Easter with the Anti-Christ

In an early note, Nietzsche writes that the only appropriate attitude towards Christianity is kindly forbearance, since mockery, cynicism and animosity have all been exhausted as options. And yet, by the end of his philosophical life Nietzsche is styling himself as the Anti-Christ and aggressively condemning Christianity as an extreme form of spiritual and physiological corruption.

Rather than see this as a sign of incipient madness, I think Nietzsche's later more negative and more clinical appraisal of Christianity is a valid and legitimate reading due to a more profound philosophical analysis of morality in relation to questions of sickness, health, and modern European nihilism. 

Unfortunately, in a post such as this, I can't trace out the development of Nietzsche's fateful (but non-dialectical) opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified at any length or in any detail. But, since it's Easter, I'd like to make a few remarks on this topic - if only to make my own implacable opposition to the Church quite clear.

In the retrospective and revisionary 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is keen to persuade us that his uncompromising opposition to Christianity is already evident in this first published work. But it's actually not until Human, All Too Human that his attitude begins to decisively harden. For by 1878, he has realized that one cannot simply turn one's back on a pathological phenomenon such as Christianity. Rather, one must make an attempt at treatment and seek out a cure: that is to say, if one wants to live and be strong, then one must learn how to actively negate the negative. This is not only a matter of hygiene, but of good conscience; for to be a Christian today, says Nietzsche, is not only to be sick, but also dishonest.

The idea of Christianity as a crisis of health is one that Nietzsche fully explores in the Genealogy of Morals. Here, he offers us a diagnosis of both society and the modern soul via the construction of a symptomatology based upon his theory of ressentiment and an aetiology that looks for causes in terms of reactive forces. In this work, arguably, Nietzsche becomes the physician of culture that he believed a philosopher should aspire towards being.

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche's most sustained polemic against Christianity, The Anti-Christ. It is vital to note that in this text Nietzsche's real opponent is not Jesus (whom he continues to think of as noble), but that "genius of hatred" St. Paul. For it is the latter who would keep Christ nailed to the Cross for all eternity and turn his teachings into what Deleuze terms a mortuary enterprise; and it is Paul who invents a new type of priest who foists ideas of guilt, judgement, and punishment upon mankind in the name of Love. 

It is precisely this vicious desire to condemn and seek retribution, that reveals just how shamefully ignorant those who call themselves Christians can be of the glad tidings given us by Jesus; indeed, as Nietzsche points out, even the very term Christian reveals a profound misunderstanding.

Thus, although Nietzsche describes Jesus as an idiot and a holy anarchist, he acknowledges that the gospels contain no trace of ressentiment or any will to revenge. Jesus might be immature and a decadent - he may suffer from a pathological horror of being touched - but he is also, in a sense, an anti-Christian.

The Post of Proper Names

Recently, at a party, I overheard what seemed an undeniably bitchy but nonetheless interesting remark: when told by a young Australian woman, who happens to be married to quite a famous Catalan designer, that they intended to name their unborn baby girl Bacardi, the hostess gave a superior little snort and declared that they were condemning the child to a future that would involve stripping and low-paid bar work.

It reminded me that many people still strongly believe that names are of crucial significance; that they not only determine an individual destiny, but also reveal the essential character of the person to whom they belong. 

I'm pretty sure that both women I mention above - the expectant mother and the hostess - subscribed to this same line of thought, which, of course, can be traced back to the ancient Athenian philosopher Cratylus; he being the most famous exponent of this popular form of linguistic naturalness.

The mother-to-be, for example, is doubtless convinced that by giving the child such an unusual name she is securing for her an exceptional future, in which the horizon of possibility will remain wide open. Like Plectrude's mother, Lucette, this woman thinks that to assign a child a common first name is the same as wanting to give them a mediocre world of grey skies and low-ceilings in which to grow up.

The acid-tongued party hostess would surely agree, in part at least. For the only real difference between the women is over what the name Bacardi implies and here there are clearly social and cultural factors involved and it is not simply a question of onomastics.  

In Praise of the Swan Princess

Like Zarathustra, I have always been a fan of girls who choose to devote themselves to the harsh discipline of classical dance: how could I be an enemy of the blessed feet and fair ankles of ballerinas?

And, like Zarathustra, I have always loathed the Spirit of Gravity; that which weighs life down and stops us learning how to fly like birds and love ourselves with a degree of supersensual coldness that the all-contented know nothing of as they hurriedly gobble-up and digest anything that is placed before them like swine.

Honour should be given only to those who are fastidious in their tastes and have learned how to say No to a soft existence of lard-arsed laziness, spreading everywhere, but leading nowhere. As Plectrude comes to realise: "Putting one's health on the line meant nothing at all as long as one could know the incredible sensation of taking flight." Ultimately, nothing tastes as good as playing Odette feels.

Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels

Ivonne Thien: Thirty-Two Kilos (2008)

Ours is an anorexic culture, writes Baudrillard; that is to say, a size-zero culture of self-loathing, bulimia, and the ecstasy of emptiness and organic annihilation. 

Ivonne Thien's digitally altered photographs of models wrapped in medical bandages were intended to both illustrate this and, at the same time, offer a point of resistance to the use of  underweight (and often underage) girls in the fashion industry.

She was inspired to create the series of fourteen pictures, entitled Zweiunddreißig Kilo, after her attention was drawn to the proliferation of pro-ana websites that argue for anorexia as a lifestyle choice and dispute the belief that it is actually a life-threatening medical condition. 

Ironically, however, her photos themselves have now become sources of 'thinspiration' to many within the pro-ana community. One suspects that Baudrillard won't be spinning in his grave at this all-too-predictable development, but perhaps gently smiling ...

Supposing Truth to be a Woman ...

The title for this post was to have been the question of style. 

However - it is woman who will be my subject. Still, one might 

wonder whether that doesn't really amount to the same thing ... 

Indeed, like Derrida - who I'm paraphrasing here - we might easily decide there is a strong level of correspondence between women and style and, in turn, between the question of style and that of seduction. All three questions deserve to be thought philosophically; which is to say, in relation to politics, ethics, and notions of what constitutes Truth, developing Nietzsche's supposition concerning the latter along the way (i.e. feminizing what has traditionally been erected as an exclusively masculine concept). 

The first thing to establish is the following: if Truth is supposed to be a woman, then Truth would not love to go naked as Rousseau naively believed. Rather, Truth-as-woman would insist on being veiled: "And only through such a veil which thus falls over it could Truth become truth; profound, indecent, desirable." [59] 

In other words, her being is not a natural pre-given, but something artificially constructed and woman forms an indivisible unity with everything that serves to show off her beauty. Thus she understands not only the need for illusion, but practises the right to lie. It is therefore pointless to speak about the essence of woman, for she "distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property" [51] and this is why she's the very ruin of philosophy and politics as traditionally conceived in the grandiose and deluded terms of phallic stupidity.

This is not to deny - today of all days - the need for an "organized, patient, laborious" form of feminism, that takes account of "the real conditions in which women's struggles develop" [94]. However, as Derrida rightly points out, whilst these struggles often require the strategic maintenance of metaphysical presuppositions and forms of agency, anyone concerned with effecting radical change must eventually interrogate such ideals precisely because they belong to and uphold the very system one is attempting to deconstruct. 

A constant process of negotiation is therefore required between organized movements and those schizo-nomadic women of style who lay their own singularity on the line and appreciate that their strength relates not to agency, but to seduction, witchcraft, and the art of the dressing table.   

Note: all quotes are from Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

On Being a Bit of a Jew (Part Two)

As an American sit-com loving child of the 1970s, I grew up with Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern and mentioned her only a couple of days ago in a post. Which is why the news that she has been diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer and given only three months to live is so sad to hear.

Ms Harper was born in New York in 1939. She grew up with many Jewish friends and always regarded them as her chosen family. It's not surprising, therefore, that she'd be so convincing in the role for which she is famous and that she would not only win four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for her performance, but make so many young boys of my generation want to grow up and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Rhoda taught us that becoming-Jewish is something that affects Jews and non-Jews alike; that anyone can be deterritorialized culturally-racially, which is to say swept up and carried off along a line of flight towards a minoritarian position. In other words, in becoming-Jewish, one is removed from the majority (which refers not to a greater relative quantity, but, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the determination of a norm or standard in relation to which everything else can be said to be minoritarian).

As Deleuze and Guattari also write, we can be thrown into a strange becoming by anything at all - a book, a piece of music, or even, as in this case, a TV show. But perhaps it always requires an element of love. That is to say, one doesn't deviate from the majority unless there is something (or someone) that attracts and captures ones desire and affection.

And so, like Valerie Harper, if I have become-Jewish it is in my heart as much as in my thinking.

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]

On Being a Bit of a Jew

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think I know what she means. 

And I think that, like Sylvia, I might also confess to being a bit of a Jew. 

How could it not be so when I have spent a lifetime under the influence of (amongst others) Malcolm McLaren, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Larry David and grew up believing Rhoda Morgenstern to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

As Susan Sontag notes, the Jews are (along with homosexuals) the greatest creative minority in contemporary urban culture; creative, that is, of a sensibility - an admittedly old-fashioned and problematic term, by which she means an emotionally and aesthetically informed way of looking at the world and thinking about the self. 

I suppose I would call this a style. And whereas Sontag identifies moral seriousness as being the crucial component, I think for me Jewishness is about an abrasive, provocative, sometimes vulgar often anarchic humour that is fundamentally anti-deutsch (with German also being understood as a style, characterized by a sluggish digestive system and an Aryan eye, bright blue).

Dying Game

We regret to announce the death of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet, which occurred 83 years ago today in Vence, in the South of France.  

  

Mr. Lawrence was a writer who exercised a more potent influence over my youthful imagination than any other and I have continued to find inspiration and interest in his work to this day, even if I tend to use him as a leaving point, rather than as a figure of ultimate authority.

For I realise now that his was not the final word and that one best expresses loyalty to his memory via acts of infidelity and deconstructive criticism. Lawrence challenges his readers in precisely the same manner as Zarathustra challenges his listeners: to lose him, so that they might find themselves. But losing a teacher does not mean forgetting all that they have taught and I will never forget above all the courage that Lawrence showed in the face of suffering and death: 

"One wishes things were different. But there's no help for it. One can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret. While we live, we must be game. And when comes the time to die, we'll die game too."   

- Letters, V. 3951

Notes on the Lolita Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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