Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

Tales from Storyville 3: The Poet and the Prostitute (Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey)

Photo of Natasha Trethewey by Nancy Crampton 

and photo of a Storyville prostitute by E. J. Bellocq

I.

According to Susan Sontag, only men find something romantic about prostitution; women look at things - including photographs of naked women taken in Storyville - differently don'tcha know. Nevertheless, there's something distinctly romantic about Natasha Trethewey's second collection of verse, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). 

The work, divided into three main sections, consists of a series of poems in the form of an epistolary novella meditating on an imaginary and composite figure (Ophelia) supposedly captured by Bellocq's camera. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, detailing as it does the life of a mixed-race prostitute in the early 1900s who had nothing to fall back on (as Toni Morrison would say).

But what's really interesting, philosophically, is that whilst Bellocq directs his gaze towards female flesh, Trethewey attempts to offer us a glimpse into Ophelia's soul; transforming her from an anonymous sex object into a unique subject whom we might know, value, and grow to love.

Most people would probably find nothing wrong with that; would think it a beautiful thing to do. But Foucault calls this process subjectivation and regards it as the exercise of power favoured by liberal humanism; i.e., the way in which the (amoral and irrational) forces and desires of the body are codified, coordinated, and given personal expression.

(I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth thinking about ...) 

II.

If asked to choose, I suppose my favourite part of the work is found in section two and entitled 'Letters from Storyville'; the part in which Ophelia recounts her initial experiences as a prostitute, including her name change to Violet, something which fans of the film Pretty Baby (1978) will knowingly smile at.

That said, I'm also very fond of this sonnet from section three of the book, with which I'd like to close this post:

'Storyville Diary,' Photography 1911

I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,

one arm folded behind my back, the other

limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,

my back so straight I imagine the bones

separating in my spine, my neck lengthening

like evening shadow. When I see this plate

I try to recall what I was thinking -

how not to be exposed, though naked, how

to wear skin like a garment, seamless.

Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps

coming to my room. These plates are fragile,

he says, showing me how easy it is

to shatter this image of myself, how

a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.

See: Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, (Graywolf Press, 2002). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part two of this post - on Bellocq's photographs - should click here.

On the Politics of Lipstick

Victory Red lipstick by Elizabeth Arden

 No lipstick will win the war. But it symbolises why we're fighting. 

I.

Can we ever maintain a pure distinction between aesthetics and politics? I don't think so. In fact, it seems to me that questions to do with art, fashion, and the extraordinary profusion of forms and ideas belonging to modern culture are always at the same time questions to do with power and ways of living in the world; what I would term philosophical questions.       

And so, the question of cosmetics, for example, is just as important as a question concerning the economy. Examining our own thinking and discourse around the simple act of wearing lipstick allows us not merely to stage a strategic engagement with historical fascism, but to confront also the molecular fascism that exists in us all.   

In a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault asks: How does one keep from being fascist? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? It isn't easy. But there are a number of things one can do (or not do) and a number of things one needs to watch out for.

For example, it's wise to exercise caution before exclusively tying an ideal of Beauty to Nature and to Truth (and thus also to the Good). It doesn't necessarily make you a Nazi if you do so and believe chapped lips have some kind of transcendental superiority - it might mean, rather, that you're a Platonist, a puritan, or simply a sad militant always on the lookout for signs of decadence - but it's not coincidental that the Nazis did precisely this ... 


II.

As soon as they gained power in 1933, the Nazis not only started to prepare for war and to persecute the Jews, they also attempted to control every aspect of women's lives, including how they looked.

Although Hitler wanted German women to be the best-dressed in Europe, trousers were out (too unfeminine) and so was the use of fur in fashion (too cruel). He also disapproved of hair dye, thought perfume disgusting, and hated makeup - particularly lipstick, which he never tired of telling everyone was made from waste animal fat.

For the Führer, the fashions coming out of Paris, pioneered by designers like Chanel, encouraged an unnaturally slender (boyish-looking) silhouette; that was no good, as he wanted German women to be physically robust breeding sows; all hips and tits and no cigarettes, paint, or powder. Aryan beauty would be wholesome, clean, and fresh-faced; the antithesis of that artificial and androgynous look favoured by the Neue Frauen parading around Berlin during the Weimar period.    

Thus it was that the Allies - whether they liked it or not - were obliged to affirm the use of cosmetics. If loose lips sunk ships, then painted red lips would provide the kiss of death to the Third Reich. 

British women, therefore, applied makeup  - even though it became an increasingly scarce commodity traded on the black market - as a patriotic duty. It was what we might term an essential non-essential and even government officials realised that lipstick mattered as much to women as tobacco mattered to men.  

American girls - including those serving in the armed forces or working on factory lines - also continued to wear their lipstick with pride in order to retain their femininity, boost morale, and stick it to Hitler. Shades including Victory Red and Fighting Red were created by cosmetic companies such as Elizabeth Arden keen to do their bit for the war effort.

Feminists still celebrate J. Howard Miller's iconic figure of Rosie the Riveter, but it's often overlooked that she always had perfect makeup and never surrendered her right to be glamorous as well as strong and free.         

See: 

Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. xi-xiv. 

Marlen Komar, 'Makeup and War Are More Intricately Connected Than You Realized', Bustle (28 Oct 2017): click here to read online.

Sandra Lawrence, 'Beetroot and boot-polish: How Britain's women faced World War 2 without make-up', The Telegraph (3 March 2015): click here to read online.

Elizabeth Nicholas, 'The Little-Known Lipstick Battle of World War II',  Culture Trip (14 June 2018): click here to read online.

Jane Thynne, 'Fashon and the Third Reich', History Today (12 March 2013): click here to read online. 

Note: this post was written in response to a series of comments on an earlier post on lips and lipstick: click here. 

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

Pippa McManus: Crazy Daisy Dreams (2017)

Flower Child Group Exhibition (12 Aug - 2 Sept 2017)

Modern Eden Gallery (San Francisco)

I. Summers of Love and Hate

As a punk rocker, the symbolism of the zip and safety pin means more to me than that of the groovy floral designs so beloved of the hippie generation. However, as the Summer of Hate is now as much part of ancient cultural history as the Summer of Love, it's easier to view both events with critical perspective and concede that wearing flowers in one's hair is probably preferable to having to remove spittle.

And, of course, as a floraphile, I very much approve of intimate relationships between plants and people and can see how one might wish to develop a green neo-pagan politics upon a love of flora - although, personally, I've no desire for universal peace and love and refuse to accept that flowers can only symbolise such benevolent (and naive) idealism.    


II. If You're Going to San Francisco ...

Back in '67, San Francisco was the epicentre of the hippie counterculture, a movement mostly composed of privileged white youths who temporarily dropped out and experimented with drugs, sex, and alternative lifestyles, before moderating their views and dropping back in again as corporate yuppies in the 1980s à la Jerry Rubin.           

Thanks to a strong economy, the hippies were able to spend their time getting stoned, listening to psychedelic music, reading Allen Ginsberg,* protesting against the Man, dreaming of revolution and generally indulging their narcissism. Some formed communes and attempted to live as far outside mainstream society as possible. It's easy to mock and tempting to despise these idealists with flowers in their hair, but they have had (for better or for worse) a wide and lasting impact and many of their ideas and values are now part of the liberal orthodoxy.

Interestingly, the American author Robert Anton Wilson suggests that the hippies can be characterised as unearthly angels whose psychology manifests friendly weakness. Such people are kind, passive, generous and trusting. But they are also easily led and secretly in search of authority (which might explain the obsession with gurus and, indeed, why Charles Manson was able to wield such control over his extended Family of followers).  


III. On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

I say their values, but, as the sociologist Bennett Berger pointed out at the time, there's nothing very new or uniquely hippie about the morality of the flower children. Their movement was merely another expression of the 19th-century bohemianism that the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had reduced to a relatively formal doctrine with several key ideas, some of which we might (briefly) summarise as follows:

(i) Only a Child Can Save Us

This first point, found in Christianity and Romanticism as well as flower power philosophy, continues to resonate today; thus the astonishing rise to global fame of Greta Thunberg, for example. The idea is that the innocent child is born with special potentialities which are systematically repressed by society. If they could only be left to blossom naturally and develop their personalities, then the world might yet be saved and humanity redeemed. 

(ii) Express Yourself (Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey)

When hippies claim the right to do their own thing, they are, of course, simply reviving the idea that the moral duty of each person is to express themselves and realise their full potential as individuals via some form of creative activity. Or smoking weed. Madonna was still churning out such bullshit twenty years after the Summer of Love.       

(iii) Paganism Good / Christianity Bad

The idea that paganism is a happy, innocent worship of the natural world that regards the body as a temple in which there is nothing unclean, whilst Christianity, in contrast, is a morally repressive and anti-sexual religion is one that I used to subscribe to myself. But then I read Michel Foucault on power, pleasure, and Christian ascesis and realised that things aren't so simple; that the difference between Graeco-Roman (i.e. pagan) and early Christian forms of self-disciplining cannot be established in terms of a fundamental distinction or dialectic. Ultimately, even the Nietzschean binary of Dionysus versus the Crucified has to be deconstructed.    

(iv) Seize the Day, Man

The idea of living spontaneously and for the moment is crucial to hippie philosophy; the immediacy of the present or the nowness of the Now is where it's at; the past and future are just abstractions and what D. H. Lawrence calls the quick of time is contained only in the instant. We have the Roman poet Horace to thank for this: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ...  But whether it's ever very wise listening to a poet (or Robin Williams) is debatable; doesn't it all just end in the sanctioned hedonism of consumer society and a Nike slogan?

(v) Free Love

Ah, the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties ... Again, part of a long tradition carried on by individuals who objected to the state having any say over matters such as marriage, contraception, sexual orientation, etc. What an individual chose to do with his or her body was, they argued, entirely up to them. The great hope was that sexual liberation would lead to greater freedom in all spheres of life and bring about profound social, political, and cultural change. Again, I used to subscribe to this, but then I read Foucault and realised that the politics of desire involves a naive and mistaken understanding of sex, power, and subjectivity thanks to our unquestioning belief in what he terms the repressive hypothesis.   

(vi) Romantic Primitivism and Exotic Otherness 

Finally, the hippies were of course anti-Western and believed that spiritual enlightenment either lay in Asia (and involved transcendental meditation and taking lots of drugs), or with native Americans who combined tribal wisdom with noble savagery. Embarrassingly, I also used to buy into this in my Kings of the Wild Frontier/Nostalgia of Mud period. But now, I'm wise to the culture cult and refuse the tyranny of guilt identified by Pascal Buckner.

Indeed, now, not only would I never trust a hippie, I'd never trust a punk, pagan, or poet either (even though I used to self-identify as a combination of all three during the 1980s).

* Note: In an essay written in 1965, Ginsberg advocated that anti-war rallies should become non-violent spectacles and that hippie protesters should be provided with masses of flowers to be handed out to political opponents, police, press, and members of the public. Thanks to activists like Abbie Hoffman, this idea of flower power quickly spread and became an important expression of hippie ideology. It also led to some iconic images, as flower-wielding protesters were confronted by armed force.

See: 

Bennett M. Berger, 'Hippie morality - more old than new', Society, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (December, 1967), pp. 19-27. Note that Society was entitled Transaction at this time.

Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, (W. W. Norton, 1934). The Penguin edition (1994), ed. Donald W. Faulkner, is perhaps more readily available.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising, (Falcon Press, 1983), p. 55. 

Play: San Francisco, sung by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips, (Ode Records, May 1967), the unofficial anthem of the flower power generation: click here. It's a pleasant enough tune, but like Sid Vicious I was busy playing with my Action Man whilst all this was going on.

    

In Support of Rachel Riley (With a Brief Note on Israel and Anti-Zionism)

Photo: Mike Marsland / Getty Images

I.

Apart from being very beautiful and highly intelligent, Countdown's resident mathematician and co-presenter, Rachel Riley, is also a woman of great courage and integrity - as demonstrated by her standing up to the anti-Semitism of those who regard themselves as belonging to the radical left (and/or Corbyn's Labour Party), something for which, as might be imagined, she has received appalling abuse from online cowards. 

Born in Rochford, Essex, educated at Oxford, Ms. Riley describes herself as Jewish (albeit non-religious) and so is sensitive to the question of anti-Semitism and fully entitled to speak out on it: this is not prostituting her heritage, as one (now suspended) member of the Labour Party tweeted; nor is she poisoning the memory of her ancestors (quite the contrary).   

Despite the abuse - much of it followed by the hashtag #BoycottRachelRiley - I'm glad to see Ms. Riley announce her intention to carry on sharing her views on social media and elsewhere. I'm also pleased to see that several of her celebrity pals have come to her defence, including David Baddiel, David Schneider and Katherine Ryan.

I'm not a celebrity. Nor am I a friend of Ms. Riley's. But I would also like to add my support here. Special mention should also go to the actress Tracy Ann Oberman who, like Rachel Riley, has dared to take a stand and call out anti-Semitism. She too has my admiration and fond regards.

II.

Many people insist that anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism and I'm broadly sympathetic to this argument; clearly, there can be perfectly legitimate criticism made of Israel and its government.

Having said that, we all know that anti-Zionism is often a coded (or disguised) form of anti-Semitism and, ultimately, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, I think one has to show solidarity with the State of Israel and question the thinking behind Deleuze's support for Palestinian terror attacks, or Badiou's desire to see Israel disappear off the face of the earth (perceiving as he does its very existence to be a crime).       

And I say this not as someone who has a vested interest in politics or is particulary well-informed about all the issues, but, rather as someone who, like Larry David, would be perfectly happy to eat great chicken anywhere and who knows that the penis doesn't care about race, creed, or colour ...*


* Note: I'm referring here to the season 8 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Palestinian Chicken', (dir. Robert Weide, 2011) in which Larry, a Jew - a big Jew - meets Shara, a virulently anti-Semitic Palestinian (played by Anne Bedian). Despite their differences, they are instantly attracted to one another and amusingly use the political and religious tension between themselves to heighten and intensify a sexual encounter: click here.   

In Praise of Vintage Fashionistas (With Reference to the Case of Anastasiia Grigoruk)

Miss Anastasiia Grigoruk

Vintage fashion model

I.

Vintage fashion is an attempt to harvest the glamour of the past by wearing the clothes, accessories, hairstyles and makeup from a previous era, sometimes creating an entirely new look by mixing and matching styles and periods. Nietzsche might describe the latter chaos of styles as a form of barbarism, but as someone with a punk background this doesn't greatly trouble me.

That is to say, whilst I want people to invest care in their sartorial ensembles, I don't demand absolute authenticity and I'm happy to see non-vintage elements added, including retro designs that merely imitate the originals.  

II.

I'm particularly smitten with some of the vintage fashionistas who go to extraordinary lengths to create a stylish and sovereign model of agency and find a new mode of relating to contemporary reality and the passing of time; of capturing something of the eternal feminine that is not beyond the present but still immanent within it.

Those puritans who criticise these young women for being vacuous and conceited and sneer at their constant posting on social media, are simply not Greek enough to understand what their passion for artifice and things of the surface tells us.

Such moralists think it's just a silly game of dressing up and recycling appearances; a nostalgic exchange of real history for hopeless fantasy. But the revolt into vintage style, like other forms of dandyism, signifies something philosophically important; for it transgresses the principle of utility and seriousness to which the grey-beards would keep the world tied and affirms instead gay insouciance.

III.

What's more, to be successful within the terms set by such an elaborately mannered ethic requires admirable self-discipline; thus one might even suggest there's an element of stoicism within the world of vintage fashion. Again, the idea of building and maintaining a lifestyle is often derided, but people who think it's easy obviously haven’t tried it.

In order to become who she is, a girl like Anastasiia Grigoruk has to spend many long hours before her mirror and display an almost fetishistic obsession with the smallest of details. The adding of style to one's nature is much more demanding than accepting a pre-given way of being. It demands sustained activity and knowledge of what Foucault terms the arts of existence and techniques of self:

"those intentional and voluntary actions by which [individuals] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria."


IV.

Finally, I'd like to close by commenting on the notion of community within the world of vintage fashion; for it strikes me that amongst those who devote themselves to such there's a good deal of shared kindness and mutual support. 

If, first and foremost, vintage fashionistas are driven by a will to create a singular existence, they nevertheless seem to instinctively understand: (i) this is not something that can be carried out in isolation - that giving birth to the dancing star of the self is not an experiment in solitude, but a true social practice; and (ii) that when a line of narcissistic flight collapses into the black hole of solipsism, this is a sign of failure. For being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, as Heidegger says. 


See: Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 10-11.

For a sister post to this one on the fabulous French vintage fashion model Miss Alba Banana, click here. 

On Etymology and Amphibology

Untitled work by Seoul-based artist Myeong Beom Kim 

featured as part of a solo exhibition in Paris presented 

by Galerie Paris-Beijing entitled Amphibology (2017)

I've always been fascinated by the etymology of words.

Not because I care about origins, or have a particular fascination with linguistic roots; nor even because I wish to determine the true sense of a word - quite the opposite!

That is to say, what really excites me is how things - including words - change and how language is always subject to a process of becoming. I'm interested also in how even innocent, straightforward little words - seemingly lacking in all ambivalence - nevertheless contain within them that which they are not; their own other and absence; their own difference and deferral, or what Derrida calls différance. 

Of course, critics say that deconstruction is nothing more than postmodern wordplay, often reliant upon false etymology in which the différance (and duplicity) of words is imagined simply to satisfy a cultural and political ideology masquerading as a philosophical project. However, I will always prefer the provocative brilliance of Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault, over the dull common sense of their critics. 

And I think that when a writer demonstrates that grammar is simply a theological prejudice and that even the Word of God contains the shadow of a lie (i.e. paradox and syntactic ambiguity), we should be grateful. For by breaking words (and worlds) open, they create the (chaotic) conditions in which poetry can thrive.

Inhuman Rights

Michel Foucault - by Paul Loboda (2015)

Someone writes and asks:

"How can you posit a notion of rights when you subscribe to an anti-humanist philosophy?" 

It's a perfectly valid and legitimate question. And it's one which can best be addressed with reference to the work of Michel Foucault. For Foucault is, on the one hand, famous for his aggressive anti-humanism (influenced by Nietzsche), whilst, on the other hand, a great defender of the rights of various marginalised groups (prisoners, refugees, homosexuals, et al).     

Without falling back on the ideal of a universal human subject who possesses innate and inalienable rights in their capacity as such, Foucault argues that all people are governed within a network of power relations and that they do, at least, have this in common.

In other words, we are all citizens and this fact alone might provide a basis for solidarity. We have the right - and the duty - as citizens to question those who govern us and to call out flagrant abuses of power, the failure to act, or the failure to exercise due care when acting and thereby causing unnecessary suffering or hardship.

What's more, argues Foucault, individual citizens have the right to come together and collectively confront governments and take direct action themselves. We don't have to - and shouldn't expect to or want to - leave only governments free to act. Private citizens, says Foucault, have the right to intervene in the political order (thus his support for groups such as Amnesty International).

Rather than fantasise about human rights and the Great Family of Man, the key is to focus on civil rights and liberties, considered in their historical reality. As one commentator notes, Foucault articulates a conception of rights "that is open, contingent and revisable - and that does not rely for its moral or normative legitimacy on the idea of a universal human essence beyond power or politics".

In other words, Foucault's work opens up the playful possibility of "a tactical and strategic usage of rights that draws on the available resources of the law and liberal institutions in order to creatively and radically contest them".

Notes

Michel Foucault, 'The rights and duties of international citizenship', trans. by Colin Gordon (2015). Click here to read online at opendemocracy.net 

The above text was a statement read by Foucault at a press conference on 19 June, 1981, organised in association with Médecins du monde and Terre des hommes. It first appeared in print (with the rather unfortunate title) as 'Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme', in Liberation, 967, (30 June/1 July 1984), p. 22. Click here to read in the original French. 

Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politcs of Rights, (Stanford University Press, 2015). 

See too Golder's post on the SUP blog entitled 'Human Rights Without Humanism', from which I quote above: click here. 

On Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 EV) 

Although a white European male, mature in years, I'm not a statesman or ruler of any kind, so it surprised me to discover just how much affinity I felt with Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher described by Matthew Arnold as the most beautiful figure in history.  

His Meditations constitute such a remarkably modern series of philosophical reflections on ethics, rationality, and the nature of the self, that it's hard not to love both book and man. And it's difficult also not to look at those moral and intellectual pygmies in positions of power today, exercising their authority over millions of lives, and feel a growing sense of despair.

I can't, for example, imagine Donald Trump tweeting something as lovely - or as profound - as this passage taken from Book 3, in which Aurelius stresses the importance of attending to little things in life, including small imperfections, and of affirming elements of baseness and corruption on the grounds that these too possess their own charm and belong to what Nietzsche will later term an economy of the whole:

"Take the baking of bread: the loaf splits open here and there, and those very cracks, in one way a failure of the baker's profession, somehow catch the eye and give particular stimulus to our appetite. Figs likewise burst open at full maturity: and in olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit. Similarly the ears of corn nodding down to the ground, the lion's puckered brow, the foam gushing from the boar's mouth, and much else besides - looked at in isolation these things are far from lovely, but their consequences on the processes of Nature enhances them and gives them attraction. So any man with a feeling and deeper insight for the workings of the Whole will find some pleasure in almost every aspect of their disposition, including the incidental consequences. Such a man will take no less delight in the living snarl of wild animals than in all the imitative representations of painters and sculptors; he will see a kind of bloom and fresh beauty in an old woman or an old man; and he will be able to look with sober eyes on the seductive charm of his own slave boys." [3.2]           

As Diskin Clay, Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University indicates, this passage not only has real philosophical interest, but an almost poetic quality.

In conclusion, we might say that whilst it's true the Ancient world cannot directly provide us with answers to the problems facing us today, there are nevertheless a number of texts containing a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, and procedures, that may help us, as Foucault argues, form a perspective upon the present and serve as tools for analysing what's happening today. Meditations is surely one such text.         

See: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. with notes by Martin Hammond, introduction by Diskin Clay, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 16-17. 

The Three Questions

A teacher in France kindly wrote to say how much she enjoys reading Torpedo the Ark.

She also shared an insight into the kind of questions her pupils sitting their philosophy exam this summer are expected to answer and closed her email by suggesting I might find it amusing to address one or more of the topics myself.

And so, not wanting to disappoint and always happy to accept a challenge, I've selected three of the six questions that Mme. Stas sent and provided (brief) answers ...  

1. Is desire the sign of our imperfection?

No: desire is a term of folk psychology and is thus a sign of our clinging to false beliefs concerning human behaviour and cognitive states. In other words, it's a sign of superstition (and idealism) rather than imperfection (or Original Sin).   

2. Is it necessary to experience injustice to know what is fair?

No: the necessity (and value) of experience has rightly been interrogated within philosophy. Kant, for example, famously wrote: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience." It is thanks to our ability not only to reason but to empathise that we can recognise injustice without having to suffer such ourselves.    

3. Does culture make us more human?

This is what Mona Lisa Vito would describe as a bullshit question. For it presupposes the human condition outside of culture, whereas humanity is purely a cultural effect; a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea, as Foucault would say.

For Nietzsche, meanwhile, the human being results from a moral-rational overcoding of the flesh and the internalisation of cruelty; i.e., a cultural experiment in discipline and breeding that makes of man an interesting animal. 

I'm not sure I'd get a very good mark with these answers - aware as I am that French students are encouraged (and expected) to consider all sides of an argument before arriving at their own conclusion - but, thankfully, I'm not sitting in a classroom under strict supervision and attempting to pass my baccalaureate. 

Freud in the Age of Neuroscience

Image: Alison Mackey / Discover (2014)

As a matter of fact, although Freud is often described as the father of psychoanalysis and credited with discovering the unconscious mind, he didn't invent the term Unbewußte.

It was coined, rather, by the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling and was first used in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); a work that some regard as a precursor to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899). One of Schelling's readers happened to be the influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it was he who introduced this concept into the English-speaking world.

I think it's important to be reminded of this. Reminded, that is to say, of the metaphysical and romantic origins of Freudian analysis. For whilst it has always liked to present itself as a modern science, this is highly contestable and I don't think it coincidental that many of its concepts have continued to exert their strongest appeal amongst philosophers, literary critics, film theorists, and those working in the arts, such as the Surrealists.    

This is not to belittle the huge cultural impact of psychoanalysis, nor deny that Freud was a true founder of discursivity, to use Foucault's phrase, establishing an almost infinite number of new ways to think and speak the self, the non-self, and other. But, psychoanalysis isn't - and never has been - a legitimate science.

For one thing - as Karl Popper pointed out - its theories have either not been tested or are unable to be tested and so can neither be verified nor shown to be false. Other well known figures, including the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, have also criticised psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman even went so far as to dismiss practitioners of psychoanalysis as witch doctors.              

And then there are eliminative materialists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the mental states and structures that those subscribing to Viennese folk psychology accept as realities. For them, there are brains and we should stick to talking about brain activity and neural networks when putting forward any theory of  mind. Thus, there is no unconscious that we can locate and which is home to all kinds of horrors and oedipal desires (let's not even mention mythological archetypes).       

I have to admit, I'm certainly sympathetic to this way of thinking and - push comes to shove - I can't help seeing recent developments in neuroscience as fatal to psychoanalysis; making it look not just obsolete and irrelevant, but, simply, wrong - and at times laughably so (I'm thinking of Freud's ideas concerning psychosexual development, for example).

Finally, be it noted that Freud's notion of psychic determinism - which posits that any and all mental processes have significance (even those things that seem arbitrary or banal) - also appears to be a lot of phooey. For research has shown that a large amount of what goes on in the brain can be regarded as ephemeral cognition and perceptual junk. And this includes our precious dreams - described by Allan Hobson as randomised imagery that has nothing to do with unconscious desires or dramatised wish-fulfilment.*

So where now and what next for psychoanalysis? Well, it seems that in order to survive in this age of neuroscience it is having to adapt and evolve into a hybrid discipline known as neuropsychoanalysis.

Adherents to this new movement - led by the South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms - fully support modern brain research, but, on the other hand, they're appalled by eliminativism and argue that the mind and the subjective laws that determine mental life are real and thus deserve be taken seriously.

It seems to me, however, that they mostly want to rehabilitate their master's name; thus their constant reminding us of the fact that the young Freud was a qualified medical doctor who spent many years working in the area of natural science as a neuropathologist. For Solms et al, it seems that no matter how much he got wrong, Freud remains worthy of respect - and not just in the humanities and social science departments.   

*Interestingly, this was also D. H. Lawrence's position in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), where he writes that most dreams are purely insignificant; just "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally". It is, says Lawrence, "beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Indeed, to imagine them loaded with meaning is simply a sign of our narcissism. Readers interested in the chapter on 'Sleep and Dreams' can read it free online thanks to Project Gutenberg by clicking here. 

This post grew out of discussion with Dr Simon Solomon to whom I am grateful. 

When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)

Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;

Retract your claws,  

Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.

Philosophers - particularly French philosophers - have always loved cats. And so it's not surprising to discover that Derrida had a feline companion named Logos; or that the only pussy Foucault enjoyed petting was an all black cat called Insanity.

Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.

Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get  a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit). 

David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.

As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?

In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.      

Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.     

See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here. 

Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).  

Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.

   

Peter Sloterdijk and the Question of Anthropotechnics

Polity Press (2013)

Anthropotechnics is a term widely used today across numerous fields of study and with many different meanings. For some, it simply concerns the close interaction of man and machine. For others, however, with more of a background in Nietzschean philosophy, it refers to the manner in which bios (i.e. the raw material of the flesh) is given shape by a combination of culture and cruelty, or what Peter Sloterdijk likes to think of as existential acrobatics.

That is to say, learning how best not only to live, but to achieve a level of physical and mental agility via extensive training techniques that enable one to perform extraordinary feats as a human being (to dance, to tumble, and to walk on tiptoe). 

If this poetics of being can be furthered via a little genetic tinkering here and there or some form of selective breeding, then Sloterdijk seems fairly relaxed about this. In Rules for the Human Zoo, for example, he suggests that in a transhuman era in which traditional methods of enhancing the self - such as reading the right books - are losing their power, then biomedical engineering might be embraced as an exciting new opportunity: Vorsprung durch Technik ...

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk's eugenic speculation was regarded by some - including the grand old man of German critical theory Jürgen Habermas - as politically and philosophically pernicious and Sloterdijk was accused of wilful provocation and crypto-fascism (the fact that the above text was written in response to Heidegger didn't help matters).

To his credit, however, Sloterdijk stuck to his anthropotechnical guns and a decade later published a book translated into English as You Must Change Your Life - a work in which he again takes up the idea of human being not as something one is born, or as a fixed essence, but as something one becomes; an ever-changing work-in-progress subject to individual and collective techniques of transformation.    

Ultimately, says Sloterdijk, human beings are self-creating, self-disciplining animals and the history of human evolution is a vertical history of anthropotechnics. Again, it's impossible not to hear echoes of Nietzsche and those who have written in his shadow, such as Michel Foucault, in all of this; indeed, one might ask why read Sloterdijk when one can read Nietzsche and Foucault, both of whom write more beautifully in my view. 

Perhaps Keith Ansell-Pearson provides an answer to this in the effusive opening paragraph of his review of Sloterdijk's work:

"Peter Sloterdijk must be the most erudite man currently dwelling on the planet. He has fresh and novel insights into whatever he’s discussing at any particular moment. His recently translated book You Must Change Your Life is a tour de force that engages the history of philosophy, religion, and thought, both Western and Eastern, in ways that make you think deeply about the evolution of the human being these past few thousand years. As if this weren’t already enough, Sloterdijk is also concerned with the future, and on a planetary scale. [...] Sloterdijk thinks there is a new global ecological and economic imperative facing us today, and to this we need to respond with a new sublime."

And so, if you want an ambitious, complex, rather sprawling but at times amusing 21st-century spin on the care of the self in terms of aesthetics, asceticism and athleticism, inspired by Nietzsche, but which also takes in the work of Rilke, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and L. Ron Hubbard along the way, then this may very well be the book for you.    

Personally, however, I continue to have reservations; not least with the text's grandness of narrative and Sloterdijk's authorial grandiosity. For me, a little modesty would have been nice - and, for the record, I really don't like to see the word mußt in a book title (even if it is a borrowing from a poet).   

See:

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27 (2009), pp. 12-28. Click here to read as a pdf online.

Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Polity Press, 2013).

Keith Ansell-Pearson, 'Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter Sloterdijk', Los Angeles Review of Books, (July 8, 2013): click here to read the online version from which I quote. 

Sologamy (With Reference to the Case of Laura Mesi)

 Image Credit: Niño Jose Heredia / Gulf News (2017)

I've been waiting for me to come along - 

And now I've swept myself off my feet!

The case of 40-year-old Italian fitness trainer, Laura Mesi, has brought the subject of sologamy back into the public arena, with many commentators perplexed and angered at the idea of self-marriage ...

Predictably, the charge of narcissism is often made against those who take themselves up the aisle, as if this were the most terrible of all imaginable crimes. Ironically, however, it's a charge that is itself born of narcissism; for the anti-narcissist is essentially objecting to the fact that there are some people who don't find them attractive as a potential spouse and they're offended by that.

Other critics sneer at sologamy as a transparent and profoundly sad attempt by (mostly) single women attempting to rationalise loneliness and justify isolation as an affirmative lifestyle choice; i.e. the ultimate act of individual autonomy and empowerment.          

Personally, I don't see any need for nastiness and hope Laura and all the other self-loving sologamists live happily ever after. However, what interests me more remains the idea of divorcing the self - i.e., of releasing the self from the self [se déprendre de soi-même] as Foucault would say, offering thus a rather amusing definition of freedom.

Ultimately, ethics is not a question of remaining faithful to the self, but, rather, of subjective infidelity; of learning how to answer not I do, but No, I don't, when asked if you wish to have and to hold on to yourself, in sickness and in health, until death do you part.

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 1: The Death of the Author

Just as Nietzsche's tragic proclamation concerning the death of God opened a new horizon for thought, so too does the death of the Author announced by Roland Barthes allow an experimental and joyous movement to be made from work to text and for the emergence of a new type of reading pleasure: jouissance.

Traditionally, the Author is seen as a central and all-important figure; in his person resides the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth. The Word belongs to him and he is the Word. Thus, as the Author, he can claim authorship of and authority over a text and its meaning. Readers who wish to give an authentic reading are obliged to know his intention and never allow their own interpretations to stray too far from this. The Author is the father of the text and readers, like children, should be seen to be obediently reading - not heard voicing their own opinions (which would be impertinent), or exposing their behinds in an act of comic defiance (which would be rebellious).

But for Barthes, to tie reading and criticism to the figure of the Author is not only lazy in its convenience, it's slavish in its wilful and passive surrender to authority. To assign an Author to a text is not only to impose a limit on the latter, but on ourselves. Thus to call for (and to celebrate) the death of Author is, like deicide or the beheading of the king, an act of political resistance to tyranny (although the naive belief that we might fully liberate the text and ourselves from power is one that Foucault makes us rightly suspicious of).

This death - and the subsequent move from work to text - allows for the birth of the reader as the source of meaning and the subject of desire. This really rather simple but very beautiful and important idea remains, almost fifty years on, very seductive. For writing (and reading in a writerly manner) cannot commence until this death has taken place. Writing is thus a posthumous activity.

And posthumous writing is also postmodern in the sense that the Author is very much a modern figure, developing, as Barthes argues, out of English empiricism, French rationalism and the unique value afforded the bourgeois individual. Within modern culture, the Author takes on greater and greater importance until, finally, he assumes total control over his work and we are no longer allowed to listen to language, but only to the monotonous voice of the Author confiding in us about "his person, his life, his tastes, his passions".

For Barthes, it was the poet Mallarmé who was one of the first to understand "the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner" and to restore to writing its impersonality - which is to restore also the status (and the pleasure) of the reader. This process of calling into question and ridiculing the authority of the Author continued in the work of Valéry, Proust, and the Surrealists.

However, it was linguistics which provided those interested in disposing of the Author "with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors". Barthes continues:

"Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Acknowledging this, not only frees the reader and the text, but it also liberates the scriptor (Barthes's term for the writer who emerges after the death of the Author). The scriptor is not the father of the book, but a child of language; that is to say, he is not the past of his own work, but rather "born simultaneously with the text" in the immediacy of the present and is not "equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing".

Thus a postmodern approach to literature allows for a different understanding of time or temporality; one primarily concerned with the nowness of the moment and what Nietzsche designates as its eternal recurrence. And it means we have moved beyond the idea of literature as a form of representation. Instead, writing now designates a performative practice "in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered".

Emphasizing the material nature of writing as marks on a surface and the physical aspect of a hand that dances with a pen across a piece of paper, Barthes both echoes and anticipates Derrida. He writes:

"Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe ... that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently ... he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which calls into question all origins."

Barthes also echoes and anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva and her key concept of intertextuality, writing:

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

This notion of the text as intertext, obviously helps to further erode the old idea of literature as either representative of a non-linguistic reality, or expressive of the author's original ideas or unique being. The scriptor understands that he or she can only play with and within the field of language and "only imitate a gesture" that is pre-given and pre-rehearsed. They ought also to realise that they essentially work with a "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words".

Barthes concludes his crucial essay in a series of passages worth quoting at some length:

"Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism ... is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted."

We see how Barthes disentangles a text and runs threads of meaning in his fetishistically detailed structural analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates how even what might appear to be a conventional readerly work written by a classical author can become a renewed source of perverse pleasure once it has been read in a writerly manner and transformed into a complex and ambiguous text.

I’ll say more about this movement from work to text (and the resulting pleasure of the text) in Part II of this post.


See: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. All lines and passages quoted are taken from this essay.
 
Note: this and the two following posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To go to PAL 2 click here. To go to PAL 3 (I) click here. To read PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'     

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part II) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

A rare but recent photo of Thomas Tritchler

taken in Salzburg, Austria

The dreary utilitarianism of the English intellectual tradition is of course a historical given. But recently this Orwellian weakness for plain speaking has been reasserted by Elliot Murphy in his otherwise valuable study of anarchism and British literature.

In Unmaking Merlin (Zero Books, 2014), Murphy devotes an embarrassingly reactionary chapter to mocking obscurantist French poststructuralism - the decadent representatives of which he is clearly far too real and rational to care to understand. Against those sceptical writers who value irony and regard critical thinking as an indispensable inheritance of that hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by the great masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), Murphy oddly joins hands with pantomime moralist Roger Scruton, for whom Foucault's The Order of Things  is to be dismissed as: 

"An artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity ... [whose] goal is subversion, not truth [that perpetrates] the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies - that 'truth' requires inverted comas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation ..."

 

Since I would gladly affirm Scruton's scornful review as a ringing endorsement, we at least both know where we stand; he in his Anglican pulpit haranguing the heretics and frauds of aesthetic thought; I, presumably, whispering to demons with a forked tongue in a Parisian graveyard. At any rate, it feels good to know that as well as wearing Prada and having all the best tunes, the Devil is also a chic-y postmodernist!

In an instructive essay on British anti-intellectualism, Ed Rooksby has traced such inverted snobbery to the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, who, in his repudiation of the romantic idealism of the French Revolution, subsumed the horror of free thinking beneath the twin lenses of natural prejudice and common sense. The inductive methodologies of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton would now underpin an ontological realism whose homespun incarnation assumed an irremediably naive strain.

Not for nothing did Oscar Wilde lament England as the 'home of lost ideas'. At the very least, in a culturally and financially bankrupt nation in which Stephen Fry offers the closest approximation of a public intellectual, it can be safely assumed one is unlikely to be breathing the rarefied air of grand thoughts.

    

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.