Prince, Oh Prince of Darkness: Notes on the Case of Peter Mandelson

Lord Peter Mandelson 

(The Prince of Darkness) 

 

'He who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is also the King of Light, knows nothing ...'  

 

 

I. 

 

The Prince of Darkness is a term used in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) [1], referring to Satan as the embodiment of evil. 

 

It is an English translation of the Latin phrase princeps tenebrarum, which occurs in the Gospel of Nicodemus (aka the Acts of Pilate), thought to have been written in the 4th or 5th century. 

 

It is, in my view, by far the loveliest of Satan's titles - much nicer than Lord of the Flies - one which makes the Devil sound like a true gentleman [2], whereas Beelzebub suggests some sort of exalted dustman.

 

The Prince of Darkness, however, is also one of the nicknames given to the Labour Party politician, lobbyist and diplomat, Peter Mandelson, who - as many readers will know - is back in the headlines at the moment ...

 

 

II. 

 

Mandelson's long (and hugely successful) career has famously been marked by controversy, which resulted in his twice resigning from the Cabinet and recently being dismissed as British Ambassador to the United States, after a scandal emerged concerning his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier and convicted child sex offender who died, in somewhat fishy circumstances, whilst in his prison cell, in 2019 [3].    

 

To be honest, before this latest scandal I knew very little about Mandelson (and cared even less). But now, knowing a bit more, I find I'm increasingly sympathetic; I certainly prefer him to Starmer, whether or not he passed on sensitive government information to Epstein and whether or not he's a corrupt moral monster of some sort.     

 

In fact, for me there's something a bit Wildean about Mandelson, as well as something diabolical. For like Wilde, Mandelson is outrageously reckless in the face of danger and forever flirting with scandal (behaviour driven, I'm told by a friend of mine who knows about this sort of thing, by a combination of psychological factors, including arrogance, hubris, and a belief in his own exceptionality).  

 

 

III.

 

Of course, I'm by no means the first to feel this way about Mandelson (to be taken in by his seductive charm, if you like).  

 

Way back in 2001, the innovation expert and social policy consultant Charles Leadbeater wrote a piece in The Guardian on his friend Mandelson, whom, he said, was an inspired political visionary who enriches British public life.   

 

Mandelson, Leadbeater continued, could think outside the box and had the "stamina, professionalism and attention to detail" [4] to push through significant change: "He made things happen when many around him simply talked. He was not afraid to take on fights when more cautious and calculating souls cowered." [5] 

 

Conceding that Mandelson has certain character flaws - including vanity and arrogance - Leadbeater points out that this is true of most politicians. And so, what if he likes the high life and his head is too easily turned by the rich and famous - at least he isn't boring and he dares to be different:

 

"That is why I like and support Peter Mandelson. In a political class marked by its limited imagination, Peter had the capacity not just to think big, but to deliver as well. He dared to stand up and stand out. Now he has been hammered back into place. The Oscar Wilde of modern politics, he embraced the establishment and challenged convention in the same movement. Those who were unsettled by his daring are the ones celebrating this weekend." [6]

 

That is a paragraph which is both uncannily resonant and extraordinarily pertinent to the present discussion of the Mandelson case.   

 

 

IV.  

 

In closing, I would like to refer readers to a spoof piece in The Daily Mash informing us that as well as losing his government post and stepping down from the House of Lords, Mandelson "will no longer be referred to as the Prince of Darkness or enjoy the benefits of the title [...] because he is a terrible representative of Satanism and the hellish underworld" [7].  

 

Continuing in the same satirical manner, the article quotes a spokesman who confirms that Mandelson has "disgraced the good name of the Devil" [8] by fawning over Epstein, rather than fulfilling his public duty of challenging God's authority and leading others into temptation. Thus, from now on Mandelson will no longer be able to possess souls, "shapeshift, or control the dead" [9].  

 

Notes

 

[1] See Book 10, line 383: click here to read online (The John Milton Reading Room).   

 

[2] See Shakespeare's King Lear (1606), Act III, scene IV, line 151: "The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman." Click here to read online (Folger Shakespeare Library). 

 

[3] Mandelson's friendship with Epstein, which had been publicly known about for some years, spanned at least from 2002 to 2011 (i.e., it had continued even after Epstein's 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a minor).

 

[4-6] Charles Leadbeater, 'My friend the political visionary', in The Guardian (28 Jan 2001): click here.  

 

[7-9] See the article 'Peter Mandelson stripped of Prince of Darkness title', in The Daily Mash (6 Feb 2026): click here.  

 

Musical bonus: Bow Wow Wow performing their 1981 single 'Prince of Darkness' on German TV: click here to watch on YouTube (80s Rec.)

 

 

Queer as Punk

A punk bromance: Sid 💘 Johnny

 

'Punk is a challenge to reconsider everything you do, think or feel; 

including the ways that you love.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In the second volume of his memoirs - Anger is an Energy  (2014) - Johnny Rotten flatly denies the persistent rumour that he and Vicious, unlike Cook and Jones, were more than just good friends ... 

 

Perhaps one reason why this romantic myth continues to resonate is because before becoming a term used by the media to identify a form of rock music that emerged in the 1970s, the word punk had a long subcultural history rooted in illicit and deviant sexual activity.   

 

In the 16th century, for example, it was used by writers including Shakespeare as a synonym for a female prostitute and spelt rather charmingly as puncke [2]. By the late 17th century, however, it had taken on a different meaning and described a youth who is provided for by an older man in exchange for certain favours. 

 

This queer [3] etymology takes on renewed significance when one recalls the story of the Sex Pistols; an anarchic collective held together with safety pins and bondage straps which included a far wider and more diverse group of people than the actual members of the band [4]. 

 

The teens who spent their time hanging around 430 King's Road challenged heteronormative values with their behaviour, attitude, and appearance; cheerfully wearing T-shirts designed by McLaren and Westwood which included images drawn from gay porn, including homosexual cowboys, nude adolescents, and well-endowed American footballers [5].     

And so, whilst both Rotten and Vicious were for the most part straight in terms of their sexual orientation, their emphasis on non-conformity, free expression, and open acceptance of gay culture - the band and their followers would often socialise in the early days at a lesbian member's club in Soho called Louise's - was positively received within the queer community at that time.    

 

 

II. 

 

Notwithstanding what I say above, I think we should be wary of retrospectively romanticising the story of the Sex Pistols, or imposing contemporary theoretical interpretations concerning queer sexual politics and identities on to the reality of the UK punk scene in the 1970s. I don't want to be the person who says let's stick to the facts at every opportunity, but I would agree that any analysis showing a flagrant disregard for historical accuracy seems of little real value or interest.   

 

Further, as David Wilkinson points out, "once punk is separated from rooted judgement through failure to locate it within a particular conjuncture, its politics can be celebrated as uniformly positive" [6] and that's a problem: the Sex Pistols did not promise to make things better and punk wasn't entirely gay friendly; there remained elements of homophobia within it (just as there did of racism, sexism, and reactionary stupidity).   

Ultimately, for McLaren and Westwood, same-sex passion was seen as something with which to confront and discomfort the English; they wished to weaponise it, not promote gay liberation or simply camp things up for the fun of it: 

"Given [their] positioning of same-sex passion as alienated, perverse and violent, it is unsurprising that McLaren and Westwood not only seemed to have little interest in the radically transformative aims of gay liberation, but were also prone to homophobic gestures that were calculated to shock in their contempt of even reformist demands for respect, understanding and openness." [7]

 

Ultimately, as Wilkinson says, McLaren and Westwood's "was an idiosyncratic, peculiarly hybrid kind of politics, especially in relation to sexuality" [8]; one based on the radical understanding of desire as "an instinctive, irrational force capable of disrupting social norms once unanchored from the private sphere" [9], but they weren't interested in how to further loving relationships, same-sex or otherwise.   

 

And as for Johnny and Sid, for better or worse, they were more romantically fixated on Nora and Nancy than one another.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing Pete Shelley writing in the second issue of his self-produced punk fanzine Plaything (1978): click here. 

 

[2] Shakespeare used the word, for example, in Measure for Measure (1603-04), where Lucio suggests that since Mariana is 'neither maid, widow, nor wife', she may 'be a Puncke’ (Act 5, scene 1).

[3] I am using this term here as one that includes same-sex desire, but which is not synonymous with such. If it were up to me, as someone who finds the empty secret of non-identity philosophically more interesting than the open secret of same-sex desire, I would restrict use of the word queer to refer to forms of practice and behaviour that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender. 

      See the post of 16 March 2025, in which I discuss the term: click here. 

[4] When I think of the Sex Pistols, I certainly don't just think of Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, and Johnny Rotten, but also of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid, Jordan, Soo Catwoman, Helen of Troy, and various members of the so-called Bromley Contingent. 

 

[5] David Wilkinson makes the important point that these designs "deliberately inhabited dominant understandings of unsanctioned sexuality as perverse, sordid and violent in order to provoke a reaction" and that McLaren and Westwood were not consciously offering a set of alternative values. 

      See Wilkinson's excellent essay 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have?): Punk, Politics and Same-Sex Passion', in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, No. 13 (2015), pp. 57-76. The line quoted from is on p. 64. 

 

[6] David Wilkinson, ibid., p. 59.

[7] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 62.

 

[9] Ibid., p. 63.  

Musical bonus: Tom Robinson Band, 'Glad to be Gay', from the EP Rising Free (EMI Records, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Festina Lente: Or How An Artist Can Learn to Be Quick Even When Standing Still

Festina lente - a design by the famous Renaissance period 

printer and publisher Aldus Manutius, featuring a dolphin 

curled round an anchor

I.

 

A recent post on the politics of accelerationism contra slowness - click here - seems to have caused a degree of confusion amongst one or two readers. 

 

So, just to be clear: whilst suggesting that it might restore a degree of sovereignty to hop off the bus headed nowhere fast and take it easy while the world goes crazy [1], I'm not advocating a politics or a philosophy of inertia. 

 

For inertia not only implies unmoving but also unchanging and my thinking is closely tied to an idea of difference and becoming, not remaining essentially the same or having a fixed identity. 

 

Further, I'm of the view that quickness has nothing to do with running around like a headless chicken; that one can, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, "be quick, even when standing still" [2], just as one can journey in intensity without travelling round the globe like a tourist.

 

 

II.

 

Of course, this isn't a particularly new idea. 

 

One might recall the Classical Latin adage: festina lente, meaning make haste slowly [3]; a saying which has been adopted as a personal motto by everyone from Roman emperors to American sports coaches, via members of the Medici family and the Cuban Communist Party.  

 

Lovers of Shakespeare will know that the Bard frequently alluded to this idea in his work; as did the 17th century French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine in his famous fable (adapted from Aesop's original) concerning a hare and tortoise (the latter being praised for his wisdom in hastening slowly).   

 

My only concern with this is that moralists see making haste slowly as a matter of policy; i.e. a form of prudent conduct that protects one from making mistakes and as someone who values error and imperfection and failure - who sees these things as crucial to the making of challenging art, for example - that's problematic (to say the least).     

 

 

III.

 

And so I return to Deleuze and Guattari, because their rhizomatic idea of being quick, even whilst standing still, is not one that can be used to negate the creation of radically new art ...

 

According to the above, a painting, for example, is an assemblage of lines, shapes, colours, textures, and movements that "produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture" [4]. In other words, just as it's formed from different material elements, so too is it made up of different speeds and comparative rates of flow.      

   

And sometimes, these things converge on a plane of consistency [5] - but that's not to say the composition is ever perfect or free from error; nor that the artist who, purely out of habit and convention, signs their name on the work has succeeded and can now sit back and admire their own canvas. 

 

A painting is never really finished and whilst I can sympathise with artists who are often gripped with the urge to destroy their own pictures, I have never really understood those who place their canvases in golden frames and are genuinely pleased to see them hanging on a gallery wall.    

 

If an artist wishes to be quick, even when standing still, then, according to Deleuze and Guattari, they must learn to paint to the nth degree and that means (amongst other things) making maps not just preliminary drawings, and coming and going from the middle where things pick up speed, rather than attempting to start from the beginning and finish at the end (something that implies a false conception of movement) [6].  

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referencing here a lyric from the Killing Joke song 'Kings and Queens', released as a single from the album Night Time (E.G. Records, 1985).

 

[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 24. 

[3]  This Latin phrase is translated from the Classical Greek σπεῦδε βραδέως (speûde bradéōs). 

[4] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus ... p. 4. 

[5] In art, composition refers to the arrangement and organisation of various elements within a work to create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing whole. 

      But by a plane of consistency, Deleuze and Guattari refer to something that opposes this and which consists only in the "relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements" [ATP 507]; there is no finality or unification. A plane of consistency, therefore, doesn't aim to produce aesthetic pleasure, so much as open up a zone of indeterminacy and a continuum of intensity upon which new thoughts and feelings can unfold and interact without being constrained by pre-existing ideas and emotions. 

      In sum: it's a kind of virtual realm of infinite possibilities. See the post dated 23 May 2013 in which I discuss this and related ideas with reference to Deleuze and Guattari's fourth and final book together, What Is Philosophy? - click here. 

 

[6] See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus ... pp. 24-25.

Eye of the Tiger

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ...[1]

 

 

It's disconcerting enough when Phoevos the cat sits and stares at me, particulary if naked like Derrida [2], so it must be almost unimaginably awkward (and significantly more frightening) to be caught in the gaze of a tiger ...

 

I'm told that thanks to a mirror-like structure behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum their night vision is far superior to ours, but that they don't see such a wide range of colours. It's movement that catches their attention and shape that they focus on; not hues, tints, and tones. But then, tigers are primarly concerned with stalking prey, not admiring the chromatic splendour of their environment. 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence, who knows a good few things on the subject of animal vision, the tiger is, in a sense, almost blind to the rest of the world, absorbed as it is in its own fullness of being:

 

"The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so fierce that the other warm light of the day is outshone, it is not, it does not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its terrifying sightlessness." [3]   

 

The tiger, inasmuch as it sees us at all, sees nothing but a rather insubstantial meal. The superior being which we like to think we are, is rendered null and void; we are almost hollow in his eyes, like animated scarecrows, or, at best, creatures that have lost their healthy animal reason [4]:

"It can only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a running of hot blood between its teeth, a delicious pang of live flesh in the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not." [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, scene 4, line 94.

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008). 

      In this work, Derrida discusses his experience of being stared at by his cat, Logos, whilst undressed. He describes a sense of discomfort - even shame - of being gazed upon in his all too human nakedness and all too naked humanity. 

      See also the post on TTA dated 5 Jan 2018 entitled 'When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)': click here.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.

 

[4] I'm thinking here of a famous section in Nietzsche's, The Gay Science (III. 224), where he writes: 

      "I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal." 

      This is Walter Kaufmann's translation of the original German text (Vintage Books, 1974), p. 211. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy ... p. 118.

      Readers interested in what else Lawrence writes about tigers, might like to see the post on TTA dated 4 Oct 2023: click here. Although not one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being.

On the Philosophical Comeback

jakelikesonions.com / @jakelikesonions 

 

 

 

In philosophy, as in comedy, there have been many great comebacks, ranging from the retort courteous and the quip modest to the reply churlish and countercheck quarrelsome, to borrow, if I may, some of the seven categories humorously established by Shakesepeare in As You Like It [1].

 

Personally, I've always liked Karl Popper's response when challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule: Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers [2]. It's an amusing and (a quite literally) disarming response; Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out the room after Popper delivered this zinger.

 

But I think my favourite debate-ending comeback involving philosophers is one reported on by Nicholas Blincoe and involves Nick Land leaving a fellow member of the faculty at the University of Warwick speechless when confronted by his inhumanism:

 

"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick's first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: 'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'" [3]

You can't argue with that. 

 

Nor can you come to any kind of agreement with a thinker like Land, who, of course, gave up on that idea a long time ago. Like Deleuze and Guattari - and to his credit - Land is more concerned with the creation of provocative concepts rather than entering into interminable discussion [4].    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Act V, scene IV.  

[2] See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (HarperCollins, 2001). 

[3] Nicholas Blincoe, 'Nick Land: the Alt-writer', in Prospect (18 May 2017): click here.

[4] See what Deleuze and Guattari say about genuine philosophers having a horror of discussion in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 28-29. 

What Was I Thinking? (2 June)

Images used for posts published on this date 

in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2023

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm still busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring and now even the style and content of which is giving me a real headache, it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material.

 

And so, let's time travel and reminisce ...

 

 

The Museum of Failed Products 

 

I always thought this post published in 2014 concerning the fact that the vast majority of new consumer products - just like the vast majority of species - are destined to fail, was an amusing if somewhat poignant post, concluding as it does that just as the marketplace can do without yoghurt shampoo or breakfast cola, so too can the universe do without us. 

 

 

Breast Ironing 

 

In June 2015, I wrote about the attempt to suppress the growth of healthy breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this moral shaping of the flesh is carried out in the name of Love; i.e., it's a bad act performed with good intentions - just like the equally disgusting practice of FGM. 

 

Unfortunately, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism we now have both these things in the UK.  

 

 

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

 

Skip a couple of years forward, to 2017, and I was back in Berlin of the 1920s and early '30s ...

 

For many people, Cabaret (1972) - dir. Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli and Sally Bowles - is a near-perfect film musical; one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. 

 

For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre. 

 

Or, as Susan Sontag writes in her famous 1975 essay, there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.  

In Praise of Denial

 

Skip forward another 24 months to 2019, and I discussed my favourite line from Shakespeare - I know thee not, old man ... (Henry IV Part 2, Act 5 scene 5) - arguing that the need to deny our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves, is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.

 

Why? Because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused. 

 

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

 

 

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

 

 

2 June 2020: what was I thinking? 

 

Apparently, about German philosophers and marine reptiles ...

 

For Schopenhauer, life is a manifestation of a hungry will; concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species - including sea turtles, wild dogs, and tigers - caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

 

Life is thus not only absurd, it is often atrociously cruel and grotesquely violent. And those who imagine that the earth would be some kind of peaceful paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether, are very much mistaken. 

Sometimes, Better a Dead Mountain Lion Than a Live Dog 

Finally, last year, a post about German born, New York based artist and Wunderfrau Heide Hatry and her latest muse and family member; a stuffed puma called Luna - proving that the author of Ecclesiastes who insisted better a living dog than a dead lion was not always right. 

 

For sometimes, as Ms. Hatry knows, it is the deceased who have something vital to teach us. Which is why her long fascination with corpses has often resulted in work of great insight and macabre beauty. 

 

 

The Grievance Collector

 

Unfortunately, there's a personality type in the world known as a grievance collector ... [1]

 

The grievance collector remembers every detail of every last slight or misfortune they have suffered (even those that have a purely imaginary origin) and they know precisely who to blame. 

 

Having zero self-awareness, they never stop to consider for one moment that their own venomous nature and toxic behaviour might be responsible for the anger and resentment they feel; they always look to hold others accountable. 

 

The grievance collector doesn't forgive, doesn't forget and never moves on; they wallow in their own victimhood (or stew in their own juices, as my mother would say) and sincerely believe themselves to be, like Lear, "more sinned against than sinning" [2]. 

 

The grievance collector rarely changes their mind; being skilled at the wilful misinterpretation of events and the rejection of evidence that challenges their pre-existing beliefs and opinions, they are confirmed in their own self-righteous bubble of bias and bullshit. 

 

This makes the grievance collector not only contemptuous of others, but wise in their own conceit. Which, in turn, causes them to develop maladaptive patterns of thought and behaviour that disrupt interpersonal relationships. It's not easy being friends with - or a sibling to - someone to whom you can never apologise enough.  

 

Although they mostly stay silent and brood, sometimes the grievance collector can become verbally abusive. And sometimes they will allow their animosity to bubble over into an act of actual violence - the will to revenge motivates them more than a desire to simply right wrongs [3].

Perhaps not surprisingly, if the grievance collector also subscribes to an extreme political or religious ideology, they will often become attracted to terrorism or serial killing. As one expert in this field writes: 

 

"When irrationality, antagonism, and rigidity combine with unyielding overconfidence in their own sentiments, and beliefs go unchecked or are not attenuated, these individuals become metastable - ready to ignite and explode." [4]

 

What then is the best thing to do when confronted by these human tarantulas and time-bombs?

 

Should we lend them a sympathetic ear and attempt to listen more closely to their complaints? I don't think that will make a whole lot of difference, to be honest. 

 

Should we, then, declare war against them; pass judgement and seek to punish or ridicule? Again, I don't think that will help.

 

Probably best we learn from Nietzsche and simply look away ... [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I prefer the phrase grievance collector to wound collector, but I'm aware that whilst the latter is often used synonymously with the former, some authors insist on a distinction. In brief, whilst the grievance collector is seen as weighed down or burdened by all the emotional baggage they carry with them, the wound collector is thought of as suffering from a far more profoundly morbid pathology; someone who likes to inflict actual psychological self-harm and, like Jesus, display their injuries.

 

[2] See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act 3, scene 2.  

 

[3] As Nietzsche says: "No one accuses without an underlying notion of punishment and revenge [...] All complaint is accusation [...] we always make some one responsible." See Human, All Too Human, Vol. II. Pt. 1: 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims', 78.

 

[4] See Joe Navarro, 'On Wound Collectors', in Psychology Today (6 Sept 2015): click here to read online. 

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, §276 where he writes: "I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation."

 

 

Being is Time: Life in the Present Perfect Continuous

Image credit: UCLA / Horvath Lab

 

Somewhat paradoxically, whilst having a minimal sense of self on the one hand, I've always possessed a strong sense of self-continuity through time on the other, and have never really bought into the Shakespearean idea of there being seven distinct ages into which a single life might be neatly divided up [1].

 

Thus, when someone asked in relation to a recent post adapted from the Von Hell Diaries [click here] whether it made me sad to realise that forty years had passed since the events described on 3 October 1982 - or frightened to think that I would soon be passing from middle age to old age - I had to say no, not really.

 

For like Jaz Coleman, time means nothing to me, and whether something happened forty years ago or yesterday, it's all the same to me [2]. I am that unity of past, present and future. That is to say, I understand time not just as something that can be measured by the ticking of a clock, but as fundamental to our being. Indeed, one might even say that being is time.     

 

And unlike the Killing Joke frontman, I don't even have to shut my eyes in order to remember childhood thoughts and feelings; for I still think those thoughts and experience those feelings. In other words, because I live in what might be termed by a grammarian as the present perfect continuous, I've no need to make an imaginative journey back in time, or to dream.      

 

But aren't you worried that you're just stuck in the past?, asks the same interrogator.

 

Again, the answer is not really. 

 

In fact, I'm more concerned - as a philosopher - with the consequences of privileging the present [3] and having a vulgar conception of time in which the past is denigrated as that which we must move on from and leave behind, as if no longer important, when, in fact, not only does the past inform the present, but it awaits us in the future too [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm thinking here of the famous monologue in Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It (1623) which opens with the line "All the world's a stage". However, I'm aware of the fact that this division of human life into a series of stages was a commonplace of art and literature and not something invented by the Bard of Avon. Whilst ancient authors tended to think in terms of three or four such stages, medieval writers liked to think in terms of seven for theological reasons.   

 

[2] I'm quoting from the Killing Joke song 'Slipstream', from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions, (Noise Records, 1990): click here. The track was written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker and Martin Atkins. Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group.

 

[3] I am increasingly sympathetic to thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida who are concerned that the understanding of Being in the metaphysical tradition is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present; i.e., that the present is viewed as more real or immediate than the past or future, with the former seen as merely the 'no-longer-now' and the latter as merely the 'not-yet-now'. 

      This tradition has run all the way from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond; see, for example, Lawrence's 1919 Preface to his New Poems (1918), in which he writes of the incarnate Now as supreme over and above the before and after and of the quivering present as the very quick of Time. For Lawrence, the past and future are mere abstractions from the present; a crystallised remembrance and a crystallised aspiration.

      Lawrence's preface can be found as Appendix I to The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 645-649.      

 

[4] I think Heidegger refers to this ontological baggage in Being and Time (1927) as Gewesenheit (i.e., our been-ness).

 

 

To Hold On or Let Go (Reflections on a Garden Gnome)

Festhalten (SA/2022)

 

 

I. 

 

In a sense, much like the figure pictured above, we are all hanging on for dear life to the great flowerpot that is the world we know and love. 

 

And of course, being able to hold on, hold tight, and hold still is crucial at times. But then, equally crucial, is knowing when and how to let go ... 

 

II. 

 

This question is often addressed by poets and playwrights; most famously by Shakespeare in Hamlet (1603) [1]. 

 

Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence chooses to discuss whether to let go or to hold on not only in terms of the individual, but at the level of the species:

 

 

Must we hold on, hold on

and go ahead with what is human nature

and make a new job of the human world?

 

Or can we let it go?

O, can we let it go,

and leave it to some nature that is more than human

to use the sperm of what's worth while in us

and thus eliminate us?

 

Is the time come for humans

now to begin to disappear,

leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos

to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans

as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus?

 

Must we hold on?

Or can we now let go?

 

Or is it even possible we must do both? [2] 

 

 

That's an amusing additional question to end on - one to which I'm not sure I know the answer: perhaps it is possible; perhaps it isn't. 

 

But maybe the best way to confront the blackmail of an either/or is simply to refuse it like Bartleby; i.e., to choose not to choose as a matter of preference; to understand that when faced by a situation that demands we select one option or the other we can always smile say neither/nor, thank you very much [3].     

 

 

III.

 

Philosophers and religious thinkers have also debated whether man's great goal is self-preservation (holding on) or self-abandonment (letting go). 

 

Nietzsche for example, spoke in an early essay of man as a being who clings on the back of a tiger which empowers but also threatens to devour him [4]. 

 

However, he also writes about the need for man to let go - of the past, of God, of friends, etc. - and discover how to forget (a crucial aspect of innocence as Nietzsche understands the latter); don't be a memory-monger, he says, learn, rather, to love fate (i.e., embrace a kind of non-willing and move towards a state of what Heidegger likes to term Gelassenheit - a mixture of serenity, joyful wisdom, and a sense of release) [5].   

 

That, I suppose, is the vital point; letting go is also a letting be, allowing things to sparkle in their own freedom and mystery.         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring, of course, to the the opening line of the soliloquy given by Prince Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." For earlier refelctions on the verb to be, see the post of 5 August 2022: click here.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'To let go or to hold on -?', in The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 372-73. Note that this is not the full poem reproduced here; there are five other stanzas before these closing verses.

[3] Having said that, I'm not a great fan of Herman Melville's figure of Bartleby the Scrivener; see what I write in the post published on 31 January 2013: click here. 

[4] See Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 80. I discuss this idea in a post published on 23 September 2020: click here.

 

[5] Heidegger borrowed the term Gelassenheit from Meister Eckhart and the Christian mystical tradition. He first elaborated the idea in a 1959 work which included two texts: Gelassenheit and Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken. An English translation of the latter was first published in 1966 as "Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking". It can now be found as Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010). 

      For a post published on 24 February 2021 in which I discuss the idea of Gelassenheit in relation to the Money Calm Bull: click here.    

 

 

In Praise of Denial

Mike Brennan: Denial 

(Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30")

mikebrennan.me

It will surprise no one to discover that Shakespeare is the most oft-quoted of all English writers.

Whilst it's probably impossible even for literary scholars to definitively say what his greatest lines are, the good people at No Sweat Shakespeare have kindly provided a list of 50 famous quotes, beginning with To be, or not to be and ending with What light through yonder window breaks.*

It's not the worst list in the world, but it's hardly an imaginative or controversial selection. And, what's more, it doesn't include my own favourite line from Shakespeare: I know thee not, old man ...

This line, from Act 5 Scene 5 of Henry IV, Part 2, has particular resonance to me at this time and deserves much greater critical attention, because the need to deny - our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves - is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.** 

Prince Hal, upon assuming the crown and becoming king, knew it; Zarathustra, who instructs his followers that they must ultimately lose all masters and learn to hate their friends, knew it; and even Jesus, who accepted the kiss from Judas and predicted Peter's triple denial, knew it.

Indeed, Christ himself denied his own mother, when he notoriously put the question to her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? As a reader of Lawrence, I have long viewed this remark made to Mary as a sign of failure. But now - in the position of a long term, full-time carer for an elderly mother with dementia - I'm rather more sympathetic.

That is to say, I'm tempted - in order to preserve my own health and sanity - to turn my back and walk away, because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused.  

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

There is even, we might suggest, an existential imperative to sell out (i.e., to compromise one's integrity and betray one's principles); not necessarily for personal gain, but in order to leap into the future and carry forward the banner of life. A creative individual must repudiate the familiarity of the past (including old relationships) if he or she is to adventure onward into the unknown.

But this isn't easy: far easier to martyr oneself and to shrivel away inside an old life; a victim of that moral poison and great depressant called pity.  

Notes

 
* Readers interested in the full list of quotes provided by No Sweat Shakespeare should click here.

** Obviously, I'm not talking about denial here in psychological terms, i.e., as a coping mechanism used to avoid confronting an emotionally disturbing truth, or denialism in the political sense of denying historical or scientific fact.

The line from Jesus can be found in John 2:1-5 and the line from Nietzsche in The Gay Science, IV. 307.

Paul Morel and Knife Crime

Susan Catherine Waters
Young Boy with a Pocket-Knife

I.

According to Professor Woody Caan, experience of bullying or victimisation at an early age is the root cause of knife and gun crime. In other words, many teens carry weapons for self-protection; not because they want to feel powerful and intimidate others, or are inherently attracted to a criminal lifestyle. 

Thus, the best way to prevent stabbings and shootings by angry, but often frightened youths, says the professor, is to invest in effective anti-bullying policies and cultures that do not breed hate and insecurity within primary schools. Make children of six and seven feel loved and safe in their environments and they'll not feel the need to arm themselves as adolescents. 


II.

Such liberal idealism seems a little naive to me. However, the idea that bullying results in a desire to arm oneself and perhaps seek revenge upon thugs who think it funny to threaten and humilate others whom they deem to be weaker or more vulnerable, finds support in the following scene involving a 13-year-old Paul Morel (the protagonist of D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers).

Paul has a passion for foreign languages and literature. But he doesn't like sports and refuses to compete in anything: "'I don't care whether I'm first or last. I don't care whether [everybody] does things better than me. What does it matter?'"

As Lawrence notes, this "modern and decadent contempt for action separated him from the mass of boys" and made him a prime target for bullying. Paul had a few friends, but the rest "regarded him coldly, with hostility, or contempt", thinking him aloof and somewhat effeminate, with his fancy ways and fancy clothes.

In an astonishing passage, that betrays the fact that, although exceedingly gentle, Paul is full of the molten hot potential for murderous violence, Lawrence writes:  

"Once, the bully faction, which he scorned, avoiding them [...] were set upon him because of the respect or consideration shown him by one of the teachers. They attacked him first with the sleering, coarse abuse of a gang in cry. He made no answer, merely looked away. Meanwhile his heart was boiling with hate. Then they took offence at the bow of black ribbon his mother tied him for a tie. The biggest bully tore it off. Another ripped his collar.

      Paul did not move, only stiffen his back against the tugs on his clothing. He did not speak, nor moved a muscle of his face, only his eye like a mad thing's flashed from neck to neck of the bullies.
      'If,' he said over and over again in his heart, 'If I had a knife, I would stick it there, and there, and there,' glancing his eye from throat to throat, looking always at the big vein. 'If I had a knife, if I had a knife -'

      Then, as he imagined the difficulty of pulling a knife out to strike the next blow, the delay thereof, he changed his glance, looked intensely between the eyebrows of the lads, whose faces he saw not.
      'If I had a revolver - there, there, there,' he counted in a flash, 'with five chambers, I would blow their brains out, one after the other.'

      He chose the spot, felt his fingers stiffen to the trigger.
      'Though,' he said to himself, 'I'd rather have the knife, to strike, to strike in their necks.'"


What this tells us, amongst other things, is that the will to violence and urge to kill is nothing new in teenage boys and that if pushed too far too often - or called upon to protect their friends or family members - even the meekest or most docile of creatures will retaliate or seek revenge:

The smallest worm will turn being trodden on, 
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Paul Morel, ed. Helen Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 55.

This early draft of Sons and Lovers is quite different from the final version of the novel published in 1913. There's more humour, but also more violence and nervous energy. It also contains episodes - like the one here, based on Lawrence's own childhood experience - that were eventually discarded.  

Woody Caan (Professorial Fellow, Royal Society for Public Health), writing in a letter on knife crime published in The Guardian (18 Jan 2018): click here to read online.

Note: the lines at the end are - of course - from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Pt. 3 (Act II, Scene 2). 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here. 

Xanthippe

I: The Nietzschean View of Marriage

Nietzsche famously declares that all great philosophers are instinctive bachelors who dislike marriage as well as that which might persuade them into it. For a free spirit, the prospect of settling down to a domestic life with a little woman by their side and a pair of slippers by the bed is anathema. They dream of living on mountain top or in those unexplored realms of dangerous knowledge. Home sweet home strikes them as a kind of cosy prison built in the name of Love. 

And Nietzsche even provides us with a convenient list of unmarried philosophers to prove his point; a list that includes Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer - and, of course - himself. None of these thinkers ever wed and, what's more, it's almost impossible to imagine them married.

A philosopher who has tied the knot, concludes Nietzsche, belongs to comedy - as the case of Socrates proves. Whether the latter wed ironically in order to demonstrate this point, as Nietzsche claims, I don't know. But the fact is, Socrates - an undoubtedly great philosopher - did marry and I'd like to say a few words about his wife ...

II: The Blonde Horse

Xanthippe was an Athenian from a possibly noble (certainly privileged) family, who, despite her name, is believed to have had flaming red hair. She was also much younger than her husband, to whom she bore three sons. Plato portrays her in the Phaedo as a devoted wife and mother, but she is described in other works - such as Xenophon's Symposium - as difficult and argumentative.

Socrates, however, is said to have found these latter characteristics attractive and crucial to his own development as a philosopher; perhaps less so after she allegedly emptied a chamber pot over his head in a fit of jealous rage, although even this he accepted with philosophical grace, saying: "After the thunder comes the rain."

This, and other stories of her violent temper, have rightly or wrongly left us with the impression that Xanthippe was - to put it crudely - a bit of a bitch. Indeed, her name has now come to mean any sharp-tongued and assertive woman. In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio famously compares Katherine to Xanthippe. More recently, the sarcastic and rebellious teen character played by Dylan Gelula in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is named after Socrates's wife.

Ultimately, who's to know what kind of woman Xanthippe was - or why she agreed to her parents suggestion that she marry an ugly, elderly, penniless philosopher who spent a good deal of time drinking with his friends whilst pursuing his love of wisdom (and young boys). Nevertheless, she stuck with him to the bitter end, which shows fidelity on her part and indicates that he must have had something about him that she found lovable.