Ecstasy

We should be extremely wary of those attempts to conceive of the overman as corresponding to the possibility of an ecstatic break from humanity. Zarathustra explicitly warns against the thought of a transcendent leap into the future.

In fact, it's arguable that what is most needed today is some form of counter-ecstatic return to the flesh; a stepping back into material life and the rejection of all forms of idealism that would abstract us away from the world of physical objects that we might touch.

For the key to constructing an active and ethical life is to remain, says Lawrence, inside your own skin and not pretend that you're any bigger than you actually are. To overcome ourselves we need not become more hu-man or superhuman, but less so; more animal, complete with teeth and guts and genitals and all those things which our idealists hope to see shrivel away.

And so, like Anna Brangwen, I hold on to the little things that save me from being swept up helplessly into the Abstract and the Universal. I don't want to get outside myself, or go around open-mouthed with a strange, ecstatic grin like a true believer. 

A Transpolitical Afterword

To my surprise, I discovered last night at a wine bar in St James's, that there are still intelligent people in the world prepared to discuss politics as traditionally understood and practised, despite the fact that we have entered a transpolitical era. They might not have been entirely sober when doing so - but they were almost certainly serious.

For one reason or another, they seemed unprepared to accept - or, in some cases, incapable of accepting - what the radical confusion of formerly fixed and distinct political categories, ideologies, and identities might signify. It was as if the last forty years had changed nothing at all. Or as if Baudrillard had never written a word!

However, like it or not, we are rapidly approaching what the latter describes as the zero point of politics; a stage in which everything that formerly held truth and value in the political sphere has been emptied of all sense. Not that this marks the end of history, or the end of man; rather, it simply results in the interminable illusion of the end and the simulation of phantom events on the world stage broadcast in real time on 24-hour news channels.

Henceforth, attempts to do politics, or discuss politics, are increasingly doomed to failure. And if many people don't bother to vote, it's not because they are apathetic or cynical, but, for the most part, indifferent to a system in which it has become impossible to believe. Parliament, I'm afraid, is beginning to resemble a huge HMV store: a place that holds no great interest and serves no real purpose. 

Revenge of the Immortals

One of the more controversial ideas that Baudrillard put forward was the final solution, by which he referred to the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to a desexualized, non-individuated state of being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous.

Thanks to recent scientific advances, this dream of becoming-amoeba, or, as it is more commonly called, cloning, is no longer simply the stuff of fiction or neo-Platonic fantasy. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that we are about to be replaced either by machines, or a new species which will be sexless and immortal. No one seems particularly troubled by the prospect of a transhuman future and, ironically, whilst we speak endlessly about the right to life, it is the right to death that is being taken from us. 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard notes: 

"Contrary to everything we ordinarily believe, nature first created immortal beings, and it was only by winning the battle for death that we became the living beings that we are. Blindly, we dream of defeating death and achieving immortality, whereas that is our most tragic destiny, a destiny inscribed in the previous life of our cells."

     - Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8

Relating his theories of evolution and cloning not only to the history of Western metaphysics, but also to modern sexual politics, Baudrillard argues that by dissociating erotic activity from procreation and reproduction from sex, fucking is increasingly regarded as a useless function; just as gender differences become irrelevant. 

Death too, it seems, is fated to become a useless function and, in the longer term, something inconceivable. Perhaps the time will come when the beings who come after us will try to understand something of our joys and sorrows by simulating a virtual experience of mortality; perhaps they will long nostalgically for nights shaken with terror and ecstasy and for what Houellebecq terms the possibility of an island.   

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.