Notes on Object Imperative and Pantheistic Sensuality

17thC print depicting a happy dendrophile

Lawrence loves trees and although he concedes they're mindless, he excitedly writes of sap-consciousness and root-lust and assigns them a unique soul. They are, he says, powerful, inhuman beings reaching up to the sky and reaching down into the dark earth. And reaching also into us.

Speaking of an American pine, Lawrence writes:

"Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's. We cannot live near one another, as we do, without affecting one another.”

Confronting the forceful reality of the tree, Lawrence speculates what might be thought of as a form of object imperative which, to paraphrase Graham Harman, radiates over him like a black sun, holding him in its orbit, demanding his attention and insisting that he reorganise his life along it axes:

"Something fierce and bristling is communicated. The piney sweetness is rousing and defiant ... the noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness. ... I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree ... And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life, within itself. ...

      Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one’s attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in one’s self: or one can open many doors that are shut.
      I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree. Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resinous erectness and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness of roots ...”

Lawrence describes this as a form of pantheistic sensuality, thereby indicating how his dendrophilia has a religious aspect and is not merely an erotic fascination.

Trees, we might say, give him a sense of god as present in all things and not merely wood. Thus Lawrence wants to venerate them as well as rub up against them (enjoying the feel of their bark and depositing his seed, like Birkin, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves).

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pan in America', Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lines quoted are from pp. 158-59. 

For a related post on Lawrence's dendrophilia, click here.

Charles, Prince of Piffle

Torpedo the Ark opposes all forms of monarchy, including the House of Windsor.

I wouldn't say I hate them, but I want them to go away - far, far away - and cease to exert any influence upon public life or the cultural imagination.  

And if there's one member of this ghastly family of privileged, parasitic inbreds that I want to go further away than the others, it's Charles, Prince of Piffle and would-be King of the Crackpots.

For whilst I can forgive him many things - his love of The Goon Show, his penchant for talking to plants, his fantasy of becoming a tampon, etc. - what I can't overlook is the very real power he has to shape government policy and popular opinion on a wide range of issues, from farming and the environment, to art, architecture and - most worryingly of all - healthcare.

A committed defender of faith and self-professed enemy of the Enlightenment, Charles is clearly a crank who subscribes to some deeply foolish ideas. But, like his former guru, Laurens van der Post, he's also someone with a rather sinister aspect, not above harming others should they challenge these anti-scientific beliefs or frustrate his attempts to have them implemented, as the case of Edzard Ernst demonstrates.

It's nothing short of scandalous that the Prince has been able to pass himself off as an expert in integrated medicine and persuade members of parliament - including government ministers - to take homeopathy, herbalism and other complementary or alternative treatments seriously enough to invest large sums of public money in researching and promoting them.

I don't want the Department of Health to use its limited financial resources on various forms of quackery at the behest of a meddling member of the royal family and whilst I'm all for choice within the NHS, I don't want that choice to include witchcraft, faith healing, or snake oil thank you very much - even if the latter comes with an official royal warrant. 

As David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, writes: "Questions about health policy are undoubtedly political, and the highly partisan interventions of the Prince in the political process make his behaviour unconstitutional."

Not only does Charles jeopardise the future of the monarchy with his behaviour (which I don't care about), he endangers the health of the nation (about which I do care). As Christopher Hitchens warns: "An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific."


See:

David Colquhoun, 'Quacktitioner Royal is a menace to the constitution and public health', The Conversation, (July 30, 2013): click here. 

David Gorski, 'Prince of Pseudoscience', Slate, (March 17, 2015): click here. 

Christopher Hitchens, 'Charles, Prince of Piffle', Slate, (June 14, 2010): click here:  

I am grateful to Maria Thanassa for suggesting the topic of this post.

Endgame: the Case of Nazi Paikidze

nazipaikidze.com

Russian-born, US-living, 22-year-old chess-master, Nazi Paikidze, is one of those women who invites use of the sexist cliché concerning an apparently rare combination of beauty and brains (I say apparently because I have no way of knowing what percentage of women are both very attractive and very intelligent, though suspect it's much higher than commonly believed - and almost certainly higher than the number of men who are gifted with good-looks and a brilliant mind).

However, Nazi is not only beautiful and brainy, but someone prepared to actively take a stand in public against the religious oppression of women, having recently announced that she will boycott the 2017 Women's World Chess Championship in Tehran, due to the enforcement of an Islamic dress code that requires all participants to wear a hijab or face action from the morality police.

Even though this will mean missing an important tournament and risk damaging her career as a professional chess player, Nazi has categorically refused to cover her hair in order to compete and thereby show complicity with a phallo-theocratic regime in which women are denied fundamental rights and freedoms.      

For this, Torpedo the Ark salutes Ms Paikidze. Her protest shames those politicians, commentators, fashion designers, etc. who would normalize the wearing of a veil even in secular-liberal Western society, wilfully turning a blind eye to the fact that it's a symbol of, at best, sexual discrimination and, at worst, violent misogyny.

And shame too on those appeasers and apologists within the chess world's governing body, including Susan Polgar, who have tried to silence Nazi on this issue, insisting she should keep her views to herself and learn to respect cultural differences, rather than standing by the women of Iran who are courageously (often secretly) seeking to reform a society (and a religion) that denigrates them on the on hand, whilst fetishizing their purity on the other. 


Note: Readers interested in the campaign for the right of individual women in Iran to choose whether or not to cover their hair in public, should visit My Stealthy Freedom; an online social movement started by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad - another brave, beautiful and brilliant woman. 

On the Question of Ensoulment

Soul entering human embryo at point of conception 

Holygraphic quantum-semantic electron microscopy imaging by pixwit.com

D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his metaphysical speculations on human fertilization and the development of the embryo. And, being primarily a religious thinker, the vital question for him concerned ensoulment; i.e., the moment at which a newly formed human being is animated by the Holy Spirit.
 

For Lawrence, as for the Pope, just as coition is the essential clue to sex, conception is the crucial act here: the instant that the father-quick fuses with the mother-germ is when a new unit of individuality is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

However, we might note that - unlike the Pope - Lawrence also believes in a form of reincarnation via which the souls of the dead re-enter and pervade the souls of the living, breeding thoughts and feelings and ensuring that each person is composed of a multiplicity of forces and so isn't absolutely unique or entirely self-contained.

As interesting as the latter belief is, it's the former notion of ensoulment that I wish to discuss here, examining the view that it occurs at conception and not, for example, at the formation of the nervous system, or when there is measurable brain activity; nor when a tiny heartbeat can be heard, or fetal viability is attained; nor when the newborn is rudely slapped on the bottom and draws its first breath.

It's a view, however, that isn't shared universally. Aristotle, for example, subscribed to a model of epigenesis and believed that ensoulment - in a human sense - only occurred forty days after conception in the case of the male embryo and ninety days after conception in the case of the female fetus, when movement is experienced within the womb. Before this time he held that an embryo had the soul of a vegetable, followed by that of an animal and so couldn't be regarded as a fully human individual.     

Aristotle's views on this question influenced many of the great Christian thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, who, even whilst conceding that the early embryo did not contain a human soul (one capable of rationality and distinguishing between good and evil), still maintained that aborting it constituted a grave sin (a position which, rightly or wrongly, the Catholic Church has been remarkably consistent on over the years).

It's worth recalling, however, that the ancient Greeks and early Christians knew nothing of fertilization; it wasn't until 1876 that Oscar Hertwig conclusively demonstrated that it involved fusion of two parental gametes and resulted in a genetically distinct zygote. Aristotle believed that the embryo arose exclusively from semen and that the female body merely provided a safe space for the embryo to develop.

Compared to this view, the notion of ensoulment at conception doesn't seem so outlandish; provided of course that one is willing to accept the idea of a non-corporeal and immortal essence animating the human being like some kind of divine breath or spark. Personally, I'm not.

I tend, rather, to share Foucault's more negative, more material view of the soul; as a virtual and historical reality that is produced as an effect of power continually shaping and disciplining the body and which ultimately serves to imprison the flesh. And, like Wilde, I hope that if ever I am to live again it can be as a little flower - no soul, but perfectly beautiful. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Spermism

Although D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist in any conventional or objective sense of the term, that didn't stop him from sharing his often peculiar ideas on human reproduction and the development of the embryo. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst confessing his ignorance of the sex cells in terms of chemical composition and function, he's perfectly happy to describe how the parental gametes sparkle with potency and send forth dark currents of vital energy attracting one another.

But if he acknowledges the importance of the large and mysterious mother-germ, one gets the impression that it's the father-spark that really excites his interest and he is at heart something of a spermist. For it's the much smaller sperm cell, writes Lawrence, that is most vivid and even more intrinsic to procreation. So whilst we should readily admit our indebtedness to our mother and her ovum, we should not deny the father-quick of ourselves, which is maybe the most essential element.   
   
Of course, this is not to suggest that Lawrence fully subscribed to the now obsolete and ludicrous-seeming notion that the head of each sperm cell contains a tiny human being - a theory of preformationism, widely accepted in the late seventeenth century after sperm (or seminal animalcules) were first identified under the microscope c.1677.

Although never as dominant an idea as the opposing (and earlier) model of ovist preformationism, spermism nevertheless had some influential supporters, including the German philosopher Leibniz, whose writings on the subject helped shape the development of embryology long into the eighteenth century.

There were major concerns with the spermist theory, however, not the least of which was the fact that it implied a colossal waste of human life on the part of a supposedly loving God: there are around 100 million sperm in each millilitre of semen and a healthy male adult will normally ejaculate between two and five ml. Conception, of course, only requires a single sperm cell. Attempts to get around this problem - arguing, for example, that sperm cells which failed to penetrate the ovum evaporated into the air and floated around until such time they could be recycled - failed to convince most critics.             

Later spermists abandoned this idea of panspermism, and argued instead that the homunculus present in sperm, although perfectly formed physically, had no soul; this would enter either at, or soon after, conception. If this rather neatly solved the moral issue, it unfortunately invoked the competing theory of epigenesis by making both sperm and egg necessary for the development of full human life.  

Ultimately, spermism was abandoned by the scientific community, not least of all because no one ever managed to find a little person existing ready-made in a sperm cell. But it nevertheless forms an interesting and amusing episode in the history of embryology - one that writers such as Lawrence still seem to be drawn to many years after its debunking.      


See: 

Cera R. Lawrence, 'Spermism', entry in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University, 2008): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

On Embryology, Ensoulment and Stem Cell Research

By his own admission, D. H. Lawrence wasn't an objective scientist or a scholar of any kind; neither an archaeologist, nor an anthropologist. Nor was he an embryologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his thoughts on human fertilization and the development of the embryo and fetus. 

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst not knowing anything about sex cells, he's happy to assert that the parental gametes continue to exist - sparkling and potent - within the zygote, forever sending forth vibrations and dark currents of vital energy. In other words, although Lawrence accepts that the sperm and ovum fuse at the moment of conception, he believes that the original parent nuclei somehow survive within the new diploid cell and function as well-heads of vivid life.

I'm not sure that's the case and, indeed, even for Lawrence this is only a preliminary rather than an intrinsic truth: this, the intrinsic truth - the truth that really matters to him, as to many religiously-minded people - is that emanating from the fusion of the father-quick and mother-germ is a new unit of unique individuality. Lawrence thus shares the papal belief that conception is the crucial  moment at which the Holy Spirit enters and a new human soul is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

Such a mystical line of thinking wouldn't really matter or particularly concern me, if it didn't have an effect on public policy and often inhibit scientific and medical research - such as embryonic stem cell research, for example. The problem with this research, from a religious perspective, is clearly a moral one: it entails the destruction of human embryos and the souls they embody and is therefore a form of murder.

In order to demonstrate how unreasonable such a view is, we need to remind ourselves just what stem cell research actually involves and what potential benefits it offers ...

First of all, it's important to remember that the embryos used will have been cultured in vitro and are not harvested directly from a woman's body. Secondly, we should recall that they are at an incredibly early stage of development, just a few days old, and consisting of no more than around 150 cells; we're talking blastocysts not babies here.

A small group of the cells inside the microscopic blastocyst are embryonic stem cells and these have two properties that make them of such great interest to scientists: (i) they can remain in an unspecialized state for long periods of time and (ii) they are pluripotent - which means they have the potential to become any specialized cell in the human body.

Clearly such cells have much to teach us about cell division and cell differentiation, which, as Sam Harris points out, would "almost certainly shed new light on those medical conditions, like cancer and birth defects, that seem to be merely a matter of these processes gone awry". Harris also powerfully addresses the issue of embryonic termination. There is not the slightest reason to think that embryos at the 150-cell stage "have the capacity to sense pain, to suffer, or to experience the loss of life in any way at all".

On the other hand:

"What is indisputable is that there are millions of human beings who do have these capacities and who currently suffer from traumatic injuries to the brain and spinal cord. Millions more suffer from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Millions more suffer from stroke and heart disease, from burns, from diabetes, from rheumatoid arthritis, from Purkinje cell degeneration, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and from vision and hearing loss. We know that embryonic stem cells promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might alleviate such suffering in the not too distant future."

But, thanks to the faithful - and to writers like Lawrence who share their superstitions and seemingly endorse their pro-life views - biologists and doctors are dragged before ethics committees and forced to justify their work and explain why a fertilized egg shouldn't in fact be accorded all the rights and protections of a fully developed child.

Again, to quote from Sam Harris if I may and to conclude in full agreement with him:

"Of course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question. But anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception, has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate. Those opposed to therapeutic stem cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society." 

 

See: 

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, (The Free Press, 2006), pp. 166-67. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Of Virgins and Raisins

According to Christoph Luxenberg's controversial reading of the Koran, one of the better known inducements offered to young Muslim males prepared to martyr themselves is not, in fact, a heavenly harem of virgins, but, rather, a fistful of raisins. 

However, without wishing to doubt for one moment Luxenberg's scholarly credentials or the painstaking nature of his research, I have to say I'm not entirely convinced by his argument that the Aramaic word hur, meaning white raisins - a great delicacy in the ancient world - was mistranslated into the Arabic term for a fair maiden (and subsequently transliterated into Latin as houris). It just seems a revision too far; that is to say, too good - because so splendidly amusing - to be true.

One fears that Luxenberg has some kind of anti-Islamic agenda in wishing to strip Jannah of its sexual promise. Accused by some of being a Christian apologist, perhaps he can't stand the thought that whilst all that he's offered in the afterlife is, at best, a family reunion, a bit of a sing-song, and the chance to hang about with Jesus, Muslim martyrs hit the jackpot.

Delights on offer include: rivers of wine, milk and honey, young boys of perpetual freshness to attend to one's every need, fine silk garments, and, as mentioned, 72 virgins. And when Allah provides virgins, they're not just any old virgins - they're übervirgins, the purest of all pure beings with lovely gazelle-shaped eyes, naturally large breasts, hairless, translucent bodies and inviting vaginas; immortals who have no need to urinate, defecate, or menstruate.

Despite Luxenberg's etymological argument, it's difficult to assign a raisin - no matter how plump and delicious it might be - such physical attributes. The fact is, the Islamic paradise is a far more sensual and priapic place than the sexless Christian heaven, which is free of pain and tears, but also lacking in erotic joy.

Some might caricature the former as nothing more than a celestial brothel, but that's a slightly more appealing prospect if I'm honest than a great care home in the sky.            


See: Christoph Luxenburg, Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Verlag Hans Schiller, 2000)

Nobody's Perfect: The Case of Sam Harris

It's hard not to love Sam Harris. He may lack the louche charm of the late Christopher Hitchens, but he's an attractive man nevertheless; super-smart and good-looking in a Ben Stilleresque manner. And, like Hitchens, he's courageous enough to openly challenge religious stupidity in all its forms (including the most violent).

But nobody's perfect: not even Sam Harris. And some of his views - particularly those in relation to parapsychology, mysticism and the so-called wisdom of the East - leave me troubled and disappointed.

It's a shame that despite all the excellent work in The End of Faith mapping out the future of reason and insulting believers, Harris continues to write of spiritual needs and to argue that our highest purpose as human beings is to come to terms with the sacred dimension of existence on an intuitive (but rational) basis.  

This seems to mean not only admitting that there are transformative experiences that transcend "the ordinary limits of our subjectivity", but accepting that such experiences are empirically significant "in that they uncover genuine facts about the world" [40]. And, wouldn't you know, these also happen to be moral facts that (in part at least) help to make happy.

In effect, Harris wants to combine scientific skepticism with an openness of mind that accepts the reality of psychic phenomena and the claims of mystics concerning ideas of reincarnation, for example, as spiritual truths worthy of serious investigation: "It is time we realized that we need not ... renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason." [43]

Which is, of course, just another way of saying: I want to have my cake and eat it.

A philosophy graduate from Stanford with a Ph.D.  in neuroscience, Harris just can't help being a bit spooky when it comes to the question of consciousness and taking a pop at those scientists who believe that the latter is wholly dependent on the workings of the brain. Such materialism, says Harris, is merely another kind of faith position; a conviction for which there is no conclusive evidence.

Mind, suggests Harris, may be a rudimentary phenomenon that exists beyond "living creatures and their brains" [209]; one which can only be explored directly through sustained introspection - i.e., via meditation and other spiritual practices, including prayer and fasting.

Aware that such ascetic idealism may strike many of his readers as a "confusing eruption of speculative philosophy" [214], Harris claims such a response to be an unfortunate consequence of Western ignorance. We might understand theoretical physics, but we are conceptually unequipped to understand the spiritually advanced and more sophisticated claims of "the great philosopher mystics of the East" [215].

Further, we're too tied to our thoughts to ever experience true consciousness which transcends its contents, or grasp the roiling mystery of the world, that is non-conceptual but not inconceivable to those initiates who have woken up to the fact that "mysticism is a rational enterprise" and that the human mind has a natural propensity for spirituality [221].           

Oh, Sam!


See: Sam Harris, The End of Faith, (The Free Press, 2006). Page references in the text are to this edition.

In Memory of The Woman Who Rode Away

Kate Millett famously condemns 'The Woman Who Rode Away' as an insane pornographic fantasy - which, in some ways, it is.

But even if there's something a little lurid and misogynistic about it at times, we can do without the kind of psycho-sexual analysis which suggests that all Lawrence's writing is animated by an unconscious element of voyeurism and sado-masochistic relish.

Charges such as this ignore the fact that, in Mexico, Lawrence discovered a religious sensibility which threatened to extinguish all that he was too. And so the tale is not merely about the drugging and murder of a desperate housewife in search of adventure. Rather, it makes a sacrifice of white-faced modernity itself, even as it mocks the romantic idealism of those renegades who turn against their own race, culture, and historical experience and seek out an impossible return to the primitive.

Of course, as one critic points out, it's never easy to "disentangle the patterns of primitive religious ritual ... from those of the kind of sexual titillation which depends on the dehumanization of its object".* But we're obliged as readers of Lawrence to at least try ...

At the heart of all religious practice and belief - I'd suggest - lies an almost fetishistic obsession with death. This becomes most apparent in sacrificial rites which are not only often elaborate, but extraordinarily cruel in character and designed to reveal the flesh, to mark the flesh, and, ultimately, to consume the flesh. 

And, let’s be clear, when I speak of the consumption of the flesh, I mean this literally; human sacrifice very often involves cannibalism. If the victim isn't quite viewed as butchers' meat, nevertheless he or she is frequently feasted upon. 

Now, whilst we may find the desire to cannibalise one another completely alien, it's worth remembering that even the Christian communion involves the eating of flesh and drinking of blood: Christ is sacrificed and ritually consumed by his followers. Indeed, the conquistadors, who provided many of the accounts we have of Aztec practices, were both thrilled and horrified to note how such a savage and cruel religion presented many points of analogy to the doctrine and ritual of their own faith.

The key, however, to all acts of sacrifice, is that they allow us as mortal or discontinuous beings to experience a sense of life's inhuman never-endingness; that is to say, via the death of an individual, the continuity of existence is confirmed. Christianity is fundamentally mistaken not in sacrificing its central protagonist, but in denying us the pleasure of this death.

One of the things Lawrence does in 'The Woman Who Rode Away', is give readers license to imaginatively exercise in good conscience those drives which direct us towards carnal pleasure, including the forbidden pleasure of anthropophagy. 

So, yes, it’s true that the woman who rode away is abused and victimized - and yes it's disingenuous to speak of her having submitted voluntarily to the above - but any sensational aspects should not obscure the story's religious dimension; in fact, they fully belong to it. Further, it should be remembered that within pagan religious culture the fatal element within eroticism was acutely felt and fully justified linking sex with sacrifice.
 
Thus, rather than try to disguise our discomfort as readers or mistakenly call for censorship, we should accept it. Anguish is one of the great religious feelings and has always accompanied human sacrifice. Bataille reminds us that within Aztec society anyone who couldn't bear to see victims being led to their deaths and allowed their anguish to collapse into pity, would be subject to punishments. Young and old alike were expected to stare death in the face and to share in the tragedy and horror of life.

In sum: I understand (and share) feminist concerns with works that portray women being raped, tortured, murdered or, in this case, ritually sacrificed - but isn’t it refreshing to think that female blood can also have redemptive power?

Besides, whilst the woman who rode away is passive in comparison to the priest who actively wields the knife, the latter too ultimately loses himself in the ritual (just as in the act of love). The ritual of sacrifice destroys the self-contained character of all participants (just as coition leaves both parties fucked). In a crucial passage, Bataille writes:

"In sacrifice, the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life … the victim dies and the spectators share in what [her] death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.”

The woman who rode away seeks this oneness; she is tired of living out of touch. In death, she achieves her freedom and fulfilment and she shares this with those who witness her death. Only a violent death which is carried out as a solemn and collective religious act has the power to allow men and women to experience immortality and live the life of the stars and the gods.

Or, as Bataille puts it, "divine continuity is linked with the transgression of the law on which the order of discontinuous beings is built" - namely, the commandment not to kill. Human sacrifice brings life and death into harmony, opening the former onto the latter whilst simultaneously transforming the latter into something paradoxically vital.

But this is not, of course, an argument for dusting off the obsidian knife and even Lawrence, thankfully, rejects violent, authoritarian theocratic culture at last and questions those writers who remain obsessed with the transgression of limits and only palpitate to thoughts of murder, suicide and rape ...  


See:

Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, (Penguin Books, 2001).

D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). *Note: The Penguin edition of this text (1996) has an introduction by Neil Reeve and he's the critic I'm quoting here.

On Orgasm and the Will to Merger (Another Thanatological Fragment)

Man can find his individual isolation or discontinuity hard to bear. Thus he often seeks primal unity, or a return to universal oneness. But this will to merger is, of course, a sign of fatigue and decadence; a thinly disguised longing for oblivion.

Lawrence is clear: "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself". When this is no longer the case - when individual singularity breaks down - death results.

And yet love, of course, is a vital attraction that brings things together into touch ...

This obliges us, therefore, to admit the relationship between Eros and Thanatos and acknowledge that the French description of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely a metaphor.

As Nick Land writes:

"Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality … The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one … but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness."

When we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime.

Despite the primary law that dictates singularity, the greater truth is that we need one another and we need love. Thus the secondary law of all organic life - according to Lawrence - is that "each organism only lives through … contact with other life". 

Of course, if we go too far in this direction, then love is no longer vivifying, but destructive and deadly. Men might live by love, but so too do they die, or cause death, if they love too much or allow their love to become infected with idealism.

Lawrence values coition precisely because it is a coming-close-to-death, but not a form of merger; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the discontinuity of each party remains intact.

But such intimacy brings us to the very point of fusion and leaves us changed, or wounded by the experience (which is why love is often poignant, painful, and transformative all at the same time).

Orgasm gives us a clue regarding the return to the actual and the deep communion that awaits us. It is, as Bataille says, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

Thus, ultimately, the truth of eroticism is ... treason.

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed.  Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading related thanatological fragments can click here and here.