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). 

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

Deleuzean Reflections on a Black Metal Wolf

Rune Wolf - a black metal logo by Monkeyrumen (2011) 

deviantart.com

 

"The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing." 

- Deleuze & Guattari

 

 

I. 

 

Yesterday, on a sunny spring afternoon, I went along to another meeting of the Subcultures Interest Group, this time held in a fifth floor room at the London College of Fashion, located, for those who don't know, on the East Bank of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford; directly opposite the London Stadium, which is where West Ham now play their football, having left Upton Park in 2016 (c'mon you Irons!). 

 

After discussing the graphic design of Dave King and the contents of the upcoming issue of SIG News, there were three short presentations by post-grad students, including one by Nael Ali, whose work on the figure of the goat within the genre of music known as war metal I briefly mentioned on Torpedo the Ark back in July 2024: click here.  

 

This time, however, there was nothing caprine about Ali's work. Instead, he spoke about the wolf as symbol within black metal; a topic which has special resonance for me as someone who has long been fascinated by the wolf within Norse mythology, folklore, and Nazi ideology [1]; as well as within the work of Deleuze and Guattari ...  

 

 

II.

 

As far as I'm aware, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were never fans of black metal, but they did like wolves. Thus, in Mille Plateau (1980), for example, they tie their theory of multiplicities to the wolf pack and, later, illustrate their section on becoming-animal with a pair of Etruscan images of a wolf-man.  

 

Wishing to distance themselves from psychoanalysis, they insist that Freud, being myopic and hard of hearing, knew nothing about wolves, but only about domestic pets and puppy-dog's tails (how fair and how accurate that is, I don't know). 

 

Although we often speak of the lone wolf, D&G insist that you can never be such a thing; that individuals even of the most solitary or independent kind are always still part of the pack; i.e., one wolf among others. 

 

They write:

 

"In becoming-wolf, the important thing is [...] the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack [...] how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity." [2]

 

The key thing is: don't reduce the many to the one; don't flatten wolf packs and machinic assemblages and molecular multiplicities. And understand that becoming-wolf has nothing to do with representing oneself as such, or believing oneself to be a wolf; wolves are "intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances" [3]. 

 

In other words, becoming-wolf is all about shooting a line of flight or deterritorialisation; not becoming hirsute, growing large carnivorous fangs, and howling at the moon like a lunatic. Sometimes, alas, I fear that our friends in the black metal community do not understand this; they seem readily seduced by medieval symbols, but to lack any knowledge of particles.        

 

Perhaps if you're the member of a black metal band then that doesn't matter too much. But if you're a doctoral research student, like Nael Ali, then you really should have an understanding of this and be able to refer to the reality of wolves within the libidinally material unconscious; they are not just imaginary or mythical in such a manner that allows us to extract from them structures of meaning or archetypal models, and lycanthropy is not simply a fantasy [4].  

 

I don't want to criticise the above too much - he is, I believe, just starting his research into the topic of black metal wolves - but it's important, sooner or later, that Ali recognise that becoming-wolf is not a game of correspondence between relations; "neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification" [5].

 

Finally, it's interesting to note in closing just how black metalheads often think like theologians; in their Satanism, for example, and when it comes to the question of the werewolf. For like theologians, they seem to regard the idea of human beings becoming animal as profoundly immoral on the grounds that essential forms are inalienable. 

 

Notes

 

[1] This fascination can be traced all the way back to Pagan Magazine issue XI: 'Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf' (1986). 

      Later, in 2007, I as part of the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures at Treadwell's, I gave a paper entitled 'In the Company of Wolves' which discussed lycanthropy and other forms of animal transformation with reference to the work of Angela Carter. 

     Finally, see also the post 'Operation Werewolf' published on TTA (6 Aug 2019), which dealt with the Nazi use of wolf mythology and symbolism: click here.

 

[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 29. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

 

[4] As Deleuze and Guattari write:

      "Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.  But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming-animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that a human does not 'really' become an animal [...] Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false narrative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that becoming passes."

      In other words: "The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not ..." See ATP, p. 238.  

 

[5] Ibid., p. 237. 

 

 

Surprise musical bonus; proto-black metal from 1933: click here. 

 

For a sister post to this one in which we follow the black parade and reflect on emo, click here. 

 

And for another SIG-inspired post, this time on the politics of female fashion in NE England during the 1960s, please click here. 

 

Who Is Stephen Alexander? A Guest Post by Sasha Thanassa

Stephen Alexander 

A Non-Selfie Selfie (2025) 

 

And how do you see yourself when looking in the bathroom mirror 

through someone else's eyes? 

 

 

I. 

 

Who (or what) is Stephen Alexander, the shadowy figure who blogs at Torpedo the Ark?

 

The multiple possibilities that he himself has playfully suggested in the past include: artist, anarchist, and antichrist; punk, pirate, poet, pagan ... More recently, he has declared himself to be a darkly enlightened philosopher-provocateur whose concerns are no longer with sex, style, and subversion, but more with silence, secrecy, and seduction. 

 

Using these and other terms that arise from within his own writings - as well as from the work of other figures to whom he often refers - I will attempt here to give a brief impressionistic sketch of someone who, like Foucault, neither wishes to self-identify as a unified subject nor feels obliged to remain forever the same [1].       

 

 

II.

 

Again, by his own admission, there are two names that have shaped Alexander's thinking above all others: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence; neither of whom he entirely embraces, but both of whom provide him with the critical weapons and crucial conceptual tools for the fight against moral idealism (i.e., the belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are the highest of values and fundamentally connected) and modern humanism (i.e., the belief that behind everything sits the kind and reasonable figure of Man).    

 

Working in the entrails of Nietzsche and Lawrence more like a postmodern haruspex than a forensic pathologist, Alexander has managed on Torpedo the Ark to produce an idiosyncratic (and intertextual) brand of fiction-theory that suspends the genre distinction between philosophy and literature [2]. 

 

Arguably, it is this mode of language and thought that has enabled him to move across other established categories and freely discuss an almost infinite variety of ideas, experiences, and events in a creative and profoundly superficial manner that is always alert to the play (and permissiveness) of language.  

 

III. 

Another name we might mention is that of Simon Solomon; more than a mere commentator on posts or a sometimes contributor, Solomon is a very real (often hostile) presence on Torpedo the Ark and a vital interlocutor. 

It's sometimes hard to tell whether Solomon is Alexander's shadow or vice versa; who's the Jekyll, who's the Hyde (or are they equally monstrous)? In queer ontological alliance - if there is such a thing -  Alexander and Solomon seem fated to remain the best of frenemies [3], each presumably drawing some benefit from their relationship, despite the mutual antagonism [4]. 

IV.

But isn't Alexander just another in a long line of reversed Platonists? 

Perhaps - but what's wrong with that? We need more not less such people. A reversed Plato may still be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a reversed Plato [5], but that's better than an unreversed Plato.

 

And besides, as Derrida indicated, the first task of deconstruction has to be reversal (i.e., the locating and overturning of oppositions within a text). That may not be enough in itself - a reversal is not the same as a revaluation - but it's a start on the road toward a new way of thinking.

 

And so, like Lawrence, Alexander encourages his reader to think in terms of immanence rather than transcendence and to climb down Pisgah [6]; to affirm appearances and the natural world of scarlet poppies rather than fantasise about a world above (and/or beyond) this one in which there are eternal white flowers and other Ideal Forms.   

And like Deleuze - another thinker whom Alexander often refers to - he perverts Plato by siding with the Sophists, the Cynics, the Stoics "and the fluttering chimeras of Epicurus" [7].  

 

 

V.

So, have I answered the question with which I opened this post? 

 

Probably not. 

 

Perhaps all I've done is refer to a number of proper names to whom Alexander himself often refers. But then, these proper names serve a crucial textual purpose and contain within them a series of associations (and connotations) that allow us to see how Torpedo the Ark unfolds within a much wider philosophical and literary history and an intertextual space. 

 

When Alexander refers to himself as a Lawrentian, for example, he's not identifying with Lawrence as an extratextual being, but evoking a certain style of thinking and writing.  

 

Using proper names is also, of course, a way of dispersing and disguising the self; like Nietzsche, Alexander wants to be able to declare himself all the names in history [8] - onymic ambiguity rather than unified authorial presence is his aim.  

 

Notes

 

[1] In his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault famously writes: "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." 

      See The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 17.

 -

[2] This has been a long time goal for Alexander; see the introduction to his PhD thesis Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

      Admittedly, he problematically writes here about dissolving lines of distinction, whereas in his later writings, influenced by Derrida, he speaks more about troubling (or curdling) these lines and concedes that the deconstructive objective is not the dissolving or permanent suspension of all oppositions, because, ultimately, they are structurally necessary to produce meaning.  

      

[3] The term frenemy - a portmanteau of 'friend' and 'enemy' - could have been invented for Alexander and Solomon, although Jessica Mitford claimed that it had been coined by one of her sisters when they were children for a particularly dull acquaintance; see her article 'The Best of Frenemies' in the Daily Mail (August 1977). It can also be found in her book, Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (NYRB Classics, 2010), or read online by simply clicking here.       

      

[4] Interestingly, Freud recognised that a close friend and a worthy enemy are equally indispensble to psychological wellbeing and have not infrequently been one and the same person. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Pelican / Penguin Books, 1964) p. 37.

 

[5] See Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 417-446, (The John Hopkins University Press, Autumn 1971), where she writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at every moment turn against itself, as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato ..." (435)

      A revised version of this can also be found in Thinking, the first volume of her two-volume posthumously published work The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary Mccarthy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-78). 

 

[6] See the essay by D. H. Lawrence 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229.

 

[7] Michel Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 346.

[8] In a letter to Jakob Burckhardt dated 6 January, 1889 (although postmarked January 5th), Nietzsche claims that by becoming every name in history, he (paradoxically) fights the reduction to anonymity and generality. 

      See his Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 346.

 

 

Philematology: On Kissing and Cannibalism

Daniel Silver: Kissing (2024) [1]

Statuario Altissimo marble and bronze,

with a stainless steel baseplate

 

I. 

 

It wasn't until I saw Daniel Silver's sculpture of bronze lovers "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [2] that I realised the full horror of an oft-quoted remark made by Georges Bataille: 

 

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism ...

 

 

II. 

 

What this means is that there's an accursed link between eating and eroticism. 

 

For consumption, like sex, is a way in which separate beings not only communicate, but fatally come into touch, enabling the self and non-self to bridge their discontinuous existence as individuals [3].  

 

Or, to put it another way, sexual desire that drives us to press lips together and insert tongues in mouths (and other bodily orifices) and the voracious desire to devour the other, are as closely connected as Eros and Thanatos in a general economy in which non-productive expenditure (via acts that often violently transgress social norms) is key.    

Herman Hupfeld may insist that "a kiss is just a kiss" [4], but, as a matter of fact, nothing is ever so innocent or free from context (i.e., a whole network of meaning and significance). 

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, anthropologists disagree on whether kissing is instinctual or an example of learned behaviour. 

 

Those who favour the former point to the fact that other animals appear to kiss (whilst ignoring that not all humans engage in the activity) [5]. 

 

Those who favour the latter, argue that kissing in its modern (romantic) form has evolved from activities such as suckling or premastication in early human cultures [6] and there is certainly evidence to support the claim that cataglottism [7] has developed from mouth-to-mouth regurgitation of food - or kiss-feeding - either from parent to offspring, or between lovers.

 

 

IV.

 

It might be noted in closing, that man's will to merger or primal unity - be it via the sexual penetration of a lover's body or the consumption of their flesh - is what some describe as a death instinct, seeing as it conflicts with the "central law of all organic life"; namely, that each organism is "intrinsically isolate and single" [8].  

 

The problem, of course, is that another vital law is that we need and desire one another; that each organism only thrives via intimate contact with others.  

 

Fortunately, coition is only ever a coming-close-to-death; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the sovereign individuality of each party remains intact. 

 

However, that's not the case in cannibalism, or what might be called a hard-vore scenario, wherein at least one party is going to be semi-digested and certainly won't be able to enjoy a cigarette afterwards as a singular being.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Daniel Silver's Kissing (2024) - in part inspired by Constantin Brâncuși's famous sculpture, The Kiss (1907-08) - features in his Uncanny Valley exhibition currently showing at the Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square, London), until 18 January 2025. The photo is by Ben Westoby, courtesy of the artist and gallery. For more details visit: frithstreetgallery.com

 

[2] This humorous remark is made by Rawdon Lilly in D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91.

 

[3] See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. I, trans Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1988). Readers interested in Bataille's interesting (somewhat idiosyncratic) take on death and sensuality might also like to see his work entitled Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (City Light Books, 1986). It is also available as a Penguin edition entitled Eroticism (2001).

[4] Herman Hupfeld (1894-1951) was an American songwriter, whose most notable composition was 'As Time Goes By' (1931), which featured in the 1942 film Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz), performed by Dooley Wilson as Sam. The line quoted here is taken from the song. 

 

[5] I'm pretty sure that Heideggerians would protest that although many other animals exchange what appear to be kisses of affection, they are not kisses in the full sense (that kissing is something that only human beings can fully experience due to our ontologically unique status). 

[6] Another theory suggests that kissing originated during the paleolithic era, when cavemen would taste the saliva of females in order to determine whether they would make a healthy mate (or perhaps a hearty meal).

 

[7] Cataglottism - more commonly known as French kissing - involves extensive tongue activity in order to induce sexual arousal and not merely the pressing together of lips. 

      As Freud rightly says, it is strictly speaking a type of kinky deviation from normal sexual activity, even if no one acknowledges or rejects it as such. See his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1920), in which he writes: "Even a kiss can claim to be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of two oral erotogenic zones instead of the two genitals."

      Later, Freud comments on how strange it is that the lips have such erotic value amongst lovers - including the most sophisticated ones - in spite of the fact that (technically) they are not sexual organs, but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, Final Version (1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 67.

        

 

Further reading: those who are interested in this topic might like to see Ursula de Leeuw's essay 'A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism: Julia Ducournau's Raw and Bataillean Horror', in Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2, (2020), pp. 215-228. Click here for an online pdf. 

 

 

From Victory to Stone: Into the Uncanny Valley with Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver: Uncanny Valley (29 November 2024 - 18 January 2025)

Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square, London) 

Photo by Ben Westoby / frithstreetgallery.com 

 

I. 

 

Firstly - and I hope this doesn't seem too pedantic - but the concept of the uncanny valley does not refer to an underworld in which one finds oneself lost, as the press release for the new exhibition of work by British sculptor Daniel Silver at the Frith Street Gallery claims [1]. 

The uncanny valley - as I'm sure many torpedophiles will know - is a psychophysiological phenomenon (rather than a mythogeographical location, such as Hades) that refers to the unease and revulsion experienced by people when challenged by certain ambiguities, inconsistencies, and/or discrepancies (in voice, movement, or appearance) of the almost but not quite human [2].  

 

 

II.

 

Daniel Silver was born in London, in 1972, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and The Royal College of Art.  

 

He describes his sculptural work as an attempt to combine ancient and modern elements whilst, simultaneously, communicating something of the timeless (and universal) character of humanity - not a project that I approve of, obviously.

 

For such idealism invariably means a retreat from external reality and the positing of a fantasy of inner life and essential being that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain mankind within some kind of crypto-theological or, in this case, a psychoanalytic narrative (Silver is a reader of Freud, so not surprising that he should think about the family ties between his pieces).  

 

Having said that, Silver does remain committed to celebrating the substantial nature of his figures, in bronze and large, heavy pieces of raw marble excavated from an old Italian stone yard, and it's this that most excites about the ten pieces in this exhibition (certainly more than the oedipal elements that he attempts to overcode the work with). 

 

Indeed, if I were a sculptor, I would be exclusively concerned with materiality and the fact that human biology is founded upon and born of geology, not Geist - i.e., that organic life evolved from inorganic rocks and minerals in a chemical process known as abiogenesis (now there's a title and a theme for a new exhibition) [3].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Click here to go to the Frith Street Gallery website where full details of Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition (29 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025) can be found and a copy of the press release downoaded.

 

[2] This term, uncanny valley, is an English translation (by the art critic Jasia Reichardt) of a phrase coined in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori - bukimi no tani. In order to avoid association with the earlier psychoanalytic concept of das Unheimliche (which Freud developed from the work of Ernst Jentsch), the phrase is sometimes alternatively translated in English as valley of eeriness (which is unfortunately not quite as catchy, even if arguably more accurate).

      According to Mark Fisher, the eerie is a distinct mode of strangeness that troubles the notion of agency and makes us question our own existence or uniqueness, making us feel anxious or apprehensive. It has very little to do with Freud's concept and should not be equated to the latter.    

      See Mark Fisher, the Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016). And see my two-part post on this work published 10 October 2023: click here.   

 

[3] Paula Zambrano, Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society, anticipates what I'm suggesting here in her short piece posted on 6 December 2024 on the CAS website, writing that Silver's work "exists between the human and non-human, intertwining rocks with bodies, minerals with flesh, embodying multiple temporalities". That's spot on, I think. 

      Unfortunately, however, she ends her piece mistakenly claiming that the uncanny valley is "shaped by memories and desires" and "is the realm of the underworld as a metaphor for the unconscious", thereby falling into the Freudian trap that Mark Fisher warned against (see note 2 above).

      To read Zambrano's article in full, click here.    

 

 

Musical bonus 1: The title of Silver's exhibition - 'Uncanny Valley' - comes from a track by the singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn working in collaboration with author Robert MacFarlane, that was released as a single from the studio album The Moon Also Rises (Transgressive Records, 2023): click here.

 

Musical bonus 2: The title of this post - 'From Victory to Stone' -  comes from a track by the Scottish punk rock band the Skids, released as the second single from their debut album Scared to Dance (Virgin Records, 1979). Written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson, it reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart: click here.  

 

Click here for another post written on Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery (29 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025).   

 

 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)

 

 

For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]. 

 

And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 

 

So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 

 

But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 

 

Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    

 

Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.

 

 

I.

 

Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 

 

It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 

 

Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]

 

 

II.

 

It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 

 

Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?

 

Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 

 

Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.

 

I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].

 

Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).

 

 

III.

 

Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 

 

And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        

 

But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 

 

Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].

 

 

IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 

 

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  

 

So what's not to love? 

 

Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 

 

Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 

 

And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]. 

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]

 

He answers by saying: 

 

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]

 

That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]. 

 

As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...

 

The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:

 

"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]

 

 

V.

 

Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:

 

"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]

 

I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 

 

For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 

 

In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:

 

"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  

 

Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]

 

Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]

 

Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  

 

The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]. 

 

What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 

 

[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    

 

[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 

      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.

     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.

 

[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 

      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.

 

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