Making Love to Music

Etruscan dancers in a tomb near Tarquinia, Italy (c 470 BC) 

Provocative dance moves, such as grinding and twerking, are obviously obscene in an everyday sense of the term, but that's not what makes them tiresome and strangely offensive. I really don't care if idiots want to aggressively thrust their hips, wiggle their bottoms, and dry hump in public.

However, far from being sexual, it seems to me these moves are distinctly anti-sexual and obscene also in the very specific manner that Baudrillard uses the term. That is to say, they lack any metaphorical dimension or any stylish, carefully choreographed component.

In grinding and in twerking, as in pornography, "the body, the sex organs, the sex act are brutally no longer mis en scène, but immediately proffered for view" - and for consumption. It's a total acting out of things that have previously been kept off-stage and regarded as part of a seductive game usually played in private between partners.        

Although his concern is with the sublimation of sex, rather than its exorcising through obscenity, Lawrence was also concerned with the relationship between Eros and Terpsichore. In a short article written in 1927, entitled 'Making Love to Music', he identifies the tango and Charleston as modern dances that are secretly averse both to actual copulation and to the ancient magic of dance.

In contrast to the young men and women of the Jazz Age, Lawrence writes of the dancers painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia:

"There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen ... opposite the naked-limbed men, in a splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There is a great beauty in them ... They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copulative either."

Although free from clothes and moral inhibition, these Etruscan figures are not grotesquely acting out sex in a crude and callous fashion, like Miley Cyrus: they are simply dancing a dance that is full of joy and a delight in movement; dancing their very souls into existence as it were.

It is, alas, we moderns who have "narrowed the dance down to two movements: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking and waggling, to elude it", or make of it something vulgar and obscene.

   
Notes: 

Jean Baudrillard, 'The Obscene', Passwords, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2003). The line quoted from is on p. 27.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Love to Music', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 41-8. Lines quoted can be found on pp. 46-7.

D. H. Lawrence's Philosophy of Mind

The Thinker - Rodin Stylized Pop Art Poster 

By Kim Wang

fineartamerica.com 

On Human Destiny is an interesting short piece written by D. H. Lawrence in which he addresses the question of mind. Lawrence argues that whilst most people don't have original thoughts, we all of us nevertheless have minds that are constantly active, even in sleep, grinding ideas over and over until they turn to dust. 

Whatever else he may be, man is first and foremost a thinking animal and even though we moderns like to assert our spontaneity of feeling and action, our very spontaneity is just another idea, born in the mind having been "gestated in self-consciousness".

Rather surprisingly, Lawrence also claims that this has always been the case: that man has never been a wild, instinctive creature; "even the most prognathous cave-man was an ideal beast ... no more like the wild deer or jaguar among the mountains, than we are". No matter how wild or primitive a man may appear to be, "you may be sure he is grinding upon his own fixed, peculiar ideas, and he's no more spontaneous than a London bus-conductor: probably not as much". 

Thus, it's unfair to claim, as some critics do, that Lawrence subscribes to the Romantic fantasy of a noble savage, beautiful and innocent in his mindlessness and free animality. And it's therefore also mistaken to suggest that Lawrence simply advocates some kind of return to Nature. He knows our becoming-animal is a question of culture and futurity, not regression, and that it certainly doesn't involve the surrendering of human intelligence: "You may, like Yeats, admire the simpleton, and call him God's Fool. But for me the village idiot is outside the pale."

Essentially, then, for Lawrence, mind is what characterizes man as a species and determines human destiny and it's "just puerile to sigh for innocence and naive spontaneity". But, the mind can become a sterile thing without some form of emotional inspiration. That's the key: our adventure further and further into consciousness mustn't become a journey into pure abstraction; we have to think, but we also need to feel and ensure our ideas remain fresh with creative vitality, not fixed and fatal and turned into dogma.

As Lawrence puts it in a poem: "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness ... a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas".


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Human Destiny', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 203-04. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Volume 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81.

At the Gym with D. H. Lawrence

Natural born pedagogue and former Croydon school teacher, D. H. Lawrence, was keenly interested in the subject of education and spilt a great deal of ink addressing the question of what its purpose is and how it might be reformed upon non-idealistic lines. That is to say, turned from an intellectual pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, into an activity that awakens the primary affective centres.

Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, Lawrence was a passionate advocate of games and physical instruction and valued the sports hall or gym as a place of vital learning as much as the science lab or art class: "Let us have a gymnasium as the Greeks had it, and for the same purpose: the purpose of pure, perilous delight in contest, and profound, mystic delight in unified motion." [158]

Lawrence wants boys to learn how to fight - "like young bantam cocks"- with fists and with foils: "Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest." [159] Football, however, would be taken off the curriculum - as would self-conscious body building or any wilful attempt to keep fit. Lawrence loathes the thought of someone sweating and grunting in the gym merely to develop muscles and perversely flaunt their healthy physique. He writes:

"The modern athlete parading the self-conscious mechanism of his body, reeking with a degraded physical, muscular self-consciousness ... is one of the most stupid phenomena mankind has ever witnessed. The physique is alright in itself. But to have your physique in your head, like having sex in the head, is unspeakably repulsive. To have your own physique on your mind all the time: why, it is a semi-pathological state, the exact counterpoise to the querulous peevish invalid." [157-58]

Clearly, for Lawrence, who subscribes to a system of dualism in which mind and body are forever distinct in polarised opposition, the problem is that modern athletes and keep-fit fanatics mix the two modes of consciousness; they prostitute the primary self to the secondary idea (which, of course, is Lawrence’s definition of masturbation).

What, then, are we to make of this? I suppose, in reply, I would wish to make three points:

Firstly, not all invalids are querulous or peevish and most do not wish for others to define, categorise, or stereotype them by their disability or illness, let alone allow it to obsessively dominate their own thoughts and behaviour. Lawrence, who spent a good deal of time in bed either ill or recovering from illness, may be speaking for himself and from his own experience here, but he shouldn’t generalise in such a manner.

Secondly, I’m sensitive also to Lawrence’s problematic gender politics and the fact that he only considers the physical education of boys in the above. The girls, presumably, will be too busy making their own dresses "and delicately unfolding the skirts and bodices, or the loose Turkish trousers and little vests, or whatever else they like to wear" [152-53]. They needn’t concern themselves with contest and naked wrestling, because, according to Lawrence, the soul of woman resides in fashion not fighting: "She puts on her clothes as a flower unfolds its petals, as an utterance from her own nature, instinctive and individual." [153]

Finally, despite referring his own model of a physical training facility back to ancient Greece, I’m not sure Lawrence fully appreciates to what extent the γυμνάσιον also functioned as a place for socializing, communal bathing and, crucially, engaging in intellectual pursuits. The nakedness of the athletes encouraged an aesthetic appreciation of the male body glistening with oil, and lectures and discussions on philosophy and the arts were frequently held at the gymnasia.

The Greeks certainly didn’t suspend all moralizing and put off all idea when they stripped for exercise as Lawrence likes to imagine; provisions were made not only for physical training, but ethical instruction. Plato’s Academy was, first and foremost, a gymnasium. As was the Lyceum, at which Aristotle established his school.

In sum: agon is a wider, more complex, and more ideal concept than Lawrence seems to realise ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166.

War Post

Statue of Ares, God of War 

(Roman Copy of a Greek original at Hadrian's Villa) 

Today, in Parliament, a government motion to extend the British military campaign against the Islamic State - to bomb targets in Syria as well as Iraq - is very likely to be passed with a majority assembled from both sides of the House. For some MPs, in the wake of Paris and other recent atrocities, there clearly exists a strong argument for doing so. For others, including the leader of the Opposition, a convincing case for further military intervention in the Middle East hasn’t been made. In fact, for Jeremy Corbyn, British bombs dropped over Syria would only serve to make a grave and ghastly situation far worse.

If I’m honest, I have no idea who’s right and who’s wrong. But I do know that Lawrence vehemently opposed modern warfare and regarded murderous weapons of mass destruction, which bring death to anonymous victims, as refinements of evil. Not that Lawrence was a pacifist or opposed to violence. In fact, he fetishized the male as essentially a fighter and tied his own philosophy of power to notions of conflict and combat. But he also hated the idea of turning a primary physical activity, such as war, into an abstract and ideal process.

Real war, writes Lawrence, is a type of passionate relationship between men and to die in battle is a type of blissful consummation or great crisis of being. Unfortunately, it's become "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines" [159] and men have been turned into cannon-fodder. To be blown to smithereens by a bomb from the blue, dropped by an invisible enemy while you are eating your supper or sitting on the toilet, is a horrible and monstrous state of affairs.

So, on the one hand, Lawrence celebrates mortal combat and wants to see fierce naked men fighting face-to-face; able to exercise what he terms the choice of war. But, on the other hand, they must not be given the chance to use automatic rifles, grenades and poison gases - the deadly fruits of our own moral idealism and will to universal love.

In a manner far more radical than anything advocated by the CND crowd, Lawrence calls on the British people to make a unilateral destruction of all guns, explosives and chemical weapons - as well as the means of their production. Were we to do this, he says, we’d be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief and come to our senses once more as a nation. It would constitute an act of "reckless defiant sanity" [162].

Then, when all the mechanical weapons were destroyed, we could arm our soldiers with swords once more and "introduce a proper system of martial training in the schools" [161], ensuring every boy is turned into a fighter; as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel as another lover of struggle and fearless youth once put it.

Of course, for ardent supporters of Lawrence, the use of this famous line from a speech made by Hitler, might be seen as something of a cheap shot, or a low blow aimed at their hero. They would angrily object to the implication that Lawrence was a fascist. And, to be fair, they’d be right to do so. For, in historical terms, Lawrence certainly wasn’t a fascist, or a fascist sympathizer.

Nevertheless, there are clearly what might be termed molecular elements of fascism within his thinking which allow for the construction of a highly dubious cratology and a rather less-than-liberal education policy. And the job of a critic who cares is to counter these elements; to refuse to become enamoured of power and resist the urge to glorify war, heroism, strong leadership and all the other militant-militaristic bullshit that - post-Serpent - Lawrence himself decisively rejected in favour of tenderness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166.

Petite Meller

Petite Meller in the video for her song Baby Love (2015).

Click here to watch on YouTube.

Peitite Meller: she's French, she's fashionable, she's thin, she's pale, she's doll-like, she's studying for an MA in philosophy and she sings catchy nouveau-jazz pop ditties. I'm pretty sure, were he still alive, Serge Gainsbourg would already have written half-a-dozen songs for her. 

In short: what's not to love about this object of perverse fascination and delight, now resident in London?

Well, there's her rather tiresome references to Freud and the unconscious and the slightly irritating elements of surrealism. For a young woman who cites Mille Plateaux as her favourite book one might have hoped not to end up back in the world of the nursery and the kind of lame sexual fantasies that are often described as forbidden, but which are actually familiar components of the pornographic imagination long circulated and sustained within our culture.

One might also object to the use of Africans, animals, and the elderly residents of a care home as extras (or little more than animated props) in her videos; exploiting their physical otherness in order to contrast and showcase her own ethereal beauty combining purity and privilege.          

If I wanted to be cruel, I might suggest she over does the blusher in order to disguise the embarrassment she must feel at her knowing collaboration with (one suspects mostly male) designers, photographers, and filmmakers who subscribe to an aesthetic that looks to Lolita, Leni Riefenstahl, and Lady Gaga for inspiration.

But, I don't want to be cruel: rather, I want to give this intelligent and talented woman every opportunity to develop as an artist. In the meantime, I suppose I'll just have to make do with an occasional flash of her knickers and sing along like everyone else to Baby Love.        

Swimming Lessons

Photo by Phil Shaw / Barcroft Media 

londonbabyswim.co.uk 

Sometimes, one pulls oneself up short, and asks: What am I doing this for? Three years of blogging, over 540 posts published, and then : What on earth am I doing it for? 

Some bloggers, of course, are writing to earn an income and establish an online reputation. I wouldn't mind a little fame and fortune myself, if I'm honest. Nevertheless, if I were writing for money and a large following of readers I should doubtless write differently, and with far more success.

What, then, am I writing for? There must be some imperative. Is it for the sake of humanity? Hardly. Like Lawrence, the very thought of such makes ones sick: for the sake of humanity as such, I wouldn't lift a little finger, much less write a blog.

But Torpedo the Ark isn't written either just for fun or personal amusement (nor even for spite). So what then?

I suppose I see it as a space of philosophical adventure and an escape from all forms of idealism that promise safety from the elements and end by becoming prisons. I don't want to be part of Noah's menagerie; just another coordinated specimen preserved thanks to the grace of God. I'd rather take my chances swirling about in the flood waters and in the midst of chaos.

Again, to paraphrase Lawrence, the elderly and the cowardly can stay aboard the boat if they wish, or sit tight on heavy posteriors in some crevice upon Pisgah, babbling about salvation and hoping to view the Promised Land. But I encourage my readers to climb down the mountain or abandon ship and ask themselves the critical question that remains at the heart of modern and contemporary philosophy: the question of Aufklärung.

Actually, this is a series of questions concerning not just past experience, but present reality and future possibility. What's at stake is not merely an analysis of the truth, but what Foucault describes as an ontology of ourselves and of the world not as something divinely ordered and full of love and reason, but as a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; "a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back ..."

Ultimately, Torpedo the Ark is an invitation to go swimming ...  


Notes:

See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229, which partly inspired this post and which I paraphrase throughout.   

The lines quoted from Nietzsche are from section 1067 of The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 549-50. 

A Philosophical Postscript on the Paris Attacks

Diesel the police dog who displayed many of 

the virtues associated with nobility of soul

In the wake of the Paris attacks, political leaders in France and elsewhere wrapped themselves in the tricolore and affirmed a predictable set of values, including Egalité, a revolutionary concept which, as Nietzsche points out, has penetrated deeply into the tissue of modernity, providing the prototype for all our moral theories regarding the universality of so-called human rights.

What these politicians cannot see is that, in practice, this false and fatal idea of equality of all souls has allowed the base and resentment-ridden to challenge every order of rank and thereby effectively undermine the very notion of society. It has thus provided our enemies - including the Islamists - with an explosive weapon against which we have no defense.

But then our Christian idealism has of course rendered the very notion of enmity impossible; we are encouraged to not only regard those who hate us and wish to do us harm as brothers and as equals in the sight of God, but love them and forgive them for their crimes committed against us.

Thus, when asked about those killed in Paris, one commentator and cryptotheologian shamefully masquerading as a philosopher, said we should mourn all those who had died - presumably this includes the bombers and gunmen - as the loss of any life is a tragedy and that no one life is of a greater value than any other.

Thankfully, no one in their right mind really believes this. Indeed, sane people everywhere were more upset by the death of Diesel the police dog than of Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his accomplices in mass murder. What’s more, they recognise something that Christopher Hitchens repeatedly pointed out; namely, that it is not only perverse (and suicidal) to love such people, but ultimately immoral inasmuch as it implies an unwillingness to actively confront and engage with the evil they embody and make manifest.

In sum:

Firstly, there is no equality between souls; not because, as D. H. Lawrence argues, each soul is uniquely different and thus incomparable, but, on the contrary, because each soul is perfectly comparable within an ethical context and some lives clearly lack beauty, lack integrity and lack style in comparison to others.

Secondly, it is our duty - as citizens and as men and women who are interested in the care of the self - to combat and destroy the enemies of civilization and of parrhesia.

Aparigraha and Adoxia (Notes on Yoga and Cynicism)

My confidante and muse, Zena, has newly qualified as a yoga teacher after an intensive period of study in the foothills of the Himalayas. She enjoys yoga as a physical and mental practice, but is also excited by it as a philosophy or system of spiritual beliefs, about which I’m naturally curious.

Thus I listened with interest when she told me about the Hindu virtue of aparigraha - an ethical concept that encourages non-attachment to material things, thereby countering the will-to-possess that can so often result in the vulgarity and the violence of greed.

Of course, what we in the West might term temperance is a crucial component of various religious traditions, not just Hinduism. For many people, the true life is not merely a simple life, but one in which poverty is believed to be a good thing and wealth something of a disadvantage for those who hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But - as far as I understand it - that's not quite the idea being advanced by the teachers of aparigraha.

Rather, as with the Stoics, the crucial issue is not so much having or not having money, but adopting an indifferent attitude towards riches, so that one does not become fixated by all the trappings of wealth, greedy for all the goods and services that money can buy, or overly worried by the prospect of one day losing one's power and status within society.

In other words, it remains perfectly possible to lead a virtuous and humble life and still have millions stashed in a secret bank account. All that matters is that these millions don’t really matter to you; that you remain morally aloof, so to speak, from your own wealth and unafraid of any reversal of fortune. By liberating the spirit and letting go in the mind, one needn't be deprived per se or physically destitute (which is certainly convenient for those religious leaders and gurus who like to wear Gucci loafers with their robes).

Now compare and contrast this with the real and radical poverty that the ancient Cynics actively sought out. Diogenes and his followers didn't just offer an effectively virtual moral teaching based upon a simple detachment of the soul; rather, they stripped existence of even the basic material components upon which it is usually thought to depend (including clothes and shelter). Thus, as Foucault notes:

"The dramaturgy of Cynic poverty is far from that indifference which is unconcerned about wealth ... it is an elaboration of oneself in the form of visible poverty. It is not an acceptance of poverty; it is a real conduct of poverty ... unlimited ... in the sense that it does not halt at a stage which is thought to be satisfying because one thinks one is ... free from everything superfluous. It continues and is always looking for possible further destitution."

- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 258. 

In fact, the Cynics push their scandalous practice of poverty to the point that they end up leading lives full of dirt, dependency, and disgrace; they become the one thing worse than being a slave in Greek eyes - and that's being a beggar. For the Cynics, the key is not aparigraha - it's adoxia - the seeking out of a bad reputation and the systematic practice of dishonour.  

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that I approve of or advocate Cynicism; not encouraging those who have taken up yoga in order to find a certain degree of inner peace and wisdom to suddenly abandon their practices and start leading a naked, bestial life of shameless destitution - I'd hate it if Zena suddenly started barking like a dog and committing indecent acts in public.

Nevertheless, I am saying something and I suppose what I'm saying is that I find the core principles of yoga (the so called yamas, of which aparigraha is a key element) platitudinous; they lack any philosophical bite, or critical edge. Further, I worry that they can lead not only to good karma for the individual (whatever that is), but to a socially conservative politics that reinforces convention and the order of things.

In sum: I don't want to masturbate in the market place, but neither do I want to meditate cross-legged on a mountain top, surrendering myself to the higher power of the universe ...            

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 

of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)

Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.

Chaturbate and the Question of Cynicism

Georg Viktor: Diogenes in der Tonne (Raku ceramic figure) 

www.viktor-ge.org

For those of you who don’t know, Chaturbate is a popular pornographic website where individuals live-stream themselves engaged in sexual activity, either solo or with a partner or partners. Performers can earn money in the form of tips from viewers, but they are essentially amateurs in the pure sense of the term; i.e. they do it because they love to live an unconcealed and shameless life; a life that is constantly under the watchful eyes of others and before the virtual gaze of the camera.

Some critics argue that such behaviour is unnatural and immoral and I’ll come to this philosophically naive charge shortly. Others suggest it constitutes a way of being that is unique to the age in which we live; one that can only be understood in terms of the technology that facilitates it. But, of course, despite what the posthumanists think, there’s nothing new under the sun, and even so-called cybersex might be seen as nothing more than a digital restaging of life in its libidinally material reality.

As such, Chaturbate constitutes a novel revival of an obscene and scandalous ancient practice - Cynicism. Diogenes masturbated in the market place and his disciple Crates liked to fuck his wife in public; our twenty-first century cynics do these things online. But far from being corrupt or perverse, it’s actually a form of the good life; a type of true love taken to the logical extreme. For as even Plato knew, true love never hides itself away; it’s that which is always happy to reveal itself before witnesses.

Now, this is not to say that Plato would have approved of Chaturbate. He may have taught that truth loves to go naked, but he also subscribed to traditional rules of Greek propriety. There were limits and it was best to exercise caution and moderation. For Plato, Diogenes was beyond the pale; he was a Socrates gone mad. And Plato knew that if you push ideals to their extreme, then you effect a kind of transvaluation.

What Michel Foucault writes of the Cynic dramatization of the unconcealed life, is precisely what we might say of Chaturbate’s interactive community of cam-girls and cam-boys and their attempt to love with complete openness: chaturbating is “the strict, simple, and, in a sense, crudest possible application of the principle that one should live without having to blush at what one does”.

But, as a result of this, all the rules, habits, and conventions of behaviour which this principle initially accepted and reinforced, are now overturned. Cynicism explodes the code of propriety and offers the possibility of a radically different (more brazen, perhaps more brutal) form of life: one that is watched over by the goddess Anaideia.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The line quoted is on p. 255 of this paperback edition.