Know Thyself: A Reflection

Ai Weiwei: Know Thyself (2022) 

Lego bricks 192.5 x 192.5 cm [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Whenever I come across the ancient Greek injunction know thyself [b], I immediately think of Nietzsche's preface to the Genealogy in which he mocks the very possibility of this, even for those who pride themselves on being men of knowledge: We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers ... [c]

 

But I also think of Foucault's text entitled Technologies of the Self ...

 

 

II.     

 

Based on a lecture given at the University of Vermont in October 1982, this text is hugely interesting for its insistence that care of the self - conceived as an ethico-aesthetic project of stylisation - is at least as important as knowing the self (understood in relation to a moral conception of Truth).

 

In the modern era, care of the self was almost entirely decoupled from the more imperative-sounding command to know the self. And that is unfortunate to say the least, because care of the self crucially entailed the forming of external relations with others, whilst knowing the self is a much more internalised and solitary pursuit (like masturbation).

 

For Foucault, "the equation of philosophical askesis with renunciation of feeling, solidarity, and care for one's self and for others - as the price of knowledge - was one of the biggest wrong turnings" [d] in Western history. 

 

But rather than simply regret this, or naively call for an impossible (and undesirable) return to an ancient way of life [e], Foucault began to think things through in his own inimitable manner (more as a hermeneutics of the self than an epistemological exercise) ... 

 

 

III.

 

Gnōthi seauton is one thing; epimeleisthai sautou is another. Without doubt, says Foucault, we moderns have overemphasised the former and largely forgotten the latter. 

 

In the Graeco-Roman world, however, "the injunction of having to know oneself was always associated with the other principle of the care of the self, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim into operation" [f]. It was, in other words, one of the key principles (and practices) governing "social and personal conduct" [226].

 

For Foucault, this "profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society" [228] has occurred for two main reasons: 

 

"We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give more care to ourselves than to anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality [...] We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation." [228] [g]

 

The second reason - just as crucial - is that in modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, "knowledge of the self (the thinking subject) takes on an ever-increasing importance as the first step in the theory of knowledge" [228].

 

 

IV.

Does any of this really matter today?

 

To many people, perhaps not: but to me, as a philosopher who, like Foucault - and, indeed, like Socrates - cares about the question of care, it matters a great deal. 

 

For I would love to see a greater concern with ethos as the Greeks understood this term; i.e. a way of being and of behaviour, of stylising the self (in relation to others) that was evident in every aspect of the person (their appearance, dress, manner, etc.). 

 

The immanent utopia realised now/here in the bonds between people that D. H. Lawrence terms a democracy of touch will be a society founded upon such an ethos; one in which everybody takes proper care of him or herself whilst also properly conducting themselves "in relation to others and for others" [h]. 

 

Ultimately, let me add in closing - once more in agreement with Foucault - the relationship between philosophy, politics, ethics, and art is permanent and fundamental. And that's why one can't simply visit an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, for example, and simply come away speaking about aesthetics or his method of working [i].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This Lego mosaic by Ai Weiwei, based on a first-century Roman work depicting a skeleton and the Greek phrase ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ, is presently on display at the Lisson Gallery (London). It previously featured as part of Ai Weiwei's solo exhibition Know Thyself, at Galerie neugerriemschneider, in Berlin (September 14, 2023 - March 30, 2024). 

      Why the artist chose to reverse the image and write the Greek maxim as if viewed in a mirror, I don't know; perhaps it is meant to indicate the fact that he is reflecting on the complex relationship between past and present (I very much doubt, from what I know of him, that he is advocating a reversal of moral wisdom).  

 

[b] Know thyself was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi. It has been quoted and interpreted by countless thinkers, scholars and authors ever since. It is usually written in Greek as Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton).

 

[c] The original German reads: Wir sind uns unbekannt, wir Erkennenden, wir selbst uns selbst ... See Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), p. iii. 

[d] Paul Rabinow, introduction to the Essential Works of Foucault 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Penguin Books, 2000), p. xxv.

 

[e] In answer to the question whether he sees the ancient Greeks as offering an attractive and plausible alternative, Foucault says: "No! [...] you can't find  the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people." Further, Greek ethics "were linked to a purely virile society" founded upon slavery and he doesn't much like that idea. 

      See 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in the Essential Works 1: Ethics ... p. 256. 

 

[f] Michel Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self', in the Essential Works 1: Ethics ... p. 226. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. 

      A slightly different version of this text appeared in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 16-49 and this can be read online by clicking here.  

 

[g] It's important to note that Foucault sees many continuities between pagan and Christian culture and does not see a clean break as many modern Christians and neo-pagans like to imagine. Christianity - a religion of confession and salvation - is, as Nietzsche once said, in many respects a form of Platonism for the people (see his preface to Beyond Good and Evil, 1886) and the Christian tradition is not uniquely to blame for the moral world we now inhabit. 

      See the interview with Foucault from January 1984, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', which can be found in an amended translation with footnotes in the Essential Works 1: Ethics ... pp. 281-301, where he stresses this point.  

 

[h] Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', Essential Works 1: Ethics ... p. 287. 

[i] In a recent post published on Torpedo the Ark, I discussed how Ai Weiwei's transformation of a well-known canvas by Van Gogh enables the viewer to reflect upon contemporary social, cultural, and political concerns. Those interested in reading the post, can click here. 

 

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.

 

 

Révéroni de Saint-Cyr: Modern Perversity and Old School Pessimism

Illustration for Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798)  

by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr [1]

 

"L'amour est une rage; il peut s’inoculer par la morsure ..."

 

 

I.

 

The Marquis de Sade may be the best-known aristocratic French author writing dark Gothic fiction with a sexually explicit flavour, but he wasn't the only one. 

 

And I'm slowly getting round to read Révéroni de Saint-Cyr's two-volume novel Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798); finally translated into English, by Erik Butler, and published by Tartarus Press (2018) [2]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Considered a (minor) classic of its kind, the work tells the story of a young Polish countess, Pauliska, as she travels around Europe, à la Sally Bowles, "inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile, man by man" [3], and misfortune by misfortune [4].

 

Combining supernatural elements with those of an erotic nature, the book is essentially a fatalistic meditation on desire, depravity, and the accursed nature of a life determined more by chance and random events, than moral law or human reason.

 

The suggestion is therefore given that we are all just helpless playthings, or, if you prefer, victims awaiting our own senseless death, rather than free-willing agents who can shape what happens to us and build an orderly world.     

 

Pauliska, is thus a deliberate slap in the face of those philosophes promoting the ideals of the Enlightenment, which is perhaps why Foucault seems to be such a fan of the work ...

 

 

III.

 

Writing in a text entitled 'So Cruel a Knowledge' [5], Foucault delights in the novel's opening where we encounter Pauliska fleeing a burning castle, as invading soldiers rape and disembowel the chambermaids; their screams reverberating in her ears as she makes good her escape:

 

"Pauliska abandons her scorched lands to the Cossacks [...] her countrywomen bound to the pale trunks of the maples, her servants mutilated and their mouths covered with blood. She seeks refuge in Old Europe [...] which sets all its traps for her at one go. Strange traps, in which it is hard to recognise the familiar ones of male flattery, worldly pleasures, scarcely intended falsehoods, and jealousy. What is taking form is an evil much less metaphysical [...] an evil very close to the body and meant for it: A modern perversity." [6]

This, obviously, is not good news for Pauliska, who encounters all kinds of terrifying men belonging to all sorts of strange sect, secret society, or criminal gang: political fanatics, libertines, counterfeiters, mad scientists, religious mystics, she is misfortunate enough to meet (and fall victim) to them all. 

 

Foucault writes: 

 

"In this underground world the misfortunes lose their chronology and link up with the world's most ancient cruelties. In reality, Pauliska is fleeing a millennial conflagration, and the partition [of Poland] of 1795 casts her into an ageless cycle. She falls into the castle of evil spells where the corridors close up, where the mirrors tell lies and watch what passes before them, where the air distills strange poisons [...] It is a paradoxical initiation not into the lost secret but into all those agonies that man never forgets." [7] 

 

This initiation into suffering - into evil - is achieved, says Foucault, through silent myths and wordless complicity; Pauliska is kept in the "harsh and monotonous condition of the object" [8]. 

 

And what is it she has to learn? 

 

That mankind will never establish a world of peace, justice, and freedom, because the savage truth is this; "man is nothing but a dog to man; law is the appetite of the beast" [9], and we're all trapped inside a giant cage from which there is no escape (for even death, as Nick Land reminds us, is at best, a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to the compulsive dissipation of life) [10].

 

Alternatively, dear reader, if you prefer we end with a different metaphor ... 

 

We're all bound - virtuous and wicked alike - naked on an enormous electric wheel; just like Pauliska at the end of  Révéroni's novel. And when this diabolical object par excellence begins to turn, sparks will fly and we'll cry out in endless agony. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Born in 1767, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr belonged to an Italian family that followed Catherine de' Medici to France in the 16th century. Unhappy with his less-than-glittering military career, Révéroni decided to try his hand as a writer. Sadly, despite writing a large number of plays, novels, and essays, Révéroni never quite established himself as a man of letters and when he died, insane, in 1829, he was already more or less forgotten.  

 

[2] Readers who wish for a recent French edition of Révéroni Saint-Cyr's novel might like to see the one edited by Antoine de Baecque (Payot & Rivages, 2001). 

 

[3] Lyric from the song 'Mein Herr', written by Fred Ebb, with music by John Kander, for the film Caberet (1972), directed by Bob Fosse. The character Sally Bowels was famously played by Liza Minnelli. 

 

[4] Pauliska is clearly indebted to Sade's novel Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu (1791), although it arguably possesses its own unique charm.  

 

[5] Michel Foucault, 'So Cruel a Knowledge', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 53-67.    

 

[6] Ibid., p. 54.  

[7] Ibid.

 

[8] Ibid., p. 56. 

[9] Ibid., p. 57. 

[10] See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 180. 

Writing So As Not to Die

 

 

One of the questions I'm often asked is: Why write?

 

Well, in part, it's because, like Kafka, I think a non-writing writer risks madness [1].

 

But it's also because I subscribe to the (somewhat magical) belief that words have the power to protect us and can keep even death at bay. 

 

Not avert it indefinitely, but at least stave it off until such a time as I no longer have anything further to say and, like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, voluntarily decide to jack it all in; break my laptop, burn my books, etc.

 

What this implies, I suppose, is that there exists an essential affinity between language and death (or literature and evil), with the latter acting as both the limit as well as the core of the former. 

 

Those who think writing is merely about the communication of ideas or self-expression, have failed to grasp its true import: We write so as not to die ... [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a letter to Max Brod (5 July, 1922), Kafka wrote that "a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity." See Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, (Schocken Books, 1977), pp. 332-335.

[2] In an interview with The New York Times (19 August, 1984), the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes said: "You start by writing so as to live, and you end up by writing so as not to die." The interview, by Nicholas Shardy, can be found online by clicking here.

      One might note, however, that in an essay entitled 'Language to Infinity', Foucault credits Blanchot with the idea of writing so as not to die; trans. by Donald F. Buchard and Sherry Simon, the essay first appeared in Tel Quel (1963), pp. 44-53. This text can also be found in Michel Foucault, The Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion, (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 89-101. 

On Torpedo the Ark as a Form of Digital Hypomnema and Honey Making

Stephen Alexander: Hypomnema (2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Is blogging really so different from the ancient Greek practice of providing a written commentary on the self and the keeping of a singular (if fragmentary) record of events? 

 

I would rather like to think that it isn't; although it depends of course on the blog and the blogger. 

 

Here, I shall offer remarks only with reference to Torpedo the Ark (TTA), which may not be the best or most popular blog in the world, but which nevertheless provides - in my view - a contemporary example of what Plato and friends referred to as hypomnemata ...

 

 

II. 

 

Neither offered as intimate diary entries, nor a series of spiritual confessions designed to purify the soul, the posts on TTA are intended as an intertextual form of ethopoietic writing based upon an assemblage of literary quotes, artistic images, gay philosophical reflections, and other heterogeneous elements.

 

And that's the key: however personal they may seem, these posts do not merely provide a narrative of the self and the primary aim is to "capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read" [1] in order that one may detach oneself from the constant buzz of the present and the uncertainty of the future.

 

In other words, blogging allows one to find a little untimely peace and quiet, via contemplation of the past. 

 

However, before one leaps to the conclusion that blogging is thus essentially conservative and nostalgic in character, my writing of posts is also (and always) a radically disparate practice, which doesn't wish to unify ideas into a doctrine or system; nor attempt to know an author's body of work in depth and in detail.  

 

It doesn't really matter, for example, if I haven't read every last word written by Nietzsche and Lawrence (the two authors who have most shaped my own thinking); and it makes very little difference to the success or failure of a post whether I have fully grasped what they meant to say, or whether I am able to faithfully reconstruct their arguments. 

 

 

III. 

 

Ultimately, TTA is governed by the same two principles that Foucault says determine the ancient Greek notebook: (i) the local truth of the precept and (ii) its circumstantial use value. I thus feel free, like Seneca, to take what I want from where I want and relate it to my own life however I like:

 

"Writing as a personal exercise done by and for oneself is an art of disparate truth - or, more exactly, a purposeful way of combining the traditional authority of the already said with the singularity of the truth that is affirmed therein and the particularity of the circumstances that determine its use." [2]      

 

Some critics are annoyed by this and accuse me of all kinds of things; I had a charming email the other day, for example, informing me that TTA is 'an infuriating mix of narcissism, plagiarism, and wilful misreading'. 

 

Fortunately, I'm not too bothered by such accusations. For again, like the great Stoic philosopher mentioned above, I feel at perfect liberty to select (and steal) ideas from other authors and then shape them into what is needed: "'This is my own custom; from the many things which I have read, I claim some part for myself.'" [3]

 

After all, isn't that what bees do when they promiscuously gather nectar from a 1000 different flowers in order to make honey?      

 

Notes

 

[1] Michel Foucault, 'Self-Writing', in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. by Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Penguin Books 2000), p. 211.

 

[2] Ibid., 212. 

[3] Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Letter II, section V. Quoted by Foucault in the work cited, p. 213. 

 

 

This post is for a friend who asked: 'Do you regard blogging as a form of life-writing?'

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

Notes on Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety (A 6/20 Paper by Maria Thanassa)

Curbing their enthusiasm: Socrates, Maria Thanassa & Larry David 

 

 

I. 

 

According to Maria Thanassa [1], notions of sobriety and intoxication are central to Plato's Symposium and Socrates is shown to be a man of self-restraint above all else; he drinks, but never gets drunk; he loves, but never succumbs to erotic ecstasy (even remaining somewhat indifferent to the charms of Alcibiades).

 

Socrates, in other words, is a man who, like Larry David, knows how to curb his enthusiasm [2] and keep his wits about him. It's not so much that he lacks passion, but he prefers to master his desires. For Socrates, sobriety guarantees the integrity of his nature.

 

But, as becomes clear later in her presentation, Dr Thanassa is not only concerned with the doings of ancient Greek philosphers. She is interested also in how the idea of sobriety can be reactivated within a contemporary culture she thinks of as intoxicated (and infantilised) by a form of liberal Dionysianism that promotes the freedom of the individual and self-expression.           

 

In other words, a bit like the Greek lyric poet Theognis, Dr Thanassa wants people to exercise a degree of control and not act in a shameless or foolish manner (enslaved by their own base instincts); to behave in an ethical and stylised manner, carefully cultivating the self [3]. 

 

II. 

 

This might make Dr Thanassa sound like a bit of a killjoy or a member of the morality police; i.e., one who wishes to enforce a code of conduct and is concerned when people transgress certain social rules. Fortunately, however, she is saved from becoming a battle-axe like Granny Hatchet [4] by that which Socrates and Larry David are both masters of: irony. 

 

Maria ironically tempers her own enthusiasm for telling others to curb their enthusiasm before it tips over into zealotry. Like Socrates - and Larry David - she seems at times to try out and test philosophical positions without ever allowing them to become points of principle or dogma. 

 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what Dr Thanassa says seriously - just not that seriously. And it certainly shouldn't stop us from enjoying the wine served at the end of the paper, for as Alcibiades might remind us, the 6/20 is, like the symposium, a drinking party as much as a forum of debate.

 

Having said that, food and wine is served at the 6/20 to help facilitate conversation between those in attendance, not to induce drunken excess and vomiting on the way home [5] - something that the host, Mr Christian Michel, would almost certainly not approve of.          

 

III.

I think the part of Dr Thanassa's paper I enjoyed the most was the section in which she (following Martha Nussbaum) discussed Socrates as someone who, in his strangeness, stands apart from other men - and indeed, the human condition itself. 

 

As already mentioned, Plato depicts Socrates as someone who is absent when he should be present; who drinks but does not get drunk; who is impervious to cold and hunger; who values beauty but remains unaffected by its physical manifestations; and who feels erotic desire but does not fully succumb to the pleasures of the flesh.

That certainly makes him sound like a queer fish and, according to Dr Thanassa, the oddity of his character when combined with his satyr-like ugliness makes him not only different, but genuinely other - inaccessible, impenetrable, and impossible to shut-up, even when sentenced to death.  

 

I can see why so many of his fellow Athenians hated him, just as so many of Larry David's friends and neighbours seem to find him impossible at times. But the above traits only increase my admiration for Socrates; he may lack empathy, but at least he recognises that even the most tragic events (such as the death of a pet parrot) have a comic aspect and that the philosopher must be free to ridicule, mock, or criticise everything under the sun - even if this risks offending others [6]. 

 

As the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote: Socrates could abstain from those things that most are too weak to abstain from and enjoy in moderation those things that many indulge in excessively to their shame. His strength, his ability to endure, and his sobriety marked him out as a man of perfect and invincible spirit [7].  

In sum - and I think this was Dr Thanassa's closing line (borrowed from Baudelaire) - Keep smiling with Spartan serenity [8] and remember that curbing your enthusiasm means choosing not to burst into flame even though, as a philosopher, you will burn with a very special type of passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dr Maria Thanassa presented a short paper entitled 'Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety' at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club (London) on 20 Feb 2023. This post is based on my recollection of what was said and I apologise to Dr Thanassa should I misrepresent her ideas in any manner. 

 

[2] The Socrates / Larry David connection and comparison has been made before; see, for example, Daniel Coffeen's excellent post on the philosophy of Curb Your Enthusiasm on his blog An Emphatic Umph: click here. 

      Coffeen rightly argues that both Socrates and Larry are characters who interact with the world in a fundamentally different way from most other people, refusing as they do inherited terms and questioning beliefs and norms of behaviour at every opportunity: "But whereas Socrates is really only concerned with big ideas about truth, morality, language, politics, Larry takes on the micro interactions of the social." 

      I was rather disappointed, considering the title of her paper, that Dr Thanassa didn't make more of the relationship between Socrates and Larry David. 

[3] This is suggestive of Foucault's later work and I was pleased to hear Dr Thanassa refer to such later in her paper, as well as to Nietzsche's idea of what constitutes the most needful thing - the constraint of a single taste - if an individual is to give style to their lives. 

[4] Granny Hatchet (Caroline Nation) was a member of the American temperance movement in the late-19th century and early-20th century, who famously smashed up liquor joints with a handheld axe. See the recent post written on her life and times: click here.   

[5] See the poem by Theognis in Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, ed. and trans. Douglas E. Gerber (Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), lines 477-496, quoted by Dr Thanassa on the night. 

[6] See my post of 14 Nov 2017 - 'Torpedo the Ark Means Everything's Funny' - click here. 

[7] I'm paraphrasing here from Meditations 1.16 - a passage quoted by Dr Thanassa in her paper. 

[8] See Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 29. 

      What I say here of the philosopher is, of course, what Baudelaire says of the modern dandy - another figure who understands, style, sobriety, and self-restraint.

 

I would like to express my gratitude once more to Maria for producing a fascinating paper and to Christian Michel for hosting another very enjoyable evening. This post is dedicated to them both and I hope it brings them some pleasure. 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 2: The Return of the 70s

Joy Division (L-R: Peter Hook / Ian Curtis / Bernard Sumner / Stephen Morris) 

 

 "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?"

 

 

Any piece of writing entitled 'The Return of the 70s' is guaranteed to excite my interest; particularly one that understands 1979-80 to be a threshold moment when one world gave way to another. 

 

But, as is so often the case, expectations are rarely met and part of my frustration with Mr Fisher's work comes out of disappointment. It's not that he fails to deliver insightful commentary (and retrospective judgement) on the decade, more that his points of reference are so very different from mine; the books of John le Carré and David Peace, for example, are almost entirely unfamiliar to me [a]. 

 

Thus, here, I shall discuss only what Fisher says about post-punk favourites Joy Division and the grotesque figure of Jimmy Savile [b].  

 

 

I. 

Fisher opens his exploration of the 70s with the following statement: "If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times." [c] 

 

Fisher wants (and probably expects) his readers to agree that: 

 

(i) pop groups in general have (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) significance ...

 

(ii) Joy Division in particular have growing (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) import ...

 

(iii) a state of despondent melancholia defines the Geist der Zeiten in which he was writing [d] ...

 

(iv) this depressed spirit can magically be captured (embodied and expressed) by a group of musicians (which essentially returns us to the first point).    

 

The problem is, I'm not sure I do agree with all (or even any) of these points. 

 

But let's say, for arguments sake, that, like Hegel, we accept the notion that there's a virtual agency determining the ideas and beliefs of a given epoch and that art reflects the culture of the era in which it is created (not least because artists are themselves a product of their time). 

 

That might be an argument for why art matters, but it still doesn't mean Joy Division are - or ever were - as important as Fisher insists; "more than a pop group, more than entertainment" [53].

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Joy Division and even have a well-worn copy of their debut studio album Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979) in my record collection. But they're not the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, when it comes to capturing (and transforming) the spirit of the times or channelling the future. 

 

These two groups - and perhaps only these two - were (to adopt and extend a term coined by Foucault) founders of discursivity (changing forever the way we think, speak, act, dress, etc.).

 

 

II. 

 

Fisher continues his piece on Joy Division by declaring them to be "the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups" [59]. 

 

By which one might assume he was simply referring to the fact that although they failed to have much success during their time as a band (1976-1980), they have exerted a wide-reaching influence ever since. But actually, Fisher means something much more interesting:

 

"What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between [Ian] Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will [...] not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror ..." [60]

 

Fisher expands on this:

 

"Joy Division followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya [...] and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW [...] will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to do." [60] 

 

Joy Division see through things; they know - far more radically than the Rolling Stones - that there's never any satisfaction; that the true Schopenhaurien moments are those "in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart's desire - and feel cheated, empty [...] voided [61].

 

This existential revelation - that we don't really want or need what we thought we most desperately wanted or needed and that even our most urgent desires "are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road" [61] - is central to what Fisher calls depressive ontology.

 

 

III. 

The great debate over Joy Division, says Fisher, is this: "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?" [63]

 

Alert to the blackmail of the either/or, Fisher doesn't take the Deleuzian option of neither/nor, but nor, like Bartleby, does he simply prefer not to say. Rather, he suggests we should hold on to both options; "the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff'" [63]. 

 

In other words, we should be a little bit of a romantic aesthete and a little bit of a lumpen empiricist, insisting like the latter on the need to root the band's songs "back in the quotidian at its least elevated and [...] least serious" [63]. 

 

Fisher's reason for wanting to hold on to both versions of Joy Division is surprising (and moving): 

 

"For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males." [63] [e]

 

 

IV. 

 

We'll never know what Mark Fisher would have made of Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Savile in the four-part TV drama The Reckoning (2023), though I suspect he would have found it as problematic as Michael Sheen's portrayal of Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) and for pretty much the same reasons:

 

"The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost." [87]

 

An actor with "more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth [...] not accessible via the TV footage" [87]. 

 

As I say - and without wanting to put words into Fisher's dead mouth -  I suspect he would also condemn Coogan for simply offering an impression of Savile; perfectly competant as far as "mannerisms and verbal tics" [87] go, but "devoid of any of the tortured inner life" [87] that might have made Savile a more complex and more interesting character (although, arguably, what was so terrifying about Savile was his emptiness; the fact that there was a complete moral vacuum where one might have expected to find at least the remnants of a soul).

 

 

V.       

 

Fisher makes the intriguing suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have struck a deal with the Devil:

 

"You'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact [...], but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil." [88]

 

Although he was a professed Catholic, I think Savile would have happily struck such a bargain. 

 

In fact, one suspects that the thought of the truth finally being revealed after his death would have delighted him. For it confirms the fact that he got away with everything and made fools of everyone, including politicians, members of the royal family, and even Pope John Paul II, who awarded him a knighthood in 1990.   

 

People say Savile was hiding in plain sight, but, actually, it was more a case of no one really daring to look, or, if they did look, then they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It was only in 2012 that the obscene truth began to leak out, "like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained" [88] - first seeping, then surging.  

By the end of that year, says Fisher, "the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as trauma" [89] as  the world of light (entertainment) transformed into "the darkest horror" [90]. Not only did we have to accept the truth about Savile, we also had to reconsider our affection for Gary Glitter and even, in 2014, Rolf Harris [f]. 

Parents used to think they had to lock up their children when the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols came to town, but it was actually Jake the Peg (diddle-iddle-iddle-um) and uncle Jimmy they really should've kept an eye on (as it 'appens).   

But they didn't. And so Savile went on abusing his victims; young and old, male and female, dead or alive. Fisher provides a political explanation why this was so:

"At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile, Knight Commader of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. [...] But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable - this can't possibly be happening." [94-95] 

 

Fisher (brilliantly) concludes his piece on Savile:

 

"The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now ..." [95]

Notes

 

[a] I have watched the film adaptation of Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd (2006) and I enjoyed it. Fisher, on the other hand, hates it; arguing that the film lacks all the bite and Gnostic mythography of the book and that in the hands of the film's director (Tom Hooper) and writer (Peter Morgan) the story is reduced into just another off-the-shelf cliché-ridden narrative. 

      Fisher also criticises Michael Sheen's performance (as Brian Clough) as campy and based on a popular image and pre-existing idea of the character, lacking depth or inner life. I will pick up on this in section IV of this post, when discussing Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Saville in the TV drama The Reckoning (2023). 

      See Fisher's piece '"Can the World Be as Sad as It Seems?": David Peace and His Adapters', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), pp. 80-87. His remarks on The Damned Utd are on pp. 85-87.  

 

[b] British readers will of course know who Jimmy Savile was (and what he was). But for anyone who is unfamiliar with the name ... 

      Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (1926-2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He hosted the long-running BBC TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. During his lifetime, Savile was well known (and much-loved, although Fisher denies this) for his eccentric image and charitable work. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude that he had been a predatory and prolific sex offender (such allegations made during his lifetime were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved). 

      As a result of the ensuing scandal, some of the honours that Savile was awarded during his career were posthumously revoked and his television appearances - including episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented - are no longer repeated. As Fisher notes: "Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed [...] as if he were some medieval devil [...]" Ghosts of My Life, p. 94. 

 

[c] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life ... p. 50. Future page references to this second edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the text.   

[d] Fisher's piece on Joy Division was adapted from a post on his k-punk blog dated 9 Jan 2005. It was published in its final form in Ghosts of My Life in 2014. 

[e] Joy Division's vocalist and lyricist Ian Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide, aged 23, in May 1980. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide, aged 48, in January 2017. As a friend of mine remarked upon hearing of the latter's death (perhaps a little cruelly): K-punk is kaput.  

[f] Glitter's status as a glam rock idol was irredeemably tarnished after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2006, and found guilty of a series of sexual offences (including attempted rape) in 2015. All round entertainer Rolf Harris, popular throughout the '60s, '70s, and 1980s, was convicted in 2014 of having sexually assaulted four underage girls. 

 

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

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here. 

 

Madness and Animality: Notes on Therianthropy

Theta-Delta: a widely acknowledged symbol 

of therianthropy created in 2003

 

 

I.

 

Thanks to the internet, an entire sub-culture has developed that has adopted the word therianthropy [1] to describe a sense of spiritual or psychological identification with a non-human animal. Members of this sub-culture typically refer to themselves as therianthropes, or, simply, therians. 

 

Because therianthropy is often a very individual matter, there are no fixed rules governing what it does and doesn't involve. This can make it a rather difficult subject of which to speak - particularly for outsiders such as myself. However, I shall do my best (with apologies in advance to any therians reading who might find what I say crass, mistaken, or offensive).  

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps the first question that arises is: How do therians understand their non-human side and how does this relate to their human aspect; is it separated or integrated, experienced mutually or exclusively? 

 

Those who are keen to promote a more esoteric understanding of therianthropy, believe that they either partly or fully possess the spirit or soul of an animal. Such persons often draw inspiration from stories of shape-shifting found in Celtic, Norse, and Native American mythologies and argue that they are reviving an ancient shamanic tradition.

 

On the other hand, those therians who prefer a more material explanation of their condition argue for some peculiarity in their neurophysiology, or perhaps suggest a genetic difference. Some even adopt concepts such as species dsyphoria and transspeciesism.

 

But most therians, however, are content to accept that what they are engaged in is simply fantasy and/or a sometimes extreme form of role play. 

 

 

III.

 

Usually, therians identify with a single species of animal. And the species with which a particular therian identifies is sometimes referred to as that individual's theriotype.

 

However, there are those - known as cladotherianthropes - who identify with all members of an animal family and even some who (schizophrenically) identify with a whole menagerie of completely dissimilar creatures. 

 

It comes as little surprise to discover that the majority of therians identify with large felines and canines, such as tigers and wolves. But there are some who identify in non-mammalian terms as reptiles, birds, or even insects (the latter overly-identifying perhaps with Gregor Samsa). 

 

 

IV.

 

Another term often heard in therian circles is shifting ... One which is used to signify a radical change of perception and cognitive outlook following a move made from human to nonhuman identity. 

 

This shift may be partial or complete, substantial or subtle, but it is always subjectively dramatic unless one happens to be a contherianthrope; a term coined to refer to those individuals who feel that rather than shifting between human and nonhuman ways of being, they always embody and experience both forms simultaneously and have merged human and animal aspects into a single integrated whole. 

 

For contherianthropes, shifting, if the term means anything, is akin to a mild change of mood.

 

More controversially is the claim made by some therianthropes that they undergo an actual physical change to their appearance. This, however, is very much a minority view and most people - both within the therianthrope sub-culture and outside it - remain sceptical that gross physical transformations à la Lawrence Talbot can actually occur. 

 

 

V.

 

The question that ultimately arises is: Are therians mentally disturbed? 

 

By which I mean, can therians be characterised as individuals who manifest a clinically significant disturbance in their cognition, emotional regulation, and/or behaviour that is usually associated with distress or impairment in important areas of functioning?

 

The answer, I suppose, depends ... 

 

For whilst some therians can legitimately be labelled as schizophrenic, struggling as they seem to be with a serious dissociative identity disorder - and whilst a rare few might even be diagnosed as suffering from clinical lycanthropy, a condition in which the subject fully believes he or she has transformed into an animal and behaves in a manner that seriously impacts upon their ability to function socially - the majority of therianthropes are probably suffering no more than a type of body dysmorphia. 

 

That is to say, a non-clinical condition which, whilst resulting in an acute dissatisfaction with their human form and appearance, is ultimately little different from the feeling experienced by those who seek gender reassignment or wish to undergo other types of surgical and non-surgical body modification, for example. 

 

Personally, I don't have a problem with such people and find those who do raise objections on moral and/or pseudo-medical grounds, as far more disturbed and disturbing. But it does lead into the wider debate concerning madness and animality, which is interestingly addressed by Foucault in his work Madness and Civilization (1964) [2] ...

 

 

VI. 

 

For Foucault, animality - like insanity - is a constructed category that is determined differently in different times and places. During the Middle Ages, he writes, "legions of animals, named once and for all by Adam, symbolically bear the values of humanity" [3]. 

 

But, by the beginning of the Renaissance, "animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men's hearts" [4]. 

 

Animality and wildness were now firmly linked, but still the mad were thought to embody some of the more positive qualities of animals, making them potential sources not only of inhuman passion, but also divine revelation. This, however, was to radically change in what Foucault thinks of as the Classical Age of Reason (c.1650-1800). 

 

During this period, madness was completely "divested of spiritual and pedagogic value" [5] and whereas animality "once had value as the sign of the extra-worldly" [6] it was now simply identified as a form of inferior being and degraded existence. Those who now gave themselves over to madness and behaved like wild beasts, would be denied human status and all the accompanying privileges; they would be treated like animals and subjected to harsh disciplinary training: 

 

"Those chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy: as if madness, at its extreme point […] managed to rejoin […] the immediate violence of animality.” [7]

 

For Foucault, the dehumanization process is crucial here and has the following meaning: it shows that man no longer has any deep fear of (or respect for) the animal and that "animal metamorphosis is no longer the visible sign of infernal powers" [8]. 

 

Foucault continues: 

 

"The animal in man no longer has any value as the sign of a Beyond; it has become his madness, without relation to anything but itself … The animality that rages in madness dispossesses man of what is specifically human in him; not in order to deliver him over to other powers, but simply to establish him at the zero degree of his own nature. For classicism, madness in its ultimate form is man in immediate relation to his animality […]" [9]

 

The 18th-century is the great century of the animal-madmen - as it is of vampires and werewolves - the century of lunatics with superhuman strength that protected them from ill health and extreme conditions of hunger, cold, and pain (thus they had no need for adequate food or clothing, or for kind treatment); the century in which the treatment of the insane is based upon the perceived need not to restore the human element, but to eradicate it entirely. 

 

For only when the madman has completely become a beast, can the true scandal of madness, which is the presence of the animal in man, be resolved. 

 

 

VII.

 

Where, then, does this leave us? 

 

Well, in a sense, I kind of admire those therianthropes and other lunatics today who defiantly declare themselves to be beasts; perhaps it takes a certain degree of courage as well as mania to travel to the very edge of humanity and into an unnatural animal becoming, if only as a mad fantasy. 

 

The category of animality will undoubtedly one day be constructed differently; perhaps we will even come to value and admire animals once more. But in the meantime, for any man or woman to identify themselves as a therian is to say in a Rimbaud-like manner: I am a beast, and I am of an inferior species for all eternity [10]. 

 

 

Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Talbot 

in The Wolf Man (1941)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Therianthropy is a generic term for any transformation of a human being into another animal form, derived from the Greek terms, therion, meaning beast and anthrōpos, meaning man. Often, the term lycanthropy - which, strictly speaking, refers to were-wolfism - is used as a virtual synonym, but I prefer to use the former term in order to avoid confusion.

 

[2] Focault's work was originlly published in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. The 1964 English translation by Richard Howard was an abridged version of this book. I am using the 2004 Routledge edition of this text. 

 

[3] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 18.

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton, 'The Animal Question in Continental Philosophy', an introduction to Animal Philosophy, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, (Continuum, 2004), p. xxi.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 68. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 69.

 

[9]  Ibid.

 

[10] I'm paraphrasing Rimbaud writing in his extended prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (1873); see the section translated into English as 'Bad Blood' where he confesses that he has always belonged to an inferior race. 

 

This material is a revised extract from 'In the Company of Wolves: Animal Transformation Fantasy', Chapter 5 of Zoophilia, Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

      

A related post to this one on the furry fandom and otherkin - also taken from the above work - can be read here.