Sid Vicious Versus the Crucified

Sid Vicious Versus the Crucified 

(SA/2024) [1]

The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; 

Sid Vicious on his motor-bike is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn 

and return again from destruction.

 

 

I.

 

Can it really be forty-five years ago yesterday that Sex Pistol Sid Vicious died, aged twenty-one, from acute intravenous narcotism? 

 

It may seem hard to believe, but time flies and it's absolutely the case that Sid departed this world in the early hours of February 2nd, 1979.

 

 

II. 

 

There's really not much more to say about a death of which so much has already been written. 

 

Besides, I'm not one who mourns or regrets Sid's martyrdom; for his was what we might term a necessary death; fatal in the originary sense of the term and one which secured his tragic status. 

 

It's important to realise that punk was - despite its nihilism and apparent morbidity - a form of thanksgiving and an affirmation of life; that Sid, as its highest representative (i.e., its one true star), was not just a drug-addicted loser, but an ecstatically overflowing spirit who redeemed the contradictory and questionable nature of rock 'n' roll.   

Christ on his Cross counts as an objection to life in its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence. But Sid on his motorbike was a spiky-haired Dionysus who affirmed life whole and not denied or in part - even in its most destructive and terrible aspects.

 

As Nietzsche writes:

"One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it." [2]

 

In sum: Christ on his Cross places a curse on life; but Sid on his motorbike - or singing on stage at the Olympia, Paris [3] - is a promise that life will be eternally reborn from destruction.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The iconic image of Sid on his motorbike is from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980): click here. Christ Crucified is an oil painting by Velázquez (1632), located in the Prado Museum, Madrid.  

 

[2] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 1052, pp. 542-543. I'm essentially paraphrasing this section throughout this post. 

 

[3] See the post published on 13 October 2018: click here. 

 

Amethyst: Brief Reflections on My Birthstone and Dionysian Philosophy

All things at the end of time become amethyst ...

 

Amethyst is a violet-coloured variety of quartz; i.e., a hard crystalline mineral made from silica (SiO2). It owes its beauty - as do most things - to its imperfections; namely, impurities of iron and the presence of other trace elements, including, if Remy Belleau is to be believed, a few drops of sacred wine [1].

 

It's also, according to astrologers, my birthstone. Which is somewhat awkward for a Dionysian philosopher, as the English name derives from the Hellenistic Greek term amethystos [αμέθυστος], meaning unintoxicated (a reference to the belief that wearing the semi-precious stone protected its owner from drunkenness). 

 

However, it's important to remember that even Nietzsche - the major disciple of Dionynsus in the modern world - doesn't approve of piss-heads, placing alcohol alongside Christian morality as one of the two great European narcotics and who, for the most part, drank only water, preferring as he did to keep both a clear-head and a cool-head (as I do).

 

Ultimately, whilst Nietzsche admired the transfiguring power of intoxication, he strongly recommended that all spiritual natures abstain from alcohol and he didn't sacrifice human reason in the name of a wild irrationalism. Throughout his writings, cognitive activity is itself conceived as a drive of some kind, or even a form of passion; the will to make an intrinsically chaotic world intelligible and thus a world we might inhabit with a degree of security. 

 

And, for Nietzsche, whilst not denying the ecstatic element of the Dionysian experience, the god speaks differently to him: he speaks of this world (as the only world); of love as an earthly reality and of the eternal delight of existence in all of its aspects (even the most terrible) [2].

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] In his poem L'Amethyste, ou les Amours de Bacchus et d'Amethyste, 16th-century French poet Remy Belleau invents a myth in which Bacchus - the Roman version of Dionysus - was pursuing a maiden named Amethyste, who refused his affections and called on Diana to safeguard her chastity. This the goddess did by transforming Amethyste into a pure white gemstone. Impressed by the girl's determination to remain chaste, Bacchus pours wine over her new mineral form as an offering, thereby staining the crystal purple.  

 

[2] In a note from 1888, for example, Nietzsche writes: 

 

"Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. [...] Such an experimental philosophy [...] wants [...] a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection - it wants the eternal circulation: the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence - my formula for this is amor fati."

 

See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), Book Four, Pt. II, §1041, p. 536. 

 

 

Nietzsche: All the Names in History

Friedrich Nietzsche (2014) by Don Mirakl

deviantart.com

I.

Whether we describe Nietzsche's anti-Christian and transhumanist late philosophy as Dionysian or schizoanalytic, it all comes down to the same thing: the shattering of the ego.

For the sovereign individual is not one who narcissistically and solipsistically proclaims themselves the big I AM - as if they were the great be-all and end-all - but one happy to declare themselves all the names in history ...

A declaration which, at the molecular level of atoms, is literally true - even if, for some readers, it's also a clear indication of Nietzsche's leap into madness (that mask which hides the most fatal of all certainties).


II.

For Nietzsche, the question of identity is, then, of fundamental importance. Thus his obsession with masks and with the processes by which one becomes what one is (subjectivation).

Refusing any grammatical fiction or essential model of self, he stamps becoming with the character of being. Which is to say, Nietzsche thinks being in terms of a chaotic and competing diversity of elements; a primordial affectivity that he calls the will to power. 

Indeterminable as it is, Dasein is free to assume an infinite variety of forms - including that of a dancing star or a Caesar with the soul of Christ - once it has been given style; the latter being Nietzsche's term for the manner in which knowledge and art are able to harmonize forces without reactively seeking to repress or eliminate those that moralists find troubling or sinful (the pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, etc).

For when affirmative and strong, the will to power takes upon itself not only difference and plurality, but evil. When negative and weak, however, it retreats behind an anaemic ideal of goodness as conceived by those who lack the ability to master their inner chaos and wish to speak but a single truth with one voice and in the name of one Love ...