Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 2)

Simon Critchley: Bald 

(Yale University Press, 2021)

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.  

All page numbers given below refer to the above edition of the book. 

Titles are Critchley's own. 

 

 

The Cycle of Revenge [a]

 

Critchley, somewhat surprisingly, takes a very Christian position on the question of revenge: turn the other cheek and forgive those who have sinned against you; at least on the first 490 occasions [b] and even if you have just witnessed the death of nearly 3000 of your citizens: 

 

"What if the grief and mourning that followed 9/11 were allowed to foster a nonviolent ethics of compassion rather than a violent politics of revenge and retribution? What if the crime of the September 11 attacks had led not to an unending war on terror, but to the cultivation of a practice of peace - a difficult, fraught and ever-compromised endeavour, but perhaps worth the attempt?" [111]    

 

As I say, that strikes me as very Christian - but almost inhuman in its idealism; as D. H. Lawrence says, man isn't a spiritually perfect being full of light, he is rooted in blood and soil and has natural instincts and vital passions and it's probably better in the long run to give these expression rather than deny them. 

 

Thus, although Lawrence acknowledges the madness of those who live solely for revenge - see his poem 'Erinnyes', for example [c] - he is not going to be meekly submissive before those who would devour him; nor is he going to love his enemies, bless those that curse him, or pray for his persecutors [d]. 

 

As for Nietzsche, well, he wasn't a big fan of revenge, describing it as a manifestation of ressentiment that often masquerades as justice. The noble individual, he says, knows not only how to forgive - for that is merely Christian - but also how to forget. Just like the spirit of gravity, the spirit of revenge must be overcome. 

 

On the other hand, however, Zarathustra teaches us that a small revenge is better than no revenge at all; that an action taken spontaneously and limited in scope prevents the malignant growth of resentment that will ultimately issue as a repulsion against time and earthly existence itself [e]. 

 

The Good Book ends, one might recall, not with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, but with John's call for the Apocalypse, the great book of revenge and world destruction that gives the death-kiss to the Gospels [f]. That tells us something important, I think. 

 

 

The Art of Memory

 

This is the first of a series of essays collected under the section heading 'Athens in Pieces' and written during the first four month of 2019, whilst Critchley was based in the Greek capital. 

 

Like him, I too have a fondness for the city - though for different reasons; Critchley thinks it "a magical city [...] where what we still recognise as philosophia really began" [124]; I think of it as the birthplace and hometown of My Little Greek. 

 

In other words, he has a more professional and I have a more personal reason for loving Athens and, whilst I'm not disputing it's ground zero for philosophy, my interest in the latter is really more Franco-German in character and located in the modern and postmodern period, rather than the Classical Age of Greece. 

 

Nevertheless, let's explore a city and a time whose ghosts "continue to haunt our present, often in unexpected and unimagined ways" [124] - ghosts whom we must find a way to make speak (or moan a bit at the very least); something which, says, Critchley, requires giving them "a little of our lifeblood" [124]. 

 

For only when we have transplanted a little of our blood into these ancient Athenian ghosts, will they communicate in a manner that will make sense to our modern ears and "tell us not just about themselves but also about us" [124] (and let's be honest, we moderns only really want to hear about ourselves):

 

"We always see antiquity in the image of ourselves and our age. But that image is not some Narcissus-like reflection; it is more an oblique refraction that allows us to see ourselves in a novel way and in a slightly alien manner." [124]

 

That's a positive spin and not one I'm sure I agree with. And I certainly have problems with the idea that the ancient past should be valued for providing "some kind of solace and escape" [125] from the present; "for a time", writes Critchley, "we can be transported elsewhere, where life was formed by different forces" [125].

 

He'll be telling us next we can even learn from the ancients, but I tend to agree with Foucault that we must exercise extreme caution here; our world and the world of ancient Greece are fundamentally distinct and we can't, for example, simply adopt their model of ethical behaviour, no matter how much we may admire aspects of it, and "you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people" [g].

 

The Stench of the Academy 

  

On my one and only trip to Athens, I crashed through a glass door - click here - and I took a look at the Acropolis. 

 

But I didn't visit Plato's Academy, although, from Critchley's description, it doesn't sound like I missed much: a run-down space smelling of piss calling itself a park in "a not particularly nice part of town" [128], where undesirable go to get high (and not on philosophy).   

 

Funnily enough, Critchley also does his best to put readers off the Academy even in its heyday and its founder:

 

"The Academy was a privately funded research and teaching facility, situated outside the city. Most of us have a rather whimsical idea of philosophy as a bunch of men in togas having a chat in the agora. And we think of Socrates as a gadfly philosophising in the street and somehow speaking truth to power. The idea is attractive. But it is a literary conceit of philosophy - one that is still in circulation today. It is the fiction that Plato wanted his readers to believe." [130-131]

 

Critchley continues - and I think these are my favourite paragraphs in Bald so far -

 

"Behind that fiction stands the library, the editing and copying rooms, and the entire research engine of the Academy, which was devoted to the careful production and dissemination of knowledge through texts and teaching. Much as we may flinch at the idea, philosophy has been academic and linked to the activity of schools since its inception." [131]

 

In other words, it's always been a business on the one hand and factional on the other and Plato - if that was even his name - was ultimately just a rich fantasist backed by wealthy patrons and fleecing wealthy students who led us all into an Ideal dead-end: 

 

"We are less attracted to the idea of a wealthy aristocratic philosopher sequestered in his research facility and making occasional trip to visit foreign tyrants than to the image of the poor, shoeless Socrates causing trouble in the marketplace, refusing to be paid and getting killed by the city for his trouble. But out captivation with this image, once again, is overwhelmingly Plato's invention." [131-132-   

 

It's the great philosophical swindle ...  

      

 

In Aristotle's Garden 

 

After visiting the Academy, Critchley obviously had to go next to the "beautifully maintained site" [137] of the Lyceum; Aristotle's answer to the former [h] - only bigger and better, transforming his new space into "the most powerful and well-endowed school in the world" [136]. 

 

And he was able to do this because if Plato had a few bob, Aristotle was one those individuals we now term the super-rich. Anyway, the Lyceum was the "aspirational school destination of choice" [137] for the elites to send their children and for ten years or so, Aristotle was top dog in the philosophical world (which is not to imply he was in any way a Cynic).  

 

For Critchley - and I agree with him here - it's important to point out that the Lyceum, like most ancient schools, had a lovely garden, and he ponders what it was for:

 

"Was it a space for leisure, strolling and quiet dialectical chitchat? Was it a mini-laboratory for botanical observation and experimentation?  Or was it [...] an image of paradise?" [138]

 

Critchley finds the latter possibility the most intriguing, but personally I prefer to think that his first suggestion concerning its use is the right answer. But whatever the answer, it's true that there's a close and vital relationship between gardens and philosophical thought. Indeed, I would suggest that those who lack green fingers and an appreciation for the beauty of flowers can never be a true lover of wisdom:

 

"At the end of the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle sees the promise of philosophy as the cultivation of the contemplative life, the bios theoretikos [...] What better place for this than a garden? Might not botany be the royal road to paradise, an activity at once empirical and deeply poetic." [138]

 

Is Critchley - someone who by is own admission was formerly insensitive to the pleasure to be found amongst plants and trees - becoming a floraphile at last ...? Will he end up like Rupert Birkin, rolling in the grass and ejaculating in the foliage in a state of delirium? [i]  

 

Perhaps not. But, then again, anything's possible ...  

 

 

We Know Socrates's Fate. What's Ours?

  

Interesting that Critchley should claim he was named after Simon the Cobbler; a good friend of Socrates and someone who "also pretended to be a philosopher of sorts" [154]. 

 

Apparently, whenever the latter called into his workshop, Simon made notes on their conversation; thus some claim that it was Simon - not Plato - who was the first author of a Socratic dialogue. 

 

Simon was also much admired by the Cynics, for refusing the patronage of Pericles in order to safeguard his freedom of speech (parrhesia): 

 

"For the Cynics, only those people who achieved self-sufficiency (autarkeia) or independence of mind could truly exercise their freedom speech. For a cobbler-philosopher like Simon to work for a powerful political figure like Pericles would have undermined that independence and compromised his freedom." [158]

 

One wonders if Critchley ever has doubts about his own relationship with powerful institutions like the New School for Social Research and the Onassis Foundation; ever wishes he were repairing old boots instead?     

 

 

The Happiest Man I Ever Met

 

From Simon the Cobbler's workshop to Mount Athos ... and three days, two nights at the monastery of Simonopetra, founded in the 13th century. Critchley wishes to know: "What is it like to be a monk? And what does it take to become one?" [161]

 

These are not questions I would ask and it's not somewhere I would go: anywhere that doesn't welcome the presence of women is a place I choose not to visit. I'm fine with the idea that monks choose to hide themselves from the world of Man, but not that the only female creatures tolerated on their Holy Mountain are cats and that this is justified on supposedly religious and spiritual grounds.

 

How, one wonders, does Critchley look his wife and daughter in the eye after going to a place from which they are barred on the grounds of maintaining a pure environment [j] ...?  Expensive four-wheel drive cars - no problem; they apparently don't pollute the place in the way that women would stink up the joint. 

 

At the end of his stay, Critchley takes off the little wooden cross he had been given to wear, and returns back into the profane world, resuming his "stupid philosophical distance and intellectual arrogance" [169].

 

I know it's a Latin phrase associated with the Jesuits, rather than a Greek phrase associated with the Orthodox monks of Athos, but, clearly, Critchley has found out what it takes to be a monk: sacrificium intellectus (i.e., the voluntary subordination of reason to faith; or what Nietzsche describes as moral self-mutilation).  

 

What shocks me is that Critchley seems to think this is something admirable and he ends this profoundly depressing piece by describing his time at Simonopetra as "the closest to a religious experience that I have ever come" [169] - as if such a psychotic episode were a good thing!

 

        

Adventures in the Dream Factory

  

This is the third of three pieces on the science fiction writer (and garage philosopher) Philip K. Dick - not someone I've ever read (or wish to read), although, yes, I know the film adaptations of his work. 

 

Dick was a kind of Gnostic on Critchley's reading and Dick's Gnosticism enables us to ditch the traditional Christian idea of original sin:

 

"Once we embrace Gnosticism, we can declare that wickedness does not have its source within the human heart but out there, with the corrupt archons of corporate capitalism or whomever. We are not wicked. It is the world that is wicked. This insight finds its modern voice in Rousseau before influencing a Heinz variety of Romanticisms that turn on the idea of natural human goodness and childhood innocence." [219]

 

Critchley continues in a paragraph that returns us to where we began this post, with a critique of authenticity:   

 

"On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world or what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the diving spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material detox [...] Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what spendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are." [219]

 

Horray! Something I can agree with and get behind! Probably a good place to finish then. But let me first wish Mr Critchley a happy 66th birthday - that's not quite the number of the Beast [ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ], but it's two-thirds of the way there ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This essay should probably be read in conjunction with the following piece 'Theater of Violence', pp.112-120, though it's not absolutely necessary to do so and I do not, in fact, analyse this later essay here; not because I disagree with Critchley's view that we need to "understand the history of violence from which we emerge" [113], but because Greek theatre, Shakespeare, sport, and the work of American rapper Kendrick Lamar do not particularly interest me (and, to be honest, I'm increasingly sceptical that complex philosophical problems can best be addressed in terms of football and/or popular music).    

 

[b] Critchley quotes Jesus telling Peter that it is not enough to forgive someone seven times, you must, rather, forgive them seventy times seven, which Critchley interprets as meaning that the quality of forgiveness is infinite and unconditional. See Matthew 18:22 and see Bald p. 110. 

  

[c] The poem 'Erinnyes' (1915), can be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. III., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1526-1527. Or it can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[d] Whilst admitting that the Christian vision is one form of consummation for man, Lawrence makes his opposition to Luke 6:27-28 clear pretty much throughout his work. See, for example, 'The Lemon Gardens'; in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119.

 

[e] See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Adder's Bite' (in Part 1) and 'Of Redemption' (in Part 2).

 

[f] See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980).      

 

[g] Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 343. Developing this point, Foucault goes on to say: "I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period ..." [347]. To think otherwise, of course, sets one on a slippery path towards universal humanism. 

 

[h] Aristotle established the Lyceum after being snubbed by Plato, who chose Speusippus as his successor, rather than him. Critchley wonders whether Aristotle was angry and disappointed not to have become the main man at the Academy and I would imagine that he was; for, in fairness, although he was "reportedly a difficult character" and "not much loved by the Athenians" [134], he was undoubtedly the best qualified for the role.    

 

[i] I'm referring to the (in)famous scene in chapter VIII of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920), to which I have referred numerous times here on Torpedo the Ark: see, for example, the post 'Floraphilia Redux' (17 Oct 2016) - click here.    

 

[j] Critchley explains, but doesn't challenge, the Athonite legend which has it that the Virgin Mary travelled to Athos and liked it so much that her son Jesus declared it her private garden, from which all other female creatures were banned. The 335 sq km peninsula that Mount Athos sits at the heart of is the largest area in the world that women cannot enter (they are not even allowed within 500m of the coast).

      What strikes me as a little hypocritical, to say the least, is that in an essay written earlier, Critchley says that the BBC Television series The Ascent of Man (1973) has an admittedly sexist title and wishes to point out that there are "a few great women too!" [190] who have played a key role in human history (not that any of them would be allowed to visit Athos).  

      In this same essay, Critchley also opposes monstrous certainty which, he says, leads "not just to fascism but to all the various faces of fundamentalism" [193] - though that apparently does not include the dogma of Greek Orthodoxy.   

Psychology 101 (Notes on Narcissistic Rumination, etc.)

 

 

'We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. 

For we have never sought to stick our tails in our mouths.'  

 

 

I. 

 

I've heard it said that self-reflection is crucial for personal growth and that personal growth is vital for enhancing self-awareness, thus creating a kind of positive psychological loop, which, for those content to sit with their tails in their mouths [1], is all fine and dandy. 

 

It is not, however, something that appeals to those of a Nietzschean bent who think more in terms of radical self-overcoming rather than bourgeois self-improvement and celebrate innocence and forgetfulness rather than indulge in narcissistic rumination. 

 

Clearly, there are a lot of terms to unpack here. But, without wishing to turn what was intended to be a bright and breezy post into a lengthy psychology lecture, let me offer some clarification ...

 

 

II. 

 

By self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung), Nietzsche refers to a process via which an individual (or a people) might abandon what they are and enter into what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a becoming-other (devenir-autre), thereby distilling Nietzsche's psychological insights into a more radical ontological concept. This is not a one-time event, but a constant process or unfolding that aims for a new way of thinking and feeling, rather than a development of the same. 

      

Ultimately, of course, if you subscribe to a philosophy of difference, there is no originary or essential self to overcome in the traditional sense; instead, there is only a site where different forces (active or reactive) interact and becoming is the process by which these forces shift and mutate, breaking away from static identities and fixed categories. 

     

 

III. 

 

When Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra of innocence and forgetfulness - I think he uses the German terms Unschuld and Vergessen - he refers to the childlike state reached when an individual has fully stylised an ethical model of self beyond good and evil (i.e., fixed moral values). 

      

Innocence, as used here, is not a form of naivety or ignorance, but rather the ability to affirm life as is (what he terms an economy of the whole), without qualification. Forgetfulness, meanwhile, acts as a necessary (and active) capacity to absorb past experiences and not be weighed down by personal history or the spirit of gravity; to be free of ressentiment. 

 

When working in conjunction, innocence and forgetfulness allows, if you like, for a fresh start and to make an affirmation of life that is both joyful and playful.

      

 

IV.

 

By narcissistic rumination I refer to an obsessive thought-cycle that locks the subject into a fixed state of neurosis and ultimately results in paralysis by analysis [2]. Narcissistic ruminators are thus those unfortunate individuals who spend a great deal of time and energy attempting to make sense of chaos; i.e., to find patterns or structures of meaning to which they are central. They love asking: Why me? [3]

 

Such individuals also love, à la Miss Haversham, recycling old conversations so that they might finally get others to admit their logical inconsistency and take ownership of their moral failings (there's nothing narcissistic ruminators enjoy more than making others feel miserable about themselves).   

     

 

V. 

 

And finally, re the idea that self-reflection can be dangerous - can lead to paralysis by analysis - let me admit that this needn't always be the case and that there are, I suppose, benefits to be had from knowing something about the self (even if it's only that the self is a convenient fiction rooted in grammar). 

 

However, it can become detrimental to wellbeing when the would-be self-knower falls into the black hole of narcissistic rumination; i.e., when they swallow their own tail and dwell on toxic negativity; when they become so obsessed on evaluating past events and collecting grievances that they become unable to act (or even smile) in the present. 

 

 

VI. 

 

In sum: Nietzscheans never ask why and rarely ruminate; they leave that to those who seek that highly suspect type of self-knowledge dreamed of by Platonists, Christians, Jungians, and other idealistic herd animals [4]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Esssays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. 

      In this short essay, written in 1925, Lawrence humorously attacks closed, self-referential styles of thinking and the obsession with interiority. With reference to the figure of the ouroboros, he also challenges the idea that the end is one with the beginning (i.e., that infinity is some kind of perfect cycle).

 

[2] Hamlet, of course, is the poster child for this idea of paralysis by analysis; a man whose 'powers of action have been eaten up by thought', as Hazlitt says in his landmark study Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (1817).   

 

[3] See the recent post 'Why Me Contra So What' (6 Feb 2026): click here. 

      Referring once more to literature, then Melville's Captain Ahab might be said to be the ultimate narcissistic ruminator. For he cannot view the loss of his leg as a random, natural event. Instead, he anthropomorphises the great white whale, convinced it acted with inscrutable malice specifically against him. He spends his life ruminating on this personal grievance, making himself the tragic centre of a cosmic drama. 

 

[4] Before I'm accused of being reductive by grouping Platonists, Christians, and Jungians together in this manner, let me indicate my awareness of the fact that these traditions have different understandings of the self and of what constitutes knowledge of the self, and different reasons for wanting to attain such knowledge. 

      However, all three traditions, it seems to me, consider the unexamined life to be a very bad thing - devoid of value, meaning, purpose, etc. - and each tradition suggests that failure to know the self will have negative consequences. I'm not adopting Thomas Gray's position here - ignorace is bliss - but I do think that innocence and forgetfulness, as discussed above, can make happy and free (inasmuch as anything can ever make us happy and free).  

 

 

Simon Poulter: Artist and Aurelian

 

Simon Poulter: Purple Emperor (2022) [1]

Watercolour on Fabriano Artistico paper 

viral.info/butterflies

 

 

I. 

 

Another Simon whom I admire and whose work I greatly appreciate, is the artist Simon Poulter whose fascination with colour naturally led him towards the iridescently beautiful world of butterflies, and who for the past five years has been assembling a collection of watercolours depicting all fifty-nine of Britain's remaining butterfly species.

 

 

II.  

 

Of course, there's a science behind the vibrant wing patterns and one could write at length about the way in which butterflies rely on colour in every aspect of their lives. From courtship displays to camouflage techniques, the 18,000 named species with which we share the planet have evolved strategies over millions of years to make the most of their defining feature. 

 

One might also wax lyrical about the fact that butterflies can see more colours than humans; like many other insects - and perhaps one or two poets - Lepidoptera are sensitive to ultraviolet light (i.e. the blue of the Greater Day). Or how they often use bright, bold colours like red and orange to advertise their toxicity to predators (a technique known as aposematism).  

 

But, instead, I think I'll just refer readers to Poulter's website and encourage them to purchase one of his lovely butterfly pictures - click here - as, in this case, the work speaks for itself. Poulter's vision - like that of the Russian author V. V. Rozanov - is full of passion and he is able to see that "immortality is in the vividness of life" itself. 

 

Thus it is that the butterfly "becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us" [2].

 

 

III. 

 

Finally, I would also ask readers to do all they can to protect these insects and their habitat. Not because they are symbols of the human soul, but because they are finer things than us; creatures with unique biological traits, including metamorphic life cycles, possessing a terminal value (or delight) independent of mankind [3].  

 

Ultimately, ethics means very little if it does not extend into the natural world and include non-human entities (indeed, I would extend it even further into the world of non-living objects, but that's another story).         

  

Notes

 

[1] The Purple Emperor (Apatura iris), was once common in southern England, but, like half of all British butterflies, it experienced a sharp decline in both range and numbers during the last hundred years, mostly due to habitat destruction. The surviving populations are now mostly confined to broadleaved woodlands in Hampshire, Surrey, and Sussex, with a few scattered across other localities. Following the rewilding of the Knepp Estate by Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, the Purple Emperor has also returned in significant numbers to this Kentish haven. I have written in praise of this project; see the post of 5 March 2019 - click here. 

      Readers might also be interested in the work of Matthew Oates, an English naturalist and nature writer, obsessed with butterflies, especially the mighty Purple Emperor. See His Imperial Majesty, a natural history of the Purple Emperor (Bloomsbury, 2020) and for more information visit his website: click here. I am told that Oates and Poulter are currently collaborating on a film project to do with the Purple Emperor butterfly, so that's something to watch out for.  

 

[2] I'm quoting from D. H. Lawrence in his 'Review of Solitaria, by V. V. Rozanov', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 317. See my post of 14 May 2019 - 'The Butterfly Revelation' - click here. 

 

[3] As John Keats once wrote in a letter to Fanny Brawne (his fiancée and muse): "I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty [human] years could ever contain." I have substituted the word 'common' with human.

      This letter, of 1 July 1819, can be found in Volume II of The Letters of John Keats (1819-1821), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge University Press, 2012); or it can be read online thanks to the Keats Letters Project: click here. 

 

 

For a short selection of other posts on butterflies (and moths), please click here.

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Queer Defamiliarisation of St. Mawr

 

Front cover of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 

Volume 7, Number 2 (2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

There are, of course, many ways of reading D. H. Lawrence. 

 

But it seems to me that the real battle now is between those who like to revere his writings from a mythopoetic perspective - i.e., an interpretive approach which looks for connections between his work and those archetypal narratives known as myths - and those who prefer to fuck Lawrence up the arse [2] and defamiliarise his texts in a queer and/or perverse manner. 

 

The first kind of reader - and they have traditionally been dominant within Lawrence scholarship - whilst conceding that there are closely observed realistic elements in his work, like to celebrate his ability to transfigure these elements via a mythopoetic imagination and thereby provide us with a glimpse into the fourth dimensional realm of Being.

 

The second kind of reader - and I'm one of a small but increasing number of such within the world of Lawrence studies - whilst conceding there is symbolic truth and metaphorical meaning in his work, prefer to celebrate his decision to climb down Pisgah and keep his feet firmly planted on the flat earth, providing us with his own form of what Bataille termed base materialism: formless, filthy, and heterogeneous.

 

For the first type of reader, Lawrence will always be a priest of love communing with ancient gods and channelling primal forces, so as to impose some kind of order and value on a secular modern world. For the second, he's more the king of kink [3], exploring the world of fluid sexuality and peculiar paraphilias, making the known world strange and always caught up in a process of becoming-other.  

 

 

II. 

 

Choosing between mythopoiesis and queer defamiliarization [4], ultimately depends on whether you think of Lawrence as a red-bearded visionary and defender of religious faith in a disenchanted world, or a radical opponent of moral rationalism and the metaphysical dualism that it rests upon; is he searching for wholeness, or is he a believer in the ruins? 

  

While traditionalists favour mythopoiesis in order to promote his prophetic genius, readers on the LGBTQI+ spectrum often find queer defamiliarization more useful for accompanying Lawrence on the thought adventures via which he tested the limits of selfhood (particularly in relation to questions of sex and gender). 

 

 

III.

 

In practice, what does all this mean? 

 

Well, it means, for example, that when distinguished Lawrence scholars still susbcribing to a mythpoeic approach read the short novel St. Mawr (1925), they immediately speak of sacred symbols and animal archetypes. 

 

John Turner, for example, although primarily wishing to discuss the sardonic aspects of the above tale, can't help insisting that what Lawrence sought beneath the mockery was "a myth that would marry the old and the new, in such a way as to [...] enrich the visionary power of the eye and re-establish religious connexion with the cosmos" [5] and that the female protagonist, Lou Witt, is on a savage pilgrimage to find "a holy place in which the self in its full depth may be known, experienced and integrated" [6].       

 

And Michael Bell, in a short piece titled 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', says that St. Mawr "belongs among those mythic tales [...] in which the balance of realism to mythopoeia shifts towards the latter" [7]. This, I suppose, is true enough. But surely we are not obliged as readers to shift accordingly and we can discuss the horse as a horse and not as a symbol with mythic significance; and surely we are entitled to claim that the new awareness that the red-golden stallion with his big, black, brilliant eyes provokes in Lou is zoosexual in nature, rather than onto-theological.

 

For although Paul Poplawski claims that there is a "relative lack of sexual content" [8] in St. Mawr, I would argue now - much as I did back in 2006, in a paper on the question of why girls love horses [9] - that St. Mawr is, in many respects, far more transgressive than Lady Chaterley's Lover (1928). 

 

For whilst in the latter book Lawrence wishes to radically challenge class divisions, in St. Mawr he challenges the distinction between human and animal by envisioning a love affair between a woman and a horse, which, whilst not explicit in its depiction - there are no sexual acts as such - is fully eroticised nonetheless. Here, for example, is a description of their very first encounter: 

 

"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her […] So slippery with vivid, hot life! 

      She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in." [10]

 

What exactly is Lou thinking of here? 

 

Personally, I think it's clear that when Lawrence writes of an 'ancient understanding' flooding into her female soul this is a form of carnal knowledge. And I don't think this is a crassly reductive or obscene interpretation, as some critics would protest. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-animal sexual relationship in St. Mawr - as he does elsewhere in his work - and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of fantasy writing. 

 

Lou may not be Bodil Joensen [11], but she's the closest to such in Lawrence's queer fictional universe ...  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The JDHLS (2025) is published by the D. H. Lawrence Society (Eastwood, Notts.) and edited by Jane Costin. The cover shows an original artwork by Lewis Weber of Nottingham High School. For details on the DHL Society (and how to join), visit their website: click here. 

 

[2] Deleuze famously speaks of approaching an author from behind and buggering them in order to inseminate them with strange new ideas and in this way produce monstrous offspring. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 6.  

 

[3] See my post titled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018), in which I list an A-Z of paraphilias, perversions, and fetishistic behaviours that can be found in his work: click here. 

 

[4] Defamiliarization - or, to use the original Russian term, остранение (ostranenie) - is an artistic technique of magically making ordinary objects in the everyday world appear new and as if seen for the first time. It was coined by the formalist Viktor Shklovsky in an essay of 1917. It has been utilised and adapted by many different artists and thinkers and has now become an important component of queer theory. 

      See, for example, Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), in which she explores how we might radically reimagine this concept in order to affirm deviant, errant, and alternative modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. 

 

[5] John Turner, 'Drift and Depth: the Sardonic in St. Mawr', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), p. 52. Note the dated - slightly affected - spelling of the word connection.  

 

[6] Ibid., p. 53.  

 

[7] Michael Bell, 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 140.  

 

[8] Paul Poplawski, 'Less is Mawr: Revisiting Lawrence's St. Mawr', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 80. 

 

[9] I'm referring to the essay 'Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses?', written in 2006, presented at Treadwell's Bookshop (London) in March 2007, and published in The Treadwell's Papers Vol. 3: Zoophilia (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 87-117. 

      Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I would suggest that this text might be seen as seminal for those who are now discovering the notion of queer defamiliarisation and/or perverse forms of materialism.     

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Penguin Books, 1997), p. 30. 

 

[11] Bodil Joensen (1944-1985) was a Danish porn star who ran a small farm and animal husbandry business. She gained public notoriety for her many  films in which she engaged in sex acts with animals, including horses, although she warned in an interview that being fucked by a horse is always a dangerous affair, particularly for those inexperienced in the practice; for not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick, or suddenly thrust and flare when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse will swell considerably and this can cause serious (if not fatal) internal damage. In this same interview (1980), she explained how she had developed a special technique to allow penetration without the risk of vaginal tearing. 

 

 

Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 2: Sections VI-X)

Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love: 

Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang 

(University of Michigan Press, 2023)

 

 

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which (sections I-V) can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

VI. 

 

Nineteen-year-old Yvette Saywell may have had a sexual relationship with a married gipsy named Joe Boswell, but for Lawrence's most notorious tale of adultery we have to turn to the case of Lady Chatterley and her lover ... 

 

The seemingly modern - and yet actually anti-modern [e] - relationship between Connie and Mellors, says Yao, is not merely a crossing of the boundaries of "class, convention, and ideology" (69), it's a "transgressive love that institutionally challenges the local and global norms of modernization" (69). 

 

Again, whilst I have in the past argued something very similar, over the years (and in light of work by Foucault) I've become increasingly sceptical about the politics of desire [f] put forward by figures such as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and, indeed, Lawrence. 

 

So, whilst I agree that warmhearted fucking and phallic tenderness are all well and good, I'm not sure these things are enough to bring about a revaluation of values or help us "breathe the air of freedom" (71) by overthrowing Western modernity. 

 

And whether the union of Connie and Mellors furthers the deconstruction of capitalist society and constitutes "an organic new life" (76), is also highly debatable; they might just become the kind of self-involved and self-contained couple that Rawdon Lilly so despises; "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [g].          

 

 

VII.

 

And so we arrive at chapter 4 and the utopia of transcendental love ... The chapter which I suspect will really get my goat. But let's see. It opens thus:

 

"After defying both local and global discourses to reach a cosmopolitan freedom, Lawrence [...] discovered that freedom lies not necessarily somewhere outside but inside a heart that longs for an alternative utopian existence. The longing for utopia develops into an increasingly stronger theme in [his] later writings, displaying [his] redemptive attempts to create a new language of God's love." (95)

 

Lawrence, argues Yao, believes in projecting love into another mysterious dimension; one which is "intimately connected to the depth of time and the cosmos" (95). His ultimate goal, as a priest of love, is to "replace the eroded religious tradition" (95) of his own culture.

 

Sex is the means not only to human wholeness, but to a mystical union with the mysterious cosmos and the vast universe: "The intimate interrelation between [...] two lovers forms the bridge between humanity and the Absolute" (100), writes Yao (approvingly). Continuing:

 

"The more completely and profoundly the lovers are sexually connected, the more sacred and transcendental their passionate love becomes. Through sexual union, lovers achieve the ultimate, mystical marriage in order to fulfill their unknown desire." (102)

 

I mention Foucault in passing above, I now think we must quote him in an attempt to counter some of this sex mysticism ...

 

Referring directly to Lawrence's work at several points, Foucault discusses how the concept of sex as an omnipresent meaning, a metaphysical form of agency, and a universal signified, "made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures" [h], becoming in the process "the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organised by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality" [i].  

 

In the imaginary element that is sex, we mistakenly believe we see our deepest and most primal selves reflected. One day, Foucault muses, "people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought" [j]. 

 

The irony is that in subjecting ourselves to the austere monarchy of sex, we think we have somehow liberated ourselves.  

 

 

VIII. 

 

And so we come to The Escaped Cock ... (which was actually Lawrence's preferred title - showing his ability to laugh even at his own phallic philosophy - not The Man Who Died, as Yao informs readers).

 

This final great work of fiction represents Lawrence's attempt to "replace Christianity with a secular practice of healing and rebirth" (103), says Yao, though I think it would be better (and more accurate) to say Lawrence attempts to place Christianity back within a wider (pagan) religious context via a libidinally material - but nevertheless sacred - practice of healing and rebirth.  

 

But hey, I'm not her editor ... 

 

 

IX.

 

Moving toward the end of her fourth and final chapter, Yao repeats the claim that Lawrence attempts to "cross boundaries of human domain in time and space through the lived experience of love" (111) and whilst that's  not a sentence I could ever imagine writing personally, I suppose for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like (although I have no idea what it means to "explore the transcendental dimension of utopia" (111-112)). 

 

Perhaps a Lawrence scholar can enlighten me on this point. And perhaps they can also confirm or deny the truth of this claim made by Yao: "Lawrence optimistically believes that utopia can ultimately be achieved triumphantly, and he consequently always concludes his stories with consummation and revelation." (112)  

 

I see that with The Rainbow - but not with his other novels. In fact, I had always thought that Lawrence was known (and often criticised) for leaving his works with open-ended, ambiguous, or inconclusive endings, thereby avoiding the conventional, neat resolutions typical of Victorian literature. Even Lady C. ends a little droopingly with the lovers separated and who's to say they will ever be reunited or that Mellor's will ever regain potency? 

 

 

X.    

 

In conclusion ...

 

For Sijia Yao, Lawrence is to be highly esteemed as a writer for developing an aesthetico-political project "in which love as an ethical feeling plays a crucial role in creating cosmopolitan connections" (117) and sharing with his readers a "vision of peace and freedom that can resist violent nationalism and hegemonic discourse" (117). 

 

She continues: Lawrence adopts love as his "mode of engagement with the multidimensional world" (117), because love, for Lawrence, "is a primal living force in its dynamic and undefinable state, which is tightly interconnected with utopia" (117) and it is the concept of utopia that "fulfills the possibility of a jump from personal love to cosmopolitan engagement" (117).   

 

Ultimately, I suppose whether one chooses to see Lawrence as a utopian or not depends on how one imagines his democracy of touch and how one interprets his injunction to climb down Pisgah. I agree with Yao that Lawrence's work has socio-political significance and philosophical import. But, unfortunately, she and I completely disagree as to the nature of this. 

 

Although, having said that, Yao nicely surprised me with the final paragraph in her book, in which she writes:

 

"While utopia itself would be a fixed state, the longing for utopia defines a particular relationship that leaves abundant space for possibilities. This mode of cosmopolitan love does not try to offer a solution but rather an attitude that welcomes a plasticity of the utopian vision." (122)

 

Now why didn't she say that at the beginning ...! 

 

 

Notes

 

[e] When it comes to the question of whether adultery is très moderne or actually anti-modern, Yao is very good: 

      "One can easily argue that adultery can be understood as a modern relationship because it dissolves traditional bonds. [...] However, adultery in Lawrence [...] is an antimodern relationship because the traditional bonds are themselves now modern forms of relationship that exclude love. The structure of modernity is still built upon the preexisting traditional norms [...] thereby breeding alienation and disconnection. Hence, the prevailing forms of relationship are so suffused with modern alienation that only adultery can be a pure form of love that opposes this alienation. Adulterous love surpasses, undermines, and destroys the existing order to set up an alternative basis for modern society." (69)  

 

[f] See, for example, my post titled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2023): click here.   

 

[g] This humorous remark made by Rawdon Lilly can be found in D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91.

      Even the narrator of Lady Chatterley's Lover is aware of the danger that Connie and Mellors will end up in a world of their own; see p. 213 of the Cambridge edition ed. Michael Squires (1993).  

 

[h] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), p.154.  

 

[i] Ibid., p. 155. 

 

[j] Ibid., pp. 157-158.

 

 

Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love: 

Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang 

 (University of Michigan Press, 2023) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

One of the books reviewed in the latest edition of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2025) is Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (2023) [b]. 

 

Written by Li Zhimin, a Distinguished Professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, it intrigued me enough that I decided I would read Yao's book for myself to discover if she really does misread Lawrence's project as much as indicated. 

 

For Lawrence - just to be absolutely clear at the outset - was not a utopian in the transcendent (and optimistic) sense that Yao argues and had no truck with cosmopolitanism if the latter is interpreted as a form of universal humanism. 

 

As for love, Lawrence absolutely rejects such when it is written with a capital 'L' and transformed into something grandiose and morally ideal; when it becomes diseased and insisted upon as the only thing that matters; when it becomes politicised and serves as a justification for violence, hatred, and authoritarianism. 

 

Even in his Chatterley writings, Lawrence prefers to speak of touch and tenderness rather than use the L-word and whilst he subscribes to a politics of desire, he ultimately thinks the transformation of society will require a new religious sensibility more than a sexual revolution and his democracy to come is, of course, an immanent utopia (now/here), existing in the bonds between people, not an ideal utopia (no/where) that "transgresses and transcends local, national, global, and even cosmic boundaries" (9).   

 

To his credit, Li does find flaws with Yao's study. But, unfortunately, he too seems to buy into the (Christian and Beatlesque) idea that all we need is love in order to "help the world become better" [c] and the human family achieve its collective maturity. 

 

 

II.    

 

As my knowledge of (and interest in) the Chinese-American author Eileen Chang is strictly limited, I'll not be commenting here on Yao's discussion of her work, nor the nature of the link made between Chang's writings and those of Lawrence, as all such comparisons are, if not exactly odious, then often questionable, even when adopting a third term methodology [d].   

 

Yao opens her Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love with the following line: "Love as a feeling is universal" (1) and normally that would be enough for me to immediately close a book. For even if this is factually correct from a bio-anthropological viewpoint, the expression of love is, of course, determined by language, history, culture, etc. (as I'm sure Yao knows; speaking immediately afterwards of Chinese love and Western love as distinct traditions). 

 

Nonsensical phrases casually dropped into the Introduction such as "it stirs one's spiritual being" (11) are also problematic and usually book-closing for me, but, in this case, I'm determined to press on and "pursue the true meaning" (11) of a text which promises to "restore [Lawrence's] literary glory" (14) and address the problems of today.  

 

 

III.

 

According to Yao, "in imagining how love breaks down preexisting orders and creates alternative utopian realities" (25) Lawrence divides love into four forms, "each corresponding to different phases of an ideal subject's maturity: parental, sexual, adulterous, and transcendental" (25-26). 

 

She then explains how she traces the subject progressing through these four separate phases, transforming their relationships in the process, as they move toward cosmoplitan love as she understands it. Thus the four phases also structure her book: beginning with chapter 1, in which the love of a child for its parents is transformed into sexual love for a non-familial other; a topic Yao discusses with reference to Freud's Oedipus complex and the question of incest. 

 

I'll take a brief look at this and the following two chapters - which illustrate how Lawrence used his model of eroticised philosophy to challenge nationalism and modernisation within a secular society - before then examining the fourth and final chapter in a little more detail, as this is the one I think will most interest (and infuriate), dealing as it does with Lawrence's creation of an "alternative language of divine love to render secular existence transcendentally meaningful" (29) and allowing lovers to enter a "mysterious dimension of utopia" (29).

 

 

IV. 

 

The argument of chapter one is essentially this: cosmopolitan love = good; incestuous desire = bad. And as the incest prohibition is "the foundation of cosmopolitan love" (32) - as well as that which also provides "the framework of all morality" (32) - it is also unquestionably in need of enforcement; human culture depends on it. 

 

This sounds very Freudian, but, actually, Yao wants to reverse certain aspects of Freud's thinking on this issue, arguing that whilst he wishes to see incest as "conforming to a universal Oedipal dynamic that originates from children" (33), Lawrence, in Sons and Lovers (1913), correctly identifies parents and the local culture as the "main drivers of incestuous desire" (33); an idea he later develops in his two books on the unconscious.     

 

I'm more than happy to be convinced by what Yao says here. It's certainly the case that, whilst influenced by Freud, Lawrence was no Freudian and vehemently rejected the psychoanalytic interpretation of his work. As Deleuze and Guattari recognise, Lawrence is fundamentally anti-Oedipus.    

 

 

V. 

 

Chapter two - 'Sexual Love as Public Defiance' - argues that there's a radical politics of desire; one capable of not only liberating the subject (particularly the female subject), but challenging ideas surrounding class and race, debunking prejudice and social convention, etc.

 

So nothing very new - and it's as if Foucault never lived! 

 

Yao's reading of The Virgin and the Gipsy is untenable, naive, and cliché-ridden; a young woman, stifled by false morality and a corrupt social order, sets out on a quest to discover her "primal selfhood" (54), the climactic flood at the stories end symbolising the unleashing of her "primitive desire" (54) and sexual awakening.    

 

Yvette is a woman transformed - a woman empowered - a woman in love! Because this is not just an erotic tale in which a randy passing gipsy deflowers the vicar's daughter, it's a utopian love story and a subversive (anti-English, post-colonial) cultural expression. Oh, and it's a rejection of the patriarchy and sexually objectifying male gaze too.  

 

Yao concludes her second chapter thusly:

 

"If the critique of incestuous love described in chapter 1 represents the struggle to break the shackles of an oppressive and immoral family culture, the affirmation of sexual love finds a way to reach a realm of freedom that is briefly achieved through a utopian moment that coincides with the cosmopolitan transcendence of national boundaries." (68) 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This 172 page text is available to purchase in hardback and paperback formats from the usual outlets, but is also freely available online as an open access book, thereby generously allowing anyone to read, download, or share it: click here to access via JSTOR. All page numbers given in this post refer to this work. 

      The author, Sijia Yao, is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America (a private liberal arts college based in California).      

 

[b] See 'Sijia Yao, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang, reviewed by Li Zhimin', in the JDHLS, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), ed. Jane Costin (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society, Eastwood, Notts.), pp. 202-206.  

 

[c] Li Zhimin, ibid., p. 205. 

      The good professor goes on to explain that when love triumphs, "people from different interest groups would be more ready to recognise each other's family values" (205-06) and live according to the rule of law within a rational political framework. Humanity, Maturity, and Family (HMF): these are the (Kantian) key terms and fundamental values of his own utopian vision; see chapter 12 of his book written in collaboration with Daniel Braun, China Being Led and Leading: A Literary and Cultural Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), pp. 151-162.  

 

[d] See the section on comparative methodology in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love, pp. 19-25.   

 

 

This post continues in part two (sections VI-X): click here.  

On Spinoza's Four Great Disciples

Les quatre grands disciples de Spinoza

(Nietzsche - Lawrence - Kafka - Artaud)

 

I. 

 

Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have never read and about whom my knowledge is extremely limited: I know, for example, that he was a 17th-century Dutch thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin and a founding figure of the Enlightenment who preferred to earn his living as a lens grinder, rather than accept an academic post that might compromise his intellectual independence. 

 

I also know that he rejected the idea of free will and divine judgement and argued for a kind of pantheistic monism (i.e., the belief that God and Nature are one and the same identical and infinite substance). Such thinking made him a controversial figure at the time and and a thorn in the side of the religious authorities. 

 

Finally, I know that Deleuze was a great admirer; that Spinoza was the thinker who provided him with the basis for his own work on immanence and encouraged a joyful affirmation of life free from belief in a world beyond, or tedious moral concepts that always terminate in judgement and punishment.  

 

For Deleuze, Spinoza was le prince de philosophes and he had four great heirs or disciples: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kakfa, and Artaud [1]. The question that interests me here, however, is not how or why Deleuze arrives at this conclusion, but what did each of these four think of the renegade Jew who gave us modernity ...? [2]

 

II.  

 

Let's work backwards and begin with Artaud, who, as far as I'm aware, never mentioned Spinoza in his writings, suggesting that the link between the two is something formed almost exclusively in Deleuze's philosophical imagination. 

 

Deleuze (and Guattari) may like to think of Spinoza's Ethics (1667) as anticipating Artaud's notion of the body without organs, but that's not something that ever occured to the French dramatist who introduced the world to the theatre of cruelty. 

 

Indeed, according to one scholar, Artaud's work is ultimately incompatible with Spinoza's rationalism [3]. For whereas Artaud aims to liberate libidinal energy and resist the body's rational organ-isation, Spinoza, in contrast, wished to perfect man via reason and an active form of knowledge. Both spoke about joy and passion, but each conceived such terms in radically different ways.    

 

 

III. 

 

Unlike Artaud, Franz Kafka apparently did acknowledge his indebtedness to Spinoza - even if he didn't do so in his published writings - considering him a spiritual mentor during his younger years when part of an intellectual circle in Prague which often discussed the Dutchman's work [4].

 

Kafka was particularly interested in Spinoza's notion of an indifferent deity; i.e., one who was blind to the suffering of humanity. This idea shaped Kafka's construction of an amoral fictional universe in which there is ultimately no justice, despite all the mechanisms of law and order put in place by mankind.      

 

 

IV.

 

Amusingly, one commentator has described Lawrence as a "sort of sexy Spinozist" [5], which I think is pushing things a bit too far, even if it's fair to say that Lawrence's own thinking does align in certain key aspects with Spinoza's philosophy. 

 

For example, Lawrence's model of pantheism which insists that God exists only in bodies; or his concept of blood-knowledge, which has echoes of Spinoza's intuitive science (a third way of knowing beyond imagination and reason which allows one to grasp the essence of things and experience a sense of blessedness or oneness with the universe).     

 

But again, as with Kafka and Artaud, there is hardly a mention of Spinoza in any of Lawrence's writings; the only one I can recall from memory is in the short prose piece 'Books' in which he dismisses him as another of those philosophers who, like Kant, only thought "with his head and his spirit" (and never with his blood) [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche  ... 

 

And finally we find actual written references to Spinoza that we are able to cite, such as the postcard sent to his friend Franz Overbeck in the summer of 1881, in which Nietzsche expresses his astonishment and delight at having found a precursor - i.e., someone in whose work he recognises himself, even if, due to differences in time and culture, there remained certain important points of divergence [7]. 

 

In the Genealogy (II.15), meanwhile, Nietzsche acknowledges Spinoza's insight into (and the need to overcome) traditional moral concepts. Material found in his notebooks from this period also show Nietzsche turning to Spinoza for ideas, particularly concerning the transformation of knowledge into a passion. 

 

Ultimately, Nietzsche saw in Spinoza someone who was able to think beyond good and evil - someone who scorned the teleological fantasy that the universe had some ultimate goal, or that man possessed free will.

 

Having said that, however, it's also true that Nietzsche viewed his own concept of will to power as superior and more radical than Spinoza's insistence that life strove above all for its own preservation. And in his mature (some might say mad) Dionysian phase, it's hard to believe that Nietzsche would have had much time for Spinoza's defence of reason as the essential human faculty leading to freedom.       

 

 

VI.

 

In sum: whilst Deleuze isn't simply joking or trying to be provocative by grouping together Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as disciples of Spinoza, we need to take this idea with a pinch of salt and remember that none of the above saw themselves as such. 

 

Essentially, Deleuze was highlighting a number of conceptual connnections between them which might otherwise go unnoticed. He was probably also attempting to make Spinoza more relevant to a contemporary readership and, perhaps, inseminate Spinoza with his own ideas. 

 

Thus, it might be best to think of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud, and Deleuze himself as a line of thinkers who share common ground with Spinoza, but are not followers per se (more like fellow travellers); artist-philosophers who above all else want to have done with judgement.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Sith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135. 

      According to Deleuze, it was not Kant but Spinoza who, in breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, carried out a true critique of judgement and had "four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (126). 

 

[2] This description was coined by the American philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein and formed the subtitle of her biographical study Betraying Spinoza (Random House, 2006). 

 

[3] See Jon K. Shaw, 'Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud from Deleuze's Spinoza', in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Edinburgh University Press, May 2016), pp. 162-185. 

      As Shaw writes in the Abstract to this essay, "much of Artaud's metaphysics is incompatible with Deleuze's Spinozism, not least the relation between a body and its constitutive outside, and the questions of affect and expression": click here. 

 

[4] In the absence of direct references to Spinoza in Kafka's writings, we have to rely on biographical studies and scholarly analysis to confirm the latter's interest in (and sense of kinship with) the former. I'm not sure I'd speak of parallel destinies between the two, however, although that's the argument put forward by Carlos García Durazo in his essay on Medium (24 Oct 2024): click here. 

 

[5] See Mattie Colquhoun, 'Rainbows: From D. H. Lawrence to the NHS', on Xenogothic (23 Dec 2020): click here.  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Books', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 198. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck (30 July, 1881). It can be read (in English translation) on The Nietzsche Channel: click here. 

      It is interesting to note that Nietzsche doesn't simply identify with Spinoza because of certain shared ideas, but also because the latter was, due to his radicalism, very much a maligned and marginalised figure in his own day (much as Nietzsche felt himself to be in modern Germany). 

      It is also important to remember that Nietzsche's understanding of Spinoza was mostly based on his reading of secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer's highly influential six-volume study Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ['History of Modern Philosophy'] (1854-1877). 

      See Andreas Urs Sommer, 'Nietzsche's Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer', in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn, 2012), pp. 156-184. This essay is available on JSTOR: click here.