The Man With the Child in His Eyes

Like many people, I have a fascination with childhood photos of "myself". The glut of more recent images and selfies taken on a smart phone don't really mean anything to me. But those rare pictures of a young boy in a pre-digital world I find powerfully seductive.       

To be clear: it's not that I'm learning to love myself, or searching for the inner child. There's nothing therapeutic or healing about my interest in old snaps. Nor is there anything perverse or pathological in it; those who theorise about narcissistic exhibitionism or auto-paedophilia are missing the point.   

It's more a case of trying to understand how these objects frozen in time continue to play an important philosophical role - not by revealing or constructing my present self, but, paradoxically, in serving to disguise it and thus helping distance me from myself. 

Ultimately, we can never really see ourselves; not in photographs, nor in mirrors. And when I look at that nine-year old above wearing his favourite Fred Perry t-shirt, I glimpse a kind of stranger - albeit a stranger with whom I have a lot in common and who constantly haunts my writings.          

As Roland Barthes says, no one is responsible for their childhood, but if it marks you and stays with you, it's never completely done away with.

A Postcard from Southend-on-Sea

Southend-on-Sea, Essex, lies approximately 40 miles east of London on the north side of the Thames Estuary; a region that has produced its own virulent strain of English now spoken in many regions of this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Ingerland.  

It is home to the world's longest pleasure pier; a marvel of 19th century engineering that everyone from Princess Caroline to Arthur Daley has strolled along at some point. 

I first day-tripped to Southend with my parents in the early seventies. By then - although I didn't know it at the time - it was already in decline as a popular holiday destination. Everyone who could was jetting off to sunny Spain instead. For who wants soggy fish and chips and a mug of lukewarm tea, when you can have a big plate of paella washed down with a cheap bottle of vino? 

Still, I always loved my time in Southend as a child, beginning with the train ride from Romford via stations whose names had an exotic and almost magical allure - Shenfield-Billericay-Wickford-Rayleigh-Hockley-Rochford-Prittlewell - my excitement growing as I got ever closer to the coast and the thought of a fresh plate of cockles raked straight out of the mud at low tide, or an ice-cream from Rossi's.

There was no real beach to speak of and the grey sea was always out as far as I remember. But the place had a certain working-class Cockney charm (dare one say authenticity) and I had hours of fun in the amusement arcades and Peter Pan's Playground (which I preferred to the rather intimidating Kursaal full of young skinheads in their boots and braces and ageing Teddy Boys). 

What I enjoyed best of all, however, was sitting in the landscaped gardens of the Shrubbery eating a packed lunch, which always involved either a ham or cheese sandwich. There was a little stream and a waterfall, a fairy castle and a few left-over figures; remnants from its fifties heyday as Never Never Land.

Today, over forty years later, Southend is still on sea and many things have remained essentially the same; the pier, for example, still stretches a mile out to nowhere (although now you have to pay to walk along it).

But the deprivation of the town is as noticeable - and as shocking - as the tattooed obesity of the natives, or the large number of women hanging around the newly built lagoon wearing hijabs and burkinis and recreating scenes that more closely resemble Mogadishu than the lost world of Jane Austen and Donald McGill. 

      
 

In Defence of Trivia

Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: 

through spacious streets conduct thy bard along

  John Gay (1716)

This just in by email, with reference to a recently published post:

"It's bad enough when writers like you try to persuade us that superficial and boring phenomena, such as fashion, have great import or interest. But what is worse is that when you do decide to discuss serious topics, such as cultural appropriation, which involve issues of class and race, you invariably reduce them to questions of style or semantics in a manner that is disingenuous, disrespectful and disappointing. Surely philosophy - even of a postmodern variety - should do more than trivialise everything with an ironic smirk; particularly things that have real consequences for real people in the real world." 

There's obviously quite a lot here to which I might respond. But it's the idea of trivia that I think I'd like to address (briefly and obviously not in depth; nor with the appropriate gravitas that my critic seems to expect).

It's clear, is it not, that those who hate trivia do so from a moral position that is thought superior, but is in fact only snobbish and judgemental.

For what constitutes trivia after all other than forms of knowledge believed to be of lesser value or commonplace; fine for those of limited education or intelligence (and postmodernists), but not for those who have greater intellectual gifts and who, like my critic, prefer to discuss important issues from a serious perspective and not waste time playing language games or worrying about aesthetics.   

The Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road forked into two. And this too provides a vital clue as to why people such as my critic hate trivialisation.

For rather than being a reductive process, it's one that adds complexity and ambiguity; multiplying alternatives and proliferating difference; demonstrating that there is no single, super-smooth highway to truth, just a network of minor roads and what Heidegger terms Holzwege - paths that might very well lead nowhere and cause the seeker after wisdom to get lost. Ultimately, my critic is frightened of losing their way by leaving the straight and narrow. But I'm more like Little Red Riding Hood and prepared to take a risk; I might miss the point - but, on the other hand, I might meet a wolf (and there's nothing inconsequential about that).

Alternatively, I just might encounter a deity ...

For Trivia refers not only to fun-facts about popular culture or the minutiae of everyday life, but is the name of a goddess who, in Roman mythology, haunted crossroads and graveyards and was the mother of witchcraft and queen of ghosts, wandering about at night beneath the harvest moon visible only to the barking dogs who told of her approach. Again, one suspects all this rather frightens and repulses my critic, who would doubtless dismiss it as superstitious nonsense. But as the former editor of Pagan Magazine, the thought of encountering such a figure continues to secretly enchant.   

And so, in a nutshell, it's better to trivialise than to moralise and be forever bound by the spirit of gravity.
          

The Test on Miriam

Heather Sears and Dean Stockwell as Miriam Leivers and Paul Morel 

Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)

An anonymous member of the D. H Lawrence Society has emailed to complain that in a recent post I "inaccurately and unfairly portray the actions of Paul Morel towards Miriam as cruel and rather sordid".

If only, they continue, I "understood more about their relationship and the complex character of love", then I would be able to see that "Paul throws the cherries at the girl with affection in a teasing, playful manner" and his subsequent seduction of her in the pine woods is "an expression of phallic tenderness".

I think the only way I can answer this criticism is by looking closely at the text in question; Chapter XI of Sons and Lovers, entitled - tellingly enough I would have thought - 'The Test on Miriam'.   

Firstly, it's true that Paul feels real tenderness for Miriam. But although he courts her like a kindly lover, what he really wants is to experience the impersonality of passion. That is to say, he wants to fuck her dark, monstrous cunt oozing with slime, not stare into her lovely eyes all lit up with sincerity of feeling. Her gaze, so earnest and searching, makes him look away. Paul bitterly resents Miriam always bringing him back to himself; making him feel small and tame and all-too-human.    

And so, in my view at least, when he throws the cherries at her, in a state of cherry delirium, he does so with anger and aggression - not affection, or playfulness. He tears off handful after handful of the fruit and literally pelts her with them. Startled and frightened, Miriam runs for shelter whilst Paul laughs demonically from atop the tree and meditates on death and her vulnerability: so small, so soft.   

When, finally, Paul climbs down (ripping his shirt in the process), he convinces the girl to walk with him into the woods: "It was very dark among the firs, and the sharp spines pricked her face. She was afraid. Paul was silent and strange." Lawrence continues, in a manner which suggests that whatever else phallic tenderness may be, it isn't something that acknowledges the individuality, independence, or needs of actual women:

"He seemed to be almost unaware of her as a person: she was only to him then a woman. She was afraid. He stood against a pine-tree trunk and took her in his arms. She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her."

And thus Paul takes Miriam's virginity (and loses his own): in the rain, among the strong-smelling trees, and with a heavy-heart; "he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond ..." Miriam is disconcerted (to say the least) by his post-coital nihilism: "She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic."

Anyway, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether my portrayal of Paul - and my reading of Lawrence - is inaccurate and unfair. Or whether my anonymous correspondent and critic has, like many Lawrentians, such a partisan and wholly positive view of their hero-poet - and such a cosy, romantic view of his work - that they entirely miss the point of the latter and do the former a great disservice. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It is interesting to note that Lawrence makes the same connection between cherries, sex, cruelty and death in his poem 'Cherry Robbers', which anticipates the scene in Sons and Lovers described above. Click here to read the verse.

Mondongo

Mondongo: Blonde Teenie Sucking (2004) 

Black Series, biscuits on wood, 60 x 80 cm

Mondongo is an Argentinian art collective founded in 1999 by three artists in Buenos Aires: Juliana Lafitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Augustina Picasso. They typically create realistic images with  provocative content out of unusual materials including bullets, matches, nails and various food items (from dried meat to burnt toast).

For the so-called Black Series, the group transformed pornographic images taken from the internet into mosaics of cookies and crackers. The use of such base materials is intended, one assumes, to provide a critical commentary on the pervasive commodification of life within contemporary culture.

However, despite their laudable aim to produce a form of pop-art that retains a high level of aesthetic and theoretical integrity, this hasn't stopped them exploiting young bodies and producing portraits of the royal, rich and famous, just like other artists looking for patronage and well-paid commissions.

So whilst I admire some of their work, I take their radical political posturing with a pinch of salt. Soup is good food, but, as Nietzsche pointed out, ultimately no one is more corruptible than an artist ... 
  

I Love Cherries (But I'm Not a Royalist)

Cherries on a Pale Orange Background 
 SA/2016

Your tastes change as you get older, so they say. 

And, annoyingly - 'cos I hate it when experience lends support to anything that Das Man has to say - I've discovered this summer that I much prefer eating cherries to strawberries.

It's not that I've suddenly been seduced by the somewhat dodgy sexual symbolism of the former, subscribed to by writers including Lawrence (in Sons and Lovers, for example, Paul cruelly pelts poor Miriam with a handful of cherries from atop a very large tree hung thick with scarlet fruit, before then popping her cherry in the pine woods).

Nor is it merely that I find the sleek, cool-fresh cherries more aesthetically pleasing to look at in a bowl.

Rather, I now genuinely like the sophisticated sour sweet taste of them more than the simple sweetness of strawberries which, let's be honest, usually needs to be supplemented with sugar, or enhanced with cream.

So I suppose I should be grateful to Henry VIII who, when not having heads cut off or dissolving monasteries, ordered the introduction of cherries into England at Teynham, in Kent, having tasted them in Flanders.

But the words Thank you, Your Majesty will never pass my lips - not for all the cherries in the world! 

Reflections on My Shiny New Red Kettle

Morphy Richards Red Accents 
2.5 Litre Whistling Stove Top Kettle

As D. H. Lawrence often stressed, it's crucial that people form connections with the external objects that populate their world. Not just other men and women, but animals, plants and inanimate objects such as favourite items of clothing, pieces of furniture, works of art, toys, tools, or weapons.

Of course, for some people - including Lawrence, unfortunately - when it comes to these inanimate objects it seems that only old things invested with dignity by the passage of time and individually crafted by human hand rather than mass produced by machine, are truly worthy of our love and respect. 

But I think anything that enters into our lives and touches us in some manner - establishing a powerful circuit of exchange - whatever its age, status, or authenticity, deserves our affection. And so I'm pleased to report that my shiny new red kettle has arrived - and I love it!
 
Love it, that is to say, precisely in all its shiny red newness and don't need it to be - or even want it to be - saturated with my own magnetism - like Lawrence's boots!

As a matter of fact, I'm sick of being surrounded by things heavy with the dead weight of the past and covered in dirt, dust, cobwebs and indecency. I find things rich in history and steeped in tradition almost unbearable these days; things that literally drain the life - and the joy of life - from out of us.

And so Mellors can keep his rotten old iron kettle; Connie may have found it glamorous, but I'm happy with my stainless steel Morphy Richards ...

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation

Karlie Kloss on the catwalk for Victoria's Secret in 2012: 
So wrong, its right ...?

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. These elements range from fashions, hairstyles and dance moves, to spiritual beliefs and religious practices.

It is seen by its opponents as almost always illegitimate, particularly when elements of a minority, marginalised, or subordinate culture are appropriated by members of a dominant mainstream society outside of their original context of meaning in an inauthentic and insensitive manner.

When this occurs, say the critics, then cultural appropriation reveals itself as a disrespectful and aggressive form of colonialism - often inherently racist in character - in which native peoples are robbed of their essential self-hood and intellectual property rights, or reduced to the humiliated status of exotic other.

Now, it just so happens that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to these arguments. Indeed, as a youthful reader of Nietzsche, I used to subscribe to a form of cultural puritanism (and cultural pessimism) myself.

Having said that, such views increasingly strike me as not only untenable philosophically, but politically pernicious. Push comes to shove, I think I prefer modern barbarism with its chaos of styles and superficial artifice; I like the ironic use of symbols and a sacrilegious refusal to take anything too seriously.    

For unlike those who fetishize the notion of culture as something that has to be revered and preserved in its pure form - particularly if it happens to be ancient and non-Western in origin - I don't regard it as a sacred quality possessed by a people which developed organically from within the conditions of their existence and shaped their unique identity. Rather, I think it's basically a form of masquerade.

Members of the culture cult regard modern civilization as the coldest of all cold monsters; something fundamentally antagonistic to genuine cultures rooted in blood and soil; something that sucks the very soul out of indigenous peoples the world over and transforms Geist into that which can be commodified and made kitsch. They desire a world in which everybody keeps it real.

But I'm quite happy for people to fake it and cheerfully borrow or steal ideas and looks. Quite frankly, I'd rather live in a world of fashion models wearing feathered headdresses on the catwalk than Indian braves solemnly preparing for war. 


Note: those interested in reading another couple of perspectives on this topic might like to see:

'In Praise of Cultural Appropriation', by the sociologist and cultural commentator Frank Furedi (Spiked, 15 Feb 2016)

'Victoria's Secret's Racist Garbage Is Just Asking for a Boycott', by the writer and columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network Ruth Hopkins (Jezebel, 11/12/12)

Moloch

18thC German depiction of Moloch

During a memorial Mass for the murdered French priest, 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel, the Archbishop of Paris accused the young men responsible of crying Allahu Akbar in order to disguise the fact that they actually worship at the altar of Moloch - the ancient pagan deity who gloried in human sacrifice.

Essentially an Old Testament take on the official line that acts of Islamic terrorism have nothing to do with Islam, Cardinal Vingt-Trois told the faithful not to be fooled by these self-proclaimed jihadists, whilst warning the latter that those who wish to serve and promulgate a god of death - one who demands bloodshed and promises paradise to those who slay the innocent - cannot expect all of humanity to surrender to their madness. In the face of evil, he concluded, Christians must do what they've always done; spread the Gospel of Jesus and find their strength, their courage, and their salvation in Almighty God, the God of Love.

   

Of course, this is as mendacious as everything else that comes out of the mouth of a religiously motivated speaker. For acts of Islamic terrorism have everything to do with Islam and, more widely, with Abrahamic monotheism in general; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are apocalyptic spiritual traditions with a common origin and they share many beliefs, traditions, and moral teachings.

And so, just as there is very little difference between Yahweh and Allah - both are judgemental and jealous gods who demand submission and sacrifice from their followers - there is genuine theological kinship and continuity between the God of Love worshipped by the Archbishop of Paris and the Canaanite idol known as Moloch.

Indeed, reviving a medieval rabbinical tradition, both Georg Friedrich Daumer and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany published influential works in 1841 arguing that Moloch and Yahweh were actually one and the same figure and that the cult of the latter developed out of that of the former. 

It's probably best, therefore, that Cardinal Vingt-Trois doesn't say anything else along this line in future; 'cos he's on a very slippery slope. Modern followers of the major religions are essentially no different from ancient pagans with their savage superstitions. Muslims and Christians, for example, are often just as willing to martyr themselves for their gods (and to kill others) without ever asking - or even caring - whether their gods are worthy of such fanatic devotion.

Bertrand Russell - not a philosopher I would normally turn to for support - sums this up nicely in the following paragraph:

"Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods ... The religion of Moloch - as such creeds may be generically called - is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain."

- Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship' (1903)

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part II)

 ... and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me 

so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart 

was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I suppose that one of the more attractive things about approaching literature according to a principle of pleasure is that it means we can have done with judgement in the traditional terms of good and bad. This in itself is surely a relief of some kind and a significant break with the moral history of the West. For as Deleuze rightly points out: "From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgement has been elaborated and developed".

Kant notoriously gave us a false critique of judgement. It was Spinoza and his heirs, such as Nietzsche, who really carried this out and Barthes follows in their footsteps, refusing either to accuse or justify, defend or condemn. Indeed, Barthes quotes Nietzsche in the very first fragment of The Pleasure of the Text: 'I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation.' All that matters is whether his body finds something pleasurable or not. It's a Nietzschean - not a subjective - game of love and hate.

Of course, what Barthes's body loves and what Barthes's body hates, will not be the same as what the body of another reader might love and hate. In Roland Barthes he makes a list of things he likes and a list of things he doesn’t like; two lists which are apparently of no great significance. But, of course, they do in fact mean something vital; namely, that no two bodies are the same: "Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma ..." [1995]

Because all bodies are different, a Society of the Friends of the Text would be a social grouping in which members had nothing in common: "for there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure" [1990]. This calls for a certain liberalism, therefore, each person consenting to "remain silent and polite when confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share", or run the risk of homicidal irritation. “I am liberal in order not to be a killer” [1995], as Barthes confesses.

The key thing is that within the above sodality, difference and contradiction is accepted. There is no judgement and no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative governing universal good taste. Barthes is very clear about who would comprise enemies of such a society:

"fools of all kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a 'mystique' of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by ... loss of verbal desire." [1990]

Picking up on this idea of the body that Barthes introduces, we may say the following: for Barthes, the text itself can be thought of as a "body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations" [1990] and utterly distinct from the body known by anatomists and discussed within scientific discourse. This is not to reduce the pleasure of the text to some kind of physiological process or need, but it is to affirm that the pleasure of the text "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas" [1990] and fully comes into its own as a site of what Nietzsche calls the greater intelligence.

This sounds at first precisely like the kind of mysticism which his critics accuse him of and which Barthes is eager to deny. Later in The Pleasure of the Text he will insist that his major aim is to materialize the text and its pleasure; making it into an object of pleasure like any other and thereby abolishing the "false opposition of practical life and contemplative life" [1990].

Jonathan Culler's commentary on this aspect of Barthes’s work is particularly insightful and thus worth quoting at length:

"Reference to the body is part of Barthes’s general attempt to produce a materialist account of reading and writing, but it has four specific functions. First, the introduction of this unexpected term produces a salutary estrangement, especially in the French tradition, where the self has long been identified with consciousness, as in the Cartesian cogito ...
      Second, structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it. ...
      Third, given structuralism's treatment of the subject ... Barthes could not talk about the subject’s pleasure without begging numerous questions ... Yet he needs a way of speaking that takes account of the empirical fact that an individual can read and enjoy a text ... the notion of the body permits Barthes to avoid the problem of the subject ...
      Fourth, replacement of 'mind' by 'body' accords with Barthes’s emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure."

Of course, problems remain with this invoking of (and appeal to) the body. For even if one strives to avoid falling into mysticism or some form of biological essentialism, we’re still left with a word that seems to have a greater degree of authority and authenticity than other words; "a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that this word holds an answer to everything" [1995] - i.e. what Barthes calls a mana-word.

Although aware that the word 'body' was functioning as such in his later writings, I’m not sure Barthes ever fully addresses this issue. He seems happy to use it, if only as deliberate provocation to the new intellectual orthodoxy - which, ironically, he had helped to create.

Further, if via his use of the term body Barthes allows a form of faceless subjectivity back into the Text, so too is he prepared to welcome back the author as a kind of spectral guest:

"If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters ... no longer privileged, paternal ... He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work ..." [1977]

In The Pleasure of the Text, he expands on this theme: 

"As an institution, the Author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared ... they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine ..." [1990]

The reason for this necrophilia is easy to appreciate. Barthes desires the return of the author for the same reason that the text needs its shadow - "a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject" [1990] - and a painting its chiaroscuro: in order for it to become fertile. Those who would argue that we abandon all caution and strip a work of everything that we previously valued within it take us towards sterility and suicide.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, caution is the immanent rule of experimentation, whether one is producing an avant-garde artwork or building a body without organs: "if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing down the plane [of consistency] you will be ... plunged into a black hole, or ... dragged towards catastrophe".

Barthes attempts to shatter the dead-grip of traditional criticism upon classical literature - not to destroy the latter. In his ‘Inaugural Lecture’ to the Collège de France, he declares:

"The old values are no longer transmitted, no longer circulate, no longer impress; literature is desacralized, institutions are impotent to defend and impose it as the implicit model of the human. It is not, if you like, that literature is destroyed; rather it is no longer protected, so that this is the moment to deal with it. ... Our gaze can fall, not without perversity, upon certain old and lovely things, whose signified is abstract, out of date. It is a moment at once decadent and prophetic, a moment of gentle apocalypse, a historical moment of the greatest possible pleasure." [1989]

Of course, whilst Barthes may retain a nostalgic fondness for these old and lovely things (works by Zola, Balzac, Proust et al) - and whilst they may still give him a great deal of plaisir - they cannot induce jouissance. For bliss comes only with the absolutely new; "for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness" [1990]. This is a rare occurrence and does not come easily. Often, what we take to be the new is merely "the stereotype of novelty" [1990].

The New, as Barthes conceives it, is then not simply the latest thing - it's a value. And it opposes all the old forms of encratic language (i.e. the language of power), which are founded upon repetition and stereotype; "all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school reports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology" [1990]. Barthes continues:

"The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as thought it were natural ... Nietzsche has observed that 'truth' is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of 'truth'..." [1990]

Opposing the rule of the stereotype is the New and the exceptional pleasure of the New (which is bliss). But finding new ways to write and to speak is not easy and would seem to involve more than merely coining endless new terms or indulging in a kind of linguistic Saturnalia. Indeed, Nietzsche warns us against those innovators in language who constantly seek to supplement language, rather than bring greater style or discipline to it.

Heidegger also argues that whilst it’s right to identify the metaphysics of language, there is no need to abandon all grammatical convention. For a revitalizing of language does not result "from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases" [1994], but from a change in our relation to (and usage of) language. Even old words, worn out by convention and repetition, can be recontextualized, reinterpreted, and revalued.

Often, it’s case of transforming the Word back into the Flesh; that is to say, of giving back to language what Anaïs Nin described as the “bulginess of sculpture, the feeling of heavy material fullness” and perhaps our poets are best placed to lead the way here. But it’s philosophy, says Heidegger, which is ultimately responsible for preserving “the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” [1998] and to protect language from being degraded by a common intelligibility into doxa, cliché, or sheer nonsense.

To allow language, in other words, the right to live and, equally important, the right to die. For what is the stereotype at last but the "nauseating impossibility of dying" [1990] - the rule of a world in which words become reified, fixed, undead.

The pleasure of the text, we might conclude, lies in its mortality ...


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (Fontana Press, 1977). 
Roland Barthes, 'Inaugural Lecture', trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, (Fontana Press, 1989).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Blackwell, 1990).
Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-06.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Miller, (Papermac, 1995).
Jonathan Culler, Barthes, (Fontana Press, 1990).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘To Have Done With Judgement’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press,
Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’, essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Blackwell, 1998).
Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, (Blackspring Press, 1985).
Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To read the first part of this post click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'