Eros, Anteros, and the Angel of Christian Charity (Notes on the Shaftesbury Memorial)

No, that's my brother you're thinking of ...

I.

Located at the southeastern side of Piccadilly Circus, the Shaftesbury Memorial was erected in 1892–93 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Victorian do-gooder Lord Shaftesbury.

As Londoners and tourists from all over the world know, the bronze fountain is surmounted by a statue of Eros, the Ancient Greek deity of sexual desire. Only ... it isn't - Alfred Gilbert's famous sculpture actually depicts Anteros, younger brother to Eros and the god of requited love.

Admittedly, there's a strong family resemblance - both have wings and curled hair; both have a penchant for nudity and carrying a bow - but the fact that so many people are mistaken about the identity of the figure atop what is arguably London's most famous landmark is, I think, shocking and disconcerting.

For it makes one doubt everything else one thought one knew for certain - is that really Admiral Nelson, for example, at the top of the column in Trafalgur Square ...? (Some, such as Afua Hirsch, would obviously be delighted to discover that it wasn't.)      

II.

Whichever god it was, the use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial at the time of its construction and, following its unveiling by the Duke of Westminster on 29 June 1893, predictable complaints were made from all the usual quarters. The work was well-received by the general public, however, even if they mistook the identity of the figure cast in aluminium.  

Gilbert had already sculpted a statue of Anteros when commissioned to work on the Shaftesbury Memorial and, rather lazily, chose to knock out another version - if only because it gave him another opportunity to ask his 16-year-old studio assistant, Angelo Colarossi, to strip and pose for him; a handsome Anglo-Italian youth from Shepherd's Bush.

It was thought that Anteros was a more suitable figure to represent Lord Shaftesbury as he was deemed to be a less selfish and more mature god than his frivolous (if better known) brother, Eros.

However, following objections that even Anteros was too sensual (and too pagan) a figure to serve as a fitting memorial to the famously sober and eminently respectable Lord Shaftesbuty, the statue was officially - if rather ludicrously - renamed The Angel of Christian Charity, thereby adding a further level of confusion as to its identity.

Unsurprisingly, this name failed to capture the popular imagination and soon everybody called the figure Eros, which, considering its location in Soho, is probably appropriate ...    


Note: It may interest readers who are unfamiliar with the complexities of Greek mythology to know that Eros and Anteros are but two members of a winged-collective of deities associated with love, known as the Erotes [ἔρωτες]. Other members include: Himeros (god of impetuous love); Hedylogos (god of sweet-talk), Hermaphroditos (god of queer desire); and Pothos (god of longing for the one who is absent). Stories of their gaiety and mischief-making were extremely popular within Hellenistic culture, particularly in the 2nd century BC, and these sons of Aphrodite continue to appear in Classical Roman and later European art, albeit in the diminutive form of Cupids or Amoretti.

Graham Harman: The Third Table (Synopsis and Critique)

Picasso: La Table (1919)

I. Synopsis

The Third Table (2012) is a fascinating short piece by the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman. Whilst providing a convenient summary of the four principles of OOO, the author primarily wishes to offer us his reading of A. S. Eddington's well-known parable of the two tables; the first of which is the familiar table of everyday life; the second of which is the quantum table as understood by physicists.

For Eddington, the latter table is more real than the former, which, although visible and tangible, is essentially a 'strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice'. You might be able to eat your supper off this first table, but that proves nothing to those who subscribe to the remorseless logic of modern science.    

For Harman, however, both humanists who insist on the everday thing and physicists who care only for quantum reality, are equally mistaken - and for precisely the same reason. For both are engaged in reductionism, even though they reduce the object in opposite directions: 

"The scientist reduces the table downward to tiny particles invisible to the eye; the humanist reduces it upward to a series of effects on people and other things. To put it bluntly, both of Eddington's tables are utter shams that confuse the table with its internal and external environments, respectively. The real table is in fact a third table lying between these two others."

Interestingly, it's not traditional philosophers who are best placed to understand this, in Harman's view, but artists: for artists aren't obsessed with reducing tables "either to quarks and electrons or to table-effects on humans". They are concerned, rather, with tables and other objects - sunflowers, nude women, pickled sharks, etc. - as things in themselves with their own autonomous and inexhaustible reality. And they know that the real table "is a genuine [substantial] reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it". 

That is to say, the third table "emerges as something distinct from its own components and also withdraws behind all its external effects". If this sounds vaguely Aristotelian, that's because it is; although Harman assures us that it's Aristotle with knobs on (i.e., given a "properly weird interpretation" - weird being one of the privileged terms within Harman's vocabulary).       

The problem that some will immediately identify, is that by locating der dritte Tisch in a space between the first and second types of table, Harman posits an object that lies forever outside the scope of human access; "a table that can be verified in no way at all", as he cheerfully concedes. Indeed, Harman suggests that practitioners of OOO should pride themselves on this fact:

"Any philosophy is unworthy of the name if it attempts to convert objects into the conditions by which they can be known or verified. The term philosophia ... famously means not 'wisdom' but 'love of wisdom'. The real is something that cannot be known, only loved."

Object-oriented philosophers - inasmuch as they remain lovers, not knowers - are thus old school philosophers. In a lovely passage, Harman continues:

"This does not mean that access to the table is impossible, only that it must be indirect. Just as erotic speech works when composed of hint, allusion, and innuendo rather than of declarative statements and clearly articulated propositions ... thinking is not thinking unless it realizes that its approach to objects can only be oblique."

Weird (or speculative) realists cannot be downward scientific reducers, nor upward humanistic reducers - they can only be hunters, forever chasing "ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, accessible only by allusion and seducing us by means of allure".

As suggested earlier, it may be artists who best fit this description:

"For on the one hand art does not function by dissolving ... [things] into their subatomic underpinnings. Quite obviously, artists do not provide a theory of physical reality, and Eddington's second table is the last thing they seek. But on the other hand they also do not seek the first table, as if the arts merely replicated the objects of everyday life or sought to create effects on us."

Art does something else, something more; it both establishes the existence of objects as things in themselves and alludes to objects that can never be made fully present. And philosophy, concludes Harman, would be wise if it gave up its pretensions of being a rigorous science and transformed itself into a uniquely vigorous art, thereby regaining its original character as a form of Eros:

"In some ways this erotic model is the basic aspiration of object-oriented philosophy: the only way, in the present philosophical climate, to do justice to the love of wisdom that makes no claim to be an actual wisdom."

Despite the obvious criticisms that can be made, I have to admit to finding Harman's thought very enticing and would happily pull up a chair at his third table in order to share a bottle of wine or eat some figs. Having said that, I do have a couple of concerns ...


II. Critique

Firstly, Harman rather overdoes the praise of artists - though he's by no means the first philosopher to do so and his flattery has earned him recognition as one of the hundred most influential figures on the international art scene; something he seems inordinately proud of, compensating as it does perhaps for the fact that many philosophers choose to ignore or dismiss his work entirely.

Still more problematic is the star-struck nature of Harman's boast in the introduction to his latest book that object-oriented ontology has attracted not only the interest of artists and architects, but also entertainers and actors. The charismatic nature of OOO, he claims, "has even captured the notice of celebrities ... with the popular musician Björk having engaged in correspondence with OOO author Timothy Morton, and the actor Benedict Cumberbatch having listened attentively to one of my lectures at a private residence in London".        

This could possibly be the most embarrassing (and shameful) line ever written by a philosopher.  For as Nick Land once said: Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked. I would therefore encourage Professor Harman to worry less about sucking-up to a pretentious singer-songwriter and a big posh sod with plums in his mouth, and concentrate instead on persuading colleagues within the world of philosophy to take his writing more seriously.

Secondly, whilst I agree that philosophy should always be conceived in terms of Eros, I see it as a far more perverse and transgressive form of love than Harman; one born of disease and the madness of unconditional desire, or what Land terms libidinal materialism. 

Thus, whereas he thinks of objects as rather shy and retiring - almost coy - and insists we must talk about them with poetic metaphors and maybe a dash of saucy innuendo (OOO-er missus), I think of objects as promiscuous and obscene; things that don't just seek to seduce us from the shadows, but which indecently expose themselves and seek to ravish us in broad daylight if given the opportunity.

However, as I'm not one of the top hundred thinkers on anybody's list and have never had Sherlock listening attentively to one of my lectures, there's really no reason why readers should favour my (equally unverifiable) view over Harman's - unless, of course, it pleases them to do so ...    

Notes
  
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, (MacMillan, 1929).

Graham Harman, The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch, Number 085 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series '100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken', (Hatje Cantz, 2012). Lines quoted are from pp. 6-15.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018), p. 8. 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge, 1992).

Anger is an Energy: On the Politics of Thymos

Thymos 2 (from a series of 50 mixed media images) 

Alejandro Tarantino

Most people are familiar with the ancient Greek terms for love (eros) and for reason (logos).

But many are unfamiliar with another crucial component of the psyche that the Greeks termed thymos and by which they referred to the desire of the male subject not merely to be found sexually attractive and in full possession of his senses, but acknowledged as one who is worthy of respect.

It is this need to be shown due regard that often leads to anger and violent confrontation within patriarchal and phallocratic society. For example, one might recall the powerful scene from A Few Good Men (dir. Rob Reiner, 1992), in which Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessep addresses Tom Cruise as US Navy lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee:

"You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I don't want money and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy!"

Staying in the cinematic universe if I may, I would suggest that it's this same (irrational) aspect of the male soul we are obliged to consider in Joel Schumacher's 1993 thriller Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as alt-right poster boy William Foster (D-FENS).

The movie suggests that, ultimately, even an average man can be pushed too far and that nobody likes to feel they've been lied to, or made a fool of. And nobody likes to feel they're invisible and thus able to be totally ignored. It makes the blood boil. One seeks justice; or some form of revenge.

Deleuzeans might dream of becoming-imperceptible. But they are a very rare and very unusual type. Most people - particularly most men - want to be seen and want to be listened to; want the world to recognise that they too have rights, including the right to freely express their views and affirm their values, whether these coincide with the views and values of a gender-neutral liberal elite or not.      

Idealists who subscribe to a philosophical fantasy of universal love and reason, will never really grasp what motivates men like Jessep and Bill Foster. If this makes them poor film critics on the one hand, so too does it make them poor political commentators on the other; people, we might say, who can't handle the truth.

And so, whilst they might write for The Guardian or appear on Dateline London, not one of them seems able or willing to conceive of why it is that reactionary and/or fascist ideas to do with cultural identity and national greatness that tap into white male rage not only persist, but have renewed appeal amongst sections of even the most prosperous and peaceful democratic societies.  


To watch the scene referred to above between Nicholson and Cruise in A Few Good Men, click here. 

To watch the official trailer to Falling Down, click here.

Entomophilia 2: Crush Fetish

Crush20 by Unknown 1886 (2017)

deviantart.com

Although some men (and, let's be honest, it is mostly men) enjoy watching women crush larger animals including live rodents, birds, fish, and even kittens beneath their feet (a practice that is illegal in many countries, including the UK and US), most devotees of crush porn are content with the so-called soft version that makes do with sexually sacrificing invertebrates; insects, arachnids, crustaceans, molluscs, etc. (a practice against which there are no laws and creatures about whom even many animal rights activists don't seem to care).

As Jeremy Biles notes in an essay on Georges Bataille and those he likes to term (after Jeff Vilencia) crush freaks, the latter are:

"sexually aroused by the sight of an insect exploded beneath the pressure of a human foot - usually, but not necessarily, a relatively large and beautiful female foot. Sometimes the insects meet their demise under the force exerted by a naked big toe. Other times, it is the impaling heel of a stiletto or the raised outsole of a platform shoe that accomplishes the extermination."

Crucially, as Biles goes on to say: "the crush freak typically fantasizes identification with the insect as he or she masturbates, and savors the sense of sudden, explosive mutilation attendant upon the sight of the pedal extrusions". This is why crush fetishism cuts across both podophilia and macrophilia, although Biles himself - rather unconvincingly - prefers to relate crush fetishism to technophilia, i.e. sexual arousal associated with machinery, rather than the feet of giant women.

I suppose the key is that lovers of crush porn feel shortchanged by the usual money shot of an ejaculating penis - they want to see (and need to imagine) a whole body exploding in every direction at once; the agony and the ecstasy of bursting bodies is the ultimate transgression of boundaries, making the values of society go splat via a perverse act of sexual violence. 

Diminutive former child star Mickey Rooney may have disapproved - although his concern was more for the children of America than the creatures being stepped on - but crush fetishism, like most other perverse forms of love - including philosophy - has something important to teach us; not least the absurdity of insisting upon an essential connection between Eros and morality.


See: Jeremy Biles, 'I, Insect, Or Bataille and the Crush Freaks', Janus Head, 7(1), pp. 115-31 (Trivium Publications, 2004). Click here to read online.

See also: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Sex', pp. 267-90. 

In the above, Raffles points out that most crush fetishists don't give a damn about insects, even though they may intensely identify with them during a moment of "wildly disorienting arousal". And neither do they attempt some kind of becoming-insect in order to escape the limits of their humanity. They just want to get off by pretending to be in the position of a bug underfoot; i.e., they just want to feel themselves worthless, disgusting, and vulnerable. For crush fetishists, the insect is merely a means to an end.       

Those interested in reading part one of this post on insect fetish should click here.  

Love Devalued (A Post for Valentine's)

When love becomes an ideal - when it becomes caught up in a system of values - then love becomes a problem. 

Not that you would know this to hear most people speak. For the majority, love remains a final solution, not something troublesome or in any way ambiguous; not even something particularly complex. Love is simply synonymous with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

I know this having attended a public debate on the subject last night at Richmond Adult Community College, chaired by Filiz Peach. Not only did members of the audience seem to agree that Eros should be forever bound by the altruistic values of Christian moral culture, but, shamefully, so did the panel of speakers (even if they referred us not only to Jesus, but to Plato, Darwin and Freud). 

Half-hearted attempts to suggest a biological or psychological basis for love, didn't disguise the fact that essentially they remained believers in and advocates of a non-narcissistic love of self and a non-exploitative love of the other; i.e. a pure love that is all-embracing, ontologically-rooted, and prepared to sacrifice anything (or anyone) to ensure its triumph. A love to live for, a love to die for, and, ultimately, a love to kill for.

This might appear to be a rather extreme interpretation of what was said by the speakers, but it is precisely because love as an ideal knows no limits that it ends by becoming suicidal and homocidal. The murderer, says Lawrence, is all too often a lover acting on the recoil. 

This is lethal enough at an individual level, but it becomes far more fatal on a collective level when love as an ideal is allowed to infect our social and political life. Fascism, communism, and liberal humanism all act in the name of love and all bring death in their wake.

We need, then, to rethink this question of love. To free Eros from his ideal chains and forced complicity within a system of moral values. To make of love a game and an art; a way of playfully giving style to our lives, not of discovering some profound meaning. When we resist the urge to make love definitive of the truth of our being, we might even find we can enjoy it again ...

  

Making Love to Music

Etruscan dancers in a tomb near Tarquinia, Italy (c 470 BC) 

Provocative dance moves, such as grinding and twerking, are obviously obscene in an everyday sense of the term, but that's not what makes them tiresome and strangely offensive. I really don't care if idiots want to aggressively thrust their hips, wiggle their bottoms, and dry hump in public.

However, far from being sexual, it seems to me these moves are distinctly anti-sexual and obscene also in the very specific manner that Baudrillard uses the term. That is to say, they lack any metaphorical dimension or any stylish, carefully choreographed component.

In grinding and in twerking, as in pornography, "the body, the sex organs, the sex act are brutally no longer mis en scène, but immediately proffered for view" - and for consumption. It's a total acting out of things that have previously been kept off-stage and regarded as part of a seductive game usually played in private between partners.        

Although his concern is with the sublimation of sex, rather than its exorcising through obscenity, Lawrence was also concerned with the relationship between Eros and Terpsichore. In a short article written in 1927, entitled 'Making Love to Music', he identifies the tango and Charleston as modern dances that are secretly averse both to actual copulation and to the ancient magic of dance.

In contrast to the young men and women of the Jazz Age, Lawrence writes of the dancers painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia:

"There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen ... opposite the naked-limbed men, in a splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There is a great beauty in them ... They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copulative either."

Although free from clothes and moral inhibition, these Etruscan figures are not grotesquely acting out sex in a crude and callous fashion, like Miley Cyrus: they are simply dancing a dance that is full of joy and a delight in movement; dancing their very souls into existence as it were.

It is, alas, we moderns who have "narrowed the dance down to two movements: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking and waggling, to elude it", or make of it something vulgar and obscene.

   
Notes: 

Jean Baudrillard, 'The Obscene', Passwords, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2003). The line quoted from is on p. 27.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Love to Music', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 41-8. Lines quoted can be found on pp. 46-7.

On Queerness, Cynicism, and the Question of True Love

The notion of true love is central within Western culture. It's a concept founded upon the four values identified by Foucault as belonging to aletheia:

“True love is first, love which does not conceal ... because it has nothing to hide ... it is always willing to show itself in front of witnesses ... Second, true love is an unalloyed love ... in which sensual pleasure and the friendship of souls do not intermingle. Third, true love is love in line with what is right, with what is correct ... It has nothing contrary to the rule or custom. And finally, true love is love which is never subject to change or becoming. It is an incorruptible love which remains always the same.” [220-21]

You can find this ideal model of love developed in both Plato and what Nietzsche derided as Platonism for the people (Christianity). It’s a straight and straightforward form of love without subterfuge, disguise, or even curiosity; love that prides itself on its sincerity and its naturalness, rather than a sense of playfulness or sophistication. There’s simply nothing queer about it. It’s what normal, healthy, men and women share and upon which the sanctity of marriage is based.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is, at its best - that is to say, at its most defiantly queer - the love that refuses to speak its name; the love that likes to stick to the shadows and hide in closets; the love that finds pride in its perverse, plural, and promiscuous character; an ironic, gender-bending, form of love that delights in artifice and in camp; a love that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative rule, or give a fig either about the judgement of God or what Nature dictates.

One might describe this queer radical style of homosexuality, as separatist. It certainly doesn’t want to fit into straight society and doesn’t keep banging on about equal rights; doesn’t long for a lifestyle involving monogamous marriage and the prospect of breeding. It isn't even particularly gay ...

In fact, we might best characterize it as Cynical in the ancient philosophical sense. That is to say, a type of practice which has a very militant idea of what constitutes the truth (of love and of life) and which has been “stamped by a scandal which has constantly accompanied it, a disapproval which surrounds it, a mixture of mockery, repulsion, and apprehension in reaction to its presence and manifestations” [231].

If Cynicism was the disgrace of ancient philosophy, then queer-cynical homosexuality is the travesty of true love; holding up a funfair mirror before Eros so that the latter can recognise himself, whilst, crucially, at the same time see himself outrageously distorted and made multiple.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Page numbers given refer to this paperback edition.