Schlegel's Hedgehog

German poet, literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, was, like other romantics, a big fan of the fragment.

In an oft-cited section of his Athenäums-fragmente (1798), he asserts that, if it is to be distinctive in form and purpose like a tiny work of art, then the fragment "has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog" [206].

Further, it must maintain itself in prickly opposition even to those fragments in close vicinity to which it might otherwise seem in some kind of relation, thereby reflecting Schlegel's view that the world is made up of isolated objects within a chaotic universality of infinite possibilities and perspectives.  

As someone who is also passionate about fragmentary writing - more due to my background in modernism and postmodernism, rather than romanticism - I feel obliged to say something about this; particularly as I feel there's something fundamentally false about Schlegel's view.

Firstly, whilst hedgehogs might lead relatively solitary lives and can, of course, roll into a tight spiky ball for defensive purposes, they are no more isolated from the surrounding world than any other creature; if they were, they'd die. So, if nothing else, the above Igel analogy doesn't hold water as far as any self-respecting naturalist would be concerned.

Secondly, whilst I concede that objects are always at some level withdrawn and don't exist purely in terms of their external relations, for me the beauty of the fragment is that it (potentially) contains all things within it on the one hand, whilst being forever open ended on the other. Indeed, I would say the perfect fragment always inconclusively concludes in an elliptic manner with a set of three dots and that they only really sparkle, like stars in a constellation, by becoming part of a new (intertextual) practice of some kind. 

Ultimately, the fragment is that which allows language to discover its own ephemeral destiny. They appear, but before we can hardly even begin to make sense of them they shoot lines of flight towards the horizon of their own disappearance, showing a beautiful indifference towards their own origin, their own end, or their own Schlegelian self-perfection as an enclosed work of art.

Each thing - be it fragment or hedgehog - streams in what D. H. Lawrence terms an intertwining flux of relations and the business of art is reveal and expand these relations, not isolate itself from the circumambient universe. The only way we might discover some kind of salvation (or belonging) is to accomplish a pure (or quick) relationship between ourselves and other objects of all description and for me it's fragmented or aphoristic writing which, as a literary genre, best facilitates this. 

Note: I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville for encouraging me to read Schlegel and write this post.

Further Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

The metal porcupine on Freud’s desk in the study 

of his Hampstead home, now the Freud Museum. 

Photo: Nick Cunard.

In his sublime essay 'The Porcupine's Illusion', the prickly-named George Prochnik (great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam) claims that, 'when it came to his own liaison with America, Freud yearned for the warmth and communal support America promised, but then felt needled and otherwise violated in consequence of whatever proximity he did attain'.

On Prochnik's reading, Freud's apparent repression of his debt to Schopenhauer - only admitting in 1925 to having come to the philosopher 'very late in life', despite thrice name-checking him in 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and Schopenhauer's theory of the will being widely regarded as prefiguring the psychoanalytic concepts of repression itself, the death-drive and the centrality of sexuality to psychic life - was motivated by Freud's scientific ambition to purge psychoanalysis of its merely philosophical contours.

An undertaking which, if true, backfired with spectacular irony, since Freud's sole public recognition in his lifetime came from the award of the Goethe Prize for services to literature. In this context, Freud's Schopenhauer complex 'became one of distance and propinquity. How much influence was required to prevent one's pen from freezing, and how much would result in one being stabbed full of holes by the writerly quills of intellectual predecessors?' Here, the porcupine problem takes on the lustre of an inter-generational Bloomian anxiety concerning how well one can bear the stab to one's pretensions of originality.

Noting that, as a rule, 'it may be said that a man's sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that "so and so" is very unsociable, is almost tantamount to saying he is a man of great capacity', Schopenhauer strikingly posited a negative correlation between the hunger for closeness and human intelligence. One endowed with sufficient intellectual warmth in himself - an interesting concept in itself when thinking types in Western culture tend to be seen as cool and remote, while emotional people are viewed as warm - would have sharply curtailed inter-animate needs, so that the heat of thought might be conceived of as a kind of libidino-cerebral surplus, a vector to the inhuman. Or, those who seem like cold fish may be always already the hottest properties ...

On his reportedly arduous hike from Putnam's mountain cabin that he was sharing with Ferenczi and Jung, the porcupine to which Freud was led by two sailor-suited young women turned out to be a fly-blown, reeking corpse. His spiny mythos would be incarnated in an over-determined rodent, death irrupting into life, as though the ambivalent truth of humanity's barbed love arises where Eros and Thanatos collide.

This would surely be enough of a psychologically sobering denouement all by itself. But the still more resonant afterword, as Prochnik vividly recollects, relates to the bronze porcupine gifted to Freud by Putnam, which can now be found on permanent display at the Freud Museum in London, where Freud died in 1939. As he attests - and in some weird and wonderful metamorphosis that pierces the skin and makes the soul sing - its quills, when rippled by the fingers, emit a 'melodic, harp-like sound'.

Our painful proximity, which implies the interpenetration of vitality and oblivion, yields to poetic music.

Notes

George Prochnik, 'The Porcupine Illusion', Cabinet, Issue 26 (Summer 2007): click here.

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

To read my own take on Schopenhauer, Freud and the porcupine dilemma, click here. 

Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma

Freud's metal porcupine (12 x 16 x 8 cm) 
Image Credit: Freud Museum (London)

In a series of reflections published in 1851, the German philosopher Schopenhauer discussed (amongst numerous other topics) the prickly question of human intimacy by making reference to the predicament faced by the Stachelschwein.

In brief, the so-called porcupine dilemma is this: it might be preferable to move closer to others of your own kind and advantageous to share body heat when the weather outside is frightful, but, if you're covered in sharp spines, then it's not so easy to do so without (unintentionally) causing or receiving serious injury.

And whilst people are not porcupines and lack quills, we nevertheless find it just as problematic getting up close and personal with others - no matter how desperate we may be to do so. In the end, the best individuals can hope for is a compromised form of relationship that calls for caution on both sides if they are to avoid mutual harm. We can smile at one another but never really touch, obliged as we are to always keep a safe distance.

This - as Freud later realised - helps to explain our frustrated sense of social isolation and why sexual relations so often end in tears. We are driven by inner needs and external conditions to seek out others, but quickly discover just how intolerable these others are thanks to the many disagreeable qualities and natural defence mechanisms they possess. The best that anyone might hope for, concludes Schopenhauer (pessimistically), is that they can generate their own heat and thus remain entirely self-sufficient; thereby avoiding the risk of either pricking or being pricked by other people.

Freud - as indicated above and who has as interesting and as close a relationship to Schopenhauer as he does to Nietzsche - exploited this tale of the porcupine in his own psychoanalytic work, directly referencing it in a key section of his 1921 text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 

In fact, if the story has become widely known in the English-speaking world - where it is commonly termed the hedgehog's dilemma - it is largely because of Freud's reading, rather than familiarity with the original text by Schopenhauer, who is today a shamefully neglected thinker, but to whom we owe a great deal.      

Notes

The metal porcupine pictured above was a memento of Freud's trip to the USA in 1909. Thought to have been given to him by the American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Freud kept the handsome beast with its razor sharp quills on his desk for the rest of his life. 

See: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 31, Section 396. 

For further reflections on this question, by Simon Solomon, click here. 

Hedgehogs Versus HS2

Hedgehog: Photo by Gillian Day 

According to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the hedgehog - a once familiar creature found in parks and gardens all over the UK, but now in serious decline due to destruction of habitat - is a secretive animal that gives nothing away and likes to keep itself to itself.

We wonder, he says, what a hedgehog has to hide; why it refuses to share its knowledge of the undergrowth; why it so distrusts mankind:   

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

And whether we choose to think of the prickly otherness of the hedgehog in terms of divinity or in the natural language of species difference, the fact is this shy little nocturnal slug-eater is right to distrust (and despise) humanity.

For despite our pretended love for all things bright and beautiful / all creatures great and small, we laugh as they are killed beneath the wheels of our vehicles, happily concrete over the spaces in which they used to find food and shelter, and watch with savage indifference as they are pushed into extinction.   

Thus it is that a House of Lords Select Committee recently ruled in favour of HS2's proposal to build a lorry park in an area that is home to the last remaining hedgehog stronghold in London. There are thought to be between 20 and 25 adults living in the Regent's Park site (right next to the Zoo) and they produced a litter of 17 young in the autumn of 2017.

But the HS2 bosses don't care. And neither do the politicians who don't want any disruption to their £57 billion rail network. Alternative options were given very little serious consideration and so the future of this long established population has been unnecessarily compromised in the name of progress, profit, and improved transport links.       

Shame on all those involved in this decision ...

Notes

Paul Muldoon, 'Hedgehog', Poems 1968-1998, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for bringing this story to my attention.

On the Scintillation of Being

Sagus93: Every man and every woman is a star (2014)

(Acrylic on canvas 140 x 70 cm)

sagus93.com 

Every man and every woman is a star, says Crowley in The Book of the Law (1:3) and I suppose by this he references the singular nature of human being; the fact that, at the very last, one is not only unique, but also isolate and alone, beyond love or any personal relationship.

That's certainly how I've always understood the remark, in a very Birkinesque manner. But perhaps we might consider the idea of astro-ontology - or what Baudrillard refers to as the scintillation of being - in a bit more detail ...   

People like to think of stars as luminous objects reliably twinkling in the night sky. Look up, and there they are! But it's worth remembering that most of the individual stars in the universe - including all of the stars outside our own galaxy - are invisible to the eye, even when we gaze into space through powerful telescopes.

And, strange as it may seem, our own sun also retains something of its invisibility or, if you like, essential darkness ...

Count Dionys, the initiated occultist of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Ladybird (1923), teaches that true fire is invisible; that it burns with its back to us and is therefore always hidden from view. The golden light of the sun is, he says, only epiphenomenal; "the glancing aside of the real original fire".

This being so, continues the Count, even the sun is black: "It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible. [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-turning away of the sun's directness that was coming to us."

He concludes that we have, therefore, a mistaken understanding of the world - and of love. That just as the "true living world of fire is dark", so too true love is "a throbbing together in darkness" and not something luminous or fully visible. What he terms white love is only an ideal surface effect. 

I don't know if this constitutes good science (I suspect not). But it nicely anticipates those object-oriented forms of philosophy which are full of strange speculations of this nature and concerned with the play of reality and the essential illusion of the world.

If nothing else, it's always amusing to think what follows from the fact that light from the stars can continue to shine for billions of years after they have disappeared from the heavens (that things - including people - are never quite what they seem).


See:

Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, (Red Wheel/Weiser, 1976). Or click here to read online.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Ladybird', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

The above work by Lawrence can also be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.

When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)

Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;

Retract your claws,  

Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.

Philosophers - particularly French philosophers - have always loved cats. And so it's not surprising to discover that Derrida had a feline companion named Logos; or that the only pussy Foucault enjoyed petting was an all black cat called Insanity.

Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.

Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get  a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit). 

David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.

As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?

In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.      

Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.     

See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here. 

Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).  

Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.

   

On the Ecstasy of Forms: A Note on Punk Fashion and the Sex Pistols as Pure Event

Vivienne wearing a Seditionaries Destroy shirt  

as designed by herself and Malcolm (1977)

For me, the reason that the punk fashions created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood still astonish and disconcert is because they perfectly illustrate what Baudrillard terms the ecstasy of forms. That is to say, a phenomenon in which objects are seduced by their own self-enchantment and run wild according to an anarchic (and often ironic) kind of logic beyond aesthetics, politics, or morality.

The above shirt, for example, modelled here by Westwood, is one that invites but paradoxically resists any formulation or judgement, becoming a fascinatingly ambiguous garment worn at the wearers' own risk. For who who can predict how it will be perceived by those who are confronted by it and how they'll react: with laughter ... confusion ... violence?

It's obviously offensive. But no one can quite say how, why or to whom it's offensive. It's inexplicably provocative, just as other designs - such as the bare tits t-shirt - are inexplicably obscene. Ultimately, zips, straps, swastikas, safety pins, sex organs, postage stamps, inverted crosses and slogans from May '68, don't convey anything; those who foolishly look for the meaning of punk are wasting their time.

They have failed, as Baudrillard would say, to grasp the fact that punk fashion "expresses a situation in which people no longer even believe in signs as a real difference but are playing at difference", just as they are playing with identity and gender.

The queerness - and the energy - of these (empty) forms seems to come from our culture, our history, our reality, but at the same time provide an escape from such. Which is why the Sex Pistols were an event, rather than just another boring rock band; they came like a fatality, without explanation or cause, and remain an event that no one has been able to rationalise or fully exploit and from which it's impossible to conclude anything.

As it said on the front of the tour bus, the Sex Pistols were going nowhere - but they were going nowhere fast. For punk was an accelerated moment, a pure speed, not a progressive movement leading us by the hand into a rosy future: there was No Future and so, ultimately, they could only succeed by imploding (Baudrillard speaks of events absorbing their own continuity), leaving no trace apart from the secondary effect of parody which occupied the space they left behind.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Dropping Out of History' and 'Catastrophic, but Not Serious', interviews in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 36-45 and 46-65. The line quoted is from the latter interview, with Robert M. Maniquis (55), but I have utilised Baudrillard's thinking throughout the post. 

No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

Xanthippe

I: The Nietzschean View of Marriage

Nietzsche famously declares that all great philosophers are instinctive bachelors who dislike marriage as well as that which might persuade them into it. For a free spirit, the prospect of settling down to a domestic life with a little woman by their side and a pair of slippers by the bed is anathema. They dream of living on mountain top or in those unexplored realms of dangerous knowledge. Home sweet home strikes them as a kind of cosy prison built in the name of Love. 

And Nietzsche even provides us with a convenient list of unmarried philosophers to prove his point; a list that includes Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer - and, of course - himself. None of these thinkers ever wed and, what's more, it's almost impossible to imagine them married.

A philosopher who has tied the knot, concludes Nietzsche, belongs to comedy - as the case of Socrates proves. Whether the latter wed ironically in order to demonstrate this point, as Nietzsche claims, I don't know. But the fact is, Socrates - an undoubtedly great philosopher - did marry and I'd like to say a few words about his wife ...

II: The Blonde Horse

Xanthippe was an Athenian from a possibly noble (certainly privileged) family, who, despite her name, is believed to have had flaming red hair. She was also much younger than her husband, to whom she bore three sons. Plato portrays her in the Phaedo as a devoted wife and mother, but she is described in other works - such as Xenophon's Symposium - as difficult and argumentative.

Socrates, however, is said to have found these latter characteristics attractive and crucial to his own development as a philosopher; perhaps less so after she allegedly emptied a chamber pot over his head in a fit of jealous rage, although even this he accepted with philosophical grace, saying: "After the thunder comes the rain."

This, and other stories of her violent temper, have rightly or wrongly left us with the impression that Xanthippe was - to put it crudely - a bit of a bitch. Indeed, her name has now come to mean any sharp-tongued and assertive woman. In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio famously compares Katherine to Xanthippe. More recently, the sarcastic and rebellious teen character played by Dylan Gelula in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is named after Socrates's wife.

Ultimately, who's to know what kind of woman Xanthippe was - or why she agreed to her parents suggestion that she marry an ugly, elderly, penniless philosopher who spent a good deal of time drinking with his friends whilst pursuing his love of wisdom (and young boys). Nevertheless, she stuck with him to the bitter end, which shows fidelity on her part and indicates that he must have had something about him that she found lovable.

Happy New Year from the Ghost of Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Sticker

Redbubble Ltd. 

When asked during an interview in January 2006 with Antoine Perraud what it meant to wish someone Happy New Year, Baudrillard amusingly replied that it was "a collectively remote-controlled symbolic ritual that has its place in a [...] cost-free sphere". 

In other words, an empty gesture without value; a seasonal greeting from another time which, just like Merry Christmas, tries to desperately recreate a social bond or, more accurately, evoke nostalgia for such, via an exchange of disintensified signs. All the high days and holidays that we so want to enjoy and make special, invariably leave us feeling lonely and inadequate; hostages to our own lives of consumption.    

Having said that, Baudrillard hates to be thought of as a pessimist or a nihilist in the pejorative sense of the term.

And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has "nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality", we might simply call evil.

And so, in wishing readers a Happy New Year, I suppose I'm wishing them the courage to become complicit with l'intelligence du mal.

See: Baudrillard, 'The Murder of Reality', trans. Chris Turner, essay in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David. B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 266-71.