On Being Followed by a Seagull

(SA/2023)

 

"It is right for a gull to fly -

freedom is the very nature of its being ..." [1]

 

I. 

 

The other day, walking in the park, I was followed by a seagull. Although it might simply be the case that he was hoping for some food, a poet friend insists on the symbolic (and spiritual) importance of the event.

 

Apparently, these intelligent and beautiful birds are not merely noisy opportunists, but able to travel between realms and bring us messages (or warnings) from the dead. 

 

Normally, I wouldn't give much time to such a thought, but as I'm still mourning the death of my mother - who loved birds - I'm inclined to be a little more receptive to the idea that the gull wanted me to know something. 

 

But what? 

 

That, of course, is the question - and the difficulty. How can one know that one has interpreted a message from the dead carried by a feathered messenger correctly? 

 

I'm not sure you can. But this is my attempt to do so ...

 

 

II.

 

As the bird remained silent, I assume it wasn't telling me to find my own voice. 

 

In fact, I'm keen to speak less and look more these days; to move away from the written text towards the world of images; to put down the pen and pick up the paintbrush; to exchange the computer keyboard for the camera. 

 

So maybe the gull was encouraging me with this; to quietly find my wings, so to speak, as a visual artist and fly above past limitations and the somewhat grim (anxiety-inducing) circumstances of the present (health issues, money worries, threats from Google to terminate this blog because I have violated their community guidelines, etc.).    

 

I certainly prefer to interpret being followed by a seagull as a good sign; as something positive, rather than a bad omen and one recalls the words of Luce Irigaray, who wrote some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

 

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word [...] restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia." [2] 

 

It may well be that a storm of some kind is approaching and I need to think a little more seriously about the future than I normally do. But somehow, as long as there are birds still nesting and calling in the world, I believe everything will be fine. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, (Macmillan, 1970). I'm quoting this from memory, so it might not be dead-on balls accurate, as Miss Mona Lisa Vito might say. 

[2] Luce Irigaray, 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, ed. Matthew Atterton and Peter Calarco, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197. I first quoted these lines in a post published ten years ago; see 'Feathered Friends' (9 Jan 2013): click here. 

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.  

A Brief Midwinter Reflection

Thank fuck it's the solstice this weekend and the promise of a returning sun; have the mornings ever been so dark as this year? I don't remember them so. But maybe it's an age thing; I appreciate now why so many pensioners like to spend winter in the south, if they can afford to do so.

Of course, despite the December solstice being a cosmic and psychological turning point, it's still a terribly long wait for spring and the warmer days when love becomes possible anew. For as Irigaray points out, whilst a god can enter the world midwinter, it's too early, too cold, and too dark to really rejoice.

Winter undoubtedly has it's own special beauty and rhythm, but it's spring - "when the heavens and the earth unite" - that is the "most wonderful and divine season"; a time of flowers and birdsong that "resonates in a deep silence [...] beyond any word".      

The solstice is a time when, briefly, the sun stands still; but in the spring everything leaps forward - even the clocks! 

See: Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 36 and 37.

 

Luce Irigaray and Constance Chatterley: Woodland Refugees

Penguin Books (2011)

Illustration by Lucy McLauchlan

I. 

Connie, we are told in one of the early chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover, was aware of a growing restlessness taking possession of her like a madness: "It twitched her limbs [... and] made her heart beat violently, for no reason."

In order to counter this restlessness, Connie would rush away from the house and from everybody and lie prone in the bracken: "The wood was her one refuge, her sanctuary."

II.

I thought of this when reading Luce Irigaray's claim that nature had saved her life and restored her health on many occasions, and that from early childhood the world of plants (and animals) has been her favourite (and most vital) dwelling place. 

Indeed, I can't think of a more Lawrentian (or, at the very least, Lawrentian-sounding) French feminist than Irigaray, who, like Lawrence, affirms the generative potential of the elements and the importance of living in emotional rhythm with the seasons: "the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the going of the seasons". 

That's Lawrence writing, but it could so easily have come from Irigaray's pen. And like the latter, Lawrence is an advocate of sexuate being: "men experience the great rhythm of emotion man-wise, women experience it woman-wise" and often expounds his thinking in terms that seem to blur the distinction between human life and vegetal being:

"We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep blooming in our civilised vase on the table." 

III.

Like Connie, Irigaray also seeks out human companionship in the woods in order to experience what she terms a more complete sharing. I don't know if, for her, that involves a phallic hunting out, but one assumes that it is about meeting another being beyond all shame and the reaching of one's ultimate nakedness.

Irigaray is disappointed that when she confesses her desire to meet a companion in the woods to her friends and colleagues most laugh and wrongly assume she's longing for some kind of caveman, or expressing a naive form of romantic primitivism. Such people, she says, not only exhaust her vitality, but show an underlying ignorance of and contempt for the subtlety of her thinking 

Again, whilst I'm not entirely sure about this, I imagine what she wants is to encounter someone who does for her what Mellors does for Connie, i.e., provide a transformative experience of otherness and an awakening into touch. She writes: "Sexuate desire is [...] an appeal for entering into relations with the other as a source and an embodiment of life different from ours, which calls for a sort of becoming [...]"

IV.

Lawrence famously opens Lady C. with a passage that suggests we are all living among the ruins and that our primary task, therefore, is to go round or "scramble over the obstacles", building "new little habitats". Irigaray also seems to arrive at a similar (essentially tragic though still hopeful) conclusion: 

"Our earth and all the living beings who inhabit on it are henceforth in danger and [...] we, as humans, must find a way to [...] return to our natural belonging and its suitable cultivation for the establishment of another manner of existing and coexisting [...]"  

The key, according to her, is to "open and reopen continuously the possibility of a new growth and horizon for life, for desire, for love, and for culture". She continues:

"Sometimes the vegetal world is our most crucial mediator; sometimes it is a loving and loved human different from us; sometimes past thinkers lead us on the way. However, we must clear up our own path alone, with the help of a star, of a grace, or the fecundity of a meeting with another human who longs to cultivate life, love, and thought through their sharing, and with building a new world in mind."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 20, 322-23, 

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 86, 97, 99

I'm not the first, of course, to note the similarity (at times) between Lawrence and Irigaray. Sue Reid, for example, has written some interesting work in this area. See her essay 'Enumerating Difference: Lawrence, Freud, Irigaray and the Ethics of Democracy', Études Lawrenciennes, 45 (2014), pp.125-140. Click here to read online.  

For a critique of Luce Irigaray's vegetal idealism, click here.

On Luce Irigaray's Vegetal Idealism

Columbia University Press, 2016

Cover image: Jessica Hines

I.

 

When Luce Irigaray first approached Michael Marder with the idea of co-authoring a book on plant life - or vegetal being, as philosophers like to say - one wonders what he was hoping for ...?

Actually, I know what he was hoping for, as Marder conveniently tells us in the epilogue to his half of the work: he was hoping that he and Irigaray might produce a work that would "open alternative horizons for relating to the vegetal world". 

What he doesn't tell us is whether he feels they succeeded in this - or whether he was as disappointed as I was with her feeble and all too human contribution; one that tells us a lot about her, but very little about the plants of which she speaks (and, arguably, exploits). 

II.

Irigaray writes of her disillusion with the intellectual world and academic establishment which, she says, has treated her unfairly in the past; she speaks also of her desire to see a new order in which plants and people can bloom and her book sales receive the kind of numbers they deserve.     

Following professional and personal difficulties - including a car accident - Irigaray discovered yoga and turned to the healing power of plants which, like her, were often overlooked, objectified, or seriously maltreated: trees, for example, are today nothing but a material resource at the disposal of human beings (what Heidegger calls a standing reserve).

To be fair, following publication of Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray was expelled from the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, sacked from her university teaching post, and even snubbed by Simone de Beauvoir, but I'm not sure that these things attract the sympathy of plants - or indeed that they share her sense of being rejected and undervalued.

She likes sitting quietly with them - meeting them in silence - and that's fine. But when she suggests they like sitting quietly with her or exerting eco-therapeutic powers, then I'm more sceptical.

Similarly, a lot of her metaphorical rhetoric seems deeply suspect to me; particularly when framed within the untenable (because naive and idealistic) language of vitalism and nature, with the latter embarrassingly portrayed as something not merely hospitable but positively benign. In Irigaray's imaginary forest, plants peacefully coexist and thus provide a model for mankind of natural belonging in a world without strife or competition.

As Irving Goh notes:

"In this regard, Irigaray ignores or forgets how trees and plants compete with one another for sunlight and water; how parasitic plants feed on and off others for their own benefit; how weeds threaten the well-being or even survival of other plants [...] and how certain plants have features like thorns or bladelike leaves that can pose serious dangers to humans and animals, or how some of them are toxic to humans and animals [...]"
       

In short, all of the violence, cruelty and obscenity of the natural world - that which gives it much of its beauty (and which always shines through our attempts to idealise it) - is simply overlooked by Irigaray. Has she never heard of la vengeance des fleurs?

I don't want to come over all dark ecological, but Irigaray needs to address the question of evil in relation to vegetal being, otherwise she's offering us nothing but a romantic fantasy that is humanistic at the very least, if not just another depressing example of anthropocentric conceit. Her reductive insistence on the innocence of plants not only robs them of complexity - the vegetal world knows nothing of sexuated difference - it ultimately makes them boring.

Again, I can't help wondering what Marder makes of all this; he must have grimaced on more than one occasion as he read through her text - must have asked himself if, in fact, she'd even read his work on plant-thinking. Irigaray is (outrageously) forgetful of the otherness of vegetal being on at least two occasions:

"The first is when she says that 'looking at a tree brings me energy, whereas looking at a manufactured object takes energy away from me' (46-47), forgetting that the very book Through Vegetal Being to which Irigaray contributes is no less a printed, that is, manufactured, object, not to mention that its manufacturing process undoubtedly involved trees at some point. The second instance is when she declares herself a vegetarian (23) without any critical consideration of her consumption of plant life as such, not recognizing, in other words, her violence toward plant life as the latter becomes her primary dietary source. In both cases, I think it difficult for Irigaray to defend 'a sharing without infringing on the life of the other,' especially if 'life of the other' concerns plant life (44-45)."
  
At this point, I can't help but let out a small sigh ... I so wanted to like this work by Irigaray and was prepared to overlook many aspects of her writing that I have, in the past, found irritating. But how can one in good faith turn a blind eye to issues such as these raised by Irving Goh, or to sentences like this:

"It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me." 

Notes

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 215 and 21.

Irving Goh, 'Le rejet of Luce Irigaray in Through Vegetal Being', research article in Differences, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 137-154. Lines quoted are on pp. 145 and 146-47. This essay can be read online via academia.edu: click here. 

For a reading of Irigaray's vegetal idealism in relation to D. H. Lawrence's work in Lady Chatterley's Lover, click here.

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 1: Encountering Plants and Ethical Offshoots)

I.

Sometimes, despite having the best of intentions, it can take five or six years to get around to reading a book and Michael Marder's Plant Thinking (2013) is a case in point. Not only have I been wanting to read it for ages, but, as a floraphile with a philosophical interest in all forms of nonhuman life, including our CO2-loving friends, I really should have read it by now.

Still, better late than never ...   

II.

Firstly, I should say as sympathetic as I am to Marder's project, I'm not entirely convinced that re-thinking our relation to plants and raising various ethico-ontological concerns to do with vegetal life significantly helps in the task of deconstructing metaphysics, or overthrowing the "capitalist agro-scientific complex" [184]. That's over-egging the philosophical pudding and marks the enlisting of plants to the revolutionary cause of hermeneutic communism (it's no surprise to discover the foreword to Marder's book is written by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala).  

And I'm certainly not of the view that his book will - to paraphrase ecofeminist Vandana Shiva - help plants threatened by human activity whilst enabling us to better understand the sanctity and continuity of life and our own place within the Earth Family. That's just quasi-religious vomit.    

Anyway, here are my thoughts first on the Introduction to Plant-Thinking, followed by responses to the Epilogue (I shall deal with the body of the text - divided into five chapters across two main parts - in parts two and three of this post) ... 


III. To Encounter the Plants ...

It's true, I suppose, that - in comparison to other living beings - plants have been given the shit end of the stick by philosophers (though, due to their penchant for manure, one might have assumed they'd not find this particularly objectionable). Even animals, which have themselves suffered marginalisation throughout the history of Western thought, suddenly seem very rich in world compared to plants; the latter are the poorest of the poor, populating the "zone of absolute obscurity" [2].

Vegetal life was simply not regarded as question-worthy by the vast majority of theorists and critical thinkers and this has allowed for their ethical neglect, argues Marder, who wishes to give plants their due and let them be in their own right. And he aims to do this by staging an encounter with plants in all their leafy otherness.

This might seem problematic (even impossible), but Marder insists human beings have "a wide array of possible approaches to the world of vegetation at their disposal" [3] and that, alien as they are, they are also curiously familiar to us in our daily lives, even if "the uses to which we put vegetal beings do not exhaust what (or who) they are but, on the contrary, obfuscate enormous regions of their being" [4].

For example, there's the aesthetic approach - think Van Gogh and his sunflowers - which seems "to be more propitious to a nonviolent approach to plants than either their practical instrumentalization or their nominalist-conceptual integration into systems of thought" [4].

I agree with that: artists and poets have a crucial role to play in the encounter with plants* and if philosophers are to think plants, they'll need to learn from the above and perhaps adopt a quasi-aesthetic approach of their own (easy enough for European philosophers, but problematic for those who belong to an Anglo-American (analytic) tradition and don't quite know what it might mean to "save singularities from the clasp of generalizing abstraction and [...] put thought in the service of finite life" [5]). 

I'm not sure Marder particularly cares about the latter, however, whom he regards as disrespectful toward vegetation. It's weak thinking postmodernists, feminists, and non-Western philosophers with their rich venerable traditions who are "much more attuned to the floral world" [6] (apparently). So I suppose we'd all better get reading Irigaray and learning Sanskrit if we want to interact with plants in a manner that doesn't negate their otherness and at least entertains the hypothesis "that vegetal life is coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage" [8]. 

Developing this latter point, Marder writes:

"This is not to say that human beings and plants are but examples of the underlying universal agency of Life itself; nor is it to plead for an excessive anthropomorphism, modeling the subjectivity of vegetal being on our own personhood. Rather, the point is that plants are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modees of dwelling on and in the earth." [8]

In other words, rather than talk (like Heidegger) about having or not having world, it's better to say we have our world and they, plants, have theirs.

Thus, whenever a man or woman meets a sunflower, "two or more worlds (and temporalities) intersect" and to accept this is "already to let plants maintain their otherness, respecting the uniqueness of their existence" [8]. We can't and probably shouldn't try to enter their world (even though they certainly intrude into ours); rather, the challenge is "to allow plants to flourish on the edge or at the limit of phenomenality" [9].

We might also admit that we ourselves retain vestiges of the inorganic and of ancient plant life; that we have a common evolutionary origin after all. Thus, Deleuze's notion of becoming-plant might be said to involve the activation of long dormant and long forgotten molecular memories. The challenge that plant-thinking sets us, therefore, is this:

"Are we ready to take the initial, timid steps in the anamnesis of the vegetal heritage proper to human beings, the very forgetting of which we have all but forgotten?" [13]  

IV. The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-Thinking

It was certainly new to me to be told that in 2008 the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Nonhuman Biotechnology released a report titled 'The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants'.

As Marder explains, for perhaps the first time in human history, "a government-appointed body issued recommendations for the ethical treatment of plants" [180]. Vegetal life was said to deserve to be treated with the same consideration accorded all other living beings. Henceforth, fucking with plants and subjecting them to arbitrary harm was not okay; they had rights.

You'd think Marder would be delighted by this - and he does, in fact, describe the report as admirable and praise its revolutionary potential. But he also points out that it failed to "inquire into the being of plants, into their unique purchase on life" [180]. In other words, it lacked any ontological insight or philosophical depth and continued to privilege mankind as supreme moral arbiter. It was ultimately an attempt to absorb the vegetal world into the all too human world of law and order.  

What was needed, rather, was "the cultivation of a certain intimacy with plants, which does not border on empathy or on the attribution of the same fundamental substratum to their life and to ours" [181]. We must go beyond being plant-like in our thinking alone; we must allow this thinking to bear upon our actions, says Marder, before outlining a series of offshoots that suggest how we might best form an ethical relationship with plants.

These offshoots tell us, for example, that ethics is "rooted in the ontology of vegetal life" [182] and that plants deserve respect in the Kantian sense of the word (which is "not to be confused with a quasi-religious veneration" [183] - please note Vandana Shiva). I don't know if either of these ideas is true, but it's certainly fun to have them on the table for consideration.

How one might show respect to a weed, for example, is an interesting question: don't immediately uproot or spray it with herbicide might seem to be an obvious place to start. But it's going to be difficult to convince my next-door neighbour - who prides himself on his decorative brick driveway upon which not even a fallen leaf shall come to rest - that the loss of even a single plant "is tantamount to the passing of an entire world" [183].   

It might be even more difficult to persuade the local greengrocer that whilst plant-thinking "does not oppose the use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human nourishment" [184], plants should not be harnessed to a particular end that ontologically exhausts them.

In other words, Hegel was mistaken to assert that "vegetal beings attain their highest fulfilment in serving as sources of food for animals and humans" [184] and Marder objects to "the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the commodified production of vegetal life" [184].    
   
It's not a question, therefore, of not eating broccoli or Brussels sprouts with your Christmas dinner, it's a question of not disrespecting other facets of ontophytology and of eating with ethical concern - which, for Marder, is eating like a plant! He explains:

"Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavouring to swallow up its very otherness in one's corporeal and pyschic interiority." [185]

That's something the even self-righteous vegans and vegetarians stuffing their faces with chickpeas and tofu might like to consider. For when it comes to the ethics of eating conceived from the perspective of plant-thinking, "what is required is a complete and concerted decommodification of vegetal life, a refusal to regulate the human relation to plants on the basis of commodity-economic logic" [185]. 

Ultimately, despite their being silent and non-conscious in the usual manner, plants are alive and therefore worthy of at least some degree of ethical consideration; indeed, I would extend this even to non-living objects - everything should be handled with care.  


Notes

* As Marder asks in the epilogue to his text: "How, for instance, could one ethically regret the fading of flowers, if not, as Rilke does, in the language of poetry, which does not represent anything and which, itself, verges on [the] silence [of plants]?" [186-87]

See: Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page references given in the text are to this work.

See also an interesting debate to do with plant ethics between Michael Marder and the legal scholar and animals rights author Gary Francione in the online magazine Berfrois (15 June, 2012): click here. Note that the image above of a thinking plant was taken from here.

Part two of this post - on vegetal anti-metaphysics - can be accessed by clicking here. 

For part three, on vegetal existentiality, click here.

 

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 the Art of Necro-Ornithology

Poor Dead Sparrow 

(on plastic orange background) 
Stephen Alexander (2017) 

As regular readers will know, I have had a persistent love for birds from early childhood; from cheeky house sparrows to menacing black crows. I love to watch them and I love to listen to them. 

I agree entirely with Luce Irigaray: Birds are our friends. They accompany us throughout our life, making happy and bringing comfort in times of crisis. Angels, one might suggest, not only have mighty wings, they also have sharp beaks.   

People who don't like birds, or would do them harm, obviously have something wrong with them. But, I have no objections to those individuals who find the dead bodies of birds an opportunity for art and lovingly transform feathered corpses into aesthetic objects of morbid curiosity.

Because whilst for birds, as for flowers, beasts and man, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive, the second best thing is to leave behind a beautiful corpse, or a fascinating image. 

Knowing nothing about taxidermy, however, and unable to draw for toffee, the best I can do is try to take an interesting snap with my iphone when encountering a poor dead sparrow lying on the front garden path (before gently wrapping the little body in kitchen paper and placing it in the bin). 

Note: readers interested in birds might like to see the earlier posts related to this one: Feathered Friends, On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight, and Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird).

Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.