On Subcultural Barbarism

Photo of Soo Catwoman by Ray Stevenson (1976)

The slogan is a paraphrase of a sentence written by Walter Benjamin [1] 

 

"Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? 

Because it would make people unhappier than they are? 

Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves!" - Nietzsche [2]

 

 

I. 

 

What constitutes a subculture?

 

I suppose, sociologically speaking, a subculture might be defined as a group of people who identify in terms of their shared tastes, values, interests, and practices whilst, at the same time, differentiating themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the dominant culture and its norms [3].

 

In other words, individuals form or join subcultures because they wish to develop an alternative lifestyle, but not necessarily one that calls for revolution or involves dropping out of society altogether. Such individuals may like to deviate from the straight and narrow, but they acknowledge the existence of a path and in as much as they offer resistance to cultural hegemony it's mostly of a symbolic nature.

 

 

II. 

 

In 1985, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli transformed much of the thinking on subcultures by introducing the idea of neotribalism; a term that gained widespread currency after the publication of his book Le Temps des tribus three years later [4].

 

According to Maffesoli, the conventional approaches to understanding solidarity and society are no longer tenable. He contends that as modern mass culture and its institutions disintegrates, social existence is increasingly conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, informally organised around ideas, sounds, looks, and patterns of consumption.

 

He refers to punk rockers as an example of such a postmodern tribe and, interestingly, suggests that through generating chaos within wider culture they help revitalise the latter in a Dionysian manner [5]. 

 

Maffesoli, of course, is not without his critics and his work is often branded as controversial. However, I think we might relate his thinking on culture, modernity, and tribalism to Nietzsche's philosophy; in particular Nietzsche's longing for new barbarians who might prevent the ossification of culture ...    

 

III. 

 

Anyone who knows anything about Nietzsche knows that he loves Kultur - understood by him as the supreme way of stylising chaos in such a manner that man's highest form of agency (individual sovereignty) is made possible. 

 

In other words, culture is not that which simply allows us to be and does more than merely preserve old identities. Rather, it allows us to become singular, like stars, via a dynamic process of self-overcoming. 

 

Unfortunately, the powers which drive civilisation outweigh the forces of culture to such an extent that history appears to Nietzsche as the process via which the former take possession of the latter or divert them in its favour. 

 

Thus, there's not merely an abysmal antagonism between culture and civilisation [6]; the latter, in Nietzsche's view, co-opts and exploits the more spiritual qualities possessed by a people which have developed organically from within the conditions of their existence. 

 

This becoming-reactive of culture is, as Deleuze reminds us, the source of Nietzsche's greatest disappointment; things begin Greek and end up German as human vitality and creativity becomes overcoded by the coordinating power of the modern state. 

 

So ... what can be done to prevent this or to release the forces of culture once more? How do we free life wherever it is encased within a fixed form? In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche famously calls for a cultural revolution, only to quickly realise that this ain't gonna happen. 

 

And so Nietzsche changes tack and instead of pinning his hopes on an alliance between artists and philosophers to save the day, he invokes a breed of new barbarians who, via subcultural activity, cast off the horny covering of civilisation so that new growth becomes possible and who, when confronted with the ways in which the dominant social order breaks down, "make no attempt at recodification" [7]. 

 

Of course, the question that arises is where will these new barbarians come from. This was a question that troubled D. H. Lawrence as well as Nietzsche, for both recogised that despite the modern world being very full of people there were no longer "any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life" [8] existing outside the gate.

 

And so, we will need our barbarians to come from within - although not from the depths, so much as from the heights. For Nietzsche's new barbarians are not merely iconoclasts driven by a will to destruction, rather, they're cynics and experimenters; "a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold" [9] who embody a "union of spiritual superiority with well-being and excess of strength" [10]. 

 

The question of culture and subcultural barbarism is badly conceived if considered only in terms of 'Anarchy in the UK' (and I say that as a sex pistol): what's required is what Adam Ant would term a wild nobility.

 

 

IV.

 

To believe in the ruins, doesn't mean that one wishes to stay forever among the ruins; a permanently established barbarism would simply be another oppressive system of philistine stupidity. Eventually, we have to start to build up new little habitats; cultivating new forms and new ideas upon discord and difference (i.e., stylising chaos).

One of the key roles of the Subcultures Interest Group [11] is to both document and inspire such activity by rediscovering something of the creative energy or potential that lies dormant in the past and projecting such into the future so that we might live yesterday tomorrow (as Malcolm would say) [12].

 

That's not easy: and it's not simply a question of revivalism; it's neither possible nor desirable to go back to an earlier time and mode of existence (despite what the writers of Life on Mars might encourage us to believe) [13]. 

 

It involves, rather, a few brave souls working with knowing mystery for "the resurrection of a new body, a new spirit, a new culture" [14] and accepting back into their lives "all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, accursed" [15] ... (i.e., becoming-barbarian).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This famous sentence from Benjamin's 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' (1940) actually reads: "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." 

      This essay, composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, was first translated into English by Harry Zohn and included in the collection of essays by Benjamin entitled Illuminations, ed. Hanah Arendt (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). 

      Alternatively, it can be found under the title 'On the Concept of History' in Vol. 4 of Benjamin's Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389-400. See paragraph VII on p. 392. 

 

[2] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1982), V. 429, p. 184.

 

[3] Those whose opposition to or rejection of the mainstream is actually their defining characteristic are probably best described as countercultural militants rather than simply members of a subculture.

 

[4] Le Temps des tribus: le déclin de l'individualisme dans les sociétés de masse was translated into English by Don Smith as The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, (SAGE Publications Ltd., 1995). 

[5] In other words, as a polemologist, Maffesoli is attracted to the idea of foundational violence and the vital need for conflict within society. See his 1982 work L’ombre de Dionysos: contribution à une sociologie de l'orgie, trans. into English by Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist as The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy (State University of New York Press, 1993). 

      Readers might find a post published in February of this year on Sid Vicious of interest, as it explores the Dionysian aspects of the young Sex Pistols' tragic death: click here.  

 

[6] Nietzsche maintained a common opposition within German letters between Kultur and Zivilization, defining the latter in terms of scientific and material progress, whilst insisting the former was invested with a more spiritual quality (Geist). See, for example, note 121 in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 75.

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze, 'Nomad Thought', in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (The MIT Press, 1992), p. 143. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 189.

 

[9] Nietzsche, The Will to Power ... IV 900, p. 479. 

 

[10] Ibid., IV 899, p. 478. 

      Nietzsche makes several remarks on barbarians and barbarism in his published work, not just in his Nachlass. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil where he identifies barbarians as culture-founders; "their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings" (9. 257). Translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 192. 

[11] The Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) is a diverse and informal collective of academics and artists operating out of the University of the Arts London. Established in 2019, they regularly publish a paper - SIG News - which aims to open a window on to the work being undertaken by members of the Group. Click here for further information. For a review of  SIG News 3 on Torpedo the Ark (28 July 2024), click here for part one of the post and/or here for part two  

 

[12] See the post published on Torpedo the Ark dated 10 June 2024: click here.

 

[13] Life on Mars is a British TV series, first broadcast on BBC One (2006-07), devised and written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah, and starring John Simm as Detective Inspector Sam Tyler, who, following a car accident, wakes up to find himself in 1973. See the post published on 2 October 2024 in which I discuss this seductive (but ultimately fatal) fantasy: click here.   

 

[14] Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, ed. Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen (John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1985), p. 217.  

 

[15] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 96.

 

 

With continued gratitude to Keith Ansell-Pearson whose work on Nietzsche helped shaped my own thinking 30 years ago.

 

 

Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure

Author Maggie Nelson: skilled in the art of making 

the personal and the private public and political

 

 

I. 

 

Someone recently asked me the following question: Can a writer ever overshare?   

 

Well, having graduated from the Deleuzian school of literary theory, I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea that the writer's main (or only) task is to give expression to the feelings, or impose a coherent and conventional model of language on lived experience.

In other words, literature should not become merely a form of personal overcoding and writing a novel, a poem, or a play is more than an opportunity for an author to confess and tell all. 

 

Like Deleuze, I'm of the view that any genre of writing reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality [1].

 

I don't think it makes me a philosophical prude to say that just as it's advisable to exercise a degree of caution [2] as an artist, so too do terms such as modesty, reservation, and self-restraint have crucial importance. Oversharing and trauma dumping is not the only way - or even the best way - to produce genuinely transgressive work.     

 

 

II.

 

Although she sometimes refers to Deleuze's work - particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari - Maggie Nelson doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the danger of giving herself away via the giving of a little too much personal information. 

 

In fact, she's a little defensive and prickly on the subject having, I suspect, been accused of oversharing by numerous critics on multiple occasions. So it is that when in conversation with the Canadian artist Moyra Davey in 2017, Nelson responds thusly to the idea that tell-all memoirs can sometimes be a bit much and leave the reader uncomfortable:

 

"Besides mainstream celebrity memoirs or other genres in which artistry need not apply, I don't know where all these narcissistic tell-alls are, not to mention the fact that there can literally be no such thing as a 'tell-all'." [3]

She continues: 

 

"Personally, I never think to myself while reading, 'Why would you want to tell me this?' That question seems to me to speak volumes about the reader/critic more than about the writer. What I hear in that question is the baseline assumption that the writer should not be telling you all this [...] that there's shame in the telling, and the critic's job is to wake the artist or writer up to the shame she/he may have missed." [4]

Nelson concludes:

"At the far end of this logic lies the virulent idea that we're better off with less speech, less telling, less expression; nearly every nasty review of a work of autobiography I've read contains this latent or manifest wish that the writer/artist would just shut up [...] it bugs the hell out of me." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst one can certainly sense Nelson's irritation - and whilst I don't doubt the genuineness of such for a moment - I don't share her conclusion. 

 

For one thing, I'm of the view that confronting (and achieving) silence is the ultimate aim of literature; that it should push language to its own external limits (which are not outside language but are the outside of language). 

 

In other words, the writer does have to learn how to shut the fuck up due to the fact that, once spoken, speech immediately and directly "enters the service of power" [6] - even if that speech is born of the writer's ultimate nakedness, wherein we like to believe ourselves to be essentially free and shameless.

 

In sum: there's nothing radical, liberating, or progressive about self-exposure and articulating one's seceret desires. On the other hand, there's a good deal to be said for those who know how to remain the soul of discretion and have the ability to withhold certain details [7].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 1-6.   

      Of course, all writers can be guilty of self-obsessed dead writing (necro-narcissism) at times; of being a little too personal. But this is something to try and keep to a minimum and an author should always aim to become-imperceptible as far as possible. Or, as Wilde says in the Preface to Dorian Gray: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 160-61, where they advocate caution and the Nietzschean art of small doses, since overdosing - like oversharing - is a very real danger when it comes to dismantling the organism, following a line of flight, or effecting a strange becoming via literature. 

 

[3] Maggie Nelson, 'A Life, A Face, A Gaze', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 137.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Roland Barthes's 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', in Selected Writings, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 461. 

[7] For an alternative view, see Lucretia Rose McCarthy's essay 'Radical Exposures: Crip and Queer in Maggie Nelson's Autotheory', in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): click here. In a nut-shell, McCarthy argues that through her autotheoretical writings: 

      "Nelson familiarizes crip and queer experience, embracing difference through detail whilst challenging stigma and otherness common to the categories. She rejects the mundane and pathological associations of 'oversharing' and shows the way self-exposure can deepen understanding of marginalized lives." 

 

Advice to a Young Blogger (2): On Establishing Your Blog as a Plane of Immanence

Gilles Deleuze attempting to keep things simple

 

 

I. 

 

In a recent post I offered some advice about blogging; stressing the need to be consistent, insistent, and persistent if one wishes to establish a plane of immanence [click here].

 

But Franz, from Austria, has written to ask what is meant by this complex concept, borrowed from Deleuzian philosophy [1], in relation to a humble theory of blogging.

 

So, let me try and answer ...

 

 

II. 

 

By establishing a plane of immanence - in relation to a theory of blogging - I mean that one must do more than merely create a space of writing in which to publish one's ideas, memories, observations, and holiday snaps [2].

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, we find an intricate network of forces, particles, connections, affects, and becomings and the writer becomes a subject-without-identity - a difference engineer - not an author who personally vouches for the truth content of the posts or guarantees the logical organisation and development of the blog. 

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, posts shouldn't be considered as empty forms awaiting for an author to fill them with content in order to give them their significance. Posts should be thought, rather, as active productions (or events) in themselves that require concrete methods of immanent evaluation rather than texts awaiting judgement with reference to a transcendent model of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.     

 

The key thing is: on a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, one can ensure the eternal return of difference; not repetition of the same. In that way, blogging is about becoming, not securing identity. 

 

And remember: Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own ... [3]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze can be a difficult philosopher to read at times, but I think it's fair to say that when he writes of a plane of immanence, he's putting forward an epistemological notion; but when he writes of the plane of immanence, he posits an ontological idea (developing Spinoza's monism). It's the former that has always most interested me; that is to say, the fact that there can be multiple planes of immanence each corresponding to an image of thought. 

 

[2] Like Deleuze, I do not think writing is an attempt to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience; blogging should not become a form of personal overcoding. Any writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality. See the post entitled 'A Deluezean Approach to Literature' (30 August 2013): click here. 

[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 239. 

 

 

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It!

 Groucho was a punk rocker

 

I.

 

I have given several attempts to explain what the polysemic phrase torpedo the ark - borrowed from Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen - means to me, including:

 

(a) to have done with the judgement of God ... [click here]

 

(b) to hate everything ... [click here]

 

(c) to find everything funny ... [click here]

 

But, every now and then, I get emails from readers asking me to further elucidate. And so, I thought I'd offer a new definition - this time one inspired by Groucho Marx, rather than (a) Gilles Deleuze, (b) the Sex Pistols, or (c) Larry David: 

 

Torpedo the ark means ... Whatever it is, I'm against it!    

 

 

II.

 

This amusing line is sung by Groucho playing the role of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Head of Huxley College) in the 1932 Mark Brothers film Horse Feathers (dir. Norman Z. McLeod).

 

The original song - 'I'm Against It' - was one of several musical numbers in the movie written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. 

 

Verses include:

  

I don't know what they have to say 

It makes no difference anyway 

Whatever it is, I'm against it!

No matter what it is 

Or who commenced it 

I'm against it!

 

Your proposition may be good 

But let's have one thing understood: 

Whatever it is, I'm against it!

And even when you've changed it 

Or condensed it 

I'm against it! [1]

Such wonderful comic nihilism nicely supplements the earlier interpretations of the phrase torpedo the ark and builds upon my own natural impulse to say no, nein, and non merci to everything - including those kind offers and opportunities that it might make more sense to accept and take advantage of [2].    

 

This obviously shows a perverse streak in my character, but there you go; if someone opens a door for me, I turn and walk away. Similary, if someone invites me to join their literary society, political party, social network, or private members club, I again remember the famous words of Groucho Marx [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] To watch Groucho perform this song - the opening number of Horse Feathers (1932) - click here. 

 

[2] See the post 'Just Say No' (1 Aug 2014): click here. 

 

[3] Groucho Marx is believed to have said: "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of it's members." Or something very similar to this; no one knows the exact wording or the precise circumstances of its employment. This amusing line was first reported by the Hollywood gossip columnist Erskine Johnson in October 1949 and it has been repeated ever since.

 

 

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for suggesting this post and reminding me also that the Ramones have a track entitled 'I'm Against It' which can be found on their album Road to Ruin (Sire Records, 1978): click here to play a 2018 remastered version on YouTube.  

 

Three French Suicides: In Memory of Olga Georges-Picot, Christine Pascal, and Gilles Deleuze

Christine Pascal, Gilles Deleuze & Olga Georges-Picot

 

 

I.

 

Last night, on TV, they were showing one of my favourite films: the British psychological thriller written and directed by Basil Dearden and starring Roger Moore; The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) [1]. 

 

There are many reasons to love this film, not least of all because it allows one to get a glimpse of the French actress Olga-Georges Picot in a very fetching black bra. She's luscious. She's ravishing. And there are some men who would happily give up red meat to be afforded an opportunity to perv [2] on this Franco-Russian beauty [3] - including Woody Allen, who cast her as Countess Alexandrovna in his 1975 film Love and Death.  

   

Whilst biographical information on her life and career seems to be limited and incomplete, we do know that she commited suicide in June 1997 by jumping from her 5th floor apartment overlooking the river Seine.

 

 

II. 

 

Olga Georges-Picot's death came less than a year after the death - also by suicide and also by jumping out of a window - of the brilliant French actress, writer and director Christine Pascal ... 

 

Interestingly, this multi-talented woman had often reflected philosophically on the question of suicide, and the first film she directed - Félicité (1979) [4] - opens with a suicide scene. Several years later, when asked by an interviewer how she would like to die, she replied: En me suicidant, le moment venu.

 

Well, that time came in August 1996, whilst receiving treatment at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of Garches [5]. Whether her suicide is best interpreted as a mad act by a mentally ill woman or a voluntary death by an unconventional woman with a penchant for transgressive behaviour is something I'll allow readers to decide [6].    

 

III.

Finally, let us remember Gilles Deleuze ... 

 

Deleuze was a philosopher very much admired by Pascal and one who, like her - and like Georges-Picot - also topped himself by jumping out of a window, when the respiratory conditions that he had long suffered from became increasingly severe [7].     

I remember the excitement news of this event generated in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick, where I was doing my Ph.D at the time and had just started to read Deleuze's work seriously. Everyone wanted to know if his death came from within or without and pondered the question of whether it marked a loss of desire on his part, or whether the decision to terminate one's own individual existence as a way of affirming life indicates a final resurgence of vitality.  

 

In other words, was his suicide a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering?

 

It remains an interesting question, I think ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written about this in relation to Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat in a post entitled 'Never Give a Doppelgänger the Keys to Your Car ...' (17 June 2020): click here. 

[2] I'm paraphrasing George Costanza interviewing for a secretary in the season six episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', (dir. D. Owen Trainor, 1998): click here.  

[3] Olga was was the daughter of Guillaume Georges-Picot, the French Ambassador to China, and a Russian mother, Anastasia Mironovich. She was born in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, in January 1940. 

 

[4] Christine Pascal was born in Lyon in November 1953. She was given a starring role, aged twenty-one, in Michel Mitrani's Les Guichets du Louvre (1974). 

      The film portrays the infamous Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup in 1942, when French police assisted Nazi soldiers in the arrest of over 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Paris and held them under inhumane conditions prior to their deportation to Auschwitz, where virtually all were murdered. Pascal played a young Jewish woman named Jeanne.

 

[5] Félicité was not only written and directed by Pascal, but she played the lead role too. It was a film that shocked many (even in France) with its explicit sexual content and provocative indecency and cemented her reputation as the mauvaise fille of French cinema.   

 

[6] Somewhat unfairly, I think, the psychiatrist who was caring for Pascal was sentenced in 2003 to twelve months in prison for failing to take appropriate action to prevent her suicide. 

 

[7] Deleuze, who had problems with his breathing even as a youngster, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent surgery to remove a lung. In the final years of his life even writing became increasingly difficult and so, on 4 November 1995, aged seventy, he jumped to his death from the window of his Paris apartment.

 

Rawdon Lilly: Notes Towards a Character Study

Adapted from the cover of Henry Miller's  

Notes on 'Aaron's Rod', ed. Seamus Cooney, 

(Black Sparrow Press, 1980)

 

 

I. 

 

"It is remarkable", writes D. H. Lawrence, "how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." [a]

 

And I suppose we might number Rawdon Lilly amongst this queer set; Lilly being the character in Aaron's Rod (1922) who, like Rupert Birkin before him (in Women in Love) and Richard Somers after him (in Kangaroo), serves as a kind of avatar for the author, often expressing his philosophical views, although he is not the novel's protagonist and doesn't enter the story until chapter five when the action moves from Eastwood to London ...

 

 

II. 

 

Lilly is an artist of the literary variety who hangs around with posh bohemian types; dark and ugly of feature as well as (arguably) of character. He thinks he's terribly witty, but he's no Oscar Wilde; he thinks he's terribly clever, but he's no Nietzsche. A strange mix of sarcasm, snobbishness, and self-regard, it's no wonder he often provokes others to violence [b] and irritaes the hell out of Tanny, his blonde-haired, half-Norwegian wife.

That said, he seems to like Aaron Sisson, the flute playing ex-miner - and the latter seems to like him; they glance at one another "with a look of recognition" [61], which is always a good sign in Lawrence's world. Unlike the look of love, because love, says Lilly, is a vice. Like alcohol. Having met and been introduced (at the opera) - and having exchanged their look of recognition - Lilly invites Aaron to visit him and Tanny for lunch one day, at their house in Hampstead (an invitation that was never taken up, as far as I recall).     

 

Despite living in Hampstead - and also owning a "labourer's cottage in Hampshire" [73] - we are asked to accept that Rawdon and Tanny were poor [c]. Perhaps this adds to Lilly's self-image as a saviour. But it doesn't explain his (racist) dislike of the Japanese, whom he thinks demonic; a quality that one might have thought he'd find attractive, since he despises Christianity and moral humanism [d].

 

He also dislikes those who can't - or won't - stand upright on their own two feet; those, like Jim Bricknell, who stagger and stumble like a drunk; "or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia" [81], as if lacking all power in their legs. According to Lilly, it's an obscene desire to be loved which makes the knees go all weak and rickety - that and a sloppy relaxation of will. 

 

For Deleuze, "the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner" [e]. But for Lilly (as for Lawence), the backbone is crucial and should be stiffened from an early age, so that one can affirm oneself into singular being and kick one's way into the future [f].  

 

When Tanny goes off to visit her family in Norway, Lilly stays in London, on the grounds that it's "'better for married people to be separated sometimes'" [90] and that couples who are "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [91] are hateful.

 

He takes a clean and pleasant room, with a piano, in Covent Garden; above the market place, looking down on the stalls and the carts, etc. Mostly he liked to watch the great draught-horses delivering produce: "Funny half-human creatures they seemed, so massive and fleshy, yet so cockney" [86]; an amusingly absurd description. 

But Lilly also has his eye on a "particular page-boy in buttons, with a round and perky behind, who nimbly carried a tea-tray from somewere to somewhere, under the arches beside the market" [86]. When reading Lawrence, one can pretty much take it as given that his leading male characters will be what we now term bi-curious (to say the least). 

 

So no big surprise to find that when he gets (a poorly) Aaron up to his room, he soon has the latter undressed and tucked up in bed: 

 

"Lilly pushed Aaron down in the bed, and covered him over. Then he thrust his hands under the bedclotes and felt his feet - still cold. He arranged the water bottle. Then he put another cover on the bed." [90] 

It's kind, of course, of Lilly to nurse the flu-ridden Aaron. But does a respiratory illness usually require an erotically-charged massage with oil - and we're not talking here of a quick chest rub with Vicks VapoRub:

"Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man's lower body - the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted." [96] 

 

Anyway, it seems to do the trick: "The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face" [96]. But afterwards Lilly wonders why he did it, worried that when Aaron is fully recovered and realises what was done to him it will result in another punch in the wind: "'This Aaron [...] I like him, and he ought to like me. [But] he'll be another Jim [...]'" [97] 

 

Poor Lilly! So full of resentment - including self-resentment. But he no sooner swears to stop caring for others and interfering in their lives, than he starts darning Aaron's black woollen socks, having washed them a few days previously.   

 

When Aaron recovers enough to sit up in bed and eat some toast with his tea, Lilly explains his thoughts on marriage - "'a self-conscious egoistic state'" [99] - and having children: '"I think of them as a burden.'" [99] He fears being suffocated "'either with a baby's napkin or a woman's petticoat'" [101] and dreams of men rediscovering their independent manhood and gathering his own soul "'in patience and in peace'" [104]. 

 

But this isn't some kind of Buddhist desire for an end to all desire: 

 

"'It's what you get to after a lot of fighting and a lot of sensual fulfilment. And it never does away with the fighting and with the sensual passion. It flowers on top of them, and it would never flower save on top of them'" [105] 

 

In other words, it's what Oliver Mellors would term the peace that comes of fucking [g], or Nietzsche a warrior's peace. Whether Aaron understands this idea, is debatable: Lilly irritates him rather. But, having said that, he seems in no hurry to leave, even when well enough to do so: "They had been together alone for a fortnight only: but it was like a small eternity." [106]

 

Thus, the two men share the room in Covent Garden, bickering like Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple [h] and drinking endless cups of tea. They have, we are told, "an almost uncanny understanding of one another - like brothers" [106], despite the mutual hostility. 

 

Lilly, of course, plays the traditionally feminine role: "He mashed the potatoes, he heated the plates, he warmed the red wine, he whisked eggs into the milk pudding, and served his visitor like a housemaid." [106] And when the food is ready, Lilly draws the curtains and dims the light so they can enjoy a rather romantic-sounding meal for two. Then he does the washing-up. 

 

Of course Lilly and Aaron part on rather bad terms: for the latter, the former is too demanding; he wants something of another man's soul, or so it seems to Aaron. Anyway, Lilly heads off; first to Malta, then to Italy (and out of the novel for several chapters). Eventually, Aaron follows, with no definite purpose but to join his rather peculiar friend ... 

 

 

III. 

 

The two men, Aaron and Lilly, Lilly and Aaron, finally reunite in Florence. 

 

Lilly doesn't seem particularly surprised to see Aaron again; or particularly fussed. For he's come to believe that there's a time to leave off loving and seeking friends; that each man has to learn how to possess himself in stillness and not care about anything or anyone. Essentially, decides Lilly, at his very core, he is alone: "'Eternally alone. And choosing to be alone. Not sentimental or lonely. Alone, choosing to be alone, because by one's nature one is alone.'" [246] 

 

He continues:

 

"'In so much as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I, [...] I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self-knowledge.'" [247]

 

Thus, for Lilly, even the heart beats alone in its own silence - and anti-idealism. For above all else, it's anti-idealism that defines Lilly (philosophically and politically):

"'The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spiritedness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity - all the lot - all the whole beehive of ideals - has all got the modern bee-disease, and gone putrid, stinking.'" [280-81]

His alternative is - after sufficient extermination - a "'healthy and energetic slavery'" [281] in which there is "'a real commital of the life-issue of inferior beings to the responsibility of a superior being'" [281] and enforced with military power. At least that's what he tells his interlocutor. Until then admitting with a gay, whimsical smile that he would "'say the opposite with just as much fervour'" [282].

Finally, Lilly delivers that which he believes to be the real truth: "'I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated." [282] Which is pretty close to Aleister Crowley's great teaching that: Every man and every woman is a star [i]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

So, in closing what then are we to make of Rawdon Lilly? 

 

Aaron comes to the following conclusion:

"He had started by thinking Lilly a peculiar little freak: gone on to think him a wonderful chap, and a bit pathetic: progressed, and found him generous, but overbearing: then cruel and intolerant, allowing no man to have a soul of his own: then terribly arrogant, throwing a fellow aside like an old glove which is in holes at the finger-ends. And all the time, which was most beastly, seeing through one. All the time, freak and outsider as he was, Lilly knew. He knew, and his soul was against the whole world." [289]

 

Still, if forced to choose, Aaron decides he'd choose Lilly over the entire world; if he has to submit and give himself to anyone, then "he would rather give himself to the little, individual man" [290] than to the quicksands of woman or the stinking bog of society. 

 

Personally, I'm not so sure. For whilst I agree with Lilly that we should finish for ever with words like God, and Love, and Humanity and "'have a shot at a new mode'" [291], I don't think I'd fancy placing my life in his hands. Nor do I share his to thine own self be true credo, which is ultimately just another form of idealism. 

 

As for his insistence on the "'great dark power-urge'" [297], I'd take that a little more seriously if in comparing this to Nietzsche's concept of will to power he didn't misunderstand the latter so completely (equating it, for example, with consciousness). Lazy and erroneous thinking like this causes me to doubt much else that Lilly says. 

 

And, finally, I don't want to submit to the positive power-soul within some hero, thank you very much: I don't have any heroes, they're all useless, as Johnny Rotten once memorably said [j].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 26. All future page references to this novel will be given directly in the text. 

 

[b] I'm thinking here of the scene in Chapter VIII, when Jim Bricknell gives Lilly a punch in the wind. To be fair, although it's arguable that Lilly provoked the assault - as Tanny believes - there's really no justification for Bricknell giving him "two or three hard blows with his fists, upon the front of the body" [82]. But there you go; those who claim to act in the name of Love - and so desperately want to be loved - are often the most vicious and violent people on earth.  

 

[c] Perhaps the Lilly's were only renting the house in Hampstead - or that it belonged to a friend who had kindly allowed them to live there rent free. Later, Lilly tells Aaron that he only has "'thirty-five pounds in all the world'" [103] and so is far from being a millionaire. (£35 in 1922 would be equivalent to around £1700 today). 

 

[d] And, indeed, Lilly does later praise the Japanese for their ability to be quiet and aloof and indifferent to love: '"They keep themselves taut in their own selves - there, at the bottom of the spine - the devil's own power they've got there.'" [81] Although, shortly after this he dismisses "'folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether'" [97], a quality which makes them vermin in his eyes.

      Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's fascination with Japanese male bodies, are advised to see my post from June 2019 on the subject: click here. 

 

[e] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, 2003), p. 23. 

      Like many of his ideas and phrases, Deleuze is borrowing this from a writer of fiction; in this case, Franz Kafka. See: 'The Sword', in Diaries 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 109-10. 

 

[f] Readers who are interested in this topic might like to see my post from April last year on encouraging a straight back: click here. Alternatively, see Lawrence writing in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).  

[g] See the Grange Farm letter that Mellors writes to Connie at the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) for an explanation of this phrase. And see the post from December 2021 on the Lawrentian notion of chastity: click here.

[h] The Odd Couple is a 1968 comedy directed by Gene Saks and written by Neil Simon (based on his 1965 play of the same title), starring Jack Lemmon (as fastidious Felix Ungar) and Walter Matthau (as easy-going Oscar Madison), two divorced men who decide to live together, despite being extremely different characters.   

 

[i] See Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (1909), 1:3 

 

[j] Rotten said this in an interview with Janet Street Porter for The London Weekend Show, a punk rock special broadcast on London Weekend Television on 28 November 1976 (i.e., three days before the notorious Bill Grundy incident). Click here to watch in full on YouTube. The remark quoted is at 8:13 - 8:16.       

 

 

On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism

 

Detail from a poster designed by Maciej Hibner 

for the film The Idiot (dir. Ivan Pyryev, 1958)

 The idiot has no soul: he is like a flower - an existence open to sunlight ... Botho Strauss

 

 

I. 

 

Derived from the ancient Greek term haíresis [αἵρεσις], heresy originally meant choice and thus implied the exercise of free will. 

 

And so one will readily understand why the heretic - he who chooses to hold views which are at variance with the orthodox position or party line - is so despised by those whose authority is challenged. 

 

For formal heretics deliberately cause division and sow discord and, according to the Church, are spiritually cut off from the Truth, even before they have been officially excommunicated (or burnt at the stake). 

 

Their sin is obstinancy rather than error; a persistent adherence to falsehood.  

 

 

II. 

 

Now, whilst I share certain traits with heretics, I'm not sure I would count myself among their number. 

 

For one thing, when presented with the blackmail of choice (either/or), I choose not to choose and affirm neither/nor. For some, this makes me an idiot, like Bartleby, but as we'll see below, that might not be so terrible.

 

Secondly, whilst a heretic may not subscribe to dogma, in choosing to believe something else, they remain persons of faith and often as fanatic in their belief (and their hatred) as those who accuse them of heresy - Martin Luther is a good example of this [1].     

 

Having said that, I sympathise with Byung-Chul Han's call for a form of heresy - based on what he terms idiotism - that might challenge the New World Order: 

 

"Today, it seems, the type of the outsider - the idiot, the fool - has all but vanished from society. Thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms." [2] 

 

Han continues: 

 

"In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom. By nature, the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed. The idiot inhabits the immemorial outside [...] 

      The idiot is a modern-day heretic. [...] As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness." [3]

 

That's a nice expression. And I do like this vision of an idiot, veiled in silence, refusing to identify himself or bow down to the neoliberal demand for total self-exposure. Today, the only way to resist the world is via silence, secrecy, and solitude. 

 

And it is philosophical idiotism alone which "erects spaces for guarding silence [...] where it is still possible to say what really deserves to be said" [4].

 

 

Notes 

[1] Nietzsche's changing view of Luther is interesting. He began as an admirer, but his favourable attitude undwent radical revision after Human, All Too Human (1878) and in his late writings Nietzsche offers a scathing denunciation of Luther as a moral fanatic. Essentially, for Nietzsche, Luther is the man who in reforming Christianity restores it to power and thereby terminates the hope of a neo-pagan Europe which the Renaissance had tantalisingly held out.  

[2] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017), p. 82.

      Clearly, Han is not using the term idiot in its modern sense (i.e., to refer to a stupid person). Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek term from which it derives - idiōtēs [ἰδιώτης] - which refers to a private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than simply subscribe to common sense or public opinion (even at the risk of appearing ignorant or foolish). For Han, "the history of philosophy is the history of idiotisms" [p. 81].

 

[3] Ibid., p. 83. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 84.

      Han acknowledges that this politics of silence was already being called for by Deleuze thirty years ago. See 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 121-34, where Deleuze writes: 

      "It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." [129]

Kill Me Now: Notes on the Introduction and First Chapter of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity 2021)

 

 

I. 

 

Emanuele Coccia has called his new book Metamorphoses. But he may as well have called it Pantheism, because what this book primarily affirms is the "unity of all living things [...] and the unity of the living being with the matter of the world" [a]. 

 

According to Coccia, pantheism is a hidden tradition with a repressed history within philosophy; a claim which, like many others in this book, is one I doubt the veracity of. For it might be argued, that philosophers simply prefer to use the less religious-sounding term monism to describe unity and the peculiar satisfaction that it gives some people to announce that All is One.

Anyway, let's get down to business ... 

As well as an Introduction and Conclusion, there are five chapters in this book: Births, Cocoons, Reincarnations, Migrations, and Associations. Here, in part one of the post, I'll discuss the first of these chapters and the Introduction.

 

 

II. 

 

Coccia opens his Introduction with a three-word phrase even more provocative than I love you: In the beginning ... 

 

Obviously, he knows this is the opening phrase of the Bible; a translation of the Classical Hebrew expression Bereshith [בְּרֵאשִׁית‎]. And whilst one hopes he's using it with a certain irony, I do worry that he's preparing the way for a religious narrative to follow. 

 

Anyhoo, in the beginning, says Coccia, "we were all the same living creature, sharing the same body and the same experience" [3]. I suppose that's true enough - banal, but true enough [b]. But we might wish to challenge Coccia's following sentence: "And things haven't changed so much since then." [3] 

 

For this is said as if the new forms and modes of existence which have proliferated in the 3.5 billion years since LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), hardly matter; as if all that really counts is the life force which animates them. For life, clearly, is the essential for Coccia, who, I suspect, would like to write the word with a capital L if he dared.    

 

Coccia challenges his readers to accept the "deepest meaning of the Darwinian theory of evolution" [5] - the one that biologists (allegedly) don't like to think about, as it means regarding species as life games, i.e., "unstable and necessarily ephemeral configurations" [5], rather than substantial entities.     

 

Coccia also wants readers to come to terms with the fact that, as Nietzsche put it, being alive is only a rare and unusal way of being dead:

 

"There is no opposition between the living and the non-living. Not only is every living creature continuous with the non-living, it is its extension, metamorphosis, and most extreme expression." [5]

 

Again, that's true enough, but it's nothing very new; thanatologists, including myself, have been pointing this out for years now: click here, for example, to read a post based on an essay from 2006 in which I attempted to dissolve the distinction between life and death. 

 

And, what's more, some of us have also dared to draw the consequences from this fatal truth; we realise that if all life is essentially the same, then a human life has no more inherent value than that of a cockroach [c], and if there is no difference between living things and the world of dead matter, then there's no point crying over species facing extinction, for example.    

 

This - to use Coccia's own phrase - is the deepest meaning of nihilism and why Ray Brassier is right to argue that philosophy's destiny (and duty) is to acknowledge the fact that "thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living" [d].

 

  

III.

 

Does Coccia share this view? Maybe. Take a look at this sentence, for example:

 

"Our adult life form is no more perfect, no more 'us', no more human, no more complete than that of the bicellular embryo that comes directly after the fertilization of the egg ..." [8]  

 

Is Coccia making the metaphysical claim that the soul enters at conception? Is he demanding full rights for the unborn? Or is he suggesting, rather, that it would be fine with him were we to abort human beings at any stage of their development - even long after birth - since each and every form "has the same weight, the same importance, the same value: metamorphosis is the principle of equivalence between all natures" [9]. 

 

If all life is just a game of forms played out on the same plane - and that plane is material actuality (i.e. death) - then it makes perfect sense to say that an embryo is the same as a foetus, a foetus is the same as a baby, and a baby is the same as an adult. It just becomes a question of whether you think their value is inestimable or zero. 

 

 

IV.

 

Coccia makes a big deal of the fact that, like the rest of us, he was born to parents, who were themselves born of their parents, who were born ... well, you get the idea: "Birth is not simply the emergence of the new, it is also the erratic wandering of the future through a limitless past." [14] 

 

He thinks we are too forgetful of this, although the fact that there's a multibillion dollar birthday industry might suggest otherwise; as might the fact that Happy Birthday to You is the most sung song in the world [e].   

 

Coccia, the proud parent of a young daughter, Colette, to whom he dedicates this book, is clearly still in the flush of first-time fatherhood. Thus it is that everything about pregnancy, birth, and babies seems miraculous and makes him gush to his readers about how special his child is:

 

"She arrived barely five years ago and she has changed everything around her, and around me: she has lit up worlds through which she has travelled with a joy and a grace I had never before encountered. She knows all the secrets of metamorphosis - and she has revealed a few of them to me." [x]

If that's the case, then one rather wishes that Colette had written the book ... Perhaps if she had, we would've avoided being told in a section entitled 'Birth and Nature' that there is "nothing more universal" [19] than birth; something that makes me as impatient as it made Roland Barthes over sixty years ago. 

 

In 'The Great Family of Man', Barthes demythologises the idea that events such as birth and death can be understood outside of history:

"Birth, death? Yes, these are facts of nature, universal facts. But if one removes History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them; any comment about them becomes purely tautological. [...] For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to [...] criticism. [...] True, children are always born but in the whole mass of the human problem, what does the 'essence' of this process matter to us, compared to its modes which [...] are perfectly historical? Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him [...]" [f] 

 

This is the sort of thing that Coccia's book might have usefully reminded us, instead of fobbing us off with lyricism surrounding the fact of birth: "To be born [...] is to experience being a part of the infinite matter of the world [...] It is always Gaia who says 'I' in us." [21] [g]

 

To which I can only say kill me now, or let's move on ... 

 

Every now and then, we come to something that might be interpreted as a philosophical statement. For example; "multiplicity is not simply arithmetical, and it does not negate the profound unity [...] of all living beings" [27]. 

 

But isn't that just saying what Deleuze and Guattari reduced to a simple equation: Pluralism = Monism [h] ...?

 

This is the magic formula which Deleuze learns from his readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche and one might have hoped that Coccia would have at least referred to this. But he doesn't. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because he's worried about becoming trapped in "the enclosed courtyard of traditional books, subjects, and arguments, all sanctioned as 'properly philosophical' by an arbitrary and culturally quite limited canon" [i].    

 

Whatever the reason, Coccia seems unwilling to reference Deleuze; even when, later on in the chapter, he meditates on difference and repetition: "We are all a repetition of a past life. [...] Yet in being so expressed, the past is [...] rearranged, arbitrarily reconstituted, transfigured." [34] 

 

I would've thought this was the perfect opportunity to at least mention Deleuze's powerful critique of representation; one that develops concepts of difference and repetition that are metaphysically prior to any concept of identity [j].

 

Instead, Coccia chooses to discuss the symbolic theory of Sándor Ferenczi - "one of Freud's most brilliant and heterodox students" [34] - who offers such astonishing insights as this: "there is a 'symbolic identity of the womb with the sea and the earth on the one hand, and of the male member with the child and the fish on the other'" [36] [k]. 

 

I've said it before - and I very much suspect I'll be forced to say it again whilst reading this book - kill me now!

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. viii. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Coccia's opening reminds me of D. H. Lawrence's Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in which he writes: "In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing." See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 69.   

[c] This is not say that you can't value a human life above that of a cockroach, only that this is a matter of personal preference (or prejudice) and has no real foundation as the same life flows through both. The case of Gregor Samsor is obviously instructive here: click here for my take on Kafka's story.

      Later, in a section entitled 'Metamorphosis as Destiny', Coccia again says something that potentially has fatal consequences; namely, that every metamorphic being "is composed and inhabited by [an] otherness, which can never be erased" [38]. If that's the case - if we carry within us everyone and everything, including all other peoples and all other species, then why does it matter if we exterminate them? 

      In some ways, Coccia reminds me of Walt Whitman who has, as D. H. Lawrence would say, broken the mainspring of his own singular being and now asserts: I am everything and everything is me! as he attempts to become in his own person "the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time". He cannot accept that outside the egg of his Allness, there is genuine otherness, which he is not and cannot become. See the final version (1923) of Lawrence's essay 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-161. The line quoted above is on p. 151.              

 

[d] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. xi.

[e] Later in the chapter, Coccia writes: "Our society is still based on the cult of the dead [...] Birth, on the other hand, remains a mystery and a taboo. [...] We barely talk about it or celebrate it [...]" [25]. This, however, is patently not true; a friend of mine has just had a baby and she never shuts up about the fact, both in person and on social media. And whilst Christian culture attaches great importance to the death of Christ, do we not also celebrate Christmas and Easter - his birth and resurrection?

      To be fair, Coccia, concedes that Christ's nativity is a familiar theme in European art, but argues that what is depicted "is no ordinary birth, but a unique, one-off, unnatural event" [30]. In other words, Christian theology places the birth of Christ outside of any naturalistic framework in order to emphasise its miraculous character.

      Like Nietzsche, who also holds Christianity responsible for throwing filth on the actual origins of life, Coccia argues that we need to liberate ourselves from "this two-thousand-year-old legacy" [32] and reverse its central teachings. However, whereas for Nietzsche this involves reviving the Dionysian mysteries, in order to ensure that every aspect of procreation, pregnancy, and birth awakens the most exalted and solemn feelings, for Coccia, we would do better to imagine that, if God participates in birth, then "he must be incarnated in any natural being whatsoever: an ox, an oak tree, an ant, a bacterium, a virus" [32]. Thinking along this pantheistic line obliges us to see every birth as "a transmission of the divine substance, but above all as a kind of metamorphosis of the gods" [32].

      See the section entitled 'Carnival of the Gods' in chapter one of Metamorphoses, pp. 30-33. And for Nietzsche's Dionysian take on this question, see section 4 of 'What I Owe to the Ancients', in Twilight of the Idols.

 

[f] Roland Barthes, 'The Great Family of Man', in Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 101-102. 

[g] For those who don't know, Gaia is the primordial Greek goddess and personification of the Earth; she whom all living beings call mother. As well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Coccia openly admits that his book has been written under the influence of the Gaia hypothesis put forward by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis [182]. It's their work which he wishes to deepen and radicalise, with sentences like this: "Being born means that we are part of this world: we formally and materially coincide with Gaia, with her body, her flesh, her life force." [37]. Obviously, as a reader of Nietzsche, I'm extremely cautious of those who deify nature or believe the earth to be a living being; see The Gay Science, III. 109.      

 

[h] This formula can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 20. Deleuze was also influenced in his thinking on this subject by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, from whom he borrowed (and adapted) the doctrine of ontological univocity.     

[i] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants, (Polity Press, 2019), p. 167. 

      It's from sentences like this that Coccia attempts to draw what Foucault termed speaker's benefit. That is to say, sentences like this make him appear to be a bit of a rebel, or an outsider, challenging the established order, etc. Which is a bit rich, coming from a man who lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), one of the most selective and prestigious educational establishments in all France. 

[j] I'm referring, of course, to Deleueze's Différence et Répétition, (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), trans. into English by Paul Patton, (Columbia University Press, 1994).

 

[k] Coccia is quoting from Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, tras. Henry Alden Bunker, (Norton, 1968), p. 45. 

To read my notes on chapter two of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter three ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter five ... click here.