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. 

 

 

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

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

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

 

II. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

III. 

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

 

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

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

On Answering the Call of the Void

Can You Resist the Call of the Void? (SA/2025)

Based on Ernst Stückelberg's painting of Sappho (1897) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Apparently, the urge to jump when atop a high building, such as the Eiffel Tower, is not limited to rock 'n' roll puppets in a band called Bow Wow Wow [2], but is a fairly common phenomenon known (rather poetically) as the call of the void ...

 

 

II.

 

Usually, it's a violently intrusive thought that passes as quickly as it comes and is not regarded as a sign of any underlying suicidal tendencies. In fact, it may be the brain's way of telling you not to jump; to recognise the danger of your situation and step back from the edge. 

 

 

III. 

 

Philosophers, of course - particularly those who have taken seriously Nietzsche's injunction to live dangerously - don't always care what their brain tells them. 

 

They know that "the secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment" [3] involves sending ships into unchartered seas, building cities on the slopes of a volcano, and daring to leap into the void when the moment to do so is right.

 

Empedocles knew this [4]. And Deleuze knew this [5] ...     

 

 

IV.

 

The void, of course, is another one of those ideas in philosophy that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. But it's probably in the modern sense that most people think it today; i.e., in relation to existential nihilism. 

 

The key thing, however, is not take it too negatively: the void might even be seen as a space of potential; not just of nothingness. It's absence that makes the heart grow fonder and which allows for the emergence of new thoughts and feelings, the creation of new values and concepts. 

 

The void is also the space of forgotten possibilities, where abandoned paths can be rediscovered, allowing for different interpretations of the past (interpretations that might then be projected into the future, so that we might in this way live yesterday tomorrow). 

 

Our artist friends often insist on the importance of what they call negative space - something that is crucial for giving form and structure to what exists. 

 

And scientists too are increasingly persuaded of the importance of the quantum vacuum - a void filled with fluctuating energy and mad particles, from which the universe itself may have emerged.   

 

So, whilst I'm not encouraging any one to jump off a tall building, I think it's worth acknowledging that the call of the void is more than what psychologists say it is, i.e., a slightly odd phenomenon not linked to actual intentions, so not worth paying too much attention to.

  

The call of the void - like the call of the wild - is, in fact, a vital experiential reality.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The Ancient Greek poet Sappho is perhaps best known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. That, and her sexuality - although her lesbianism is much disputed amongst scholars and there is no documentary evidence to conclusively indicate her preference when it came to lovers. 

      (In classical Athenian comedy, she was often portrayed as promiscuoulsy heterosexual; the earliest surviving sources to explicitly identify Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period, although such modern terms, of course, would have been meaningless to the ancient Greeks and one does wonder whether projecting lesbianism on to a figure like Sappho is anything other than an ideological move motivated by queer-feminist politics.) 

       According to legend, Sappho killed herself by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon; a story related to a myth about the goddess Aphrodite and one that is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars.

 

[2] I'm referring to Annabella Lwin, lead vocalist with Bow Wow Wow, and their track 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' on Your Cassette Pet (EMI, 1980), an eroticised tale of teen suicide involving a leap from the sexiest building left: click here to play. 

      

[3] Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 283, p. 228.

      

[4] The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles famously threw himself into the lava and flames of Mount Etna and his death has been mythologised by writers and artists ever-since. Whether he believed that this would guarantee his immortality or not, the fact is that his name lives on to this day. The Roman poet Horace refers to the death of Empedocles in his work Ars Poetica and suggests that great thinkers have not only the right, but almost a duty, to destroy themselves. 

 

[5] Deleuze committed suicide on 4 November 1995 by jumping from the window of his apartment in Paris. He was suffering from increasingly severe respiratory problems that made even simple tasks difficult (including writing, though I'm not sure we can describe that as a simple task). 

      Whether his surrendering to the call of the void marked a loss of desire on his part, however, is debatable; it could be that his decision to terminate his own individual existence was a way of affirming life and thus indicates a final resurgence of vitality. In other words, his suicide might be seen as a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering. 

      See the post entitled 'Three French Suicides' (31 Jan 2024) in which I discuss Deleuze's death in relation to the deaths of Olga-Georges Picot and Christina Pascal (both of whom also answered the call of the void): click here.  

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.  

 

 

Punk History is for Pissing On: Notes on PZ77 by Simon Parker

PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022) 

by Simon Parker

 

'Ah, those days... for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. 

Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Conceived, designed, narrated, and edited by Simon Parker - and published by an independent co-operative he established in 1996 to celebrate and promote contemporary Cornish writing - PZ77 is "a unique story of time, place, friendship, community, and an almost obsessive passion for making music" [2]. 

 

The book features more than ninety personal accounts, across 392 pages, from old punks like himself who grew up in a place "others came for their holidays" (Penzance) [3].      

 

It's not the kind of book I would normally read (for reasons we'll come to shortly). 

 

However, as a 40 page extract from the work - the first five tracks - is the chosen text for discussion by the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) [4] this coming week - a group with which I'm associated - I thought I'd take this opportunity to assemble (and share) some thoughts in advance ...

 

 

II. 

There are, as Russ Bestley reminds us, now hundreds of books on punk in the mid-late 1970s, and it sometimes feels as if everyone and their dog who was in any way connected to the scene has now had their say on the subject or shared their memories of the time. 

 

For those over a certain age, punk nihilism has now given way to punk nostalgia; the chaos of a life lived blissfully in the moment (now/here) has been replaced with a comforting and conformist vision of the past. 

 

In other words, instead of going with the flow of events and strange becomings that carry them beyond the constraints of a fixed identity, many old punks now prefer to relive the past as best they can at the Rebellion Festival [5] and produce narratives which reinforce the mythology of punk by "re-articulating variations of the same story, often through a nostalgic lens centred on personal experience and memories" [6].  

 

 

III.   

To be fair to Parker, PZ77 might be read as an attempt to give a voice to many punk fans whose stories and memories of the time might otherwise have gone unrecorded, thereby expanding our understanding of punk (certainly as it unfolded in Corwall in 1977).  

 

As Bestley rightly points out, "punk's standard narrative has become so deeply embedded, its cultural and historical position so neatly summarized, that there is a desperate need for alternative perspectives that might sustain a sense of engagement and highlight new contributions to knowledge within a tired and over-familiar field of study" [7]. 

 

However, from what I've read of the work, I don't like it ... 

 

And the reason I don't like it is because, as a Deleuzian - and as a member of the extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars [8] - I don't like writing that attempts to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience and I don't like writing that is merely a form of personal overcoding; i.e., an opportunity for an author to give whatever it is they write about a familiar face that somehow resembles their own. 

 

Any form of writing that is heavily reliant upon the recounting of youthful memories is usually not only bad writing but dead writing; for as Deleuze says, literature dies from an excess of autobiography just as surely as from an overdose of emotion or imagination [9].   

 

Rather than transport us away from Oeidpal structures towards a zone of indiscernibility where we might lose ourselves, PZ77 attempts to take us back to a better time where we might rediscover our passions and dreams, renew old friendships, etc. 

 

Whereas I still believe in the ruins, Parker believes in building a sense of community. The interviews with participants in his project indicate a level of acceptance that punk has become part of mainstream culture; nice people, performing nice gestures, and leading nice lives, etc. 

 

 

IV. 

Ultimately, I was never going to like a book written by an obsessive Ramones fan: they may have been Sid's favourite band, but they were never my favourite band. 

 

And whereas Parker, a grammar school boy from a Methodist fishing village who likes to see the good in people is, by his own admission, "always thinking about music" [10], I don't care about the music; to paraphrase Malcolm, if punk had just been about the music it would have died a death long ago.   

  

It's his best mate, Grev Williams, however, who really irritates me. Thinking back to the Summer of Hate, he ponders just how important the period was to him: 

 

"Punk bursting into our lives was hugely invigorating and inspiring [...]  but I'd be lying if I said I found any expression of my inner self in it [... and] the idea that I was revolting against my background and community would be wholly false. I was blessed with the strength of knowing where I came from, I didn't want to smash it up - I loved it. Punk wasn't a spit-filled, nihilist cul-de-sac for me, it was a launch pad. As a budding musician it provided opportunities and informed my attitude, not my taste. [...] Anyway, long story short and truth be told, I didn't hate or revolt against much [...] [11]

 

Whilst aknowledging the benefit of his experiences in 1977, Williams has to ask himself whether he was ever really a 'punk': "As with so much, I'm really not sure." [12]

 

It's not, of course, my role to help him decide the matter. 

 

But I would say, given his confession above - every aspect of which (apart from his uncertainty) I find objectionable - that whilst he may or may not have been a punk, he was clearly not a Sex Pistol as I understand the term; i.e. in a manner largely shaped by McLaren's description in the Oliver Twist Manifesto (1977) - click here - and the ideas developed in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

I look forward to discussing this with other members of the SIG, including Russ Bestley [13]. 

 

However, I won't be buying a copy of Parker's PZ77. For those who like this sort of thing, as Miss Brodie would say, this is the sort of thing they like: but, for me, punk history is for pissing on ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] J. L. Carr, A Month In The Country (Harvester Press, 1980). 

      This quote was used as an epigraph to PZ77. It should be noted, however, that the narrator of the novel goes on to ask himself would he have always remained happy had he somehow been able to stay in the same time and place. And the answer is: "No, I suppose not."  

 

[2] I'm quoting here from the Scryfa website: click here. 

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] The Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) is an informal collective operating out of the University of the Arts London (UAL), concerned with what we might briefly describe as the politics of style and offering resistance to temporal colonisation; i.e., the imposition of a perpetual present in which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a future (or remember a past) that is radically different. 

      I have published several SIG-themed posts here on Torpedo the Ark, which can be read by clicking here.    

      

[5] For those who don't know, Rebellion is the biggest independently run punk festival in the UK, that takes place each summer in the historic Winter Gardens, Blackpool. I haven't been and I don't want to go to this family-oriented event which celebrates Punk in all its forms with the blessing of the local council. For further information, click here. 

 

[6] Russ Bestley, 'Going Through the Motions: Punk Nostalgia and Conformity', in Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2. (Intellect Books, 2021), pp. 179-196. 

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] This wonderful phrase was coined by Peter York to describe the denizens of 430 King's Road (i.e., the SEX people). It was used in his article 'Them' that appeared in Harpers & Queen (October 1976) and is cited by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329.

 

[9] See the post dated 30 August 2013 entitled 'A Deleuzean Approach to Literature' - click here. 

 

[10] Simon Parker, PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022), p. 11.

 

[11] Grev Williams quoted by Simon Parker in PZ77 ... pp. 38-39.

 

[12] Ibid., p. 41.

 

[13] Russ Bestley's own review of Simon Parker's PZ77 can be found in Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb 2023), p. 131 - 134. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to gain free access to this text online, so couldn't discuss it here.    

 

 

Yellow Yellow Blue: Notes on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in) 

Photo by Maria Thanassa

 

'You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then 

testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing - 

it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites.'  

                                                                                               - Megan Rooney

 

 

I. 

 

Sometimes you visit an exhibition because you know and admire the work of the artist and wish to be reassured of their genius and reconfirmed in the soundness of your past judgement and the continuity of one's aesthetic tastes.   

 

Sometimes, however, you visit an exhibition without any prior knowledge or formed opinion and in the hope that perhaps you'll discover something new not only about art, but about one's self ... 

 

And so to Thaddaeus Ropac, to see an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Megan Rooney entitled Yellow Yellow Blue ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Probably it was the title of the show that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue and in this body of work Rooney explores the chromatic territory that lies between yellow and blue (as well as the spectrum of green that emerges from mixing these two primary colours).   

 

Yellow I love for its emotional intensity (its joy, its vibrancy, its madness) [2]; blue for its profundity - for blue is the colour of the Greater Day and of the Void much loved by painters, poets, and philosophers; a colour which Christian Dior once described as the only one that can possibly compete with black, which remains the ne plus ultra of all colours [3]. 

 

But, having read the press release for the show, I was intrigued also to see how Rooney - said to be an enigmatic storyteller - manages to construct a dreamlike narrative indirectly referencing "some of the most urgent issues of our time" whilst also addressing "the myriad effects of politics and society that manifest in the home and on the female body" [4], simply by using colours, lines, shapes, and gestural marks on canvas in an almost entirely abstract manner.

 

For whilst I'm happy to accept that you can use purely visual elements to convey emotion or explore the formal qualities of painting as an art, I'm not entirely convinced (as a writer and philosopher) that you can adequately convey the kind of ideas mentioned above simply with such elements; ultimately, words - not colours - remain the primary tool for this. 

 

 

III. 

 

Located on the gallery's two floors, Yellow Yellow Blue presents pieces ranging from a dozen or so small works on paper (pretty enough, but not massively exciting) to large-scale (slightly overwhelming) canvases alongside a family of works in Rooney's signature wingspan format (i.e., equivalent to the full-reach of her outstretched arms). 

 

A bit like Goldilocks, I preferred these works; not too big, not too small, just right in size; for like D. H. Lawrence, I think it important that an artist acknowedge their limitations and the fact that they end at their finger-tips [5].

 

I liked the fact that Rooney clearly puts a LOT of work into what she does; constantly layering on paint, then sanding the works down and attempting to discover forms which might lie buried deep within the surface, before then slapping on more and more paint. 

 

By her own confession, Rooney often continues working on canvases right up until the opening; some seemed to be still wet in places and one could smell the canvases before even entering the room to view them - this was something else I also liked very much.   

 

Some works made one think of Monet and his water lilies and as I believe abstract impressionism is a thing, I don't think that's too crass or naive an observation [6]. Other works, because of their yellowness as an essential common feature, invariably made one think of Van Gogh. 

 

Still, as Rooney likes to talk of her paintings as having family connections - i.e., of being intimately connected to one another "as well as the lineage of paintings that precedes them" [7], I don't suppose she'll object to my seeing of similarities between her works and those of le dandy of impressionism and het gekke menneke of post-impressionism.  

 

 

IV. 

 

"Does anyone know, really, what a life is?" asks Emily LaBarge [8].    

 

As a reader of Deleuze, I suppose I could put my hand up and answer: Yes: a life is something inseparable from philosophy conceived in terms of pure immanence; something that has to be invented [9].   

But nobody likes a smart arse and I suppose it's essentially a rhetorical question - albeit one the answer to which just might lie in painting, according to LaBarge; an art form that captures something of temporal and spatial reality, even whilst painting does not quite belong to the same temporal and spatial reality of this world.  

Thus it is that: "As soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in [Rooney's paintings] - a copse of trees? a flurry of lilacs? a sunrise? a chimney? a rain-soaked evening? - it disappears ..."  

That's true - or at least, I think I know what Ms LaBarge means by this: All that is solid melts into light and colour, as Marx might have put it. 

 

The moment you grasp something concrete in Rooney's work, "it departs, skitters away, taking your heart with it, if only to throw it back to you [...] with the reminder that this image is also, first and formost, a painting: a made thing, worked and burnished [...] where luminous forms merge and fly like ghosts". 

 

And that's the beauty of abstract art; it doesn't just present on a plate like representational art - it gives, takes back, and gives once more - or, more precisely perhaps, it shows and hides and then shows some more in a provocative game of tease: It always seduces, always excites!

 

And if it fails to satisfy, that's arguably the point and it tells us something crucial not only about pleasure, but about the allure and withdrawal of objects in a way that a still life cannot.  

 

     

Megan Rooney photographed in her studio 

by Eva Herzog (2023)

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details. 

      See also Megan Rooney's page on ropac.net: click here, or visit her own website: megan-rooney.com   

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] I have written several posts on the colour blue in art and literature; click here, for example, for a post dated 1 April 2017 on Rilke's blue delirium; or click here, for a post dated 2 April 2017 on the work of Yves Klein.  

 

[4] From the exhibition press release written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press, Thaddaeus Ropac London).  

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985). pp.191-198. 

      Lawrence argues that every man or woman - artist, philosopher, poet, or scientist included - ends at their own finger-tips and that this is a simple, but profoundly vital, truth. We may draw sustenance and stimulation from outside ourselves - from sights and sounds and smells and ideas, etc. - and these may allow us to change, but it's the living body upon which these things act that remains the most important. 

      Rooney appears to share this view, which is why she (mostly) likes to keep her canvases roughly 200 x 152 cm in size; i.e., in relation to her own reach, her own body. Thus, as it says in the gallery's press release: "The body has a sustained presence in Rooney’s work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her [...] practice."   

 

[6] Abstract impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s, the term apparently being coined by the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning and then popularised by Louis Finkestein (initially to describe the works of Philip Guston). 

      I'm not sure Rooney would wish to be associated with the term, but there is something lyrical in her canvases and although resolutely abstract, her works "contain fleeting suggestions of recognisable forms [...] ladders, beehives, clouds, trees, skies and tombs weave through the exhibition, like fugitive glimpses of a half-dreamed world". Again, see the gallery press release by Nina Sandhaus available to download from the Thaddaeus Ropac website.

 

[7] Nina Sandhaus, press release for Yellow Yellow Blue.  

 

[8] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', written for the catalogue to Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). All lines quoted in this section of the post are from this text unless stated otherwise. 

      The title of the piece refers us to the possibility that if you squint hard enough and long enough at Rooney's large canvases you might just imagine, as LeBarge did, "Virginia Woolf's London as described by her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, on a fresh morning in spring [...] when everything seems [...] to be happening all at once, the past and present kaleidoscoping in a work of art".      

[9] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Pure Immanence: A Life', in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Intro. by John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2005). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - 'More Yellow, More Blue!' (29 June 2025), please click here.    

 

 

On Traversing the Excluded Middle

Andrew Weir: Excluded Middle (2019)

Acrylic paint on paper, 36 x 48 cm
saatchiart.com

 

Logicians to the left of me, Derrideans to the right, 

here I am, stuck in the excluded middle with you ... [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In classical logic, the law of the excluded middle (p ∨ ¬ p) states that either a proposition or its negation has to be true.

 

It is the third of the three great laws of thought upon which rational discourse is based; the other two being the law of identity - each thing is identical with itself - and the law of non-contradiction - propositions cannot both be true and false at the same time.

 

But such axiomatic rules don't really mean a great deal to me as someone who is happy to do their thinking in the moral no-go zone that is the excluded middle; i.e., the evil realm of fuzzy logic, dark limpidity, and what Nietzsche terms dangerous knowledge.

 

 

II. 

 

Similarly, as someone who privileges difference over identity and refuses to be haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction, I'm prepared also to cheerfully transgress the other two laws. For as I wrote in a post from a few years ago:

 

'Whether our analytic philosophers like to admit it or not, some forms of thinking rely upon daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. Our very greatest poets, for example, creatively affirm paradox and ambiguity; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves, that's because they contain multitudes.' [2]

  

One suspects that a good deal of the continued hostility aimed towards those who take a more continental approach to philosophy is that we see the latter as more of an art than a science (unless it be a gay science). Nothing enrages the Anglo-American mindset more than logical inconsistency and the idea that some feel free in the excluded middle to affirm the neither/nor and defy the spirit of gravity so that thinking becomes pleasurable.      

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: without wishing to explicity reject the law of the excluded middle, I don't support its rigid enforcement and, like Deleuze, see le milieu exclu as a zone in which becoming is stamped with the character of being and where not only do new possibilities emerge, but it is reasonable to demand the impossible.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing a lyric from the well-known song by the Scottish folk rock band Stealers Wheel entitled. 'Stuck in the Middle With You', written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan. It can be found on their eponymous debut album Stealers Wheel (A&M Records, 1972) - or played by clicking here. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...' (1 Oct 2021): click here. 

 

This post is for Bryan Kam who probably cares more - and certainly knows more - about this topic (and many others) than I do. London-based for the last 20 years, Kam studied English and Russian literature at Princeton and Cambridge, but is also widely read in both Western and Eastern philosophy. He regularly publishes work on Substack: click here. 

      According to Kam, the law of the excluded middle, born in Athens c. 350 BC, died in Amsterdam in 1908 at the hands of L. E. J. Brouwer. That might be true, but, unfortunately, even dead concepts can still retain an icy grip on our thinking.  

 

 

Who Is Stephen Alexander? A Guest Post by Sasha Thanassa

Stephen Alexander 

A Non-Selfie Selfie (2025) 

 

And how do you see yourself when looking in the bathroom mirror 

through someone else's eyes? 

 

 

I. 

 

Who (or what) is Stephen Alexander, the shadowy figure who blogs at Torpedo the Ark?

 

The multiple possibilities that he himself has playfully suggested in the past include: artist, anarchist, and antichrist; punk, pirate, poet, pagan ... More recently, he has declared himself to be a darkly enlightened philosopher-provocateur whose concerns are no longer with sex, style, and subversion, but more with silence, secrecy, and seduction. 

 

Using these and other terms that arise from within his own writings - as well as from the work of other figures to whom he often refers - I will attempt here to give a brief impressionistic sketch of someone who, like Foucault, neither wishes to self-identify as a unified subject nor feels obliged to remain forever the same [1].       

 

 

II.

 

Again, by his own admission, there are two names that have shaped Alexander's thinking above all others: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence; neither of whom he entirely embraces, but both of whom provide him with the critical weapons and crucial conceptual tools for the fight against moral idealism (i.e., the belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are the highest of values and fundamentally connected) and modern humanism (i.e., the belief that behind everything sits the kind and reasonable figure of Man).    

 

Working in the entrails of Nietzsche and Lawrence more like a postmodern haruspex than a forensic pathologist, Alexander has managed on Torpedo the Ark to produce an idiosyncratic (and intertextual) brand of fiction-theory that suspends the genre distinction between philosophy and literature [2]. 

 

Arguably, it is this mode of language and thought that has enabled him to move across other established categories and freely discuss an almost infinite variety of ideas, experiences, and events in a creative and profoundly superficial manner that is always alert to the play (and permissiveness) of language.  

 

III. 

Another name we might mention is that of Simon Solomon; more than a mere commentator on posts or a sometimes contributor, Solomon is a very real (often hostile) presence on Torpedo the Ark and a vital interlocutor. 

It's sometimes hard to tell whether Solomon is Alexander's shadow or vice versa; who's the Jekyll, who's the Hyde (or are they equally monstrous)? In queer ontological alliance - if there is such a thing -  Alexander and Solomon seem fated to remain the best of frenemies [3], each presumably drawing some benefit from their relationship, despite the mutual antagonism [4]. 

IV.

But isn't Alexander just another in a long line of reversed Platonists? 

Perhaps - but what's wrong with that? We need more not less such people. A reversed Plato may still be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a reversed Plato [5], but that's better than an unreversed Plato.

 

And besides, as Derrida indicated, the first task of deconstruction has to be reversal (i.e., the locating and overturning of oppositions within a text). That may not be enough in itself - a reversal is not the same as a revaluation - but it's a start on the road toward a new way of thinking.

 

And so, like Lawrence, Alexander encourages his reader to think in terms of immanence rather than transcendence and to climb down Pisgah [6]; to affirm appearances and the natural world of scarlet poppies rather than fantasise about a world above (and/or beyond) this one in which there are eternal white flowers and other Ideal Forms.   

And like Deleuze - another thinker whom Alexander often refers to - he perverts Plato by siding with the Sophists, the Cynics, the Stoics "and the fluttering chimeras of Epicurus" [7].  

 

 

V.

So, have I answered the question with which I opened this post? 

 

Probably not. 

 

Perhaps all I've done is refer to a number of proper names to whom Alexander himself often refers. But then, these proper names serve a crucial textual purpose and contain within them a series of associations (and connotations) that allow us to see how Torpedo the Ark unfolds within a much wider philosophical and literary history and an intertextual space. 

 

When Alexander refers to himself as a Lawrentian, for example, he's not identifying with Lawrence as an extratextual being, but evoking a certain style of thinking and writing.  

 

Using proper names is also, of course, a way of dispersing and disguising the self; like Nietzsche, Alexander wants to be able to declare himself all the names in history [8] - onymic ambiguity rather than unified authorial presence is his aim.  

 

Notes

 

[1] In his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault famously writes: "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." 

      See The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 17.

 -

[2] This has been a long time goal for Alexander; see the introduction to his PhD thesis Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

      Admittedly, he problematically writes here about dissolving lines of distinction, whereas in his later writings, influenced by Derrida, he speaks more about troubling (or curdling) these lines and concedes that the deconstructive objective is not the dissolving or permanent suspension of all oppositions, because, ultimately, they are structurally necessary to produce meaning.  

      

[3] The term frenemy - a portmanteau of 'friend' and 'enemy' - could have been invented for Alexander and Solomon, although Jessica Mitford claimed that it had been coined by one of her sisters when they were children for a particularly dull acquaintance; see her article 'The Best of Frenemies' in the Daily Mail (August 1977). It can also be found in her book, Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (NYRB Classics, 2010), or read online by simply clicking here.       

      

[4] Interestingly, Freud recognised that a close friend and a worthy enemy are equally indispensble to psychological wellbeing and have not infrequently been one and the same person. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Pelican / Penguin Books, 1964) p. 37.

 

[5] See Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 417-446, (The John Hopkins University Press, Autumn 1971), where she writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at every moment turn against itself, as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato ..." (435)

      A revised version of this can also be found in Thinking, the first volume of her two-volume posthumously published work The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary Mccarthy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-78). 

 

[6] See the essay by D. H. Lawrence 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229.

 

[7] Michel Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 346.

[8] In a letter to Jakob Burckhardt dated 6 January, 1889 (although postmarked January 5th), Nietzsche claims that by becoming every name in history, he (paradoxically) fights the reduction to anonymity and generality. 

      See his Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 346.

 

 

From Kant's Cave to Nietzsche's Kindergarten (Confessions of a Children's Entertainer)

Me in my role as a punk children's entertainer 

(c.1985)

 

Now watch closely little girl as I prick your red balloon 

with a safety pin ...

 

I. 

 

Last night I gave a short talk to the crowd gathered at Kant's Cave; a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All [1] and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster [2].

 

The paper addressed the question of what constitutes dark enlightenment [3], so perhaps not ideal material for "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats" [4] - or indeed young children. 

Nevertheless, I was delighted to discover that one of the people Zooming into the event was watching it accompanied by her precocious four-year-old son, who was equally fascinated by my public persona and appearance as he was by the contents of the paper itself:  

 

Mummy, why does he talk so fast? Why is he wearing such funny clothes? What's a zombie apocalypse?

 

 

II. 

 

Deleuze says that children are born philosophers or, more exactly, natural Spinozans; by which I think he means they instinctively know how to map real (rather than imaginary) trajectories and experiment with immediate (rather than representational) affects. 

 

That may or may not be the case. 

 

But what is undoubtedly true is that I should never have abandoned (my very short-lived) career as a punk children's entertainer in the mid-1980s, in order to become a failed artist and spectacularly unsuccessful poet-philosopher. 

 

For it seems I have a real knack for amusing little ones (and corrupting young minds in the manner of Socrates), whereas I have strictly limited talents as a grown up intellectual and adult educator. 

 

Not that I'm unhappy about this: for like Nietzsche, I think it is only by remaining a little childlike ourselves that we remain close also to the flowers, the grass, and to butterflies ... [5]

         

 

Notes

 

[1] Founded by Anja Steinbauer in 1998, Philosophy for All is an independent non-profit organisation that welcomes everyone with a love of wisdom - whatever their intellectual background or IQ - to attend its various events; walks, talks, film screenings, etc. Click here to visit the PfA website for full details.

 

[2] The Two Chairman is thought to be the oldest public house in Westminster and is housed in an 18th-century Grade II listed building in a part of Town at one time as notorious for cockfighting as political intrigue.        

 

[3] I published a four-part series of posts on dark enlightenment on Torpedo the Ark in July 2024: click here for part one, on the politics of hate; here for part two, on exiting the present; here for part three, on the zombie apocalypse; and/or here, for part four, on rejecting universalism. These four posts essentially formed the heart of the paper given at Kant's Cave.

[4] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 38, p. 102. 

 

[5] See Nietzsche writing in Human, All Too Human, Vol. II, Part 2 ('The Wanderer and His Shadow'), section 51.