On Blasphemy (amb referència al cas de Dolors Miquel)

Photo of Dolors Miquel by Gianluca Battista

El Pais Catalunya (Feb 2016)

Blasphemy, as Richard Dawkins is fond of reminding us, is a victimless crime: for whilst God is obviously a real object of reference (and reverence) within human history and culture, he is not, of course, an actual entity.

And so, whilst you can certainly injure the feelings of his often hypersensitive followers, nothing that is said about or addressed directly to God makes the slightest difference to him. The most devout and beautiful of prayers as well as the most irreverent of insults, all fall on ears that are not even deaf.

Despite this being the case, there's a depressingly large number of countries that still retain - and vigorously enforce - blasphemy laws; including, of course, all the usual suspects in the Muslim world.

Shamefully, however, there are still Europeans who would also like nothing more than the opportunity to prosecute and punish those whom they accuse of bad-mouthing God; Christian reactionaries who envy Islamic militants and yearn for the good old days of Inquisition when they too could torture and murder blasphemers, heretics, atheists, witches, etc. in the name of Love and Divine Justice.

And so it doesn't really surprise to hear of the case of the poet Dolors Miquel being prosecuted - presumably under Article 525 of Spanish penal law - after publicly reciting her feminist version of the Lord's Prayer on stage in Barcelona, in which she redirects worship away from the figure of a bearded male towards that of a female deity: "Our Mother, who art in heaven / Hallowed be thy cunt."

The head of the Church in Catalonia immediately branded the verse as blasphemous and angrily dismissed the idea that it might better be understood as an ode to womanhood that celebrates fertility and life - just as he also quickly brushed aside arguments in defence of free speech.

My view - if it isn't already pretty clear - is that whist Dolors Miquel may not be the greatest poet in the world, she has every right to promote her vulva activism and gynaecological pride. The cunt isn't sacred, but neither is it blasphemous or obscene. And if phallocentric misogynists like to deny their maternal origin and wish to mutilate female genitalia rather than find happiness therein, well, that's something I find offensive ...

Nietzsche and the Question of Race

Unpersuaded by the determining influence of environmental factors, such as sunlight, upon the production of melanin and ignorant of genetics, Nietzsche has a rather outlandish explanation for variations in human skin colour: starting from the assumption that the primal colour of man "would probably have been a brownish-grey", he suggests that blackness is the evolutionary result of anger and whiteness the result of fear.

Nietzsche thus speculates that racial difference is psychological in origin. "Could it perhaps not be", he muses, that blackness is the "ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years", whilst, on the other hand, "an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin?" 

Section 241 of Daybreak would be embarrassing enough for readers and admirers of Nietzsche if this was all that he said. But, unfortunately, there's more - and idiosyncratic philosophizing on human biodiversity seems to betray (as is so often the case) an inherent racism. For Nietzsche goes on to explicitly link fearful white timidity to intelligence and violent black fury to animality. 

However, before Nietzsche is once more vilified as a fascist and critical opprobrium again directed towards his writing, it should be recalled that, for Nietzsche, cleverness is a trait he often associates with slave morality and men of ressentiment. Nobility, in contrast, is distinctly bestial in character and frenzied fits of passion are to be admired as a sign of underlying health and vitality.  

Thus, if Nietzsche seems to reinforce the classical ideal that equates what is good with fairness of complexion and what is bad with darkness of hair and skin, his notorious concept of the blond beast doesn't merely refer us to blue-eyed Europeans, but equally to those non-white peoples who also "enjoy freedom from every social constraint" and the good conscience of the wild animal.

In sum: when it comes to the question of race (as with the question of woman), Nietzsche is a complex, challenging, and controversial thinker whose work continues to disturb because it so aggressively refuses to conform with the moral and political standards and expectations of liberal humanism. Ultimately, he doesn't seek to enlighten, but to provoke.     

See: Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), IV. 241 and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), I. 11. 

'A' Level Greek (with Reference to the Case of Lady Chatterley)

Constance Chatterley (2012) 

An image created by the digital artist Brian J. Davis 

using commercially available composite sketch software 

based on Lawrence's descriptions of the character. 

For this and other images by Davis go to thecomposites.tumblr.com

In order to reach what is termed her ultimate nakedness - a state of innocence and becoming - Connie is willing to be stripped of her clothes, her social status, and her personal self. She is also willing to be sodomised by her lover in order to free herself of all bad conscience concerning the body.

For it’s not enough within the Lawrentian universe for a woman to be vaginally penetrated by the phallus of the male in order to enter the realm of bliss. She might even be the best bit o' cunt left on earth, but if she wants to learn how to make “weird, wordless cries, like the animals”, then, apparently, she’s going to have to take it up the arse.

This might not quite be Lawrence’s answer to everything, but he certainly privileges it as an act within his sexual metaphysics and for Connie anal penetration serves much like a prince’s kiss, awakening her back into life and out of the semi-conscious, dreamlike state in which she drifted through the days without meaning, without substance, and with no gleam or sparkle in the flesh.

Not that she’s entirely comfortable with the act. Indeed, Lawrence writes that Connie is a little startled, and almost unwilling as Mellor’s enters her with no small degree of force, like a devil. But, with what Germaine Greer describes as a rapist’s mindset, Lawrence assures his readers that as the sharp, searing mixture of pain and pleasure forces its way through her bowels and burns her soul to tinder, it’s this phallic hunting out she really desired and needed after all – not love and the lies of poets and philosophers.

Indeed, as she tells Clifford one evening, intellectual pleasures and the life of the spirit mean nothing to a woman in love who has shamelessly experienced the greater reality of the body and discovered that she is not merely a creature of light and virtue, but also alive in corruption. Why read Plato or pray to Jesus when you can quiver like plasm and dance naked in the rain?

The only sin - suggests Lawrence - lies not in the knowledge of evil, or the experience of carnal delight, but in “turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies”.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Note, however, that the line quoted on the ‘weird, wordless cries’ of animals is from Lawrence’s Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 333, and the line quoted about the ‘truth of bodies’ is from Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 73.

The Becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

Richard Madden as Oliver Mellors in the BBC TV adaptation of 

Lady Chatterley's Lover, dir. Jed Mercurio (2015)

Lawrence famously completed three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and there are significant differences between the gamekeeper, Parkin, who appears in the first and second versions of the novel, and the gamekeeper Mellors who emerges with swift menace from out of the woods to fuck Connie in the third. 

Indeed, there are also significant variations in character between Parkin the first and Parkin the second (whom I'll refer to here as P1 and P2) and I shall touch on some of these as I trace out the becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin in terms of a becoming-woman and becoming-hors classe of the working man. 

There were two major problems presented by the stubborn, semi-literate, and class-bound P1: firstly, he doesn't make a very convincing lover for a woman like Connie; secondly, he doesn't make a very convincing advocate for a writer like Lawrence. Ultimately, both Connie and Lawrence seem frustrated and disappointed with P1, who ends the novel employed in a Sheffield steel mill and as secretary of the local communist party, having deteriorated into someone dreary and political.

And so P1 is replaced by the superior model, P2. Or, at any rate, a less angry and resentful figure; someone more concerned with preserving his own virile integrity, rather than promoting world revolution and killing the upper-classes. P2 wants to put his hands around the body of a woman, not round the throats of the rich. In other words, he's more of a lover than a militant and Lawrence repeatedly emphasizes his sensitivity and difference from other men. 

For her part, Connie actively encourages P2 to develop his touchy-feely side and produce a molecular woman within his molar male subjectivity. It's not that she wants to feminize or emasculate her lover, but she wants him to explore and experience otherness. P2 concedes the importance of this, but he nevertheless speaks of his becoming-woman with intense bitterness on occasion and admits to finding the process terribly humiliating. For, unfortunately, he equates becoming-woman with a loss of manliness. This greatly angers and disappoints Connie - and so, just like P1, he has to go.

His replacement, Oliver Mellors, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Not quite a gentleman, but far more cultured and better educated than either P1 or P2, Mellors is able to move fairly freely through society and, indeed, move outside of class altogether. For Mellors shares Lawrence's view that ultimately it makes no sense to think or act in terms of class when the whole of mankind has today become robot. That is to say, a vast homogeneous body of slaves all integrated into the same system of capital. 

If there remains any theoretical opposition, it is no longer between classes as such, but between the robot mass of humanity and those very rare few who, miraculously, remain on the outside and might potentially sabotage the Machine; outlaws and outcasts such as Mellors who do not fit in (and who do not want to fit in); singular men and women who are not so much déclassé as hors-classe. 

If Mellors remains quite consciously afraid of the Machine that sparkles with malevolence and electric lights, he is nevertheless free from all sense of shame when it comes to sex. Lawrence tells us that Mellors had "No sense of wrong or sin: he was troubled by no conscience in that respect." He accepts that his affair with Connie will bring trouble his way - that the fatality of love invariably involves a new cycle of pain - but any post-coital anxiety is quickly replaced by a defiant joy and the desire to make the world anew, or, at the very least, protect the tenderness of life.  

This, ultimately, is all Mellors can hope to do; keep his peace of soul and abide by the little forked flame fucked into being between himself and Connie, whilst dreaming of a democracy to come in which people sing, dance, and walk naked and light along the Open Road. 

In Mellors, Connie finally finds a man whose child she is happy to bear. That said, she's not prepared to marry him in any hurry having just got rid of one husband ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).   

See also: Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), Part 4, chapter 12, from where the material for this post has been taken in an edited and revised form. 

The Art of Love

 Franz Von Stuck: Cupid at the Masked Ball (1887)

We have long endeavoured to make love identify itself to us; to have Eros speak his name and reveal the truth of sex. And, historically, there have been two main methods for achieving this; a scientific method (based on interrogation) and an aesthetic method (based on amplification of effects). 

I suppose, push comes to shove - and without wishing to suggest that these two methods are diametrically opposed - it's the latter which continues to most fascinate and which seems to hold out the most promise in a transsexual era described by Baudrillard as existing after the orgy.  

The promise not necessarily of producing still further truth, but of creating new pleasure understood as a practice that is not considered "in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility" [57], but only on its own terms (evaluated, that is to say, according to what is queer and kinky, rather than normalizing moral and medical standards).

What appeals about an ars erotica is that its most important elements are not to be found in the "humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality" [71], nor in the obsession with orgasm. Rather, it involves playing a secret and sophisticated game with sign and symbol in which lovers wear masks, not because they are ashamed or because there's what Michel Foucault terms an element of infamy attached to love, "but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve" [57]. 

Ultimately, I don't want to reconsecrate love and make of it again our highest ideal. I may want to dress it up and disguise it, but I don't want to put Eros back on a pedestal. I am, if you like, a fetishist, not a priest of love. I want so-called desires to be deferred (or sublimated), not fulfilled. And I want any truths that are produced to be paradoxical.      

Note: Lines quoted are from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998).  

Love Devalued (A Post for Valentine's)

When love becomes an ideal - when it becomes caught up in a system of values - then love becomes a problem. 

Not that you would know this to hear most people speak. For the majority, love remains a final solution, not something troublesome or in any way ambiguous; not even something particularly complex. Love is simply synonymous with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

I know this having attended a public debate on the subject last night at Richmond Adult Community College, chaired by Filiz Peach. Not only did members of the audience seem to agree that Eros should be forever bound by the altruistic values of Christian moral culture, but, shamefully, so did the panel of speakers (even if they referred us not only to Jesus, but to Plato, Darwin and Freud). 

Half-hearted attempts to suggest a biological or psychological basis for love, didn't disguise the fact that essentially they remained believers in and advocates of a non-narcissistic love of self and a non-exploitative love of the other; i.e. a pure love that is all-embracing, ontologically-rooted, and prepared to sacrifice anything (or anyone) to ensure its triumph. A love to live for, a love to die for, and, ultimately, a love to kill for.

This might appear to be a rather extreme interpretation of what was said by the speakers, but it is precisely because love as an ideal knows no limits that it ends by becoming suicidal and homocidal. The murderer, says Lawrence, is all too often a lover acting on the recoil. 

This is lethal enough at an individual level, but it becomes far more fatal on a collective level when love as an ideal is allowed to infect our social and political life. Fascism, communism, and liberal humanism all act in the name of love and all bring death in their wake.

We need, then, to rethink this question of love. To free Eros from his ideal chains and forced complicity within a system of moral values. To make of love a game and an art; a way of playfully giving style to our lives, not of discovering some profound meaning. When we resist the urge to make love definitive of the truth of our being, we might even find we can enjoy it again ...

  

Love and Hate in a Very Cold Climate

Katja Hietala: founder of the Sisters of Kyllikki

Photo: AFP/Sam Kingsley 

For idealists, driven by a will to love and insistent upon the notion of a universal humanity, the acceptance of strangers and embrace of foreignness is a desperate moral duty.  

Thus it is, for example, that the Sisters of Kyllikki in a determined effort to make migrants feel welcome and demonstrate what a kind and tolerant people the Finns are, have taken to the streets distributing smiles and heart-shaped cards that grant permission to hug and carry other positive messages. 

Quite what the women of Cologne and other German cities who were assaulted on New Year's Eve think of this one can only wonder. But I do know that despite what the Sisters of Kyllikki may believe, not everyone wants to be assimilated into a coercive system of reciprocated emotion in which they have no choice but to love and be loved; a system which is happy to generate superficial difference and cultural diversity, but which refuses to conceive of genuine otherness. That is to say, a form of radical alterity that may very well be violently antagonistic. 

Why can't privileged white liberals ever quite accept that not everyone wants to be like them? That many feel an almost visceral aversion towards them and what they represent, decisively rejecting what they have to offer. This feeling of hate might be rooted in class, race, religion or a combination of these things. But it's a profound and authentic form of passion that makes our own feelings and values look pale and feeble in comparison. 

Baudrillard understands the hate of the un-Enlightened Other better than anyone. In an interview with François Ewald, he says:

"There's something irremediable, irreducible in this. We can offer them all the universal charity we are capable of, try to understand them, try to love them - but there is in them a kind of radical alterity that does not want to be understood, and that will not be understood."

Ominously, Baudrillard warns:

"I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them. I believe they have a profound contempt for us; they dislike us with an irreducible feeling of rejection." 

    

Islamic terrorism is only the most extreme and overt form of this contempt; "a passion of radical vengeance, a kind of absolute reversion that's not about to subside" anytime soon. But, I would suggest, the imported phenomenon of taharrush gamea can also be analysed from the theoretical perspective of hate.      

Thus, despite the good offices of Angela Merkel and the huggy women of Finland, one suspects things are going to become increasingly ambiguous in Europe as we wake up to the fact that the world is governed not by a principle of Love and Unity, but by the irreconcilability of evil.


See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hate: A Last Sign of Life', interview with François Ewald, trans. Brent Edwards, in From Hyperreality to Disappearance, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 132-42. Lines quoted are on pp. 133-34.

On the Politics of Knitting

Matthew Dyck and Ayame Ulrich 

The Uniter (Volume 67, Number 13)

In an interview in which he discusses the delights (and importance) of idleness, Roland Barthes interestingly touches upon the question of knitting.

Knitting, says Barthes, is like amateur painting; "an absolutely gratuitous activity, corporal, aesthetic ... and truly restful at the same time". It's an authentic and affirmative form of laziness, "because there's no pride or narcissism involved".

In fact, knitting might be thought of as the epitome of euphoric idleness (unless of course one is gripped by utilitarian desire to actually finish a piece of work); a perfect example of a manual activity that opens up a simple yet successful form of freedom.

Unfortunately, knitting has been increasingly marginalized within our society. Something that is acceptable only if done by elderly women. Thus, as Barthes goes on to suggest (without too much irony), perhaps one of the most unconventional and, therefore, most scandalous things would be for a young person, particularly a young man, to pull out some needles in a public space and openly begin to knit.

Strangely enough, three decades after Barthes playfully imagined this revolt into handicraft, it came to pass as young punks, goths, and bearded hipsters suddenly became more interested in cross-stitch patterns and yarn bombing, than those more traditional activities associated with alternative lifestyles. (When they weren't busy baking, of course ...!)

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was amused or impressed by this development. The late Steven Wells, for example, wrote in a piece for The Guardian that the very idea of radical knitting is "as absurd as radical dusting or radical toilet cleaning" and that it signals the death not only of youth culture, but of feminism.

However, whilst it's true that Germaine Greer "didn't articulate her disgust with women's oppression by knitting a lavender and yellow toilet-roll holder" and that "Jimi Hendrix didn't take to the stage at Woodstock wearing a nice orange and puce cardigan", I think it just as ludicrous to propose sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll as being the revolutionary solutions to all life's problematic aspects - surely no one really believes this any longer, do they?

Ultimately, I don't care how people choose to articulate their lives and express their politics; it's all good, providing it's done with style, with humour, and without any trace of ascetic militancy. What I don't have time for is the attempt to establish hierarchies in which certain acts, arts, or pleasures are privileged and others denigrated and despised.


Notes

Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', from an interview conducted by Christine Eff, in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 338-45. The lines quoted are on pp. 340-41.

Those interested in reading the Steven Wells Guardian article (14 June, 2008) should click here. 

This year's World Wide Knit in Public Day is on Saturday 18 June, 2016. Click here for details.  

This post is dedicated to CheyOnna Sewell and the women of The Yarn Mission.    

Roland Barthes's Enigmatic Individualism

It is often said that man is a social animal; that he's naturally gregarious. 

And, I suppose, that's true and that this herd instinct is not entirely a bad thing. I certainly wouldn't wish to dissolve all sense of solidarity and belonging with others in favour of a liberal idealism which posits the individual as a self-contained unit. I'd sooner be a sheep existing as part of a flock, than Rob Brydon's Small Man in a Box.       

Having said that, I'm wary of the fact that a vulgar and often aggressive will to conformity reigns in every herd. Thus the idea of individualism continues to attract and demands to be taken up in a new (non-bourgeois, non-romantic) manner. 

Some authors, like Nietzsche, think of this in terms of starry singularity and a speculative transhumanism. Others, such as Barthes, are perhaps not quite so optimistic and conceive of an alternative individualism as something equally radical, but more enigmatic. 

That is to say, a clandestine and ambiguous model related to the margins rather than the heavens; one that's non-militant in its discourse and its methods and doesn't directly contest or confront power, so much as subvert or seduce it via the creation of queer new styles of writing, desiring, dressing, etc. 

This is why fashion - perhaps even more than philosophy - provides a "privileged vantage point for observing how society functions" and why the question of individualism invariably leads us back to dandyism, that peculiarly modern and scandalous form of stoicism and self-creation.

Start with externals, as Lawrence says, and the rest will slowly follow ...


See: Roland Barthes, 'The Crisis of Desire', from an interview conducted by Philip Brooks (20 April, 1980), in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 361-65. The line quoted from is on p. 362.

On Women in Love, Sea Devils and Sexual Dimorphism

Photo by David Shale of a deep-sea anglerfish (female) 

One of the most extraordinary passages in Lawrence's Women in Love opens chapter XVI and concerns the question of sexual dimorphism, or the polarised duality between men and women. 

Feeling sick of everything and vehemently hostile towards the old ideal of love proffered by Ursula, Birkin reflects upon what might take the place of a life lived together in the "horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction" [199]. Finding the thought of union - be it blissful or otherwise - repulsive, Birkin hopes for something cooler, clearer, and cleaner than the sticky intimacy enjoyed by couples:

"On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned man into a broken half of a couple ... And he wanted to be single in himself  ... not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. ... And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him." [199-200]

Unfortunately, in Birkin's experience at least, women were unlikely to share in this dream of a post-sexual (post-human) future, in which there was a further conjunction beyond love between two pure beings, balancing each other "like two angels, or two demons" [199]. 

It seemed to him that "woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her ... the Great Mother ... out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up." [200]

For Birkin, the maleness of men must be more than something supplementary or epiphenomenal. Otherwise, they are in danger of becoming sea-devils; a species of anglerfish that exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism (the male of the species being greatly different from the female in size, shape, structure and function).

This sounds at first as if the anglerfish have achieved what Birkin dreams of; i.e. pure polarised opposition between the sexes, where each is "free from any contamination of the other" [201]. But, as anyone who knows about these creatures is aware, this isn't the case at all.

Rather, when mature, the tiny male fish seeks out and attaches himself permanently to the body of a far larger female with his sharp, beak-like mouth. Releasing an enzyme that dissolves his own face and the flesh of her body, the male literally fuses with the female, merging circulatory systems. Having lost his head, his testicles swell in size and the male fish thus becomes not only parasitically dependent upon the female for all his nutritional needs, but a mere sexual appendage and sperm bank.

The female sea devil is then a fishy Magna Mater; she assimilates the male whom she has borne back into herself with pure assumption, filling Birkin and those men who would be free and singular beings, living a kind of starry existence beyond love (and beyond woman), with an almost insane fury.


See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 199-201.

And, if interested in the topic, see also Theodore W. Pietsch, "Dimorphism, parasitism, and sex revisited: modes of reproduction among deep-sea ceratioid anglerfishes (Teleostei: Lophiiformes)", in Ichthyological Research 52 (3): 207–236 (25 August, 2005).