More Yellow, More Blue: Further Thoughts on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Emily LaBarge and Megan Rooney

against Rooney's Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas 

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in)   

 

 

I. 

 

Having visited an exhibition by an artist I was shamefully unaware of until very recently [1] - and having come away greatly impressed by the paintings and a little in love with the painter - I simply had to attend an event hosted by the gallery in which said artist, Megan Rooney, was to be joined in conversation by her friend and interlocutor, the Canadian writer Emily LaBarge [2]. 

 

And so, on a sunny Saturday morning, it's back into Town and back to the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (located in one of Mayfair's finest eighteenth-century mansion houses: Ely House) ... 

 

 

II.        

 

As I said in the original post written on Rooney's exhibition, it was the title of the show - Yellow Yellow Blue - that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue, although maybe not with the same obsessive intensity as Megan; she really loves these colours and the chromatic territory that lies between them. 

 

But whilst yellow makes her want to tap her foot and dance and be swallowed by the sun, and blue makes her want to contemplate the secret of a colour that comes in many different shades and varies dramatically in intensity and brightness, I'm still not sure she offers us a new concept of these colours. 

 

But then, to be fair - even if abstract art is an attempt at some level to dissolve the distinction between art and philosophy - Rooney is an image-maker first and foremost and doesn't claim to be a philosopher. For whilst the latter are concerned with metaphysical constructions that define and enable a style of thinking, artists, as a rule, are more interested in novel combinations of sensation and feeling. 

 

In other words, art is a game of percepts and affects, not concepts: just as important and as vital as philosophy, but a very different way of confronting chaos [3]. For whereas philosophy wishes to give to chaos a certain consistency (and moves from chaos to concept), art wants to create forms invested with a little wild and windy chaos, whilst steadily moving from chaos to composition [4]. 

 

In sum: what Deleuze and Guattari say of artists in general, I would say of Rooney in particular; she struggles with chaos "in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant" [5]. 

 

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she's struggling less against chaos and more against the thing that all artists dread: cliché. And the reason she inflicts such violence on her canvases is in order that she might erase any trace of the latter and not simply scrub away the colour. 

 

But that's not an easy task; for the cliché is pre-existent and even after one primes or treats a blank canvas, it's still there, hiding, and threatening to ensure artistic failure (even if one produces a conventionally successful picture that is praised by critics and public alike).      

 

 

III. 

 

Interestingly, Rooney talks about her works as excavations; as if she's searching for something. But what is she searching for ...?

 

We know that beneath the paving stones lies the beach, but what lies beneath the multiple layers of paint she adds, removes, and reapplies to a canvas? Towards the end of their conversation, LaBarge suggested that it might possibly be love, but Rooney (to her credit) seemed resistant to that suggestion. 

 

So let's propose rather that she's looking for something that we might call truth ... Only it's a truth born of chaos and isn't tied to goodness or even beauty (although there is certainly beauty in Rooney's work and perhaps even an ethic to do with innocence and becoming rather than moral conformity).     

Perhaps we might better name this truth with the Ancient Greek term ἀλήθεια (aletheia) ... An unorthodox concept of truth first given us by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides and famously developed by Heidegger, who translated aletheia into German as Unverborgenheit (disclosure or, more literally, unconcealment).

 

Like Heidegger, Rooney seems to be enchanted by the manner in which objects reveal their presence before then withdrawing back into the darkness, never quite allowing us to grasp their truth in full. LaBarge was spot on to write that as soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in Rooney's works - a flower, a sunrise, a chimney pot - it melts once more back into light and colour, or retreats into shadow and silence [5].   

 

And it's the concept of aletheia that explains this phenomenon ... 

 

For aletheia is a radically different notion of truth and a radically different ontological model of the world to the one in which things are fixed and can be made fully present to mind. If one subscribes to the concept of aletheia then you can forget about ever being able to accurately describe a state of affairs or have full knowledge of anything. All of a sudden, absence matters at least as much as presence and being rests upon non-being as a distinct aspect of reality. 

 

In his essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger says the true value of a work of art is that it opens a clearing for the appearance of things in the world; and this glimpse affords human beings the opportunity to formulate not only a degree of knowledge, but meaning [6].

  

Amusingly, as LaBarge also notes, when those things momentarily glimpsed in one of Rooney's abstract (but not resolutely abstract) canvases withdraws it takes your heart with it. And that's not only a rather lovely thought, but an accurate one hinting as it does at the seductive beauty of Rooney's work. 

 

Ultimately, her canvases are like an erotic game of hide and seek; they tease and excite, without ever quite satisfying and this tells us something crucial not only about pleasure and the magical allure of objects, but about the nature of existence.         

 

 

IV. 

   

When leaving the gallery, I overheard a woman say that Rooney's canvases are so completely full of colour that they leave the viewer unable to move or breathe. But, actually, that's profoundly false and if she genuinely feels stifled, then, well, maybe she should loosen her girdle. 

 

For Rooney always leaves (or creates) just enough space to allow us to both move and breathe by making a slit in the Great Umbrella: "And lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision" [7]; a window to the yellow of the sun and the brilliant blue of the Greater Day. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The artist in question is Megan Rooney and the exhibition is titled Yellow Yellow Blue, at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details and/or here for my original post on the exhibition (26 June 2025). 

 

[2] Emily LaBarge wrote the introductory text - 'Like the Flap of a Wave' - for the catalogue to accompany Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, and she is a regular contributor to The New York Times. For more information and to read her work, visit her website: click here. 

 

[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994). 

      And see also D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116; an essay that Deleuze and Guattari freely borrow from in their work.     

 

[4] This move from chaos to composition is crucial: for art is not chaos, "but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes [...] a composed chaos - neither foreseen nor preconceived". See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 204.   

 

[5] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', introductory essay for the catalogue to accompany Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). 

 

[6] See Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Rouledge, 1993), pp. 139-212. This essay as it appears here was first presented as a tripartite lecture entitled Der Urspung des Kunstwerkes, presented in Frankfurt in 1936.     

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Chaos in Poetry' ... op. cit., p. 109. 

 

 

This post is for Hemma Matuschka (née Khevenhüller-Metsch) Head of Events and Client Development at Thaddaeus Ropac London, in gratitude for all her hard work and attention to detail.   

  

 

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). 

 

Reflections on the Exhibition Time to Fear Contemporary Art (17-21 March, 2025)

Time to Fear Contemporary Art  (17-21 March, 2025)

exhibition poster featuring a work by SJ Fuerst

galleryeight.com 

 

 

I. 

 

Although my own interest in art that 'preys on our fascination with fear and plunges contemporary painting into the exhilarating world of horror' [1] doesn't have the same obsessive character as that of my esteemed frenemy Síomón Solomon, I still felt compelled to visit the exhibition currently showing at Gallery 8 and featuring work by a handful of artists [2]. 

 

Whilst relatively modest in scale, the exhibition has the grand aim of countering the recent trend of making art accessible and less intimidating. Whether it achieves this is debatable, but the artists on show certainly did their best to immerse visitors into the dark world of the queer-gothic imagination, showing us how beauty doesn't always have to be tied to the good and the true.         

 

 

II. 

 

Primarily, the work I wished to see was a small oil on panel (40 x 25 cm) by Lizet Dingemans, a London-based artist originally from the Netherlands, entitled Pediophobia (i.e., an intense and irrational fear of dolls and not, as some might mistakenly think, a fear of children). 

 

Now, whilst I have several phobias and anxiety disorders, this, fortunately, isn't one of them; although, having said that, I can see that some dolls are extremely creepy and seem to have come straight from the Uncanny Valley. However, they don't scare me and I don't think they pose an actual threat - except Voodoo dolls, obviously, although that might be more related to my fear of pins and needles (belonephobia). 

 

In fact, regular readers of this blog will recall that, if anything, I have a positive fascination with dolls and other human-like figures. Indeed, some might term it a fetish, although it stops just short of my wanting to have sexual relations with a doll or fall in love with a statue à la Pygmalion [3].  

 

Anyway, returning to Dingeman's work ...  

 

Pediophobia is only one of a series of phobia paintings included in the exhibition; the others being Ailurophobia, Arachnophobia, Ornithophobia, Phasmophobia and, last but by no means least, Thanatophobia. 

 

Why anyone would be afraid of cats, spiders, or birds, is beyond me; ghosts (and other supernatural entities) I can understand - I can even, at a push, see why some people might fear death, although, as Heidegger pointed out, authentic being is a being-towards-death and Angst is a crucial aspect of this seeking for an ontological grasp of one's own mortality and the fact that being rests upon non-being. 

 

Those who would in some way deny us our experience of Angst lessen Dasein's experience of life. In a sense, fear is a fundamental source of freedom [4].

 

 

III.

 

Whilst I was interested in and impressed by Dingeman's work - as indeed I was by the work of all the artists exhibiting - for me, the star of the show (and curator) was SJ Fuerst, allowing the dark undercurrent of her more colourful works of pop surrealism to finally surface, whilst, at the same time retaining her playfulness and sense of humour. 

 

There were no inflatable animals or toy cars in this exhibition (as far as I remember) - and I suppose we might describe her new works as sugar-free - but, nevertheless, works such as Trixie in the Basement and Shattered Psyche made me smile; as did the very amusing and thought-provoking Objects in Mirror (see figure 1 below).  

 

Objects in Mirror was obviously going to seduce me: firstly, as an object-oriented philosopher; secondly, as someone fascinated by the idea of mirror life (or homochirality) [5]; and thirdly, as someone who believes that behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed, just waiting to take their revenge [6]. 

 

As Katie B. Kohn says in her essay written for the exhibition, the figure in Fuerst's work seems to defy their own entrapment within the pictures as images. The fact that the female figure is painted (in oil) on a looking glass only enhances the effect and evokes "the spectral reflections of the Daguerrotype as well as the galvanic shocks of the phantasmagoria" [7].     

 

Ms Kohn is also spot on to say that to regard a portrait of oneself too closely (à la Dorian Gray) - or a reflection in a mirror - is to trouble subjectivity; "to find oneself ever so subtly at risk of being unravelled ..." [8] 

 

Nevertheless, that's precisely what I thought I'd experiment with when standing in front of Fuerst's Objects in a Mirror (see figure 2 below) - attempting to see if Bram Stoker was right to suggest that when we look into a mirror it is mistaken to think the figure we see is ourselves; "the glass is a window; on the other side lies a stranger" [9].   

Figure 1: SJ Fuerst: Objects in Mirror 

Oil paint on mirror over interactive video installation, 51 x 73 cm (framed size)

Figure 2: SJ Fuerst's 'Objects in Mirror' as viewed by S. A. Von Hell (2025)  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This from the Gallery 8 website: click here. 

 

[2] The five artists whose work is shown in the exhibition are Luca Indraccolo, Lydia Cecil, Lizet Dingemans, SJ Fuerst, and Svetlana Semenova. Here, for reasons of space, I shall only discuss the work of two of the above: Lizet Dingemans and SJ Fuerst.  

 

[3] For those who are interested in agalmatophilia, there are several posts on Torpedo the Ark which touch on the subject: click here. For posts which specifically refer to sex dolls, click here and here. Readers might also be interested in the following paper presented at Treadwell's in October 2012: The Pygmalion Syndrome: Sex-Dolls, Solipsism, and The Love of Statues - available on request.

 

[4] I'm guessing that SJ Fuerst understands this, which is why she included a picture in this exhibition entitled The Anxious Thinker (oil paint on mirror, 37.5 x 43 cm).

 

[5] For a post dated 21 December, 2024 on the idea of homochirality, click here. 

[6] For a post dated 22 December, 2024 on the revenge of the mirror people, click here.

 

[7] Katie B. Kohn, 'Exhibition Essay' - available to read in the exhibition catalogue: click here.  

 

[8] Ibid. 

[9] Bram Stoker, 'The Judges House' (1891), quoted by Katie B. Kohn in her 'Exhibition Essay', op. cit.

 

 

A Philosophical Reflection on Getting Older

Portrait of the Artist as a 

Darkly Enlightened Philosopher

(SA 2025) [1]

 

"Darling, am I looking old? / Tell me dear I must be told ..." [2]

 

I. 

 

You know you're getting older not just when another birthday looms on the horizon - each candle on the cake essentially another nail in the coffin - but when, following the presentation of a short paper at Kant's Cave [3], a young woman approaches not to discreetly slip you her phone number or ask for your email address, but to inform you of the fact that you remind her of her father.

 

Still, as a friend said with a smile, at least she didn't say grandmother ... 

 

 

II.

 

Many people like to believe that there are advantages to growing older; that experience makes one a little wiser, for example. But this is bullshit: and even if it were true, who wants a smidgen more wisdom when you can't see, can't run, can't breathe, and your hair has fallen out?

 

The fact is, most great works of philosophy were produced by thinkers in their mid-to-late 30s - Heidegger, for example, was 37 when Sein und Zeit was published - and whilst there are of course exceptions - such as Kant and his three Critiques - we can confidently say that there are very few works of significance written by thinkers over the age of 55 [4].  

 

As I'll be 62 next week - the same age as Wittgenstein when he died - that means I'm now way over the philosophical hill ... Still, at least I'm not buried beneath it.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The photo was taken on February 3rd 2025 at Kant's Cave (see note 2 below). I'm not sure if I look darkly enlightened, as intended, or simply like an old punk; one person described me as resembling a flamboyant East End gangster - i.e., a Kray brother dressed by Vivienne Westwood. 

 

[2] Lyrics from the X-Ray Spex song 'Age': click here to listen to it on a Peel Session (recorded 6 Nov 1978 and broadcast on the 13th of that month). 

 

[3] Kant's Cave is a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster. The paper addressed the question: What is the Dark Enlightenment?

 

[4] See the post by Eric Schwitzgebel analysing the question of what the average age is when philosophers complete their most influential work: The Splintered Mind (12 May 2010): click here. 

What Was I Thinking? (13 December)

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

13 December (2014-2023)

 

 

Apart from 2012, 2013, 2019, 2020, and 2022, I have published a post on this date on Torpedo the Ark in every year since its inception. And sometimes, it can be instructive to look back and see what one was thinking and how things may have changed since ...

 

 

Carry On Facesitting (13 Dec 2014) 

This perfectly innocent post is, I discover, another now placed behind a sensitive content warning by the censor-morons who police things for Blogger (which has been owned and hosted by Google since 2003): is it something I said in the text, is it the accompanying image, or is it both? 

 

I don't know. And Google will not say: they simply refer you to their community guidelines and then invite you to identify your own wrongdoing, rectify the situation, and then republish the post in the hope that, after an official review, you'll be allowed to keep it up and that it will be freely accessible to readers. 

For the record: the post is fine as is and I do not intend to make any changes to it. It does not advocate facesitting, although, even if it did, this is not a criminal activity and harms no one.

 

Rather, the post simply reported on a good-natured and somewhat comical protest outside Parliament by sex workers, freedom-loving perverts, and various interested and/or sympathetic parties against new legislation that prohibits the depiction of certain kinky (but nonetheless perfectly legal) acts between consenting adults.

 

It amazed me then and amazes me now, that the UK government might spend its time opposing activities such as facesitting - or regulating the size of dildos - on the (spurious) grounds of health and safety. As one of the organisers of the protest pointed out, the new laws are not only anti-queer, but also inherently sexist, as many of the activities discriminated against are ones that afford specifically female pleasure and empowerment. 

 

 

On the Truth of Things (13 Dec 2015) 

 

Whilst conceding that questions concerning politics and psychagogy are philosophically interesting and that one must invariably return to them at some point, for me, back in 2015 - in my object-oriented days - I was more enthralled by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the posing of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject or final solution.

 

In other words - and I still think this now - the beauty and the truth of things is precisely that they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.

 

 

Reflections from a Sickbed (13 Dec 2016) 

 

It strikes me that the depressing thing about a long-term health condition, is that it lowers your expectations of what constitutes a good life; one is suddenly pleased merely to experience a pain-free day.  

On the other hand, convalescence is a vital phenomenon and so sometimes one welcomes being sick, so that one can, as Heidegger would say, return home to oneself and one's destiny - which of course is death (as all being is a being-towards death). 

 

That being the case, it's not surprising that when ill in bed back on December 13th, 2016 my thoughts should turn to the question of how best to dispose of that most accursed of all objects, one's own corpse. After considering several of the main methods, including cremation, inhumation, and immurement, I decided that a Tibetan sky burial - in which one is literally fed to the vultures - was the most attractive option.  

 

 

Kissing Hitler 1: Some Like It Hot / Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life (13 Dec 2017) 

 

Not one, but two posts on the theme of kissing Hitler published on the same day back in 2017 - what was I thinking, indeed! Perhaps there's some truth in Godwin's law after all ...

Although, as a matter of fact, the first post - 'Some Like It Hot' - was more about Tony Curtis (and what it was like to share an on-screen smooch with Marilyn Monroe), than about Hitler as a recipient of amorous affection. 

 

The second post, however, did look somewhat deeper into Hitler's love life - something that has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. I arrived at the conclusion that, ultimately, it was a pity that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi; it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so.      

 

On Poetry and Plagiarism (With Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole) (13 Dec 2018) 

 

The case of the young American poet Ailey O'Toole - which caused a bit of fuss in certain literary circles - still interests me and I still feel that Ms. O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about and that she was treated poorly by moralists defending bourgeois (and untenable) notions of intellectual property.

 

For the fact remains, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style. 

 

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. 

 

Wherever she is today - and whatever she's doing - I send Ms. O'Toole kind regards and warm wishes.  

 

 

Notes on the Fetishist (And Other Stories) by Michel Tournier (13 Dec 2020)

 

Michel Tournier was the writer I loved reading most in the winter of 2020-21 and I wrote over twenty posts inspired by (or referencing) his work in this period. 

 

This includes the above post, in which I offered a series of notes on a collection of stories originally published in French under the title Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) and which offered a queer and often disconcerting dip into the world of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description).  

 

Those who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore terms the perverse dynamic, will like this book - and like it a lot. Other readers, who don't enjoy such fiction, probably won't like it so much (but then, such people probably aren't spending time on this blog either). 

 

The Day of the Golden Jackal (13 Dec 2021)

 

I love felines: but I'm not so keen on canids. 

 

That said, I was happy to discover back in December 2021 that the number of golden jackals - small wolf-like animals, about three times the size of a red fox - have been rapidly expanding in number and increasing their range in recent decades. 

 

Apparently, you can now find jackals living, hunting, and howling in many parts of Central and Northeastern Europe and it has been estimated by the IUCN that whilst there may be fewer than 17,000 wolves left in Europe, there are around 117,000 jackals - and the more the merrier, I say, although, of course, all the usual suspects - such as farmers - raise their familiar objections. 

 

Sadly, therefore, these intelligent and sociable animals continue to be hunted in many countries; one can only invoke the great jackal-headed god Anubis to bite off the hands and tear out the throats of those who harm them (some think that capital punishment for deliberate cruelty to animals is a bit extreme, but I'm not one of them). 

 

 

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd (13 Dec 2023)

 

Finally, on December 13th last year, I discussed how, as I get older, my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia; i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s. 

 

This includes Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads.

 

A former dancer and model, Miss Lloyd also appeared in a number of films; performing alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965) and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978), for example.  

 

But what I like most about Miss Lloyd is not her acting credentials, but the fact she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later. 

 

 

Vive le flâneur - et la flâneuse!

 

Mariateresa Aiello: The Flâneur

(Ink on paper, 2011)

sketchbloom.com 

 

"Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. 

The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them." - Walter Benjamin

 

I. 

 

In comparison to the concept of dandyism, which has often been referred to on Torpedo the Ark [1],  the idea of  flânerie - as embodied by the figure of le flâneur - has, rather mysteriously been overlooked.

 

I don't know why that is, particularly as this blog is essentially a form of strolling amongst literary leftovers, philosophical fragments, and the ruins of contemporary culture; coolly observing what passes for (and remains of) the real world whilst collecting images and ideas as I go, thereby making me a kind of postmodern flâneur in all but name.

 

For although the term flâneur threatens to transport us back to the arcades of 19th-century Paris and the musings of Baudelaire and Benjamin [2], that needn't be the case. For the concept of the flâneur - and flânerie as a practice - has been brought into the 21st-century by those who are more interested in moving through virtual spaces and exploiting the opportunities afforded by mobile technologies than actually standing on street corners. 

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, as someone who has concerns with the question of technology, I'm not averse to physically still drifting through Soho; gazing in the windows of shops and restaurants; observing the street life whilst sipping coffee on Old Compton Street; jotting down notes for future blog posts; vaguely hoping someone I know will pass by, or that I might encounter the ghost of Sebastian Horsely; essentially just idling time away (much as I have the last forty years) [3].

 

Paradoxically, as a flâneur one is both an essential part of urban life and yet detached or set apart from it - which kind of suits me as I want to belong, but only on the margins or fringes of society; Johnny Rotten may want to destroy the passer-by, but I'm happy to be a non-participant who is not caught up in events or overcome with enthusiasm (for one thing, this provides a certain degree of immunity from infection by political or religious fanaticism).

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, it isn't easy to be a flâneur in the poetic-philosophical sense today.

 

Some (perhaps overly pessimistic) commentators suggest that the flâneur has been supplanted by the badaud - an open-mouthed bystander who simply gawks without intelligence or aesthetically attuned appreciation for what he sees; one who is enchanted by the Spectacle and is a representative of das Man [4].

 

Way back in 1867, before Debord and Heidegger were even born, the French journalist and author Victor Fournel wrote this:

 

"The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed here. […] The simple flâneur […] is always in full possession of his individuality. By contrast, the individuality of the badaud disappears, absorbed by the outside world, which ravishes him, which moves him to drunkenness and ecstasy. Under the influence of the spectacle that presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a man, he is the public, he is the crowd." [5]

 

However, just as I believe in fairies, so too do I believe there are flâneurs still amongst us today; just much rarer in number and harder to spot. And I was reinforced in this by a chance meeting a couple of weeks ago at the National Poetry Library with an astonishing young woman called Tamara who gaily confessed herself to be a flâneuse ... [6]

Notes

 

[1] Click here for several posts on TTA which have mentioned dandyism over the years.  

[2] Developing the work of Charles Baudelaire, who described the flâneur both in his poetry and the seminal essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), Walter Benjamin spurred artistic and theoretical interest in the flâneur as a key figure of the modern world; see The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999). And for a short discussion of this work by Benjamin - and my convoluted relationship with him - see the post dated 21 October 2024: click here. 

 

[3] Readers will doubtless understand that this is a form of active idleness; as one French literary critic noted, flâneurie is tout le contraire de ne rien faire. 

     

[4] The badaud is essentially the anti-flâneur; more bystander than passer-by; the sort of person who today films events on their mobile phone, bartering away the sheer intensity and joy of experience for mere representation. This includes filming those terrible sights from which any decent person would look away; the mangled remains of some poor devil who jumps from the platform in front of a train, for example. 

      In contrast, the flâneur takes single snaps that are technically imperfect and full of flaws, but never obscene or sensational; images that give a fleeting glimpse without exposing objects or making them strike a pose (thereby allowing objects to retain their allure). 

 

[5] Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris [What One Sees in the Streets of Paris] (1867), p. 263. The (uncredited) English translation is cited on the Wikipedia entry for the subject of badaud: click here.  

      Walter Benjamin essentially adopts this distinction between the two figures of flâneur contra badaud in his work. 

 

[6] The feminine term flâneuse was born of recent feminist lit-crit and gender studies scholarship; previously, the term passante was used to describe the somewhat elusive modern woman who liked to wander round the city, experiencing public spaces in her own manner. Proust famously favoured this term.  

      Readers who are interested, might like to see Lauren Elkin's book: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (Chatto & Windus, 2016), in which she discusses a number of flâneuses, including George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Agnès Varda, Sophie Calle, and Martha Gellhorn.    

 

Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen

Autumn-Foliage-Strike-Fun

 

 

It's often said that the Greeks have a word for everything, but, as a matter of fact, that's not true [1].

 

Fortunately, however, when the Greeks fail us, the Germans are usually ready and willing to step up to the mark with a compound noun ... [2]

 

Thus, when Maria was unable to supply a term for the pleasure of kicking through autumn leaves - something that I enjoy as much now at sixty as I did at six years of age - I immediately consulted with my friend in Berlin and she was happy to text the following: Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen ... [3]

 

There's something profoundly impressive about the German ability to capture in a single word a relatively complex idea or emotion that would take an English speaker a whole sentence to explain; no wonder Heidegger insisted that German is uniquely qualified for the task of thinking [4] (he wasn't simply trying to piss off certain French intellectuals).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have even used this idiomatic expression myself on Torpedo the Ark; see the post of 27 September 2020, for example, in which I briefly discuss the 1930 stage play by Zoe Akins from which the phrase derives: click here.

[2] See Ben Schott, Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (Blue Rider Press, 2013); an amusing dictionary of neologisms that capture the idiosyncrasies of life as only the German language can.  

 

[3] It's pronounced: hairbst-laowb-tritt-fair-gnuu-ghen.   

 

[4] Whilst Heidegger never actually said that if you want to think you have to do so exclusively in German, he did argue that German, like ancient Greek, but unlike Latin - the language of metaphysical philosophy - is particularly suited to thinking because it's phenomenologically well grounded. 

      See Heidegger's famous interview with Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wollf from Der Spiegel (conducted on 23 September, 1966; published posthumously on 31 May, 1976): click here to read the English translation by William J. Richardson under the title 'Only a God Can Save Us'. 

 

 

The Wheel is the First Principle of Evil

 Rota est primum principium mali

 

I.

 

If, like me, you get much of your historical knowledge from the Carry On films, then you could be forgiven for believing that Hengist Pod, an ancient Briton, invented the wheel. However, if like most people you get your information from the internet, then you'll be of the view that it was actually the Sumerians who first came up with the idea sometime in the 4th millennium BCE [1].

 

Either way, I'm not concerned here with the first solid wooden wheels attached to rickety old wagons pulled by oxen, nor even with the wheels used on horse-drawn chariots in Asia Minor, which, thanks to possessing spokes, represented a significant advance and allowed for the production of vehicles that were lighter, faster, and more reliable.   

 

What concerns me, rather - as a thinker troubled by the question concerning technology - is the fact that the wheel is the essential rotating component that allowed for the mechanization of agriculture, the industrial revolution, the becoming-robot of mankind, and the destruction of the natural world. 

 

 

II.

 

In other words, it isn't ithyphallic demons that we have to fear - for even "the double phallus of the devil himself" [2] never truly threatens - but, rather, the spinning wheel wherein mortal danger lies: for the spinning wheel is "the first principle of evil" [3], both within the external world of things and material activity and within the inner workings of the human psyche. 

 

Or, if you want to be a bit Heideggerian about this, you could say that the wheel is that which enframes being; that upon which Dasein is bound and broken and "absolved from kissing and strife" [4].   

 

And those who think the heavens rotate like a wheel are mistaken; the stars and planets may revolve, but they move in their movement, we know not where. Only a fixed wheel, whose centrifugal motion is denied by a stationary axis, spins round and round but never wanders or goes anywhere [5]. 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1]  Of course, it's impossible to know for certain who first invented the wheel because records of such things were not kept in the ancient world. It's more than likely that the wheel was discovered independently by different peoples at different times. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Doors', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'What then is Evil?', The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 626.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Death is not Evil, Evil is Mechanical', The Poems Vol. I ... p. 627.

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Wandering Cosmos', The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 627.

 

Note that the above four verses were originally published in the UK in D. H. Lawrence, Last Poems (Martin Secker, 1933).

For a related post to this one on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil (published on 27 May, 2019), click here. 

 

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 2)

 

Cover of the original German edition (2007) [a]

 

 

I.

According to Byung-Chul Han: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental characteristic of the Western soul, even of Western thinking." [48] 

 

Hegel, for example, is bored by inertia and hates the heaviness of matter: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental trait of Hegel's 'spirit'." [49]

 

And even Zarathustra was opposed to the Spirit of Gravity and wished to see young people become light of foot like dancers and for dancers to become birdlike, so that they may experience the incredible sensation of taking flight [b]. Weighed down by the Spirit of Gravity, they are prevented from ever loving themselves and discovering their own goodness, says Nietzsche. 

 

Of course, this all goes back to Plato who conceived of the human soul as striving towards the divine and infinite: "Its feathered wings allow it to shed its heaviness and float upwards towards the gods [...]" [50]

Far Eastern thinking, by contrast, "is pro-gravitational [...] insofar as it seeks to accomodate itself to the weight of the world" [51], rather than inciting resistance. Keep your feet on the ground seems to be the message.

 

 

II. 

The sea was angry that day my friends ... But that's okay, because maritime adventure is another popular metaphor in Western philosophy: "Conquering stormy seas is seen as a heroic undertaking." [56] 

 

Both Hegel and Nietzsche love to compare thinking to setting out on an endless ocean; for the former - perhaps the most hydrophobic of all philosophers - this requires real courage; for water is the most mendacious of all elements "because it permanently changes its form, because it does not have a form of its own at all" [57] [c] and fails, unlike solid ground, to offer stability (an important aspect of essence):

 

"Western thinking has its source in a desire for solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat." [58]

 

Kant also relies on a metaphor of seafaring to illustrate his concept of thinking; he trusts in a good captain to navigate with knowledge and to keep the boat clear of dangers: 

 

"The Kantian art of helmsmanship conquers the sea by framing it with a system of principles and fully charting it with coordinates." [58]. 

 

Reason will triumph over the darkness of the oceanic depths, tame the wild waves, and keep the ship off the rocks. Even Heidegger subscribes to this, although he argues for the importance of exposing thought to the abysmal sea.

 

This is not a very Chinese way of thinking: for Chinese philosophers the mind is as great as the sea and in fact they form a unity. Thus, the sea is no threat to man: "Someone who is as big as the world will not be hindered or impeded by anything in the world." [62] 

 

There's no angst in the Chinese model; it's far more carefree and effortless: "You are effortless when you do not set anything against the world, when you fully unite with it." [62] 

 

Thus, as Han concludes: "Chinese thinking involves an altogether different relationship to the world; it is characterized by a deep trust in the world" [63] - and a love of water, in which is seen the highest goodness:

"Because it lacks all solidity, water does not exercise any coercion. It is yielding and flexible. Thus, it does not encounter any resistance. As it does not assert itself, does not resist anything, does not oppose anything, it does not compete in strife." [64] [d]

 

Water, we might say, seduces, although this is not a term that Han uses. He concludes this interesting chapter on land and sea (and ways of thinking) with a convenient summary of what has been discussed:

 

"For the Chinese, the sea is not a symbol of chaos or the abyss, nor is it a mysterious place that lures adventurers. It is neither the sea of Odysseus nor that of Kant and Hegel. It is a place of in-difference, of the unbounded and inexhaustible. In the Far East, the transition from land to sea is not experienced as a transition from a firm ground to an unstable support. It is a transition from the limited to the inexhaustible and comprehensive, from difference to in-difference, from fulless to emptiness, from presencing to absencing, from holding fast to releasement (Gelassenheit). This is true not only of Daoism but also of Zen Buddhism. The moment of satori (illumination) is one of a great transition that leads to an oceanic feeling." [68-69] [e] 

 

Han continues:

 

"For the Chinese, water, or the sea, is the symbol for a thinking or a behaviour that, from moment to moment, adapts and snuggles up to the transforming world [...] The world is not abysmal. It is merely manifold in its manifestations. It is not a being but a path that permanently changes course. Far Eastern thought does not circle around identity. Transformations and change are not felt to be a threat. They just represent the natural course of things, to which one needs to adapt." [69]

 

The Chinese sage does not feel the need to set sail and conquer the world - he's happy just to snuggle up to the latter and be shaped by it ... One is almost tempted to say: Like a woman [f]. 

III.

 

Because we are so caught up in grammar - the metaphysics or presence of God within language - it makes it very hard for a Westerner ever to really think or speak or see the world like someone from the Far East. 

 

Han's native Korean, for example, doesn't presuppose an active subject - in fact the subject is often left out of things altogether, which is problematic for Westerners who find it hard to conceive of a subject-less happening; we have to have an actor behind every action (be it a human actor or a god) [g]. 

 

Han writes: "The subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master." [81] What would be noble, from a Buddhist perspective, would be to escape this delusion (and subjectivity) entirely.    

 

Would it be noble also to remain silent? Confucius often wished to remain silent. But Han is at pains to point out that Confucius's silence "does not aim at the unsayable, the mystery that cannot captured by language" [82]. Nor does he want to remain schtum because he thinks language is insufficient "and cannot signify its object adequately" [82]. 

 

In fact, the unsayable - that which escapes language - "is not a theme in Far Eastern thinking" [82] - it's a Western thing: "Language is renounced in favour of a remainder that can be expressed only in song" [82], for example. Or silence is affirmed as the only thing that can do justice to this extralinguistic residue (be it metaphysial, asthetic, or ethical in character). 

 

The silence of Zen masters is an empty silence; it does not refer to anything, but is designed to make others think about the reality of the world, which just is as it is, neither secret nor mysterious; "there are no murky depths" [83] for philosophers or psychoanalysts to uncover or root around in like pigs in search of truffles.   

 

 

IV.

 

The final chapter of Han's book is on greeting and bowing, i.e., forms of friendliness - although, interestingly, he suggests that originally to greet someone "must have involved emitting a dark, gutteral, threatening sound" [90], as, etymologically, the word means to attack, provoke, or unsettle.

 

Somehow, even as a (slightly shy but also somewhat cheeky) three-year old, I already knew this; which is why I was not just being friendly when I stood on my front garden wall and greeted strangers passing by [h].   

 

Han writes:

 

"Initially, the other represents a possible threat and danger to my existence. The other has an usettling effect. The gutteral sound of gruozen is probably an immediate reaction to the primordial threat posed by the other, another human being. By emmitting a gutteral, threatening sound I challenge the other to fight." [91]  

 

Eventually, once there's a degree of mutual recognition, the greeting becomes more of a form of reassurance; it tells the other that they are accepted and that you mean no harm to them. But, crucially, both parties remain separate; a greeting does not instantly or automatically create intimacy; the greeter greets the other across a pathos of distance and from within their own essence. 

 

Offering a friendly greeting lets the other be in their essential otherness - it's not aiming at some form of merger; it says I'm me and you're you. But the Japanese do not verbally greet with a grunt, they bow ...

 

According to Han, bowing is all about absencing oneself from the scene; there's no exchange of gaze or mutual sizing up. In a deep bow, parties form a flat plane between them, levelling out difference. Neither party bows to the other, they bow rather into the empty space between them. Technically speaking, no one is greeting or being greeted; and no one is subjugated or subjugating. 

 

Han writes: "A deep bow does not mediate between persons, does not reconcile anyone with anyone else. Rather, it empties and de-internalizes those involved into absencing individuals." [98]

And that's why bowing is so philosophically important; it's not just a form of politeness, but a way of negating essence and identity [i].

Notes

 

[a] I am using the English translation of this work by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steur as Absence, (Polity Press, 2023) - all page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.  

 

[b] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'On the Spirit of Gravity'. 

      Readers who are interested might also like to see my post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.

 

[c] Later, Han will note that whilst water may not have a form of its own, "it is anything but 'amorphous'. It always has a shape, because it takes the form of the other in order to unfold. It is friendly because [...] it snuggles up to any form." [64]

[d] This way of thinking isn't entirely unknown in the West - one thinks, for example, of Henry Miller's insistence on loving everything that flows - but, on the whole, it's undoubtedly true that we in the West prefer things to be dry and solid. Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 7 June 2013: click here.

[e] Again, this line of thought is not entirely alien to Western thinkers; Zarathustra, for example, tells his followers that in order to be overhuman they must become a sea so as not to be defiled by the polluted rivers of the all too human world, although, admittedly, that's not not quite the same thing as the oceanic feeling of oneness that Far Eastern philosophers champion and Han concludes that Nietzsche - for all his attempted reversal of Western metaphysics - "remained a Western thinker" [70]

      Interestingly, Freud - another great Western thinker - argues that (if it exists) the oceanic feeling is a primitive form of egoism preserved from infancy.     

[f] I'll let readers decide whether that's a  good or bad thing, but would remind those in need of reminding that even Nietzsche toyed with the supposition that truth might be a woman; see the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. If that's the case, then that pretty much changes everything; no phallogocentic certainty; no solid foundations or fixed forms, etc. (Again, I'll let readers decide whether this would be for better or for worse.) 

[g] Han notes: "For Asian aesthetic sensibility, something that happens without a subject being involved, without the imprint of a doing, is both noble and beautiful. The imprint of a subjective act is a typically Western motif." [84] 

      Nietzsche, of course, attempted to think deeds without an actor, but, says Han, he was unable to "turn from the philosophy of doing and power to the philosophy of happening" [85], which is why he remained very much a Western thinker and "more or less attached to subjectivity" [85].

      As for Heidegger, whilst he "may have repeatedly allowed himself to be touched by Far Eastern thinking" [88], he also remained in many respects a Western thinker attached to the idea of essence. And if he frequently used the trope of the way, his way "differs from the way as dao" [88]. Ultimately, Heidegger's being is a bit more mysterious and withdrawn than the being-so of Eastern thinking, which is what we might call everyday immanence.   

[h] See the post entitled 'Say Hello Then!' (3 Aug 2018): click here.

 

[i] I'm pretty sure Roland Barthes recognised this in L'Empire des Signes (1970), though I'm not sure Larry David fully appreciated this in episode 7 of season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011). See the post entitled 'Shit Bow: Larry David and Roland Barthes on the Art of Japanese Etiquette' (26 Oct 2017): click here. 

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here.