The Slop-ification of Literature: One Night at the UnHerd Club

Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West, 

and Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the UnHerd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely and without fear of retribution'. 

 

In other words, it's a members' club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.

 

My friend cynically described it as:  

 

A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.     

 

Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).  

 

II. 

 

Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers: 

 

(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.

 

(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who has worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.      

 

(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

III. 

Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.  

 

This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.  

 

And, err, that was really about it ...

 

It's not that I don't - as a Lawrentian - in part agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.  

 

And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs. 

 

Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection. 

 

It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network. 

 

 

IV.

 

What the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing. 

 

For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the greater danger lies. 

 

To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen, is to entirely fail to understand that the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism. 

 

I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333. 

      See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one, or here for part two.    

 

[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here. Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a new Baudrillard biography published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post. 

      I think a good book to start with by Baudrillard might be The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), described by Fantin and Nicol as "one of Baudrillard's most prophetic texts, valuable even now, more than thirty years after its publication, as a key to understanding our 'permanently online, permanently connected world'" (Jean Baudrillard, 2025, p. 96); a world where the screen has replaced the mirror and each individual exists in their own kind of bubble, like an astronaut inside their spacesuit.    

 

 

This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave. 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Two)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nichol (Part One)

Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol: Jean Baudrillard 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'What I am, I don't know? I am the simulacrum of myself.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Unlike Michel Surya's 2002 biography of Bataille (608 pages), or Benoît Peeters' 2012 biography of Derrida (700 pages), this new paperback biography of Jean Baudrillard by Fantin and Nicol is very slim in size; just 184 pages (although it does come with 31 illustrations).   

 

Once hailed as an historian of the future, many people now regard Baudrillard as yesterday's man; the only thing my friend said when I told her I wanted to buy the book was: Why?; the implication being that it no longer made sense to be interested in the life and work of the high priest of postmodernism in 2025. 

 

Obviously, I beg to differ ... In fact, I would suggest that many aspects of his thinking have never been more relevant and that even though he has been dead for eighteen years he is still a far more vital figure than the majority of commentators and talking heads I see on TV (as Nietzsche said, some thinkers really only come into their own posthumously) [a].      

 

 

II. 

 

The book is the first biography of Baudrillard in English and whilst it obviously provides details of his life, it's not these that particularly interest me. 

 

In fact, I'm happy for Baudrillard to remain enigmatic and elusive (two terms often applied to him, both as a thinker and as a man); to allow him the disappearance (or seductive departure) he desired. It was the fresh insights into his philosophy that I was promised by the publishers that persuaded me to hand over my £12.99.     

 

Having said that, as we read through the book here, if there are any tasty titbits about his personal life or his journey from little-known French intellectual to famous cult figure on the global stage, I will of course share them (though without pretending that these biographical facts "capture the 'essence' of Baudrillard" [11]).  

 

 

III. 

 

The Introduction rightly picks up on the aesthetics and ethics of disappearing: In the years before he died, Baudrillard had increasingly been turning his thoughts to how he might best take his leave and become, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, imperceptible [b].  

 

That was his goal; not to leave behind a great legacy, but to die at the right time and in the right way (a difficult and rare art, as Zarathustra says) [c]. 

 

Crucial to this is knowing how to disappear before you exhaust all possibilities and whilst you still have something to say. Fantin and Nichol suggest Andy Warhol achieved it, but for me it's David Bowie who comes first and foremost to mind [d]. And for Baudrillard, "this was more than just a matter of bowing out at the right time but one closely aligned to the key principles of his philosophy" [9].

 

 

IV. 

 

The Introduction also rightly makes much of the fact that Baudrillard did not belong and liked to work at a distance (on the margins): 

 

"He cared little about labels or categories [...] resisting being pinned down to any specific movement, group or academic discipline [...] He felt his 'trajectory' always 'passed through' disciplines that wished to adopt him as one of their own [...]" [11-12]

 

This, of course, is one of the main reasons I admire him; he has a radical detachment born of cynical indifference and a desire for independence (or a state of poetic grace) that I seek to emulate; to become an object that evades "the grasp of any system" [13] that attempts to limit (or contain).  

 

And his fragmentary (destructive) model of writing (and provocation) is one that has shaped Torpedo the Ark:

 

"He wanted his writing [...] to be seductive and elusive; to read like thought-provoking fragments that gestured towards a secret whole system behind them [but which does not, in fact, exist]. He was not concerned that this meant he might not be fully understood or that his readers would be frustrated." [14] 

  

 

Notes

 

[a] As Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol write in their Introduction to Jean Baudrillard (2025, p. 17): 

      "His ideas about virtuality, hyperreality, technology and sexuality, and his provocations about the end of things that defined the modern world - production, human agency, history - have only become more relevant in our age of globalization, data production, digital culture, automation and AI."

      For Nietzsche's idea of posthumous individuals, see Ecce Homo, 'Why I Write Such Excellent Books' (1). 

 

[b] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...' For D&G, becoming-imperceptible is the immanent end or cosmic formula of becoming; that which all other becomings move toward.

 

[c] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of Voluntary Death'. For Zarathustra, some die too early; many die too late. Dying at the right time is not easy.  

 

[d] See the post 'On the Art of Death and Disappearance in the Case of David Bowie' (5 Feb 2026): click here.  

 

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.  

  

 

Welcome to a New Kind Of Tension: Brief Thoughts on Civilisational Erasure and the Great Replacement

Donald Trump and Wajahat Ali

 

 

I. 

 

President Donald Trump's administration has warned in a new report that, due to falling birthrates and mass (largely uncontrolled) migration from the Third World, Europe faces civilisational erasure ... [1]

 

It's a catchy phrase, but is this stark warning something that European leaders should take seriously? 

 

Most don't seem to think so - even if the native peoples of Europe are increasingly concerned with issues around changing demographics and cultural identity (thus the emergence of populist parties such as the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK).        

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, these remarks from the Trump administration are echoed (and inadvertently lent weight) by those of Wajahat Ali, an American Muslim commentator and provocateur. 

 

Speaking on The Left Hook - his Substack, which he describes as "a thoroughly opinionated and biased intellectual playground for people who enjoy political, cultural, and religious hot takes without corporate censorship and nonsense centrism" [2] - Ali had this to say to his white viewers: 

 

"You have lost. You lost. The mistake that you made is, you let us in in the first place. 

      

See, that's the thing with brown people - and I'm going to say this as a brown person - there's a lot of us. Like a lot. There's like 1.2 billion in India. There's more than 200 million in Pakistan, there's like 170 million in Bangladesh. Those are just the people there. I'm not even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants. There's a bunch of us and we breed. We're a breeding people. 

 

And the problem is you let us in [...] and once you let one of us in, you know what happens with brown folks? Our grandmother comes, our grandfather comes, our uncle comes, our aunt comes, our cousin comes, our second cousin comes, our third cousin comes, then we have kids, a bunch of kids [...] 

 

So, we're embedded. We are everywhere." [3]

 

 

III. 

 

Obviously, this is designed to be inflammatory - cheap rage bait, as Matt Walsh describes it. And one assumes it's also intended to be satirical; mocking the kind of rhetoric (and hate speech) used by those on the racist far-right whom Ali despises.   

 

The problem, however, is it's also accurate; there are a lot of brown-skinned people in the world and they do tend to have larger families than white westerners. And they are, as Ali says, embedded within European and American society in a way that they weren't fifty years ago. 

 

Thus, as I indicate above, Ali's short video gives credence to narratives concerning the Great Replacement [4] and civilisational erasure spun by white nationalists. In other words, the satire not only fails to be recognised as humour, but it backfires on the satirist and works in favour of the lampooned group by promoting their ideas to a wider audience whilst reinforcing them among their existing followers.   

 

It thus appears that Ali has never heard of Poe's Law, which informs us that without a clear indicator of the author's intent it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that someone somewhere won't mistake it for a sincere expression of those views [5]. 

     

 

Note 

 

[1] See the article by Brandon Livesay discussing the report on the BBC News website (5 Dec 2025): click here.  

 

[2] Wajahat Ali, writing on the About page of his Substack 'The Left Hook': click here.  

 

[3] The full rant (just under a minute-and-a-half in length), from which I've extracted these lines, can be found on Rumble: click here. 

 

[4] Replacement theory has its origins in the work of French author Renaud Camus, who argues that - with the complicity of governments and global elites - the native populations of Europe are being replaced by non-white peoples, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. 

      Although such claims have repeatedly been dismissed by scholars and those in the mainstream media, the idea of a Great Replacement continues to circulate in both European and American far-right circles. Readers who wish to know more, may like to begin with Camus's Le Grand Remplacement (2011). An English edition, translated by the author, was published in 2024 as The Great Replacement: Introduction to Global Replacism. 

 

[5] Poe's Law was named after Nathan Poe who came up with the idea in 2005, or rather nicely summarised what others had already noted about the need to explicitly indicate sarcasm, irony, or parody when writing online or texting on social media; that winking smiley is crucial if you don't want an attempt at trolling to be taken seriously.   

 

Sacred Lovers: On Colette Peignot and Her Bad Romance With Georges Bataille

Colette Peignot (aka Laure) and Georges Bataille
 

No one has ever seemed to me as uncompromising and pure as she, 

or more decidedly sovereign, and yet everything in her was devoted to darkness. 

                                                                                                  - Georges Bataille

  

 

I. 

 

Colette Peignot was a French writer and poet, perhaps better known by the pseudonym Laure, who - thanks to ill-health, the death of her father in the First World War, and knowledge of the sexual abuse of her sister by a Catholic clergyman [1] - endured what might be described as a challenging childhood. 

 

Out of such circumstances, however, a rebellious and free-spirited young woman emerged and, during her early 20s, she began to frequent the company of communists and surrealists and enter into tumultuous love affairs with older men who had a taste for cruelty. 

 

Once, in 1927, after discovering she was pregnant and feeling exhausted following a flare up of her tuberculosis, Peignot shot herself in the chest; like Vincent Van Gogh. Unlike the unfortunate painter, however, she survived - the bullet having been deflected by a rib away from her heart - and went on to make a full recovery. 

 

The following year, she met the German poet, physician, and pervert Eduard Trautner - a central figure in the Expressionist and New Objectivist movements - and moved to Berlin to be with him. 

 

After a few months, however, the intensity of the relationship proved too great - Trautner would regularly beat her and obliged her to wear a dog collar - so Peignot fled Germany and sought refuge in the Soviet Union, living in Leningrad, Moscow and the Black Sea resort of Sochi, before retuning to Paris penniless and in poor health once more.   

 

Figuring that she was probably never going to be rich or in good health - and not wanting a boring and bourgeois existence - she decided to throw herself into a life of dissolution, spending the last of her inheritence and pushing experience to the limit: it was thus almost inevitable that she would, sooner or later, become involved with Georges Bataille and serve as a living embodiment of one of his fictional heroines [2].

 

 

II.

 

During the summer of 1935, Laure and Bataille moved in together, having first briefly encountered one another four years earlier and become lovers in the summer of 1934. Thus began their mad affair, which combined debauchery with high culture in the company of artistic and intellectual friends. 

 

He was undoubtedly attracted by her intensity and instability and the fact that she had such contempt "for anything devout or conformist" [3]. But he also sensed that they were extremely sympathisch. Not surprisingly, therefore, Laure soon found herself at the center of Bataille's secret society or post-Nietzschean religion - Acéphale - members of whom (almost exclusively male) met in the woods and discussed human sacrifice.    

 

In a fascinating passage, Michel Surya argues that what distinguished them as a couple is that their love had nothing romantic or transformative about it: 

 

"Nothing that puts love above everything and gives it meaning and salvation [...] no unity [...], nothing of the marvellous [...], no devotion of any kind. One might even go so far as to say that happiness was ruled out of Bataille's concerns with this love (happiness was too weak a concept ever to have interested him). On the contrary, he exacerbated both their wounds, even when they came at the highest cost. In fact this love resembles a twin descent into the depths; anguish is its key." [4]   

 

Surya concludes: 

 

"Colette Peignot's courage lay in responding to all this [...] the only one unafraid of what Bataille was blindly setting in motion. [...] The only difference was that everything in her led her to seek heaven, even in hell [...], while for him everything led him to make even heaven into a hell." [5].  

 

Given this crucial difference, things were never going to end well ... and Laure confessed to Bataille before her death in 1938, aged 35, that although she had loved him and thought him a kind of god, she hated their life together, which, to be fair, can't have been a barrel of laughs [6]. 

 

Ultimately, I suppose it might be asked whether Laure was destined to die young (having lived fast): 

 

"Could another way of life - less harsh and less debauched - have saved her? How much longer would she have lived had she been 'sensible'?" [7] 

 

Probably a bit longer: but not much; her tuberculosis was already far too advanced in 1935 for any treatment to save her. 

 

And besides, some only come into their lives posthumously ...     

 

 

III. 

 

After her death, two volumes of Peignot's work were published, hors commerce, under the name Laure, edited by Bataille and Michel Leiris: 

  

Le Sacré (1939), is an assemblage of poems and fragments exploring themes of mysticism, eroticism, and revolution. 

 

It was published only a few weeks after the author's death, against the wishes of her family, and distributed furtively to a selected (and limited) group of readers. It has been argued by one commentator that Bataille "effectively sanctifies Laure" [8] as the martyed figurehead of what Blanchot calls an unavowable community (i.e., one based on otherness and difference, rather than sameness and shared identity).   

 

Histoire d'une petite fille (1943), meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical text dealing with the traumas of childhood and how the narrator rebels against her middle-class Cathlolic background, rejecting social and moral convention so as to shape life in accordance with her own dreams. 

 

As with the first book, the print run was extremely limited - just thirty-three copies of the fifty-five page book were produced - and copies were intended only for the personal use of the recipient [9].       

 

  

Notes

 

[1] When Colette confronted her mother with the facts about this abuse, she not only refused to believe them, but accused her younger daughter of having a perverted imagination. That seems terribly unjust, but, as Mark Polizzotti remarks: "She wasn't entirely wrong, for while the incident cemented Laure's hatred of organised religion and its manifold hypocrisies, it also made her believe in an unbreakable link between the holy and the erotic." 

      See Polizzotti's review of Laure's Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (1995), titled 'Dirty's Story', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 18, No. 23 (November 1996): click here.    

 

[2] It is often claimed that Peignot was the inspiration for the character Dirty in Bataille's novel Le bleu du ciel (written when he was involved with her in 1935, but not published until 1957, with the first English translation following in 1978). 

      However, as Michel Surya points out, this is  doubtful as the character of Dirty was conceived long before Bataille met Colette Peignot; see p. 216 of the work cited below.  

 

[3] Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzystof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (Verso, 2002), p. 165. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 201.  

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] Bataille later expressed his feelings about their relationship in the essay Le coupable (1944), describing Laure as a unique spirit inextricably linked to his own life and work; a woman who oscillated between extreme audacity and dreadful anguish, looking for love whilst courting death and disaster. 

 

[7]  Michel Surya, Georges Bataille ... p. 257. 

 

[8] See Milo Sweedler, 'From the sacred conspiracy to the unavowable community: Bataille, Blanchot and Laure's Le sacré', in French Studies, Volume 59, Number 3 (Liverpool University Press, July 2005), pp. 338-350.  

 

[9] Fortunately for us, a complete edition of Peignot's writings, ed. Marianne Berissi and Anne Roche, was published by Éditions les Cahiers in 2019: click here for details. English readers without knowledge of French, however, will have to make do with Laure: The Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman (City Lights Publishers, 1991). 

 

 

Never Ever Say Hey Ho! Off We Go: Why I'm Sceptical of the Work Ethic

       

linkedin.com 

 

 

I've expressed my contempt for those professional network hippies and Silicon Valley fascists at LinkedIn before on Torpedo the Ark - click here - but their Open to Work feature launched in 2020 (which has only just come to my attention) really takes the biscuit ...

 

Designed to let recruiters and potential employers know that you are available for new job opportunities - the feature works by securing a green-coloured slave collar round your profile picture - they may as well have asked members to hold up a cardboard sign with the words willing to work scrawled on it!

 

The primary issue, then, is that the feature makes a job seeker appear desperate: even some career experts agree with this and suggest it may warn off some employers - those who prefer to discreetly headhunt talented candidates, for example - whilst leading others to make derisory salalry offers [1].     

 

But the deeper issue, for me at least, has to do with the philosophy behind such a feature; for it echoes, does it not, those terrible words written on the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit macht frei ...

 

 

II.  

 

This infamous slogan originated from a popular 19th century novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, the title of which - Die Wahrheit macht frei (1873) - refers to the phrase used by Jesus: 'And the truth shall set you free' (John 8:32). However, the book reimagines this as 'work makes free' and that's what really struck a chord with the Nazis and other advocates of an ultra-strong work ethic. 

 

Following their coming to power in 1933, the Nazis first utilised it in programmes designed to combat mass unemployment in Germany. But it is now forever associated in the cultural imagination with the concentration camps and forced labour carried out in the most atrocious conditions imaginable; the only freedom being death.      

 

Interestingly, the Nazis seemed to have used the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz neither with the intention to mock the inmates nor provide them with false hope. It was employed, rather, in the sincere belief that endless labour and self-sacrifice does result in a form of spiritual freedom. 

 

In other words, it illustrates their idealism, not their cynicism; just as 'Open to Work' doubtless illustrates the good intentions of the good people at LinkedIn and is not an attempt to humiliate and make members look needy.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For a discussion of whether you should (or should not) use LinkedIn's 'Open to Work' feature, see Elizabeth Perarson's article in Forbes (Sept 2024): click here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Bow Wow Wow, 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)', (EMI, 1981): click here for the extended 12" remix. This track, with lyrics written by Malcolm McLaren, is an amusing rejection of the work ethic. The sleeve, designed by Jamie Reid, also makes clear of how such an ethic can become malignant and fall into the black hole of fascism: 

 

 

 

Reflections on a Punk Jesus

Fig. 1: Jesus: Punk or Cunt?  

 

 

I.

 

We all know, thanks to the Ramones, that Jackie is a punk (and Judy is a runt), but Jesus ... can the Nazarene really be conceived as such? 

 

After all, Johnny Rotten campily affirms a cod-Nietzschean position vis-à-vis the Son of God in the opening line of the Sex Pistols' debut single: I am an anti-Christ [1]. 

 

And in case there should still be some doubt regarding this matter, the infamous Destroy shirt designed by McLaren and Westwood for Seditionaries, features (along with a swastika) an inverted crucifix [2] - could that be any more sacrilegious, as Chandler Bing might say.   

 

Despite this, however, there's recently been talk in certain punk circles around the need to enthuse the diverse global subculture that has emerged from what was once simply a sound and a look born of 430 King's Road with a form of Christian spirituality (or faith) [3] - and I for one don't like it! 

 

For as my friends in Cradle of Filth once succinctly put it, Jesus is a cunt [4].  

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, even Nietzsche recognised Christ as someone in revolt against social hierarchy, writing: 

 

"This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners' [...] to oppose the ruling order [...] was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society." [5]

 

So perhaps the idea of a punk Jesus is not so absurd as it seems at first (whilst remaining profoundly problematic). 

 

Or perhaps we might instead understand punk as merely another unfolding of the slave revolt in morality [6]; the marginalised, the disprivileged, and the talentless - driven by ressentiment - attempting to invert the value system of the music business and overthrow the pop elite: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones ... [7] 

 

 

Fig. 2: Johnny Rotten: Anti-Christ / Photo by Barry Plummer (1976)   

Fig. 3: Destroy shirt by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (1977)  

  

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI Records, 1976). The track also features on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play and watch the official video on YouTube. 

      As one critic writes, the opening line of this song has become one of the most famous in rock history: "As a simple declaration, these words possess an immediate shock value familiar in the themes of transgression and iconoclasm that helped define rock and roll." 

      See Benjamin Court, 'The Christ-like Antichrists: Messianism in Sex Pistols', in Popular Music and Society, Volume 38, Issue 4 (2015), pp. 416-431.

 

[2] The figure of Christ on the Cross was adapted by McLaren from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). 

 

[3] In November 2019, for example, Francis Stewart and Mike Dines of the Punk Scholars Network, organised a two-day in person and online symposium on the theme of 'Punk and the Sacred': click here for details. 

      The peer-reviewed academic journal Punk & Post-Punk (ed. Russ Bestley) has also published several articles on punk spirituality; see, for example, Ibrahim Abraham's 'Postsecular punk: Evangelical Christianity and the overlapping consensus of the underground', in Volume 4, Issue 1, of the above (Mar 2015), pp. 91-105, which argues that "the negotiated inclusion of religiously diverse social actors in punk scenes can inform ongoing debates about diversity and inclusion ..." Abraham also edited Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020).

      This attempt to give punk a religious gloss doesn't always involve a Christian makeover, however; there have also been attempts to blend punk with Buddhist and Hindu practices and beliefs, for example. If not exactly hostile, let's just say - as an anti-theist [click here] - I'm suspicious of this creeping religiosity; I don't want punk philosophy and art to be corrupted by theologenblut.

 

[4] This line was written on the back of the Vestal Masturbation T-shirt; a controversial item of Cradle of Filth band merchandise, originally printed and distributed in 1993 (the front of the shirt features an image of a masturbating, semi-naked nun). As with several of the early McLaren-Westwood shirt designs, it garnered much controversy and resulted in some fans being arrested for wearing it. 

 

[5] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), § 27, p. 150.

 

[6] See sections 10-12 of the first essay in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

      It's important to note that this slave revolt is not merely a politics of class war and revenge; it also, crucially, introduces into history the idea of a free-willing human subject (the modern individual) whose existence is conceived in moralistic terms (i.e., as good or evil). Thus, Nietzsche does not simply condemn the triumph of this revolt nor seek to reverse it: "Such an exercise, even if desirable, would be pointless because slave morality has become an essential part of what we are." 

      See Keith Ansell-Pearson, editor's introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xv.

 

[7] Lyrics from '1977', by The Clash; B-side to 'White Riot', their debut single (CBS Records, 1977).  

 

 

On the Anointed and the Accursed

Fig. 1: Marko Rupnik: The Anointing at Bethany (date unknown) 

Fig. 2: Marti Blue in Dirty (dir. Annabel Lee and Tessa Hughes-Freeland, 1993)

 

'And there will be a time of crisis, of worlds hanging in the balance.

And in this time shall come the Anointed.'

  

Or the Accursed ...

  

 

I. 

 

If you know your Greek, then you know that the title Christ does not mean king or saviour, but, in fact, derives from the term Χριστός (Khristós), which means the Anointed One [1]. 

 

II. 

Anointment is a ceremonial blessing, both sweet and useful, in which sacred aromatic oil [2] is ritually poured over an individual's head and/or body in acknowledgement of their divine nature and in order to provide protection from dangerous spirits and demons (which were widely believed to cause disease) [3].

 

It's a Jewish practice that many other peoples adopted, including the Ancient Greeks, and the concept of a sweet-smelling Messiah is, of course, central to Christianity; a faith whose oily followers we might legitimately describe as unctuous.     

 

I'm not sure, but I would guess that the practice has its origins in prehistoric cultures; the fat and blood of sacrificial animals being smeared on the body as a powerful form of sympathetic magic. To believe that anointment with sacred oil imparted the Spirit of the Lord [4] is really not all that different from thinking that to rub oneself with lion's blood makes one strong and fierce in battle.   

 

Finally, it might be noted that Jesus was never officially anointed by a High Priest in accordance with the ceremony described in Exodus. He was, however, considered to have been anointed by the Holy Spirit during his baptism. And he also has his feet lovingly oiled by Mary of Bethany shortly before meeting his sticky end on the Cross [5].  

And speaking of sticky ends ... Not everyone in this life is lucky enough to be anointed: indeed, some individuals - let us call them the accursed [6] - have filth poured over them rather than fine oils.

III.

Without wishing to go into too much detail, punishments involving the covering or pelting of people with bodily waste matter, rotten food items, or other types of filth, have a long and disgusting history. 

 

Sometimes these punishments were designed to publicly shame or appease the anger of the mob; sometimes, however, they were meant not only to shame, but to result in the person's (often slow and agonising) death ... 

 

One thinks, for example, of the ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism [7], in which the naked victim would be trapped between two boats, with only his head, hands and feet sticking out. 

They would then be force fed with excessive quantities of milk and honey, causing them to vomit and soil themselves and thus left festering in their own puke and excrement, attracting the attention of voracious flies and other egg-laying insects. 

 

Maggot infestations and bacterial infection would eventually lead to sepsis and death, but the whole ghastly process could take many days. 

Readers who know their Bible will not be surprised to learn that the idea of being metaphorically shit upon - or turned into a piece of fly-covered meat - in order to demonstrate one's accursed state and vileness in the eyes of Man and God alike, can also be found in the Good Book. 

 

The prophet Nahum, for example, makes perfectly clear what God will do to anyone who dares to break his Law, including those women branded as witches and harlots: 'I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock' (3:6), saith the LORD. 

 

 

IV.

 

Of course, there are some today who couldn't care less about the threats of a dead deity; indeed, there are some who have even transformed their own abjection and accursed status into an erotic pleasure ...

 

For these perverts - coprophiles and urophiles - being covered in (or interacting with) bodily waste materials is better than being anointed with the even the holiest of holy oils.  

 

Mysophiles with an abnormal attraction to filth and salirophiles who love to despoil or dirty the object of their affection, may horrify those like D. H. Lawrence who think such kinky individuals degraded and unable to differentiate between the flow of sex on the one hand and the flow of excrement on the other [8], but, for writers like Georges Bataille, transgressive paraphilias play a vital role in a Nietzschean revaluation of values and in his fiction he delights in presenting readers with characters such as Dirty; an incontinent foul-smelling alcoholic who engages in debauched sexual acts with her lover Troppmann [9], and the teen terror Simone, who loves sitting in saucers of milk, being urinated on, smearing herself with mud whilst masturbating in the rain, and inserting globular objects (soft-boiled eggs and eyeballs ripped from their sockets) into her anus or vagina [10].           

 

I'm not sure I'd like to date either girl, but perhaps Bataille is right to suggest that divine ecstasy and extreme horror are identical and that this is ultimately what the anointed and the accursed both discover.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] And if you know your Hebrew, then you also know that this Greek term is a direct translation of מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ), which again refers to the Anointed One and is transliterated into English as messiah. 

      Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will at this point be keen to remind us all that the character played by Andrew J. Ferchland in the series was also known as the Anointed One - and the epigraph at the top of this post is in fact a reference to this character and not to Jesus. 

      See the season 1 episode of Buffy entitled 'Never Kill a Boy on the First Date' (dir. David Semel, 1997).

[2] The oil used in a ceremonial anointment is called chrism, from the Greek χρῖσμα (khrîsma), and is commonly a mix of olive oil and balsam oil. These days, different traditions of Christian faith use different ingredients in the mix - not always following the biblical formula (discussed in note 4 below). and monarchs have sometimes.  

 

[3] Anointing was also understood to literally seal in goodness and, during the medieval and early-modern period, the practice of oiling the dead was thought to provide posthumous protection from vampires and ghouls who might otherwise feast on one's corpse. 

 

[4] See chapter 30 of the Book of Exodus, verses 22-25: click here. 

      Apparently, God not only gave Moses specific instructions for the preparation of anointing oil, he even provided a list of ingredients to be used; essentially expensive spices blended and mixed with olive oil. The resulting mixture was to be reserved exclusively for religious purposes and the recipe was not to be duplicated for personal or everyday use under any circumstances (breaking this commandment would result in a severe punishment). 

      The oil symbolised the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit and its purpose was to sanctify (or set apart) people and objects, highlighting the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

 

[5] See John 12:1-8: click here. 

 

[6] The term accursed may not be a precise antonym for anointed, but it's the best I could think of and I believe it has a theological resonance as well as a more general meaning. 

      Arguably, I suppose, the accursed might also be thought of as a class of the damned. But the accursed, unlike the damned, are more loathsome and detestable than they are evil and whilst they may be marked for destruction by God, they are not necessarily heading for eternal punishment in the depths of Hell - although it's not always clear cut: see Matthew 25:41, for example, where Jesus is depicted as telling those who find themselves unfortunate enough to be standing on his left hand side at the Final Judgement: 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels'.     

 

[7] Plutarch discusses scaphism in his Life of Artaxerxes, detailing the execution of a Persian soldier named Mithridates. His account originates from a source considered unreliable, however (which is not to say the practice didn't take place). See section 16 of the above work: click here.  

 

[8] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 242, where he writes 

       "The sex functions and the excrementary functions in the human body work so close together, yet they are, so to speak, utterly different in direction. Sex is a creative flow, the excrementary flow is towards  dissolution [...] In the really healthy human being the distinction between the two is instant [...]

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead and the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt [...]" 

[9] See Bataille's novel Le blue de ciel (1957), trans. by Harry Mathews as Blue of Noon (Penguin Books 2001). 

      Dirty - or Dorothea to give the character her Christian name - personifies Bataille's philosophy of base materialism. Her utter degeneracy - moral and social - is contrasted with the ideals of purity and goodness that characterise both bourgeois and fascist society. 

      Interestingly, the character was modeled on Bataille's real-life lover at the time, Colette Peignot, a revolutionary Communist (known by the pseudonym Laure) whose (short and tragic) life was lived to (and at) the limit. 

 

[10] See Bataille's novel Histoire de l'oeill (1928), trans. by Joachim Neugroschal as Story of the Eye (Penguin Books, 1982). 

 

On Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Another Post in Response to Simon Solomon)

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

A common form of corporal punishment for boys and junior officers in the British navy was being bent over the breech of a cannon in order to be caned or whipped on their exposed buttocks. This practice - painful, but not disabling - was euphemistically known as kissing (or marrying) the gunner's daughter and Adam Ant once wrote a song alluding to it [1].

 

II. 

I thought of this when Simon Solomon recently admonished me for providing an 'unsourced reference taken from the heavily doctored Will to Power and as such non-canonical' [2]. 

It wasn't so much that I felt I was about to receive a light beating, but I did feel I was being tied to Nietzsche's canon - i.e., those works which were written and published by him in his lifetime [3] - and forced to pledge love and loyalty only to his authorised books.

And I have to confess that, just like Captain Renault, I was shocked - shocked I tells ya! - to be reprimanded by Herr Solomon of all people; an independent scholar whose reading of Hölderlin in terms of schizopoetics and things that go bump in the night [4] is unorthodox to say the least. 

Indeed, some - including those of a more Swalesian mindset - might even describe it as heterodox, i.e., a work that not only deviates from older, more conventional readings, but wilfully perverts them. By his own confession, Solomon's passionate appreciation (and translation) of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin involved fucking the latter up the arse in order to produce some kind of monstrous offspring [5].      

 

So, for Simon to invoke the canon and insist that I play by the academic rules and show my obedience to (and conformity with) the law that governs what is and is not an acceptable text, is, I think, a bit rich.  

III. 

Having said that, I accept that there are seminal texts - i.e., works which are highly influential and possibly lay the foundation for future study - but I'd not even call these texts canonical (and what is seminal work for me - such as Sade's La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), is merely a white stain on the history of French literature for others).  

 

Ultimately, to invoke the canon and wish to uphold it, is to give support to those texts which, as Barthes would say, come from culture and do not break with it; texts which are linked to "a comfortable practice of reading" [6]; texts which have authority and have achieved the status of timeless classics; texts which are meant to contain eternal truths.

As a white European heterosexual male, I'm not obsessed with deconstructing, decolonising, expanding, or queering the canon; I simply don't wish to be strapped to it and thrashed by those who think I should show a little more respect to the Political Father.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adam Ant, 'Marrying the Gunner's Daughter', from the album Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (Blueblack Hussar Records, 2013). Not one of his best songs, but click here if you fancy giving it a listen.  

 

[2] See Solomon's comment dated 27 November 2025 and posted at 17:14:00 on Torpedo the Ark in response to a post titled 'On (Not) Taking a Stand' - click here. And see note 3 below for why Solomon is right to be wary of material extracted from The Will to Power.  

 

[3] Ecce Homo can also be included as part of Nietzsche's canon; for whilst it was published posthumously in 1908, he had completed writing it in 1888. 

      However, the book of notes assembled from Nietzsche's Nachlaß (i.e., literary remains) by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche working in editorial collaboration with his friend Peter Gast and titled Der Wille zur Macht (1901) is an entirely different kettle of fish and references to this work should be treated with a certain amount of caution. 

      His sister's claims that this was the magnum opus Nietzsche had hoped and planned to write can certainly be dismissed and some Nietzsche scholars have gone as far as to describe it as essentially a philosophical forgery. Nevertheless, the significantly expanded second edition containing 1,067 sections (1906) has been translated into English - most famously by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910 for the edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Oscar Levy and by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in 1968 - and the book remains one often consulted by readers of Nietzsche (albeit a non-canonical text as Solomon says).

      Readers who would like to know more about the publication history of Nietzsche's work might like to see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 

 

[4] See Solomon's 2020 book Hölderlin's Poltergeists: A Drama for Voices, published under the Irish spelling of his name as Síomón Solomon (Peter Lang, 2020). I have written extensively on this book on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

[5] In the book cited above, Solomon writes enthusiastically of what he describes as Deleuze's bum banditry, a reference to the way in which the latter liked to approach certain other thinkers from behind and below. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.  

[6] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 14.

      Like Barthes, I prefer texts that discomfort and impose a state of loss; texts which unsettle "the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories" and bring to a crisis our relation with language itself (texts a bit like Nietzsche's, in fact - including his non-canonical writings).