On Answering the Call of the Void

Can You Resist the Call of the Void? (SA/2025)

Based on Ernst Stückelberg's painting of Sappho (1897) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Apparently, the urge to jump when atop a high building, such as the Eiffel Tower, is not limited to rock 'n' roll puppets in a band called Bow Wow Wow [2], but is a fairly common phenomenon known (rather poetically) as the call of the void ...

 

 

II.

 

Usually, it's a violently intrusive thought that passes as quickly as it comes and is not regarded as a sign of any underlying suicidal tendencies. In fact, it may be the brain's way of telling you not to jump; to recognise the danger of your situation and step back from the edge. 

 

 

III. 

 

Philosophers, of course - particularly those who have taken seriously Nietzsche's injunction to live dangerously - don't always care what their brain tells them. 

 

They know that "the secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment" [3] involves sending ships into unchartered seas, building cities on the slopes of a volcano, and daring to leap into the void when the moment to do so is right.

 

Empedocles knew this [4]. And Deleuze knew this [5] ...     

 

 

IV.

 

The void, of course, is another one of those ideas in philosophy that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. But it's probably in the modern sense that most people think it today; i.e., in relation to existential nihilism. 

 

The key thing, however, is not take it too negatively: the void might even be seen as a space of potential; not just of nothingness. It's absence that makes the heart grow fonder and which allows for the emergence of new thoughts and feelings, the creation of new values and concepts. 

 

The void is also the space of forgotten possibilities, where abandoned paths can be rediscovered, allowing for different interpretations of the past (interpretations that might then be projected into the future, so that we might in this way live yesterday tomorrow). 

 

Our artist friends often insist on the importance of what they call negative space - something that is crucial for giving form and structure to what exists. 

 

And scientists too are increasingly persuaded of the importance of the quantum vacuum - a void filled with fluctuating energy and mad particles, from which the universe itself may have emerged.   

 

So, whilst I'm not encouraging any one to jump off a tall building, I think it's worth acknowledging that the call of the void is more than what psychologists say it is, i.e., a slightly odd phenomenon not linked to actual intentions, so not worth paying too much attention to.

  

The call of the void - like the call of the wild - is, in fact, a vital experiential reality.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The Ancient Greek poet Sappho is perhaps best known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. That, and her sexuality - although her lesbianism is much disputed amongst scholars and there is no documentary evidence to conclusively indicate her preference when it came to lovers. 

      (In classical Athenian comedy, she was often portrayed as promiscuoulsy heterosexual; the earliest surviving sources to explicitly identify Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period, although such modern terms, of course, would have been meaningless to the ancient Greeks and one does wonder whether projecting lesbianism on to a figure like Sappho is anything other than an ideological move motivated by queer-feminist politics.) 

       According to legend, Sappho killed herself by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon; a story related to a myth about the goddess Aphrodite and one that is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars.

 

[2] I'm referring to Annabella Lwin, lead vocalist with Bow Wow Wow, and their track 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' on Your Cassette Pet (EMI, 1980), an eroticised tale of teen suicide involving a leap from the sexiest building left: click here to play. 

      

[3] Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 283, p. 228.

      

[4] The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles famously threw himself into the lava and flames of Mount Etna and his death has been mythologised by writers and artists ever-since. Whether he believed that this would guarantee his immortality or not, the fact is that his name lives on to this day. The Roman poet Horace refers to the death of Empedocles in his work Ars Poetica and suggests that great thinkers have not only the right, but almost a duty, to destroy themselves. 

 

[5] Deleuze committed suicide on 4 November 1995 by jumping from the window of his apartment in Paris. He was suffering from increasingly severe respiratory problems that made even simple tasks difficult (including writing, though I'm not sure we can describe that as a simple task). 

      Whether his surrendering to the call of the void marked a loss of desire on his part, however, is debatable; it could be that his decision to terminate his own individual existence was a way of affirming life and thus indicates a final resurgence of vitality. In other words, his suicide might be seen as a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering. 

      See the post entitled 'Three French Suicides' (31 Jan 2024) in which I discuss Deleuze's death in relation to the deaths of Olga-Georges Picot and Christina Pascal (both of whom also answered the call of the void): click here.  

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.  

 

 

Herr Nietzsche Agrees: Sydney Sweeney Hat Tolle Jeans

I think we can classify Sweeney as a member of the Nietzschean right ... 

- Richard Hanania [1] 

 

 

One final thought on the controversy surrounding the American Eagle 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' campaign, which I discussed briefly in a recent post: click here ...

 

Even if concerns that the ads featuring Sydney Sweeney appear to knowingly play on the long and troubling history of eugenics (i.e., the largely discredited set of beliefs and practices to do with genetically improving the population by promoting certain traits designated as superior and desirable over those designated inferior and undesirable) are valid and justified - and I'm not persuaded of that - the level of anti-white rhetoric that it has unleashed (in the name, ironically, of standing up to racism) is a little disheartening (to say the least); particularly when it comes from whey-faced commentators and is born of white guilt, white fragility, and self-loathing.    

  

But perhaps, as a reader of Nietzsche, I shouldn't be surprised at this: for anti-white rhetoric is arguably just another unfolding of what in the Genealogy he describes as the slave revolt in morality, a fateful turning point in history which begins when "ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values" [2]; or, more precisely, when it inverts the values of the ruling class and in this way extracts an imaginary revenge.

 

For example, noble values of strength and beauty are suddenly seen as oppressive forms of evil whilst the opposite of these things are deemed to be virtues; thus we see an emergence of so-called body positivity and a celebration of DEI.   

  

Unfortunately, things become particularly heated when framed in terms of perceived racial characteristics, such as skin colour, which is precisely how many of those who have attacked the American Eagle ads have framed things, seeing Sweeney's whiteness as inherently oppressive and offensive in itself; a malevolent and aggressive condition of being. 

 

It's almost as if they look at her image and hear her humorous affirmation of her own dress sense (and not, as a matter of fact, her genetic inheritance or racial identity) and can only think: ea est alba [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Richard Hanania on X (24 Mar 2024): click here to read the post in full. I very much doubt this is the case, but it's interesting that Hanania should write this 16 months ago. As far as I'm aware, Miss Sweeney has yet to declare her political or philosophical leanings.  

 

[2] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 10, p. 21. 

 

[3] I'm referencing and reversing the line from Horace's Satires (I. 85): hic niger est - literally meaning 'he is black' and often translated into English as 'he is a dangerous character' and thus intended to be understood as a warning against those with dark hair or skin. 

      

 

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

Pippa McManus: Crazy Daisy Dreams (2017)

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

Modern Eden Gallery (San Francisco)

I. Summers of Love and Hate

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

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


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

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

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

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


III. On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

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

(i) Only a Child Can Save Us

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

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

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

(iii) Paganism Good / Christianity Bad

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

(iv) Seize the Day, Man

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

(v) Free Love

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

(vi) Romantic Primitivism and Exotic Otherness 

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

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

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

See: 

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

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

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

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