The Banality of Evil

Yale University Press, 2010

I don't like Terry Eagleton: not as a literary critic, not as a cultural theorist, and particularly not as a Marxist theologian addressing the question of evil, which he thinks of as a metaphysical desire to negate being. 

This simple and straightforward definition of evil - rooted in Freud's notion of the death drive - is not one that I share. But then I'm one of those postmodern individuals whom Eagleton vehemently despises and so lack the moral depth to understand the "true destructiveness" [15] of evil, or appreciate the need for redemption. Nor do I believe that "Hell is the final victory of  nihilism over idealism" [78]; that there can be "no life outside God" [78]; or that there is "good reason to believe that the devil is a Frenchman" [93]. 

In fact, I find Eagleton's casual xenophobia, aggressive misogyny, and bluff-empiricism not only irritating, but offensive. He comes shamefully close at times to being a Little Englander, exasperated by clever foreigners who always complicate matters and terrified of "filth-dabbling feminists" [84] who "strike at the root of all social and sexual stability" [80].   

It's this - the phallocratic regime guaranteeing stability and the firmness of his erection - which Eagleton wishes to safeguard from evil; the latter now understood as that which emasculates and challenges all order. He tells us, for example, that the witches in Macbeth deserve to be burned because they practise a form of chaos magic, lacking in rhyme or reason and without any clear aim: "They are radical separatists who scorn male power ... whose words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed identities." [80-1]

As the above makes clear, it's not just social and sexual stability that Eagleton wishes to protect, but also ontological stability: he wants human being to be fixed and immutable. Such essential continuity is to be cherished rather than lamented, he writes, for only self-identical men and women are capable of leading lives rich with purpose, meaning, aspiration and achievement - unlike the damned who are decentred and incapable of finding fulfilment in life.

Eagleton speaks at length about these evil ones who lack souls and move around like zombies,"leeching life from others in order to fill an aching absence" [71] in themselves. Thus his language insistently draws upon (and reinforces) all the old metaphysics of presence, plenitude, and authenticity. Evil is now characterized as a form of lack or deficiency of being and its "seductive allure is purely superficial" [123].

Again, it's depressing and disappointing stuff from one of 'Britain's foremost intellectuals'. One can't help but wonder if, in his intellectual dotage, he even cares any longer about serious critical thinking - or even, for that matter, the problem of evil. For at the end of chapter two he suddenly makes the unexpected confession that evil "is not something we should lose too much sleep over" [130]. If only his publishers had been bold enough to put this line on the cover they'd have saved us all a lot of time and effort.

Eagleton should probably have concluded his study at that point. Instead, he adds a third and final chapter and it's here that we get to watch with wide-open eyes of amused astonishment as he oscillates frantically between two poles of delirium: Christianity and Marxism.

Eagleton cannot decide whether he believes in Salvation or Revolution - or both - because he can never quite decide whether people are essentially good, or originally sinful. As a Marxist, he wants to believe that men and women are conditioned into evil by a system of "vested interests and anonymous processes" [143]. But as a Catholic he can't help reaffirming the view that that evil is "a condition of being as well as a quality of behaviour" [152].

And so, whilst we are determined by historical forces and therefore innocent at a certain level, Eagleton also maintains we are corrupt and that any revolutionary optimism must be tempered by religious pessimism. What we need, he decides, is a new political faith founded upon a more realistic reality principle (not too sanguine, not too gloomy); one that will finally enable the passing of "reliable moral judgement on the human species" [153].

This, of course, is Eagleton's ultimate fantasy - to establish a tribunal over which he and his God can preside and pass verdict. It's this disgusting mania to judge and to find guilty that, ironically, I think we could characterize as evil. And the noble task of philosophy and literature remains what it has always been: to have done with judgement.  

In Praise of the Supermodel

It is often said by critics of the fashion industry that a young woman on the catwalk provides a bad role model in allowing herself to be commodified as a hollowed-out object, trading on her looks.

But perhaps woman-as-beautiful-object has found a way to turn her own emptiness and reification not only into something that works to her material advantage, but ultimately provides a symbolic form of resistance to the phallocratic order, by subtly exposing how all notions of essence, truth, and identity are based upon deceit and delusion.  

        

For the supermodel is neither an ideal being, nor a natural phenomenon. She is, rather, an artificial creature born of mirrors and make-up, whose mask-like face expresses neither sensitivity, nor true feeling. On the contrary, "her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression ... beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile" [Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95].

Rather like the leading ladies from Hollywood's golden age, Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia, and Christy are no ordinary women of flesh and banal sexual status, but mythological beings "around whom crystallized stern rituals and a wasteful profusion which turned them into a generation of sacred monsters" [ibid]. They don't enchant us because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and frigidity. Their lack of human warmth and ever-changing appearance, ensures they remain unknown and unlovable; like mysterious and elusive lesbians.

Thus it is that the supermodel is never really with us: she just suddenly appears, struts her stuff, pouts and strikes a pose, turns, and then vanishes - immediately eclipsed by the girl who follows.      

The Greatest Joy of All

One of my favourite scenes in Lawrence's Women in Love comes towards the end of the book, when Gudrun presents her sister with three pairs of the coloured silk stockings for which she was notorious.

Ursula, as one might imagine, is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings', she says, and Gudrun echoes this sentiment. This comes as no big surprise, as throughout the novel the Brangwen sisters often discuss clothes with the same intensity of excitement as they recount their latest experiences of the heart. 

What is surprising, however, is that Lawrence will later chastise George Bernard Shaw for his remark that clothes arouse our desire and not the exposure of flesh, which, in many cases, has quite the opposite effect. For Lawrence, this reveals Shaw to be a flippant and vulgar thinker and he sternly declares: "The man who finds a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a savage."

But actually, Shaw has a point and an important point at that; one developed by Roland Barthes who argues that woman is desexualized "at the very moment when she is stripped bare". It is only via a whole spectrum of adornment (i.e. the furs, the gloves, the shoes, the frilly underwear, the expensive stockings, the jewellery, etc.) that the living body can be projected into the symbolic category of  erotic objects and thereby made magical and alluring.

Thus, far from 'savagery' - and I'm assuming here that Lawrence means by this primitive naivety - fetishism is a sign of human sophistication; a happy exchange of nature for artifice. And so whilst the simplest of men may admire a woman's bare and blotchy legs, the more cultured are likely to admire her legs only when they are made lustrous by nylon. As for those rare individuals who are refined to the point of perversity, such persons are interested only in the stockings themselves and have no real concern for limbs.

Lawrence would probably describe the first type as healthy; for they have naturally directed their desire towards the nakedness of woman. The second type he would doubtless think of as having their sex in the head - though this would surely have to include the Paul Morel type, the Mellors type and, indeed, his own type.

As for the third class, i.e. those who - like the Brangwen sisters - get the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings and whom Lawrence thinks of as crude and savage, well, personally, I have nothing but the highest regard for them. It might just be that those who have recognised that passion not only ends in fashion, but begins there as well, have something to teach us all.  

 

Passion Ends in Fashion

Michel Houellebecq is right: We're a long way from Wuthering Heights. 

Our obsession with love and the forming of human relationships is today evidence only of a certain loyalty to the past. All our feelings are completely artificial and our nights are "no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy". Sex is a form of nostalgia.

After the naked excess of the orgy - which was all about bodies and organs and gross acts of penetration - there comes the masked ball in which desire for the flesh has been replaced by a passion for fashion and dressing-up has become more exciting than stripping-off. We can witness this in our popular culture and I would suggest that Carrie Bradshaw tells us a good deal more about ourselves today than Cathy Earnshaw.

For whilst her significantly older friend, Samantha, still faithfully subscribes to the myth of sex and sexual liberation, Carrie - despite the residual romanticism of her character - is keenly aware that a finely crafted pair of shoes is likely to last longer and bring more satisfaction than a relationship with a man. 

Ultimately, even Mr Big can't compete against Manolo Blahnik and you can't help wondering whether Carrie didn't marry the former simply so she might wear the Something Blue satin shoes designed by the latter ...?    

Non Placet

Having just finished reading the Derrida biography written by Benoît Peeters (trans. Andrew Brown), I was reminded once more of the time in 1992 when four Cambridge dons brought shame upon themselves and their University with a decision to oppose 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.

The fact that this ignominious decision was supported by numerous other academics in an open letter to The Times which accused Derrida of being, at best, a clever trickster whose writing style not only defied comprehension but threatened the very foundations of scholarship, only made things even more embarrassing for those of us who, whilst belonging to a British intellectual tradition, were excited by the challenge French theory presented to traditional models of thought and methods of reading.   

Thankfully, when put to a wider ballot, it was decided by 336 votes to 204 to give Derrida his degree. But of course, the old prejudices and stupidities continued to circulate and erupt from time to time and even some of the obituaries written following his death in 2004 contained an ugly, jeering tone full of resentment and in stark contrast to Derrida's own profoundly beautiful writings of mourning and commemoration.  

Snow

It's snowing and I hate it: the ice-cold wetness and the silent whiteness that isolates the soul and surrounds the heart with frozen air. 

It makes one think of poor Gerald stumbling towards his death amidst sheer mountain slopes; the terrible snowy landscape offering promise of eternal rest.  

This Be the Post

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do. 

From my mother I get: 

My urgency, my phobias, my obsessive character, my estrangement from the world and my prejudices (I do not eat tins of tuna, buy things from a market stall, or trust Cockneys). In a word, from my mother I get my complexity.

From my father I get:

My passivity and lack of worldly desire or ambition, my inability to prosper and almost Christ-like unconcern for those things belonging unto Caesar. In a word, from my father I get my saintliness.

Perversion Makes Happy

Someone recently asked me why I no longer characterize my work as a form of libidinal materialism, preferring instead to now label it as a perverse materialism. Well, firstly, I wanted to move away from the whole politics of desire shtick, particularly as associated with Deleuze and Guattari. 

Secondly, the concept and practice of perversion, understood as a quest to find joyful thoughts and feelings not made profitable by any social end and which deviate from the straight and narrow, is something that has always appealed. Even as a young child, I hated any kind of norm or convention and would often wear my clothes inside-out.

I think Barthes is right when he argues that the pleasure potential of perversion is always greatly underestimated by moralists who fail to understand that it does not corrupt or make sinful, but, quite simply, makes happy. 

     

Dare to See the World Through Deaf Eyes

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm deaf and I try to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear ... 
It's not so bad.

Perhaps we should all try like Larry to imagine what it would be like not to be able to hear and dare to see the world through deaf eyes. Perhaps we'd find the silence beautiful. And liberating as well as instructive.

For to live in a soundless, speechless world without birdsong or the insistence of the human voice, is not to live without contact or to be loveless: we do not become fish simply because we surrender our ears and enter a mute but amazingly dexterous world of sign and physical gesture.

But, of course, most people will never concede the point that the profoundly deaf are neither disabled nor stupid. For audism is deeply-rooted within our culture and draws philosophical support from what Derrida has identified as phonocentrism: i.e. the belief that the voice is the privileged medium of truth and meaning and that hearing is the deepest of all the senses, sound acting directly upon the great affective centres of being.

Until we deconstruct, or, if you prefer, curb our enthusiasm for this metaphysical prejudice, then we will continue to remain enthralled by orality and continue to discriminate against those who cannot hear and find the idea of reading lips offensive and humiliating. 

A Short Lesson in Queer Theory

One of the things that Lawrence disliked Whitman for was the latter's obsession with the notion of One Identity. That is to say, Whitman's compulsion to embrace everyone and weave everything into himself until, at last, the entire universe had been absorbed and personalised and made Walt Whitmanesque.

Whitman's great mistake was confusing his watchword Sympathy with the Christian Love-ideal. Thus, rather than respect the pathos of distance between things and celebrate otherness and plurality, Whitman calls for universal merger. Instead of feeling with, he tries to feel for and, in this way, compassion gives way to egoism. 

Broadly speaking, I agree with Lawrence's reading of Whitman and think we should remain alert to the danger presented by the will-to-merger. But, having said that, one of the joys of queerness is that it enables one to cruise and drift transpositionally between  fixed subject-formations, so that one might indeed become-Eskimo or become-woman: not in an historical or ethno-biological sense, obviously, but as a question of style.

I'm really not interested in assimilating anyone's soul. And I'm not asserting, like Whitman, that I am X, Y, or Z. Rather, I'm saying: I am not I and that X, Y, or Z are never truly themselves either. Thus we should not fetishize, eulogize, or ontologize notions of self or identity; be they based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else. 

This, of course, brings me into clear opposition with Lawrence, as well as Whitman. But that's okay. For if Lawrence once meant so much to me, these days I can't help feeling his will-to-integrity is as suspect as Whitman's will-to-merger. For me, utopia begins when we stop talking about souls and refuse to be bound by stupid binaries.