Ecce Homo: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is

poetry.rapgenius.com

Written in 1888, Ecce Homo - Nietzsche's intellectual autobiography - wasn't published until 1908. It met with a hostile critical response and was dismissed by many as little more than a testament to the author's incipient madness. Throughout most of the twentieth century it continued to occupy a tenuous position in his works, often being held up as a prime example of both his stylistic strengths and weaknesses. It has only been during recent decades that the text has finally gained the readership and attention that it deserves.

       

Although Ecce Homo provides Nietzsche’s own important if somewhat idiosyncratic summary of his earlier writings, what I like most about this late work is that it is the book in which Nietzsche finally becomes what he always wanted to be: a comedian of the ascetic ideal. Via a mixture of mockery, parody, and paradox, Nietzsche teaches us mistrust of morality and all universal truth claims and he revels in his role as a philosophical joker.

But Nietzsche also concedes that he is a décadent – perhaps the first perfect décadent – and it is this mixture of comic persona with corruption which persuades me that whilst there is something Nietzschean in Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, there is also something outrageously Wildean about Nietzsche and his aphorisms.

Although neither man knew of one another, they were, I think, more than mere contemporaries; they shared a common genius and had a similar ethical, intellectual, and erotic project; namely, the queering of modern European culture or what Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. 

       

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche finally throws off all restraint – not from madness, but from the joyful realisation that “life is much too important ever to talk seriously about it”. His final work is an extravagant exercise in style and subversion, combining gay science with elements of camp performance. He not only finally reveals the multifaceted-man that he has become, but, like Wilde, he demonstrates his ability as a writer to sum up “all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram” – even his own. 

And this is why he is so clever and writes such excellent books.

On Voluntary Human Extinction

Rupert Birkin's reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man’s self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human.

Foremost amongst such groups is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), who want people to live long, happy, childless lives and then die out peacefully, proud in the knowledge that their own decision not to breed has helped to secure the diversity of life on earth.

The movement was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, after he came to a very similar conclusion as Birkin; namely, that the world would be better off without us. He neither dreams of a cataclysmic destruction nor calls for genocide; rather, Knight advocates the voluntary adoption of a non-reproductive future, so that we might first reduce population levels and, eventually, disappear altogether as a species.

According to VHEMT literature, this gradual phasing out of humanity via a programme of universal non-breeding, represents a positive alternative to the continued exploitation and wholesale destruction of the bio-sphere. The myriad plant and animal species currently being pushed towards oblivion due to human activity will be given an evolutionary second chance by this benevolent act of selflessness. Further, once man is no more, as Birkin recognised, countless new life forms will be able to evolve from out of the unknown. Man’s non-existence thus promises to secure not only the present, but also the promise of the future. However, as long as there remains a single breeding pair of homo sapiens then this promise is threatened.

As VHEMT is neither a political party nor organization, it doesn’t have paid-up members. Rather, it simply has ‘supporters’ and ‘volunteers’. The former do not call for man’s extinction, but they accept that the continued rise in the level of human population is unsustainable and that reproduction is therefore irresponsible and unjustifiable at the present time. The latter, meanwhile, do support the VHEMT goal of total human extinction and have fully committed themselves to the dream of a childless future.

Unfortunately for VHEMT volunteers, whilst in some of the wealthier nations fertility rates have fallen below the level needed to sustain population numbers, in other poorer countries numbers continue to increase rapidly and Knight knows in his heart-of-hearts that his non-violent philosophy stands zero chance of popular adoption or success. Mankind, it seems, prefers to remain on its present path towards environmental catastrophe and the sixth species event. Nevertheless, Knight believes voluntary human extinction remains the morally right thing to advocate.

This moral component to Knight’s philosophy is often overlooked by opponents and commentators. Indeed, much of the media reportage on VHEMT has been sensationalist in nature, unfairly depicting it as a sinister suicide cult, despite Knight’s insistence that he and his supporters are not just misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster befalls humanity. Indeed, it might be argued that Knight is actually a type of pessimistic idealist acting in the name of love – even if zero population is an extreme development from the old idea of zero population growth.

Interestingly, when pressed, Knight admits to feeling a sense of sadness when contemplating the prospect of a posthuman world and the passing of a species of such fantastic potential, but which, in his view, has screwed everything up. This rather mournful confession contrasts sharply with Birkin’s sense of jubilation. However, Knight also writes that returning the Earth to its natural prehuman splendour is a happy thought and primarily he wishes to encourage a practice of joy before death, not sorrow.

In order to foster this cheerful approach to human extinction, Knight avoids the use of aggressive rhetoric and seeks to gain new supporters and volunteers via gentle persuasion, coupled to the hard facts concerning human impact upon the biosphere. He doesn’t want people to kill themselves individually in a state of despair, or move collectively towards a violent and terrible end via war, famine, or disease (as seems likely if we continue along the path we’ve chosen). Thus the VHEMT newsletter, These EXIT Times, calmly calls for an end to reproduction.

In other words, the goal is not to abort the human race, so much as prevent its future conception. And if they would like to establish anti-natal clinics, this doesn’t mean they are rabid baby-haters. On the contrary, VHEMT volunteers love babies – but they value young birds, beasts, and plants as much as human offspring. Their argument, in a nut-shell, is this: if life matters at all, then every life matters equally and human presence or non-presence doesn’t determine the ‘blessedness’ of anything. Again, the religious character of the language used here is conspicuous, as it is in Birkin’s speech in Women in Love.

To some people, of course, to equate human life with that of other species is mistaken and offensive. Even Heidegger suggested that human being is uniquely rich in world and has a privileged relationship to Being. Others would assert that the desire for children is the most natural desire of all. Obviously, VHEMT supporters and volunteers would reject such claims and I have to confess that I would also regard any argument that relies upon anthropocentric conceit and/or the language of nature as being highly suspect and in need of careful but relentless deconstruction. VHEMT supporters and volunteers are right to say, after Darwin, that all life forms are ‘netted together’ and that there is no abyss of essence between us and other living beings. They are also right to claim that even if the desire to fuck is a ‘natural instinct’, the desire to procreate is culturally conditioned and enforced.

For just as there is an underlying moralism so too is there is a fierce logic to Knight’s position; a logic that contrasts tellingly with our frenzied consumption of resources and seemingly insane destruction of the natural environment. Knight’s ‘final solution’ might not be one many people will give serious consideration to, but surely most would concede that something has to be done in the face of climate change, loss of habitat diversity, and melting ice caps. Unfortunately, despite what our supermarket retailers tell us, recycling carrier bags and buying their fair trade coffee isn’t going to halt the Holocene extinction event; nor does environmental friendliness and acting locally slow population growth, or reverse global warming.

Activists and politicians who espouse ‘green technologies’ and increased government intervention as the key to saving the planet, are essentially liars or fantasists dreaming of universal harmony when the lion will at last lie down with the lamb. The fact is, we are not going to develop a cosy symbiotic relationship with all God’s creatures when there are ever-more of us demanding to be fed, housed, and accorded our right to shop and fly-drive round an air-conditioned world.

Like it or not, humanity is a walking environmental disaster: a violent and destructive parasite. Quite simply, Birkin was right: we have to go! And if Les Knight had been around to do so, whilst he might not have torpedoed the ark, he would certainly have encouraged Noah and his three sons to have post-flood vasectomies.

Enienay: Fashion Among the Ruins

English fashion designer Nina Davies

(not to be confused with the Canadian performance artist of the same name)

One must always be very grateful to fashion, says Nietzsche, for liberating within those who are subject to its law the energy and goodwill that is often paralysed by negative feelings of anxiety and low self-esteem; i.e. those feelings which are productive of drabness and conformity of appearance. Fashion, in other words, allows the individual to communicate confidence and joy in their own form. 

And so, without wishing to encroach too far onto the kind of territory best covered by the super lovely Nunzia Garoffolo in her smashing blog, Fashion Beyond Fashion, I would nevertheless like to say a few words in praise of the talented design queen of Spitalfields, Nina Davies, and her fashion label Enainay.

In her unique collection of womenswear, Ms Davies recycles and reconstructs old fabrics and abandoned garments into entirely new pieces by draping them round her trusty mannequin and then cutting, pinning, stitching and twisting with a mixture of madness, mockery, and love for all things motley.

She is, if you like, a designer amongst the ruins. By which I mean one who attempts to create something beautiful out of that which others have discarded as worn out or outmoded. Nina realises that because second-hand clothes have no intrinsic significance, any item might attain new meaning and new life by being incorporated into a novel vision of what constitutes elegance.

For those who like sartorial harmony and a wardrobe steeped in classical tradition, there might not be much to admire in her collection of fitted jackets, skirts, dresses and corsets. But for those who want to dress up to mess up and who desire clothes that display wit, warmth, and intelligence - as well as craftsmanship - in every asymmetric line, then I would highly recommend a visit to her shop.           


Enienay, at Seam, 14-16, Market Street, Spitalfields, London, E1. 
Open Mon-Fri 11am-7pm & Sat-Sun 10.30am-6.30pm.
Or visit: www.enienay.com 
 
 

In Praise of Sapphic Decadence

Renée Vivien (1877-1909): The Muse of the Violets

The perverse lesbian was a central figure within decadent literature. An object of endless fascination for writers such as Baudelaire and Swinburne, she might almost be thought of as nothing other than a figure of the male porno-poetic imagination; i.e., a creature of artifice and obscenity shaped by and within desire on the one hand and fear and loathing on the other.    

But perhaps she appears most beautifully - and most controversially - in the work of expatriate English poet and female dandy-bohemian Renée Vivien. 

In Vivien's text, if the lesbian remains a species of fleur du mal very much marked by the misogyny and homophobia that runs through the work of the above male authors, she is, at the same time, radically and paradoxically reconfigured through "a utopian politics of Sapphic revival" and in this way provides a more affirmative and naturalistic (though no less fictional) conception of liberated female sexuality. In other words, "Vivien's decadent Sapphist is a shimmering, negative embodiment of the utopian possibility contained within a modern world in decline".

- See Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire, (SUNY Press, 2009), p. 12.

This negative dialectics which finds value - even hope - in decadence will remind some readers of Adorno and others of Nietzsche. The point is that sickness, corruption, and perversity often serve to advance us as a species and a culture; that we need our decadent individuals (including alcoholic, anorexic, suicidal, sadomasochistic, lesbian poets like Renée Vivien) and not merely those healthy-living normal types who eat breakfast, go to the gym, work hard and preserve the status quo.

Queens of the Wild Frontier

Lady Gaga             Princess Julia             Countess Alex Zapak

Female devotees of art-pop seem to have a fascination with aristocratic society and often assign themselves titles, constituting a false order of privilege, or what Adam Ant memorably described as a new royal family / a wild nobility.

But it might be asked if this ironic act of self-entitlement doesn't also betray a certain contempt for class.

For what we observe here is not simply nostalgia or a reactionary desire to return to a world in which everyone had a place and was expected to know their place, but an anarchic attempt to subvert all systems of hierarchy and caste; to construct a utopia in which breeding counts for nothing, miscegenation is celebrated, and everyone - whatever their origin - is allowed to sprinkle stardust in their hair.

     

Selfies and the Rise of the Look Generation

Early selfie by Anastasia Nikolaevna (1914)

Typically taken with a smart phone or webcam and then posted onto a social media website, the selfie is very much a contemporary phenomenon. 

This is not to say that it is entirely without precedent or lacking history. In fact, human beings have long enjoyed making and circulating photographic images of themselves and selfies have existed in non-digital form ever since the days of the Kodak Box Brownie. Thirteen year-old Anastasia Nikolaevna, for example, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, was one of the first girls to take her own picture, which she then mailed to a friend in 1914.

And so I have no wish to add my voice to those that suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem. I understand the arguments put forward by concerned commentators, but fear that they often collapse into precisely the sort of moral hysteria that greets everything to do with technology, sex, and the play of images.

But what is worth pointing out is how Jean Baudrillard anticipated the rise of the selfie thirty years ago and nicely identified what is unique about this disenchanted form of mannerism, or pose without purpose.

In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Baudrillard discussed what he termed the 'Look Generation' and argued that we were rapidly moving towards a world in which it would be impossible to speak of alienation or inauthenticity; a world in which individuals could no longer hope "to come into existence in and through the eye of the other, for there is no longer a dialectic of identity" [41].

In such a world, everyone is required to make themselves visible as an image, but without worrying too much about being (or even being seen). It's all about the utopia of the look, rather than the empire of the gaze. In proliferating and posting a huge number of self-taken images - including explicit images - Baudrillard doubts there is even any desire to seduce; "for this would require that appearances were carefully worked on, stylized, according to a strategy of diverting the other in order to harness their gaze and lead them into loss" [41].

The selfie is simply saying: I exist, I am here, I am an image, look at me, look, look! This may or may not be a form of narcissism, but what it certainly involves is "exhibition without inhibition, a kind of ingenious publicity in which each person becomes the impresario of their own appearance, of their own artifice" [41].

The Look Generation, concludes Baudrillard, have discovered a new and ironic form of passion; "that of being devoid of all illusion about their own subjectivity ... about their own desires ... fascinated by their own metamorphosis" [41] into electronic and ephemeral images lacking in any particular significance. Lovers of selfies no longer worry about the social logic of distinction (as found, for example, in fashion pictures taken by professional photographers) and they no longer believe in coded difference, such as gender. Rather, they simply play with it; just as they play with singularity "without falling into dandyism or snobbery" [42].


See: Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane, (Routledge, 1993), pp. 41-2.  

Cinema Botanica (An Introduction to the World of Plant Porn)

Cinema Botanica, by Jonathan Keats (2009) 

As a floraphile, I have a certain interest in and admiration for the work of American artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathan Keats; particularly his attempt to create a Cinema Botanica that incorporates a pornography for house plants and suburban shrubs and bushes. 

I find it amusing that whilst the majority of people who like to look after plants feel they are doing their bit if they remember to water regularly and perhaps administer an occasional drop of Baby Bio, Keats has expressed his concern that plants in a domestic environment might be bored and in need of entertainment designed to cater for their tastes and desires. 

And so he has filmed explicit scenes of floral pollination by honeybees, using specialized techniques developed for organisms that whilst lacking eyes, are nevertheless sensitive to light and shade. These edited but uncensored scenes are then projected directly onto the foliage. For human beings, there is very little to observe other than a silent flickering of light and so their enjoyment is strictly limited. However, as Keats points out, Cinema Botanica was developed for the titillation of the plants and not those who tend them.

Note: Cinema Botanica was screened in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater on October 1st, 2009, as part of Arse Elektronika, the world's foremost sex and technology festival, organized by the international art and theory collective, monochrom, founded in 1993, in Vienna, by Johannes Grenzfurthner. 

For further details, see Of Intercourse and Intracourse, ed. Johannes Grenzfurthner, Guenther Friesinger, and Daniel Fabry, (RE/SEARCH, 2011), or visit the monochrom website: www.monochrom.at/english  

Nietzsche and Capitalism

Nietzsche's opposition to capitalism and his loathing of modern bourgeois society is present throughout his writings. In an early essay entitled 'The Greek State', for example, he argues that self-seeking, money-loving entrepreneurs and stateless corporate executives should be regarded as the enemy within, threatening as they do the stability and welfare of the community. 

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the manner in which the market determines the value of everything; including the value of all other values. The consequence of this is not only that all things become commodified and given price tags, bar codes, and registered trade marks, but that everything becomes permissible - providing, of course, that it's economically viable and can generate profit. Thus it is that, within liberal society, all types of commercial exchange and all modes of conduct are discreetly sanctioned; including those that many advocates of free trade like to publicly condemn and make illegal, but do nothing to actually prevent.

Like Marx, Nietzsche is concerned by the prospect of a world in which there is no connection between people other than shared greed and a desire to succeed at any cost. Such a world would be one suspended in a state of systematic anarchy and nihilism; a world in which an aggressive philistinism would effectively cancel out the possibility of culture as he conceives of it in a classical sense. 

The permanent substratum of money under everything in the modern world causes Nietzsche to experience a feeling of ugly disillusion; he rejects liberalism and democracy as forms of political degeneracy. As for the equality of opportunity that is said to be opened up by capitalism, he dismisses this as merely the freedom to buy and sell one another in a universal slave market. 

As an alternative, Nietzsche advocates a strong model of volksgemeinschaft that rests upon a bond of trust formed between rulers and ruled and an agreed series of duties and obligations. If this fails to guarantee the rights of the private individual, it will, he says, at least ensure the production of a small number of sovereign men and women and allow for cultural greatness (which is something other than material and scientific progress).

Of course there are problems with Nietzsche's thinking here as elsewhere; his views on politics, culture and society are never fully developed and often in need of radical revision and recontextualization. But one thing is surely clear: Zarathustra hates shopkeepers and there is nothing - neither property rights nor human rights - given to us by liberalism which fully compensates for what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered".

See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.   

Sensitive Hands on a Cyclops

Eric Drass: Nietzsche and the Horse (2011)
www.saatchionline.com

Pity in a man of knowledge seems ludicrous, says Nietzsche. Indeed, it can even tip a philosopher into madness and make them fling their arms round the neck of an old carthorse, causing a public commotion.

He should, of course, have known better: for Nietzsche warned repeatedly against the non-egotistical instincts and singled out the Christian virtue of pity as the most fundamentally dangerous of all such feelings; something that weakens the individual who surrenders to it and ultimately fails to benefit the one who is the object of their pity.

Pity, says Nietzsche, is anti-life: for pity attempts to preserve what is ripe for destruction or belongs in the knacker's yard. It is the great seduction into nihilism; the most sublime form of decadence. And yet one can't help loving Nietzsche for attempting to protect some nag from cruelty; for ultimately being just a little allzumenschliche and displaying a feminine incapacity to remain a passive spectator when confronted by the suffering of a fellow creature.

Becoming-hard like the diamond, does not mean becoming an insensitive moron who knows nothing of kindness or the politeness of the heart; rejecting the moral ideal of pity does not mean one should not feel compassion or sympathy in the noble sense. If it did, one would hardly bother to read Nietzsche.

O Superman

 Atanas Botev: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2004)

Nietzsche's great concept of the Übermensch remains something to ponder and to play with. But there are still those who just don't get it and insist on believing that the overman is merely a higher type of human being - a tendency that has not been helped by the unfortunate and misleading English translation of the original German term as 'superman'.

Thus, amongst our transhumanist friends for example, we still find those who naively think of the idea exclusively in terms of genetic engineering and contrived evolutionary advance. But the metaphysical, moral and material overcoming of man is absolutely not the same thing as his biological self-preservation and enhancement.

To be fair, Zarathustra doesn't help matters by initially speaking about worms and apes and describing man as a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch. But he is later at pains to point out that his primary concern is not with what might or what should succeed mankind in the sequence of species and that his teaching is not a variety of Darwinism.

What then is the concept of the Übermensch all about?

For me, the best reading is developed in the work of Michel Foucault in terms of forces and forms; the latter defined as a compound of relations between the former. In this interpretation, our humanity is understood as a non-predetermined form which results when forces internal to ourselves as a species (such as imagination and memory) enter into a historical relationship with certain external forces (be they natural, artificial or virtual).

Thus Man - with a capital M and by which we mean the hu-man - has not always existed and will not exist forever. Our humanity is a contingent form and as internal and external forces as well as the relations between them change, so our form changes. This is why Foucault famously writes of Man being nothing but a face drawn in the sand that is destined to be erased by the incoming tide.

The Übermensch is thus simply another word for these external forces: the sea which receives us; the lightning that licks us with its tongue; the madness with which we might be cleansed. In other words, it is that which frees the life within us and reconfigures form in a manner that is not only posthuman, but genuinely transhuman and inhuman.