Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Introduction and Chapter One

Zer0 Books (2025) [a]

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

'The more artificial you can make it, the greater the chance of its looking real.' [b]

                                                                                                 

  

I. 

 

As is only right and proper for an Introduction, Fisher sets out some of his key terms (my emphasis in bold):

 

"Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive." (14) 

 

This anorganic continuum, says Fisher, is the "province of the Gothic" (15). 

 

Just to clarify, he adds:

 

"The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorise this flatline demands [...] the theorisation of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism." (15)

 

Fisher also informs us of his major aim: to pursue cybernetics to its limits by asking 'What if we are as 'dead' as the machines?' "Much of what follows is an attempt to answer this question" (15) and reach the Gothic flatline. 

 

As might be apparent, Fisher is deeply indebted in his thinking to Deleuze and Guattari (and their reading of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer). For Deleuze and Guattari, the Gothic refers us to nonorganic life and has nothing to do with anything "supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly" (15) [c]. 

 

That said, Fisher does rather want to sex up the idea of materialism by thinking it "in terms closer to Horror fiction than to theories of social relations" (15) and demonstrate how the anorganic "is not the dead matter of conventional mechanistic science; on the contrary it swarms with strange agencies" (16).

 

Now, without wishing to anticipate what Fisher says later in Flatline Constructs, I think it might be helpful to clarify this point by stressing that the anorganic (or nonorganic) is entirely different from the inorganic. Whilst the latter is - like a Monty Python parrot - completely devoid of life, the former is a vibrant, unorganised form of intensive life operating on a flatline. 

      

Unfortunately, things get complicated because techno-capitalism, argues Fisher, has collapsed these distinctions, rendering human subjects inorganic and machines anorganic and thus it is that we end up discussing "the gleaming products of technically sophisticated capitalism" (16) in the "ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fiction: zombies, demons" (16), etc. 

 

 

II.

 

Finally, there are two other names who are central to Flatline Constructs: Freud and Baudrillard ...

 

Freud emerges in Fisher's study as "a somewhat ambivalent figure, sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, of Gothic Materialism" (17). The problem is, although Freud flirts with the idea of the inanimate becoming active in his essay The Uncanny (1919), he ultimately dismisses it. 

 

As for Baudrillard (whose work at times parallels that of Deleuze and Guattari, but which is by no means compatible) [d], his interest in cyberpunk fiction and film combined with "his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it" (18). 

 

Baudrillard matters for Fisher also because it is Baudrillard "who is most associated with the emergence of theory-fiction as a mode" (19), putting an end to theory and fiction as separate genres. In Flatline Constructs, Fisher wants to take Baudrillard's thinking in this area very seriously "and approach fictional texts, not simply as literary texts awaiting theoretical 'readings', but as themselves already intensely theoretical" (19) [e].  

 

 

III.  

 

Chapter One of Fisher's thesis "examines the nexus of postmodernism, cybernetics and the Gothic" (20) and is titled 'Screams, Screens, Flatlines'. It opens with an analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or as those who prefer novels to films know it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968); a key cyberpunk text. 

 

The chapter also "aims to show ways in which Cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic" (20) [f] and how the language of Horror is important for Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetic realism or what Fisher calls the hypernatural - a concept that is positioned "as an intensification of naturalism, and by opposition the supernatural" (20).  

 

Before examining these things in more detail, let me just confess that I have minimal interest in the kind of films and novels that fascinate Fisher. I've seen Blade Runner - and, to be honest, I found it a bit boring; but not half as boring as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which sits alongside George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) as the book I most wish I'd never attempted to read.

 

So, while I'm curious about Fisher's work, I move in a very different cinematic and fictional universe. 

  

 

IV.

 

Dick-Gibson-Burroughs-Ballard-Cronenberg ... Fisher wants to envelop this literary-cinematic line along with a legion of other names - Lovecraft, Freud, Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, Worringer, McLuhan, Jameson, Baudrillard - into Gothic Materialism conceived as an alternative postmodernism.

 

He explains that the writers and filmmakers with whom he mostly enjoys interfacing are already haunted by Gothic Materialism. They are not postmodernists "who process reality through a textualist or linguistic grid, but theorists who understand 'postmodernity' as an essentially material phenomenon, describing its effects primarily in terms of the impact that new telecommercial configurations have on the human nervous system" (27). 

 

They (to a greater or lesser degree) understand that man is no longer alienated, but ecstatic - ecstasy being defined as a free-floating experience that arises "when the subject is jacked into late capitalism's network of cybernetic communications" (28) and retreat to a private space is no longer an option. 

 

This terminal lack of retreat breeds a distinct gothic dread; not a traditional psychological fear of castration or external penetration by technology, but a realization that we no longer possess any organic interiority. We have been turned radically inside out - everted into the circuit (a thought that might make even an android scream).    

 

Once jacked in this manner, it's naive to still posit a "transcendent and authentic human agent" (29) who might resist and overcome capital. In fact, rather than think of human subjects, better to speak of non-subjectified forms of individuation - i.e., individuals who have become one with their environment. And nobody helps us conceive of such posthuman individuals than some of the names listed above:

 

"Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard's ecstatic communication, Gibson's Cyberspace, Jameson's total flow and Cronenberg's Videodrome, the map of hypermediatised capitalism that is decoding privatised subjectivity." (31)

 

  

V. 

 

To recap: Gothic Materialism = cybernetic realism. 

 

And the key feature of all cybernetic systems is feedback - both positive and negative.   

Which is why criticism of the system and forms of resistance to it are futile; for both, as Baudrillard pointed out, can easily be fed back into a system that "doesn't work by suppression, or repression, but through participative processes" (40). 

 

For Fisher, the fact that there is a "convergence of cybernetics and sorcery on the Gothic Flatline" (43) appears to be a paralysing predicament to say the least. However, the flatline is where everything happens; "the site of primary process [...] not a line of death but rather a continuum enfolding [...] beyond both death and life" (43).

 

I'm not sure that is meant to be encouraging, but it sounds strangely positive to my ears - almost hinting at a kind of dark and secret utopianism. There may be no hope for humanity in a conventional sense - no god to save us or revolution to liberate us - but by flattening human identity into an immortal, self-assembling network of digital code and alien desire, the flatline offers a release from personal neurosis into a state of inhuman euphoria. 

 

Ultimately, the Gothic Flatline excites because it invites us to merge with a vast cosmic machine (at least I think that's what's on offer). 

 

It's a shame that The Matrix was released in the same year Fisher submitted his PhD (1999), as he might have found it a useful point of reference, even if Baudrillard was unimpressed by the film and thought it a fundamental misunderstanding of his work [g]. As it is, he relies heavily on Neuromancer, in which the term flatline is central.   

 

 

VI. 

 

As Adam Jones rightly said in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, Fisher likes to promote the idea of a Gothic Marx; one who emphasised the vampiric character of capitalism:

 

"The modern world for Marx is peopled with the undead; it is indeed a Gothic world haunted by spectres and ruled by the mystical nature of capital." (44)

 

But - and this is important - as capitalism develops and mutates it "outstrips Marx's most horrified descriptions of it" (45), just as the Gothic "escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene" (45). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"For cyberpunk, Marx's most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities." (45)

 

Recognising this, Deleuze and Guattari's work "inherits and supplements Marx's Gothic vocabulary" (45), which is why they like to speak of vampires, werewolves, and the body without organs - although it should be noted that there's nothing horrific about the latter as open system full of possibilities; it's the organ-isation of the body into an organism or "homeostatically sealed and hierarchically arranged bio-container" (49) that should give us the shivers.  

 

 

VII. 

 

Of course, embodiment isn't everything; and it certainly doesn't underwrite subjectivity. 

 

As Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr discovers, a brain in a liquid-filled jar "can have the experience of subjectivity - all the memories and dreams that post-Freudian man thinks define him uniquely - so long as the right material conditions are simulated" (51) [h].     

 

Thus - and this is something which again I know some readers will have trouble accepting - the jar matters just as much as the brain inside. Identity needn't be something essential or even personal; it can be engineered just like a prosthetic leg. 

 

And if that's the case, then does it really matter if you are dealing with an old school human or a genetically engineered bio-synthetic humanoid (what they term replicants in Blade Runner)?

 

Fisher concludes section 1.4 of his opening chapter by pointing out that debates around the question of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant miss the Gothic Materialist implications of the film:

 

"Since, in Blade Runner, the criteria for rating the human above the replicants [...] have now evaporated, Cartesian epistemological questions have been obsolesced by functional / operational criteria. Since you could be a replicant [...] it is already as if you were a replicant, a desiring-machine. Becoming-replicant is therefore not a matter of identifying oneself as a technical machine; it is not a question of identification at all, but of recognising all identity as construction." (54)  

 

I have to admit, that's a brilliant insight - and probably more relevant to the world we live in today than anything I wrote in my PhD.  

 

 

VIII.  

 

In the end, it all comes down to (an art of) lines: organic (naturalistic) lines and geometrical (mechanical) lines. And of course, the Gothic flatline ... These lines determine how we interact with our environment and, indeed, what kind of environment exists to interact with.  

 

In brief, we might think of organic lines as the ones that shape nature and the representation of nature in classical art. People who love these flowing, undulating lines - think rhythymic waves and rolling hills - are seduced by a relaxing, harmonious aesthetic and will probably imagine Mother Earth with exaggerated female curves à la the Venus of Willendorf.

 

Geometric lines, on the other hand, are rigid and right angled; they can be found in abstract art, modernist architecture and mathematics. Those who love the precision of these lines are seduced by a fascist aesthetic and wish to impose structure and order onto a chaotic world; they value logic and wish to impose systems, grids, or networks in order to exercise control.         

 

As for the Gothic flatline, well, as we have discussed, this is beyond the binary of the organic and geometric and dissolves the distinction between them. In other words, it flattens the biological and technological on to the same plane; things become entangled so it becomes impossible to say where biology ends and machinery begins. 

 

In other words, for Fisher and his cyberpunk chums, humans are no longer independent organic beings who simply use tools and machinery; rather, we are fully integrated parts of a massive techno-digital landscape: "In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism [or cybernetic realism] the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism [...] collapses." (60)

 

And there's no point in calling for either a neo-vitalism or a neo-thanatropism, as neither will provide a satisfactory description for the world today. What we need is a concept - or at least a term - that we can use to discuss what arrives on the flatline - and Gothic fiction gives it to us: undeath (which is, of course, synonymous with unlife).    

 

"Following Freud [...] we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life - or death - but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living." (62) [i] 

    

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs. 

 

[b] Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 148. Quoted by Fisher in Flatline Constructs, p. 35. At the close of chapter one of Flatline Constructs, Fisher suggests that Bacon is the painter who best helps us visualise the world from a Gothic Materialist perspective.

 

[c] It's because Fisher wishes to disassociate his theory of Gothic Materialism from some of its existing cultural associations, that I find Graham Harman's description of Flatline Constructs as "a precious gift from the other world, where he [Fisher] now resides", so profoundly mistaken. If I were the publishers, I'd remove this remark from the front of the book. 

 

[d] One of the aims of Flatline Constructs, says Fisher, is to "play off Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard against each other" (18). 

 

[e] This is one of many points on which Fisher and I are in accord. In my own doctoral thesis completed at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s (and submitted just a few months after Fisher submitted his), I had a section of the Introduction titled 'On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature'. 

      See Outside the Gate: A Study of Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation as Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

[f] Fisher has the slightly irritating habit of capitalising words that don't require capitalisation. For the sake of consistency, I follow his lead and adopt his practice. If Gothic requires a big G, still there is no reason as far as I can see why cybernetics should come with a capital C. 

 

[g] In a k-punk post titled 'dis-identity politics' (25/04/2006), Fisher claims that he is "no fan of the Wachowskis' Matrix" - even if it did become a "massively propagated pulp mythos" which "suggested that what counts as 'real' is an eminently political question". 

      See k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 136. 

 

[h] I'm referencing The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983), starring Steve Martin as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, a pioneering neurosurgeon. 

      Whilst not mentioning this film - do CCRU members ever enjoy comedies? - Fisher does mention Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986) in which Josef Virek lives as a disembodied consciousness inside a life-support vat and notes that "if subjectivity can be experienced by a brain in a vat [...] what is interesting [...] is not the subjectivity but the vat" (47). 

        

[i] Without knowing anything of Fisher's work at the time, I explored similar ideas in a six-part series of talks at Treadwell's in 2006 entitled Thanatology. 

      See the first two essays - 'On Dissolving the Distinction Between Life and Death' and 'All Being is a Being Towards Death' - in The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Books, 2010). Or click here for a thanatological fragment based on material in the first of these essays posted on TTA (27 Sept 2014).   

 

 

For a post discussing Adam Jones's Foreword to Fisher's Flatline Constructs (5 June 2026), please click here.  

 

 

Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love: 

Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang 

 (University of Michigan Press, 2023) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

One of the books reviewed in the latest edition of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2025) is Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (2023) [b]. 

 

Written by Li Zhimin, a Distinguished Professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, it intrigued me enough that I decided I would read Yao's book for myself to discover if she really does misread Lawrence's project as much as indicated. 

 

For Lawrence - just to be absolutely clear at the outset - was not a utopian in the transcendent (and optimistic) sense that Yao argues and had no truck with cosmopolitanism if the latter is interpreted as a form of universal humanism. 

 

As for love, Lawrence absolutely rejects such when it is written with a capital 'L' and transformed into something grandiose and morally ideal; when it becomes diseased and insisted upon as the only thing that matters; when it becomes politicised and serves as a justification for violence, hatred, and authoritarianism. 

 

Even in his Chatterley writings, Lawrence prefers to speak of touch and tenderness rather than use the L-word and whilst he subscribes to a politics of desire, he ultimately thinks the transformation of society will require a new religious sensibility more than a sexual revolution and his democracy to come is, of course, an immanent utopia (now/here), existing in the bonds between people, not an ideal utopia (no/where) that "transgresses and transcends local, national, global, and even cosmic boundaries" (9).   

 

To his credit, Li does find flaws with Yao's study. But, unfortunately, he too seems to buy into the (Christian and Beatlesque) idea that all we need is love in order to "help the world become better" [c] and the human family achieve its collective maturity. 

 

 

II.    

 

As my knowledge of (and interest in) the Chinese-American author Eileen Chang is strictly limited, I'll not be commenting here on Yao's discussion of her work, nor the nature of the link made between Chang's writings and those of Lawrence, as all such comparisons are, if not exactly odious, then often questionable, even when adopting a third term methodology [d].   

 

Yao opens her Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love with the following line: "Love as a feeling is universal" (1) and normally that would be enough for me to immediately close a book. For even if this is factually correct from a bio-anthropological viewpoint, the expression of love is, of course, determined by language, history, culture, etc. (as I'm sure Yao knows; speaking immediately afterwards of Chinese love and Western love as distinct traditions). 

 

Nonsensical phrases casually dropped into the Introduction such as "it stirs one's spiritual being" (11) are also problematic and usually book-closing for me, but, in this case, I'm determined to press on and "pursue the true meaning" (11) of a text which promises to "restore [Lawrence's] literary glory" (14) and address the problems of today.  

 

 

III.

 

According to Yao, "in imagining how love breaks down preexisting orders and creates alternative utopian realities" (25) Lawrence divides love into four forms, "each corresponding to different phases of an ideal subject's maturity: parental, sexual, adulterous, and transcendental" (25-26). 

 

She then explains how she traces the subject progressing through these four separate phases, transforming their relationships in the process, as they move toward cosmoplitan love as she understands it. Thus the four phases also structure her book: beginning with chapter 1, in which the love of a child for its parents is transformed into sexual love for a non-familial other; a topic Yao discusses with reference to Freud's Oedipus complex and the question of incest. 

 

I'll take a brief look at this and the following two chapters - which illustrate how Lawrence used his model of eroticised philosophy to challenge nationalism and modernisation within a secular society - before then examining the fourth and final chapter in a little more detail, as this is the one I think will most interest (and infuriate), dealing as it does with Lawrence's creation of an "alternative language of divine love to render secular existence transcendentally meaningful" (29) and allowing lovers to enter a "mysterious dimension of utopia" (29).

 

 

IV. 

 

The argument of chapter one is essentially this: cosmopolitan love = good; incestuous desire = bad. And as the incest prohibition is "the foundation of cosmopolitan love" (32) - as well as that which also provides "the framework of all morality" (32) - it is also unquestionably in need of enforcement; human culture depends on it. 

 

This sounds very Freudian, but, actually, Yao wants to reverse certain aspects of Freud's thinking on this issue, arguing that whilst he wishes to see incest as "conforming to a universal Oedipal dynamic that originates from children" (33), Lawrence, in Sons and Lovers (1913), correctly identifies parents and the local culture as the "main drivers of incestuous desire" (33); an idea he later develops in his two books on the unconscious.     

 

I'm more than happy to be convinced by what Yao says here. It's certainly the case that, whilst influenced by Freud, Lawrence was no Freudian and vehemently rejected the psychoanalytic interpretation of his work. As Deleuze and Guattari recognise, Lawrence is fundamentally anti-Oedipus.    

 

 

V. 

 

Chapter two - 'Sexual Love as Public Defiance' - argues that there's a radical politics of desire; one capable of not only liberating the subject (particularly the female subject), but challenging ideas surrounding class and race, debunking prejudice and social convention, etc.

 

So nothing very new - and it's as if Foucault never lived! 

 

Yao's reading of The Virgin and the Gipsy is untenable, naive, and cliché-ridden; a young woman, stifled by false morality and a corrupt social order, sets out on a quest to discover her "primal selfhood" (54), the climactic flood at the stories end symbolising the unleashing of her "primitive desire" (54) and sexual awakening.    

 

Yvette is a woman transformed - a woman empowered - a woman in love! Because this is not just an erotic tale in which a randy passing gipsy deflowers the vicar's daughter, it's a utopian love story and a subversive (anti-English, post-colonial) cultural expression. Oh, and it's a rejection of the patriarchy and sexually objectifying male gaze too.  

 

Yao concludes her second chapter thusly:

 

"If the critique of incestuous love described in chapter 1 represents the struggle to break the shackles of an oppressive and immoral family culture, the affirmation of sexual love finds a way to reach a realm of freedom that is briefly achieved through a utopian moment that coincides with the cosmopolitan transcendence of national boundaries." (68) 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This 172 page text is available to purchase in hardback and paperback formats from the usual outlets, but is also freely available online as an open access book, thereby generously allowing anyone to read, download, or share it: click here to access via JSTOR. All page numbers given in this post refer to this work. 

      The author, Sijia Yao, is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America (a private liberal arts college based in California).      

 

[b] See 'Sijia Yao, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang, reviewed by Li Zhimin', in the JDHLS, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), ed. Jane Costin (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society, Eastwood, Notts.), pp. 202-206.  

 

[c] Li Zhimin, ibid., p. 205. 

      The good professor goes on to explain that when love triumphs, "people from different interest groups would be more ready to recognise each other's family values" (205-06) and live according to the rule of law within a rational political framework. Humanity, Maturity, and Family (HMF): these are the (Kantian) key terms and fundamental values of his own utopian vision; see chapter 12 of his book written in collaboration with Daniel Braun, China Being Led and Leading: A Literary and Cultural Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), pp. 151-162.  

 

[d] See the section on comparative methodology in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love, pp. 19-25.   

 

 

This post continues in part two (sections VI-X): click here.  

Euphoria Contra Ecstasy

Killing Joke: Euphoria (2015)  

Screenshot from the official video

And then the clouds break / A ray of sunlight, gloria!  

As if a promise / Some strange kind of euphoria [1]

 

 

I. 

 

When I was young, one of the key words in my vocabulary was the Ancient Greek term ἔκστασις (ékstasis), which refers to a psycho-spiritual sense of release; the ecstatic individual is one who has found a way to literally step outside of their own self and become part of something greater (some might characterise this as the nowness of the moment; some might speak of God).  

 

Ecstasy, therefore, is an altered - some would insist higher - state of consciousness and many who have experienced it speak of an intensely pleasurable experience, whether resulting from sexual activity, drug use, or religious devotion [2]. The desire for a temporary loss of self and loss of control is, it seems, rooted in a fundamental human instinct - one which Freud memorably termed der Todestrieb [3].     

 

And it's at this point I'd like to say something about another Ancient Greek term - εὐφορία - or, as we write it in English, euphoria  ...

 

 

II.  

  

It's because I think Freud is right to identify a death drive and because I believe the wilful desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in this drive (and is thus, from a Nietzschean perspective, décadent), that I now avoid speaking of ékstasis and favour euphoria, which, I would argue, is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

In other words, euphoria is a sense of physical wellbeing that encourages us to stay true to the earth, whilst ecstasy, involving as it does an element of transcendence and a stepping out of reality, is a dangerous first step on the path to heaven; euphoria is tied to Dionysian joy [4], but ecstasy terminates in the kind of religious rapture [5] longed for by Christians and other afterworldsmen [6].  

 

 

III. 

By way of providing an example, let us turn to two contrasting scenes in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915) ...  

 

In the first of these, we witness the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dancing naked in her bedroom and this, I would say, is a scene of euphoria; one that celebrates the fertile female body in all its gravid beauty:

 

"Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen [...]

      [...] She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss [7] [...] she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness [8].   

 

In the second scene, which comes in the following chapter (VII), we are told how her husband, Will, is driven to the point of ecstasy by Lincoln Cathedral:

 

"When he saw the cathedral in the distance [...] his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven, it was the Spirit hovering like a dove [...] He turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange, ecstatic grin." [9]    

 

It's not that Will is an objectophile - though he clearly has certain tendencies in that direction - his real desire is to escape mortal existence and become one with the Infinite in timeless ecstasy. No wonder Anna "resented his transports and ecstasies" [10] and longs to leave the cathedral and be back under the open sky.

 

And no wonder she turns to the gargolyes, which save her "from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite" [11] and help her to bring Will back down to earth with a bump.  

 

In brief: Anna's Dionysian euphoria triumphs over Will's Christian ecstasy ...

 

He still loves Lincoln Cathedral, but, after Anna has effectively disillusioned him by mocking his desire to consummate his love, even Will recognises there is life outside the church; that there are birds singing in the garden; flowers growing in the fields. 

 

And these things induce a sense of joy and wellbeing that was free and careless and "at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral" [12]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

And on a cold and grey November morn, when all the autumn leaves have fallen and "I can hear the magpies laugh" [13], all it takes is a momentary break in the clouds and a ray of sunlight and I too feel strangely euphoric ...     

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the Killing Joke single 'Euphoria', released from the album Pylon (Spinefarm Records / Universal Music Group, 2015): click here to play. The melodic character and almost choral quality of this track reminds me of the songs on Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (E.G. Records / Virgin Records, 1986), which is certainly one of my favourite Killing Joke albums.  

      

[2] I'm not suggesting these are the only ways to induce ecstasy; other methods might include physical activities such as yoga, dancing, or working out at the gym. Others find quiet meditation in which they concentrate on their breathing does the trick.

 

[3] Freud defines the death drive as the will possessed by organic life forms to return to an inanimate state. It is the opposing (although complementary) force to the life instinct, Eros, which drives self-preservation and reproduction. Both drives belong to the same libidinal economy. See his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). 

      Here, I will argue that whilst the desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in the death drive, euphoria is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

[4] For Nietzsche, the story of Dionysus is form of thanksgiving and an affirmation of life; the promise that it will be eternally reborn (this in stark contrast to the figure of the Crucified, who counts as an objection to life and a curse upon it). 

 

[5] Rapture is derived from the Latin term raptus, meaning to seize and carry off; one is literally swept up with ecstasy and transported to another (better and more perfect) world. This is why certain evangelical Christians in the United States use this term as their great eschatological watchword. 

      For these religious fanatics, the Rapture is an end-times event when all Christian believers (including the resurrected dead) will rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord their God. Although this is a relatively recent theological development - first arising in the 1830s - the origin of the term can be traced back to the Bible which uses the Greek word ἁρπάζω (harpazo); see 1 Thessalonians, 4:13-18, where a gathering of the elect in Heaven is described after the Second Coming of Christ.     

 

[6] This term - Hinterweltler in the original German - is a coinage of Nietzsche's and refers to those lunatics who focus their hopes and values on a transcendental realm that one enters at death, thereby devaluing earthly life. 

     For Zarathustra, it was suffering and impotence which created the idea of an afterworld and whilst it may seem attractive to many, it is, he says, a humiliation to believe in such heavenly nonsense. He teaches men to listen rather to the voice of the healthy body and stay true to the earth. 

      See the section entitled 'Of the Afterworldsmen', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 58-61. 

 

[7] Although the term bliss was later appropriated by those who like to imagine the spiritual delights of heaven, it was originally an Old English word (with a Proto-Germanic root) simply meaning joy in the mundane sense. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169-170. I discuss this scene - much loved by maiesiophiles everywhere - in the post 'On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen' (30 July 2017) - click here - and again in a post titled 'Maiesiophilia' (8 Dec 2022): click here.   

       

[9] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 186.  

 

[10] Ibid., p. 188. 

 

[11] Ibid., p. 189. I discuss this scene at greater length in the post titled 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris' (16 April 2019): click here.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 191.  

 

[13] Killing Joke, 'Euphoria' (2015), as cited in note 1 above.  

 

On the Politics of the Smile

 And Still You Wear That Happy Face ...

 (SA/2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst totalitarian regimes do not enforce happiness and demand that citizens always smile per se, they do, nevertheless, require outward displays of satisfaction and conformity and often clamp down on any signs of discontent or unhappiness. 

 

Thus it is that one doesn't see many frowns on the faces of those depicted in state controlled propaganda and public emotion at mass events is carefully stage managed. 

 

And this is as true of Disneyland as it is of Nazi Germany; of corporate-media spectacles, such as the Olympics opening ceremony, as it is of a worker's parade in Pyongyang. 

 

Mickey Mouse, Joseph Goebbels, Danny Boyle, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, all know how to put on a good a show and make the people smile. 

 

In other words, they all understand the importance of exploiting what Freud calls the pleasure principle [2] and transforming what should be a natural expression of joy [3] into a regulatory facial mechanism that signals the correct response to power.

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, the smile can still, I think, be a counterfascist gesture; for as Baudrillard reminds us, there is the possibility of a sudden reversal even in a single ironic smile, "just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master" [4].

 

This is not to imply we can laugh all our troubles away, but to suggest that the more hegemonic the system, the greater is its vulnerability to even the smallest of set-backs or acts of defiance. Any challenge, even at a micropolitical level, represents a failure and threatens to quickly go viral; a total system requires complete control and demands absolute complicity. 

 

Thus, smiling - perhaps more with the eyes than the mouth - is still an important ability to possess. If one smiles with a mix of cheerful insouciance and philosophical indifference to the circumstances in which one finds oneself [5], then, who knows, perhaps others might smile back ...             

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The title of this image is taken from the lyrics written by Jello Biafra and John Greenway for 'California Über Alles"' (1979), the debut single by American punk band Dead Kennedys. The background artwork is a detail taken from the sleeve for the single, designed by Winston Smith. 

      The main image (allegedly) shows a woman wearing a smile mask intended to fight depression, taken in Budapest, 1937. The theory behind the mask, designed to force the wearer's mouth into a smile using mechanical devices like wires or medical tape, was that if people looked happier then they would feel happier. Unfortunately, if such masks were ever actually used, they proved to be ineffective and did nothing to reduce the high number of suicides in the city at that time. 

 

[2] For Freud, the Lustprinzip is the instinctive seeking of pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. In his 1921 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, he considered the possibility of something more primal and operating independently of a pleasure principle conceived in relation to the life instinct; something that he termed the death drive (Todestrieb).   

 

[3] Whilst it's true that in different cultures and societies smiling can convey emotions other other than joy and amusement - such as confusion and embarrassment, for example - there are no non-smiling peoples and evolutionary biologists have traced smiling back millions of years to our earliest ape ancestors.

      Interestingly, smiling may also be something that men do more than women and a common female complaint is being told to smile by male strangers, as this is seen as aggressive and controlling rather than born of concern for their happiness.     

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser (University of Michigan, 1994), p. 163.  

 

[5] It's important to note that I'm not asking for sincerity to be expressed in one's smile; nor do I want people to smile enthusiastically. I want them to smile in a manner similar to the Cheshire Cat, so that they become elusive and enigmatic (or imperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari would say).  

 

 

Musical bonus: Nat King Cole 'Smile', recorded and released as a single in 1954, it can be found on the album Ballads of the Day (Capitol Records, 1956): click here. 

      Or for Jimmy Durante's version of 'Smile', originally found on his 1965 album Hello Young Lovers (Warner Bros.) and which famously features in the movie Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019), click here.  

 

Aleister Crowley and D. H. Lawrence: The Great Beast Versus The Priest of Love

Messrs. Crowley (1875 - 1947) and Lawrence (1885 - 1930)  

I. 

 

The great English occultist Aleister Crowley and the great English novelist D. H. Lawrence never actually met in person. 

 

And that's probably just as well; for whilst they both had scandalous reputations [1], it's almost impossible to imagine they would have become pals.

 

Despite never crossing paths, however, Crowley and Lawrence were certainly aware of one another and had several friends and acquaintances in common [2]. 

 

What's more, not only did Crowley and Lawrence move in similar bohemian circles, but they also lived in some of the same places, including Cornwall [3] and Sicily [4], for example.    

 

 

II.  
 

I'm not a Crowley expert, but my understanding is that, essentially, he viewed Lawrence's work as naive and unrefined. 

 

Thus, whilst he approved of Lawrence's pagan sensuality, for example, at the same time he felt it overly romantic; capable of arousing adolescent passions, but not of satisfying the more mature tastes of the sophisticated libertine. 

 

Further - and this is rather surprising, coming as it does  from a practitioner of sex magick - Crowley thought Lawrence exaggerated the importance of sexual relationships (in much the same way as Jung criticised Freud) and that this ultimately has fatal consequences [5].      

 

 

III.

 

What then did Lawrence think of Crowley? 

 

To answer this we must turn to his letters, although even here the references to Crowley are few and far between and Lawrence's interest in pagan occultism and the magical arts was inspired more by the writings of Madame Blavatsky, James Frazer, and J. M. Pryce [6] than by The Great Beast, even whilst conceding that the latter was one of those esoteric wonder-freaks whom people think it marvellous to name-drop [7]. 

 

In July 1910, Lawrence read a volume of selected poems by Crowley entitled Ambergris (1910), borrowed from Grace Crawford, an acquaintance of his whom he had met through Ezra Pound. But he soon returned the book, simply stating that he "didn't like it" [8], having anticipated his own likely response in an earlier letter to Miss Crawford, writing that if Ambergris "smells like Crowley [...] Civet cats and sperm whales" then it will be "pretty bad" [9]. 

 

Fast forward a few years, and Lawrence again mentions Crowley in his correspondence ...

Writing to his Australian friend, the writer and publisher, P. R. Stephensen, in September 1929, Lawrence expresses his concern that the Mandrake Press - which Stephensen had co-founded with Edward Goldston earlier that year - was too heavily committed to publishing Crowley's work, saying that, in his view, the latter's time "was rather over" [10] (the implication being that the day belonged more to him and Stephensen should therefore concentrate on publishing more of his work).   

 

 

IV.

 

Ultimately, we can say that Lawrence had an ambivalent relationship to occultism and to the individuals who studied or practiced the magical arts.    

 

Thus, on the one hand, he would mock those such as Meredith Starr and his wife [11] as herb-eating occultists who "descend naked into mine-shafts, and there meditate for hours and hours, upon their own transcendent infinitude" [12]. 

 

But, on the other hand, Lawrence was excited by Starr's knowledge of the subject and the latter's fine collection of rare books "opened up ideas and images" [13] that Lawrence was able to incorporate into his own philosophy. 

 

In a letter to the American author Waldo Frank, Lawrence attempts to clarify his position:

 

"I am not a theosophist, though the esoteric doctrines are marvellously illuminating, historically. I hate the esoteric forms. Magic has also interested me a good deal. But it is all part of the past, and part of the past self in us: and it no good going back, even to the wonderful things. They are ultimately vieux jeu." [14]

 

In the same letter, Lawrence adds: 

 

"There should be again a body of esoteric doctrine, defended from the herd [...] a body of pure thought, kept sacred and clean" and argues that a new earth and heaven will only come about through "the sanctity of a mystery, the mystery of the initiation into pure being" [15]. 

 

This is surely a view that Crowley would endorse (and a sentiment he would share) and I think Ronald Hutton is right to suggest the Priest of Love and The Great Beast have more in common than either cared to admit [16]. 

 

Finally, we might mention a letter to the artist Mark Gertler, written in the spring of 1918, in which Lawrence again opens up about his continuing interest in all things esoteric, whilst taking the opportunity to have a pop at a friend-turned-enemy with whom he had even once planned to collaborate on a lecture series:

 

"I have been reading another book on occultism. Do you know anybody who cares for this - magic, astrology, anything of that sort. It is very interesting, and important - though antipathetic to me. Certainly magic is a reality - not by any means the nonsense Bertie Russell says it is." [17] 

 

 

Crowley self-portrait (1918) / Lawrence self-portrait (1929)

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In 1923, the British weekly magazine John Bull branded Crowley the wickedest man in the world. Five years later, it characterised the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover as a diseased sex maniac who prostituted art to pornography.   

 

[2] Both Crowley and Lawrence were friends with the composer Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock), for example; as they were with Cecil Gray, another composer and music critic with a strong interest in occultism. 

     

[3] Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived in the small village of Zennor, in Cornwall, from March 1916 until October 1917, when they were evicted from the county by the authorities. Cornwall, of course, had longstanding connections to witchcraft and attracted a number of individuals keen to explore what we now term alternative lifestyles.   

      Aleister Crowley visited Zennor on many occasions, both before and after the Lawrences lived there, and he is believed to have had connections with Carne Cottage, where Katherine (Ka) Cox - Rupert Brooke's lover and Virginia Woolf's bestie - died in mysterious circumstances, in May 1938.

 

[4] Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived at the villa Fontana Vecchia, in the hilltop town of Taormina, on the east coast of Sicily, from March 1920 to February 1922. 

      Crowley, meanwhile, and some of his followers - including his Scarlet Woman Leah Hirsig - were setting up house during this period 130 miles down the road at the so-called Abbey of Thelema, in the small fishing town of Cefalù (from where they were eventually evicted by Mussolini, in April 1923).   

 

[5] Crowley's critical dismissal of Lawrence is not uncommon for its time, but it is unfair. For whilst agreeing with Freud that an element of sex enters into all human activity, Lawrence nevertheless insists that this is only half the picture and that it is mistaken, therefore, to say that all is sex: "All is not sex. And a sexual motive is not to be attributed to all human activities." 

      For Lawrence, as for Crowley, there is something else "of even higher importance and greater dynamic power" than sex, and that is the religious or creative motive: "This is the prime motivity. And the motivitity of sex is subsidiary to this: often directly antagonistic." 

      See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66-67.

 

[6] Lawrence gleaned a lot of his ideas from Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888), Frazer's Golden Bough (1890), and Pryse's Apocalypse Unsealed (1910), and was more influenced by the mystical and sexual radicalism of Edward Carpenter (Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 1889), than by Crowley's philosophy.  

 

[7] See the letter to his friend Ernest Collins (22 March 1914) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed.George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 157. 

      Thanking Collins for sending him a newly published book of his drawings, Lawrence writes: "You are a queer man. I think if you persist you will one day have a real boom. Because people will think you are an esoteric wonder-freak, and it will be a kind of aesthetic qualification to know you, as it was to know Bearsley, and is rather now, to know Alastair." 

      Despite the misspelling, the latter is understood to have been a reference to Aleister Crowley.     

 

[8] See the letter from Lawrence to Grace Crawford (24 July 1910) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 171.  

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Grace Crawford (9 July 1910), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, p. 169.   

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to P. R. Stephensen (5 Sept 1929), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 469.

      The Mandrake Press were contracted to publish five titles by Crowley, including a book of short stories (The Strategem and Other Stories, 1929), a novel (Moonchild, 1929) and an autobiography (The Spirit of Solitude, subsequently retitled The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, of which the first two volumes were published in Nov-Dec. 1929). 

      Mandrake had also published The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence in the summer of 1929, so Lawrence had a vested interest in seeing this small press succeed. Unfortunately, however, the company soon ran into financial problems and a consortium led by Aleister Crowley took over. But this consortium was unable to turn things round and the company was dissolved in December 1930. It seems that even having the world's most powerful worker of magick on board can't stave off bankruptcy or keep tax officials and debt collectors from the door.

      See also Lawrence's letters written in November 1929 to his literary agent Laurence Pollinger, in the first of which he complains about Stephensen's lack of business sense and the fact that he has "spent far too much of Goldston's money" (VII 564) by printing 3000 copies of Crowley's novel and only sold 200 copies. 

      And in the second of which Lawrence can't resist passing on the latest literary gossip and having another dig at Crowley: 

      "I hear that Stephensen wants to float off the Mandrake into a limited company, as they have £6000-worth of stock to sell. Well it's none of it me. But it seems as if there was quite a definite breach between Stephensen and Goldston, so perhaps the Mandrake is already a withered root. Too bad!  but no wonder, with half a ton of Crowley on top of it." (VII 573) 

[11] As Jane Costin reminds us: "Meredith Starr and his wife Lady Mary Stamford [...] moved to Zennor after their marriage in 1917 and lived just a short walk away from Lawrence. Starr came from a wealthy family and, in the early twentieth century, wrote for Crowley’s publication The Equinox and also for The Occult Review which published articles and correspondence by many leading occultists". Starr regarded Crowley as the 'only real modern genius' and 'by far the greatest living artist in England'. 

      See Costin's excellent essay 'Lawrence and the "homeless soul"', in Études Lawrenciennes 56 (2024), which covers in detail much of the ground we have briefly touched upon in this post. Click here to read online.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, writing to Lady Cynthia Asquith (3 Sept 1917) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 158.

 

[13] Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912 - 1922, Vol. II of the Cambridge Biography (CUP, 1996), p. 386.  

 

[14] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Waldo Frank (27 July 1917), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, p. 143.  

 

[15] Ibid. 

          

[16] Ronald Hutton is an English historian specialising in early British folklore, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol, Hutton has written over a dozen books, including The Triumph of the Moon: a History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, (Oxford University Press, 1999). A second, extensively revised edition of this work was published in 2019. 

      According to Hutton, Lawrence and Crowley shared the same desire for a religious revolution and a revaluation of all values (even if they wouldn't have agreed on what form this should take or how to proceed).           

 

[17] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler [28 April 1918], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, p. 239.

      Re the Lawrence-Russell relationship and the planned lecture series in London, see chapter five of Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912 - 1922. See also the astonishing series of letters that Lawrence wrote to Russell between February 1915 and March 1916 in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II op. cit.    

 

 

This post is for Christina Harrington of Treadwell's (London). 

 

For a sister post to this one on The Battle of Blythe Road: The Great Beast Vs. W. B. Yeats (23 June 2025): click here.   

 

 

Sein zum Tode: Notes on the Case of Ellen West and the Work of Ludwig Binswanger

Ellen West (1888-1921) [1]

 

'She looked in death as she had never looked in life; calm, happy, and peaceful.'

 

I. 

 

I've been interested in the tragic (but also seminal) case of Ellen West since the Thanatology series of papers at Treadwell's in 2006 and, to be honest, I'm very surprised to discover that - apparently - I haven't discussed it in a post published on Torpedo the Ark before now ... [2]

 

 

II.

 

Der Fall Ellen West - Eine anthropologisch-klinische Studie was published in 1944-45 by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger [3].

 

It offers a fascinating account of a young woman's agonising struggle to die at the time and in the manner of her own choosing and is considered to be a crucial text within a discipline known as Daseinsanalysis (one that attempts to combine therapeutic practice with existental philosophy) [4].    

 

Ellen West already had a clinical history of depression and disordered eating by the time she came under the care of Binswanger at his Bellevue Sanatorium in the picturesque town of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, in 1921. Her ten week stay here resulted in a diagnosis of bulimia nervosa and schizophrenia and, ultimately, the suicide that she had long desired.

III.

West was born to a Jewish family in the United States in 1888, who moved to Europe when she was ten years old. An intelligent and articulate child, who enjoyed reading and writing poetry, she was also said to be disobedient and prone to obsessive-compulsive behaviour. By the time she reached early adulthood, she already had an extreme fear of gaining weight and began taking an extraordinary amount of laxatives.

 

Aged 28, she married her cousin, Karl, and hoped for a child. But her eating disorder had left her in a frail and fragile condition and by 30 she was no longer menstruating and had fallen to a dangerously low weight below 100 lbs. (the average weight for a healthy woman of her age at that time was between 135-150 lbs).

 

If he hadn't noticed already, West's husband was forced to confront the truth of his wife's condition when she confided in him about her problematic relation with food, her addiction to laxatives, and her obesophobia, which, by this stage, was mutating into an altogether something different (and something philosophically more interesting).       

 

 

IV.

Towards the end of her life, death was West's great obsession; one is tempted to describe it more as her passion and paradoxical life goal (i.e., that which provided meaning and direction and which she didn't merely resign herself to, but actively strove to achieve).

 

She had arrived at the conclusion that being dead was better than being fat - and preferable to a life that felt empty and boring and required the constant consumption of food. And so, West chose to invite death into her life by indulging in dangerous activities, such as kissing children with scarlet fever, riding horses in a reckless manner, and standing naked in the cold after having a hot bath [5].    

None of these things did the trick, however, and West eventually died after leaving the Bellevue clinic with Binswanger's blessing [6] and swallowing a lethal dose of poison; something her husband consented to and witnessed, telling others that she had been in a strangely festive mood for several days prior. 

 

Herr Doktor Binswanger was also recorded as saying that Ellen looked 'as she had never looked in life - calm, happy, and peaceful', having taken full responsibility for her own existence and her own death. 

 

 

V.

 

So, what, in sum, do we learn from the case of Ellen West? 

We learn that for some people, sometimes, only voluntary death brings freedom and fulfilment. 

 

In other words, there are times when nothingness and non-being take on a desperately positive meaning and only in her decision for death did West, paradoxically, find her authentic self. As George Steiner writes, conveniently summarising Heidegger's thinking on the matter in Sein und Zeit (1927):

 

"Dasein can come to grasp its own wholeness and [...] meaningfulness [...] only when it faces its 'no-longer-being-there' (sein 'Nicht-mehr-dasein) [...] Dasein [...] has access to the meaning of being because, and only because, that being is finite. Authentic being is, therefore, a being-towards-death, a Sein-zum-Tode." [7] 

 

 

VI.

 

It's clear that Michel Foucault found the case of Ellen West particularly fascinating and he develops this thanatological line of thinking in his own work. She was, he said, a woman "'caught between the wish to fly, to float in ethereal jubilation, and the obsessive fear of being trapped [by] a muddy earth that oppressed and paralyzed her'" [8].

 

To embrace death was obviously to bring her life to an end, but suicide nevertheless enabled the brief experience of a "'totally free existence […] one that would no longer know the weight of living, but only the transparency where love is totalized in the eternity of an instant'" [9]. 

 

I'm not sure I know exactly what this means - but it sounds very beautiful and it's worth noting in closing how the case of Ellen West has inspired several writers and artists, including the acclaimed American poet Frank Bidart, whose long persona poem 'Ellen West' (1977) can be read by clicking here [10]. 

 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 

Kopf Dr. Ludwig Binswanger und kleine Mädchen (1917-18) 

 meisterdrucke.uk

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The real name of the young woman at the centre of this case remains unknown; Ellen West was a pseudonym invented by her doctor, Ludwig Binswanger, who is believed to have based it on the character Rebecca West, in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm (1868), a central theme of which is the idea of suicide as one way to find meaning and freedom in death.

 

[2] I say apparently because I'm half-convinced that such a post was published on TTA but has since been deleted by Blogger. 

      The Treadwell's paper to which I refer was entitled 'Suicide and the Practice of Joy before Death'. It can be found in volume two of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

 

[3] Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) was a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential psychology or what he termed Daseinanalyse (see note 4 below). 

      In 1907, Binswanger received his medical degree from the University of Zurich and, as a young man, he worked and studied with some of the great shrinks of his era, including Freud, Jung, and Eugen Bleuler (who coined the terms schizophrenia and autism). He was, however, always a bit wary of psychoanalysis and arguably more influenced by the philosophical ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. Perhaps not surprisingly, Foucault was a fan of Binswanger's work, translating his 1930 essay Traum und Existenz from German into French in 1954 and providing a substantial introduction (the fact that Ludwig Binswanger's uncle, Otto Binswanger, had been one of Nietzsche's physicians during the philosopher's final years was doubtless something Foucault also found intriguing).

      An English translation of Binswanger's most famous case - that of Ellen West - by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons, can be found in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1958).  

 

[4] Daseinsanalysis was first developed by Binswanger in the 1920s under the name phenomenological anthropology. His thinking at this time was heavily influenced by Husserl on the one hand and Freud on the other. His key idea was that human existence (as a specific mode of being) is open to any and all experience and that die Lebenswelt significantly shapes an individual's self (thus, if you want to change the way someone thinks, you must first alter their lived experience of the world).

      Binswanger also believed that mental health issues - including schizophrenia, melancholy, and mania - often stemmed from the paradox of men and women living alongside others whilst ultimately remaining alone. As he developed his thinking and continued his research, Binswanger began to increasingly relate his analysis to the work of Martin Heidegger and following publication of his book Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins in 1942, he began using the term Daseinanalyse.

 

[5] Whether or not these activities constitute a practice of joy before death is something that you, dear reader, may decide upon. It might be noted that West also attempted to commit suicide on several occasions via more conventional methods; for example, she twice overdosed on pills, once threw herself in front of a car, and once attempted to jump from the window of her psychiatrist's office.

 

[6] As James Miller informs us, in her sessions with Binswanger Ellen West is "alert, amiable, and apparetly consumed by the desire to die". Thus, after consulting with two other psychiatrists - both of whom agree that her case is hopeless - Binswanger decides that she should be allowed home, even though he is aware that Ellen "will almost certainly kill herself".  

      See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), pp. 74-75.

 

[7] George Steiner, Heidegger (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 99.

 

[8] Foucault quoted by James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault ... p. 75.

[9] Ibid.  

      Although Foucault didn't successfully commit suicide, he made a number of attempts to do so - including one in which he slashed his chest open with a knife - and always dreamed "'of violent death, of savage death, of horrified death' […] a death in which in its most inauthentic form is but the bloody and brutal interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfilment of [man's] very existence". 

      For Foucault, then, as for Ellen West, suicide is the final desire or ultimate mode of imagining. Far from being a negation of the world and the self, it is rather "'a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself world'". 

      Again, see Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault ... pp. 78-79. 

 

[10] 'Ellen West', by Frank Bidart, was originally published in The Book of the Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). It can also be found in Bidart's In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).