All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Símón appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.  

The Blue Boy Will Never Die: On Fear, Fashion and Immortality

Gainsborough: The Blue Boy (c.1770)

According to D. H. Lawrence, the northern consciousness is gripped by a fear - almost a horror - of the body, especially in its sexual implications. This naturally has a detrimental effect on the plastic arts which "depend entirely on the representation of substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies". 

Thus, whilst English painters are very good at painting people hidden away inside their clothes, they daren't handle the living flesh that lies beneath; the social persona becomes more important than the actual man or woman.      

This may of course contain an element of truth. But isn't it also possible, as Cioran suggests, that what really terrifies is not the body in its erotico-libidinal aspect, but the body as an object prone to disease, ageing and death; that, ultimately, clothes don't serve to get between us and life in all its naked beauty, but us and nothingness ...    

"Look at your body in a mirror: you will realise you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs [...] and you will see how close you are to the grave." 

Maybe that's why Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough et al cared so much about painting subjects in all their finery; not simply because they were bourgeois - and not in order to deny the "gleam of the warm procreative body" - but because it's only when he has his glad rags on that man is able to entertain ideas of immortality: how can we die when we wear a pair of blue satin knee-breeches?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lawrence knows that it's not the sexual body so much as the diseased body that scares the pants on people, which is why he spends most of this essay discussing the cultural and psychological consequences of syphilis [click here for a discussion of this elsewhere on this blog]. He also knows the importance of clothes, even if, as here, he likes to think flesh as more important than fashion and imply that human nakedness has greater authenticity than our sartorial splendour.  

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section entitled 'Sartorial Philosophy' in chapter 6, 'Abdications'. 

Gainsborough's Blue Boy is quite clearly a costume study as well as a portrait; the shimmering blue satin of the clothes is rendered in a spectrum of cleverly calibrated tints and applied with a complexity of fine brush strokes. It's a picture in which Jonathan Buttall, the son a wealthy merchant, achieves his immortality. The work now hangs in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  

On Philosophy and Prostitution (Reflections on An Illicit Lover's Discourse)

Everything I know I learned in the School of Vice!

I.

Reading a fragment by Cioran in which he advises the philosopher who is "disappointed with systems and superstitions" to imitate the street savvy scepticism of that "least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute", reminded me of my own musings from long ago on this topic, collected as An Illicit Lover's Discourse ...    

II.

The aim of this short work, written many years ago and privately published (with a revised title) by Blind Cupid Press in 2010, was not to describe in detail the world of the Prostitute, but to examine the nature of the love affair that exists between her and her clients; for in this relation we discover much of the violence, obscenity, and poignancy of modern life.

The necessity for the book lay in the following consideration: the discourse of the Prostitute and her Illicit Lover was at that time openly displayed in every other central London phone box. This discourse, spoken and shared by thousands of amorous subjects, had received very little attention, scorned as it is by the languages of authority which, nevertheless, often share in its image-repertoire and sustain its stereotypes.

Essentially, I was hoping to indicate the manner in which some of the more frequently occurring myths upon which the pornographic imagination is founded are circulated by and within wider culture and reveal how legitimate discourses - of literature, fashion, and advertising, for example - frequently feed off and into the writings and images of the Prostitute.

The short fragments were written in relation to a large number of cards collected casually over a two-year period from phone boxes mostly in the Paddington and Soho areas of London, where they'd been conveniently placed by the Prostitute. To my mind, these cards constituted a populist and promiscuous medium and could be thought of as an obscene form of folk-art. Mushrooming in the fetid, urine-soaked environment of the phone box, they represented the public face of prostitution and were an affirmation of the Prostitute’s right to self-expression and self-promotion.

I made no attempt to establish any unity or development between the fragments. In fact, the only link between them was one of insistence and repetition; qualities which are of course inherent to pornography as a genre. Thus, as in the cards upon which they were based, the same words would appear over and over in the text, constructing the Prostitute not as a woman like any other, but as a symptomal subject of the pornographic imagination.

Some fragments broke off short; others contradicted something that had already been said elsewhere in the text. Ultimately, however, this was unimportant: the fragments were not meant to be taken too seriously and the success or otherwise of each depended on whether the reader was able to relate it to some aspect of their own experience and in this way be able to declare its truth.

If there was anything central to my assemblage of fragments, then, I suppose, it was the body of the Prostitute - although whether we can actually locate and reveal such is debatable. For the body of the Prostitute must not be thought of as a natural object just waiting to be discovered, but rather as a cultural construction in which is encoded a whole set of values: the shape, size, colour, age and all the ornamental attributes of the Prostitute’s body signify what we imagine illicit sexual desire and femininity to be. Thus the body of the Prostitute exposes our own fantasies.

Wishing neither to celebrate nor condemn the Prostitute, my affection for the figure as a woman who denies nothing and no one and lives beyond judgement, was fairly obvious throughout the text. Found in all places, all cultures, and all ages, the Prostitute is, paradoxically, someone who is forever at the margins of society and has abolished all history in her person. She is, in this manner, untimely.

And if this makes her philosophically interesting, then the manner in which she silently accepts the abuse of those who speak against her and call for her punishment makes her lovable in my eyes.

Notes

E. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section 'Philosophy and Prostitution' in chapter 1: 'Directions for Decomposition', pp. 81-82.

If I'd known of this text at the time of writing, I almost certainly would have referred to it. For what Cioran writes here is very close to my own position. I agree, for example, that the prostitute offers us a mode of behaviour which philosophers would do well to consider; detached and yet open to everything; lacking moral convictions and prejudices; quick to change position, etc. And, crucially, whores don't fuck between the bed-sheets ...   

Stephen Alexander, Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.

Melt: On the Transubstantiation of Love

Cover art for the single 'Melt!' by

Siouxsie and the Banshees 

(Polydor, 1982) 

"Are you familiar with the frightening sensation of melting", asks Cioran; "the feeling of dissolving into a flowing river, in which the self is annulled by organic liquidization?" 

Well, as a matter of fact, thanks to the British post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, I am ... 

The lovely song 'Melt!', released as a single from their fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, gave an interesting - some might say psychedelic - insight into the phenomenon way back in 1982.

The lyrics betray a decadent and delirious fascination with sex and death and some of the images have fetishistic overtones; the melting lover is handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm, before eventually being beheaded.        

Whilst it's tempting and certainly wouldn't be mistaken to discuss the song in relation to Baudelaire and Masoch - or the sleeve art with reference to Klimt - I think it just as legitimate (and in some ways more interesting) to refer to Cioran's astonishing first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934).

(Don't get me wrong: I love Flowers of Evil and Venus in Furs as much as the next man, but so much has already been written about these texts, that it's hard to offer any further insight. Cioran's work, on the other hand, is shamefully underdiscussed and undervalued. Indeed, much of it is hardly known in the English-speaking world, even by people who thrill to similar authors, such as Bataille and Blanchot, for example.)    

Like the Banshees, Cioran eroticises the notion of melting, or what Barthes would describe as the body's liquid expansion and include crying as well as ejaculating. For love, writes Cioran, "is a form of intimate communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation".   

Although he seems to regard sex as marginal to the irrationality of love, Cioran concedes that you cannot conceive of the latter without the former and insists that there's no spiritual love between the sexes; "only a transfiguration of the flesh" via which lovers identify themselves so intensely with one another that they create an illusion of spirituality.

Only at this point does the sensation of melting occur: "the flesh trembles in a supreme spasm, ceases resistance, burning with inner fires, melting and flowing, unstoppable lava". In other words, it's a form of suicide in sex, as Siouxsie sings.

Notes

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992). I'm quoting from sections entitled 'Weariness and Agony' and 'On the Transubstantiation of Love', pp. 16-17 and 84. 

Play: Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Melt!', from the album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (Polydor, 1982): click here.

This post is in (mostly) fond memory of Gillian Hall.

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.    

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on the Bath of Fire and Becoming-Ash

Phoenix design by Stephen Russ for the cover of Penguin's 

unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960) 

According to D. H. Lawrence, unless the individual is willing to be dipped into oblivion and made nothing, then they will never really change. For like the phoenix, we renew our youth only when we are burnt down to hot and flocculent ash.

Interestingly, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran thinks along similar lines when it comes to the question of how best to achieve one's immortality - with the latter conceived in terms of immaterial purity (a synonym for nothingness).

In his astonishing first work - written whilst still only 22 years of age - Cioran speaks of the bath of fire which "purifies so radically that it does away with existence". Its scorching flames set one's very being ablaze, until, finally, one has become-ash.

In a moving final passage, he asks: "when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience?" There is, he confesses, "both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world".

Thus, unlike the vitalist Lawrence, the nihilist Cioran feels no need to imagine himself rising from the ashes like some mythical bird, with bright new feathers. For him, the passing into death isn't any kind of triumph, nor a preliminary to a new and better life.

Having said that, even Cioran allows himself to occasionally dream of a world that is transfigured by the bath of fire, rather than simply reduced to ruin:     

"If I could [...] I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. [...] In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be imminent in life." 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Phoenix', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), see the sections entitled 'The Bath of Fire' and 'The World and I'. 

This post is dedicated to my beautiful friend, the artist Heide Hatry, who knows more than most about becoming-ash. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-animal, should click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Man's Becoming-Animal

Helmo: from the Bêtes de Mode series (2006)

I. Becoming All the Animals in Turn. 

Sick and tired of well-domesticated modern men like her husband, the female protagonist of Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr (1925), ponders if there mayn't be something else to marvel at in men besides "'mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness'" and that perhaps this something else is animality. 

Her mother, however, is unconvinced by this idea and imagines that her daughter secretly desires a caveman to club her over the head and carry her away. Angered that her suggestion has been misinterpreted as a vulgar rape fantasy, Lou responds:

"'Don't be silly, mother. That's much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind! I don't consider the caveman is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. [...] He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves."

Mrs. Witt, unnerved by this, argues that whatever else such a combination of man and beast would be, he'd certainly be dangerous. Lou, angry now with her mother, replies that be that as it may, she'd still rather live in a world of animal-men that one full of tame and humble half-men who are merely sentimental and spiteful.     

II. Not to Be a Man Anymore

Of course, D. H. Lawrence isn't the only writer to dream of man's becoming-animal, or, indeed, becoming-plant. So too does the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. In his first book, for example, published just ten years after Lawrence's St. Mawr, he writes these rather lovely lines:

"I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man. [...] If I could, I would choose every day another form, plant or animal, I would be all the flowers one by one: weed, thistle or rose [...] Let me live the life of every species , wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure."

But it's important to note that Cioran isn't looking to escape from or abandon his humanity once and for all, so much as to make it seem a newly attractive option once more:

"Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again."    

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-62, and E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 68-69. 

Note: Helmo is a French design studio established by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez. In the Bêtes de Mode project, they collaborated with Thomas Dimetto to produce a series of double-exposure photographs of man and beast, exhibited at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris, (2006). To see more of these images, click here. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-ash, should click here. 

On the Anguished Lyricism of E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!

I.

From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...

Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.    

Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion. 

After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.      

Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.  

II. 

The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:

"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."

I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.

Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.  

For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression. 

Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:

"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."

As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.

I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).