On Textual Cruising (with Reference to the Case of Camus)

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1944): 
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair, 
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period

One of the (many) ideas I've absorbed from Roland Barthes is that of textual cruising as a key component of the art (and erotics) of reading. 

To cruise the body of a text is both to slowly drift through it in an aimless but pleasurable manner and to make oneself sensitive to the play of signs and those few details, preferences, and inflections (what Barthes terms biographemes) that seem to reveal something of the author and "whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion".*

I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.

Take Camus, for example. He's by no means a favourite writer and I have only a very casual relationship with his work. But I'm fond of him nevertheless, in a way I never could be about Sartre - monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo - and it makes me wonder if it isn't simply due to the fact that Camus was so damn good-looking and his biographemes so seductive ...?**

* See: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 9.  

** I'm not simply trying to be funny here: one commentator recently described Camus as "the Don Draper of existentialism" and several others have remarked on his physical attractiveness and beautiful writing style. See Adam Gopnik, 'Facing History: Why We Love Camus' The New Yorker (April 2, 2012): click here to read online.

Learning to Love the Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabelle Adjani: Pull Marine 
(music video dir. Luc Besson, 1984) 

Click here to watch

I think the first work I tried to read by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray was Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was published in English translation (by Gillian C. Gill) in 1991, when I was doing my MA at the University of York and spent a lot of time hanging around with members of the women's studies department, including Liz DeLoughry, who is now a professor at UCLA and who, if I remember correctly, lent me the book.  

Unfortunately, I couldn't make head or tail of it and I found Irigaray's lyrical-poetic style antithetical. It should be noted that this is not offered as a criticism of her thinking or mode of writing, but is more a reflection upon my own limitations as a reader at this time. Indeed, it might partly explain why I'm not a professor at UCLA ...

However, here we are in 2019, almost 30 years later, and I'm strangely tempted to give it another go, having just come across this very beautiful line by Irigaray in another work: The plant nourishes the mind that contemplates the blooming of its flower.   

That's not to say I don't still have limitations as a reader - don't we all? - but I'm hopefully a little less limited than I was in '91 and have, in the years since, often myself adopted a writing style that attempts to dissolve the distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy. So, fingers crossed I'll get more from my re-encounter with l'amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

See: Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Columbia University Press, 1991). 

Notes:

Originally published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Irigaray interrogates the feminine as conceived within modern philosophy from an elemental perspective; in the case of this book, as the title makes obvious, it's water that is used to cleanse Nietzsche's writings of their phallogocentricity and freshen up his ideas. But Irigaray does so not as an enemy, but as an imaginary lover who engages in an amorous dialogue with the latter. 

And the song? It's an absolutely beautiful track written by Serge Gainsbourg and released as a single from the album Isabelle Adjani (Philips, 1983). 

Agnès Gayraud: la philosophe de la pop

Agnès Gayraud / Photo: Vincent Ferrané

It's hard not to love the French philosopher and singer-songwriter Agnès Gayraud; she's French, she's a philosopher, and she's a talented singer-songwriter - so what's not to love?

At any rate, I like her (even if some of her records are a tad too arty and sophisticated - or Simonesque - for my tastes) and I'm very tempted to read her new book, Dialectics of Pop (2019), in which she explores the many paradoxes of pop music and calls for it to be recognised as a modern, technologically-mediated art form that fully deserves to rank alongside film and photography.* 

Oh, and she also delights in taking on the Frankfurt School's chief bore, Theodore Adorno, famous for his dismissal of popular culture; particularly popular music; particularly American forms of popular music, such as jazz. According to her publishers:

"Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive art form that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking 'against itself'."

Pop music may never quite achieve the status that Gayraud wishes for it - and she may struggle to convince many of her fellow philosophers that Kylie should be accorded the serious critical attention given to Kant - but hers is an interesting attempt to make the case.   

Notes

Agnès Gayraud, Dialectics of Pop, trans. Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, and Nina Power, (Urbanomic, 2019).

* For those less tempted to read Gayraud's 464 page book, there's a convenient 11 minute interview with the author on YouTube in which she discusses the work and summarises her main arguments: click here. 

Play: La Féline, Comité Rouge (Official Video With English Subtitles): click here. Taken from the album Triomphe (Kwaidan Records, 2017), this, I think, is a good example of her work as a singer-songwriter. 

Notes on Vegetal Philosophy and Literature

I.  All Flesh is Grass [Isaiah 40:6]

"Plants", says Randy Laist, "play a vital role in the experience of being human" [9].

It's not just the fact we like to keep a cactus on the kitchen windowsill and utilise plants in an ornamental and symbolic manner; we also consume them, fashion clothes out of them, inhabit structures built with plant materials, and - let's not forget - exploit our green-leaved, photosynthesising friends to manufacture drugs, medicines, and cosmetics.    

Archaeologists might like to speak about the stone age, iron age, and bronze age, but we have always essentially lived in an age (and a world) dominated by plants:  

"Not only has agriculture always been the primary source of bioenergy that has allowed human populations to balloon so prolifically, but the weaving of plants into baskets, the carving of trees into floating vessels, and, possibly, the use of plant-based psychotropic substances to provoke dream-visions have all played a crucial role in the emergence of modern globalized human beings." [9]

Our intimate relationship with plants has also shaped our evolution; the hand - so beloved by Heidegger and which he thinks of as unique to human beings - wouldn't be what it is were it not for the branches and twigs it evolved to grasp and manipulate as tools. It's worth remembering that, according to Genesis, God created plants three days before he bothered to create man and that ultimately all flesh is grass.   


II. On the Defoliation of the Cultural Imagination

Having said all this, ultimately Laist's critical interest is in the long and intimate relationship between plants and literature; a relationship that has been in serious decline for some years now, despite our over-fondness for the prefix eco. Laist notes:

"When one scans contemporary culture for evidence of plant-based narratives [...] the most dramatic meta-phenomenon is the defoliation of the cultural imagination." [My italics, indicating not only that I love this phrase, but that I fully intend to use it henceforth.] [10]

Even as recently as a hundred years ago, writers shared a botanical vocabulary with readers who had a deep familiarity with the appearance and properties of a wide variety of trees and plants. Arguably, that's simply no longer the case. For not only do most readers prefer tarmac and technology to woodland and wilderness, but most authors no longer know the names of the remaining flowers growing by the roadside - and nor does this particularly bother them.     

Laist suggests that the situation is a little different with poetry; that there are still a number of contemporary poets fighting a rearguard action "against encroaching mental defoliation" [11], but I struggle to think of a poet who knows the world of flora in the astonishing and intimate manner that D. H. Lawrence experienced it.

And would any poet today define poetry as Blanchot once defined it: the attempt to protect and preserve in speech a voice in which the silent suffering and joy of flowers might come to expression? I doubt it.   


III. On the Uncanny Ontological Potency of Plants

In his introduction to Plants and Literature (2013), Laist also makes the following interesting point:

"The scarcity of plant-life in the cultural canon of the contemporary West is particularly striking when contrasted against the ubiquity of stories that feature animals [...] Despite the fact that urbanization has taken human beings just as far away from animals as it has taken them from plants, the fewer animals there are in the wild, the more seem to crop up on television [...] and on YouTube." [11]

Not only that, but within academia animal studies has recently developed alongside women's studies, queer studies, and black studies. But as Laist rightly argues:

"Animal studies is essentially an extension of human studies; it is relatively easy to imagine the subjectivity of animals. Animals may be shaped differently than we or pursue a different mode of life, but the basic coordinates of human existence and animal existence are identical in many respects." [11]

Reminding us of Aristotle's extremely influential (but limited) characterisation of plants, Laist continues:

"When it comes to plants [...] we encounter a much more significant barrier to our imagination. Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life-cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms." [12]

You might think that Aristotle's positioning of plants at the borderline between inanimate objects and living beings lends them uncanny ontological potency, but it seems that for many writers - primarly concerned as they are with the human, all too human and the personal, all too personal - they're of almost zero interest. 

If I may mention the name of D. H. Lawrence once more, one of the reasons for his greatness - and one of the reasons for my continued fascination with his work - is that he never forgets that human life unfolds within a non-human and inhuman context that is completely depersonalised; a context in which dark pansies and lilies of corruption blossom.

Lawrence understands that the power of plants is not merely symbolic, that they have ontological import all of their own and provide a way of life that is alien, beautiful and soulless; that they challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to be a living thing and our anthropocentric conceit.

The brute force and environmental destructiveness of man may crush many plants or push them into extinction, but, writes Lawrence, the plants will rise again and all our mighty monuments and great cities will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  

See: Randy Laist (ed.), Introduction to Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, (Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9-17.

Philosophical Reflections on Self-Partnering

Emma Watson
Photo: Action Press / Rex / Shutterstock

As members of the Hollywood set are amongst the most self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-indulgent individuals in the world, it came as no surprise to hear Emma Watson speak in an interview with Vogue about self-partnering [click here to read online].

Of course, such a single-positive proposition is really nothing very new: we could trace out a long and fascinating history of self-partnering from Narcissus to Jerry Seinfeld; "Now I know what I've been looking for all these years - myself. I've been waiting for me to come along. And now I've swept myself off my feet!"*

And although some people seem to react with hostility to the idea, there's really nothing to get angry or judgemental about. In fact, I would encourage people to be happy for Ms Watson - particularly as she seems to be so content with the arrangement.

Ultimately, self-partnering is better than sitting around moping like Bridget Jones, or complaining about not having met your soulmate - that special someone who will complete you as a human being (as if Aristophanes's amorous fantasy was anything other than that).**

I also agree with Foucault that care for others shouldn't be put before the care of oneself; that the latter is ethically prior due to the fact that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. ***    

The only problem comes when you grow tired of the arrangement and seek a conscious uncoupling; i.e., a releasing of oneself from oneself  - 'cos breaking up is hard to do (comma, comma, down dooby doo down down).  

Notes

*Dialogue from Seinfeld, 'The Invitations', (S7/E22, 1999), written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, episode dir. Andy Ackerman. Click here to watch a clip on YouTube.

** Plato, The Symposium, ed. M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C. Howatson, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

*** Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, (The New Press, 1997).

Readers who enjoyed this post will probably find an earlier one on sologamy also of interest: click here.

Enchanted Clothing 2: Dali's Aphrodisiac Jacket

Le veston aphrodisiaque (1936)

© Salvador Dalí / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

As I pointed out in a sister post to this one, the belief in the power of enchanted clothing has deep roots in magic, mythology, and the popular imagination. Everyone has something that they like to wear for luck or to feel good about themselves; or something designed to capture the admiration of strangers.

And that includes artistic genius and showman Salvador Dalí who, in a 1936 Paris exhibition of Surrealist Objects (designed to transfigure and transform everyday things), submitted his veston aphrodisiaque or, as it is known in English, Aphrodisiac Jacket. 

The jacket - which reinforces me in the view that the most interesting Surrealist works were not those confined to the canvas - came with over six dozen shot glasses filled with crème de menthe (believed to be a mild aphrodisiac as well as a digestif). Each drink also had a dead fly floating in it. Nice.

Dalí instructed that the jacket should ideally be worn for outings on evenings when the weather was calm, but pregnant with human emotion; "provided that the person wearing it be transported in a very powerful machine travelling very slowly (in order not to upset the liqueurs)".

Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a drink if they wished (straws were supplied by the artist) and also encouraged to top up the glasses, thereby making it not only a wonderfully wearable work of art, but an amusingly interactive one (provided you didn't swallow the fly).  

Note: readers interested in the sister post to this one - on Icelandic necropants - can click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post (though I suspect he might have wished for more details on the paranoiac-critical aspects of the jacket).

Enchanted Clothing 1: Icelandic Necropants

A pair of necropants hanging in the  
Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft 
Photo: Sigurður Atlason

I. Opening Remarks

I suspect most people have a favourite piece in their wardrobe - a jacket, a shirt, a pair of trousers (or maybe even just a belt or tie) - that they like to wear in the belief it will bring them good fortune or provide protection in a potentially fraught situation (such as a job interview or first date). 

Indeed, some would-be lovers like to have on their lucky underwear when going on a big night out, thereby magically increasing their chances of securing a sexual partner. 

This belief in the power of enchanted clothing has deep roots in mythology; one might recall Aphrodite's magic girdle, Joseph's coat of many colours, or Thor's power-belt, for example. Even Jesus - the least stylish of all gods - had his favourite pair of sandals; items that were among the most important of holy relics in the Middle Ages and which are now displayed in Prüm Abbey, Germany.

But, as a thanatologist and philosopher on the catwalk, what really interests me are not Jesus creepers, but necropants, or, as they are sometimes termed, corpse trousers ...


II. Nábrók

These ghoulish garments are, as the name suggests, a pair of britches made from the skin of a dead man and believed within Icelandic folkore to guarantee the wearer an endless supply of money.   

To make a pair is relatively straightforward, though probably not something your tailor will be overly keen to run up for you (and which also present a nightmare for drycleaners). Firstly - and this is crucial - you must enter into an agreement with a living subject to posthumously make use of his skin in this fashion. Without consent, the necropants will not work their magic.

Having got permission, you are then free to dig up the deceased's corpse and flay the skin from the lower-body, carefully ensuring that it's removed intact and in one piece. Then, just as carefully, you can step into your new necropants, which should fit like a glove - or a macabre pair of tights.

Next, in order to activate the grisly garment, you need to place a coin that has been stolen from a widow in the scrotum along with a piece of paper on which has been drawn a magical symbol that is called a nábrókarstafur and looks like this:

 

If everything has been done correctly, then you'll soon discover that the scrotum is full of money and can never be emptied, no matter how much you spend, providing the original coin is not removed.

The only problem is that in order to ensure the salvation of your soul, you must eventually remove the necropants. And in order to do that, you must first convince someone else to take ownership and step into them as soon as you step out - which, I assume, despite the financial rewards, might not be so easy.

After all, many people are creeped out by the thought of wearing a dead man's shoes and this takes things to a whole nother level ...


Note: readers might also be interested in a sister post to this one which discusses the revolt into magical style with reference to Salvador Dalí's veston aphrodisiaque (1936): click here. 

Day of the Dead (Essex Style)

Day of the Dead 
SA / 2019

In Mexico, November 1st is a day of celebration in which the people remember friends and family members who have died and, perhaps, recall also their Aztec past, prior to European colonisation, allowing them the opportunity to decorate their homes with marigolds and loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present in which only life is sanctified.

Watching over events is the goddess Mictēcacihuātl, queen of the underworld, who renders the flesh and washes the bones of the dead; she who threatens to one day swallow all the stars in the heavens above.

Meanwhile, in grey-skied Essex, one sad-looking crow sits on a wire-mesh fence overlooking the train tracks and unlovely Romford landscape where, in a sense, every day is given over to death and there seems to hover a doom so dark one feels as if one might lose one's mind.

"Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? Is that the truth?"*

* D. H. Lawrence, 'We die together', Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 544.

Benevolence

Jean-Michel Zazzi: Friedrich Nietzsche (2019) 

artsper.com

To read what one commentator writes, you'd think that Nietzsche's entire project (assuming it's possible to ascribe such a notion of purity and wholeness to his work) was based on the concept of Schadenfreude and that the greatest thing about his revaluation of values was that it allowed one to revel in the misfortune of others - including malignant ex-girlfriends - in good conscience.*

That would be very much mistaken, however.

For whilst it's true that Nietzsche rejects the Christian virtue of pity [Mitleiden] and speaks of the positive role that cruelty has played in the formation of man (often using Grausamkeit as synonymous with Kultur), so too does he privilege terms such as Wohlwollen in his text - what we in English-speaking countries term benevolence.

For Nietzsche, like the rest of us, doesn't merely 'deal in damage and joy', he also deals in goodwill and affirms the idea of having a cheerful, friendly disposition. This is particularly true in his mid-period writings.

In Human, All Too Human, for example, Nietzsche writes of those little, daily acts of kindness that, although frequent, are often overlooked by those who study morals and manners; those smiling eyes and warm handshakes, etc., that display what D. H. Lawrence terms phallic tenderness, but Nietzsche simply calls politeness of the heart.**  

These things have played a far more important role in the micropolitics of everyday life and the construction of community than those more celebrated virtues such as sympathy, charity, and self-sacrifice.

Of course the power of malice also plays a key role in human relations - and Nietzsche affirms an emotional economy of the whole - but, as I have said, it's profoundly mistaken to read from this that he is some kind of sadistic psychopath.

In other words, moving beyond good and evil does not mean behaving like an unethical little shit and I would remind Dr Solomon that "the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable [...] as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power".**

Criminal lunatics who carry out atrocities and seek to justify their actions by calling on Nietzsche's name are invariably bad and/or partial readers; individuals as confused in their thinking as they are unrestrained and immoderate in their actions.  

* See the remarks made by Simon Solomon following my recent post on the subject of schadenfreude: click here.

** Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. 49.

** Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), I. 13. 

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a form of malicious mirth that takes cruel delight in another's misfortune, failure, or humiliation. Nietzsche describes this complex emotional response as all too human, in contrast to Schopenhauer who assigns it a diabolical origin. Either way, there's no exact English term for it; I've never heard anyone use epicaricacy.

However, this isn't to say that the English, for all their talk of fair play and siding with the underdog, don't also take pleasure in seeing others - particularly successful individuals from a humble origin - lose out or be brought back down to earth with a bump, in order to remind them of who they were and who they essentially remain.

In other words, schadenfreude has an unpleasant moral component wrapped inside its apparent immorality. We laugh and jeer and sneer at others in order to teach them a lesson; schadenfreude is a form of judgement and punishment; i.e. morally corrective justice.

And it's for that reason - rather than the cruelty as such - that I don't like it: torpedo the ark means (amongst other things) to have done with judgement. Further, one's own natural indifference to how others fare means that I never really experience schadenfreude any more than its opposite, compassion or, keeping things in German, Mitgefühl.* I might not feel your pain or suffering - but I won't laugh at it either. 

So - just to be clear on this - I don't have a moral objection to schadenfreude; rather I object to it as a form of moralism. And perhaps also as a form of faint-heartedness and bourgeois compromise. For whilst observing others suffer may well have a tonic effect on the soul of man, as Nietzsche suggests, it's making others suffer which is where the true festival of cruelty begins ...  

*It might be noted that this indifference also extends towards my own welfare or fate. Partly this is punk nihilism and partly it's informed by the ethics of Stoicism. There are also elements of Sade, Masoch, Lawrence and Larry David mixed up in there too (apathy, coldness, insouciance, and the curbing of enthusiasm). None of this says anything whatsoever about my own sense of self-esteem.           

See: Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: the Joy of Another’s Misfortune, (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection, 2018). See also her article in The Guardian entitled 'The secret joys of schadenfreude' (14 Oct 2018): click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for provoking this post.