Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From Porn to The End of Theory)

Byung-Chul Han

 

IV. 

 

Whilst philosophe du moment Byung-Chul Han gives reference to the four great Bs of 20th-century French philosophy - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, and Baudrillard - it's clear that The Agony of Eros (2017) is primarily written under the influence of Alain Badiou. 

 

Which means his defence of love is really just an excuse to stage a neo-Marxist assault upon techno-capitalism, developing his argument that the latter is responsible for creating a burned-out society in which an obscene (pornographic) ideal of transparency and self-disclosure is the cultural norm, compromising other values, including secrecy, silence, and shame, upon which eros (and mental health) depend.    

 

Writing in The Burnout Society (2015), Han describes a pathological landscape shaped by depression, attention defecit disorder, and exhaustion, all thanks to a 24/7 lifestyle of continuous positivity - a form of violence in his view - in which we are all expected to become entrepreneurs of the self. This leads not only to ever greater levels of self-exploitation, but to narcissism, and thus the extermination of Otherness, which, once more, is crucial for love and, indeed, society. 

 

For when subjects are concerned exclusively with themselves, then relationship with others becomes impossible - as does thought - and we end up living in l'enfer du même ruled over by the kind of painfully inferior and deeply stupid politicians presently posturing (and virtue signalling) on the global stage. 

 

Anyway, let's return to The Agony of Eros (2017). I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers given refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press. 

 

 

V.

 

Porn

Han opens his fourth chapter with the kind of concise statement that readers will either love or loathe: "Porn is a matter of bare life on display." [29] 

 

It's an attempt, I suppose, to distill Baudrillard's rather complex idea of porn as the hyperreality of sex (i.e. the more sexual than sex) into a kind of pithy observation that some will find profound and others see as a piece of shallow sloganeering. Of course, it could be both ... 

Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le surréalisme, said André Breton [a]. But if you love Love, you're also going to hate porn, which, according to Han, is antagonistic to eros and spells the end of sexuality as he would have it; i.e., something authentic, something natural, something sacred. 

 

The pornographication of the world is, he says, "unfolding as the profanation of the world" [29] - and this is a very bad thing; presumably because some things, like love, should be reserved only for the gods and not made freely available for misuse and commercial exploitation by mortals. 

 

Men might be encouraged to play with love - one possible definition of erotics. But should not be allowed to debase love - one possible definition of porn, in which there is nothing playful, nothing sanctified, nothing mysterious: "In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy." [32]             

 

Again, all this interests, but it does seem to be going over old ground; do we really want to resurrect the tired opposition between eroticism on the one side and porn on the other? One recalls D. H. Lawrence's axiom: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." [b]  

 

 

Fantasy

 

In Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012), Eva Illouz makes the fascinating claim that, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, desire is no longer determined by the unconscious mind, so much as conscious selection. 

 

What's more, she argues, we have had our imagination heightened by all the faces and bodies we encounter online, with the result that we are more often disappointed with those we meet in the real world; the flesh never shapes up.  

 

Han doesn't quite buy this though: 

 

"Counter to what Illouz assumes, desire is not 'rationalized' today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. [...] Today's ego [...] does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing. Illouz does not take the libido-economical particularity of desire into account." [37]

For Han, fantasy survives because it inhabits an undefined space that is outside the network of information-technology: 

 

"It is not heightened fantasy, but - if anything - higher expectations that are responsible for the mounting disappointment experienced in contemporary society." [ 38]

 

The high information density of social media is not conducive to the imagination. That's why, says Han, "pornography which maximizes visual information [...] destroys erotic fantasy" [38]. The secret of eroticism is that it forever withdraws the object of one's desire from view; it provides a glimpse, but never reveals all. Love - like horror - takes place in the shadows. Indeed, at its most extreme, love is blind and makes blind; a retreat into the "twilight space of dreams and desire" [40].        

 

Unfortunately, today, "faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes" [40]. Compulsive (and compulsory) hypervigilance certainly makes it extremely difficult to do so and hypervisibility might be thought the "telos of the society of transparency" [40-41].  

 

The agony of eros thus involves not only a crisis of fantasy, but being forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to have our eyelids clamped open, so that we might see everything all of the time. 

 

The Politics of Eros

 

Oh dear, Byung-Chul Han and I are forced to part company once more; too much talk, right from the off, concerning the universal nature of love (Badiou) and beautiful souls guided by Eros (Plato) ... 

 

As for contemporary politics within a burnout society, well, according to Han, it's founded on pleasure-based desire (epithumia) and has no interest in either eros or thumos - the latter being something I have written about on Torpedo the Ark: click here and/or here, for example [c].

 

Whilst acknowledging that "a politics of love will never exist" [44], that doesn't stop Han dreaming of love stories unfolding against a background of political events and of a secret resonance existing between politics and love. For political action is "mutual desire for another way of living - a more just world aligned with eros on every register" [44]. 

 

Is it? That's news to me. I mean it could be that, but it could be something entirely different; a politics of evil, for example, which understands love to be an eternal part of life, but only a part: "And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease [...]" [d].      

 

That, in a nutshell, is my concern with Byung-Chul Han: that he turns a once healthy process of the human soul (love) into a diseased ideal and I suggest he read Lawrence's hugely important novels Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923) to get an astonishing insight into this. Or some Nietzsche.      

 

 

The End of Theory

 

When not inspired by the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, Heidegger was moved by the beating wings of the god of love; it was Eros who encouraged him as a thinker to venture along previously untrodden paths into the incalculable. At least that's what he told his wife. And Han believes him, because he also believes that:

 

"Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same." [47] 

 

Thinking not only becomes more powerful, but also more uncanny, when it's eroticised. Without erotic inspiration it just becomes dreary and repetitive: "Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere 'sensuality'." [48] 

 

This is why an artificial intelligence will never be able to produce a beautiful philosophical concept and why genuine thinking "transcends the positivity of given facts" [49] and data-analysis. Confronted with the "pullulating mass of information and data" [50], says Han, we need theoretical thinking more than ever. For theories, like ceremonies and rituals, "confer form on the world" [50] and keep things from breaking down into sprawling chaos.

 

In other words, information overload "massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise" [50]. And that's a problem, because thinking "as an expedition into quietness" [50] demands calm. We are faced with a spiritual crisis at top volume: "Rampant, massive information - an excess of positivity - makes a racket." [50] 

    

And just as we can't close our eyes, neither can we block up ears. Philosophy might be the "translation of eros into logos" [52], but when it speaks it does so in a seductive whisper, it doesn't shout or issue commands. And it still respects the importance of silence. 

 

And on that note, I'll shut up ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] No surprise that Byung-Chul Han eventually calls on André Breton for support, describing the surrealist reinvention of love as "an artistic, existential, and political gesture" which "ascribes a universal power to eros"; the power of poetic revolution and renewal. See chapter 6, 'The Politics of Eros', in The Agony of Eros. The lines quoted are on p. 46. 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Having said this, Lawrence does then go on to call for rigorous censorship of genuine pornography, which he says you can recognise "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit" [241]. Where Lawrence and Byung-Chul Han appear to significantly differ is on the question of secrecy. Whereas the latter thinks it fundamental to eroticism, Lawrence writes:

      "The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved." [243]

      Of course, Lawrence was writing in a different time. Today, pornography is not underworld or under the counter, it's freely and openly available online and the styles, values, and norms of the sex industry have been largely determine mainstream culture (this is what is meant by pornification). Still, what he writes in this essay is something that the author of The Agony of Eros might like to consider.   

 

[c] Whilst I don't expect Han to have read either of the above posts, I'm surprised he didn't refer to Peter Sloterdijk's work on thumos in his psycho-political study Zorn und Zeit (2006). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 328.

      See also Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) in which I discuss the politics of evil (as well as the politics of style, the politics of cruelty, and the politics of desire), with reference to the work of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. 

 

 

To read part one of this post - Melancholia to Bare Life - click here.       

 

 

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

Adam Eget, Super Dave (Bob Einstein), and Norm Macdonald 

in the first episode of Norm Macdonald Live 

 (26 March, 2013): click here.   

 

 

I. 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask where I get my ideas for posts from. 

 

To be fair, although this is not an original question, it isn't as dumb as some people think and deserves an answer, rather than a snort of derision or a look of disdain. In fact, to enquire after the origin of ideas and the creative process is to ask something philosophically important.

 

And so, Adam, let me try to say something that might help ...

 

 

II. 

 

An idea - from the Greek term ἰδέα, meaning a visible pattern - is now more commonly defined as an abstract concept or (after Descartes) as a mental representation of an object. Many philosophers, being forever caught up in the realm of ideas, have considered them ontologically to be the fundamental category of being. Further, they consider the capacity to form, comprehend, and exchange ideas as an essential (and defining) feature of mankind [1].

 

Some people like to believe that ideas spontaneously generate from out of nowhere; that no real effort or serious thinking is required. Artists, for example, will often speak of inspiration. But whilst I don't wish to deny eureka moments or the divine influence of a muse, I think we all know that inspiration is usually born of hard work. 

 

Similarly, I'm sceptical of the idea of innate ideas believed to be universal, i.e., something which all people are born knowing (intuitively), rather than something they have learned through experience - what D. H. Lawrence, for example, terms blood knowledge. If you want to have ideas - particularly new ideas - then you need not only work hard, but get out into the world and encounter things. 

 

Having said that, I'm not advocating any and all forms of experience and by hard work, I do not mean mere toil. As Heidegger says, sometimes the most vital form of activity is waiting patiently and preparing for the future and allowing one's work to become an inner illumination of the heart [2]. 

 

Ultimately, good ideas cannot be compelled and, ironically, may often result from those times when work seems to go slowly or badly; i.e., those moments of failure.                      

 

 

Notes

[1] Plato, for example, argued that there is a mind-independent realm of unchanging and universal ideas or forms. Real knowledge is knowledge of these ideas; knowledge of the material world (which is subject to change) doesn't count for much in his view. 

 

[2] I take this phrase (and idea) from section 150 of Heidegger's 'Ponderings IV', in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 186. 

Aristocracy

Image (detail) from the front cover of  

The Economist (Jan 24-30, 2015)

 

I. 

 

If you were to ask me to name the thing that artists value most, I might say inspiration. Or a wealthy patron.

 

But, according to D. H. Lawrence, the prédilection d'artiste is for the singular individual who dares to become who they are. This fascination for those men and women who - as Zarathustra would say - give birth to the dancing star of themselves is rooted deeply in every creative soul [1].

 

Lawrence calls these rare individuals aristocrats, but is at pains to stress that he is speaking only of those with innate virtue and tremendous self-discipline, rather than members of an elite (but decadent and artificial) social class who have simply been born with proverbial silver spoons in their gobs.

 

 

II. 

 

It is, of course, a fantasy of the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination that there exist such natural aristocrats. 

 

Interestingly, however, whilst it's an idea usually associated with figures on either the reactionary or radical right - from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Nietzsche - it's one which also appealed to Thomas Jefferson, who developed the concept in a letter to John Adams:

 

"I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong [...] bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction." 

 

"The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?" 

 

In contrast, Jefferson condemns the artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth and without either virtue or talents, expressing his hope that within a democratic system their power will be curtailed: 

 

"The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent it's ascendancy. [...] I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil. [...] I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise." [2]

 

Sadly, as we all know, the United States didn't become wisely governed by a natural aristocracy; it quickly grew, rather, into a rapacious plutocracy masquerading as a democracy (as discussed in a recent post: click here).   

 

 

III.

 

Maybe, we might conclude, Plato was right; those fittest to rule are invariably those who genuinely have no desire to do so. If, every now and then, one such person does drift into politics, it is usually with great reluctance and they feel under constant pressure to justify why they have done so [3].  

But we must also point out that this whole idea of a natural aristocracy is untenable. And it's disappointing that by continuing to subscribe to this idea Lawence failed to address the dominant realities of his age and betrayed the radicality of his own work with a series of theo-political speculations on the nature of power and society, etc. 

 

Ultimately, because Lawrence lacked the conceptual categories of analysis appropriate to the twentieth-century, he falls back on metaphors to do with nature and life; metaphors that conveniently (but illegitimately) provided him with justification for his illiberal political ideas, just as they did for Social Darwinists and National Socialists. 

 

Be wary of anyone who attempts to derive social and political values from Nature, or likes to attach the prefix eco- to their work. 

 

For not only is the attempt to disguise noble lie with natural law fraudulent, but, as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, anyone who tries to draw ethical and intellectual values from the so-called laws of nature - even Nietzsche - is guilty of an anthropomorphic employment of reason that oversteps the bounds of philosophical good taste [4].         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See chapter V of Lawrence's 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

      For Lawrence's fullest statement on his understanding of aristocracy (natural and otherwise), see the essay 'Aristocracy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 365-376. 

      One might also like to see the Epilogue to Movements in European History, where Lawrence writes of natural nobility and chapter XVI of The Plumed Serpent, where Don Ramón presents his vision of a Natural Aristocracy ruling the entire world. 

[2] The three quotations I select here are all from Jefferson's letter to Adams, written on 28 October, 1813. See The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), Vol. 2, pp. 387-92. 

      The above letter can be read online in The Founders' Constitution, Vol. 1, Ch. 15, Document 61 (The University of Chicago Press): click here.   

 

[3] Nietzsche describes this as the bad conscience of commanders and argues that only when this has been overcome, will the best want to rule in good faith and happily accept their obligation to do so. See Beyond Good and Evil, V. 199.     

[4] See Keith Ansel-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), pp. 28-29.  

Notes on The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity, 2018)

 

I. 

 

As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a]. 

 

One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping. 

 

Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct. 

 

For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b]. 

 

Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...

 

 

II.

       

Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3]. 

 

So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate. 

 

In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.   

For what is animalism if not merely "another form of  anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...? 

 

Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable: 

 

"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]

 

Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].   

 

This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests). 

 

As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]

 

 

III.   

For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial. 

 

But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c]. 

To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day). 

People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις. 

 

For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]

 

Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].

 

Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:

 

"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19] 

 

Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...  

 

 

IV.

As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:

 

"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]

 

But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78]. 

 

Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:

 

"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]

 

That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology. 

 

I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f]. 

 

Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.

 

Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:

 

"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]

V.

 

Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.

 

And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100]. 

 

Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.   

 

But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote: 

 

"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]  

 

What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117]. 

 

And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.

 

[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880). 

      Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.

      Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.

 

[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.    

 

[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.   

[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant. 

[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. 

      An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here. 

 

[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun." [91] 

      That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us). 

      Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94] 

      Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth. 

      He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]   

 

[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.

  

[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).  

I, Too, Dislike It: Thoughts on The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

Fitzcarraldo Editions (2020) 

fitzcarraldoeditions.com

 

 

I.

 

Any work with the word hatred in the title is likely to catch my attention. 

 

For hatred is a poorly appreciated passion, often understood purely in reactive terms as love on the recoil, as if the latter were the great primary term or essential prerequisite and the former lacked its own positivity or dynamism. 

 

The fact is, however, that whilst love makes blind and compromises judgement, hatred activates areas of the brain involved in critical evaluation. Thus, whilst love may seem to promise human salvation, it's hate which has enabled us to survive as a species [a].  

Still, we're not here to discuss hatred per se, but, rather, Ben Lerner's essay from 2016 in which, paradoxically, he uses his hatred of poetry to construct an interesting defence of the art and craft of which he is himself a skilled practitioner [b].

 

 

II. 

 

Lerner opens with the revised (shorter) version of Marianne Moore's 'Poetry':

I, too, dislike it.

    Reading it, however, with a perfect

      contempt for it, one discovers in

    it, after all, a place for the genuine. [c]

 

And that's a clever place to open and a clever little poem to open with, although I must confess to being uncomfortable with the final word; one that not only refers us back to ideals of truth and authenticity, but retains echoes of a concern with paternal origins and racial purity.

 

Still, we're not here to discuss the etymology and politics of the word genuine: it's the unforgettable first line that matters most; a line that has been on repeat in Lerner's head for even more years than Bartleby's I would prefer not to has been in mine [d]. I know exactly what Lerner means when he speaks of a refrain having either "the feel of negative rumination" or "a kind of manic, mantric affirmation" [e]. 

 

There is, then, something about poetry that makes us all dislike it - even if we continue to read it, write it, and wish to safeguard it. It's an art form which, as Lerner points out, has been defined for millennia by this rhythm of denunciation and defence. Maybe, he suggests, that's because poetry always fails to deliver what it promises to deliver; i.e., it always at some level disappoints. 

 

This probably has something to do with the limits of language. For language can never quite capture the transcendent impulse that often inspires great poetry and, as Nietzsche says, we posit words where feeling ends. 

 

Thus, whilst poetry clears a space for something, it isn't the thing itself. At best, poetry is a kind of approximation or simulation and this irritates a lot of people who want the real deal and demand the impossible from language (that it describe the indescribable, for example). The song of infinitude, writes Lerner, "is compromised by the finitude of its terms" [13]. 

 

This means that the poet is a tragic figure - someone gripped by a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, filled with recurrent dreams and imaginative fantasies and repeating the same errors over and over again. In my view, the sanest poets learn to climb down Pisgah and attend, like Francis Ponge, to the nature of things as actual objects. To substantiate mystery is the task of the artist and their concern should be with immanence, not transcendence. 

 

But that's just my view: it's not necessarily Lerner's view. For even if he admits of the impossiblity of genuine poetry - and confesses that he can't hear the planet-like music that the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney claims to hear - I sense that he still admires those who attempt to project existence into the fourth dimension of being and place individual experience within something bigger - something like Humanity, for example. 

 

But I might be mistaken here; for Lerner, like many contemporary poets, expresses acute hesitancy about the desire to speak for everyone and is sceptical of the Whitmanesque fantasy of a poet who could "unite us in our difference, constituting a collective subject through the magic of language" [60] [f]. 

 

 

III. 

 

There are many reasons to dislike Plato. But, to his credit, he didn't take any shit from poets, as Larry David might say. 

 

The irony of Plato's dialogues, however, is that "they are themselves poetic: formally experimental imaginative dramatizations" [26]. And Socrates might even be thought of as "a new breed of poet" [26]. The further irony, is that by attacking poetry as he did, Plato makes it seem sexier - more powerful, more dangerous - than it really is:

 

"How many poets' outsized expectations about the political effects of our work, or critics' disappointment in what actual poems contribute to society, derive from Plato's bestowing us with the honour of exile?" [28] [g]

 

This mistaken attack on poetry has continued in one form or another down the ages. One suspects that the Romantics were very much aware of something that Nietzsche later formularises: what doesn't kill a thing makes it stronger. Thus they secretly revelled in the attacks upon them: It is better to be hated than loved ... an idea which Malcolm McLaren would later subscribe to.   

 

 

IV.

     

Lerner tells us that his favourite poet is Cyrus Console, his boyhood friend from Kansas (which may be true, or may simply be a touching gesture on his part). And he confesses that he's "never found Keatsian euphony quite as powerful as Emily Dickinson's dissonance" [46], to which one can only reply: moi non plus. 

 

In fact, I'm fairly sympathetic to Lerner throughout this work and mostly in agreement with what he says; even if I suspect he'd characterise my hatred of poetry as a defensive rage against all otherworldliness (that is to say, as a form of reaction, whereas I tend to see this as a form of active nihilism or a negation of the negative).   

 

I certainly share Lerner's "refusal of modernist nostalgia for some lost unity of experience and [...] rejection of totalizing ideologies" [97]. That  would serve as a fine description of my own postmodern project (even if Lerner says it with reference to Charles Orson's 1949 verse 'The Kingfishers', and not Torpedo the Ark).

   

I'll close this post, if I may, with what might (and should) have been Lerner's own conclusion: Poems are like the meterological phenomenon known as virga - i.e., observable streaks of water or ice crystals trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they ever reach the ground. 

 

In other words, poetry is a shower of rain "that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth" [100] [h].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I say more on the advantages of hatred in a post published in November 2014: click here. 

 

[b] As well as three highly acclaimed novels, Lerner has also published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Angle of Yaw, (Copper Canyon Press, 2006); and Mean Free Path, (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). These three volumes, plus a handful of newer poems, have been brought together in No Art (Granta Books, 2016).

      For more information on Lerner and to read a selection of his work, visit his page on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[c] See The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, (MacMillan, 1967). 

      The original (longer) version of 'Poetry' was published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920) and can be read on poets.org by clicking here.

 

[d] I have always had an ambivalent relationship to Bartleby the scrivener; sometimes I hate him, sometimes I am taken with his strange beauty and negativism beyond all negation. See one of the very earliest posts on TTA (31 Jan 2013) in which I discuss Melville's great anti-hero: click here. 

 

[e] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 9. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.   

[f] Lerner provides an excellent discussion of Whitman in The Hatred of Poetry, see pp. 61-70. His conclusion is clear: "the Whitmanic program has never been realized in history, and I don't think it can be" [67]. In other words, poetry is incapable of reconciling the individual and the social; of transforming millions of individuals into an authentic people. Later in the text, Lerner describes the desire for universality as a form of white male nostalgia (see pp. 78-85) and veers towards identity politics in a fairly lengthy discussion of Claudia Rankine's writing (pp. 87-96).    

[g] Lerner provides an interesting discussion of poetry and politics - particularly in relation to the idea of being avant-garde - later in his work; see pp. 53-57. 

      For the avant-garde, writes Lerner, "the poem is an imaginary bomb [...]: It explodes the category of poetry and enters history. The poem is a weapon - a weapon against received ideas of what the artwork is, certainly, but also an instrument of war in a heroic, revolutionary struggle [...]." But of course, ultimately poems are bombs that never go off - much to the annoyance of those who hope to achieve real political change via poetry. 

[h] It's unfortunate that this isn't Lerner's closing remark; that he goes on to qualify it, thereby undermining the strength of his own argument:

 

"I hope it goes without saying that [...] poems can fulfill any number of ambitions [...] They can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audience at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community; and so on." [101-102]

Lerner then provides a kind of postscript in which he attempts to explain how that can be; i.e., how poetry as a linguistic practice might overcome or bypass the internal contradictions he's been describing. Lerner thus ends his book not with an interesting comparison between poetry and a weather event, but with a (slightly nauseating) plea for the genuine and hate's sublimation:

"All I ask the haters - and I, too, am one - is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love." [113-114]

For an earlier review of The Hatred of Poetry - one which I had forgotten writing back in October 2016, until kindly reminded by a friend of mine - click here. 

 

 

On Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (With Reference to the Case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton)

Norman Douglas by unknown photographer (1949) 

Photographs Collection NPG 

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, that whilst familiar with the idea of Stockholm syndrome - i.e., the (contested) condition in which hostages are said to develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity [1] - it is only recently that I learnt of something similar said to occur within the world of illicit intergenerational relationships: child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome (or CSAAS as it is known in the literature).

 

Of course, as with Stockholm syndrome, CSAAS is not an officially recognised diagnostic term and many have challenged an idea which is used by some to explain the uncomfortable truth that not only do young people who have had sexual encounters with adults frequently fail to report incidents or later withdraw complaints of abuse - making prosecution of offenders difficult - but that many claim to have actively enjoyed their experiences and benefitted from the attachements formed with people often much older than themselves.   

 

In other words, rather than just accept what the children tell them, some social scientists working in the area of child sexual exploitation have developed a concept that allows them to morally condemn and legally prosecute the adult without blaming the child for their misperception and misunderstanding of events; their false consciousness, it is argued, is simply another aspect of their victimhood; a form of coping mechanism [2].

 

Now, as I don't have any real knowledge or experience in this field, I don't know what to think. On the one hand, I don't wish to defend the sexual abuse of minors. But, on the other hand, as a philosopher, I'm fully aware that different peoples in different times have understood intergenerational sex in radically different ways from us; the ancient Greeks providing a very obvious example. 

 

In other words, how cultures think about loving children is shaped by a wide range of beliefs, values, and social norms. Plato and friends regarded pederasty as a perfectly legitimate relationship between an adult male (the erastes) and an adolescent male (the eromenos) and it was characteristic of the Classical period in Greece [3].         

 

And, even in modern Europe until relatively recently, it was silently accepted that certain sophisticated older gentlemen - particularly of an artistic persuasion - often had a penchant for young boys and girls [4]. By way of example, let us consider the case of the now mostly forgotten British author Norman Douglas ...

 

 

II. 

 

Douglas was born in 1868. He died in 1952 of a drug overdose. 

 

In his day, he was highly respected and much loved as a popular novelist and writer of travel books. He was also widely known to be a pederast and accused on numerous occasions of what we would now term child sexual abuse. 

 

In November 1916, for example, British prosecutors charged Douglas with indecent assault on two boys; one aged twelve, the other only ten. Given bail, he fled the country and exiled himself in Italy. However, in May 1937, he was forced to flee Florence, fearing he was about to be arrested for raping a ten-year-old girl. 

 

Although reports of these cases appeared in the British press, Douglas's reputation remained relatively untarnished and, if anything, his outrageous behavior and outlaw status only increased his popularity with the public.    

 

His circle of friends and acquaintances - which included Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence [5], Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and Oscar Levy (the German-Jewish intellectual who famously oversaw the first English translation of Nietzsche's work) - also turned a blind eye on his activity with children of both sexes, just as they seemingly accepted the sexual subculture that enabled a man like Douglas to indulge his tastes whilst always remaining one jump ahead of the law. 

 

Indeed, it was Levy who provided Douglas with refuge in Monte Carlo after he fled Florence and told him that not only was he unconcerned by the allegations against him, but that, in his view, the Italians ought - in recognition of his genius - to have provided him with an annual supply of virgins in the same way the Athenians once supplied the Minotaur [6].  

 

It was only after his death that criticism of Douglas's behaviour began to grow, although even in in 1952 Greene was prepared to publicly defend his friend and try to secure his posthumous reputation [7]. Today, as one commentator on the Douglas case writes, "it's impossible to imagine how such a notorious paedophile could be admired by so many people despite his sexual behaviour" [8].    

 

But this same commentator - the historian Rachel Hope Cleves - doesn't just leave things there; she explores the Douglas case at length and in depth, demonstrating how it can not only tell us much about sexuality in the late-19th and early-20th century, but perhaps also help us understand "present-day willingness to turn a blind eye to blatant sexual abusers, such as the American financier Jeffrey Epstein and the French writer Gabriel Matzneff" [9], though that's not really my point of concern here, as the first part of this post makes clear. 

 

What most interests me is this: what the case of Douglas and one young object of his affection, Eric Wolton, tells us about the phenomenon of CSAAS ...

 

 

III. 

Eric Wolton was a young Londoner whom Douglas first picked up in Crystal Palace, in 1910, when the former was twelve. Douglas took the boy - with parental consent - to Italy and, on their travels together, he tutored Wolton, helping him improve his reading and writing abilities, as was "in keeping with the pederastic model" [10]. 

 

Of course, in between lessons, Douglas expected sexual favours from the boy in return ... But what is perhaps most shocking, however, is that like many of the other children who had sexual relations with Douglas, Wolton later expressed nostalgia for their time together and gratitude for all that Douglas did for him as an educator and mentor. 

 

Indeed, as he got older these feelings only intensified and Wolton not only claimed that Douglas had saved him from a life of crime and set him on the path to personal and professional success, but, in the early 1950s, Wolton took his own children to visit Douglas shortly before the latter died: 

 

"His loyalty and affection for the writer were fairly typical of Douglas's past connections. Many of Douglas's boys remained on friendly terms with him throughout their adult lives, inviting the writer into their homes and introducing him to their wives and children." [11]

 

Is this evidence of child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome? 

 

Or is it that these men had genuinely positive feelings and happy memories about their relationships with Douglas? I don't know: as I said earlier, I'm not qualified to give an opinion on this either way. The fact is, however, there's "almost no evidence of children speaking out against Douglas either during their connections or afterwards, as adults" [12].

 

Ultimately, all we can say is that the past is a very (very) different world to the one we live in now ... In Douglas's day, as Cleves wryly notes, sex with children was seen as questionable but commonplace (and all too human); now, it's seen as terrible but exceptional (something that only monsters engage in).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stockholm syndrome is a contested condition due to doubts about its legitimacy; it has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders due to the lack of a consistent body of academic research. If it does exist, then the syndrome is rare; according to data from the FBI, only about 5% of hostages show any signs of positive feeling or sympathy for their captors. The term was first used by the media in 1973 when four peope were held hostage during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. Not only did they defend their captors after being released, but they refused to testify against them in court.

 

[2] In a dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, Michel Foucault argued that when a child speaks of his "sexual relations, his affections, his tender feelings, or his contacts", we should learn to trust him and accept what he says. In other words, even if a child cannot legally give consent, they can be believed when articulating their own desires and they are perfectly capable of talking about themselves and their relations (particularly on the question of whether there was violence or coercion involved): "And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable."

      See: 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', trans. Alan Sheridan, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 264-274. Lines quoted are on pp. 272-273. 

      For an earlier post that discusses Foucault's views on the question of paedophilia (with reference to the case of Gabriel Matzneff), click here.   

 

[3] For a post in which I discuss the Ancent Greek love of boys and the benefits that a revival of pederasty as an institution might bring, click here.

 

[4] As one commentator writes: 

 

"It might feel natural to presume that the moral injunction against sex between adults and children is timeless. But today's extreme antipathy to paedophilia dates only to the 1980s, when contests over masculinity and homosexuality inspired an outburst of panic about child abuse. [...] Before the 1980s, attitudes towards sexual encounters between adults and children or youths - boys and girls - were far more ambiguous."

      - Rachel Hope Cleves, 'The Case of Norman Douglas', Aeon (9 April 2021): click here.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence had a long and complex (love-hate) relationship with Norman Douglas, whom he satirised in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) and again in his Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1924). Interestingly, despite his loathing of the grand perverts as he called them, Lawrence doesn't mention Douglas's pederasty and seemed happy to enjoy his company in Italy, even if at some level the two men were natural enemies. See the section entitled 'Purgatory: Italy, 1919-1922', in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 147-275. She provides a fascinating account of the queer threesome formed by Lawrence, Douglas and Magnus and how it ultimately ended in acrimony, suicide, and an astonishing piece of writing.

 

[6] The fact is, pederasty had long had its defenders. To quote once more from the above essay by Cleves: 

 

"In the mid-19th century, a neo-Hellenist intellectual movement swept German and British universities. Scholars such as Karl Otfried Müller, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds embraced ancient Greek history and philosophy as models for modern liberal politics and society. These neo-Hellenists placed pederasty at the centre of the Greek model, defining the pederastic relation as one 'by which an older man, moved to love by the visible beauty of a younger man, and desirous of winning immortality through that love, undertakes the younger man’s education in virtue and wisdom.' In this lofty vision, pederasty didn't entail a sexual relationship, but took place on a higher spiritual plane. In point of fact, both Pater and Symonds were sexually attracted to male youths. Their writings influenced Douglas and other pederasts who came of age in the late 19th century."

 

[7] Ultimatey, Greene and others failed in this attempt to secure the reputation and literary status of their friend Douglas. Cleves notes:

 

"If Douglas escaped condemnation during his lifetime, he couldn't escape the assault on his reputation following the intensification of anti-paedophilic sentiment after his death. The shift in public mores during the 1980s towards viewing paedophiles as monsters made it impossible to defend Douglas. He disappeared from literary memory, except as an example of historical villainy [...]" 

 

[8-12] Rachel Hope Cleves, op. cit. 

 

As well as the above essay, I would highly recommend the excellent book-length study by Cleves of Norman Douglas and his exploitation of children: Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality, (Chicago University Press, 2020).

D. H. Lawrence is all the Rage

 James K. Walker and an outsider art style portrait of DHL

 

I. 

 

There are not many joyous events to look forward to in November: All Souls' Day, Bonfire Night, and Katxu's birthday - that's really about it. However, I'm pleased to announce an addition to this short list; a presentation by bibliophile and promiscuous homotextual James Walker to the D. H. Lawrence London Group [1].  

James - a teacher, writer, and critic who describes himself as a digital storyteller - has assembled two major projects of note in collaboration with Paul Fillingham: The Sillitoe Trail (2012-13), which explored the enduring relevance of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; and Dawn of the Unread (2014-16), a graphic novel celebrating Nottingham's literary heritage.

 

He is currently working on a transmedia project that will digitally recreate D. H. Lawrence's savage pilgrimage. It's this project - which James likes to describe as a Memory Theatre - which he'll be discussing in November, with particular reference to the subject of rage within the life and work of Lawrence. 

 

This obviously excites my interest, as I've recently been researching the ancient Greek concept of thymos (anger) which Plato named as one of the three constituent parts of the human psyche; the others being logos (reason) and eros (sexual desire) and which Peter Sloterdijk locates as central within Western history, arguing that an active form of this emotion - i.e., free of ressentiment - might actually be something vital and productive.

 

And so, without wishing to anticipate in too great a detail what James might be planning to say, here are a few thoughts on Lawrence and rage that I'm hoping he'll develop ... 

 

 

II.

 

James isn't, of course, the first to have noticed (and been amused by) Lawrence's semi-permanent fury with himself, with others, and with the world at large. 

 

Geoff Dyer, for example, picked up on this in his study of Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage (1997) and, twelve years prior, Anthony Burgess had offered his own passionate appreciation of Lawrence in an episode of The South Bank Show which aired on 20 January 1985 under the title 'The Rage of D. H. Lawrence' [2].  

 

I don't know why Lawrence was so often so angry; some commentators have suggested it was symptomatic of his TB [3]; others take a more psychological approach and discuss Lawrence and his work in terms of behavioural disorders such as social anxiety disorder and intermittant explosive disorder. 

 

Again, I have no idea if Lawrence was bipolar, although he did seem to swing from periods of depression to periods marked by an abnormally elevated mood - but then, who doesn't? 

 

And it's important to note that Lawrence - perhaps aware of his own public image - often played up his anger for comic effect, as in the famous letter to Edward Garnett in which he curses his critics and fellow countrymen: 

 

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed. They can but frog-spawn - the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime." [4]

   

Only someone with no sense of humour would mistake this for genuine anger; it's Lawrence doing what writers love to do most, i.e., play with words.

Having said that, I think we can characterise even Lady Chatterley's Lover as a thymotic text and not simply an erotic novel or piece of romantic fiction. It's as much about Mellors raging against the class system, industrial capitalism, modern technology, poaching cats, crying children, ex-wives and girlfriends, lesbians, and contemporary art, as it is about Connie's sexual awakening. 

 

And I think we should also mention that there were occasions when Lawrence's rage was genuine and took a nasty, violent turn. I'm sure James will refer to the verbal and physical abuse suffered by Lawrence's wife Frieda, for example, and the incident involving poor Bibbles the dog (readers who would like reminding of these things can go to a post on the subject by clicking here).      

III.

 

Anger is an energy, as John Lydon once sang [5]. And, as a matter of fact, he's right; those experiencing rage have high levels of adrenaline and this increases physical strength and sharpens senses, whilst also inhibiting the sensation of pain. 

 

Rage, in other words, enables individuals to do things that they might otherwise be incapable of (and if you don't believe me or Rotten, ask Dr. Bruce Banner).  

 

And with that, it's over to you James ...

 

Notes

[1]  James Walker's presentation to the Lawrence London Group is via Zoom on 26 November 2020, between 6.30 and 8.30 pm local time. For further details of the event and for information on the DHL London Group, visit Catherine Brown's website by clicking here.  

 

[2] Readers who are interested in watching this episode of The South Bank Show [S08/E11] can find it on YouTube in four parts: click here for part 1.

[3] Katherine Mansfield, who was herself consumptive and "subject to outbursts of uncontrollable rage", also believed this. See David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 15. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Edward Garnett, dated 3 July 1912, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp.420-22. Lines quoted are on p. 422. 

 

[5] Play 'Rise', by Public Image Ltd., a single release from the album Album (Virgin Records, 1986), by clicking here.