On Phlegm, Philosophy, and Apathy

Franz Gareis: portrait of Novalis (1799)

The 18th-century German poet and mystic known as Novalis was fond of the phrase: Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren - Vivificiren! This has since become a familiar slogan in the work of post-Romantic writers, often translated along the lines of: 'To philosophise is to cast off apathy and to live!' 

To be honest, however, I'm not entirely convinced by this call to philosophical vitalism, either in the original German or English translation (though would have happily painted it on T-shirt when I was nineteen and regarded myself as a punk revolutionary). 

For one thing, I'm not convinced that phlegmatic is synonymous with apathetic; to be cool, calm, and self-possessed isn't quite the same as being without passion - nor, come to that, does it mean one is deadened in some manner, like an unleavened lump of inert matter.

Ulimately, it's just prejudice to ideally equate the love of wisdom with life and the overwrought, overheated world of feeling. For philosophy can, actually, be something entirely other; something alien, something perverse, something inhuman; something as abstract and as beautiful as a solitary snowflake.  

The fact is - contrary to what Walter Pater might say - we don't all wish to burn like a flame or to think always on the edge of ecstasy (though, etymologically - and ironically - phlegmatic means inflammation); some of us want to put ideas on ice for the same reason we like to add ice to our drinks; some of us, indeed, aspire, like Sade, to a condition of apathy that is pleasurable (in a denaturalised and non-Stoic manner) not only beyond good and evil, but beyond hot and cold.

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

Hot Gypsy Girls 2: Esmeralda - Trope Codifier and Fraud

Maureen O'Hara as Esmeralda 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

Esmeralda is the teen Gypsy in Victor Hugo's famous Gothic novel, Notre Dame de Paris (1831). Able to bewitch men of every description, including handsome soldiers, lecherous priests, and hunchbacked bell-ringers with her dancing, she is rarely seen without her faithful goat Djali by her side.

Despite being the codifier for the trope of the Hot Gypsy Girl (i.e., a kind of template that all other examples of the type then follow), Esmeralda is actually something of a fraud. The illegitimate child of a prostitute and a handsome young nobleman, she was of French origin, not Romani. Christened with the name Agnès when born - meaning pure or chaste - she was kidnapped by Gypsies who left the hideously deformed infant Quasimodo in her place.

This explains why even after having grown up amongst the Gypsies, Esmeralda retains an innocence about her; she is more the sweet-natured, kind-hearted ingénue than the worldy young pricktease that her suitors might have expected and hoped for. Her swaggering, hand-on-hip sluttishness is always countered by her innate virtue.

And, ironically, as with Sade's Justine, it's her virtue that leads to her misfortune and an untimely death upon the scaffold for a crime she didn't commit. A canny young Gypsy girl would never have got herself into such a compromised - and fatal - situation; never have allowed herself to be the hapless victim of men and circumstance (even if, as a Romani, she'd happily be a lover of fate). And a true Hot Gypsy Girl would never go the gallows wearing a white dress; she'd be defiantly dressed in gold and scarlet for sure!

No wonder then that Disney were able to so easily co-opt the figure of Esmeralda and turn this faux-Gypsy girl into a caring-sharing social justice warrior, whose greatest wish was to see social outcasts like Quasimodo and persecuted ethnic minorities like the Romani accorded equal rights (something almost guaranteed to make male viewers lose their erections). 

To read part one of this post - On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women - click here.

To read part three of this post - On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher - click here. 

On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)

I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:

"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."

Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...


I: On Faciality

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.

In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.

And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:

"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."

Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this. 


II: Becoming-Imperceptible

For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.   

Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).

It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.

I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".

To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming  - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?       

Notes

Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'

Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91. 

Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.    

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Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part I)

Marilyn being pleasured by James Joyce

The Pleasure of the Text, published two years after 'From Work to Text', clearly picks up from where the latter left off. It offers us not a poetics, but an erotics of reading. And, also, a challenge to all forms of moral asceticism and militancy which have no time for sensual pleasure and despise the body. Barthes explained to an interviewer at the time:

"I felt that today’s intellectual language was submitting too easily to moralizing imperatives that eliminated all notion of enjoyment, of bliss. In reaction, I wanted therefore to reintroduce this word [pleasure] within my personal range, to lift its censorship, to unblock it, to un-repress it." [1991]

This, actually, was quite a daring thing to do and it lost Barthes many friends and supporters (even as it won him a new, wider readership). I suspect that a lot of the continued hostility aimed towards postmodern approaches to literature and to life is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and concern themselves with pleasure. Nothing enrages the puritan more than this - unless it's logical inconsistency and The Pleasure of the Text opens by imagining a figure who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1990].

Over the course of some 46 fragments spread over 67 pages and arranged alphabetically by title (i.e. arbitrarily), Barthes speaks in favour of such an anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. And he reveals him to be "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure" [1990].

But for Barthes there are two types of pleasure; the pleasure of the text, which he terms jouissance and the pleasure of the work, for which he uses the common word plaisir. Of course, there is no absolute distinction between them and Barthes freely admits that his use of such an opposition is here, as elsewhere, purely provisional and strategic:

"The opposition 'pleasure/bliss' is one of those voluntary artificial oppositions for which I’ve always had a certain predilection. ... These oppositions shouldn’t be taken literally; for example, by asking if such and such a text belongs to the order of pleasure or of bliss. These oppositions are intended above all to clear more ground, to make headway - just to talk and write." [1991]

But, having said that, Barthes does then qualify this statement by adding: "the difference between the two words is still quite real ..." [1991]. What, then, is this real difference?

In ‘From Work to Text’ Barthes puts it this way:

"Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work ... I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac ... But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them ... and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works ... As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation." [1977]

Throughout The Pleasure of the Text he expands upon and plays with this distinction, using a libidinally material and perverse language of gay desire; words such as cruise, for example, coming to prominence. The language used is also significantly informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, famously, the unconscious is structured like a language and the subject - thought of primarily as a desiring subject - is perpetually seeking out the lost object of their desire. As Mireille Ribière writes:

"The prime function of language, and hence literature, is to signify this fundamental sense of loss. Therefore, desire is the force that drives reader and writer endlessly to go from signifier to signifier in search of fulfilment and pleasure."

The most erotic aspect of a text, for Barthes, is not found in any sexual description or pornographic representation as such, but in the language deployed and the very structure of sentences. This is what he loves most about the writings of Sade for example; the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from the fact that not only does he bring together different types of writing and create many new words and concepts, but that "pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models" [1990]. Emphasizing the erotic aspect of jouissance, Barthes concludes his fragment on Sade:

"The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss."
[1990]

What Barthes is excited by then, is the thought of a limit or of an edge between two terms and the pathos of distance (or break) between them. He doesn’t want the destruction of culture or of narrative; he wants these things to be taken to the point at which they are lost and we too lose ourselves in some manner.

Can classic works promise us this experience of bliss or are they strictly tied to a form of pleasure which simply reaffirms cultural convention and our sense of self? Barthes, often thought of as a champion of the nouveaux roman, surprisingly still seems to have a lot of time for the works of the great 19thC authors. For he suggests that if we read them in a writerly manner - unconcerned with the integrity of the text - and at our own pace or rhythm - bypassing those passages or pages which we find boring - then we may yet find them newly pleasurable: "Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again." [1990]

Of course, this has "nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself" [1990], but it does mean that we can develop an approach to literature which allows us still to read a work like War and Peace without nodding-off and having the book fall from our hands. Ironically, the only way to read the more avant-garde texts is to go slowly and carefully through them in a leisurely, aristocratic manner. Try to read a novel by Philippe Sollers or Maurice Blanchot quickly and it will become "inaccessible to your pleasure" [1990].

And so, to reiterate, we have two types of text: the text of pleasure that "comes from culture and does not break with it", linked to a "comfortable practice of reading" [1990]; and the text of bliss that "imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ... unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language" [1990].

The reader can thus enjoy the satisfaction of plaisir which guarantees their subjective consistency, or the promise of its loss via jouissance.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977).

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To go to part two of this post click here.

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

On the Metaphysics of the Soul Contra the Aesthetics of Existence

In the end, as a philosopher, one has a choice to make: to concern oneself either with inner being, or outer beauty; the metaphysics of the soul, or the aesthetics of existence. 

Of course, it may be that these questions are constantly linked. But there is no necessary relationship; rather, it's contingent and variable. Thus, push comes to shove, one is obliged to think the care of self primarily as a question of ontology, or as a question of style; two very different projects, even if they have a common starting point and common goal (what is known as the good life). 

Broadly speaking, those who choose to be soulful naturally tend towards mysticism and notions of God and immortality. They often allow their asceticism to flourish negatively as a contempt for the body and things belonging to the material world and this is why they frequently end up badly dressed, marginalized from society and prone to violent fundamentalism. Like Jesus or Osama Bin Laden.    

Those who choose to be stylish, on the other hand, tend towards materialism and notions of artifice and superficiality; they have no time for thinking about the soul when there are flowers to look at, wardrobes to furnish, and bodies to penetrate. However, they often allow their cynicism and irony to make them apathetic, which is why they can end up looking good, but devoid of feeling or enthusiasm, and this can make them attracted to cruelty and perversion. Like Sade or Dorian Gray.

There are dangers, therefore, in either affirming the soul as an ontological reality distinct from physical existence, or affirming the latter - bios - as something to be shaped and disciplined according to a set of elaborate procedures. But each attempt to account for the self takes a certain courage; those who choose to live in desert caves are not to be sneered at, but nor are those who prefer to practice their philosophy either in the bedroom or on the catwalk.

Having said that, I obviously prefer the libertine or the dandy and their modality of truth-telling, to the prophet or holy fool who would sacrifice the entire world for the sake of saving his own precious soul.        

         

Everything Ends in Shit

Salvador Dali: The Lugubrious Game (1929)

Unlike Bataille, obsessed with making an all-out assault upon human dignity and aesthetics in the name of a base materialism, I don't feel compelled as a thinker to become-porcine and to dig deep into forms of heterogeneous matter with my snout in order to uproot everything with repugnant voracity.

I don't even want to toss rose petals like the Marquis de Sade into a madhouse latrine. In other words, I'm not what André Breton would describe as an excremental philosopher.

But, having said that, one is obliged to concede that everything ends in shit; life terminating as a shipwreck in the nauseous.       

Sandals

Young girls in strappy Greco-Roman style sandals: what excites the most; the bareness of the feet, or the tightness of the binding?

Or perhaps it's the fantasy of owning slaves. For desire can quickly negate liberalism and every erection makes despotic.  

Pegging

Many heterosexual men are disconcerted by the thought of a woman with a dildo. For not only can she penetrate herself with such, but she can penetrate them. Only with great reluctance would they submit to a partner with a strap-on who challenges conventional notions of who does what to whom. 

Their unease is related not just to the homophobic fear of accepting a cock into their anus (albeit a rubber one), but also to the wider concern with passivity which, in the male mind, is often thought of as humiliating and castrating. 

It's an old problem: one that greatly troubled the ancient Greeks. But Sade laughs at such moral anxiety and prejudice, insisting that not only are both classes of intercourse - active and passive - perfectly legitimate, but that it is the latter which ultimately affords the greatest pleasure: since one enjoys at a single stroke the sensations of before and behind.

How Even Sade Becomes Boring

Marquis de Sade by Delphine Lebourgeois   

Sade asks of his readers precisely what he asked of his countrymen: one more effort in order to achieve an unprecedented level of freedom. His work is thus a call for permanent revolution and self-overcoming. And, arguably, within the mad dialogue that he constructed between love and death, Sade not only made good his own escape from captivity, but opened up a line of flight for us all. 

However, as Foucault points out, in a sense Sade doesn't go far enough and he remains at last a transitional figure shaped by the Age of Reason, even as he points a way beyond it. Thus whilst he succeeded in introducing the frenzy of desire into a world dominated by law and order and made evil attractive to us, he remained trapped within certain conventions of thought.

So it is that Sade's pornographic fantasies of crime and cruelty begin to bore us and we ask of his texts what Lawrence once asked of all those works that forever turn on an ideal of transgression: 'If we can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees, however are we going to live?'  

Fragments of Remembrance

Gathered here are six little fragments of text written in remembrance of authors who have, at one time or another, meant something special to me. Arguably, they might be read as an attempt to bear witness to the uniqueness of the relationship that one has with the writers and the books that one loves. And, indeed, with the dead.

Not that these somewhat incomplete and unfinished verses constitute anything so grand as a poetry or a politics of mourning. In writing them, I think I simply (and at the risk of banality) wanted to record an affection, rather than produce art or pass judgement.

In Memory of Anaïs Nin 

Many types of flow - of madness and literature, desire and disintegration - 

traversed the queer forest of her body in which gay little birds twittered 

obscenely and dark poppies blossomed.

In Memory of Henry Miller

A boy from Brooklyn: a pornographer: a mystic.

A son-of-a-bitch quoting Nietzsche in an East Coast accent,
whilst parading round Paris with a personal hard-on like the
happiest man alive.

In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche

Bones, a few biographical details, the odd photograph,

and a small number of books: the remains of a dead

philosopher.

And yet he is more alive now, in death,
than he was in life, having become that
posthumous individual he said he would.

And this childless man is today father to us all.


In Memory of Sylvia Plath

I do not like the English summer, unfolded
into green completion and the smugness of
strawberries and cream.

Intolerable the seasonal stupidity of the natives;
one yearns for the first breath of autumn and
the fresh reassurance of rain.

Even, like a spinster, I long for winter,
so scrupulously austere.

In Memory of Marinetti

When I think of Marinetti
hurling defiance at the stars
beneath a violent electric moon,

I think of a bald-headed little man
in a bow-tie masturbating whilst
erect on the summit of the world.

Instinctively, one can't help but smile
at how quickly this ludicrous lover
of the machine and the manifesto
became passé.


In Memory of the Marquis de Sade

A monster, say his jailers.
Perhaps.

But, if so, then a monster of generosity
and good will, in whose name sex and
death entwine to produce a singular
form of love.

Notes on the Lolita Case

Lolita, it is often said, is a beautiful book about an ugly thing. Nabokov writes in a manner so as to groom and demoralize his readers, making us complicit in the crimes that the novel describes. Thus, as Martin Amis says, Lolita leaves us 'ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent'.

But just what is it that we say Yes to: deceit, murder, and child abuse; or simply to the event of literature?

It's arguable that, ultimately, we are encouraged to say Yes to all of the above - and to everything - as belonging to what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole. For the world is as it is and the strongest individuals are those who not only accept it, but affirm it, as it is; embracing the tragic character of life and loving fate.

That said, from somewhere comes a growing dislike for Humbert Humbert and an increased sympathy not only for the girl-child, but for her mother, the Haze woman. One doesn't want to become John Ray Jr., full of paper mâché pieties, but perhaps Richard Rorty might have a point when he suggests that Humbert is a monster not only of perversity and of cruelty, but of incuriosity. 

That is to say, Humbert is not merely nymphet-desiring, but intensely self-obsessed and self-idealizing; he is very little interested in the thoughts and feelings of others, even those he claims to love. Thus, writes Rorty, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, the novel does have a moral in tow:

"But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you they are suffering." 

                                           - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CUP, 1989), p. 164. 

(Of course, Sade might well point out that there is no good reason why someone else's suffering should in any way infringe upon or prevent one's own pleasure; indeed, it might usefully serve to heighten the latter. Or, as Nietzsche would say: pain is not an argument.)