Learning to Love the Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabelle Adjani: Pull Marine 
(music video dir. Luc Besson, 1984) 

Click here to watch

I think the first work I tried to read by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray was Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was published in English translation (by Gillian C. Gill) in 1991, when I was doing my MA at the University of York and spent a lot of time hanging around with members of the women's studies department, including Liz DeLoughry, who is now a professor at UCLA and who, if I remember correctly, lent me the book.  

Unfortunately, I couldn't make head or tail of it and I found Irigaray's lyrical-poetic style antithetical. It should be noted that this is not offered as a criticism of her thinking or mode of writing, but is more a reflection upon my own limitations as a reader at this time. Indeed, it might partly explain why I'm not a professor at UCLA ...

However, here we are in 2019, almost 30 years later, and I'm strangely tempted to give it another go, having just come across this very beautiful line by Irigaray in another work: The plant nourishes the mind that contemplates the blooming of its flower.   

That's not to say I don't still have limitations as a reader - don't we all? - but I'm hopefully a little less limited than I was in '91 and have, in the years since, often myself adopted a writing style that attempts to dissolve the distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy. So, fingers crossed I'll get more from my re-encounter with l'amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

See: Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Columbia University Press, 1991). 

Notes:

Originally published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Irigaray interrogates the feminine as conceived within modern philosophy from an elemental perspective; in the case of this book, as the title makes obvious, it's water that is used to cleanse Nietzsche's writings of their phallogocentricity and freshen up his ideas. But Irigaray does so not as an enemy, but as an imaginary lover who engages in an amorous dialogue with the latter. 

And the song? It's an absolutely beautiful track written by Serge Gainsbourg and released as a single from the album Isabelle Adjani (Philips, 1983). 

On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)

I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:

"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."

Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...


I: On Faciality

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.

In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.

And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:

"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."

Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this. 


II: Becoming-Imperceptible

For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.   

Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).

It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.

I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".

To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming  - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?       

Notes

Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'

Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91. 

Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.    

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