Johnny Rotten as an Abject Antihero
(SA/2024)
I.
Following publication of a recent post on Johnny Rotten as an abject antihero, a young woman writes from France to accuse me of body shaming the former Sex Pistol:
'If he wasn't larger-bodied than you and many others in our fatphobic society find acceptable, then I very much doubt you'd feel at liberty to ridicule Lydon and subject him to such unfair criticism.'
Whilst I'd accept there's an element of truth in this, I think it misses the point of the post, which - as the opening reference to Julia Kristeva indicates - was essentially concerned with the state of abjection and what an abject individual may have to teach us, rather than with Rotten's weight per se (although his obesity obviously plays a role here).
Perhaps I might offer a few further remarks in an attempt to clarify ...
II.
In critical theory, to be an abject individual is to exist outside of social expectations and moral standards in a manner that doesn't only challenge but unsettles conventional notions of identity. One isn't so much inhuman, as abhuman (i.e., not-quite-human and seemingly caught up in the process of becoming-monstrous).
For Julia Kristeva, this can easily induce horror, particularly when one is confronted by an intrusion of corporeal reality into the symbolic order [1] - such as seeing Rotten on stage now whilst remembering him on stage back in the day.
Being forced to face the abject truth is an inherently traumatic experience; like being asked to look at the decomposing corpse of a loved one.
It's deeply disturbing and I understand how it can manifest in the desire not merely to look away, but do away with the abject subject.
Learning how to accept others in their otherness - particularly when that otherness strikes us as repulsive - is to adopt what Roland Barthes describes as a politics of pure liberalism: I am a liberal in order not to be a killer [2].
III.
The irony is that whereas in his punk period Lydon was merely pretending to be Rotten and a social outsider, he has now become truly abject.
And yet, as I suggested at the close of the post we're referring to here, perhaps we should be grateful to him for this; for mightn't it be the case that Rotten, in his very abjectness, draws us unto him and not only grants us a perversely-morbid pleasure of some kind, but exemplifies a Christ-like level of passion by which we might all learn something important ...?
I think so.
And thus, I wasn't so much subjecting Rotten to 'unfair criticism', as my correspondent suggests, rather I was trying to find a way to view him in a positive light; recalling, for example, Jean Genet's insistence that it is only via a becoming-abject that the individual can achieve an existentialist form of sainthood (something that might appeal to the son of Irish Catholics who self-righteously believes himself to be the voice of Truth).
IV.
Ultimately, why Rotten does what he does now in the manner he chooses, is, I suppose, only something he can explain.
Perhaps his speaking tour is not simply a commercial venture, but a method of public mourning; i.e., a form of catharsis via which he can express all his anger, sorrow, regret, etc.
And perhaps his karaoke rendition of 'Anarchy in the UK', in which he invites the audience to clap and sing along as if they were the elderly residents of a care home, can be seen as a piece of abject performance art in which old ideals (such as artistic integrity) are devalued once and for all.
Or perhaps he's just become what he is (and what he formerly despised) ...
Notes
[1] See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982).
[2] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), p. 117. My italics.
