      Those interested to know more, should see Baudrillard's essay 'The Hell of the Same', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993).  

[g] Han's first chapter is essentially an interpretation of von Trier's Melancholia (2011); a film inspired by a depressive episode which prominently features music from the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  

[h] See my post of 22 September, 2021: On the Question of Distance and Proximity. 

[i] Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, (Serpent's Tail, 1998). 

      With this brilliant line, from his debut novel, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion which characterizes the early 21st century. And he does so twenty years before Byung-Chul Han picks up the idea and runs with it. 

 

This post continues in part two - from Porn to The End of Theory - which can be read by clicking here. 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.      

Je fixais des vertiges

 

I woke up this morning to discover that the room was spinning around and whilst Bataille might imagine vertigo as a pathway to the Void and a fall into ecstatic joy, I have no interest in touching the impossible or experiencing dizziness to the point of trembling, thank you very much. 

 

Right now, I just want to make the whirling world stand still, as Rimbaud would say ...

 

 

See: Rimbaud, 'Délires II: Alchimie du verbe', Une saison en enfer (1873): click here.

 

 

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.