Reflections on Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)

Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980) 

Top row: Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and Louis Brandeis

Bottom row: George Gershwin, the Marx Bros, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt and Sigmund Freud

 

 

Warhol, one of my favourite 20th-century artists, was not Jewish and yet, for some reason, I often think of him as Jewish - or Jew-ish, to use a complex and at times controversial term [1].

 

I suppose it's partly because as the child of East European migrants, he would likely have been subject to the same kind of othering within American society during the 1930s, where, as one commentator notes, "cultural and social interactions were built around ethnic identities and tensions" [2]. 

 

This same commentator also claims that despite being Capatho-Rusyn and an orthodox Catholic, Warhol's "closest childhood friends were Jewish, and you can imagine him sharing their sense of being permanent outsiders within the American mix" [3].

 

And indeed, throughout his life and career, Warhol continued to form important relationships with Jews and was clearly sympathetic to anyone who is marked out as queer, different, or alien; "Warhol knew and cared more about alterity, and the difficult quest for cultural inclusion, than most other artists you could name" [4].   

 

So, it should be no surprise that in 1980 Warhol produced a series of ten silk-screened canvases (each 40" x 40") which celebrated some of the most important Jewish figures of the twentieth century.

 

What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this work was dismissed or condemned by the critics at the time [5] and remains still, in my view, undervalued - although there has, admittedly, been something of a critical reappraisal in recent years and Jewish art lovers continue to view the work with enthusiasm and pride. 

 

In sum: whilst it would be wrong to claim Warhol was an ardent philosemite - and it should be noted that the idea for the above work was not his, nor did he select the ten figures chosen (or even know who Martin Buber was) [6] - Warhol was certainly not guilty of Jewsploitation, nor jokey antisemitism (hang your head in shame for this last remark, Ken Johnson) [7].

 

I like the series: although if I were asked to compile a list of ten dead Jewish figures that I would like to see portraits of, it would certainly have to include Serge Gainsbourg, Malcolm McLaren and Jacques Derrida ...    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Aviya Kushner, 'What does it mean to be "Jew-ish"? How the term went from warm inside joke to national flashpoint', Forward, (28 December, 2022): click here.

 

[2-4] Blake Gopnik, 'Andy Warhol's Jewish Question', Artnet, (22 November, 2016): click here. 

 

[5] Writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer accused Warhol of exploiting his Jewish subjects "without showing the slightest grasp of their significance". The critical consensus was that the work was produced in the cynical knowledge it would fetch a high price from a wealthy Jewish collector.    

 

[6] The series was suggested to him by art dealer Ronald Feldman and the subjects of the portraits were subsequently chosen by Feldman after consultation with Susan Morgenstein, director of the art gallery of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, where the work was first exhibited in March 1980. 

      The series was later exhibited at the Jewish Museum of New York (September 1980 to January 1981) and was first displayed in the UK at the National Portrait Gallery, London, between January and June 2006, where they were described thus by curator Paul Moorhouse in the booklet that accompanied the NPG exhibition:

 

"Magisterial in conception, they advance a new subtlety and sophistication in technical terms. One of their most compelling aspects is the way surface and image are held in a satisfying and fascinating dialogue, generating new depths of meaning and implication. [...] 

      The disjunction between sitter and surface is a visual device that unites the portraits, but the series has a conceptual unity also. Warhol's insistence that the subjects be deceased invests the series with an inescapable character of mortality. The faces of the dead appear as if behind a veneer of modernity. The tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue of their celebrity. Probing the faultlines between the person and their manufactured, surface image, Warhol presents these individuals' fame as a complex metamorphosis. The real has been transformed into a glorious, poignant, other-worldly abstraction."

 

[7] See Ken Johnson's piece in The New York Times entitled 'Funny, You Don't Look Like a Subject for Warhol' (28 March 2008), in which he wrote: "What is remarkable about the paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made them controversial - the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism - has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike representations."  

 

 

In Praise of Notes and Parenthetical Elements (A Reply to a Critic)

A gargoyle checking footnotes

 

 

A critic writes:

One of the most irritating things about your blog is the use of endnotes. 

      One might question whether such are really needed at all in what is essentially an informal and non-academic forum, but since you seem determined to provide additional information, thereby supplementing your main text, you might at least try to keep them as brief as possible and not attempt to write a post within a post; as you do, for example, in the note on Barbette in 'Carry On Cross-Dressing' (9 April 2022). 

      It's fine to mention that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were coached in the art of drag by Barbette, since you were discussing Some Like It Hot, but you needn't then discuss Jean Cocteau's relationship with the latter. This seems to suggest distraction on your part - as if you suddenly become bored with your own post and wish to head off in a new direction - and it's disconcerting too for readers to suddenly be taken off-topic. 

      If I were you, I would rework the format of your blog and consider eliminating notes altogether.

         

My reply: 

 

As a provocateur, it pleases me to think there are irritating aspects to Torpedo the Ark and that it doesn't simply soothe or pacify its audience. The pleasure of the text in its most radical sense - what Barthes terms jouissance - ultimately relies upon the reader's discomfort [1].      

As a post-Derridean, i.e., one who happily inhabits the margins of philosophy, I am favourably disposed towards footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical elements, and prioritise fragmented forms, literary digressions, and the seemingly trivial detail (in which the devil hides) over conceptual coherence, etc. [2]

 

I regard the notes, therefore, as more than merely supplementary - they are not just afterthoughts, or add-ons, which serve to complete or enhance the main text; the notes have interest and import in their own right and function more like gargoyles on the side of a cathedral, jeering at the idea of wholeness (as if any post could ever be the last word on anything) [3]. 

 

The endnotes, as a type of birdsong, provide a way out of even my own arguments. I want to digress (to step aside or walk away from the straight and narrow); I like to be distracted (to have my thoughts pulled in a different direction, my attention diverted). If you find this disconcerting, then that's good; see my remarks above about jouissance. 

 

And so, I won't be changing the format of posts on Torpedo the Ark; a blog which might even be characterised (à la Whitehead) as ultimately nothing but a footnote to Nietzsche.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). And see my discussion of this work in Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: click here. 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (The University of Chicago Press, 1982). 

      See also Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), particularly the reading of Rousseau, in which Derrida demonstrates how there is no transparently pure language awaiting corruption by an external supplement that is entirely alien to it. 

 

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-191. I discuss Lawrence's gargoyle philosophy in several posts, including 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here. 

 

 

Further reading:  

 

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, (Harvard University Press, 1999). 

Chuck Zerby, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes (Touchstone, 2003). 

 

See also Pat Thomson's post 'a little fluff on the footnote' (9 May 2016) on her blog, Patter, click here. 

On Human Nakedness as Seen by Animals

Giovanni Lanfranco:  

Giovane nudo sul letto con un gatto (c. 1620-22)

Oil on canvas (112 x160 cm)

 

I often ask myself who I am at that moment when I'm caught naked

by the silent gaze of an animal; for example, the eyes of a cat ... [1]

 

 

Do animals understand that we are wearing clothes? Or, to put it another way, do they know when we are naked? 

 

D. H. Lawrence suspected his favourite brown hen would, if she could, address him as Mr. Skinflappy: 

 

"Skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my blue shirt and baggy cord trousers. How would she know I don't grow them like a loose skin!" [2]

 

How indeed, being only a chicken? 

 

But what about a cat? For I'm assuming that a cat is more insightful than a chicken when it comes to this question [3] and must surely sense the difference between skin and cloth and know when its human is in the nip? 

 

Didn't Derrida discover this for himself when his cat [4], having wandered into the bathroom, exposed the philosopher's nakedness and caused him to experience a feeling of embarrassment or shame? [5]

 

As Derrida points out, at such moments we are transported back to that moment in Genesis [3:7] when, post-Fall, Adam and Eve know themselves to be naked not only in the eyes of God and each other, but the serpent and all the other animals that inhabited the garden (and so quickly cover themselves with fig leaves). 

As Nietzsche concludes, when the animals look at man - particularly as he stands naked before them on two bare legs - they do not see a creature that is separate and superior; rather, they see "a being of their own kind which has in a most dangerous manner lost its sound animal reason" [6] and is physically maladapted to the world (lacking in speed, in strength, in sharp teeth and fur). 

That's man: the mad animal, the vulnerable animal, and the naked animal ill at ease in its own skin ...

   

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from memory (so have doubtless not quite got it right) a line by Jacques Derrida in 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2, (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 369-418. Click here to access on JSTOR.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', in Refections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 316. 

 

[3] Actually, my love of cats might be causing me to be unfair to chickens. For according to a study into their intelligence by a professor at Bristol University in 2013, chickens can not only outperform cats and dogs in several tests of cognitive and behavioural ability, but even four-year-old children.

 

[4] Like Foucault and Deleuze, Derrida had a much-loved feline companion; see my post from January 2018 - 'When I Play With My Cat' - click here. In 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', Derrida is at pains to stress that when he speaks of a female cat staring at his nakedness in the bathroom, he is referring to an actual creature in all its unique singularity: 

      "I must make it clear from the start, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn't the figure of a cat. It doesn't silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables." [374]  

 

[5] Again, see Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', op. cit., where he confesses: 

      "I have trouble repressing a reflex dictated by immodesty. Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one's sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see. The impropriety [malséance] of a certain animal nude before the other animal [...] the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant. [...] It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed." [372]

 

[6] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §224. This is my translation of the line. The section, entitled Kritik der Thiere ['Critique of the Animals'], reads in full and in the original German:

      "Ich fürchte, die Thiere betrachten den Menschen als ein Wesen Ihresgleichen, das in höchst gefährlicher Weise den gesunden Thierverstand verloren hat, - als das wahnwitzige Thier, als das lachende Thier, als das weinende Thier, als das unglückselige Thier." 

 

 

On Background Radiation (in a Cultural-Philosophical Sense)

The Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

Readers may recall the big hoo-ha created by physicists Sokal and Bricmont back in the late '90s when they criticised (and indeed mocked) philosophers and postmodern theorists for their misuse - as they saw it - of very precise scientific and mathematical concepts. 

 

Their book - first published in French as Impostures intellectuelles (1997) - polarized opinion, with those in the scientific community largely supportive, whilst opponents in the humanities argued that Sokal and Bricmont lacked understanding of the work they subjected to analysis and of how concepts are malleable and can thus be subtly (and sometimes playfully) reworked within different contexts and that doing so isn't necessarily a sign of charlatanism, ignorance, or pretension on behalf of thinkers such Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Irigaray. 

 

Nor is this reworking simply a sign of cognitive relativism and anti-scientific prejudice within European philosophy (though that's not to deny that such may exist). Using scientific terminology within a non-scientific context doesn't deny the original technical meaning, it expands the meaning and/or transfers it into a new environment (the terms are revealed as having a metaphorical component and capacity). 

 

Sokal and Bricmont may find this peculiarly offensive for a number of reasons, but then, on the other hand, some of us may find their linguistic puritanism and Francophobia equally objectionable. As Derrida rightly pointed out at the time, science and philosophy have long discussed their differences, but never with such an ugly emphasis placed on the nationality of individuals. 

 

(Derrida also stated, for the record, that there was neither relativism nor a naive rejection of reason in his work and hoped that in the future the debate might be pursued more seriously and with greater dignity: "at the level of the issues involved" [1].) 

 

 

II.                  

 

So why did I bring all this up once again? Well, because I have just been reading an interview with Peter Sloterdijk in which he mentions his fondness for the concept of background radiation ... 

 

Now, as Sokal and Bricmont would be quick to point out, this is a scientific term which refers to a measure of the ionising radiation present in the environment at a particular location originating from a variety of sources, both natural and artificial.

 

And as I'm sure they'd be equally quick to point out, Sloterdijk is a philosopher and cultural theorist - not a physicist - and, worse, he's a German thinker in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, so really shouldn't be allowed to use the concept of background radiation at all. 

 

Nevertheless, use it he does and in his own unique way which, hopefully, illustrates what I was saying above:

"I really like the concept of 'background radiation', especially applied to cultural structures. Astrophysicists may rack their brains about what background radiation means in cosmological terms. However, that there is something like cultural radiation from a darkened background - patterns of order that are so deeply hidden in the oldest things, so strongly embedded in the sediment of what we think is self-evident that they seem to escape any reflection [...]" [2]

 

As an interesting example of this cultural background radiation, Sloterdijk points to the fact we still use a technique of temporal ordering that was first developed in ancient Babylon:

 

"We live in the Babylonian week apparently naturally, without thinking that it was predicated on a theology of the Heavenly Seven, that is, on a kind of septemtheism, which means the worship of seven deities. The seven day week is a cultural creation because, unlike the day, the month and the year, it has no cosmic basis, but represents a freely made decision that fixes the arrangement of social time." [3] 

 

In sum: Sloterdijk nicely demonstrates how you can borrow a term from one discipline and redefine it within another - without in any way harming the original meaning or preventing its continued usage by others.

 

Notes 

[1] See Jacques Derrida, 'Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious', originally published in Le Monde, this short text can be found in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 70-72. It can also be found on Reddit by clicking here. 

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'With the Babble of Babylon in the Background', interview with Manfred Osten, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 313-14.

       

[3] Ibid., p. 314.  

Send in the Clowns

I.

In an early school report, one of my teachers noted: "Stephen's work suffers due to his insistence on playing the clown. He has to understand that he is in school to learn and not merely to amuse his classmates."

Despite this po-faced attempt to nip my talent for comedy in the bud, this insistence on playing the clown - influenced in part by Cesar Romero's performance as the Joker in Batman - continued all the way into adolescence, when that fabulous grotesque, Johnny Rotten, the clown prince of punk, became a great inspiration.     

II.

As a matter of fact, I never regarded myself as a clown: certainly not the type who relied on slapstick or other forms of physical comedy; and certainly not the type who was solely interested in entertaining others.

Even at six-years-old, I was more interested in challenging authority and provoking laughter through the use of language - including the language of fashion - than by throwing buckets of water (not that there's anything wrong with throwing buckets of water, as Tiswas demonstrated).

Admiring as I did fun lovin' criminals like the Joker and, later, anarchic pranksters like the Sex Pistols, meant there was always a bit more of a subversive edge to my fooling around, refusal to care, and mockery (of self and others). I may have worn Grimaldi's whiteface makeup, but that's just about where any point of comparison ends.    

III.

If not a clown, then what was I really? Some might say a fool and I've nothing against those who rush in where angels fear to tread.

But I'd probably be happier with the term trickster, as there's something more ambiguous about such a shape-shifting figure and the manner in which they often push things beyond a joke; are they being mischievous, malicious, or both? Either way, they seem to act with the full intelligence of evil.

Primarily, tricksters violate principles of social and natural order. That is to say, tricksters playfully deconstruct reality and dissolve binary distinctions. And that's why Jordan Peterson is absolutely right to describe Derrida as a philosophical trickster - though his ignorant dismissal of Derrida's work (without even attempting to engage with it) is as shameful as that of those four Cambridge dons who, in 1992, opposed the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

Ironically, Peterson has himself just had an offer of a visiting fellowship rescinded by Cambridge University following a humourless and politically correct backlash from members of both faculty and the student body, who seem to regard him in much the same way he regards Derrida - that is to say, as a dangerous charlatan.

Ultimately, culture requires its clowns and tricksters - almost as comic saviours. Indeed, that's something I would have thought Peterson, as a great reader of Jung, would readily agree with. Thus his loathing of Derrida is, in some ways, surprising as well as disappointing.

Decorating the World with David Bromley

Anglo-Aussie artist David Bromley, who is best known for his images of youngsters that nostalgically recreate a memory (or fantasy) of a Boy's Own childhood and decorative female nudes painted in black outline with clever colour combinations that also make one long for the past, is certainly not without his critics.   

And no doubt some of the criticism is fair. But, in so far as this criticism relates to his production techniques and the manner in which he has successfully branded himself and his work ensuring mass commercial appeal, much of it seems laughably passé; this is, after all, not only a post-Warhol world, but an age in which Banksy, Hirst and Koons all operate as artist-celebrities.   

To suggest, as Peter Drew suggests, that by proliferating images on an industrial scale Bromley dilutes the meaning and substance of his work, is to return to hoary old notions of originality and artistic aura (the latter being a magical quality said to arise from a work's uniqueness and which cannot possibly be reproduced). 

I mean, I love Benjamin as much as the next man, but c'mon ... 1936 is a long time ago and the myth of presence - which this idea of aura clearly perpetuates - is something that Derrida has, one might have hoped, put to bed once and for all.     

And Drew's assertion that all great art is a form of self-expression, is also one that deserves to be met with scorn. The last thing I want to see revealed on a canvas is subjective slime; I really don't give a shit about the artist's feelings, or care about the condition of their immortal soul.

Ultimately, even if Bromley is simply in it for the money, then, that's his business and his choice. But I like his tots and tits - not to mention his use of flowers, birds and butterflies - and he has, after all, six kids to support.    

One suspects, however, that Bromley is actually a more interesting figure than this and I rather admire his attempt to take art outside of the usual gallery network and into a more public arena, weaving his images into the fabric of everyday life and contemporary culture. 


See: Peter Drew, 'Too Many Bromley's', post on peterdrewarts.blogspot.com (25 May 2010): click here.

bromleyandco.com

Oikophobia

Home is made for comin' from, for dreams of going to

Which with any luck will never come true.

I. Confessions of an Oikophobe

Oikophobia - from the Greek, oikos, which refers to the three distinct but related concepts of home, household, and family, and phobia, meaning fear and loathing - is a term used within psychiatry, literary studies, and political philosophy.    

In the first of these fields, psychiatry, it identifies a deep-seated aversion to the vita domestica as it unfolds within a physical space, including the everyday objects and household appliances that are commonly found in the home: including, for example, cookers, carpets, and curtains.

Whether such a phobia is irrational, is debatable; to my mind it seems perfectly reasonable. I don't think disliking the saccharine stupidity and bourgeois vulgarity of home, sweet home is symptomatic of mental illness - it's surely a sign rather of cultural nobility (that is to say, artistic and intellectual superiority).

Thus it is that many poets have a romantic and nomadic desire to wander in far away lands and escape the ever so 'umble confines of home; including married life, regular employment, and onerous social duties (such as putting the rubbish in the correct recycling bins). To long to flee along the open road or roam outside the gate, is so closely tied to the creative impulse, that one is almost tempted to describe modern art and literature as inherently oikophobic.   

II. On the Politics of Oikophobia

Thanks to conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, however, the term oikophobia has recently taken on a new and negative meaning within reactionary political circles; now oikophobes are regarded as self-hating, left-leaning liberals who despise or feel ashamed of their own culture, history, and society.

Scruton argues:   

"This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours'. I call the attitude oikophobia - the aversion to home - by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested."*

Scruton's weaponised and anti-intellectual political usage has been taken up by other commentators with an alt-right axe to grind. They argue, for example, that oikophobia is particularly prevalent on university campuses and is a chronic symptom of political correctness, informed by the work of such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, who express contempt for ideals of love, loyalty and longing for Ithaca, preferring instead, say their critics, to affirm a kind of rootless nihilism.        

I'm not saying there's no truth in this - only that it's often spoken by the kind of ugly, flag-flying individuals that I'm never going to feel at home with. 

* Roger Scruton, speaking in Antwerp, on 23 June 2006: the text of this speech appears in The Brussels Journal (24 June 2006) and can be read by clicking here.  

For a related post on D. H. Lawrence's experience of oikophobia in terms of devouring nostalgia and infinite repulsion for his hometown of Eastwood and for England in general, click here. 

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake: It's Time for Man to Make Amends

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - certainly the one that most interests at present - is Derrida's. For it's a reading in which the question of interspecies ethics is paramount, i.e., how should we behave when confronted by the non-human otherness of the animal. 

The fact that we need to develop a new type of ethics and form a new relationship with animals can, I suppose, be regarded as a given. For the old relationship, determined by an implicitly anthropocentric moral philosophy in which the human subject is granted dominion over all other creatures and can treat them or eat them as he will, is clearly not satisfactory or working very well; unless, that is, one actively desires to continue the industrial slaughter of domestic beasts and further the mass extinction of wild things.

I certainly don't want this and, contrary to what some readers mistakenly believe, torpedo the ark doesn't mean exterminate all life forms. Rather, it means destroy the human coordination and exploitation of animals - the making them march two-by-two into captivity and containment within a system described by Derrida as carnophallogocentric; a system in which they are turned into just another natural resource to be processed and negated in their uniqueness of being.  

In his poem, Lawrence as narrator attempts to approach and to know a real snake - not merely an idealized construction or symbol - with a mixture of respect and due reverence. He's not entirely successful, but he tries. Thus he accepts that he is ethically accountable for his behaviour, including his cruelty, towards the snake and this is what fascinates Derrida in his reading. This and the fact that Lawrence openly challenges Judeo-Christian fears regarding snakes that are biblically rooted within our culture. As Anna Barcz notes:

"Derrida does not treat the poem as a challenge to literary criticism; he reads it, paying attention to details, as a sort of guidebook, a summary of human and other species' history of complex relationships and emerging problems. This results in a philosophical interpretation ... [that] sheds light on the issue of human and animal rapprochement and distance, not directly but also not far from the vantage point  of many critical, anti-speciesist and anti- or post-humanist accounts." 

Derrida is convinced that Lawrence's short verse effectively anticipates and contains his own animal philosophy in poetic form, as it touches upon just about everything that he himself is concerned with in a lecture series entitled The Beast and the Sovereign. Like Lawrence, Derrida concludes that we as humans have something to profoundly regret in the history of our relationship to the animal; a pettiness to expiate. 

This healing process begins when we recognise both the victimhood and the sovereignty of the snake; that he has been unfairly persecuted and that he is, in fact, an uncrowned king - one of the true lords of life.

Notes:

Anna Barcz, 'On D. H. Lawrence's Snake That Slips Out of the Text: Derrida's Reading of the Poem', Brno Studies in English, Vol. 39, No. 1, (2013), pp. 167- 82. Lines quoted are on p. 170.  

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Vol. I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (eds.), (Chicago University Press, 2009); see the 'Ninth Session' for Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem Snake.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in The Poems (Volume. 1), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. 

 

D. H. Lawrence's Becoming-Bat

Lawrence doesn't like bats, but this doesn't stop him writing about them in his poetry in a manner of real philosophical interest. For rather than anticipate Thomas Nagel's question and attempt to say what it's like to be a bat, Lawrence allows a proto-Derridean play of différance to infuse his writing, constructing a dummy creature with a mask-like face which parodies and subverts the very notion of an essential batness.

In the short poem, 'Bat', for example, Lawrence first confuses them for swallows flying late in the Italian twilight and sewing the shadows together. But then he realises his mistake:

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in the flight 
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!The swallows are gone.

This realisation that he's watching bats and not birds flitting about the Ponte Vecchio and flying overhead, gives Lawrence an uneasy creeping in his scalp. He thinks of them as little clots of darkness with wings like bits of umbrella:

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

They may very well be symbols of happiness and good fortune in China, but not so for this former resident of Eastwood.

In the much longer and more amusing poem 'Man and Bat', Lawrence develops his chiroptophobia whilst again doing something of philosophical and literary import. The impure frenzy with which a bat flies round and round his room in mad circles of delirium disgusts and disconcerts him, but it also allows Lawrence to demonstrate not merely how experience might be transfigured into art and given poetic expression, but how writing is inseparable from a process of becoming.

Lawrence, that is to say, establishes what Deleuze terms a zone of proximity with the bat, just as he does elsewhere with various other birds, beasts and flowers. He becomes-bat as the bat in turn becomes-rag or old umbrella. This is not something which is easy to accomplish. But to affect a becoming of this kind is something which all great writers must achieve. Indeed, this is the very mark of literary greatness.  


Notes

For an excellent reading of Lawrence's poetry in terms of différance and intertextuality, see Amit Chaudhuri's study, D H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Chaudhuri for showing how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms.

'Bat' and 'Man and Bat' may be found in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), pp. 294-300.  

On the Joy of Text

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934)

Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for a friend who seems puzzled by the concept how the term text is used by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Firstly - and crucially - it does not simply refer to words on a page containing some fixed and authoritative truth. In other words, the text is not simply a piece of writing that has been signed and sealed and which can be explained by a literary critic schooled in the art of hermeneutics. A book can be held in hand; but a text can only ever be held in language and experienced as a signifying practice which takes language to its paradoxical limit. 

Or, to put it another way, the text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original and drawn from innumerable sources, promiscuously and pleasurably come together not to express an extra-linguistic reality or give birth to meaning, but, rather, to ensure the constant deferral and systematic exemption of the latter.

In the text, everything is to be disentangled and nothing deciphered. As a reader, one cruises the surface without ever imagining that one might delve beneath it, or step beyond it. For there is nothing beneath the text, nothing behind the text, and nothing outside of the text: signs point only to other signs and never towards a transcendental signified. To presuppose the category 'world' as existing prior to and as the origin of the text, is simply to fall back into onto-theology. 

Having said that, there are small holes (aporia) in the fabric of the text, no matter how tightly or carefully it has been woven together and, like Alice, we can conveniently disappear down these. The fact that the text is a tissue of lies and stereographic plurality is precisely what offends those who believe that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, etc.

Finally, as I have already hinted, the text allows for an erotics of reading that is linked to jouissance rather than the dull pleasure of consumption. We don't discover ourselves in the text, we lose ourselves and find that our cultural and psychological assumptions are unsettled; i.e., the subjective consistency of our tastes, values, and memories is brought to a crisis of some kind.  

And so - as confessed in a recent post - I'm happy to declare myself a homotextual. That is to say, someone who affirms difference, contradiction, and ambiguity; but who sees no need for divine judgement and makes no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative determining universal good taste. 

Those who oppose the text and call for its foreclosure, either in the name of morality or rationalism, have effectively placed themselves outside of desire. And this not only means they lack a sense of intellectual playfulness, but that they're physically a bit dead and sexless too: you wouldn't want to think like them and you wouldn't want to sleep with them.  

On the Philosophical Importance of Zombies

The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feasting on brains and fucking with the categorical certainties of oppositional thinking ever since. For by inhabiting that indeterminable realm that is also home to queers, vampires, and cyborgs, the zombie occupies the non-space between binaries and is neither dead nor alive, but, paradoxically, both at once, without taking on the full sense of either term. 

Thus the zombie cannot have its status determined within a system of metaphysical dualism. This makes the zombie the stuff of modern nightmare; for we depend for our security and conceptual coherence in a chaotic and threatening universe upon being able to make clear and unambiguous distinctions between either this or that: true or false, good or evil, friend or foe ...etc. 

It's true that within such binaries there is always a privileged term set over and against its inferior opposite and that whilst each term depends upon the other for its meaning and value the nature of their relationship is therefore one of violent inequality. But, nevertheless, these pairings by enabling us to firmly organize people, things, and relations, do make human society possible. 

By disrupting this operational logic, the zombie makes it difficult for us to think straight or think clearly, indicating, if you will, the very limits of our world as ultimately the distinction between life and death is dissolved and the lines between other crucial oppositions are also blurred. 

Obviously, if good order is to be preserved, then the zombie needs to be defeated: but how? It isn't easy to terminate something that is already dead (whilst alive). Addressing this problem, one critic writes:

"You can't kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be 'killed' categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being. At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled." 

- Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida, (Icon Books, 2000), p. 23

But of course, we know in our hearts that the zombie can never really be resolved in this manner; that it is always out there somewhere in the shadows or at the margins of this world, ready and waiting to return after dark. Or, as Derrida would say, undecidability is ever present. 

Further - and finally - inasmuch as we too are made from inanimate matter, it might be argued that there's something of the zombie in all of us.

Non Placet

Having just finished reading the Derrida biography written by Benoît Peeters (trans. Andrew Brown), I was reminded once more of the time in 1992 when four Cambridge dons brought shame upon themselves and their University with a decision to oppose the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

The fact that this ignominious decision was supported by numerous other academics in an open letter to The Times which accused Derrida of being, at best, a clever trickster whose writing style not only defied comprehension but threatened the very foundations of scholarship, only made things even more embarrassing for those of us who, whilst belonging to a British intellectual tradition, were excited by the challenge French theory presented to traditional models of thought and methods of reading.   

Thankfully, when put to a wider ballot, it was decided by 336 votes to 204 to give Derrida his degree. But of course, the old prejudices and stupidities continued to circulate and erupt from time to time and even some of the obituaries written following his death in 2004 contained an ugly, jeering tone full of resentment and in stark contrast to Derrida's own profoundly beautiful writings of mourning and commemoration.  

Dare to See the World Through Deaf Eyes

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ... 
It's not so bad.

Perhaps we should all try like Larry to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear and dare to see the world through deaf eyes. Perhaps we'd find the silence beautiful. And liberating as well as instructive.

For to live in a soundless, speechless world without birdsong or the insistence of the human voice, is not to live without contact or to be loveless: we do not become fish simply because we surrender our ears and enter a mute but amazingly dexterous world of sign and physical gesture.

But, of course, most people will never concede the point that the profoundly deaf are neither disabled nor stupid. For audism is deeply-rooted within our culture and draws philosophical support from what Derrida has identified as phonocentrism: i.e. the belief that the voice is the privileged medium of truth and meaning and that hearing is the deepest of all the senses, sound acting directly upon the great affective centres of being.

Until we deconstruct, or, if you prefer, curb our enthusiasm for this metaphysical prejudice, then we will continue to remain enthralled by orality and continue to discriminate against those who cannot hear and find the idea of reading lips offensive and humiliating.