The Surrealist Sex Pistols According to Marie Arleth Skov

 

André, Johnny & Marie 

(The Surrealist, the Sex Pistol & the Punk Scholar)

 

 

I.

 

I don't know why, but there are some people in the world I just like. 

 

And the Berlin-based Danish art historian, curator, and author Marie Arleth Skov is one such person - even though we have only met once, very briefly, a couple of years ago at a punk symposium in London [a]. 

 

Partly, the reason I feel her to be sympathisch is because her interests and mine intersect and I admire her as a writer. But I also think she has a nice face and a stylish way of dressing [b].  

 

And while Johnny Rotten tells us not to judge a book by its cover [c], D. H. Lawrence argues that if you can't judge a thing by its appearance - which is to say, by the instinctive impression it makes upon you - then you're a fool [d]. And while I'm many things, like Stinky Turner I am not a fool [e].    

 

 

II. 

 

Anyway, this is all by the by. 

 

For we're actually here to discuss Dr Skov's contribution to the recently published Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols (2026): an essay titled 'Dustbin Flowers, Fallen Angels, and Safety-Pin Lips', which examines the punk band in the light of surrealism ...

 

Skov opens her chapter with André Breton's definition of the simplest surrealist act: namely, blindly firing a pistol into a crowd (Breton, 1930). 

 

One immediately assumes, therefore, that we are going to be discussing the random shooting that ends Sid Vicious's unique performance of 'My Way' in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980). However, Skov surprises us by referencing instead Johnny Rotten's declared wish to destroy the passerby, which she feels is an "echo of sorts" [f]. 

 

I have to say, that's not my interpretation of this line from 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI, 1976). 

 

For me, just as Rotten's self-description as an anti-Christ is rooted in his ethnoreligious background as the son of Irish Catholic parents - and not, alas, in Nietzschean philosophy - so too does his ambition of wanting to destroy the passerby display traces of lessons learnt in Sunday school by a good little boy in shirt and tie. 

 

Particularly, of course, the parable of the Good Samaritan, as told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (10: 25-37) [g].

 

In other words, the line echoes Christian moral teaching, rather than French surrealism. 

 

Rotten is not, unlike Breton, simply expressing his (typically modernist) political contempt for those who conform to mass society [h]. He is displaying his moral outrage with those who refuse to get involved or directly participate in events. 

 

Like early Christianity - and, indeed, like fascism - punk as practised by Rotten obliges everyone to adopt a position and take a stand; it compels us to action. There can be no passersby and no passive audience members.    

 

III. 

 

According to Skov, as movements, "both punk and surrealism merged the poetic with the political, romance with revolt" (315). 

 

I think that's true. 

 

But, the thing is, one might have hoped for a certain wariness when it comes to this aestheticisation of politics, the logical outcome of which is either the fascism of the far-right or the militant asceticism and theoretical terrorism of the ultra-left - and yet I'm sensing Skov's tacit approval. 

 

In 2026, however, we've got a bigger problem now, as Jello Biafra would say [i] ... 

 

For what's infecting politics today isn't the poetic, but the sacred; and revolt is no longer tied to romance but religion. And even if shouting Allahu Akbar before driving a car into a crowd can be interpreted as a surrealist act against global hegemony inspired by a creed of combat and sacrifice [j], I don't think we should romanticise it.

 

 

IV.

 

Skov is right to highlight the connection between André Masson and Malcolm McLaren - something I've done myself on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

 

I still think Masson's cover design for the first issue of the journal Acéphale (1936-39), featuring an iconic headless figure with stars for nipples and a skull where his sexual organs should be, is one that McLaren should have got Jamie or Vivienne to adapt as a design for the Sex Pistols. 

 

And I still think Bataille's "Secrètement ou non, il est nécessaire de devenir tout autres ou de cesser d'être" would have made a great punk slogan [k]. 

And Skov's right also to insist that when speaking of the Sex Pistols, it is vital to remember that one is not merely referring to members of the band, but also McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid, and Jordan - although, rather sweetly, she still insists that "music was the key" (318).    

 

 

V. 

 

Skov quotes a famous couple of lines from the Sex Pistols song 'God Save the Queen' (Virgin, 1977): 

 

We're the flowers in the dustbin  

We're the poison in your human machine.

 

But whereas she sees the first as indicating a "very fragile, tender imagination" (319) and somehow connected to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), I've always thought it simply revealed Rotten's contempt for the hippies.

 

And whereas she reads the second line as a neo-Luddite critique of relentless mechanisation, for me it's a line that lends weight to Bernard Brook-Partridge's characterisation of the Sex Pistols as the antithesis of humankind [l]. 

 

In other words, it's not the "rejection of a societal system that [...] crushes dreams" (319), and nor does it essentially correlate with "fighting the (dystopian) future" (319). Rather, it echoes the nausea expressed by D. H. Lawrence who wrote: "The very words human, humanity, humanism make one sick." [m]

 

VI.  

 

I like that Skov brings up the subject of alchemy. I would argue that the slogan cash from chaos can be read as an alchemical formula.

 

However, before getting too carried away, it's important to remember the crucial scene in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in which Steve Jones defecates on a gold disc presented to Johnny Rotten to recognise sales of Never Mind the Bollocks in what is an explicitly counter-alchemical gesture (i.e., the turning of gold back into base matter). 

 

As the female A&R executive with ants crawling on her face in the Swindle says, the Sex Pistols have a "sort of negative Midas touch - everything they touch turns to shit" [n].  And after dumping on the golden disc, Jones credits Malcolm with knowing how to bring out the punk in him - i.e., one who desires to destroy success. 

 

I rather worry at times that Skov's reading of the Sex Pistols is just a tad too upbeat and positive; did they really dance in the dirt in order to create glory? Or did they not seek to degrade the idealist pretensions attached to the latter? 

 

 

VII. 

 

It's true that McLaren and Westwood subscribed to a radical politics of desire that weaponised sex. 

 

But it's also true that this was because they were quite naive and old-fashioned in their thinking, subscribing, for example, to the repressive hypothesis that would be so brilliantly exposed by Foucault in the same year that the Sex Pistols entered public consciousness (1976).  

 

And just as we no longer find it so appealing to romanticise surrealist acts of terrorism, we are no longer nostalgic enough to cling to ideas of sexual revolution, whether inspired by Sade, Reich, or Marcuse (not when we live in a world after the orgy). 

 

Having said that, Skov's ideas on the body in punk and corporeal aesthetics remain fascinating and I really liked her discussion of posture - particularly the idea of slouching as nonconformity.

 

I'm grateful also to learn of Leo Dohmen's surrealist photocollage titled Revanche de la nuit (1958), which features a steel safety pin pierced directly through the lips of a woman - a work about which I knew nothing before reading Skov's essay. 

 

 

VIII.      

 

In the final section of her essay, Skov writes this: 

 

"Of course, the political implications of the Sex Pistols are difficult to pin down [...] Being ambiguous and paradoxical was part of punk's DNA." (323) 

 

And again, that's true as far as it goes, although the politics of boredom or radical negativity as expressed by the Sex Pistols are not entirely beyond our conceptual grasp: beneath the ambiguity lies a fairly simple message after all. 

 

Namely, that politics as traditionally understood and practiced is no longer possible in a transpolitical era and that in order to survive our engagement with nihilism we need to become a little more ironic, a little more insouciant, and a little more intelligent. 

 

In a word, more playful ... 

 

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,  

don't make it in ghastly seriousness,  

don't do it in deadly earnest, 

do it for fun.

 

Above all: 

 

Don't do it because you hate people, 

do it just to spit in their eye. [o] 

 

 

Notes 

 

[a] See the post titled 'On Torn Edges and the Need to Archive' (25 March 2024). 

 

[b] I wouldn't normally comment on someone's looks. But as Dr Skov is someone who writes on the visceral history and rhetoric of the punk body and challenges dualism, I'm assuming she will appreciate that one cannot divorce the intellect from its physical embodiment and stylisation. Without wishing to resurrect and fully endorse the ancient Greek notion of καλοκαγαθία (Kalokagathia), which aligns beauty and virtue, as a Nietzschean, I find the idea still strangely resonates. 

 

[c] I'm referencing the lyrics to 'E.M.I.', by the Sex Pistols, on Never Mind the Bollocks ... (Virgin Records, 1977). 

 

[d] I'm referencing Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 192. 

 

[e] Stinky Turner (aka Jeff Geggus) is the lead singer with the Cockney Rejects. 'I Am Not a Fool' was a single on EMI Records, released in 1979. It would be hard to find any trace of surrealism in the Rejects. 

 

[f] Marie Arleth Skov, 'Dustbin Flowers, Fallen Angels, and Safety-Pin Lips', in The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols, ed. Mike Dines, Gabriela Gelain, Paul Graves-Brown and John Schofield (Routledge, 2026), p. 315. All future page references to this work will be inserted directly in the main text.

    It might be noted that Skov does, in fact discuss Sid's 'My Way' performance later in her text and assumes that Breton "would have loved it" (p. 320). 

 

[g] See the post 'I Wanna Destroy the Passerby: Notes on Johnny Rotten as Good Samaritan' (28 May 2020). 

 

[h] I'm aware that his defenders will say my reading of Breton's famous, provocative passage in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism is crass and all-too-literal. I'm afraid, however, that I agree with Camus writing in The Rebel (1951). 

      By fantasising a blind act of violence against a random crowd, Breton reveals a terroristic level of contempt for the public whom he thinks have been debased and crétinised by the System and so deserving of whatever they get. Like so many other modernist intellectuals who claimed to love the People and wish to liberate them, Breton was frustrated and resentful when they preferred the safety and stability of bourgeois lives over the revolution he was offering. 

 

[i] Jello Biafra was the lead singer with the Dead Kennedys. 'We've Got a Bigger Problem Now' is a reworked and updated version of their classic track (and debut single) 'California Über Alles' (1979). It can be found on the EP In God We Trust, Inc., (Alternative Tentacles, 1981). 

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Michel Foucault who famously characterized the Iranian uprising not as a traditional revolution, but as a collective outburst of political spirituality outside of secular liberalism and the ideals of the Enlightenment. He rightly faced accusations of romanticising anti-modern religious fundamentalism and largely remained silent or evasive regarding the regime's subsequent human rights abuses. 

      See the post 'Foucault's Islamic Folly' (14 Aug 2014). 

 

[k] I would translate this into English as: "Secretly or not, it is necessary to become wholly other, or cease to be." Often, however, the French phrase tout autres is translated as 'completely different'. 

      The line is from Bataille's essay 'The Sacred Conspiracy', which can be found in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179. Masson's Acéphale can also be found in this book, on p. 180. 

 

[l] Brook-Partridge was a high-profile Tory member of the Greater London Council and, as this interview shows, he was not a fan of punk rock in general, but had a particular loathing of the Sex Pistols. The interview was included by Julien Temple in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

[m] D. H. Lawrence, 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 255. 

 

[n] This two-minute scene at MAMIE Records - which Skov would, I'm sure, describe as surreal - can be watched between 34:56 - 36:54 in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. The role of the A&R executive is played by Jean Warren. Sex Pistols aficionados will recall that a gold disc version of Never Mind the Bollocks with a plastic dog turd on it is featured on the back of the compilation album Flogging a Dead Horse (Virgin Records, 1980). 

 

[o] I quote these lines from D. H. Lawrence's poem 'A Sane Revolution', Pansies (1929) and discuss them in my own essay in The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols (2026); see 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Swindle: Or, Why I Still Believe in the Ruins', pp. 180-191.  

 

 

  

Pretty Punk Vacancy Contra Sado-Libertine Apathy

The Marquis de Sade looks on as Johnny Rotten 

acts pretty vacant for the cameras

 

'I have a very strong feeling that the opposite 

of love is not hate - it's apathy.' [1] 

 

I.

 

Consult any modern reference source and you will find apathy defined as a lack of emotion, interest, and/or concern. It is presented as a state of perfected indifference; a clinical curbing of enthusiasm. 

 

More often than not, apathy is also regarded in a negative light; as a psychopathological problem that sits on the same spectrum of diminished motivation as abulia and, at the extreme, akinetic mutism. Because they lack a sense of drive and seem to have no purpose or meaning, apathetic individuals are believed to have an inferior quality of life. 

 

Expressive individuals who like to openly display their emotions and endlessly bang on about their feelings, think apathetic individuals must be suffering from depression or some other brain disorder. It's not normal - and it's not natural - to be so cold and detached. It seems to betray not only an absence of passion, but a lack of soul - which is why Christians have historically condemned apathy as a deficiency of love and devotion to God and listed it among the seven deadly sins: sloth [2].

 

The Ancient Greeks, however, thought a little differently on this matter. And so, although the modern English term apathy (first used in 1594) is derived from ἀπάθεια (apatheia), it is important not to confuse or conflate the two terms. For the Stoics, for example, apatheia signified a desirable state of indifference toward events and things that lie outside one's control (and it is still considered a virtue today within Orthodox monasticism and certain schools of Gnosticism).    

 

 

II.  

Moving on from this brief history of apathy and its etymology, I'd like to discuss the concept as developed within the work of the Marquis de Sade, contrasting this with how the idea was expressed in the scene that developed in and around 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s. 

 

My aim is to show that although there were Sadean currents within punk as conceived by McLaren and Westwood - examined at length and in detail by Matthew Worley [3] - there's a world of difference between Johnny Rotten's pretty vacancy and l'apathie of those libertines who do their philosophising in the bedroom rather than at a pervy fashion boutique. 

 

 

III. 

 

According to Matt Worley: "Punk's cultural body bore Sadean scars." [4] 

 

It's a nice line. 

 

And Worley is right to suggest that, at some level, punk was "transmitting the echoes of Sade's howl through the mediums of popular music and fashion" [5]. 

 

However, while McLaren and his young protégés may have subscribed to an ideology of sex, style and subversion coupled to a kinky aesthetic incorporating safety pins, swastikas, and fetishwear, what they almost certainly did not do was read the works of the Marquis de Sade.

 

For if they had, they would have learnt that central to Sade's transgressive philosophy was the formal concept of l'apathie ...    

 

To understand what our punk friends missed, one might look to the Fifth Dialogue of Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), wherein the libertine Dolmancé encourages fifteen-year-old Eugénie to systematically discard traditional moral values in favour of l'apathie. 

 

He explains how the sensations resulting from apathy are vastly superior to those born of emotional sensitivity and advocates a total shift toward cold indifference and egoistic gratification: 

 

"Ah, Eugénie, believe me when I say the delights of apathy far outweigh those of virtue; the latter have only one application, whereas the former can excite and overwhelm one's whole being." [6]  

 

Thus, far from being a secondary concern, l'apathie - derived from the ancient Greek apatheia [7] - is an ideal given primary importance by many (if not all) of Sade's philosophically-minded libertines. 

 

More than a passive lack of feeling, l'apathie is a deliberate, active mechanism with specific functions; eradicating empathy, purging all moral sentiment, and ensuring the libertine's pleasure is derived entirely from the will. Complete indifference to the suffering of the victim thereby eliminates all emotional dependency upon the amorous object. 

 

As Bataille observed in Eroticism (1957), a sadist who indulges their raw impulses simply for instant gratification or bourgeois pleasure is merely a poor doomed creature ruled by vice. True sovereignty requires passion to be strictly disciplined and compressed. L'apathie is the ingenious method used to reject spontaneous emotion, converting raw impulse into a calculating, destructive energy that allows the libertine to abandon the all-too-human aspects of his character. 

 

Deleuze further formalised this in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), arguing that Sadean apathy is fundamentally directed against sentiment. Because moral guilt or emotional pleasure represents a dangerous dissipation of mental focus, the libertine derives ultimate satisfaction from pure mathematical and philosophical reasoning. His sex, as Lawrence would say, is in his head - but that's precisely where he wants it to be. 

 

L'apathie acts as a mechanism that clears away emotional noise, transforming sex into something experienced in the mind and imagination rather than the body and its organs, thereby allowing the ego to contemplate the pleasure of negating natural instincts [8]. By maintaining zero degree coldness, the libertine becomes a machine capable not only of acts of debauchery, but violent atrocity.     

 

IV. 

 

Early punk was to a large extent defined by a rhetoric of boredom, blank generational indifference, and pretty vacancy. The Sex Pistols explicitly stated that they didn't care and Rotten boasted of the fact that he had no feelings for anybody else (only his beautiful self) [9]. 

 

However, like almost everything else, this was merely a defensive (and stylistic) pose against systemic disappointment. The majority of punks, bless them, wanted to have fun, and to feel, and to have a rosy future full of career opportunities. Theirs was a form of faux apathy and feigned indifference - the fact that Rotten would often berate his audiences to get off their arses gives the game away. All too often punk was an expression of sincere moral outrage and a frustrated desire for change.     

 

V. 

 

In conclusion: punk's relationship with Sade remains purely superficial, transactional, and aesthetic and, as a form of Romantic idealism, punk has opposing goals to Sadism [10].  

McLaren and Westwood may have exploited aspects of Sade's work - mostly the tits and bums - just as they borrowed from numerous other sources in order to fuck the rich up the arse and generate cash from chaos, but, ultimately, they were more interested in anarchy and the politics of boredom than apathy and la philosophie dans le boudoir. 

 

 

Photo of Jordan (the first Sex Pistol) 

by David Parkinson (1975) [11] 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Leo Buscaglia, Love (Charles B. Slack, 1972), p. 112.  

 

[2] The word sloth comes from the Old English term slǣwþ, simply referring to pace meaning as it did slowness. But by the late 12th century, the term now written as slewthe or slouthe, had developed a markedly moral connotation and shifted to mean indolence. It was applied specifically to those who avoided their duties and neglected their responsibilities. 

      In the 14th century, it was finally adopted as the English translation of the Latin term acēdia (a state of spiritual apathy) and listed among the seven deadly sins. Thus, in Catholic theology, sloth is more than mere laziness; it's a culpable lack of effort to do good and a willful refusal of the joy that comes from purposeful living and divine goodness. To put this in punk terms, the slothful individual is vacant to the point of no longer caring about their status or condition (the original Greek term - ἀκηδία - literally meant an inert state without pain or concern).  

      Although I here wish to write primarily of apathy, I hope at some future point to return to the concept of acedia (sometimes written as accidie). I am particularly interested in how as it has been used in more modern times by figures including Aldous Huxley, who wrote an essay on the subject in 1923, and Walter Benjamin who in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), describes acedia an 'indolence of the heart' that can lead to the ruin of great figures. Some readers might recall that I have previously said something on acedia in my 'Mourning Post' (25 April 2023). 

 

[3] Matthew Worley, 'Whip in my valise: British punk and the Marquis de Sade, c. 1975-85', in Contemporary British History, 36 (2), pp. 277-321. 

      In brief, this essay argues that punk was an attempt by McLaren and Westwood to fuse youth and sexual subcultures in order to provoke a dominant culture believed to be repressive. Worley examines the Sadean influences on this project conceived at 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s, suggesting that the Divine Marquis had a seminal impact on the punk movement. 

      The essay is available as a pdf at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/104006/  

 

[4] Matt Worley ... p. 303.

 

[5] Ibid., p. 305.  

 

[6] Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir, trans. Meredith Head (Creation Books, 2004), p. 94. 

 

[7] Sade explicitly borrowed the structural technique of l’apathie from ancient Greek philosophy, describing it in Juliette (1797-1801) as an outstanding example of the benefits that one gets from studying Stoicism. Like the Stoics, Sade believed in the sovereignty of reason, rigorous self-discipline (askesis), and independence from external distractions or stimuli (self-sufficiency). 

      However, Sade radically inverted the ethical purpose of Stoicism based on his fundamentally opposing view of existence. For example, the Stoics saw Nature and the Cosmos as essentially harmonious and benevolent. Sade, on the other hand, saw Nature and the Cosmos as destructive and chaotic. The Stoics also wished to eliminate the negative emotions (rage, fear, lust) in order to cultivate a healthy, happy human being. Sade was more interested in suppressing moral feelings (of pity and remorse, for example) so as to engineer a monster of coldness and cruelty who views others merely as disposable objects.  

      Ultimately, Stoic apatheia is about freedom from emotional turmoil in order that one can lead a good life; Sade's model of libidinal sovereignty sees l'apathie as a means to detach oneself from conscience and all human feeling in order to consummate nihilism. As Blanchot says, it's a shocking inversion of values.  

 

[8] The question of nature is not straightforward in Sade. On the one hand, he would agree that the deliberate destruction of all human feeling is unnatural. But, on the other hand, he would argue that by achieving complete insensibility to the suffering of others the libertine frees their passions from moral law and mimics the destructive indifference of Nature herself.   

 

[9] See the posts on the Sex Pistols' songs 'Pretty Vacant' and 'No Feelings' published on TTA on 30 July 2018 and 19 April 2023 respectively. 

 

[10] The 18th-century Romantic poet Novalis declared that the goal was to cast off apathy and to live a life full of passion and feeling; burning like a flame on the edge of ecstasy - and that sounds closer to the punk ideal of living fast and dying young than the Sadean ideal of l'apathie in which one puts the heart on ice and lives a life that is both unnatural and inhuman. See the post 'On Phlegm, Philosophy, and Apathy' (25 April 2023). 

 

[11] This famous photo by David Parkinson of Jordan (Pamela Rooke) modelling a red-rubber outfit from McLaren and Westwood's King's Road store, SEX, featured in a six-page article titled 'Sado Sex for the Seventies', written by David May, in the adult magazine Gallery International (Vol. 1, No. 4, 1975). 

      A copy of the magazine has thankfully been preserved by cultural historian and McLaren's biographer Paul Gorman in his archive. For more information - and to purchase your very own copy of the above in excellent condition (priced $300) - visit recordmecca.com  

 

    

Notes From the Gutter on Joe Orton's Fur Coat and the Seditionaries Prick Up Your Ears Shirt

Joe Orton's fur coat and the 

Seditionaries Prick Up Your Ears shirt [1]

   

I. 

 

In January 1967, Joe Orton's theatrical agent, Peggy Ramsay [2], bought him a dark grey faux fur coat designed by Hardy Amies for Hepworths [3]. 

 

Whether intended as a belated Christmas gift, or simply an act of mid-winter kindness, it's a fabulous-looking thing that I would be more than happy to wear, knowing as I do that twenty years later the coat was worn by Gary Oldman playing the part of Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987) [4]. 

 

And knowing as I do too that previously the coat was mentioned on a Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood designed shirt for Seditionaries (one which also borrowed its name from John Lahr's definitive biography of Orton).

 

 

II. 

 

I have to confess, the gay orgy scene depicted - which McLaren adapted from an image found on a T-shirt he purchased from a sex shop in LA [5] - is not really my cup of tea, but, as Miss Brodie would say in her best Edinburgh voice, for those who like that sort of thing - and regard the word 'ears' as an anagram - then that is the sort of thing they like.

 

More exciting to me than the image - to which McLaren added a splash of colour and a few other minor details in order to punk it up - is the fact that underneath the scene is a short text in the form of a dialogue reproduced from Orton's diary which reads:   

 

"'You look very pretty in that fur coat you're wearing', Oscar said as we stood on the corner before going our separate ways. I said, 'Peggy bought it me. It was thirteen pounds fifteen.' 'Very cheap,' Michael White said. 'Yes, I've discovered I look better in cheap clothes.' 'I wonder what the significance of that is?' Oscar said. 'I'm from the gutter,' I said. 'And don't you ever forget it because I won't.'" [6] 

 

As Paul Gorman notes in his reading of this text: "Orton's response to White, thought McLaren, expressed punk attitude to a T." [7] 

 

Wilde was probably right to say that some look at the stars (i.e. aspire to the highest ideals and have the capacity for hope), but others, like Orton, and McLaren, and so many other artists, draw inspiration from the gutter itself and the base materials found therein that are "external and foreign to ideal human aspirations" [8]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] I think I'm right in saying that Joe Orton's fur coat was last given an outing as part of retrospective exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of his death and featuring a collection of his personal belongings. Entitled 'Ortonesque', the exhibition was held at Leicester's New Walk Museum and Art Gallery (March 3 - May 7 2007). The coat was eventually sold at auction, on behalf of the Orton Estate, in June 2022, for £2,295. The image used here is taken from the Bonhams website: click here, but an alternative image can be found on joeorton.org: click here. 

      The long-sleeved white muslin shirt, designed by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westood for sale at their King's Road store Seditionaries in 1979, known by the title borrowed from John Lahr's 1978 biography of Orton features a graphic print of a homosexual punk orgy and includes a text taken from Orton's diary (9 January, 1967). The shirt shown here was sold by Julien's Auctions, in June 2021, for $576: click here.

 

[2] Peggy Ramsay represented many of the leading dramatists to emerge from the 1950s onwards, including Alan Ayckbourn, Eugène Ionesco, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Poliakoff, and David Hare. 

      After discovering Joe Orton, then living on National Assistance, she persuaded producer Michael Codron to stage his play Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). Ramsay represented Orton, and then his estate, for the rest of her life. 

 

[3] Hardy Amies was a British fashion designer and one of the first to venture into the ready-to-wear market when he teamed up in 1959 with another iconic British brand, Hepworths, to produce a range of stylish but essentially conservative men's clothing.  

 

[4] Prick Up Your Ears (1987), dir. Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett (based on the 1978 biography of that title by John Lahr), starred Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay. 

      The fur coat makes its first appearance in an early scene when Oldman visits Ramsay's office to show it off to her (6:00) and is seen twice more later in the film; once after an awards ceremony (1:18:28) and once in an episode set in a public convenience (1:18:50). Click here to find the scenes and watch the entire film on YouTube. Oldman's excellent performance in this almost makes me forgive his portrayal of Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (dir. Alex Cox, 1986). 

 

[5] The store was (and still is) called The Pleasure Chest and is located at 7733 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. It wasn't the first time that McLaren found inspiration here and borrowed - Paul Gorman's word is hijacked - a design for use on one of his pieces produced in collaboration with Westwood; he visited the original New York store, based in the West Village, in the period when his shop at 430 King's Road was called SEX.  

 

[6] There seems to be some discrepencies between the text on the shirt and the actual diary entry; for example, the first speaker is referred to on the shirt only by his first name, Oscar, and not his full name Oscar Lewenstein (a British theatre and film producer); and whilst the price of the coat is given on the shirt as £13 19s, in the diary it is priced at £13 15s (i.e., four bob less). 

      Readers who are interested can check things for themselves by consulting The Orton Diaries, ed. John Lahr (Methuen, 1986), p. 54. Just to add a little further confusion into the mix, Paul Gorman identifies the Oscar figure as Oscar Beuselinck, the showbiz lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect; see The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 426.      

      As for the third speaker - Michael White - he was a prominent theatre and film impresario and a champion of Orton's work.   

 

[7] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 426. 

 

[8] Georges Bataille, 'Base Materialism and Gnosticism', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 51.

 

 

For a related post to this one on Joe Orton, click here. 

 

Notes from the Labyrinth on Picasso and the Minotaur

Picasso becoming-minotaur

Photo by Edward Quinn (1959) 

 

'If you marked on a map all of the routes I've made and connected the dots 

with a single line, might not a Minotaur emerge?' - Picasso 

 

I. 

 

Yesterday, I finally got along to the exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Picasso at the Halcyon Gallery [1], featuring over 130 original pieces, which essentially confirm something that even his critics and detractors know deep down; namely, that Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century.   

 

As much as I loved his works, however, I think my favourite image was a photograph by Edward Quinn taken of Picasso masquerading as the Minotaur in his studio in 1959 ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Picasso was obsessed with this taurean figure from Greek mythology, who was famously part man and part bull, and dwelt at the centre of the Labyrinth [2]. 

 

The Minotaur became a powerful symbol of desire, violence, and horror in Picasso's artwork and some authors like to imagine that he also served as Picasso's alter-ego, embodying the cruelty, lust, and virile vulnerability present in his own character and complex personal life [3]. 

 

But of course, Picasso wasn't the only artist who identified in terms of the Minotaur; many of the Surrealists (and associated artists) in the 1930s were also fascinated by this mythical monster, which is why when, in 1933, a title was needed for a new magazine Bataille suggested Minotaure and his pal André Masson excitedly agreed to design a cover for the first edition. 

 

But then Picasso - ever alert to what was going on and not slow in cheerfully stealing ideas and jumping on the lastest trend - co-opted the idea of the Minotaur and, with André Breton's support, not only produced an elaborate image for the magazine's cover, but also supplied four other drawings to be used, insisting that the lead article, to be written by Breton, promoted his vision of the Minotaur.    

 

Whether this makes Picasso the 'fat little magpie' that Adam and the Ants once described him as, or just someone with a genius for seizing the moment and self-promotion (a bit like David Bowie), I'll let readers decide [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Despite being published rather irregularly (due to financial considertions), Minotaure (1933-39) proved to be a great success and had a wide circulation in most European countries. 

 

Far superior in quality to most other arts magazines of the period, it was beautifully illustrated and had covers by prominent artists including Matisse, Miró, and Dalí. Not only did it contain articles on the plastic arts and literature, but also music, theatre, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, esotericism and all things avant-garde. 

 

Whilst not originally intended to be a surrealist publication per se, Breton and his chums on the editorial committee naturally exerted a huge (and ever-increasing) influence on it and Minotaure became a significant element in Surrealism's rise from a relatively obscure circle of poets, artists, and intellectuals in the 1920s to a major movement of 20th century art. 

 

 

Minotaure (Issue 1 - June 1933) 

Cover by Picasso

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Picasso: A Legacy (16 Oct 2025 - 4 Jan 2026) at the Halcyon Gallery (148 New Bond Street, London, W1): for further information and to view selected works, click here. 

 

[2] The Labyrinth was an elaborate maze-like construction designed by Daedalus and his son Icarus, acting upon command of King Minos of Crete. Every nine years the people of Athens were forced to choose seven noble youths and seven beautiful virgins to be offered as sacrificial victims to the Minotaur. He was eventually slain by the Athenian hero Theseus.  

 

[3] See, for example, John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume IV: The Minotaur Years 1933-43 (Jonathan Cape, 2022).

 

[4] To be fair to Picasso, it's not as if he stole an original idea from Bataille and Masson; the Ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur had been popular for some years in intellectual circles and had already been referenced in the work of several other writers and artists. 

      The Adam and the Ants song I'm referring to is 'Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios', which can be found on the Prince Charming album (CBS, 1981) and played on YouTube by clicking here.     

 

  

Behold the Sausage (Or Incipit Parodia): A Foolish Response to Simon Solomon

The Three Jokers (SA/2025)

 

'I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy ... 

I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon ... Perhaps I am a buffoon ...' [1]

 

  

I. 

 

According to Simon Solomon, Nietzsche's final book, Ecce Homo (1908) [2], is an embarrassing catastrophe resulting from his tragic inability to reconcile free-spirited sincerity with his desire to consummate nihilism. As a consequence, says Solomon, he falls into the abyss and we are left with a work which is "rightly regarded as the catastrophic car-crash of his philosophical career" [3]. 

 

This last line makes one think of Ballard's famous 1973 novel and imagine Nietzsche as the nightmare angel of the philosophical highway, looking to develop not so much a new and perverse sexuality, but a Dionysian philosophy [4]. 

 

Only, of course, Ecce Homo is not a car crash and nor should it be read as a cautionary tale of psychopathology. And Nietzsche doesn't fall into the abyss so much as voluntarily leap into the absurd, becoming the clown or comedian he always wanted to be. 

 

In this respect, Nietzsche is more like Arthur Fleck than he is Robert Vaughan and whilst the subtitle of Ecce Homo is apt and memorable - Wie man wird, was man ist - it could also have been: I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realise it's a fucking comedy [5]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, whilst Nietzsche is more Fleck than Vaughan, he is also far more of a silly sausage than the mentally ill clown played by Joaquin Phoenix. And by that I mean he has more in common with Hans Wurst [6] than Joker ...  

 

A popular comic character in Germany with a complex, multifaceted personality, Hans Wurst often featured in rural carnival celebrations during the 16th and 17th centuries. His humour was often coarse - lots of sexual innuendo and scatalogical references - and it certainly wasn't popular with everyone. Indeed, in the 1730s there were attempts to banish Hans from the German stage in order to improve the quality of comedy writing and protect public morality.  

 

This was initially met with resistance, however, German theatre gradually moved away from popular, improvised performances to the modern bourgeois artform we know today. And Hans Wurst morphed into the far more respectable stock character of the Harlequin; or, if he did appear, it was in puppet form as a German equivalent of Mr Punch.  

 

By the close of the 18th century, Emperor Joseph II had banned all buffoonery and burlesque and instructed theatre producers to concentrate on staging shows suitable for all to enjoy. However, Wurst's name lived on and he retained his place in the cultural imagination.     

 

 

III. 

 

So what has all this to do with Nietzsche? 

 

Well, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche says it's preferable to be thought of as Hans Wurst than as any kind of guru or holy figure: see the line quoted at the top of this post. 

 

Christine Battersby writes: 

 

"In his so-called 'late' period, Nietzsche denies that there is any underlying or sublime 'truth' that is covered over - and healed - by art. Instead, we are left with a play of surfaces, and with the affirmation of life as the new ideal. Indeed, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche takes an additional step as he aligns himself with the Hanswurst: with a mode of the ridiculous, the crude and the all-too-human - with that which is, above all, not elevated, self-denying or sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense." [7]

 

In sum: for Nietzsche, playfulness - not sincerity or systematicity - is the essential precondition of greatness. And so whilst other philosophers sing in praise of wisdom or mature reason, he sings in praise of childlike innocence and pure folly. 

 

But he also sings in praise of human baseness: for in adopting the persona of Hans Wurst in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is "aligning himself not only with a mode of the ridiculous that is cut off from the sublime, but also with that which is morally repellent" [8].  

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 126. 

 

[2] Although written in 1888, Ecce Homo was not published until eight years after Nietzsche's death in 1908. The subtitle of the work reveals its autobiographical aspect: How One Becomes What One Is.  

      As well as assessing his own life and contribution to philosophy, Nietzsche attempts to give us a new image of the philosopher; one who mocks the ascetic ideal that has hitherto dominated philosophy (i.e., a set of values that are a fundamental denial of life and which teach that meaning is to be found not in joy, but in suffering).

 

[3] See the comments left by Solomon on the posts 'Waxing Philosophical on Insincerity' (9 July 2018) - click here - and 'Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale' (22 November 2025): click here. 

      I fear that Solomon has a rather old-fashioned view of Ecce Homo; one that buys into the idea that it is the product "of a mind no longer master of its fantasies" and that it should be regarded as a work of insanity. The line quoted is from the Introduction to R. J. Hollingdale's translation (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 7. 

      Far from being the car crash he says it is, I see it as Nietzsche's most fun book and, as Hollingdale concedes, despite its "obvious failings and shortcomings", when "considered purely as an essay in the art of writing, it is among the most beautiful books in German" (ibid., p. 8). 

      See my post of 15 October 2013: 'Ecce Homo: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is' - click here. And see also my essay of this title (also known as Carry On Nietzsche) in Visions of Excess and Other Essays (Blind Cupid Press, 2009), pp. 255-280.   

 

[4] I'm referring here to J. G. Ballard's Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).  

 

[5] This is a line spoken by the protagonist of the film Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019), Arthur Fleck, played (brilliantly) by Joquin Phoenix. Click here to watch the scene in which this line is delivered.

 

[6] The name Hans Wurst literally translates into English as John (or Jack, if you prefer the diminutive) Sausage. 

 

[7] Christine Battersby, '"Behold the Buffoon": Dada, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Sublime', Tate Papers, No. 13 (Spring, 2010): click here.

      As Battersby reminds us, Schopenhauer was interested in how the ridiculous [lächerlich] relates to the sublime and claims that the genuinely humorous is not in conflict with the latter, but is complementary, and that the most serious people often laugh easily. 

      However, Schopenhauer draws a sharp distinction between true humour and that which is merey komisch - such as the bawdy rubbish given us by Hans Wurst and which amuses only the lower classes who lack the ability to appreciate the sublime with any intensity. Nietzsche, however, sides with the ordinary people who know, like D. H. Lawrence, that a little bawdiness keeps life sane and wholesome; see his poem 'What's sane and what isn't', in The Poems Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 1614. 

[8] Christine Battersby, as cited above. 

      In other words, whilst Schopenhauer ties the humorous to the sublime, Nietzsche ties the comic to the monstrous and criminal and to the fact that man has physical needs and limitations (this is evidenced by other references to Hans Wurst in Nietzsche's late notebooks). 

      Essentially, this is the Nietzsche embraced by Bataille in his idiosyncratic reading of the latter. Obviously the French author was influenced by other thinkers, but, as he once confessed: "A peu d'exceptions près, ma compagnie sur terre est celle de Nietzsche ..." See 'On Nietzsche', (Continuum, 2004), p. 3, where the line is translated by Bruce Boone as: "Except for a few exceptions, my company on earth is mostly Nietzsche ..."         

 

 

For a related post to this one - 'Don't You Know Jesus Christ Is a Sausage?' (18 April, 2020) - which also references this essay by Battersby - please click here.

 

Musical bonus: Serge Gainsbourg, 'Ecce homo', taken from the album Mauvaises nouvelles des étoiles (Mercury Records / Universal Music Group, 1981): click here.  

      I'm not sure what Nietzsche would have made of this track, but I like to think the title if nothing else would make him smile.   

 

 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.