Come Not with Kisses: Leda, Lawrence and the Swan

Max Sauco: Leda and Her Swan 

D. H. Lawrence wrote four very lovely and at times very amusing poems based on the Leda myth. Taken together, these verses are significantly more interesting than the more-widely read poem written by Yeats on this same woman and bird coupling, projecting as they do the idea into a transhuman future in which the new Helen is imagined not as some semi-divine beauty, but as a human-animal hybrid or chimera, compete with green webbed-feet made to smite the waters of an unknown world.

Lawrence is not entirely happy with his own vision, however. For within the curious world of Lawrentian zoology the swan has ambiguous status and often features alongside snakes, newts, and beetles as one of the animals he associates with corruption:

"With its reptile feet buried in the ooze ... its beauty white and cold and terrifying ... it is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphorescence of corruption ... This is  the beauty of the swan ... this cold white salty fire of infinite reduction."

       

- 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (CUP, 1988), p. 293 

Thus, for Lawrence, when humanity seeks its fulfilment in avisodomy this is not merely a sign of our perversion, but also indicative of a kind of death drive.

Whether we agree or disagree with Lawrence's analysis of becoming-animal in terms of regression and nostalgie de la boue, at least, to his credit and unlike many pure-minded scholars who refuse to discuss the zoosexual aspects of the Leda myth, he doesn't shy away from the question of why sensitive men and women might desire to fuck with birds and beasts, rather than one another.

And besides, who's to say that the Übermensch won't be born of a swan-princess in a time of corruption?

Why Bataille's Work Remains Crucial

André Breton was not the last to describe and attempt to dismiss Bataille as an excremental philosopher. But such a characterization, whilst not entirely unfair or inaccurate, nevertheless fails to appreciate that it is precisely because the latter obsessively returns us to the idea that life is no more than a moment of temporary stabilization before the collapse back into the filth and chaos from which it arose, that his books say the essential and are essential.  

We need to have our noses rubbed in the fact that there is ultimately no difference between the magnificence and splendour of the sun and a coffin full of shit. Idealists like André Breton may not like it, but flies, dung-beetles, and base matter of every description belongs to the same general economy as all that he finds noble and elevated. 

In the end, what makes us beautiful and keeps us sane as human beings, is not the fact that we are capable of moral and aesthetic grandeur, but that we leave stains upon our underwear. It's the mind's inability to accept this fact and it's sense of disgust when faced with evidence of the body's physicality that is problematic and shameful. 

Like Heidegger, Bataille realised that thinking doesn't overcome metaphysics by attempting to transcend it in some manner; on the contrary, thinking overcomes metaphysics by climbing back down Pisgah and substantiating itself in the touch of bodies and the strangeness of objects. 

And so it's only when, like a young child, you can happily parade a lump of dog shit on a stick in the knowledge that here too the gods come to presence, that you'll be able to affirm the world as it is; with flowers that fade and corpses that rot.

How Even Witches Lose Their Charm

The Malleus Maleficarum is clear on one point above all others: witchcraft results from insatiable carnal lust and is therefore a form of sexual depravity as well as religious heresy. 

Thus it was widely accepted in the early modern period that witches copulated with demons and that their rituals involved obscene and unnatural acts including masturbation, bestiality, and feasting on the flesh of infants. Via a potent combination of sodomy and sorcery, witches threatened to subvert the very foundations of the moral and political order of society and this made them wicked, dangerous - and fascinating. 

But what of witchcraft today?

Alas, if many practitioners are to be believed, it has become a depressingly tame affair: few covens now insist upon nudity, or practice the more controversial rites involving sex and scourging. And far from providing a rare opportunity to form a perverse relationship with the satanic, pagan witchcraft merely affords the chance to commune with a loving Nature and explore methods of spiritual self-discovery and personal development.

The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass has given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same stupidities and myths that govern conventional thinking. Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror, is often now just a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.  

The Politics of Friendship

Nietzsche has some interesting things to teach us about the concept of friendship; not least of all when he insists on the importance of maintaining a degree of enmity towards those we hold dear. It is never enough, he argues, to learn how to love your enemies - for that is merely Christian - one must also learn how to hate one's friends. 

And so, with that in mind, here are four short fragments of affectionate animosity.

Simon 

Overqualified and overblown he stumbles and tumbles
from wine bar to seminar pissing his promise away.

And those are buttons
that were his eyes.

Thomas

Remote and raptorious you sit

unspeaking at table's end.

Your bald head and bare neck

obscenely suggestive.

Perhaps you were once young,

but now you are old and an

eater of putrescence.

Mark

I know your type: with those finely curved lips

and boyish charms, eyes sparkling with the

conceit of your own corruption.

A narcissist who masturbates in mirrors and

dreams of murdering all those who will not

accept your love.

Laura

From out of the past she came ...

Doodling demons to demonstrate the darkness of her soul
and the two-dimensional depth of her talent.

A gargoyle gurgling about balls of light and how she likes
to come whilst listening to the Cocteau Twins.

California Über Alles

Jake and Dinos Chapman: California Über-alles (2003)

Why do those professional network hippies at LinkedIn feel the need to exercise so much control over whom their members may and may not establish connections with and so build what is effectively a wide but nonetheless gated community?

I know the official LinkedIn policy speaks about the need for establishing trust amongst members and providing security, but it feels like the kind of soft-fascism identified by the Dead Kennedy's: California Über Alles.

And so, whilst I understand the need to have regulations in place to try and stop abusive behaviour, I resent the constant threat of having my account restricted or deleted altogether simply because I might choose to invite a stranger into my world.

There doesn't seem much point in only forming virtual connections with the same people I already know in what remains of and passes for the real world. I want the freedom to cruise on-line and pick up who ever catches my interest in a random, promiscuous and anonymous manner. 

For ultimately, the most creative and most beautiful relations are ones solicited outside the gate and closed communities, no matter how elite the membership, become at best ghettos and, at worst, concentration camps.

Fragments of Remembrance

Gathered here are six little fragments of text written in remembrance of authors who have, at one time or another, meant something special to me. Arguably, they might be read as an attempt to bear witness to the uniqueness of the relationship that one has with the writers and the books that one loves. And, indeed, with the dead.

Not that these somewhat incomplete and unfinished verses constitute anything so grand as a poetry or a politics of mourning. In writing them, I think I simply (and at the risk of banality) wanted to record an affection, rather than produce art or pass judgement.

In Memory of Anaïs Nin 

Many types of flow - of madness and literature, desire and disintegration - 

traversed the queer forest of her body in which gay little birds twittered 

obscenely and dark poppies blossomed.

In Memory of Henry Miller

A boy from Brooklyn: a pornographer: a mystic.

A son-of-a-bitch quoting Nietzsche in an East Coast accent,
whilst parading round Paris with a personal hard-on like the
happiest man alive.

In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche

Bones, a few biographical details, the odd photograph,

and a small number of books: the remains of a dead

philosopher.

And yet he is more alive now, in death,
than he was in life, having become that
posthumous individual he said he would.

And this childless man is today father to us all.


In Memory of Sylvia Plath

I do not like the English summer, unfolded
into green completion and the smugness of
strawberries and cream.

Intolerable the seasonal stupidity of the natives;
one yearns for the first breath of autumn and
the fresh reassurance of rain.

Even, like a spinster, I long for winter,
so scrupulously austere.

In Memory of Marinetti

When I think of Marinetti
hurling defiance at the stars
beneath a violent electric moon,

I think of a bald-headed little man
in a bow-tie masturbating whilst
erect on the summit of the world.

Instinctively, one can't help but smile
at how quickly this ludicrous lover
of the machine and the manifesto
became passé.


In Memory of the Marquis de Sade

A monster, say his jailers.
Perhaps.

But, if so, then a monster of generosity
and good will, in whose name sex and
death entwine to produce a singular
form of love.

Philosophy on the Catwalk

Nunzia Garoffolo: fashionbeyondfashion.wordpress.com

Six reasons why fashion is fabulous and the question of style is philosophically crucial:

1) Because Professor Teufelsdröckh, despite being a typical German Idealist in many respects, is right to suggest that in the "one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [Sartor Resartus].

2) With its obsessive desire for the New as a value in and of itself, the logic of fashion is the determining principle of modernity. To his credit, Kant, who was often mocked by his friends for his fine silk shirts and  silver-buckled shoes, was one of the first to identify this irrational principle and note that fashion therefore has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. it's not a striving after beauty, but novelty, innovation, and constant change). Designers seek to make their own creations as superfluous as quickly as possible; they don't seek to improve on anything and there is no progress, purpose, or ultimate goal within the world of fashion (a short skirt is not an advance on a long dress). If it can be said to have any aim at all, it is to be a potentially endless proliferation of forms and colours.

3) It's true that many philosophers regard fashion as something trivial and beneath their attention. Doubtless this is why the most interesting work written on the subject has tended to come from the pens of our poets and novelists including Baudelaire, Wilde, Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, and D. H. Lawrence. But there are notable exceptions to this: Nietzsche, Barthes, and Baudrillard, for example, all concerned themselves with the language of fashion and the question of style. And they did so because they understood that once the playful and promiscuous indeterminacy of fashion begins to affect the 'heavy sphere of signs' then the liquidation of values associated with the order of referential reason is accelerated to a point of rupture. Fashion, in other words, is a method for the consummation of nihilism. 

4) Closely associated with fashion is the practice of dandyism: whilst primarily thought of as a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century phenomenon, dandyism can in fact be traced back as an ethos or way of living to the Classical world of ancient Greece, where techniques of the self and arts of existence were accorded singular importance amongst all those who wished to give style to their lives (i.e. that one needful thing which, in all matters, is the essential thing rather than sincerity).

5) The world of fashion also understands and perpetuates ideas of camp and queer. The first of these things, thought of somewhat problematically as a sensibility by Susan Sontag, taught us how to place quotation marks around certain artefacts and actions and thereby magically transform things with previously little or no worth into things with ironic value and perversely sophisticated appeal. Camp thus challenges conventional notions of good taste and high art and also comes to the defence of those forms and, indeed, those individuals, traditionally marginalized and despised.

As for queer, it's never easy or advisable to try and summarize this notion; it's a necessarily mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed definition. Indeed, it's technically impossible to say what queerness 'is' as isness is precisely what's at issue in its rejection of all forms of onto-essentialism: it refers to nothing in particular and demarcates a transpositional positionality in relation to the normative. In other words, queer is a critical movement of resistance at odds with the legitimate and the dominant; it challenges the authority of those who would keep us all on the straight and narrow and wearing sensible shoes.

6) Finally, fashion matters because, without it, figures such as Nunzia Garoffolo would not exist and without women such as this in the world, clothed in the colours of the rainbow, life would be as ugly and as dull as it would be without flowers. We do not need priests all in black, or politicians all in grey. But we do need those individuals who bring a little splendour and gorgeousness into the world, otherwise there is only boredom and uniformity. 

On the Philosophical Importance of Zombies

The zombie long ago shuffled out of the West African religious imagination and into popular global culture, where it has been feasting on brains and fucking with the categorical certainties of oppositional thinking ever since. For by inhabiting that indeterminable realm that is also home to queers, vampires, and cyborgs, the zombie occupies the non-space between binaries and is neither dead nor alive, but, paradoxically, both at once, without taking on the full sense of either term. 

Thus the zombie cannot have its status determined within a system of metaphysical dualism. This makes the zombie the stuff of modern nightmare; for we depend for our security and conceptual coherence in a chaotic and threatening universe upon being able to make clear and unambiguous distinctions between either this or that: true or false, good or evil, friend or foe ...etc. 

It's true that within such binaries there is always a privileged term set over and against its inferior opposite and that whilst each term depends upon the other for its meaning and value the nature of their relationship is therefore one of violent inequality. But, nevertheless, these pairings by enabling us to firmly organize people, things, and relations, do make human society possible. 

By disrupting this operational logic, the zombie makes it difficult for us to think straight or think clearly, indicating, if you will, the very limits of our world as ultimately the distinction between life and death is dissolved and the lines between other crucial oppositions are also blurred. 

Obviously, if good order is to be preserved, then the zombie needs to be defeated: but how? It isn't easy to terminate something that is already dead (whilst alive). Addressing this problem, one critic writes:

"You can't kill a zombie, you have to resolve it. It has to be 'killed' categorically, by removing its undecidability. A magic agent or superior power will have to decide the zombie, returning it to one side of the opposition or the other. It has to become a proper corpse or a true living being. At that point the familiar concepts of life and death can rule again, untroubled." 

- Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida, (Icon Books, 2000), p. 23

But of course, we know in our hearts that the zombie can never really be resolved in this manner; that it is always out there somewhere in the shadows or at the margins of this world, ready and waiting to return after dark. Or, as Derrida would say, undecidability is ever present. 

Further - and finally - inasmuch as we too are made from inanimate matter, it might be argued that there's something of the zombie in all of us.

The Masked Philosopher

Illustration by Shorri on deviantart.com

Those who know me well know that I hate the human face. Well, hate is perhaps too strong a word to use; let us simply say that I have a strong philosophical aversion towards the face and a mistrust of all those familiar facial features that so conveniently express emotion and display our conformity to the dominant reality (not least of all the smile). 

For the face is not some kind of natural formation, nor is it uniquely individual as many people like to believe. It is rather a type of social machine that eventually envelops and codifies not just the front of the head, but the entire body, thereby ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

The fact that most people love their own white, grinning faces with the same passion that slaves love their oppression and take every opportunity to shamelessly promote their own profile - not least on Facebook, for example - is a source of no little disappointment and irritation I have to admit. 

On the other hand, I'm full of admiration and respect for those who counter the privileging of the face within Western metaphysics by choosing to veil, mask, hide, or disguise the face in some manner. It takes courage, I think, to willingly lose face or seek to escape the face. I will always love Lady Chatterley not merely for her sexual frolics with her lover in the woods, but for daring to stand naked before a full-length mirror and place a "thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman" in order that she might better know her body "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!" [DHL]

And I will always love Michel Foucault for daring to become a masked philosopher, surrendering both name and face and instructing people: 'Do not ask me who I am and do not expect me to remain the same.' In celebrating anonymity in this manner, Foucault reminds us of something that Nietzsche taught: Every profound spirit loves a mask - and the profoundest of all despise even their own image.   

    

Heidegger and the Thing

To his credit, Heidegger went out of his way to develop a highly singular understanding of the thing in contradistinction to the modern concept which invariably places the latter-as-object in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis a human subject who represents and determines its nature.

I like it, for example, when he tells us that there is something solid in a work of architecture, coloured in a painting, or sonorous in a musical composition. Such statements may seem trite, or pseudo-profound, but it's important to be reminded of the self-evidently (but nonetheless frequently overlooked) thingly element in art works.

However, I don't like it when Heidegger begins to discriminate between things and mere things; with the latter described somewhat pejoratively as the lifeless beings of nature. He might mean to simply suggest that clods of earth and pieces of rotten wood are things in their purest state, but you can sense the contempt (just as when he tells us the stone is without world).

And when he hesitates to call God a thing, or to consider man as a thing, it profoundly disappoints.

Ultimately, Heidegger is a correlationist. And so, whilst not anthropocentric in the traditional sense, he continues to assign Dasein a special role and insist that it be taken as the final standard of reference. Thus, for all his talk of hammers, jugs, bridges, and shoes etc, Heidegger fails to provide the thingly-oriented ontology that he teases us with.

Whether his somewhat unorthodox disciple Graham Harman will succeed in this - or whether he'll become entangled in his own fourfold project and polypsychism - remains to be seen.