My Sister and I

My Sister and I (Dec 1967)

 

"The warm and lovely world we knew, has been struck by a bitter frost.

But my sister and I, recall with a sigh, the world we knew, and loved, and lost." [1]

 

 

Like Herr Nietzsche, I also have a sister called Elizabeth (named after a princess). And like Herr Nietzsche, I also have a somewhat troubled relationship with my sibling who, for the record, is eleven years my senior. 

 

But whereas Nietzsche's sister was keen to take control of her brother's archive after his collapse and capitalise upon his growing fame throughout Europe [2], it seems that my sister would rather eradicate all traces of my existence.

 

Thus, for example, not only did she remove and destroy all of my childhood toys, games, and treasured possessions from our parental home (with my mother's acquiescence, but without my knowledge or consent), but she has now searched through all of her family photograph albums in order to find any pictures of me, so that these too might be removed. 

 

To be fair, she didn't burn or bin these pictures (or try to sell them on eBay). Rather, she presented the images to me so that I may do with them as I please; this includes the photo above, taken in December 1967.    

 

This censorship of images and editing (or falsification) of the past is reminiscent of what went on in the Soviet Union under Stalin, although my sister is driven by sibling resentment rather than political expediency; i.e., it's an act of spite rather than propaganda.  

But whatever the motivation, it's all a bit of shame, really. But there you go - all families operate with a degree of dysfunction, don't they? And, to be honest, I don't feel inclined to apologise for having been born (I'm just pleased to have the pictures).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from My Sister and I, a song written by Hy Zaret, Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer, recorded by Jimmy Dorsey, with vocals by Bob Eberly. It hit number one on the Billboard charts on June 7, 1941. Click here to play on YouTube.

[2] In 1889, aged 45, Nietzsche suffered a collapse in Turin and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, until his death in 1900. 

      As curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts, Elisabeth used her brother's unpublished writings to promote her own agenda, wilfully overlooking his philosophical views when they conflicted with her nationalism and antisemitism. 

      Readers who are interested in this topic should see Carol Diethe's Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power, (University of Illinois Press, 2003), in which she demonstrates how Elisabeth's desire to place herself - not her brother - at the center of German cultural life damaged his reputation for many years.

      Readers might also enjoy the apocryphal work attributed to Nietzsche entitled My Sister and I, trans. Oscar Levy (1951). This book - which most scholars consider a forgery - was supposedly written in 1889-90, during Nietzsche's time in a mental asylum. If legitimate, My Sister and I would be Nietzsche's final text, chronologically following his Wahnbriefe. Amongst several highly contentious (and otherwise unreported) biographical claims, the book details an incestuous relationship between Nietzsche and his sister Elisabeth. 

Send in the Clowns

I.

In an early school report, one of my teachers noted: "Stephen's work suffers due to his insistence on playing the clown. He has to understand that he is in school to learn and not merely to amuse his classmates."

Despite this po-faced attempt to nip my talent for comedy in the bud, this insistence on playing the clown - influenced in part by Cesar Romero's performance as the Joker in Batman - continued all the way into adolescence, when that fabulous grotesque, Johnny Rotten, the clown prince of punk, became a great inspiration.     

II.

As a matter of fact, I never regarded myself as a clown: certainly not the type who relied on slapstick or other forms of physical comedy; and certainly not the type who was solely interested in entertaining others.

Even at six-years-old, I was more interested in challenging authority and provoking laughter through the use of language - including the language of fashion - than by throwing buckets of water (not that there's anything wrong with throwing buckets of water, as Tiswas demonstrated).

Admiring as I did fun lovin' criminals like the Joker and, later, anarchic pranksters like the Sex Pistols, meant there was always a bit more of a subversive edge to my fooling around, refusal to care, and mockery (of self and others). I may have worn Grimaldi's whiteface makeup, but that's just about where any point of comparison ends.    

III.

If not a clown, then what was I really? Some might say a fool and I've nothing against those who rush in where angels fear to tread.

But I'd probably be happier with the term trickster, as there's something more ambiguous about such a shape-shifting figure and the manner in which they often push things beyond a joke; are they being mischievous, malicious, or both? Either way, they seem to act with the full intelligence of evil.

Primarily, tricksters violate principles of social and natural order. That is to say, tricksters playfully deconstruct reality and dissolve binary distinctions. And that's why Jordan Peterson is absolutely right to describe Derrida as a philosophical trickster - though his ignorant dismissal of Derrida's work (without even attempting to engage with it) is as shameful as that of those four Cambridge dons who, in 1992, opposed the awarding of an honorary degree to M. Derrida on the grounds that his thinking failed to meet accepted standards of philosophical clarity and rigour.

Ironically, Peterson has himself just had an offer of a visiting fellowship rescinded by Cambridge University following a humourless and politically correct backlash from members of both faculty and the student body, who seem to regard him in much the same way he regards Derrida - that is to say, as a dangerous charlatan.

Ultimately, culture requires its clowns and tricksters - almost as comic saviours. Indeed, that's something I would have thought Peterson, as a great reader of Jung, would readily agree with. Thus his loathing of Derrida is, in some ways, surprising as well as disappointing.

On the Pleasure of the Text and the Politics of Reading

Ever since a young child, I have loved reading and would define myself as a homotextual. That is to say, someone who derives their primary pleasure from books, not from people, and accepts that reading in what Barthes terms a living sense (i.e. homogeneous with a virtual writing) is always perverse in nature and immoral in character.     

I remember at primary school we had to line up and slowly make our way towards the teacher's desk, book in hand. The splendidly named Mrs Horncastle would ask each pupil in turn what page they were on and then request that they read a short paragraph to her.

She was, I suppose, a good woman attempting to be a good teacher. But I fear she understood only dead readings in which the printed word was recognised and mechanically repeated, but failed to produce an inner text or deterritorialize the subject. Her concern was with improving comprehension, not intensifying pleasure or bringing children's relationship with language to a crisis of some kind. 

Once, the line moved so slowly that I finished reading the Ladybird Book I'd been assigned before I'd reached the front of the class. And so, when asked: 'What page are you on Stephen?' I placed the closed work onto her desk and replied proudly: 'I've read it Miss!' in anticipation of praise and a possible gold star.

Maybe she didn't believe me - or maybe she wanted to punish what she regarded as impudence - but I was unjustly sent to the back of the line and told to begin the book again from page one. This taught me an important early lesson about the exercise of authority and that within a culture of institutionalised stupidity, it doesn't pay to be too clever ...