Notes on an Essay by Stéphane Sitayeb: 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos'

Fragment of stained glass (19th century)

7.2 x 3.2 cm (whole object) 

Royal Collection Trust

 

 

I. 

 

Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualised objects in D. H. Lawrence's short fiction [1] is a fascinating read if, like me, you are interested in such things. 

 

However, I'm not sure I share his insistence on giving material items an all-too-human symbolic interpretation. Sometimes, a white stocking is a white stocking and that's precisely wherein its allure resides for the fetishist and object-oriented philosopher, if not, perhaps, for the literary scholar keen to open a "new figurative level of reading".  

 

And his claim that Lawrence resolved to "awaken his readers' spirituality by inducing a shock therapy paradoxically based on physicality, with explicit references to sexualized items and licentious tendencies", is not one I agree with either. In fact, I don't think Lawrence gave a fig for his readers' spirituality. 

 

And, again, just because an object stands upright, that doesn't always mean it has phallic significance; even Freud recognised that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and doesn't represent anything, or always express unconscious human desire. Thus, when Sitayeb says that "Lacanian readings of Lawrence have fathomed the hidden meaning of phallic objects in his fiction", I want to beat him about the head with a large dildo [2].

     

 

II. 

 

Moving on, we discover that Sitayeb wishes to discuss objects in terms of Eros and Thanatos; i.e., as objects that lead to fulfilment on the one hand, and as objects that lead to self-destruction on the other. He rightly points out, however, that Lawrence's work demonstrates a complex connection between Love and Death and thus his fictitious objects "stimulate at once procreation and destruction, creativity and annihilation". 

 

The result is that death becomes sexy and sex becomes decadent and perverse; not so much tied to an ideal of love, as to numerous paraphlias, often involving objects or the objectification of body parts. Sitayeb mentions several of these, but by no means exhausts the number of kinky elements in Lawrence's work (elements which I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: see here, for example). 

 

 

III.

 

Sitayeb's reading of 'The Captain's Doll' in terms of agalmatophilia and pygmalionism is good. Perhaps not as good as mine in terms of dollification - click here - but good nonetheless. He certainly makes some interesting points, such as this one: "The interchangeability between subject and object is conveyed by an inversion of the invariable principles governing mechanic and organic matter." 

 

Similarly, his reading of 'Sun' is good, but not as good as mine: click here. Sitayeb still thinks Juliet's story simply involves an anthropomorphic type of sexuality and Lawrence's "conception of Nature as a macrocosm incorporating man", but it's far more important philosophically than that.   

 

As for 'The Thimble' - a short story that formed the basis of the 1922 novella The Ladybird - the ornate object in question is not first and foremost a symbol of unfulfilled sexual desire and Mrs. Hepburn's fiddling with it is not a form of symbolic masturbation. This lazy and old-fashioned psychosexual reading just bores the pants off me and I really can't fathom why Sitayeb bothers to refer to it.   

 

 

IV. 

 

Sometimes, Sitayeb says things that I do not understand: "Lawrence studied the escalation of desire for both objects and subjects in the presence of imitation and rivalry patterns." But that's probably due to my ignorance of theories to do with mimesis on the one hand (I've certainly never read a word of René Girard) and my suspicion of the concept on the other (I have read a fair deal of Derrida and Deleuze). Nevertheless, I enjoyed Sitayeb's reading of the love triangle in The Fox [3]. 

 

I also enjoyed his excellent reading of 'The White Stocking' - another story involving a love triangle, but this time one "not only composed of human objects of desire", but also including a material item "sexualized to express an unsatisfied ambition such as an impossible sexual act" (i.e., the white stocking). Sitayeb says that this is more precisely termed a split-object triangle and I'll take his word for that. 

 

Sitayeb also notes:    

 

"In the absence of Elsie’s secret lover [...] the eponymous object acts as a reminder of a passionate adulterous dance and a catalyst reactivating the ecstasy of forbidden desire. In the presence of the object, Elsie is invested with a sexual energy, even away from her lover." 

 

And that's true, although I'm not sure I think Elsie vain and superficial simply because she likes silk stockings and jewellery; I mean, who doesn't? But then, having said that, I did call her a 'pricktease with pearl earrings' in a case study published on Torpedo the Ark four years ago: click here.

 

 

V.

 

Ultimately, what Sitayeb wants to suggest is that within consumer society, objects - be they directly or indirectly eroticised - become dangerous shape-shifting agents, as commodity culture becomes increasingly death-driven. And he thinks that's what Lawrence illustrates in 'Things', a tale which tells of the syllomania of an American couple addicted to collecting beautiful objects:

 

"Through their syllomania - the pathological need to acquire and hoard objects [...] - the couple [...] indirectly socializes and sexualizes the various objects that they have purchased to decorate their home by replacing their usual libido sexualis with a libido oeconomicus, thus linking Eros to Thanatos."

 

Sitayeb continues:

 

"Owning or consuming objects procures an immediate and transient feeling of satisfaction verging on ecstasy [...] which is nonetheless quickly replaced by an impression of void when their desire for objects becomes insatiable."      

 

Again, that's an insightful take on Lawrence's work and I was intrigued to see how Sitayeb related this to Baudrillard's thinking on the collusion between subjects and objects, the latter being an author of special interest to me, as torpedophiles will be aware:

 

"Baudrillard's main three arguments to account for men's attraction to trinkets are staged in Lawrence's short story. Both philosopher and author highlighted 1) the escapist function of objects of desire, since they represent a spatial and temporal vehicle transporting their owners into the past of various regions and cultures; 2) the feeling of conquest through the act of collecting, as the collector becomes conqueror; and 3) the access to higher social classes, a pose that D. H. Lawrence evokes with satirical overtones through the detached heterodiegetic narrator of 'Things'."

 

Expanding on this, Sitayeb writes:

 

"Far from attractive to the reader, the couple's bric-à-brac is presented as an overload of useless items due to an accumulation where all the objects are juxtaposed in a concatenation of long compound substantives preceded by adjectives evoking several national origins with little coherence. Just as every decorative item is deprived of real functionality, the words to name them also consist of mere signifiers for the reader, which confirms Baudrillard's idea that the difference between simple objects and objects of desire lies in "'the object's detachment from its functional, experienced reality'." [4]

 

Sitayeb concludes:

 

"Although Lawrence's ideology in 'Things' is comparable to Baudrillard's, the former interpreted the phenomenon as collective, not personal, warning his contemporary readers against the loss of identity resulting from the vain desire for objects, which he perceived as a post-traumatic stigma of a World War One."

 

 

VI.

 

The problem, ultimately, that I have with Sitayeb's reading of Lawrence is that he seems to subscribe to a notion of what Meillassoux termed correlationism - i.e., the idea that "we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" [5].

Why do I say that - and why does it matter? 

Well, I say it because Sitayeb posits a two-way process wherein the desiring human mind shapes the material universe or world of objects, whilst the latter either fulfil or destroy us, and this permanent and privileged relationship is a form of correlationism, is it not? 

 

And this matters because it serves to make reality mind-dependent and I find such anthropocentrism not only untenable but objectionable - be it in Lawrence's work, or readings of Lawrence's work.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stéphane Sitayeb, 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos', Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 71, (Autumn 2018), pp. 133-147. Click here to read on openedition.org. All lines quoted are from the online version of the essay.

 

[2] It should also be noted that the phallus is not the same as an erect penis; a confusion that we can trace all the way back at least as far as Kate Millett, who claims in her Sexual Politics (1970), that Lawrence is guilty of transforming  his own model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon the homoerotic worship of the penis. That's unfair and mistaken, as Lawrence himself emphasises that when he writes of the phallus, he is not simply referring to a mere member belonging to a male body and male agent. For Lawrence, the phallus is a genuine symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge not only between lovers, but to the future. Thus fear of the phallus - and frenzied efforts to nullify it in the name of a castrated spirituality, not least by confusing it with the penis - betray a great horror of being in touch. 

      Writing fifty years after Millett, one might have hoped Sitayeb would've not made this same error. I would suggest he see my Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), where I discuss all this in relation to the case of Lady Chatterley, pp. 233-246. 

 

[3] My recent take on this novella by Lawrence can be found by clicking here. 

 

[4] Sitayeb is quoting from Baudrillard's Le Système des objets (1968), trans. James Benedict as The System of Objects, (Verso, 1996). 

      For me, Baudrillard's later work on objects (in relation, for example, to his theory of seduction) is far more interesting; here, he is still too much influenced by Marxist ideas and basically offers a political critique of consumer capitalism - as if, somehow, the subject might still differentiate themselves from the world of things and resist the evil genuis of the object.

 

[5] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude,  trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008), p. 5.

I Would Like to Know the Stars Again: Reflections on Astronomy and Astrology in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

"I would like to know the stars again ... I would like to be able to put my ego into the sun, 

and my personality into the moon, and my character into the planets, 

and live the life of the heavens." - D. H. Lawrence

 

I. There's a Star Man Waiting in the Sky

 

To his credit, Lawrence was always open and honest about his preference for astrology over astronomy. 

 

For him, the former is an ancient body of esoteric knowledge - a lost science - concerning the vital relationship between man and the universe; whilst the latter is merely an attempt to restrict human consciousness and kill the true splendour of the heavens, as his Introduction to Frederick Carter's The Dragon of the Apocalypse makes clear:

 

"I have read books of astronomy which made me dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. But the heart melts and dies, it is the disembodied mind alone which follows on through this horrible hollow void of space, where lonely stars hang in awful isolation. And this is not a release. It is a strange thing, but when science extends space ad infinitum, and we get a terrible sense of limitlessness, we have at the same time a secret sense of imprisonment. Three-dimensional space is homogeneous, and no matter how big it is, it is a kind of prison. No matter how vast the range of space, there is no release."*      

 

Works of astrology, on the other hand, bring a marvellous release of the whole imagination:

 

"In astronomical space, one can only move, one cannot be. In the astrological heavens, that is to say, the ancient zodiacal heavens, the whole man is set free, once the imagination crosses the border. The whole man, bodily and spiritual, walks in the magnificent fields of the stars [...] and the feet tread splendidly upon [...[ the heavens, instead of untreadable space." [46]

        

Essentially, Lawrence is contrasting two types of experience and privileging one over the other:

 

"To enter the astronomical sky of space is a great sensational experience. To enter the astrological sky of the zodiac and the living, roving planets is another experience, another kind of experience; it is truly imaginative, and to me, more valuable. It is not a mere extension of what we know: an extension that becomes awful, then appalling. It is the entry into another world, another kind of world, measured by another dimension. And we find some prisoned self in us coming forth to live in this world." [46] 

 

It's not that Lawrence wishes to deny the first experience. But he much prefers the sense of being part of the macrocosm that astrology affords him:

 

"I become big and glittering and vast with a sumptuous vastness. I am the macrocosm, and it is wonderful! And since I am not afraid to feel my own nothingness in front of the vast void of astronomical space, neither am I afraid to feel my own splendidness in the zodiacal heavens." [47]  

 

Astrological symbolism may only be a type of fantasy - may not be factually correct or true in the scientific sense that astronomy is true - but it provides one with a feeling of joy and sense of power as well as freedom: "So we need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with." [47]**

 

 

II. Transcendental Egoism à la D. H. Lawrence

 

Let me begin by saying that I understand Lawrence's objection to positivism and his response to the inhuman scale of the cosmos as given to us within astronomy. When you first encounter the facts and figures of the universe you can indeed become dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. 

 

However, I think we should accept the challenge of this and affirm our vertigo and our imprisonment - Lawrence's word - within a godless and, for the most part, lifeless universe. Nihilism is not something to fear, or seek to overcome, but, as a form of intellectual integrity, something to celebrate.***

 

Alas, in order to guarantee imaginative freedom, Lawrence is prepared to dismiss empirical evidence in favour of subjective truth and to cheerfully exchange scientific knowledge for religious myth. As a fantasist and a theo-humanist, of course he prefers astrology to astronomy. And why not, when the former is so much more flattering to one's sense of self-importance.

 

By his own admission, placing his feet upon the heavens makes him feel alive and powerful; and that's not a minor consideration when you are as close to death as Lawrence was when writing here. Small and insignificant, Lawrence wants to project himself into "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [46]. He wants to declare his unity with the cosmos and, in so doing, achieve a certain immortality. 

 

But this dying man's wish is surely the same kind of transcendental egoism that Lawrence elsewhere ridicules in others. He boasts that he is not afraid to feel his own nothingness before the vast void of astronomical space, but, actually, he does seem frit when confronted with reality and ontological hollowness. 

 

However, scared or not, Lawrence at least knows what it is he wants: a release of the imagination in order that it might make him feel stronger and happier. Science doesn’t provide this, he says. At best, it satisfies the intellect by giving us a sun and a moon that are "only thought-forms […] things we know but never feel by experience" [51].

 

This, I have to say, is a bit rich: for so too are the sun and moon given us by astrology only thought-forms - and, arguably, nothing but colourful thought-forms, whereas the sun and moon spoken of within astronomy have some actual basis in material reality.

 

 

III. A Coda on Correlationism

I think it's fair to say that Lawrence's thinking can be characterised by what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. Thus his preference for astrology over astronomy. For Lawrence is not really interested in the stars and planets, so much as he is interested in their relation to him and his relation to them. 

 

In other words, the paradox at the heart of Lawrence's writing is that whilst he rages against modern people for falling out of touch with the living reality of the cosmos, his fundamental concern is with human consciousness and language and he's not even going to try to conceive of the universe as existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or not.

 

Perhaps this is why Lawrence instinctively hates what science tells him about the universe, in terms of its size, its age, its formation, etc. Statements, for example, such as the universe is 13.7 billion years old obviously posit a pre-human and non-human cosmos and Lawrence - for all his professed anti-humanism - simply doesn't want (or know how) to think events that are "anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness".****

 

Ultimately, what Lawrence reveals himself to be in his late work is a subjective idealist; one who desperately wants to belong to a meaningful universe and is incapable of conceding that what science tells us about matter existing independently of man might be true. Indeed, he comes dangerously close at times to resembling one of those religious lunatics who insist that ancient wisdom is true because they feel it to be true and want it to be true. 

 

And that's disappointing to be honest ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.

 

** To be fair, Lawrence does later qualify this by adding: "But not in the rather silly modern way of horoscopy and telling your fortune by the stars." [51]

*** I agree with Ray Brassier, who argues that nihilism is an important speculative opportunity and an "unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality". See the Preface to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

**** Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009), p. 9.

Just to be clear on this important point: it doesn’t matter whether Lawrence chooses to think such events true or false, but the fact that he is completely unconcerned with the modern scientific discourse which describes these events, does, I think, bring shame upon him. As Meillassoux points out, it is this discourse that allows us to have a rational and meaningful debate "about what did or did not exist prior to the emergence of humankind, as well as what might eventually succeed humanity" [ibid., 114]. In other words, it is science - and only science (not myth, religion, or poetry) - that can posit dia-chronic statements and makes dia-chronic knowledge possible (i.e. knowledge of a world without witness). Whether Lawrence likes it or not, no man, god, or sentient being need be on the scene for a mind-independent universe to exist and to carry on just as it has always carried on.

Some of this material has been extracted (and revised) from an essay entitled 'Sun-Struck' published on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage: click here. The picture of a cosmic-looking D. H. Lawrence used at the top of this post is a detail from an image created by Walker to illustrate the essay as it appeared on his blog.   

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 3: Chapters 4-6

Patricia MacCormack: Professor of Continental Philosophy
Anglia Ruskin University: click here for profile

It's always a bit worrying when an author says that the work that follows is experimental, because - sometimes, not always - that means badly thought through and lazy writing. Still, I doubt that's the case here, so let's investigate MacCormack's occultural and thanatological escape routes from anthropocentrism ...

VI.

Occulture, for those who don't know, is "the contemporary world of occult practice which embraces a bricolage of historical, fictional, religious and spiritual trajectories [...] an unlimited world of imagination and creative disrespect for [...] hierarchies of truth based on myth or materiality, law or science" [95-6] and a ritualistic method of catalysing ahuman becomings.

In other words, its a demonic mix of chaos magick, witchcraft, Lovecraft, and Continental philosophy that aligns itself with feminists, minorities, and nonhuman animals and which leads onto a paradoxically vital form of death activism, which we shall discuss below.

Occulture is also, according to MacCormack, a material and secular practice; a kind of atheism that opposes religious fundamentalism (or moral power and authority) in all forms that perpetuate anthropocentrism. It's compassionate too - for even the demons and monsters invoked by MacCormack conveniently share her ethical concerns.*

All that one needs to do to become a practitioner is read and think a little differently from the mainstream. No other experience is necessary and no teachers are required. It's self-inspirational. However, it's not about self-help, so much as loss of identity and refining the ego towards nothingness (what Deleuze and Guattari term becoming-imperceptible).     

That said, the key idea seems to be "remake the self and remake the world" [106] - though I hope that MacCormack is not suggesting that these projects are linked or one and the same, for that would be to fall into the purest idealism, or what Meillassoux terms correlationism. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure MacCormack is not suggesting that - even if she often writes of neural networks, modes of perception, and environmental systems in the same sentence.)  

Despite once spending a good deal of time at Treadwell's, the truth of the matter is I don't really know enough about chaos magick, or Elder Gods, etc. in order to comment on MacCormack's work in this area. Having said that, I have written fairly extensively on the cunt as a site of loss (where flies and philosophers lose their way), so was very interested to see what she had to say on why the cunt has been deemed "antithetical toward anthropocentrism, particularly phallocentrism" [116]. 

First thing's first, it's important to note that the cunt is not merely a biological organ; the cunt, in other words, is so much more than an obedient vagina. MacCormack likes to think of it as a kind of demon that incarnates as a viscous, fleshly, mucosal entity; "all the features of femininity despised by patriarchy [...] as abject and horrific" [119]. 

Alternatively, we might think of the cunt as a monstrous nonhuman animal; a "threshold of internal and external" [122] that is crucially composed of folds; a conceptual gate that grants access to unnatural worlds even while belonging itself to the natural order.

Ultimately, however, the cunt can never be fully known or described; can never have its form and function fixed like the rigid phallus. And it "will not come unless it is desired" [125], says MacCormack - and I don't quite know if she's only making a point about demonic evocation or if this is what passes for a saucy double entendre in the world of occulture.    


VII.

And so we come to death. But this is not just death; this is a life-affirming, ecosophical model of death that is about "the death of the human body in its actual existence more than just a pattern of subjective agency" [141]. This is the death of man (as species) understood as "a necessity for all life to flourish and relations to become ethical" [140].

Which, as I indicated in the first part of this post, is certainly not an idea I'm unfamiliar with or unsympathetic towards. As a thanatologist, I'm perfectly happy to curdle the distinction between life and death, or collapse the binary as MacCormack would say, and I'm pleased to see her discuss her project in relation to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia - something I did in my own work several years ago.

And if I'm not fully persuaded by the arguments in favour of cannibalism, necrophilia and utilising human corpses as a source of fuel, I'm kind of on board with sodomy, antinatalism, and suicide (as a practice of joy before death). Where Patricia and I part company is on the topic of abolitionism, which seeks to "abolish all interactions with animals based on human superiority presumption" [145], thereby ending vivisection and closing circuses, sea parks and zoos.

For although I don't subscribe to human exceptionalism, as a Nietzschean I do accept that life is founded upon a general economy of the whole in which the terrible aspects of reality - cruelty, violence, suffering, hatred, and exploitation, for example - are indispensable. MacCormack may address this elsewhere in her work, but, as far as I can see, she entirely fails to do so in The Ahuman Manifesto.

Instead, she adopts a fixed, unexamined and, ironically, all too human moral standpoint throughout the book from which to pass judgement (on men, on meat-eaters, on breeders et al). She may push her work in a queer ahuman direction beyond the "constraining systems of capital, signification and normativity" [155], but it's certainly not, alas, beyond good and evil.

Even when she does get a bit Nietzschean, celebrating death as an absolute Dionysian frenzy, for example, she quickly adds a proviso: "the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual" [158]. Ultimately, as she later admits: "I want to create an ahuman thanaterotics based on love, not aggression" [158].

And by that she means free of misogyny, racism, and the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male who can only imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in savage, sensational, and pornographic terms - and we don't want that, for this form of "serial-killer necro-cannibalism is a microcosm of normative anthropocentric practice" [160] of the kind that objectifies the world.

In the thanaterotics of love, the corpse can be fucked or served with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti, but only if the corpse has not been produced against its own agency via anthropocentric violence. Necro-cannibalism can thus be made perfectly natural and politically correct - and if it is still against the law, that doesn't matter because the law is a white, male Western phallocentric ass that seeks to deny the liberating potential and beauty of death for a variety of reasons (none of them good).

So Patricia says it loud and says it proud: "Go forth and love the dead!" [164]

And if you must eat meat - eat human corpses: "Our world is groaning under the weight of the parasitic pestilence of human life and yet our excessive resource is the human dead [...] a phenomenally cheap, if not free, resource." [162] 

Is this nihilism? No - this is the "only available creative outlet in an impossible situation" [165] and a form of ethical affirmation; it's fun too - and a form of freedom (the freedom to be eaten or become a necrophile's object of desire). After all, even Jesus - whom MacCormack regards as an activist - offered up his flesh for human consumption.   


VIII.

The closing chapter of The Ahuman Manifesto is a kind of apocalyptic conclusion that reminds readers that whilst they are right to have fears about the future, they can still act in the present with "tears of love and joy" [191] streaming down their faces - which is a bit too ecstatic for my tastes; I would rather people showed a little self-discipline and curbed their enthusiasm.    

For MacCormack, there are multiple apocalypses, large and small; the sexist apocalypse that women are born into and where "assault from a young age is expected" [172]; the speciesist apocalypse in which nonhuman animals - especially those that are farmed or enslaved for entertainment - are condemned to lives of abject misery; and even the Brexit apocalypse that shows "fascism can and does win" [174]. (I wish I were making that last example up, but unfortunately I'm not.)

None of these minor apocalypses really interest MacCormack though; she longs for something a bit bigger and regrets that plagues and wars in the past didn't do a better job of finishing off humanity: "For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species ..." [176]. A sentence that seems a long way removed from her preface promise that this is not a misanthropic manifesto. 

Ultimately, there's not much left for us to do now, she says, but manage our extinction and act as kindly caretakers for the planet. Which is all a bit Letzter Mensch sounding, is it not? The last man being the one who is tired of life and seeks only a slow and gentle way out ...

Oddly enough, MacCormack quotes from Zarathustra towards the end of the chapter and suggests that her compassionate model of apocalypse is in tune with his message of creating beyond the self. But, for me, it's hard to see anything very Nietzschean about her ahumanism. Indeed, it's arguably no more than another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; one that speaks of love and joy, but is shot through with ressentiment and a refusal to accept that nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.


* Note: Zarathustra says that if you take the hump from the hunchback, you take away his soul. I do feel MacCormack does something similar to the demons and monsters she invokes; robbing the former of their horns and the latter of their very monstrousness. I simply can't see why she is so sure that creatures of the underworld and hidden realms also read The Guardian - especially as she is keen to point out that "this cosmos is not [a] happy hippy cosmos but a terrifying one" [122].

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work.

To read part 1 of this post - notes on the preface and introduction - click here.

To read part 2 of this post - notes on chapters 1 and 2 - click here.

On Miracles and Absolute Contingency in the Work of Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Meillassoux

I.

The opening tale of Daphne du Maurier's astonishing and disturbing collection of short stories entitled The Breaking Point (1959), is not so much a whodunnit as a who did what and reveals what she describes as "the lovely duplicity of a secret life" [22] and it's potential for tragedy.

But, whilst the latter is a fascinating notion - explored at length by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray - what really caught my interest is the moment of revelation at the very beginning of the story when James Fenton realises that miracles can happen at any moment and dramatically mark the end of one's old life. This liberating thought had never come to him before:

"It was as though something had clicked in his brain [...] time had ceased [...] everything had changed [...] he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension." [2-3]

What's more, Fenton feels himself strangely empowered, as if he had become a miracle-worker himself; i.e., an instrument of fate capable of altering the lives of strangers with a single gesture, be it a random act of kindness, or one of sadistic cruelty.


II.

In some ways, it's nice to know that miracles, far from being rare or unusual, are actually the natural unfolding of things and events and can not only happen at any time, but are, in fact, happening all of the time. For one thing, it releases us from the grip of absolute necessity or what's known within philosophical circles as the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., the metaphysical insistence that the world is at is with good cause and could only be as it is).  

To think in terms of miracles, the unfolding of fate, and what Quentin Meillassoux terms unreason, is to enter a world of absolute contingency in which there is no reason for anything to be as it is or to remain so; everything - including the laws that govern the world - could be otherwise:

"Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing." [53]

For Meillassoux, this is the only absolute: a kind of hyper-chaos that du Maurier, at the point of breakdown - when reality must be faced - discovered for herself. Thus, when her protagonists suddenly step outside the gate, what they encounter is:

"a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses [...] a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas." [64]

Further, whilst conventional time ceases, they observe something akin to it - an uncanny form of time that is:

"inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity [...] even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.” [64]

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Alibi', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Infinity, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009).

For a semi-related post to this one on miracles understood from a Deleuzean perspective in terms of the fold, click here.

On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).

On the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge in Nietzsche's Early Philosophy

Portrait of Nietzsche as a Young Professor
 University of Basel, 1872

What Nietzsche terms in his early writings the knowledge drive, is something he favours subjecting to strict control. For whilst it powerfully propels modern science, it does so in a promiscuous and indiscriminate manner that is incapable of determining value. To give it free reign is, at the very least, a sign of vulgarity.

The role of the philosopher, therefore, is to act as a kind of guardian and ensure that science serves life and furthers the aim of culture; left unchecked, the will to truth will ultimately result in nihilism. But this subordination of the knowledge drive isn't accomplished by means of metaphysics, or the establishment of a new faith. It requires, rather, the granting to art new powers and responsibilities. 

Readers in the analytic tradition of philosophy who are unfamiliar with German Romanticism, might be surprised at this. But, for the youthful Nietzsche, writing as an ardent devotee of Richard Wagner, philosophy - whilst it might rely upon similar methods to science - is, in its desire to invent beyond the limits of experience, a form of art and a continuation of the mythical drive. It is thus essentially pictorial and not mathematical in its expression.

What's more, according to Nietzsche, the reason why philosophy retains its value - and, indeed, a higher value than science - is because it continues to concern itself with notions of beauty and human greatness. Of course, this makes philosophy a refined form of anthropocentrism; one that transforms all nature into man's own image and posits all being as a permanent correlate of thinking, thereby demonstrating its radical incompatibility with scientific realism.     

Leaving us in no doubt about what this means, Nietzsche writes: "Man is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself ..." A little later, he adds: "We are acquainted with but one reality - the reality of thoughts". And, as if to show how Kantian he remained in his epistemology, he concludes: "The world has its reality only in man: it is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men." 

Nietzsche doesn't at this point flatly deny the existence of the thing-in-itself or dispute the possibility of facts, he simply argues that because objects are mind-dependent, we can say nothing about them outside of this relationship. In other words, for Nietzsche - as for other sceptics - we can only know reality as it appears to us. Consequently, Nietzsche privileges art over science, as art, of course, is all about appearances and attempting to form representations of reality (i.e. pictures of the world that are ever more complete).  

Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche feels sensory knowledge is more than mere illusion; that it's adequate to the truth of the world and that the mind mirrors what is, because the mind of man has itself evolved out of matter and not out of thin air. The mind might structure and colour things, but it doesn't do so in an entirely arbitrary manner; even if its reflections are distorted, they are not entirely false or simply the product of dreamy idealism.

In other words, objects may conform to mind - but mind is itself an object. Thus, breaking out of the correlationist circle and directly accessing what Meillassoux terms the ancestral realm that exists prior to humanity (or, indeed, any forms of sentient being whatsoever), is not a major concern for Nietzsche. Indeed, even in his later, supposedly positivist mid-period, Nietzsche is still primarily concerned with what is true for us (mankind) and his model of science remains distinctly gay and tied to his understanding of art.

Ultimately, what does an arch-vitalist care about arche-fossils ...?    

See: Nietzsche, 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990). The lines quoted are from sections 80, 94 and 106.

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

The Moon at the End of My Street

According to Lawrence, who insists on an essential and dynamic correspondence between man and the heavenly bodies, the moon is a strange, white, soft-seeming world; a great cosmic nerve centre from which we quiver forever. 

Now, as readers of this blog may know, I'm philosophically hostile to such naive vitalism and what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. However, la luna continues to attract my interest and affection and I agree with Lawrence that it's a far lovelier thing than merely a dead lump of rock in the night sky. 

And so it is that - just the other evening - I took the above photo of the moon at the end of my street, which, coincidentally, happens to be the title of a new collection of poems by Isabel del Rio, who, kindly, has given me permission to reproduce the following lines from a verse entitled 'If you and I did not have the moon':

    

If we did not have the Moon,
we would not know what to call
the night, perhaps only
darkness, we would describe it
only by its colour, black,
by its lack of purpose, pointless.


Other lunar-inspired verses in Ms del Rio's new book include 'wondering moon', 'this Moon is but a quaver on the sky', and 'Moon Haiku Number 1':


Like you, the Moon is
not in the universe, but
is the universe


Obviously, as a poet, there are moments when Ms del Rio falls into the same anthropocentric idealism and affectation as Lawrence. It's not so much that either author wilfully privileges the human over other objects, but each seems unable to help thinking the latter unless they conform to the mind of a knowing subject and in this way become products of human cognition and aesthetic fancy.

Still, it's been said that I often do the same, despite my best efforts to adhere to a strict form of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (i.e. to know that the moon and stars exist independently of Man and are not ontologically exhausted by their relation to us), so who am I to criticise ... 

Note: Isabel del Rio is a writer and linguist, born in Madrid and living in London. She writes in English and Spanish and has published fiction and poetry. Her new book is published by Friends of Alice Publishing (2016).