Reflections on Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory in Relation to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

 

Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory 

Cover of the FSG Originals edition (2021) 

 

I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked 

and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, 

and for all those guys who don't want to be protectors, for those who 

are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I have to confess, I don't know a great deal about the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes, other than that she likes to explore themes of gender, sexuality, and marginalisation and that her work is often labelled transgressive (i.e., that those marketing her books and movies want you to believe they have a certain edgy vibe). 

 

Probably her most famous fictional work is the 1993 novel Baise-moi, which she adapted for film in 2000. Because of its graphic mix of violence and explicit sex scenes, the movie received extensive media coverage - but not great reviews. It is sometimes considered an example of what critics like to refer to as the New French Extremity [2]. 

 

I'm afraid that when I come across any writing which seems to thrill with graphic depictions of rape and murder, I can't help recalling Lawrence's letter to Aldous Huxley in which he warned how this ultimately results in a feeling of profound boredom [3]. 

 

Still, that's just me - and I doubt very much I'm the target audience for this enfant terrible of French cinema and the literary world. 

 

 

II. 

  

When not writing fiction or directing films, Despentes produces cultural theory and feminist philosophy from a radical pro-sex and post-punk perspective. 

 

Her most famous contribution to such is the wonderfully titled 2006 book King Kong Theory - a work which, like Baise-moi, was shaped by her (not particularly pleasant) experiences as a teenaged hitchhiker and groupie and then, later, as a prostitute working in peep shows and massage parlours and walking the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes, not giving a shit about what people thought of her [4]. 

 

For Despentes, being gang-raped was the price she had to pay for living with total freedom: or living like a man, as she put it [5]. 

 

Or a giant gorilla ...   

 

 

III.  

 

In King Kong Theory, Despentes explicitly informs her readers early on that she is more King Kong than Kate Moss, by which she means "too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish" [6] to pass as a waifish and fashionable model of womanhood. 

 

Later, she expands on what it is to be a King Kong Girl: essentially, it's to be transgender and to trouble all binary distinctions; not just male and female, but also human and animal, primitive and civilised, good and evil. 

 

To become King Kong is not just to have an enormous appetite for bananas and destruction, but to realise one's potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphic sexuality and escape the confines of femininity (which she equates with bootlicking and the art of servility). 

 

Arguably, King Kong Theory owes a good deal to a number of earlier works, including Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1968). But it reminds me also of a more recent book, namely, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) and I thought it might be interesting to briefly compare and contrast these three texts ...

 

 

IV.  

 

With its use of aggressive, non-academic, and visceral language to critique patriarchal structures, sexual violence, and societal hierarchies, Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory is most comparable to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. 

 

Both writers position themselves in the margins and address those excluded from conventional definitions of womanhood, respectability, or desirability. And both authors wilfully court controversy and reject mainstream feminist assimilation, opting instead to shock the reader into a new awareness of gender power dynamics. 

 

However, in terms of their political ideology, they diverge significantly: whereas SCUM girls seek the destruction of society and the elimination of men, King Kong Girls don't subscribe to such a separatist (and androcidal) revolutionary model. 

 

They seek only their own survival and autonomy whilst holding to the hope of building new relationships in a trans-future which liberates both men and women from the current forced masquerade of gender. For Despentes, feminism is ultimately a collective adventure. 

 

I think Despentes is a little less crazy than Solanas - she isn't going to shoot anyone (even if she promises to provide a gun for every girl) and King Kong Theory is rooted more in sincere personal memoir (with its mix of trauma and vulnerability) than razor sharp political satire. 

 

Ultimately, this makes it much less fun to read than SCUM, although, for those who like the kind of confessional writing (or autotheory) peddled by Despentes, King Kong Theory is more moving on a human level. 

 

And it is precisely this shift toward the deeply personal, structurally fluid world of autotheory that brings me to Maggie Nelson ...        

 

 

V.

 

By Nelson's own account, King Kong Theory was a direct inspiration on her book The Argonauts [7]. 

 

Both books are a very skilful blend of deeply personal memoir and critical theory used to dissolve traditional ideas - including mainstream feminist ideas - about gender, sex, and societal expectations and both writers refuse to separate the ideological from the biological. 

 

Thus, it is that their philosophical thinking is rooted in the messy reality of their own bodies, sex lives, and personal histories (interestingly, both authors identified as lesbians, but both became romantically involved with women who then transitioned to men) [8]. 

 

Despite sharing certain foundational similarities, there are contrasting structural differences between King Kong Theory and The Argonauts and their tone and style are very different. I wouldn't necessarily say that Nelson is the more gifted writer, but she's definitely the more lyrical and coolly analytic; less punk, perhaps, but more poetic and intellectual. 

 

Personally, as much as I like Despentes's use of a monstrous metaphor - King Kong - to describe polymorphic sexuality and a non-heteronormative way of being in the world, I think Nelson's mythological metaphor (borrowed from Roland Barthes) - the Argonauts' ship - is not only more subtle and sophisticated, but more useful for thinking about the continually changing nature of queer identity. 

 

In sum: Despentes's King Kong Theory is probably closer in anger and attitude to Solanas's Scum Manifesto than to Nelson's The Argonauts. But in as much as King Kong Theory blends personal memoir with gender theory and addresses queer marginalized lived experience, you'd have to say that it anticipates the latter work more than it recalls the former.  

 

 

VI.

 

A friend of mine asked which of the three books I would recommend for her fourteen-year-old daughter - which is a tricky question to answer. 

 

Liberal-minded people doubtless wouldn't hesitate to suggest The Argonauts as the most age-appropriate work and there is a lot to argue in favour of this. 

 

Maggie Nelson's book is a thoughtful, beautifully written piece of autotheory and for a teenager growing up in today's world, it offers a nuanced, empathetic, and highly relevant look at how we construct our identities and relationships. Whilst rich in fairly complex ideas, The Argonauts remains grounded in a real-world domestic situation and is written (for want of another word) with love [9]. 

 

However, I'm not particularly liberal-minded and always feel instinctively drawn to that which is inappropriate ... 

 

And so I think I'd probably go with the SCUM Manifesto - even at the risk that this might be misinterpreted by a young mind and taken all-too-literally. King Kong Theory loses out simply on the grounds that I think it offers far fewer laughs and, ultimately, as Lawrence warned about obscenely graphic writing, it can become boring and a bit depressing after a while. 

 

And - to be perfectly honest - I'd rather my friend's daughter dreamed of becoming a thrill-seeking female intent on overthrowing governments, destroying the male sex, cracking jokes, and building a magical world rather than thinking about the grim reality of pornography, prostitution, and gang-rape.  

Ultimately, with its cynicism, nihilism, and dark humour I still think the SCUM Manifesto is more punk than King Kong Theory [10] - despite the gritty authenticity of the latter and its liberal use of expletives. 

  

Notes

 

[1] This is a composite quote from the opening section ('Bad Lieutenants') to Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020). The original French edition, King Kong théorie, was published by Grasset in 2006. 

      Previous English-language editions, trans. Stéphanie Benson, were published by Serpent's Tail (2009) and The Feminist Press (2010). 

 

[2] As a noun, un baiser simply means a kiss. But as a verb, baiser means to fuck. And so Baise-moi is best translated in English as Fuck Me. In some markets, however, Despentes's film is known as Rape Me - a mistranslation with which she has expressed her displeasure in interviews.

      As for the term New French Extremity, this was first coined by critic James Quandt in 2004 in a piece complaining about the violent turn that French filmmaking appeared to have taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 

[3] In a letter to Huxley written in October 1929, Lawrence writes: "If you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape [...] however are we going to live [...] it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia [...] and final atrophy of the feelings." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. 

 

[4] See the section 'Sleeping With the Enemy' in King Kong Theory where Despentes discusses her time as a sex worker. She claims one of the things she found most difficult about the job was dealing with the loneliness and vulnerability of the men who were her clients. She positively contrasts sex work with heterosexual relationships in which, as she puts it, women are fucked for free.

 

[5] That's maybe an unfair (reductive) characterisation of Despentes's position. 

      In the section of her book titled 'You Can't Rape a Woman Who's a Total Slut', Despentes recounts her experience of being gang-raped in 1986 at the age of seventeen, and explains how she has processed the experience since. 

      Her account and response is more nuanced than I imply. She notes, for example, how women who have been raped are socially encouraged to blame themselves and harbour feelings of guilt and shame for not resisting (this is, in fact, one of her central arguments). Despentes also suggests that female rape fantasies do not indicate an inherent desire for subjugation, but are the result of a patriarchal system that conflates female sexuality with powerlessness and oppression.  

      At the same time, however, it should be noted that Despentes famously rejects the status of dignified victim and this rejection is crucial to her punk-feminist philosophy in King Kong Theory. She will not feel shame and she will not be silent and prefers to assert angry agency rather than ask for pity (or even demand justice in the traditional legal sense). She explicitly claims that rape did not destroy or defeat her, even if it did permanently change her and lead to her wider political awakening.

 

[6] Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 14. 

 

[7] Maggie Nelson generously provides a blurb for the Fitzcarraldo edition of King Kong Theory in which she writes: "I can think of almost no book I've enjoyed in recent years as much as King Kong Theory - in part for its content, in part for the ferocity of its style. [...] This book is a classic, and I'm grateful for it."

 

[8] Despentes dated Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado from 2005 to 2014; Maggie Nelson is married to the artist and writer Harry Dodge. The Argonauts largely chronicles their relationship and experiences with queer domesticity and family life. 

 

[9] I published a two-part post on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts back in April 2025. To access part one of this post (on pp. 1-74 of the book), click here. There is a link to the second part of the post (pp. 75-180) at the end of part one. 

 

[10] For a recent post on Valerie Solanas's place in the punk imagination - with particular reference to the history of the Sex Pistols, click here.    

 

 

Bonus: Frank Wynne reads from Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory (Fitzcarraldo, 2020 / FSG, 2021).

 

 

Blake Morrison Spills the Beans on Memoir Writing

Blake Morrison Spills the Beans (SA/2026)

(Photo of Morrison by Charles Moriarty) 

 

 

The poet and author Blake Morrison is perhaps best known for three works of memoir: And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993); Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002); and Two Sisters (2023).  

 

To be honest, I've not read any of the above and as I have an instinctive aversion to Morrison - even though he is a great champion of Lawrence, particularly Sons and Lovers [1] - I don't suppose I ever will.  

 

I have, however, ordered a copy of his new book published by Borough Press: On Memoir: An A-Z of Life Writing (2026), as this genre of writing is of increasing interest to me, even whilst it's one I remain somewhat suspicious of and hostile to.  

 

And, funnily enough - if a recent essay in The Guardian is anything to go by - Morrison himself has a few doubts himself about memoir writing in the age of Substack and digital self-publishing: 

 

"What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell - 'nobody memoirs', the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them." [2] 

 

Still, whether written by nobody or somebody, candour is the key to memoir writing; "no matter how fraught the consequences". In a post-Maggie Nelson universe, it doesn't pay to be shy and, as Morrison goes on to note, shocking revelation has long been "an integral part of memoir [because] sometimes the facts are shocking".

 

To be honest, I'm not sure I like such explicit (often brutal and ugly) openness. I do think an author can overshare and that there is such a thing even in confessional writing as too much information. I would like to know, as a reader, how a writer feels about the death of a parent; I probably don't need to know they recall masturbating in the bath on the day it happened. 

 

Whether "the divulgence is sad-fishing on Facebook, curated self-glorification on Instagram or out-there revelation in a memoir", I'm afraid that I'm one of those readers who feels irritated and affronted by exhibitionist authors who figuratively spill the beans whilst literally inviting us to watch them jerk off. 

 

As Morrison acknowledges, it's not essential for writers to reveal all; they should be able to write "on their own terms and in control of what's committed to print". It's often a mixture of laziness and narcissism that causes a writer to indulge in bean spilling and oversharing. Even in the age of social media, discretion can still be a virtue. 

 

But, on the other hand, says Morrison, discretion is not such a virtue when it becomes a form of evasion driven by dishonesty or fear of how others will react:

 

"There's no point in telling a personal story if you censor yourself and hold back too much. Be brave [...] it's your version of events and if people close to you object, never mind - let them write their own memoir." [3] 

 

Having said that, like the exercising of discretion, the expression of candour requires technique: "It needs compression, structure, the right tone of voice. The task is to set down what happened, not parade extremes of feeling." 

 

In fact, I would go further than that and say the task is to reimagine what happened, not just record like a machine; to fictionalise and transform life into art. Ultimately, the best form of memoir is called a novel. But writing a novel is difficult, whereas - as we have noted - nobody and anybody can write a memoir. 

 

Clearly, Morrison and I disagree on this point: 

 

"Truth-telling is the measure of memoir, and it's not the same as autofiction. Readers will allow an author wriggle room, for comic exaggeration, say, but where there's knowing fabrication they'll feel cheated, even outraged." 

 

To which one can only ask this Easter weekend: What is truth? And repeat: memoir that doesn't become autofiction is merely poor writing - or what Deleuze describes as dead writing [4]. 

 

Morrison says that readers want to be able to trust writers. But here he forgets his Lawrence, who sagely advised us to trust the tale, not the teller and reminded his readers that art speech is essentially a form of telling lies, but that, paradoxically, "out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth" [5].    

 

But it's not the kind of truth that most people want to hear: it's the truth that Oscar Wilde declared to be anything other than pure and simple [6] and which Nietzsche described as a convenient fiction or a forgotten lie [7]. 

 

Finally, what of the argument that readers want more than blog posts or fragments and snippets of text on Substack; that when the story is interesting and the writer is good, then they are justified in demanding a full-length (professionally published) memoir and that ultimately only such will serve and satisfy ...

 

Obviously, I don't agree with that. I think the best way to illuminate a life is in a series of lightning flashes; thus I privilege the glimpse over the detailed portrait [8].

 

But Morrison defends the latter against flashy short-form writing:  

 

"For myself [...] I think published memoirs have plenty to offer that social platforms can't, not least the rewards of a full-length story with a narrative arc, a set of characters, and an approach that doesn't depend on sensational self-exposure, allowing room for reversals, surprises, digressions, complications and a tussle between adversity and reprieve. At their best, memoirs develop with a subtlety unavailable in a short extract [...]" 

Morrison concedes that published full-length memoirs can - "when the author is a bumptious blabber or a catastrophiser" - be "as much a turn-off as online snippets". But, he says in conclusion, "where the self-disclosure is nuanced and the writing compelling" nothing beats a book (how very arborescent, as Deleuze would say). 

 

Some might see this as a hard-working and highly respected professonal author defending the traditional art and craft of writing. But one can't help interpreting Morrison's remarks also as a form of gatekeeping;i.e., safeguarding the elite world of serious literature and those who belong to such - editors, agents, critics and publishers - from the barbarian content creators and bloggers such as myself who are not looking to turn memory into memoir and memoir into money ... [9]

 

 

Blake Morrison Spills the Beans (II)

(SA/2026) 

     

  

Notes

 

[1] See Blake Morrison, 'Sons and Lovers: a century on', in The Guardian (25 May 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Blake Morrison, '"Enough of this me me me": Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing', The Guardian (4 April 2026): click here. 

      All quotes that follow in this post are from Morrison writing in this article.  

 

[3] Interestingly, Morrison goes on to write: "Readers are no less sensitive than they ever were, just sensitive about different things [...] Push it too far and there might be a social media storm and public backlash. [...] Writers can't afford to ignore the moral climate of the times. But they don't have to kowtow." 

      Again, I take a rather more aggressive line than Morrison. For me, it's not just a question of not being subservient; a writer worth their salt should stand against public opinion and challenge (transgress) the moral climate of their age (move beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche would say). 

 

[4] For Deleuze, writing is not as an attempt to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding, which is why any form of writing that is exclusively reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only bad writing, but dead writing. Literature, he says, can die from an excess of truth-telling, just as it does from an overdose of reality. 

      See Deleuze's essay 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998). And see the post 'A Deleuzean Approach to Literature' (30 Aug 2013): click here.   

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.

 

[6] Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). It can be found in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (HarperCollins, 2003).   

 

[7] See Nietzsche; On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873). This essay can be found in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990), pp. 77-97. 

 

[8] See the post 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021): click here.  

 

[9] I pick up on this phrase in a sister post to this one, with reference to the work of Mark David Gerson, a leading figure in the memoir industry: click here.  

 

 

Reflections on a Fat Sand Rat

Top: photo of a fat sand rat by fmeijerdd (2023) 

on deviantart.com 

Bottom: Joan Miró: Le Rat des Sables (1975) 

Aquatint in colours on Arches paper (96 x 138.8 cm) 

shaperomodern.com

 

 

I. 

 

Once, at a graduate seminar titled 'Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology', Maggie Nelson was asked to participate in a "quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals" [1]; an exercise that triggered her identity phobia. 

Not quite knowing what to say as she didn't possess any such animal, Nelson nervously awaited her turn as they went around the room, and then just blurted out otter, for no real reason other than the fact that it was important at the time for her to feel "small, slick, quick, amphibious, dexterous, capable" [2]. 

 

Like Nelson, not identifying with any tribe, clan, or close-knit community, I don't have a totem animal either; nor even do I have a spirit animal looking over me as an individual [3]. However, if I were put on the spot and obliged, like Nelson, to suddenly come up with such, I think at this point in time (when I'm feeling a little overweight) I'd probably say the fat sand rat ...

 

 

II. 

 

The fat sand rat (Psammomys obesus) is a terrestrial mammal belonging to the gerbil subfamily that is mostly found in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Despite their (rather unflattering) name, they are actually very fussy eaters in the wild, only consuming stems and leaves from plants that belong to the genus Amaranthus. It's when they are kept in captivity and fed the wrong diet that they become obese and rapidly develop diabetes-like symptoms [4].  

 

As well as foraging for food, sand rats like to explore, to sunbathe, and to sleep; so quite a pleasant life, although they are not the most social of animals, preferring to live alone in their burrows and only interacting with members of the opposite sex for breeding purposes in the autumn to early spring period (perhaps followed by a bit of grooming). As a rule, it's the females who initiate such activity, although once fucked they will quickly turn aggressive and see off their mates.  

 

Obviously, fat sand rats can't afford to be too relaxed; for they are preyed upon by birds, snakes, desert cats and weasals, so have to be vigilant at all times. When frightened, they squeak, stamp their feet and then scarper below ground.    

 

 

III.

 

Of course, my reason for chooing the fat sand rat as my totem animal doesn't only relate to the fact that - due to the Little Greek's endless baking and years of inactivity due to my Essex exile - I have piled on the pounds. I was also influenced by my new admiration for one of Miró's monumental prints currently on display (and sale) at one of my favourite galleries here in London (Shapero Modern) ... [5]

 

Entitled Le Rat des Sables and printed in 1975 (as a signed series of 50), this work doesn't actually depict a fantastical creature as we are informed in the catalogue. For the sand rat is not a mythical or fictional being that exists only in legends or folk tales. Rather, as indicated above, sand rats - whatever their somatotype - are very much living organisms or biological entities; the result of evolution rather than the human imaginary.

 

Having said that, perhaps having been transformed by Miró into a work of modern art, this particular sand rat with its bold fluid lines and bright red eye, might (at a stretch) be thought of as a type of alibrije; a term coined by Mexican artist Pedro Linares to refer to his brightly coloured zoomorphic sculptures made from papier-mâché [6].    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Melville House UK, 2016), p. 139. 

[2] Ibid.

 

[3] Whilst most people today - if they use these terms at all - use them interchangeably, they do, technically, have distinct meanings; a totem animal belongs to a group of people and represents their shared identity or collective spirit; a spirit animal, on the other hand - sometimes called a power animal - is chosen by and called upon by an individual as a guide, or protector, or source of inspiration on their unique life journey.   

[4] Unfortunately for the sand rats, this has led to their use in research into obesity and diabetes. They are also used in tests related to sleep patterns and seasonal affective disorder due to the fact that, like humans, they are diurnal. And, because of their remarkably efficient kidneys - crucial for life in very hot and very dry environments - they are further studied by scientists who think any amount of cruelty to animals can be justified so long as their is some human benefit (be it medical or commercal in nature).   

[5] For a recent post on this exhibition - Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking (6 Mar - 4 May 2025) - click here. Or to visit the Shapero gallery website directly, please click here.  

[6] This art form originated in Mexico City in the 1930s, when Pedro Linares began creating his surreal creatures after experiencing vivid hallucinations during an illness. His designs, which combined elements of various real animals, became widely known as alebrijes and inspired many other artists and artisans, quickly becoming a significant aspect of Mexican folk art that combined indigenous traditions with modern artistic ideas. 

      Whether Joan Miró was thinking of them when he created his sand rat is not something I am able to say for sure, but it's certainly possible; Frida Kahlo was a fan of Linares and his figures and Miró admired the latter, whom he met during an exhibition in Paris, in 1939. 

 

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 1: pp. 1-74)

Cover of the Melville House edition 

(2016) [a]

 

 

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical [b].

 

I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.  

 

And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as sodomitical parenthood - I don't really care about [d]).  

 

 

I. 

 

Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e]. 

 

It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.

However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].

 

 

II.

Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10]. 

 

And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].

 

 

III.

 

This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.   

 

IV. 

  

This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's): 

 

"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]

 

In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?

 

There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality. 

 

 

V.

 

I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31]. 

 

And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]

 

And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson, who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish. 

 

 

VI.

 

This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37]. 

 

The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.     

 

 

VII.

 

"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]

 

This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e., that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.

 

But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.  

So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.

VIII.

 

I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.

 

For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].

 

(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)  

IX.

Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it? 

 

I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do. 

 

Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].

 

But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.         

 

X.

On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h]. 

Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]  

 

Notes 

 

[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.  

 

[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.   

[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here. 

[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter. 

 

[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this. 

      What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here. 

      See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.

 

[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35]. 

      On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways. 

      But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].

 

[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here. 

Before heading to part two of this post - which can be accessed here -  readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here. 

Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure

Author Maggie Nelson: skilled in the art of making 

the personal and the private public and political

 

 

I. 

 

Someone recently asked me the following question: Can a writer ever overshare?   

 

Well, having graduated from the Deleuzian school of literary theory, I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea that the writer's main (or only) task is to give expression to the feelings, or impose a coherent and conventional model of language on lived experience.

In other words, literature should not become merely a form of personal overcoding and writing a novel, a poem, or a play is more than an opportunity for an author to confess and tell all. 

 

Like Deleuze, I'm of the view that any genre of writing reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality [1].

 

I don't think it makes me a philosophical prude to say that just as it's advisable to exercise a degree of caution [2] as an artist, so too do terms such as modesty, reservation, and self-restraint have crucial importance. Oversharing and trauma dumping is not the only way - or even the best way - to produce genuinely transgressive work.     

 

 

II.

 

Although she sometimes refers to Deleuze's work - particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari - Maggie Nelson doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the danger of giving herself away via the giving of a little too much personal information. 

 

In fact, she's a little defensive and prickly on the subject having, I suspect, been accused of oversharing by numerous critics on multiple occasions. So it is that when in conversation with the Canadian artist Moyra Davey in 2017, Nelson responds thusly to the idea that tell-all memoirs can sometimes be a bit much and leave the reader uncomfortable:

 

"Besides mainstream celebrity memoirs or other genres in which artistry need not apply, I don't know where all these narcissistic tell-alls are, not to mention the fact that there can literally be no such thing as a 'tell-all'." [3]

She continues: 

 

"Personally, I never think to myself while reading, 'Why would you want to tell me this?' That question seems to me to speak volumes about the reader/critic more than about the writer. What I hear in that question is the baseline assumption that the writer should not be telling you all this [...] that there's shame in the telling, and the critic's job is to wake the artist or writer up to the shame she/he may have missed." [4]

Nelson concludes:

"At the far end of this logic lies the virulent idea that we're better off with less speech, less telling, less expression; nearly every nasty review of a work of autobiography I've read contains this latent or manifest wish that the writer/artist would just shut up [...] it bugs the hell out of me." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst one can certainly sense Nelson's irritation - and whilst I don't doubt the genuineness of such for a moment - I don't share her conclusion. 

 

For one thing, I'm of the view that confronting (and achieving) silence is the ultimate aim of literature; that it should push language to its own external limits (which are not outside language but are the outside of language). 

 

In other words, the writer does have to learn how to shut the fuck up due to the fact that, once spoken, speech immediately and directly "enters the service of power" [6] - even if that speech is born of the writer's ultimate nakedness, wherein we like to believe ourselves to be essentially free and shameless.

 

In sum: there's nothing radical, liberating, or progressive about self-exposure and articulating one's seceret desires. On the other hand, there's a good deal to be said for those who know how to remain the soul of discretion and have the ability to withhold certain details [7].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 1-6.   

      Of course, all writers can be guilty of self-obsessed dead writing (necro-narcissism) at times; of being a little too personal. But this is something to try and keep to a minimum and an author should always aim to become-imperceptible as far as possible. Or, as Wilde says in the Preface to Dorian Gray: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 160-61, where they advocate caution and the Nietzschean art of small doses, since overdosing - like oversharing - is a very real danger when it comes to dismantling the organism, following a line of flight, or effecting a strange becoming via literature. 

 

[3] Maggie Nelson, 'A Life, A Face, A Gaze', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 137.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Roland Barthes's 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', in Selected Writings, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 461. 

[7] For an alternative view, see Lucretia Rose McCarthy's essay 'Radical Exposures: Crip and Queer in Maggie Nelson's Autotheory', in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): click here. In a nut-shell, McCarthy argues that through her autotheoretical writings: 

      "Nelson familiarizes crip and queer experience, embracing difference through detail whilst challenging stigma and otherness common to the categories. She rejects the mundane and pathological associations of 'oversharing' and shows the way self-exposure can deepen understanding of marginalized lives." 

 

My Naked Nakedness is Positive Atrociousness: Notes on The Deadman (1989)

 Jennifer Montgomery as Marie in The Deadman 

(dir. Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, 1989)

 

"When Edouard fell back dead an emptiness opened inside her,

a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel." [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence insisted that there was "no real battle" between himself and Christianity [2] and that's certainly true when it comes to the question of nudity in art and the importance of retaining the essential beauty and dignity of the human form.

 

For like any devout Catholic, Lawrence believes that the human body is sacred - not least in its sexual aspect - and that whilst art affirms this fact and manifests being, pornography attempts to deny it; to reduce the human form to base matter and to do dirt on sex.  

 

Pornography, says Lawrence, is an insult to the flesh and to a vital human relationship: ugly and cheap it makes human nudity; ugly and degraded it makes the sexual act; "trivial and cheap and nasty" [3]. 

 

And that's nothing to be proud of ...    

 

 

II.

 

I was reminded of Lawrence's vital opposition to pornography - defined as the "grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow-disease of dirt-lust" [4] - when reading Maggie Nelson's favourable review of the short film The Deadman (1989), by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn. 

 

Based on Bataille's story Le Mort - written sometime during the period 1942-44, but first published posthumously in 1964 - The Deadman is summarised on IMDb as a "strange tale of a woman who sets off on a wild adventure before returning home to die" [5]. 

 

Somehow, that doesn't quite prepare the viewer for the 40 minutes of black-and-white depravity that follow; a symbolic free play of bodies and images that many queer feminist commentators - including Nelson - find liberating.     

 

According to the latter, what's great - and important - about The Deadman is that by giving back full and uncompromising sexual agency to a nearly naked female protagonist (played by Jennifer Montgomery), it reclaims the pornographic imagination from its confinement within a certain (male) cinematic history and genre for a female audience:

 

"It's a funny, radical, stand-alone reclamation of realms in which so many of us have too often had to hold our noses and practice a robust disidentification in order to play." [6] 

 

And that's a good thing, I suppose ...

 

 

III. 

 

Although Keith Sanborn - who had read Bataille in the 1970s and produced his own translation of Le Mort - is co-credited as a director, Nelson seems to think that Peggy Ahwesh - who "comes out of the anti-art sensibility of punk, out of feminism, and out of lowbrow horror" [7] -  is the real driving force behind the film, responsible for getting the actors to do "real sexual things to each other, with all the mess and stakes" [8].  

 

When, says Nelson, you combine Bataille's transgressive philosophy with Ahwesh's anarcho-feminist sensibility, you get "an exploration of perversity that nods to misogynistic tradition and feminist corrective while also devoting itself to nongendered erotics - the erotics of chaos, of self-abandon, of wrestling, of scatology, of necrophilia, of ugliness, of aggression, of suicidality, and so on" [9].

 

And you also get a film that is, says Nelson, "laugh-out-loud funny" and "crackling with distubance and pleasure" [10].

 

Though Lawrence wouldn't like it - and, to be honest, I'm not sure I do either ... [11] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Georges Bataille, The Dead Man, in My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 168.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'There is no real battle ...', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press,1988), Appendix I: Fragmentary writings, p. 385. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornograpy and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 241. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 242. 

 

[5] See the entry on The Deadman (1987) on IMDb: click here.  

[6] Maggie Nelson, 'A Girl Walks Into a Bar ... On Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn's The Deadman', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 70. 

[7] Ibid., p. 71. 

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p. 72.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Readers who wish to judge for themselves can watch an eight minute excerpt from The Deadman on Vimeo: click here.