Yellow Fever (Notes on the Politics of Asian Girl Fetish)

Bérénice Lim Marloe as Sévérine 

There's something about Asian girls. They're cute. They're smart. 

They have a kind of thing going on.

A friend asked who was my favourite Bond Girl ...

When I replied it was the character Sévérine, portrayed by the beautiful French actress Bérénice Marloe in the 2012 film Skyfall, she smiled and said that this exposed my Asian Girl Fetish (Marloe's father is of Cambodian and Chinese descent) and that this in turn indicated I had politically suspect views and subscribed to a number of pernicious racial and sexual stereotypes.

This may or may not be true, but it kind of made me wish I'd answered differently - although if, for example, I'd named Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), couldn't this be said to reveal my Nordic Girl Fetish and indicate subscription to an equal number of stereotypes, perhaps even more pernicious and politically suspect in character ...?          

However, happy to play along, I asked what she meant. And she explained that many men who identify as members of the so-called alt-right have a particular penchant for dating women of SE Asian origin, despite their fantasies of white supremacy and purity of blood.

Not surprisingly, this topic has caused heated debate on various white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites and demonstrates to many commentators that there's an amusing level of erotico-ideological confusion within the alt-right world. But, as Audrea Lim points out, there is, actually, no real contradiction in this Asian fetish when one realises how it arises at the intersection of two popular racial myths:

"First is the idea of the 'model minority,' in which Asian-Americans are painted as all hard-working, high-achieving and sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. If Asians are the model minority [...] then perhaps that opens the door to acceptance from white supremacists.

      The second myth is that of the subservient, hypersexual Asian woman."

For many misogynysts, across the political spectrum, the sad fact is that most white women are - thanks to feminism - simply too much trouble; i.e., too unwilling to serve and to pleasure their menfolk. Asian girls, in contrast, are so much more amenable - and - whisper it - far more uninhibited in the bedroom. This idea - deeply ingrained within the pornographic imagination - has its roots in America's post-war experiences in the bars and brothels of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Thus it is that the alt-right Asian fetish combines these ideas and "highlights a tension within the project of white supremacism as America grows more diverse [...] The new, ugly truth? Maintaining white power may require some compromises on white purity".

May require, indeed, sleeping with the enemy ...

See: Audrea Lim, 'The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish', New York Times (Jan 6, 2018): click here to read online.

On the Inspiration of Touch: An Afterword on the Question of Delicacy in a Molecular Age

The beautifully delicate structure of graphene

Image by AlexanderAIUS on Wikipedia

Someone wrote to say how much they enjoyed the recent post on the Lawrentian notions of touch and tenderness and to agree on the need for delicacy and lightness of hand. But I fear that they have a rather more utopian understanding of these things than I do and thus misconstrue my position. 

To be clear: I'm attempting to problematise Lawrence's work and would agree with Steven Connor that delicacy isn't the ideal binary opposite of grasping or rough-handling. In other words, it's not an entirely innocent form of contact, nor is it completely free from the exercise of power within the world. Further - and this might rather offend some Lawrentians - the term delicacy might even be said to refer to a form of touch that is more mental (more abstract) than other heavier, less refined forms of tactile sensation; a form of touch-in-the-head.

Conner notes:

"Delicacy involves work on a scale that makes it a matter of mind, work that approaches the condition of weightlessness [...] work that seems untouched by human hand [...] work that refines the idea of work."

If weightlessness is one of the defining features of delicacy, so too does it involve "the apprehension of altered scale". To touch something delicate in a delicate manner, is ultimately to draw closer to the invisible world of the tiny object which can be viewed only through a microscope. This has become increasingly true in an age of molecular science, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. For what is more delicate, for example, than a sheet of graphene; a carbon allotrope consisting of but a single layer of atoms prettily arranged in a hexagonal lattice?

The fact is, power is not simply "mitigated in delicacy" and we are obliged - like it or not - to recognise that "our world is one in which delicacy itself has become a modality of power." In a crucial passage, Connor writes:

"Sensitivity used to be at the opposite end of the scale from power, which needed to make itself blunt and insensible to maintain its power. The rise of biopower means that power involves, no longer the brute manipulation of life, but insinuation into it, infiltration and manipulation of the miniscule balances that maintain systems.
      Power used to be applied. That is to say, it needed to be brought up against its object, which would either resist, buckle, or be displaced by the pressure. Such meetings, impressions or collisions take place on the outside of things [...] Now, it is not that there are no comings together, no bearings down, no adversity any more. It is that it is no longer quite clear where the outside of things is to be found. In the age of interface which is now upon us [...] everything is at once inside and outside everything else."      

In other words, there is now a promiscuous and paradoxical intermingling of all bodies, all objects, large and small. And delicacy is just a more subtle form of violation; a method of overcoming the natural reticence and resistance of the Other. For serious readers of Lawrence, this means they must perform a radical reappraisal of the ethics and erotics of (phallic) tenderness. Simply put, the world of Lady Chatterley is long lost and the lightness of her lover's touch can no longer be so clearly distinguished from the hand that wields power.

See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 267, 268, 280 and 281.

Note: those interested in reading the post to which this forms an afterword can click here.

On the Inspiration of Touch

Michelangelo: Detail from Creazione di Adamo (c. 1512) 

What Tommy Dukes refers to as the inspiration of touch is an idea that continues to fascinate and intrigue. For if we must still think of the soul, then let us think of it not as some kind of immortal essence located in a mysterious region of the body, but, rather, as something that exists momentarily in the contacts formed between a body and its external environment.

In other words, the soul is a flash of interchange between objects and not an an intrinsic quality belonging to either. This is illustrated, for example, in Michelangelo's famous fresco, The Creation of Adam (c. 1512) - at least as I interpret it.

For rather than conceive of Adam as a useless lump of clay just waiting to be animated by the all-powerful index finger of God's paternal right hand, I prefer to imagine inspiration is born between the two as entities who unfold into being within a democracy of touch. Unequal as objects perhaps, but equally objects nevertheless upon a flat ontological playing field.

It's often pointed out that, as a matter of fact, the two hands don't actually touch. But that's ok. What counts is the active reaching out of fingertips and that magical space and spark created between them that we might think of as the shimmer of possibility that lies betwixt things and forever beyond the grasp of any single entity.   

And what also counts, as Steven Connor rightly indicates, is the delicacy of the shared touch; it has to have a certain lightness and softeness. People with greedy, heavy hands who believe they must grab life by the throat and tear open the flower bud are essentially soulless. Connor writes:

"Delicate and subtle things have a life of their own, and call, not for grasping or prodding or palpation, but for caress [...] for in the caress, there is an approach or address to another skin capable of sensation, capable of its own experience of the borderline between thought and feeling. To caress an object in the world is to treat it as though it possessed such a sensitive skin."

Arguably, another word for this sensuous, subtle form of touch is tenderness - a term privileged by D. H. Lawrence in his late works and elaborated into a provocative ethic that encapsulates his ideal of blissful bodily interaction that is free from any will to dominance or exploitation. One might hold the other, but, at the same time, one must hold back from holding the other too tightly. 

It is interesting to note how the French philosopher Michel Serres develops this notion of reserve in his work, suggesting that humanity - in the best sense of the word - is defined not by its power to manipulate and destroy, but by its ability to show self-restraint and recognise limits. To exceed limits and to seek to exercise control over others - to refuse either to let them go or let them be - is to fall into a fatal form of ego imperialism (à la Clifford Chatterley).      

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 262-63. 

 
Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser and William Paulson, (University of Michigan Press, 1997). 

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (Continuum, 2008). 

Note: to read an afterword to this post that develops the idea of delicacy and problematises Lawrence's notions of touch and tenderness, please click here.

On the Myth of Maternal Impression (with Reference to the Case of Joseph Merrick)

Joseph Merrick (aka the Elephant Man) 

Photo from c.1889

I remember being amused by the suggestion made in David Lynch's mawkish and moralizing movie The Elephant Man (1980), that Merrick's unfortunate condition may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy. 

At the time, I thought this was just a cinematic fantasy, or a typical piece of Hollywood hokum. But I eventually discovered that the folklorish idea of maternal impression (or what is sometimes referred to with the German term Versehen) is a genuine - though long-discredited - theory of inheritance from a world before genetic science. It was particularly popular in the 18th century.

Basically, this superstitious concept rests on the belief that a powerful mental stimulus experienced by a woman-with-child could produce an impression on the gestating fetus, thus causing the newborn baby to be marked in some manner. Or as my friend Simon Solomon would say, a psychic disturbance or trauma is realised on the physical plane as some kind of birth defect or congenital disorder (thus demonstrating that mind and imagination shape matter). 

Whilst we now know that this is essentially nonsense - that a woman frightened by a cat is extremely unlikely to give birth to a child with whiskers - there is of course evidence to suggest that physical or psychological illness in the mother can affect the fetus in adverse ways, as can the consumption of alcohol or the smoking of cigarettes, for example.

So, ladies, don't over do it on the vino when pregnant and lay off the fags; but, please, don't worry too much about any perverse longings, being attacked by monsters, or coming into direct contact with animal skins ...   

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77. 

Lily and the Brontës

The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire 

with Lily Cole (inset)

As a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society, the recent fuss concerning the appointment of the very lovely model and actress Lily Cole to a prominent role within the forthcoming bicentenary celebrations for Emily Brontë, has, technically, nothing to do with me. What the Brontë Society choose to do (or not to do) is entirely a matter for trustees to decide (although one would like to think they also consider the views of ordinary members, which is not, regrettably, always the case within literary societies).

However, as someone who cares a good deal about Emily - her novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), has been discussed on this blog on several occasions [click here, for example, or here] - and as someone who hates snobbery and bigotry, I feel that I should say something ...      

Miss Cole, who first graced the cover of Vogue aged 16 and who was also named as Model of the Year in 2004 by the British Fashion Awards, is not just a pretty face. She has 'A' levels (at A grade) in English, Politics, and Philosophy. And she graduated from Cambridge in 2011 with a double first in the History of Art. She has since shown herself to be a canny entrepreneur with a strong social conscience; along with (rather predictable) humanitarian and environmental involvements, she's a founder of impossible.com a social network and gift economy website.

So, as I say, not just a pretty face ...

In fact, I would've thought she'd make an ideal creative partner to any literary society and can't see why her appointment has been criticised in some quarters. To describe it as an insult to the memory of Emily Brontë, is, ironically, to bring shame upon the latter's name. This isn't merely a triumph for the modern obsession with celebrity or an attempt to be trendy. For Cole wasn't chosen because she once modelled for many of the top fashion houses, or once acted on-screen alongside Heath Ledger - but because she's clearly a strong, independent, intelligent, and talented young woman, just like one of the Brontë sisters.           

Nick Holland's decision to quit the Brontë Society in staged outrage is up to him. He might be an expert on all things Brontë, but his presumptuous claim to possess superior insight into what Emily might think about Miss Cole's appointment is simply ludicrous and reveals his own resentment towards those whose fame and success is greater than his own rather than any mediumistic abilities.

Miss Cole's considered response to Holland's provocative nastiness and rank stupidity proves that the Brontë Society have made a smart move in enlisting her and allowing him to leave. I'm only sorry the D. H. Lawrence Society didn't first attempt to enlist Lily as a member and representative. 

Readers interested in joining the Brontë Society should visit their website: click here. 

Readers interested in joining the D. H. Lawrence Society should visit their website: click here.

There's an Insulting Stereotype For That

The British Gas campaign that encourages consumers to rely upon local tradesmen - whatever the job - rather than attempt to fix things themselves, is probably the most irritating and offensive ad on TV at the moment. 

It opens in a store with some poor bloke holding a plunger, filthy from head to toe, clearly having tried - and failed - to clear a blockage in his plumbing system. The other people queuing at the till look on disapprovingly as the young woman serving - Sarah - informs him with a suppressed smirk: "There's a local hero for that." He glances at her with impotent rage, knowing full well that, whilst she's obviously a complete cunt, there's nothing he can do or say. 

In the second scene, another unfortunate fellow is in the shower, having trouble with the water control; as he presses a button, the bathroom lights go out. A woman - presumably his wife or girlfriend - carries on brushing her teeth at the sink in the dark with superior indifference, whilst also smugly reminding him: "There's a local hero for that."

In the third scene, an attractive woman sits having dinner in someone's flat. She's dressed as if on a date, wearing her favourite little black dress and there are wine glasses on the table. But her useless boyfriend is struggling to flush the toilet - clearly having broken the handle. Like Sarah, she pulls a knowing face before sliding her smart phone to him under the bathroom door, saying: "There's a local hero for that."

Later, in a scene that returns us to the above apartment, we finally see one of these local heroes. And, surprise, surprise, he's one of those friendly, helpful black characters that advertisers and TV executives love. Not so much a magical negro - for he's not there to impart ancient tribal wisdom - more a house nigger who can be trusted to fix things and provide service with a smile, before letting himself out the door and exiting the white-bread lifestyle into which he's been temporarily inserted. 
        

In brief, we have 30 seconds of insulting bullshit: thank you British Gas.  

To watch the British Gas 'Local Heroes' ad on YouTube, click here.   

Notes on the Case of Peter Hitchens Versus Lady C.

Peter Hitchens (2017) by 65c56 
deviantart.com

I.

Not for the first time when reading an essay, article or - as in this case - a book review by the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, one is left feeling exhausted and a bit bewildered; not quite knowing how or where to begin fashioning a response. And not entirely convinced it's even worth the effort. For Hitchens is a man of firm moral conviction and thus extremely confident as well as forthright in his beliefs. He knows what he thinks and he thinks what he knows is true. 

However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.  

Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...


II.

Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.

In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.   

Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion." 

This is a surprising remark. For one might've imagined that Hitchens - a man once described by James Silver in The Guardian as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" whose columns contain "molten Old Testament fury" - would rather like elements of portent and prophecy. And it's difficult to imagine Hitchens caring about the dictates of fashion, eagerly pursuing all the latest literary fads and trends as he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight, but there you go! His views are reactionary, but never square.


III.

As for the trial of Lady C., Hitchens seems to believe things were rigged from the start. That there was "scarcely a chance" of the jury deciding that the novel should remain banned, "and almost everyone involved knew it". I don't know if that's true. And I don't really care. For ultimately the right decision was reached. Not because the work has redeeming social and literary value, but because ancient obscenity laws drawn up by those grey ones whom Lawrence terms censor-morons brought greater shame upon us as a people than their abolition. 

I suspect that saying this is enough for Hitchens to lump me in with all those liberals, libertines, and libertarians whom he so despises, even though, for the record, I don't think of myself as any of the above. Nor do I live in a square, paint in a circle, or love in a triangle; there's absolutely nothing Bloomsbury about me. Or Fabian socialist. Like Lawrence, I grew up in a working-class community and if I speak up for him and his writing it's for reasons other than those imagined by Hitchens. It's not because I'm a sandal-wearing vegetarian, naturist or health nut; it's because I feel a sense of solidarity with Lawrence and regard his enemies as my enemies.    


IV.

Hitchens describes Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "frankly rather terrible book". And, interestingly, many of Lawrence's own followers seem to agree; often acting as if a little embarrassed by it. But a novel isn't a fixed object. It's a literary machine that invites you to enter the space that it opens up and invest it with external forces; to send it zooming in new and unexpected directions. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that there are no bad books per se, only poor - by which I mean lazy, reactive and judgemental - readings.

And, despite Hitchens insisting that Katherine Anne Porter's 1960 essay on the novel is a supremely honest and courageous reading, I'd place 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper' in this poverty-stricken category. For all it boils down to ultimately is a superior woman shaking her head in condescending despair over poor Lawrence and his artistic inferiority in comparison to the real literary greats, like Tolstoy, James, and Joyce. And the novel itself ... well, that is nothing but the fevered day-dream of a dying man, or "the product of a once-fine author's sad decline", as Hitchens puts it with a little more compassion.    

As Nietzsche taught, however, whilst strength preserves, it is only through sickness that cultures develop and that we as a species advance. Thus, even if true - even if Lady C. is the product of a diseased imagination and a body corrupt with tuberculosis - we need these works for what they paradoxically teach us of the greater health.  


V.

Eventually, even Hitchens has to admit that the book does, in fact, contain "some moving and thoughtful passages [...] though they are mostly about the industrial ravaging and gouging of the English countryside and the wretched consumer society coming into being after World War I." However, as he then notes: "The idea that these miseries might be redeemed by adulterous sex in an old hut on an army blanket, by twining wildflowers in one’s pubic hair, or by capering naked in the rain is far-fetched."

This, I think, living as we do after the orgy, is hard to deny. Also difficult to deny is that Lady Chatterley's Lover contains "blots and scabs of anti-Semitism", as well as troubling elements of racial bigotry, sexism, misogyny and lesbophobia. But, again, it's Lawrence himself who teaches that the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it and not merely use these things in order to judge a work and condemn an author. And, to be fair to Hitchens - although he clearly has no interest in saving this particular tale - by offering us a far more sympathetic reading of Sir Clifford than Lawrence encouraged, he invites an interesting reappraisal of the work (one that I have myself also considered: click here).       


VI

Finally, we come to the 'night of sensual passion'. Hitchens seems as baffled by the redemptive possibilities assigned to anal sex within Lady C. as he is perplexed by the importance given to red trousers. But that's because he's ignorant of the wider body of Lawrence's work and fundamentally hostile to the philosophical project of which it's part. Which is fair enough; he isn't and doesn't pretend to be a Lawrence scholar. But it does rather lessen the force and validity of his criticism.

For Hitchens, like Freud, "shame and hypocrisy" are crucial social components; they protect, he says, the boundary "between normal, respectable life and the sordid and dirty". Lawrence disagrees. Not because he desires the latter or despises the former, but because he sees the possibility of a new innocence that lies beyond such a false dichotomy, or what Marcuse terms the fatal dialectic of civilization. 

I'm sorry that Mr Hitchens didn't find a way to enjoy this novel; find a way, that is, to impose his own abrasions upon its surface. And I'm sorry that, unable to ban it or to burn it, he seems determined to foreclose the text and its pleasure with his intransigent moral conformism, his political and social conservatism, and his refusal to allow his body to pursue its own happiness just for once. Despite this, rather perversely perhaps, I retain a fair deal of respect and admiration for Peter (as I do for his much-missed brother, Christopher): May the peace that comes of fucking be upon him.       

See: 

Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online. 

Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.

Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above. 

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.