Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 1: Introduction and Prologue

Simon Reynolds: Retromania

Faber and Faber (2012) 

 

 

I. 

 

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Simon Reynolds's celebrated book on pop culture's addiction to its own recent past: Retromania. 

 

So that seems like a good excuse to dust off my trusty yellow paperback edition [a] and reread its 450-odd pages divided into three main sections - the first two given the Savilesque titles 'Now' and 'Then' and the third designated 'Tomorrow' which, I suppose, is now our present - reassessing its arguments as I go along.   

 

Let's begin, however, by discussing the book's front matter: an Introduction that poses the crucial question: "Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is ... its past?" [ix]; followed by a Prologue which considers the concepts nostalgia and retro which are central to the study. 

 

 

II. 

 

I've always loved this opening sentence: "We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration." [ix] 

 

For whilst some younger readers might consider it inappropriate to casually use terms referring to mental health issues in such a jocular manner, I admire Reynolds's light-hearted writing style and do not believe for one moment that he's an ableist (though he does seem to also have a liking for the slang term lame, which is regrettable).

 

Like me, Reynolds belongs to another (perhaps less sensitive and politically less correct) generation; one that studied T. S. Eliot at school and so produces sentences such as "This is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set ..." [ix] in an attempt to be amusing, not intellectually intimidating or elitist.

 

Still, we're here to discuss pop's loss of dynamic energy and temporal sluggishness, not Gen Z's wokeness and the shift in linguistic standards since 2011, so let's push on ...

 

It's hard not to agree with this:

 

"Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be [...] dominated by the 're-' prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments." [xi]

 

Or this:

 

"Too often with new young bands, beneath their taut skin and rosy cheeks you could detect the sagging grey flesh of old ideas." [xi]

 

And I suppose I understand (though don't quite share) Reynolds's (quasi-Nietzschean) anxiety about the "uses and abuses of the pop past" [xiii] and the way in which retro has become democratised and mainstream. For these days anyone can play with the past and dip into the historical dress-up box, whereas retro used to be the "preserve of aesthetes, connoisseurs and collectors" [xii], i.e., individuals who self-consciously expressed themselves "through pastiche and citation [...] combined with a sharp sense of irony" [xii-xiii].  

   

Reynolds is not quite saying that it's okay for wealthy, well-educated people to go in for period stylisation and antiquarianism, but unhealthy for the hoi polloi to be fascinated by the "fashions, fads, sounds and stars" [xiv] of their own youth, but he appears to regard retromania as a form of digital decadence leading us to the abyss. 

 

It feels, he says, "like we've reached some kind of tipping point" [xiv] and face cultural catastrophe; not just the end of pop music, but innovative new work in other areas too, such as theatre, film and fashion. Even toys and games and food fads are now retro: "But strangest of all is the demand for retro porn"

[xviii] [b].

 

Is that really so strange though? And is retro-consciousness really so wrong or harmful? 

 

I mentioned the almost Nietzschean feel to Reynolds's argument that pop music ought to be all about the present - that "the essence of pop is the exhortation to 'be here now', meaning both 'live like there's no tomorrow' and 'shed the shackles of yesterday'" [xix] - and this really does echo the German philosopher's insistence that history must serve the needs of life (with the latter understood to be creative, vigorous action in the present) [c]. 

 

Nietzsche's warning that an excess of historical knowledge can produce historisches Fieber and that this can paralyse individuals and cultures, is pretty much what Reynolds is warning of retromania. I suppose that this is why it's so vital that we have the capacity to forget. But in the era of YouTube - which he discusses in chapter 2 of his book - how can we ever do that? 

 

As Reynolds notes:   

 

"All the sound and imagery and information that used to cost money and physical effort to obtain is available for free [...] We've become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data." [xx-xxi]

 

 

I can't recall if Nietzsche blames any group of people in particular for the oversaturation of 19th century life with history - I think he holds the education system and German culture collectively responsible - but I do know Reynolds blames hipsters for inculcating retromania as the "dominant sensibility and creative paradigm" [xix] in the early 21st century: 

 

"The very people who you would once have expected to produce (as artists) or champion (as consumers) the non-traditional and the groundbreaking - that's the group who are most addicted to the past." [xix-xx]

 

 

After all, why be cutting-edge, when you can just press the replay button; why be a creator, when you can be a curator? "The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde" [xx] - for it's so much less demanding to fall back into the safety of the past than step forward into an unknown future.  

    

All this being said, Reynolds now adds an important qualification (and makes a necessary confession): 

 

"Retromania is not a straightforward denunciation of retro as a manifestation of cultural regression or decadence. How could it be, when I'm complicit myself [...] as a historian, as a reviewer of reissues, as a talking head in rock documentaries and as a sleeve note writer." [xxi]

 

Indeed, even as a music fan, he's complicit and as "addicted to retrospection as anybody" [xxii] - however, and this is why Reynolds can be characterised as a romantic optimist at heart - as much as he gives in to the "lure of the past", he pines (Mark Fisher-like) for "the future that's gone AWOL" [xxii]. 

 

In other words, Reynolds still believes that mañana es otro día ... If only because, deep down, he feels that retro is ultimately "lame and shameful" [xxiii] - the kind of informal moralism that his readers have come to anticipate. 

  

 

III.

 

Does anyone else find it a little odd (and a little unnecessary) to follow an introduction with a prologue in a work of non-fiction? Still, I'm not complaining; if Mr Reynolds wishes to further set the scene, define terms, and provide a little more (political and philosophical) context to his study, then that's fine with me.

 

His brief history of nostalgia as word and concept - starting as a spatial-geographical condition (the ache of displacement) before becoming a temporal condition (the longing for a lost time) - is certainly appreciated [d] and Reynolds is right to remind his readers that nostalgia "hasn't always served the forces of conservatism" [xxvi]; that radical movements often dream too of restoring a golden age.

 

But let's get back to the world of pop and one of the key passages in the Prologue:

 

"In the second half of the twentieth century, nostalgia became steadily more and more bound up with popular culture [... and] is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up our youth. Eclipsing individual pursuits (like hobbies) or participatory local activities (like amateur sports), the mass media and pop culture take up an ever-increasing proportion of our mental lives." [xxix-xxx] 

Memory, in other words, is now colonised and exploited by capitalism as a resource and the past is mined (rather than idealised or revered) as a source of pleasure and profit. It's not just pop that eats itself, we too cannibalise and consume our own lives; the symbol of retromania is surely the ouroboros (the serpent which swallows its own tail). 

 

But where does the term retro come from? Reynolds dismisses the idea that it's a linguistic spin-off of the Space Age and its retro-rockets and suggests, rather, that it is merely a detached prefix. He also stresses that for most people it's something of a dirty word; too associated with "camp, irony and mere trendiness" [xxxii]. 

I'm not quite sure why these things are thought more negatively than "musty, mouldering old stuff" [xxxii], but guess Reynolds is probably right to say that they signify "a shallow, surface-oriented attunement to style, as opposed to a deep, passionate love of a music scene's essence" [xxxii]. 

 

But that's precisely why, despite sharing some concerns, I would choose retro pop over prog rock and prefer to hang out at 430 King's Road rather than Louis Balfour's Jazz Club. Ultimately, this means rejecting even the austere monarchy of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and privileging The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in all its anarchic eclecticism [e].  

 

I suppose what I'm admitting here is that I prefer fashion, ideas, images, and chaos over music (be it recorded and played on the radio or performed live by the actual musicians), whilst strongly suspecting that Reynolds loves music above all other art forms and, indeed, all other things [f]. Which is fine: but it's where he and I differ and one can't help wondering if, in fact, retro isn't a moral and cultural danger, but a valid aesthetic form of its own ...? 

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the main text are to this edition. 

 

[b] See the post: 'On the Pleasure of Queer Nostalgia' (3 April 2015): click here. 

 

[c] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the uses and disadvantages of history for life', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57-123. See also Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), a work cited by Reynolds - see the long footnote in bold on pp. 26-28.   

 

[d] I'm particularly grateful for the reference to Svetlana Boym's work on reflective nostalgia versus restorative nostalgia, in The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2002).  

 

[e] Reynolds makes much the same point I'm trying to make, but refers to the schism in the British folk scene between purists and those who are rather less militant in their asceticism; see pp. xxxiii-xxxv.    

 

[f] In an interview from way back in 2006, Reynolds attempts to explain why he has devoted so much of his time and energy to writing about music and taking music seriously (as opposed to literature or film). Partly, he says, it's because rock music was the most powerful cultural force when he was a teenager and partly it's because he believes music to be the most democratic art form. Also, there's something almost magical about music: 

      "It meshed with everything. It connected to politics, it connected to all the other arts [...] Music was [...] the thing that gave a bit extra to whatever you were doing and you wanted to have some connection to it. [...] Music was definitely both the centre of everything and what took you to other things and connected you to other things. [...] But, to me, music was the only thing really worth being excited about."

      See 'Simon Reynolds: interview by Wilson Neate', Part 1 of 2 (Feb 2006), in the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever: click here.     

 

 

To read part 2 of this post on Retromania, please click here. 

 

Parts 3 and 4 will follow in due course ...

Psychology 101 (Notes on Narcissistic Rumination, etc.)

 

 

'We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. 

For we have never sought to stick our tails in our mouths.'  

 

 

I. 

 

I've heard it said that self-reflection is crucial for personal growth and that personal growth is vital for enhancing self-awareness, thus creating a kind of positive psychological loop, which, for those content to sit with their tails in their mouths [1], is all fine and dandy. 

 

It is not, however, something that appeals to those of a Nietzschean bent who think more in terms of radical self-overcoming rather than bourgeois self-improvement and celebrate innocence and forgetfulness rather than indulge in narcissistic rumination. 

 

Clearly, there are a lot of terms to unpack here. But, without wishing to turn what was intended to be a bright and breezy post into a lengthy psychology lecture, let me offer some clarification ...

 

 

II. 

 

By self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung), Nietzsche refers to a process via which an individual (or a people) might abandon what they are and enter into what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a becoming-other (devenir-autre), thereby distilling Nietzsche's psychological insights into a more radical ontological concept. This is not a one-time event, but a constant process or unfolding that aims for a new way of thinking and feeling, rather than a development of the same. 

      

Ultimately, of course, if you subscribe to a philosophy of difference, there is no originary or essential self to overcome in the traditional sense; instead, there is only a site where different forces (active or reactive) interact and becoming is the process by which these forces shift and mutate, breaking away from static identities and fixed categories. 

     

 

III. 

 

When Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra of innocence and forgetfulness - I think he uses the German terms Unschuld and Vergessen - he refers to the childlike state reached when an individual has fully stylised an ethical model of self beyond good and evil (i.e., fixed moral values). 

      

Innocence, as used here, is not a form of naivety or ignorance, but rather the ability to affirm life as is (what he terms an economy of the whole), without qualification. Forgetfulness, meanwhile, acts as a necessary (and active) capacity to absorb past experiences and not be weighed down by personal history or the spirit of gravity; to be free of ressentiment. 

 

When working in conjunction, innocence and forgetfulness allows, if you like, for a fresh start and to make an affirmation of life that is both joyful and playful.

      

 

IV.

 

By narcissistic rumination I refer to an obsessive thought-cycle that locks the subject into a fixed state of neurosis and ultimately results in paralysis by analysis [2]. Narcissistic ruminators are thus those unfortunate individuals who spend a great deal of time and energy attempting to make sense of chaos; i.e., to find patterns or structures of meaning to which they are central. They love asking: Why me? [3]

 

Such individuals also love, à la Miss Haversham, recycling old conversations so that they might finally get others to admit their logical inconsistency and take ownership of their moral failings (there's nothing narcissistic ruminators enjoy more than making others feel miserable about themselves).   

     

 

V. 

 

And finally, re the idea that self-reflection can be dangerous - can lead to paralysis by analysis - let me admit that this needn't always be the case and that there are, I suppose, benefits to be had from knowing something about the self (even if it's only that the self is a convenient fiction rooted in grammar). 

 

However, it can become detrimental to wellbeing when the would-be self-knower falls into the black hole of narcissistic rumination; i.e., when they swallow their own tail and dwell on toxic negativity; when they become so obsessed on evaluating past events and collecting grievances that they become unable to act (or even smile) in the present. 

 

 

VI. 

 

In sum: Nietzscheans never ask why and rarely ruminate; they leave that to those who seek that highly suspect type of self-knowledge dreamed of by Platonists, Christians, Jungians, and other idealistic herd animals [4]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Esssays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. 

      In this short essay, written in 1925, Lawrence humorously attacks closed, self-referential styles of thinking and the obsession with interiority. With reference to the figure of the ouroboros, he also challenges the idea that the end is one with the beginning (i.e., that infinity is some kind of perfect cycle).

 

[2] Hamlet, of course, is the poster child for this idea of paralysis by analysis; a man whose 'powers of action have been eaten up by thought', as Hazlitt says in his landmark study Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (1817).   

 

[3] See the recent post 'Why Me Contra So What' (6 Feb 2026): click here. 

      Referring once more to literature, then Melville's Captain Ahab might be said to be the ultimate narcissistic ruminator. For he cannot view the loss of his leg as a random, natural event. Instead, he anthropomorphises the great white whale, convinced it acted with inscrutable malice specifically against him. He spends his life ruminating on this personal grievance, making himself the tragic centre of a cosmic drama. 

 

[4] Before I'm accused of being reductive by grouping Platonists, Christians, and Jungians together in this manner, let me indicate my awareness of the fact that these traditions have different understandings of the self and of what constitutes knowledge of the self, and different reasons for wanting to attain such knowledge. 

      However, all three traditions, it seems to me, consider the unexamined life to be a very bad thing - devoid of value, meaning, purpose, etc. - and each tradition suggests that failure to know the self will have negative consequences. I'm not adopting Thomas Gray's position here - ignorace is bliss - but I do think that innocence and forgetfulness, as discussed above, can make happy and free (inasmuch as anything can ever make us happy and free).  

 

 

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidegger

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidgger 

(SA/2026)

 

'It is no longer the Earth on which human beings dwell today ...'  

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I have to remind myself of when reading Heidegger is that even if he was born in the year Nietzsche went mad and published Sein und Zeit a few months before The Jazz Singer premiered in New York, he lived for a significant number of years after 1945 and so witnessed (whether he wished to or not) a period of rapid global transformation marked by huge geopolitical events and socio-cultural shifts.

 

We know what he thought about the Cold War - that it was a battle for technological mastery of the Earth fought between two superpowers that, whilst ideologically opposed, were metaphysically identical - and yet we have no idea what Heidegger thought about the sexual revolution, the extension of civil rights, England winning the World Cup, or a thousand other things that he could have commented on had he wished to do so. 

 

However, thanks to a posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, we do know how he regarded the space race ... [1]

 

 

II.      

 

Whilst Heidegger did not comment directly on the 1969 Apollo moon landing, in the above interview he did express his horror at the idea of humanity venturing into space; one small step for a man, one giant leap further into the void for Dasein. 

 

Looking at photographs of the Earth taken from space by the robotic lunar orbiters launched by NASA in 1966-67, Heidegger said he was frightened, regarding the images as evidence that we no longer dwell (i.e., have our being) on Earth in any meaningful sense. Instead, our relationship with the world had become, he said, purely abstract, reducing the Earth to a planetary object to be surveyed and enframed (i.e. reduced to a mere resource for exploitation).  

 

For Heidegger, das Raketenzeitalter, as he called it, was perhaps even more disasterous than the Atomic Age; for whilst the latter threatened to blow us all to kingdom come, the Rocket Age essentially evicted humanity from its terrestrial home. He provocatively claimed that nuclear weapons were thus no longer needed as the technological revealing exemplified within the space race had already resulted in mankind's existential uprooting.   

 

For Heidegger, the idea of colonising the Moon (or other planets, such as Mars) was anathema; for the Moon was a physical environment that could never be a world in the true sense of the term, only a site for technical manipulation. Far from expanding the human horizon, space exploration would only reduce and narrow such by making everything distanceless. 

 

Heidegger also criticised the modern scientific jargon used to describe the heavens; what he called rocket language made words purely functional and thereby rendered authentic communication or poetic engagement with the world impossible. 

 

In sum: Heidegger wholeheartedly rejects the idea advanced by Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise that our destiny as a species is to "explore strange new worlds" and to "boldly go where no man has gone before" [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] This interview with Der Spiegel was conducted on 23 September, 1966, by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff. It had been granted by Heidegger only on the condition that it remain unpublished during his lifetime and so was not published until 31 May, 1976. 

      The interview is commonly known by the title 'Only a God Can Save Us' in the English translation by William J. Richardson, which can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive. 

 

[2] I'm quoting here, as I'm sure most readers will know, from the opening monologue spoken by William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk during the opening title sequence of the original Star Trek series (1966-69).

 

 

For a sister post to this one - 'Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger' (13 Jan 2026) - click here.    

 

 

On Spinoza's Four Great Disciples

Les quatre grands disciples de Spinoza

(Nietzsche - Lawrence - Kafka - Artaud)

 

I. 

 

Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have never read and about whom my knowledge is extremely limited: I know, for example, that he was a 17th-century Dutch thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin and a founding figure of the Enlightenment who preferred to earn his living as a lens grinder, rather than accept an academic post that might compromise his intellectual independence. 

 

I also know that he rejected the idea of free will and divine judgement and argued for a kind of pantheistic monism (i.e., the belief that God and Nature are one and the same identical and infinite substance). Such thinking made him a controversial figure at the time and and a thorn in the side of the religious authorities. 

 

Finally, I know that Deleuze was a great admirer; that Spinoza was the thinker who provided him with the basis for his own work on immanence and encouraged a joyful affirmation of life free from belief in a world beyond, or tedious moral concepts that always terminate in judgement and punishment.  

 

For Deleuze, Spinoza was le prince de philosophes and he had four great heirs or disciples: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kakfa, and Artaud [1]. The question that interests me here, however, is not how or why Deleuze arrives at this conclusion, but what did each of these four think of the renegade Jew who gave us modernity ...? [2]

 

II.  

 

Let's work backwards and begin with Artaud, who, as far as I'm aware, never mentioned Spinoza in his writings, suggesting that the link between the two is something formed almost exclusively in Deleuze's philosophical imagination. 

 

Deleuze (and Guattari) may like to think of Spinoza's Ethics (1667) as anticipating Artaud's notion of the body without organs, but that's not something that ever occured to the French dramatist who introduced the world to the theatre of cruelty. 

 

Indeed, according to one scholar, Artaud's work is ultimately incompatible with Spinoza's rationalism [3]. For whereas Artaud aims to liberate libidinal energy and resist the body's rational organ-isation, Spinoza, in contrast, wished to perfect man via reason and an active form of knowledge. Both spoke about joy and passion, but each conceived such terms in radically different ways.    

 

 

III. 

 

Unlike Artaud, Franz Kafka apparently did acknowledge his indebtedness to Spinoza - even if he didn't do so in his published writings - considering him a spiritual mentor during his younger years when part of an intellectual circle in Prague which often discussed the Dutchman's work [4].

 

Kafka was particularly interested in Spinoza's notion of an indifferent deity; i.e., one who was blind to the suffering of humanity. This idea shaped Kafka's construction of an amoral fictional universe in which there is ultimately no justice, despite all the mechanisms of law and order put in place by mankind.      

 

 

IV.

 

Amusingly, one commentator has described Lawrence as a "sort of sexy Spinozist" [5], which I think is pushing things a bit too far, even if it's fair to say that Lawrence's own thinking does align in certain key aspects with Spinoza's philosophy. 

 

For example, Lawrence's model of pantheism which insists that God exists only in bodies; or his concept of blood-knowledge, which has echoes of Spinoza's intuitive science (a third way of knowing beyond imagination and reason which allows one to grasp the essence of things and experience a sense of blessedness or oneness with the universe).     

 

But again, as with Kafka and Artaud, there is hardly a mention of Spinoza in any of Lawrence's writings; the only one I can recall from memory is in the short prose piece 'Books' in which he dismisses him as another of those philosophers who, like Kant, only thought "with his head and his spirit" (and never with his blood) [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche  ... 

 

And finally we find actual written references to Spinoza that we are able to cite, such as the postcard sent to his friend Franz Overbeck in the summer of 1881, in which Nietzsche expresses his astonishment and delight at having found a precursor - i.e., someone in whose work he recognises himself, even if, due to differences in time and culture, there remained certain important points of divergence [7]. 

 

In the Genealogy (II.15), meanwhile, Nietzsche acknowledges Spinoza's insight into (and the need to overcome) traditional moral concepts. Material found in his notebooks from this period also show Nietzsche turning to Spinoza for ideas, particularly concerning the transformation of knowledge into a passion. 

 

Ultimately, Nietzsche saw in Spinoza someone who was able to think beyond good and evil - someone who scorned the teleological fantasy that the universe had some ultimate goal, or that man possessed free will.

 

Having said that, however, it's also true that Nietzsche viewed his own concept of will to power as superior and more radical than Spinoza's insistence that life strove above all for its own preservation. And in his mature (some might say mad) Dionysian phase, it's hard to believe that Nietzsche would have had much time for Spinoza's defence of reason as the essential human faculty leading to freedom.       

 

 

VI.

 

In sum: whilst Deleuze isn't simply joking or trying to be provocative by grouping together Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as disciples of Spinoza, we need to take this idea with a pinch of salt and remember that none of the above saw themselves as such. 

 

Essentially, Deleuze was highlighting a number of conceptual connnections between them which might otherwise go unnoticed. He was probably also attempting to make Spinoza more relevant to a contemporary readership and, perhaps, inseminate Spinoza with his own ideas. 

 

Thus, it might be best to think of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud, and Deleuze himself as a line of thinkers who share common ground with Spinoza, but are not followers per se (more like fellow travellers); artist-philosophers who above all else want to have done with judgement.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Sith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135. 

      According to Deleuze, it was not Kant but Spinoza who, in breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, carried out a true critique of judgement and had "four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (126). 

 

[2] This description was coined by the American philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein and formed the subtitle of her biographical study Betraying Spinoza (Random House, 2006). 

 

[3] See Jon K. Shaw, 'Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud from Deleuze's Spinoza', in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Edinburgh University Press, May 2016), pp. 162-185. 

      As Shaw writes in the Abstract to this essay, "much of Artaud's metaphysics is incompatible with Deleuze's Spinozism, not least the relation between a body and its constitutive outside, and the questions of affect and expression": click here. 

 

[4] In the absence of direct references to Spinoza in Kafka's writings, we have to rely on biographical studies and scholarly analysis to confirm the latter's interest in (and sense of kinship with) the former. I'm not sure I'd speak of parallel destinies between the two, however, although that's the argument put forward by Carlos García Durazo in his essay on Medium (24 Oct 2024): click here. 

 

[5] See Mattie Colquhoun, 'Rainbows: From D. H. Lawrence to the NHS', on Xenogothic (23 Dec 2020): click here.  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Books', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 198. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck (30 July, 1881). It can be read (in English translation) on The Nietzsche Channel: click here. 

      It is interesting to note that Nietzsche doesn't simply identify with Spinoza because of certain shared ideas, but also because the latter was, due to his radicalism, very much a maligned and marginalised figure in his own day (much as Nietzsche felt himself to be in modern Germany). 

      It is also important to remember that Nietzsche's understanding of Spinoza was mostly based on his reading of secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer's highly influential six-volume study Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ['History of Modern Philosophy'] (1854-1877). 

      See Andreas Urs Sommer, 'Nietzsche's Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer', in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn, 2012), pp. 156-184. This essay is available on JSTOR: click here. 

 

 

New Year's Day: I've Said It Before and I'll Say It Again ...

TTA New Year's Day Postcard (SA/2026)*

 

 

Here we are on the first day of the New Year and I find that, like Oliver Hardy in Dirty Work (1933), I have nothing to say ... 

 

That being the case, I thought it might be fun to republish half-a-dozen posts from years gone by dated January 1st ...

 

 

Panem et Pyrotechnics (1 Jan 2014)

 

Fireworks, as Oscar Wilde observed, have one big advantage over the stars; namely, you always know precisely when they are going to appear in the sky. 

 

But public firework displays - no matter how spectacular - soon bore and disappoint and one can't help wondering at the politics of the event and the psychology of people who stand in the cold gazing upwards with their mouths open, fascinated by bright lights and loud bangs; content to obey their leaders for another twelve months thanks to the promise of panem et pyrotechnics. 

 

New Year's Eve makes North Koreans of us all ... 

 

 

A Nietzschean Message for the New Year (1 Jan 2015) 

 

For me, the greatest and most touching of new year blessings and resolutions remains the one with which Nietzsche opens Book IV of The Gay Science (written January, 1882): 

 

'Today, everybody permits themselves the expression of their dearest wish. Hence, I too shall say what it is that I most desire - what was the first thought to enter my heart this year and what shall be for me the reason, guarantee, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want increasingly to learn to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, so that I may become one of those who makes things beautiful: amor fati - let that be my love from now on!'

 

 

Happy New Year From the Ghost of Jean Baudrillard (1 Jan 2018) 

 

When asked during an interview in January 2006 what it meant to wish someone Happy New Year, Baudrillard amusingly replied that it was 'a collectively remote-controlled symbolic ritual that has its place in a [...] cost-free sphere'. 

 

In other words, an empty gesture without value; a seasonal greeting from another time which, just like Merry Christmas, tries to desperately recreate a social bond or, more accurately, evoke nostalgia for such, via an exchange of disintensified signs. All the high days and holidays that we so want to enjoy and make special, invariably leave us feeling lonely and inadequate; hostages to our own lives of consumption. 

 

Having said that, Baudrillard hates to be thought of as a pessimist or a nihilist in the pejorative sense of the term. And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has 'nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality', we might simply call evil. 

 

And so, in wishing readers a Happy New Year, I suppose I'm wishing them the courage to become complicit with l'intelligence du mal. 

 

 

Reflections on a Rose and a New Year's Resolution (1 Jan 2019)

  

New Year's Day: the world of my little garden forever undying. Roses, stained with the blood of Aphrodite, bloom and make happy. Sometimes, I think it would be nice to remain alone with the flowers and do nothing but quietly reflect upon their perfection. 

 

But then, after a few minutes, I realise that not only is such a life impossible, it's also undesirable; that one's main duty as a Lawrentian floraphile is to actively shelter the rose of life from being trampled on by the pigs. Thus, I resolve to 'go out into the world again, to kick it and stub my toes. It is no good my thinking of retreat: I rouse up and feel I don't want to. My business is a fight, and I've got to keep it up.' 

 

 

Why You Should Never Wish a Happy New Year to a Nietzschean (1 Jan 2023)

 

I don't know the origin of the zen fascist insistence on wishing everyone a happy new year, but I suspect it's rooted in the 18th-century, which is why in 1794 the Archange de la Terreur - Louis de Saint-Just - was able to proclaim: Le bonheur est une idée neuve en Europe ... 

 

Such a new idea of happiness - one concerned with individual fulfilment in the here and now and realised in material form, rather than a deferred condition of soul which awaits the blessed in heaven - had already become an inalienable right of citizens in the United States, although whether Jefferson was inspired by the English empiricist John Locke - or by the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau - is debatable. 

 

Either way, the pursuit of happiness was declared a self-evidently good thing that all Americans should uphold and practice; for ensuring the greatest happiness of the greatest number was, as Jeremy Bentham wrote the mark of a truly moral and just society.

 

The problem, however, for those who take Nietzsche seriously, is that this positing of happiness in its modern form as the ultimate aim of human existence makes one contemptible; the kind of person who only seeks their own pleasure and safety, avoiding all danger, difficulty, or struggle. 

 

Nietzsche wants his readers to see that suffering and, yes, even unhappiness, play an important role in life and culture; that greatness is, in fact, more often than not born of pain and sorrow. This is why his philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism. And this is why it's ironically insulting to wish a Nietzschean happy new year ...

 

 

Nothing Changes on New Year's Day (1 Jan 2024) 

 

I don't like - and have never liked - the Irish rock band U2. 

 

But that isn't to say they haven't written some fine songs, including 'New Year's Day', which contains the killer line: Nothing changes on New Year's Day - a line which counters all the mad optimism of those gawping at fireworks, popping champagne corks, and singing 'Auld Lang Syne' without any idea of what the phrase means. 

 

Often, these are the same people who criticise others for being despairing about the past or present and who insist on being hopeful for the future - even though the expectation of positive outcomes with respect to temporal progress seems entirely groundless. 

 

I don't want to sound too diabolical, but it seems to me that the phrase lasciate ogni speranza written above the gates of Hell is actually a sound piece of advice. For Nietzsche may have a point when he suggests that it is hope which prolongs the torments of man and is thus the most evil of all evils. 

 

* One of six designs in the official TTA postcard range, available as a set for just £29.99.

 

 

Weirdeval: A Brief Note on Historybounding and Renaissance Dandyism

Jack Brotchie wearing reconstructed clothing by Jenny Tiramani 

based on figure 102 in The Book of Clothes by Matthäus Schwarz [1] 

 

If a dozen Renaissance dandies stroll through Soho tomorrow 

wearing bright red and yellow clothes, then the revolution against dullness will have begun. [2]

 

 

It seems highly unlikely that D. H. Lawrence's call for a revival of Renaissance dandyism is going to happen any time soon. And so I'm not expecting to encounter a dozen young men strolling along the Strand with bright red hose and wearing doublets of puce velvet when I next head into London. 

 

Having said that ... it seems there's recently been a trend amongst a niche subculture of fashionable individuals to experiment with clothing from yesteryear, including things from the Early Modern Period [3].

 

Critics might sneer and dismiss this as merely a form of larping, but lovers of the trend insist that their attire is an authentic form of self-expression and that by incorporating 16th-century items of dress into contemporary outfits they manage to avoid looking as if they are merely actors in some kind of theatrical production. 

 

They call this practice historybounding (cf. the more mundane practice of historical reenactment) [4] and if theirs is not a full revolt into style, then it's a form of elegant rebellion nevertheless against the boredom and drabness of everyday life in 2026 and I have nothing but admiration for those young men who belong to the world of the weirdeval [5] and flounce around in their ruffs and doublets and codpieces; or those young women who want to dress like Joan of Arc - the patron saint of Gen Z - and adopt her distinctive hairstyle.    

 

  

  

Notes

 

[1] See the astonishing section by Jenny Tiramani - 'Reconstructing a Schwarz Outfit' - in The First Book of Fashion, ed. Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 373-396. As she herself notes, reconstructing clothes from 1530 has very particular problems and results in some surprising discoveries. 

      Perhaps the most fascinating thing is that the outfit gave the model, Jack  Brotchie, the fashionable silhouette of the period; because cut and folds of the clothes "he appears to have broad sloping shoulders , a high waist, and long legs" (396). In other words, even a 'modern body' can be styled and shaped in a Renaissance manner.     

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Red Trousers', ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138.  

 

[3] See, for example, the article by Esther Newman, 'Forget Futurism, I Want to Dress Like Joan of Arc', Refinery29 (4 November, 2024): click here. 

      As she excitedly informs her readers: "This season, we're not looking forward for style inspiration, nor even to the very recent past - the trend cycle is turning to the Dark Ages, literally; we're all going medieval."

 

[4] Just to be clear: historybounding is a fashion trend where one incorporates elements of historical clothing into one's contemporary wardrobe, creating looks inspired by past eras without wearing full costumes. The key is to draw inspiration from the past and evoke a past aesthetic, not attempt to replicate it; to live yesterday tomorrow. 

      Even so, one imagines that Zarathustra would not approve; he famously moans about men of the present painted with all kinds of colours surrounded by mirrors: "Written over with the signs of the past and these signs over-daubed with new signs [...] All ages and all peoples gaze motley out of your veils [...]

      See the section entitled 'Of the Land of Culture' in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 142. 

 

[5] The portmanteau term weirdeval is a subcultural fashion phenomenon - also known as medieval weird core - that blends elements of medieval-era clothing (corsets, chainmail, flowing tunics, etc.) with unconventional contemporary styling. The aesthetic, which consciously rejects historical accuracy, gained traction on social media platforms, particularly TikTok. It draws inspiration from film and television, fantasy fiction, and various fashion designers.  

 

 

For a sister post to this one on Renaissance Dandyism and The First Book of Fashion, please click here. 

 

 

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. 

 

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

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking 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. 

 

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

 

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