It is But Death Who Comes at Last

Keith Haring Untitled (For James Ensor) 1 (1989)

Acrylic on canvas (36 x 72 in)

The Keith Haring Foundation

 

Apparently, having penetrated the object of their desire, the average male lasts between four to eight minutes before ejaculating. Many men may like to believe they last longer - and many female partners may wish that were the case - but, according to those who have studied the matter, it simply isn't so.     

 

Of course, some men climax much more rapidly than four minutes; expelling semen and experiencing orgasm soon after initiating sexual activity and with minimal stimulation [2]. This is often characterised as a form of male sexual dysfunction, although there is no universally agreed definition amongst the experts about what constitutes ejaculatio praecox; some say anything under a minute is premature, whilst others don't think there's any real issue if the man can last over fifteen seconds before jizzing [3].

 

On the other hand, there are men who can last much longer than the average time; although for some delayed ejaculation is problematic rather than pleasurable and can also cause discomfort for their partners [4].     

 

Either way, and whatever the ejaculation latency time one averages out at, it's crucial to remember the following wise words of Sir Walter Scott: 

 

And come he slow, or come he fast, 

It is but Death who comes at last. [5]

 

I don't think even Bataille could have put it better ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Shortly before his death in February 1990, Keith Haring produced a number of works with an erotico-thantological theme, including this work depicting a skeleton ejaculating on a flowerbed. It formed the first panel of a diptych (for James Ensor). In the second panel, thanks to the dead man's sperm, the flowers have grown and are in full bloom, much to the delight of the skeleton.

 

[2] The 1948 Kinsey Report suggests that three-quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters.

 

[3] The belief that premature ejaculation should be considered a medical condition (or an indicator of neurosis) rather than a normal variation, has been disputed by some sex researchers, including Alfred Kinsey, who viewed it as a sign of masculine vigour and pointed to the fact that in the natural world male mammals often ejaculate rapidly during coition in order to increase their chances of passing on their genes. 

      It would seem to me that any coital imperative which posits an optimal-time to ejaculate, merely contributes to the pressure on men to perform like machines and furthers the pathologisation of male sexuality in the modern world.    

 

[4] Delayed ejaculation - which is far less common than premature ejaculation - refers to a man's persistent difficulty in coming, despite his wish to do so and even if he is sexually stimulated. Whilst, as we have discussed, most men reach orgasm within a few short minutes of active thrusting during intercourse, a man with delayed ejaculation either does not have orgasms at all or cannot have an orgasm until after a prolonged period of huffing and puffing.

 

[5] Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808), canto 2, st. 30, lines 567-568.

      This historical romance in verse consists of six cantos, each with an introductory epistle and extensive notes. It concludes with the Battle of Flodden (1513). Those who are interested can find the work on Project Gutenberg: click here.  

[6] Bataille famously explores the relationship between Eros and Thanatos in his work, demonstrating how the idea of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely metaphorical. As Nick Land notes: 

      "Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending-off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality […] The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one […] but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness." 

      In other words, when we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime. It is, as Bataille argues, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

      See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 136. And see also my post of 21 September 2016 on orgasm and the will to merger: click here. 

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones

The Lovers of Valdaro 

Image: Dagmar Hollmann / Wikimedia Commons

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

 

 

I. 

 

New York based German artist Heide Hatry has recently been posting a series of images on her Icons in Ash Instagram account showing the exhumed skeletal remains of lovers who had been buried together for what they probably imagined would be all eternity, including the pair shown above discovered by archaeologists at a Neolithic tomb in San Giorgio, near Mantua, Italy, in 2007.

 

The Lovers of Valdaro, as they are known, are believed to have been no older than 20 years of age when buried, approximately 6,000 years ago, with arms wrapped tenderly around one another. Osteological examination revealed no evidence of a particularly violent death (no fractures or signs of traumatic injury, for example), so perhaps they died of broken hearts, or having swallowed poison in an amorous suicide pact - who knows?  

 

Anyway, morbid voyeurs who might wish to, can see the skeleton lovers for themselves on permanent display at the National Archaeological Museum of Mantua. 

   

 

II. 

 

Touching as the story of the Valdaro Lovers may be, regular readers of Torpedo the Ark will recall that - for philosophical reasons - I have a real problem with bones. But allow me to summarise these reasons for those readers who are not quite so familiar with the contents of this blog ... 

 

Due to the fact that bones are relatively long lasting, many cultures accord the skeleton - conceived as a noble infrastructure - far greater respect than the soft pathology of the flesh. As Nick Land notes in The Thirst for Annihilation (1992):  

 

"A corpse has one pre-eminent and historically fateful heterogeneous distribution: that between its skeletal structure and its soft tissues. This is apprehended as a difference between what is perdurant, dry, clean, formal, and what is volatile, wet, dirty, and formless."

 

Thus it is that osseological idealists of all varieties - including Christians, Hegelians, and fascists - love bones and skulls, associating these things not only with phallic rigidity, but spirit and intellect, whilst, on the other hand, associating the flesh (and filth) with the feminine. 

 

Unable to face up to the fact that we will all one day decompose and melt into slow putrescence, they posit the skeleton as that which provides figural permanence to human being and marks an acceptable transfiguration of the organic body. 

 

The skeleton is thus the affable mascot of humanist narcissism - reassuring in a way that a rotting, stinking corpse crawling with maggots can never be.       

 

Musical bonus: Dem Bones - aka Dry Bones - is an African-American spiritual song first recorded in 1928. The lyrics, whilst often changing, were inspired by Ezekiel 37:1-14, wherein the prophet visits the Valley of Dry Bones and foretells of the resurrection of the dead: Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again! Now hear the Word of the Lord! 

      Click here to watch The Delta Rhythm Boys giving us their version, a recording of which can be found on their album Swingin' Spirituals (Coral Records, 1960).     

 

On Stamina (as Ontological Destiny)

John Melhuish Strudwick: A Golden Thread (1885)

I.

An aged philosopher, said a young Nick Land, is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan. We can probably say the same of artists, rock stars, and maybe even monarchs.

For whilst I don't want to revive and reinforce the romantic ideal of living fast and dying young - as if a premature death confirms authenticity and proves the truth of one's message - there are perhaps certain individuals who are under a greater obligation to die at the right time than other (superfluous) men and women; i.e., not too late, but not too early either. 

However, it's not this Nietzschean idea I wish to discuss; nor do I wish to comment here on what makes monstrous, or write in defence of charlatanism. I want, rather, to say something on the concept of stamina ...

II.

It's unfortunate - and a little disappointing - that Land seems to rely upon the common understanding of the term stamina; i.e., synonymous merely with staying power, or the ability to maintain an activity or commitment regardless of circumstances (including fatigue and old age). That's the kind of error that the sort of people who think that a rock has the capacity to endure might make ...   

For stamina means more than merely having the energy and strength to keep going; it refers us rather to the essential elements of a thing; the vital structures or qualities of being. As the plural form of stamen, we might even define it as the thread (or filament) from which the individual (and their fate) is woven. 

Thus, philosophically speaking, all mortals have stamina (i.e., an ontological destiny) - even charlatans, those who burn out early, or those who regard death as a festival and voluntarily choose to squander their souls ...

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992). 

Nietzsche, 'Of Voluntary Death', Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (Penguin Books, 1969).   

On Learning to Laugh at Everything with Larry David, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence

Credit: durantelallera/Shutterstock

I. Everything's Funny

As I said in a recent post, one of the things that the phrase torpedo the ark means to me is having the freedom to criticise everything under the sun - even if that risks offending others. Nothing is sacrosanct or off limits; everything can be targeted and everything can be ridiculed, mocked, or poked fun at because, as Larry David rightly informs his friend Richard Lewis, everything's funny - even the death of a beloved parakeet.*

Here, I'd like to expand on this idea with reference to the work of Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence ...

II. A Philosophy of Laughter

Bataille discovered the importance of laughter very early on in his career as a writer.

It wasn't, however, until a lecture made many years later, in 1953, that he was able to admit with a smile that, insofar as he'd been engaged in serious philosophical work at all, he'd been constructing a philosophy founded upon (and exclusively concerned with) the experience of laughter as that which escapes reason and understanding.    

In other words, it's not just the unknown or unknowable that causes us to laugh; laughter is itself inexplicable and we often have no idea why we laugh when we do - joy bubbles over or bursts forth unexpectedly and as a form of excess (or what Bataille terms unproductive expenditure).

And - crucially, from the perspective of ethics - laughter is often infectious; when we laugh, others laugh too. Indeed, whilst it's perfectly possible to weep alone, I'm not sure one can ever really laugh in isolation (without being a madman). It's laughter - not sorrow (or mourning) - that is the social practice par excellence.     

But what, for Bataille, is there to laugh at?

The answer, as for Larry David, is everything: Bataille encourages us to laugh not just at the world and the things that are in it, but at being itself and, ultimately, at that which all being is a being towards: death. This is clear in his short poem entitled 'Laughter' [Rire]:

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mummy
at a coffin full of shit

Commenting on the above verse, Nick Land writes:

"It is because life is pure surplus that the child of Rire - standing by the side of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. [...] Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the haemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth."

Ba-dum-tsh!

III. Curb Your Enthusiasm

D. H. Lawrence is another writer who makes an important contribution to the philosophy of laughter - perhaps surprisingly so, as this self-styled priest of love is thought by many to be utterly humourless, though often unintentionally comic or absurd.   

However, as Judith Ruderman points out, the mistaken idea that Lawrence had no sense of humour is an opinion held for the most part by those who are misled (or disconcereted) by his intensity. He is often over-earnest and can sometimes be a bore. But Lawrence also values (and utilises) humour in his work, often deliberately undermining his own seriousness and tendency to preach.    

Ruderman also reminds us of this crucial passage written by Lawrence in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe (a passage that LD would surely approve of): 

"The Holy Ghost bids us never to be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and at everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule - everything."

The Holy Ghost, according to Lawrence, also helps us to keep it real; "not to push our cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and willful [...] to leave off when it bids us leave off".

In other words, the Holy Ghost helps us curb our enthusiasm and recognise that the latter - particularly when tied to moral and ideological fundamentalism - is what threatens us today.

Notes

*I refer here to a scene in the first episode of the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Foisted!', dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (2017): click here.

Bataille, 'Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears', in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, (University of Minnesota, 2001). 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge 1992), p. xvii. The translation of the poem is also found here. 

Judith Ruderman, 'D. H. Lawrence on Trial Yet Again: The Charge? It's Ridiculous!', Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1, (2018), pp. 59-82.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 73. 

On Orgasm and the Will to Merger (Another Thanatological Fragment)

Man can find his individual isolation or discontinuity hard to bear. Thus he often seeks primal unity, or a return to universal oneness. But this will to merger is, of course, a sign of fatigue and decadence; a thinly disguised longing for oblivion.

Lawrence is clear: "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself". When this is no longer the case - when individual singularity breaks down - death results.

And yet love, of course, is a vital attraction that brings things together into touch ...

This obliges us, therefore, to admit the relationship between Eros and Thanatos and acknowledge that the French description of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely a metaphor.

As Nick Land writes:

"Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality … The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one … but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness."

When we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime.

Despite the primary law that dictates singularity, the greater truth is that we need one another and we need love. Thus the secondary law of all organic life - according to Lawrence - is that "each organism only lives through … contact with other life". 

Of course, if we go too far in this direction, then love is no longer vivifying, but destructive and deadly. Men might live by love, but so too do they die, or cause death, if they love too much or allow their love to become infected with idealism.

Lawrence values coition precisely because it is a coming-close-to-death, but not a form of merger; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the discontinuity of each party remains intact.

But such intimacy brings us to the very point of fusion and leaves us changed, or wounded by the experience (which is why love is often poignant, painful, and transformative all at the same time).

Orgasm gives us a clue regarding the return to the actual and the deep communion that awaits us. It is, as Bataille says, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

Thus, ultimately, the truth of eroticism is ... treason.

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed.  Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading related thanatological fragments can click here and here.

Amorous Ruin (Or Why Nick Land Makes Bad Boyfriend Material) #TBT

In the name of Love, the amorous subject is prepared to burn himself up to the point of destruction within that exhausting wound like a madman for whom duration has no meaning. If we are blessed with enough courage and good fortune, he says, then the object of our desire is the one most likely to destroy us.  

For the terrible truth is that we have no real happiness except that of ruinous expenditure. What makes blissful is to betray the world of utility, the world of work, the world of self-preservation:

"Erotic passion has no tolerance for health, not even bare survival. It is for this reason that love is the ultimate illness and crime. Nothing is more incompatible with the welfare of the human species."

This is certainly the case when love is unrequited:

"One wastes away; expending health and finances in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destruction, pouring one's every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness and suicide."

But it can also be the case even when love is returned:

"There are times when the morbid horror of love infects the beloved, or one is oneself infected by the passion of another, or two strains of love collide, so that both spiral together into a helix of strangely suspended disintegration … Each competes to be destroyed by the other … to exceed the other in mad vulnerability. When propelled by an extremity of impatience this can lead to suicide …" 

Or murder.

Of course, it has to be admitted that neither outcome is common; most lovers seek security within the confines of bourgeois marriage and "conspire to protect each other from the lethal destiny of their passion … relapsing into the wretched sanity of mutual affection".

But, asks Nick Land, isn’t it the case that a love that doesn’t end tragically is always at some basic level disappointed ...?

See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), pp. 189-90. 

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading a related thanatological fragment should click here. 

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here. 

     

Some Dark Solar Reflections on a Grey Morning in September

UV image of the sun taken by NASA

Everything starts with the sun. And everything will end with the sun. The sun is our alpha and omega. And God, we might say, is nothing other than a typical main sequence yellow dwarf star, approximately 93,000,000 miles away, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Essentially a thermonuclear machine, the sun generates vast quantities of electromagnetic energy which is discharged into space without aim or design, providing the earth with all the light and heat needed to create and sustain that "feverish obscenity we call ‘life’".

Above all, the sun is big. In fact, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and, were it hollow, you could easily fit over a million earth-sized planets inside it. It’s the ultimate object and yet, ironically we can’t look at it without going blind or mad, or both. It’s like a woman’s cleavage: one peek and look away – that’s the rule; no staring. It’s different for flowers: they open to face the sun. But we must avert our eyes, for we are not flowers.

The sun is also pretty bright as stars go and has been shining brilliantly for around 4.6 billion years. And as it gets older, it gets hotter. In a billion years from now, it’ll be so bright and so hot that there’ll be no water left on the surface of the earth and life as we know it will be compromised. Eventually, the sun will enter its red giant phase and the earth will be engulfed entirely. It will then shrink back down in size to live out its days as a white dwarf. At such a time, as Nietzsche says, the clever animals who invented knowledge will be no more.

D.H. Lawrence, whose cosmology is idiosyncratic to say the least, is right in at least one respect; the sun is not simply a ball of blazing gas with a few spots. For it also has a dark and complex internal structure. And the visible surface, known as the photosphere, is by no means where the real action is taking place. It’s at the core where things really heat up and molecules of hydrogen are fused into helium at a rate of 620 million tons per second.

If you like, it is this invisible sun, this dark sun, that philosophically most interests. We are bored of Plato’s Ideal sun that serves only to empower and enlighten mankind; “a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth and goodness”. It’s the black sun of Lawrence, or the rotten sun of Bataille that induces solar delirium and acts of sacrificial madness, that most interests and disconcerts:

"From this second sun – the sun of malediction – we receive not illumination but disease ... The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves."

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

This is the sun the Aztecs knew. And we might ask of Lawrence’s sun-women what they might demand in the end of those men who dared to love them: semen or blood? Would they bring forth children from their sun-opened wombs, or obsidian knives? For in belonging to the sun, they ultimately belong to death.