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. 

  

 

Reflections on a Punk Jesus

Fig. 1: Jesus: Punk or Cunt?  

 

 

I.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

  

Notes

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

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

 

II. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

III. 

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

 

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

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

Euphoria Contra Ecstasy

Killing Joke: Euphoria (2015)  

Screenshot from the official video

And then the clouds break / A ray of sunlight, gloria!  

As if a promise / Some strange kind of euphoria [1]

 

 

I. 

 

When I was young, one of the key words in my vocabulary was the Ancient Greek term ἔκστασις (ékstasis), which refers to a psycho-spiritual sense of release; the ecstatic individual is one who has found a way to literally step outside of their own self and become part of something greater (some might characterise this as the nowness of the moment; some might speak of God).  

 

Ecstasy, therefore, is an altered - some would insist higher - state of consciousness and many who have experienced it speak of an intensely pleasurable experience, whether resulting from sexual activity, drug use, or religious devotion [2]. The desire for a temporary loss of self and loss of control is, it seems, rooted in a fundamental human instinct - one which Freud memorably termed der Todestrieb [3].     

 

And it's at this point I'd like to say something about another Ancient Greek term - εὐφορία - or, as we write it in English, euphoria  ...

 

 

II.  

  

It's because I think Freud is right to identify a death drive and because I believe the wilful desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in this drive (and is thus, from a Nietzschean perspective, décadent), that I now avoid speaking of ékstasis and favour euphoria, which, I would argue, is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

In other words, euphoria is a sense of physical wellbeing that encourages us to stay true to the earth, whilst ecstasy, involving as it does an element of transcendence and a stepping out of reality, is a dangerous first step on the path to heaven; euphoria is tied to Dionysian joy [4], but ecstasy terminates in the kind of religious rapture [5] longed for by Christians and other afterworldsmen [6].  

 

 

III. 

By way of providing an example, let us turn to two contrasting scenes in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915) ...  

 

In the first of these, we witness the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dancing naked in her bedroom and this, I would say, is a scene of euphoria; one that celebrates the fertile female body in all its gravid beauty:

 

"Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen [...]

      [...] She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss [7] [...] she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness [8].   

 

In the second scene, which comes in the following chapter (VII), we are told how her husband, Will, is driven to the point of ecstasy by Lincoln Cathedral:

 

"When he saw the cathedral in the distance [...] his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven, it was the Spirit hovering like a dove [...] He turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange, ecstatic grin." [9]    

 

It's not that Will is an objectophile - though he clearly has certain tendencies in that direction - his real desire is to escape mortal existence and become one with the Infinite in timeless ecstasy. No wonder Anna "resented his transports and ecstasies" [10] and longs to leave the cathedral and be back under the open sky.

 

And no wonder she turns to the gargolyes, which save her "from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite" [11] and help her to bring Will back down to earth with a bump.  

 

In brief: Anna's Dionysian euphoria triumphs over Will's Christian ecstasy ...

 

He still loves Lincoln Cathedral, but, after Anna has effectively disillusioned him by mocking his desire to consummate his love, even Will recognises there is life outside the church; that there are birds singing in the garden; flowers growing in the fields. 

 

And these things induce a sense of joy and wellbeing that was free and careless and "at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral" [12]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

And on a cold and grey November morn, when all the autumn leaves have fallen and "I can hear the magpies laugh" [13], all it takes is a momentary break in the clouds and a ray of sunlight and I too feel strangely euphoric ...     

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the Killing Joke single 'Euphoria', released from the album Pylon (Spinefarm Records / Universal Music Group, 2015): click here to play. The melodic character and almost choral quality of this track reminds me of the songs on Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (E.G. Records / Virgin Records, 1986), which is certainly one of my favourite Killing Joke albums.  

      

[2] I'm not suggesting these are the only ways to induce ecstasy; other methods might include physical activities such as yoga, dancing, or working out at the gym. Others find quiet meditation in which they concentrate on their breathing does the trick.

 

[3] Freud defines the death drive as the will possessed by organic life forms to return to an inanimate state. It is the opposing (although complementary) force to the life instinct, Eros, which drives self-preservation and reproduction. Both drives belong to the same libidinal economy. See his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). 

      Here, I will argue that whilst the desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in the death drive, euphoria is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

[4] For Nietzsche, the story of Dionysus is form of thanksgiving and an affirmation of life; the promise that it will be eternally reborn (this in stark contrast to the figure of the Crucified, who counts as an objection to life and a curse upon it). 

 

[5] Rapture is derived from the Latin term raptus, meaning to seize and carry off; one is literally swept up with ecstasy and transported to another (better and more perfect) world. This is why certain evangelical Christians in the United States use this term as their great eschatological watchword. 

      For these religious fanatics, the Rapture is an end-times event when all Christian believers (including the resurrected dead) will rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord their God. Although this is a relatively recent theological development - first arising in the 1830s - the origin of the term can be traced back to the Bible which uses the Greek word ἁρπάζω (harpazo); see 1 Thessalonians, 4:13-18, where a gathering of the elect in Heaven is described after the Second Coming of Christ.     

 

[6] This term - Hinterweltler in the original German - is a coinage of Nietzsche's and refers to those lunatics who focus their hopes and values on a transcendental realm that one enters at death, thereby devaluing earthly life. 

     For Zarathustra, it was suffering and impotence which created the idea of an afterworld and whilst it may seem attractive to many, it is, he says, a humiliation to believe in such heavenly nonsense. He teaches men to listen rather to the voice of the healthy body and stay true to the earth. 

      See the section entitled 'Of the Afterworldsmen', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 58-61. 

 

[7] Although the term bliss was later appropriated by those who like to imagine the spiritual delights of heaven, it was originally an Old English word (with a Proto-Germanic root) simply meaning joy in the mundane sense. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169-170. I discuss this scene - much loved by maiesiophiles everywhere - in the post 'On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen' (30 July 2017) - click here - and again in a post titled 'Maiesiophilia' (8 Dec 2022): click here.   

       

[9] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 186.  

 

[10] Ibid., p. 188. 

 

[11] Ibid., p. 189. I discuss this scene at greater length in the post titled 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris' (16 April 2019): click here.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 191.  

 

[13] Killing Joke, 'Euphoria' (2015), as cited in note 1 above.  

 

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.   

 

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.

 

 

Heidegger's (Absent) Dog

 

Martin Heidegger and Rae based on an image 

created by Ruth Malone using ChatGTP

@goingalongwithheidegger 

 

I. 

 

According to Ruth Malone, whilst Heidegger's method of comparative analysis between the human, the animal and the stone can be defended against the charge of anthropocentrism - provided, that is, that one accepts his foundational ideas and the validity of his philosophical approach - he nevertheless didn't understand dogs, in her view, and she is certain, therefore, that he could not have had a canine companion. 

 

I'll return to that final point later. Firstly, however, let me try and summarise Miss Malone's position set out in a short piece on Substack entitled 'Heidegger's captivated animals' [1] ...  

 

 

II.  

 

Heidegger famously thought animals, including highly intelligent animals like dogs, were poor in world in comparison to world-forming humans; although they are much better off than inanimate objects, such as stones, which, in his view, are entirely without world; i.e., have no access to being [2].  

 

Animals - and again, this includes mutts - may not understand the world as we understand it, but they are, nevertheless, instinctively captivated by things; in fact, it is this term - captivation [Benommenheit] - which defines the animal's particular way of being and how they are essentially different from us and from rocks [3]. 

 

And for Malone this is sufficient to get Heidegger off the anthropocentric hook. Being poor in world is a consequence of captivation but does not describe the essence of the animal; our four-legged friends are neither intrinsically deprived nor inferior in any fundamental sense, it's just Heidegger has a penchant for thinking negatively and views lack as a key aspect of being (and not merely the absence of something). 

 

In fact, as Malone indicates - drawing on the recent work of Sean Kirkland - it's impossible to carry out the Destruktion of philosophy that Heidegger calls for unless one posits a concept of lack and adopts a privative method or approach [4].       

 

Having found that we have something in common with the animal - we both have worlds - Heidegger then destructively examines the notion of poverty "revealing the both having and not-having of world by the animal" [5], before then dipping into zoology in order to tie his idea of captivation to animal behaviour. 

 

"Importantly, at this stage, Heidegger's approach is no longer driven by comparison with the human but builds a positive account of the being of the animal using the findings of biology. As such, Heidegger develops an account of the animal way of Being which can no longer be described as privative but now [...] contains a 'wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare'." [6]

 

This suggests that not only is the animal other to us, but, in some ways, has an advantage over man; the fallen animal; the unhappy animal; the mad animal who has lost his healthy animal reason [7]. 

 

And yet, despite this - and despite Malone's valiant attempt to defend Heidegger from the accusation of anthropocentrism - I can't help still having the impression that Heidegger had little time for nonhuman creatures which, according to him, have no language, history, or hands and cannot even be said to dwell or die.   

 

And indeed, Malone herself kind of circles round in order to conclude that it's difficult "to maintain the view that the animal is poor in world once one sees its captivation and 'wealth of openness'" [8] - and perhaps it's mistaken to posit the notion of weltarm in the first place; or, at any rate, wrong to group all animals together. 

 

For whilst the lizard does not recognise the rock as a rock [9], it seems clear to Malone that dogs do recognise their ball or favourite chew toy. Therefore, she suggests, the latter can recognise beings as beings, even if they cannot reflect upon and understand the being of beings and if Heidegger had only enjoyed the companionship of a canine chum he'd have had to acknowledge this.

 

 

III. 

 

And so we return to the question of whether or not Heidegger ever had a dog ... 

 

And, to my suprise, it seems that Malone was right in her supposition: he did not, in fact, own a dog; nor is there any mention in the numerous critical and biographical studies of his ever having any other kind of pet animal either.  

 

Notes

 

[1] See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', on Substack: @goingalongwithheidegger (16 Nov 2025): click here. 

 

[2] See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indiana University Press, 1995), Pt. 2, Ch. 2, § 42, pp. 176-78.  

      It's unfortunate that Heidegger chose to use the terms weltbildend (to describe human being), weltarm (to describe animality), and weltlos (to describe stones), as they do appear to lend themselves to an anthropocentric and hierarchical philosophy, both in the original German and English translation (world-forming, poor in world, without world).   

 

[3] Malone rightly reminds us that Derrida sees a logical difficulty in Heidegger's insistence on the fact that the difference between the animal's poverty and the human's wealth is not one of degree, but, rather, a difference in essence: "if the animal is so very different to the human, then how can a comparison, which results in the idea of the animal as 'poor in world', be meaningful?"

      See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals' (as cited above) and see also Derrida's discussion of this issue in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49.   

 

[4] See Sean D. Kirkland, Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2023). It's an interesting new study of Heidegger's project of Destruktion (a project famously taken up and radically extended by Derrida, of course, as déconstruction).   

      Malone summarises the three steps of Heidegger's methodology, which Kirkland derives from Being and Time (1927), and which she argues structures his comparative analysis of humans and animals, as: 

      "1. Start by bringing something positively to light. 2. Reveal destructively what is beyond that which is successfully brought to light. In other words, reveal what had remained concealed in the first step. 3. Focus the destruction on the 'posing of the question', not the claims, conclusions positions or philosophical results." - Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', as cited above.

[5] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[6] Ibid. Malone is quoting Heidegger writing in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ... p. 255. 

 

[7] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche here; see The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

[8] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[9] As someone who likes lizards more than dogs, I'm not entirely comfortable with this claim. For whilst a lizard may not know what a rock is in an abstract conceptual sense, it's smart enough to know that rocks are not just great places to sunbathe, but, in providing camouflage and shelter, are also crucial to its survival needs and studies have shown that they carefully select rocks and remember which ones offer most advantage. 

      Thus, even if their relationship with rocks is primarily based on instinct and learned association, they are not devoid of higher cognitive functions (they can solve problems, learn simple tasks, exhibit advanced social behaviours, etc.). 

      One recalls the following short poem by D. H. Lawrence, from his 1929 collection Pansies:

 

A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening 

no doubt to the sounding of the spheres. 

And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you 

And swirl of a tail! 

 

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards 

they’d be worth looking at.