Notes on Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety (A 6/20 Paper by Maria Thanassa)

Curbing their enthusiasm: Socrates, Maria Thanassa & Larry David 

 

 

I. 

 

According to Maria Thanassa [1], notions of sobriety and intoxication are central to Plato's Symposium and Socrates is shown to be a man of self-restraint above all else; he drinks, but never gets drunk; he loves, but never succumbs to erotic ecstasy (even remaining somewhat indifferent to the charms of Alcibiades).

 

Socrates, in other words, is a man who, like Larry David, knows how to curb his enthusiasm [2] and keep his wits about him. It's not so much that he lacks passion, but he prefers to master his desires. For Socrates, sobriety guarantees the integrity of his nature.

 

But, as becomes clear later in her presentation, Dr Thanassa is not only concerned with the doings of ancient Greek philosphers. She is interested also in how the idea of sobriety can be reactivated within a contemporary culture she thinks of as intoxicated (and infantilised) by a form of liberal Dionysianism that promotes the freedom of the individual and self-expression.           

 

In other words, a bit like the Greek lyric poet Theognis, Dr Thanassa wants people to exercise a degree of control and not act in a shameless or foolish manner (enslaved by their own base instincts); to behave in an ethical and stylised manner, carefully cultivating the self [3]. 

 

II. 

 

This might make Dr Thanassa sound like a bit of a killjoy or a member of the morality police; i.e., one who wishes to enforce a code of conduct and is concerned when people transgress certain social rules. Fortunately, however, she is saved from becoming a battle-axe like Granny Hatchet [4] by that which Socrates and Larry David are both masters of: irony. 

 

Maria ironically tempers her own enthusiasm for telling others to curb their enthusiasm before it tips over into zealotry. Like Socrates - and Larry David - she seems at times to try out and test philosophical positions without ever allowing them to become points of principle or dogma. 

 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what Dr Thanassa says seriously - just not that seriously. And it certainly shouldn't stop us from enjoying the wine served at the end of the paper, for as Alcibiades might remind us, the 6/20 is, like the symposium, a drinking party as much as a forum of debate.

 

Having said that, food and wine is served at the 6/20 to help facilitate conversation between those in attendance, not to induce drunken excess and vomiting on the way home [5] - something that the host, Mr Christian Michel, would almost certainly not approve of.          

 

III.

I think the part of Dr Thanassa's paper I enjoyed the most was the section in which she (following Martha Nussbaum) discussed Socrates as someone who, in his strangeness, stands apart from other men - and indeed, the human condition itself. 

 

As already mentioned, Plato depicts Socrates as someone who is absent when he should be present; who drinks but does not get drunk; who is impervious to cold and hunger; who values beauty but remains unaffected by its physical manifestations; and who feels erotic desire but does not fully succumb to the pleasures of the flesh.

That certainly makes him sound like a queer fish and, according to Dr Thanassa, the oddity of his character when combined with his satyr-like ugliness makes him not only different, but genuinely other - inaccessible, impenetrable, and impossible to shut-up, even when sentenced to death.  

 

I can see why so many of his fellow Athenians hated him, just as so many of Larry David's friends and neighbours seem to find him impossible at times. But the above traits only increase my admiration for Socrates; he may lack empathy, but at least he recognises that even the most tragic events (such as the death of a pet parrot) have a comic aspect and that the philosopher must be free to ridicule, mock, or criticise everything under the sun - even if this risks offending others [6]. 

 

As the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote: Socrates could abstain from those things that most are too weak to abstain from and enjoy in moderation those things that many indulge in excessively to their shame. His strength, his ability to endure, and his sobriety marked him out as a man of perfect and invincible spirit [7].  

In sum - and I think this was Dr Thanassa's closing line (borrowed from Baudelaire) - Keep smiling with Spartan serenity [8] and remember that curbing your enthusiasm means choosing not to burst into flame even though, as a philosopher, you will burn with a very special type of passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dr Maria Thanassa presented a short paper entitled 'Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Socrates and the Ethics of Sobriety' at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club (London) on 20 Feb 2023. This post is based on my recollection of what was said and I apologise to Dr Thanassa should I misrepresent her ideas in any manner. 

 

[2] The Socrates / Larry David connection and comparison has been made before; see, for example, Daniel Coffeen's excellent post on the philosophy of Curb Your Enthusiasm on his blog An Emphatic Umph: click here. 

      Coffeen rightly argues that both Socrates and Larry are characters who interact with the world in a fundamentally different way from most other people, refusing as they do inherited terms and questioning beliefs and norms of behaviour at every opportunity: "But whereas Socrates is really only concerned with big ideas about truth, morality, language, politics, Larry takes on the micro interactions of the social." 

      I was rather disappointed, considering the title of her paper, that Dr Thanassa didn't make more of the relationship between Socrates and Larry David. 

[3] This is suggestive of Foucault's later work and I was pleased to hear Dr Thanassa refer to such later in her paper, as well as to Nietzsche's idea of what constitutes the most needful thing - the constraint of a single taste - if an individual is to give style to their lives. 

[4] Granny Hatchet (Caroline Nation) was a member of the American temperance movement in the late-19th century and early-20th century, who famously smashed up liquor joints with a handheld axe. See the recent post written on her life and times: click here.   

[5] See the poem by Theognis in Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, ed. and trans. Douglas E. Gerber (Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), lines 477-496, quoted by Dr Thanassa on the night. 

[6] See my post of 14 Nov 2017 - 'Torpedo the Ark Means Everything's Funny' - click here. 

[7] I'm paraphrasing here from Meditations 1.16 - a passage quoted by Dr Thanassa in her paper. 

[8] See Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 29. 

      What I say here of the philosopher is, of course, what Baudelaire says of the modern dandy - another figure who understands, style, sobriety, and self-restraint.

 

I would like to express my gratitude once more to Maria for producing a fascinating paper and to Christian Michel for hosting another very enjoyable evening. This post is dedicated to them both and I hope it brings them some pleasure. 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 2: The Return of the 70s

Joy Division (L-R: Peter Hook / Ian Curtis / Bernard Sumner / Stephen Morris) 

 

 "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?"

 

 

Any piece of writing entitled 'The Return of the 70s' is guaranteed to excite my interest; particularly one that understands 1979-80 to be a threshold moment when one world gave way to another. 

 

But, as is so often the case, expectations are rarely met and part of my frustration with Mr Fisher's work comes out of disappointment. It's not that he fails to deliver insightful commentary (and retrospective judgement) on the decade, more that his points of reference are so very different from mine; the books of John le Carré and David Peace, for example, are almost entirely unfamiliar to me [a]. 

 

Thus, here, I shall discuss only what Fisher says about post-punk favourites Joy Division and the grotesque figure of Jimmy Savile [b].  

 

 

I. 

Fisher opens his exploration of the 70s with the following statement: "If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times." [c] 

 

Fisher wants (and probably expects) his readers to agree that: 

 

(i) pop groups in general have (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) significance ...

 

(ii) Joy Division in particular have growing (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) import ...

 

(iii) a state of despondent melancholia defines the Geist der Zeiten in which he was writing [d] ...

 

(iv) this depressed spirit can magically be captured (embodied and expressed) by a group of musicians (which essentially returns us to the first point).    

 

The problem is, I'm not sure I do agree with all (or even any) of these points. 

 

But let's say, for arguments sake, that, like Hegel, we accept the notion that there's a virtual agency determining the ideas and beliefs of a given epoch and that art reflects the culture of the era in which it is created (not least because artists are themselves a product of their time). 

 

That might be an argument for why art matters, but it still doesn't mean Joy Division are - or ever were - as important as Fisher insists; "more than a pop group, more than entertainment" [53].

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Joy Division and even have a well-worn copy of their debut studio album Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979) in my record collection. But they're not the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, when it comes to capturing (and transforming) the spirit of the times or channelling the future. 

 

These two groups - and perhaps only these two - were (to adopt and extend a term coined by Foucault) founders of discursivity (changing forever the way we think, speak, act, dress, etc.).

 

 

II. 

 

Fisher continues his piece on Joy Division by declaring them to be "the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups" [59]. 

 

By which one might assume he was simply referring to the fact that although they failed to have much success during their time as a band (1976-1980), they have exerted a wide-reaching influence ever since. But actually, Fisher means something much more interesting:

 

"What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between [Ian] Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will [...] not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror ..." [60]

 

Fisher expands on this:

 

"Joy Division followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya [...] and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW [...] will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to do." [60] 

 

Joy Division see through things; they know - far more radically than the Rolling Stones - that there's never any satisfaction; that the true Schopenhaurien moments are those "in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart's desire - and feel cheated, empty [...] voided [61].

 

This existential revelation - that we don't really want or need what we thought we most desperately wanted or needed and that even our most urgent desires "are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road" [61] - is central to what Fisher calls depressive ontology.

 

 

III. 

The great debate over Joy Division, says Fisher, is this: "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?" [63]

 

Alert to the blackmail of the either/or, Fisher doesn't take the Deleuzian option of neither/nor, but nor, like Bartleby, does he simply prefer not to say. Rather, he suggests we should hold on to both options; "the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff'" [63]. 

 

In other words, we should be a little bit of a romantic aesthete and a little bit of a lumpen empiricist, insisting like the latter on the need to root the band's songs "back in the quotidian at its least elevated and [...] least serious" [63]. 

 

Fisher's reason for wanting to hold on to both versions of Joy Division is surprising (and moving): 

 

"For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males." [63] [e]

 

 

IV. 

 

We'll never know what Mark Fisher would have made of Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Savile in the four-part TV drama The Reckoning (2023), though I suspect he would have found it as problematic as Michael Sheen's portrayal of Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) and for pretty much the same reasons:

 

"The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost." [87]

 

An actor with "more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth [...] not accessible via the TV footage" [87]. 

 

As I say - and without wanting to put words into Fisher's dead mouth -  I suspect he would also condemn Coogan for simply offering an impression of Savile; perfectly competant as far as "mannerisms and verbal tics" [87] go, but "devoid of any of the tortured inner life" [87] that might have made Savile a more complex and more interesting character (although, arguably, what was so terrifying about Savile was his emptiness; the fact that there was a complete moral vacuum where one might have expected to find at least the remnants of a soul).

 

 

V.       

 

Fisher makes the intriguing suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have struck a deal with the Devil:

 

"You'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact [...], but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil." [88]

 

Although he was a professed Catholic, I think Savile would have happily struck such a bargain. 

 

In fact, one suspects that the thought of the truth finally being revealed after his death would have delighted him. For it confirms the fact that he got away with everything and made fools of everyone, including politicians, members of the royal family, and even Pope John Paul II, who awarded him a knighthood in 1990.   

 

People say Savile was hiding in plain sight, but, actually, it was more a case of no one really daring to look, or, if they did look, then they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It was only in 2012 that the obscene truth began to leak out, "like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained" [88] - first seeping, then surging.  

By the end of that year, says Fisher, "the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as trauma" [89] as  the world of light (entertainment) transformed into "the darkest horror" [90]. Not only did we have to accept the truth about Savile, we also had to reconsider our affection for Gary Glitter and even, in 2014, Rolf Harris [f]. 

Parents used to think they had to lock up their children when the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols came to town, but it was actually Jake the Peg (diddle-iddle-iddle-um) and uncle Jimmy they really should've kept an eye on (as it 'appens).   

But they didn't. And so Savile went on abusing his victims; young and old, male and female, dead or alive. Fisher provides a political explanation why this was so:

"At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile, Knight Commader of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. [...] But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable - this can't possibly be happening." [94-95] 

 

Fisher (brilliantly) concludes his piece on Savile:

 

"The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now ..." [95]

Notes

 

[a] I have watched the film adaptation of Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd (2006) and I enjoyed it. Fisher, on the other hand, hates it; arguing that the film lacks all the bite and Gnostic mythography of the book and that in the hands of the film's director (Tom Hooper) and writer (Peter Morgan) the story is reduced into just another off-the-shelf cliché-ridden narrative. 

      Fisher also criticises Michael Sheen's performance (as Brian Clough) as campy and based on a popular image and pre-existing idea of the character, lacking depth or inner life. I will pick up on this in section IV of this post, when discussing Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Saville in the TV drama The Reckoning (2023). 

      See Fisher's piece '"Can the World Be as Sad as It Seems?": David Peace and His Adapters', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), pp. 80-87. His remarks on The Damned Utd are on pp. 85-87.  

 

[b] British readers will of course know who Jimmy Savile was (and what he was). But for anyone who is unfamiliar with the name ... 

      Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (1926-2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He hosted the long-running BBC TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. During his lifetime, Savile was well known (and much-loved, although Fisher denies this) for his eccentric image and charitable work. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude that he had been a predatory and prolific sex offender (such allegations made during his lifetime were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved). 

      As a result of the ensuing scandal, some of the honours that Savile was awarded during his career were posthumously revoked and his television appearances - including episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented - are no longer repeated. As Fisher notes: "Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed [...] as if he were some medieval devil [...]" Ghosts of My Life, p. 94. 

 

[c] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life ... p. 50. Future page references to this second edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the text.   

[d] Fisher's piece on Joy Division was adapted from a post on his k-punk blog dated 9 Jan 2005. It was published in its final form in Ghosts of My Life in 2014. 

[e] Joy Division's vocalist and lyricist Ian Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide, aged 23, in May 1980. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide, aged 48, in January 2017. As a friend of mine remarked upon hearing of the latter's death (perhaps a little cruelly): K-punk is kaput.  

[f] Glitter's status as a glam rock idol was irredeemably tarnished after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2006, and found guilty of a series of sexual offences (including attempted rape) in 2015. All round entertainer Rolf Harris, popular throughout the '60s, '70s, and 1980s, was convicted in 2014 of having sexually assaulted four underage girls. 

 

Part 1 of this post on Lost Futures can be read by clicking here.   

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here. 

 

Madness and Animality: Notes on Therianthropy

Theta-Delta: a widely acknowledged symbol 

of therianthropy created in 2003

 

 

I.

 

Thanks to the internet, an entire sub-culture has developed that has adopted the word therianthropy [1] to describe a sense of spiritual or psychological identification with a non-human animal. Members of this sub-culture typically refer to themselves as therianthropes, or, simply, therians. 

 

Because therianthropy is often a very individual matter, there are no fixed rules governing what it does and doesn't involve. This can make it a rather difficult subject of which to speak - particularly for outsiders such as myself. However, I shall do my best (with apologies in advance to any therians reading who might find what I say crass, mistaken, or offensive).  

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps the first question that arises is: How do therians understand their non-human side and how does this relate to their human aspect; is it separated or integrated, experienced mutually or exclusively? 

 

Those who are keen to promote a more esoteric understanding of therianthropy, believe that they either partly or fully possess the spirit or soul of an animal. Such persons often draw inspiration from stories of shape-shifting found in Celtic, Norse, and Native American mythologies and argue that they are reviving an ancient shamanic tradition.

 

On the other hand, those therians who prefer a more material explanation of their condition argue for some peculiarity in their neurophysiology, or perhaps suggest a genetic difference. Some even adopt concepts such as species dsyphoria and transspeciesism.

 

But most therians, however, are content to accept that what they are engaged in is simply fantasy and/or a sometimes extreme form of role play. 

 

 

III.

 

Usually, therians identify with a single species of animal. And the species with which a particular therian identifies is sometimes referred to as that individual's theriotype.

 

However, there are those - known as cladotherianthropes - who identify with all members of an animal family and even some who (schizophrenically) identify with a whole menagerie of completely dissimilar creatures. 

 

It comes as little surprise to discover that the majority of therians identify with large felines and canines, such as tigers and wolves. But there are some who identify in non-mammalian terms as reptiles, birds, or even insects (the latter overly-identifying perhaps with Gregor Samsa). 

 

 

IV.

 

Another term often heard in therian circles is shifting ... One which is used to signify a radical change of perception and cognitive outlook following a move made from human to nonhuman identity. 

 

This shift may be partial or complete, substantial or subtle, but it is always subjectively dramatic unless one happens to be a contherianthrope; a term coined to refer to those individuals who feel that rather than shifting between human and nonhuman ways of being, they always embody and experience both forms simultaneously and have merged human and animal aspects into a single integrated whole. 

 

For contherianthropes, shifting, if the term means anything, is akin to a mild change of mood.

 

More controversially is the claim made by some therianthropes that they undergo an actual physical change to their appearance. This, however, is very much a minority view and most people - both within the therianthrope sub-culture and outside it - remain sceptical that gross physical transformations à la Lawrence Talbot can actually occur. 

 

 

V.

 

The question that ultimately arises is: Are therians mentally disturbed? 

 

By which I mean, can therians be characterised as individuals who manifest a clinically significant disturbance in their cognition, emotional regulation, and/or behaviour that is usually associated with distress or impairment in important areas of functioning?

 

The answer, I suppose, depends ... 

 

For whilst some therians can legitimately be labelled as schizophrenic, struggling as they seem to be with a serious dissociative identity disorder - and whilst a rare few might even be diagnosed as suffering from clinical lycanthropy, a condition in which the subject fully believes he or she has transformed into an animal and behaves in a manner that seriously impacts upon their ability to function socially - the majority of therianthropes are probably suffering no more than a type of body dysmorphia. 

 

That is to say, a non-clinical condition which, whilst resulting in an acute dissatisfaction with their human form and appearance, is ultimately little different from the feeling experienced by those who seek gender reassignment or wish to undergo other types of surgical and non-surgical body modification, for example. 

 

Personally, I don't have a problem with such people and find those who do raise objections on moral and/or pseudo-medical grounds, as far more disturbed and disturbing. But it does lead into the wider debate concerning madness and animality, which is interestingly addressed by Foucault in his work Madness and Civilization (1964) [2] ...

 

 

VI. 

 

For Foucault, animality - like insanity - is a constructed category that is determined differently in different times and places. During the Middle Ages, he writes, "legions of animals, named once and for all by Adam, symbolically bear the values of humanity" [3]. 

 

But, by the beginning of the Renaissance, "animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men's hearts" [4]. 

 

Animality and wildness were now firmly linked, but still the mad were thought to embody some of the more positive qualities of animals, making them potential sources not only of inhuman passion, but also divine revelation. This, however, was to radically change in what Foucault thinks of as the Classical Age of Reason (c.1650-1800). 

 

During this period, madness was completely "divested of spiritual and pedagogic value" [5] and whereas animality "once had value as the sign of the extra-worldly" [6] it was now simply identified as a form of inferior being and degraded existence. Those who now gave themselves over to madness and behaved like wild beasts, would be denied human status and all the accompanying privileges; they would be treated like animals and subjected to harsh disciplinary training: 

 

"Those chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy: as if madness, at its extreme point […] managed to rejoin […] the immediate violence of animality.” [7]

 

For Foucault, the dehumanization process is crucial here and has the following meaning: it shows that man no longer has any deep fear of (or respect for) the animal and that "animal metamorphosis is no longer the visible sign of infernal powers" [8]. 

 

Foucault continues: 

 

"The animal in man no longer has any value as the sign of a Beyond; it has become his madness, without relation to anything but itself … The animality that rages in madness dispossesses man of what is specifically human in him; not in order to deliver him over to other powers, but simply to establish him at the zero degree of his own nature. For classicism, madness in its ultimate form is man in immediate relation to his animality […]" [9]

 

The 18th-century is the great century of the animal-madmen - as it is of vampires and werewolves - the century of lunatics with superhuman strength that protected them from ill health and extreme conditions of hunger, cold, and pain (thus they had no need for adequate food or clothing, or for kind treatment); the century in which the treatment of the insane is based upon the perceived need not to restore the human element, but to eradicate it entirely. 

 

For only when the madman has completely become a beast, can the true scandal of madness, which is the presence of the animal in man, be resolved. 

 

 

VII.

 

Where, then, does this leave us? 

 

Well, in a sense, I kind of admire those therianthropes and other lunatics today who defiantly declare themselves to be beasts; perhaps it takes a certain degree of courage as well as mania to travel to the very edge of humanity and into an unnatural animal becoming, if only as a mad fantasy. 

 

The category of animality will undoubtedly one day be constructed differently; perhaps we will even come to value and admire animals once more. But in the meantime, for any man or woman to identify themselves as a therian is to say in a Rimbaud-like manner: I am a beast, and I am of an inferior species for all eternity [10]. 

 

 

Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Talbot 

in The Wolf Man (1941)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Therianthropy is a generic term for any transformation of a human being into another animal form, derived from the Greek terms, therion, meaning beast and anthrōpos, meaning man. Often, the term lycanthropy - which, strictly speaking, refers to were-wolfism - is used as a virtual synonym, but I prefer to use the former term in order to avoid confusion.

 

[2] Focault's work was originlly published in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. The 1964 English translation by Richard Howard was an abridged version of this book. I am using the 2004 Routledge edition of this text. 

 

[3] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 18.

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton, 'The Animal Question in Continental Philosophy', an introduction to Animal Philosophy, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, (Continuum, 2004), p. xxi.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 68. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 69.

 

[9]  Ibid.

 

[10] I'm paraphrasing Rimbaud writing in his extended prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (1873); see the section translated into English as 'Bad Blood' where he confesses that he has always belonged to an inferior race. 

 

This material is a revised extract from 'In the Company of Wolves: Animal Transformation Fantasy', Chapter 5 of Zoophilia, Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

      

A related post to this one on the furry fandom and otherkin - also taken from the above work - can be read here.  

A Brief Note on the Queer Gothic, etc.

Margarita Dadykina: Cathy's Ghost (2019) 

Sculpted figure (58 x 20 cm)

I. 

 

Sometimes, a literary genre and a theoretical framework can become so inextricably entwined that it is difficult to discuss the one without reference to the other. Thus it is, for example, that next month sees the publication of a new collection of essays exploring the gothic from a queer perspective [1].   

 

This notion of the queer gothic was one that I dipped in-and-out of over ten years ago, producing three papers presented at Treadwell's Bookshop; the first on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); the second on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the third on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) [2]. 

 

Anyway, in anticipation of the Edinburgh Companion, here are some remarks I made back in 2014 in an attempt to (loosely) define what I understood by gothic queerness (as well as related terms, including the uncanny and the perverse) ... 

 

II. 

 

My concern with the gothic relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I'm not concerned with Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale). 

 

Primarily, then, it's to a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre I refer when I use the term gothic, whilst happily acknowledging that elements of this have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies. Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender and sexual nonconformity to issues within hauntology and demonology. 

 

Obviously, this is facilitated by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking [3].

 

We can certainly never overestimate the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality. For not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity [4]. 

 

If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto is the first gothic novel - published in 1764 - it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked. 

 

Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). 

 

However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché; not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, it is similar to pornography. Both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations" [5]. 

 

Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it's true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself" [6]. 

 

And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it's never boring. It constantly opens up new worlds of knowledge and provides an opportunity to explore the pleasures of socio-erotic transgression; incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and spectrophilia. 

 

Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (written in 1785, but not published until 1904), his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though the Divine Marquis himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books [7]. 

 

So, to conclude this briefest of brief introductions to the gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for things to go bump in the night. More than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human - and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts and ghouls might appreciate. 

 

And if, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. And it is this, as indicated, which qualifies it as queer [8]. 

 

And what do I mean by queer?  

 

Well, let me stress that I'm certainly not using the term queer or the concept of queerness as synonymous with either homosexuality or gayness [9]. Indeed, I vigorously object to those who conflate ideas in this manner and use queer as an overarching and unifying label for what are distinct forms of practice, behaviour and identity (often with nothing queer about them). 

 

For me, the appeal of queerness is twofold: 

 

Firstly, it is not a positivity or subject position. It's a transpositional negativity - i.e., a mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed categorical definition and remains permanently at odds with all forms of legitimacy and identity. Queer, ultimately, doesn't refer to anyone or anything; it's a form of non-being "utterly inimical to [...] authentic existence, ontological or natural" [10]. 

 

Secondly, it subsumes and dissolves all forms of dualism; not only sexual and gender oppositions, but also that model of thinking which would keep life and death as absolutely distinct and separate categories. Ultimately, it's this thanatological project that I most wish to further, even if that involves unfolding it within a spooky sexual context. This project, which is both morbid and material, picks up on Nietzsche's contention that life isn't categorically different from or opposed to death; that being alive is, in fact, simply a rare and unusually complex way of being dead [11].

 

Death, we might say, is the material kingdom of the actual and vital signs, although real, are but an epiphenomenal effect of matter. Or, to put it another way, life is a momentary stabilization of solar energy that upon death is released from its molar entrapment back into unformed chaos and an infinite process of molecular disintegration [12]. This becomes important when arguing that there can't really be any serious philosophical objections to romancing corpses or getting it on with ghosts - even whilst there may well be legitimate moral, social, and cultural reservations. 

 

Moving on, we must of course mention the perverse ... 

 

The perverse might be thought of as a more aggressive and transgressive form of queerness; one that takes us to the very heart of a game involving desire, deviation, and damnation. Historically, perversion is tied to political insurrection and involves straying or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right. To those who live their whole lives on the straight and narrow it is obviously an abhorrent concept. But, personally, I think it’s a good thing to stray off the path; just as it's preferable to fall into sin, rather than fall into line [13]. 

 

Figures like Heathcliff or Dorian Gray are irresistibly drawn towards the perverse. Which is to say they are intellectually predisposed towards evil and that which is unnatural or anti-natural. The former, for example, knowingly engages in practices such as necrophilia and spectrophilia. And there's the rub; Heathcliff is fully aware of what he's doing and what he wants to do. It's the perversion of free will that leads to transgression, says Augustine. And it is transgression that brings death into the world. 

 

But it is also that which brings understanding and gives pleasure and we should never forget or underestimate the pleasure of perversion. As Freud was led to conclude, it's the perversions alone that ultimately make happy [14].

 

Finally, there's one more term which we simply must mention; one made famous by Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche ...

 

The uncanny is, arguably, also a form of queerness. But in designating the sinister, gruesome, and lugubrious it moves beyond sexual strangeness and gender troubling. The uncanny is more likely to give us the creeps than excite our desire. Wuthering Heights is, for me at least, the greatest of all uncanny novels; familiar, yet alien, seductive, yet repulsive; a book in which even the mortal status of the lovers is never fixed.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 

      There seems to be some interesting material in this 368 page book divided into three main sections - Queer Times, Queer Monsters, and Queer Forms - although, having said that, it does seem slightly old hat (though maybe I'm just miffed that I wasn't invited to contribute to the book). 

 

[2] 'Elements of Gothic Queerness in The Picture of Dorian Gray' was presented at Treadwell's on 18 May, 2011. This was followed by 'The Scarlet Letter: An Earthly Story with a Hellish Meaning' on 4 July, 2013 (advertised as 'A Slice of American Gothic for American Independence Day'). 

      As for the paper entitled 'Spectrophilia and Other Queer Goings On in the Tale of Wuthering Heights', this was due to be presented at Treadwell's on 7 October, 2014, but unfortunately had to be cancelled due to unforeseen (and unrecalled) circumstances. 

      Together, these essays formed part of a wider project to do with perverse materialism.

 

[3] See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

 

[4] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

 

[5] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, p. 9. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 10. 

 

[7] Sade did admire at least one gothic novel, namely Matthew Gregory’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), a work in which every attempt was made to outrage readers in as many explicit, violent, and perverse ways as possible. 

 

[8] I don't want to overstate the case or make too wide a claim here. Haggerty is right to carefully resist the temptation to uncritically celebrate the gothic and its literary-cultural significance. As he points out, the genre was always somewhat marginal and semi-legitimate and never succeeded in challenging the dominant mainstream fiction of the age, which remained rigidly straight and heteronormative. 

      Also, if it provided alternative (queerer) ways to think through the politics of desire, it was ultimately powerless to prevent the "imposition of sexological thinking at the end of the nineteenth century". At best, the gothic continued to cast a shadow across the bright new world of scientia sexualis. See Queer Gothic, p. 19. 

 

[9] Elisa Glick is a Marxist critic guilty of this; see p. 11 of her book Materializing Queer Desire (SUNY Press, 2009), where she rather weakly explains her reasons for wanting to employ (and I would say misuse) the term queer synonymously with gay, lesbian, and homosexual. 

 

[10] Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 140. 

      I’m tempted, in fact, to drop the term queer altogether here and use instead a notion of the uncanny, which is closely related but without the sexual overtones. 

 

[11] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 109, p. 168. 

 

[12] Those who attended Treadwell's regularly in 2006 will perhaps remember my six week course on thanatology in which these ideas were discussed in detail and at length. The work can be found in The Treadwell’s Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

 

[13] Even such a trite and common expression as the straight and narrow - thought of as the one true path into the future - reveals something crucial about Western metaphysical thinking; note the linkage of truth with linearity and teleology. People think they are strolling along this path naturally or by choice, but in fact they march along it by arrangement and coercion. 

 

[14] Freud made the attainment of (non-functional, non-reproductive) pleasure central to his theory of perversion and stressed that it is the perversions that make happy; their repression which causes suffering and neuroses. Freud also understands that this is why many normal individuals strongly dislike queers who dare to manifest and flaunt their perversity; not only do they find them monstrous and threatening, but also seductive and this places them in the uncomfortable position of having to overcome a secret envy of those who enjoy illicit pleasures. 

      Note too how Freud compares the perversions to the grotesque demons used to illustrate the temptation of the saints. This is precisely how such images and descriptions continue to function within gothic literature; i.e. as uncanny manifestations and queer embodiments of the perverse; a threatening excess of difference and deformity. See his Three Essays on the Theory of Human Sexuality, (1905). 

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Melancholia to Bare Life)

The MIT Press (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

Neue deutsche Denke are a bit like buses; you wait ages for one to come along, then two or three arrive on the scene. Byung-Chul Han is one such thinker; part of a generation that also includes, for example, Markus Gabriel [a] and Armen Avanessian [b]. 

 

Han is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is (according to his publishers) one of the most widely read theorists writing today, both inside and outside the Academy; the author of over twenty books, including (in English) The Burnout Society (2015), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017), and The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2017).

 

But the text I wish to discuss here is an essay on love entitled The Agony of Eros (2017), in which he argues that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself ...

II. 

 

The Agony of Eros comes with a foreword by Alain Badiou, whom, readers will recall, published his own little book on love - Éloge de l'amour - in 2009, in which he argued (after Rimbaud) that love needs re-inventing as an opportunity - not for pleasure, so much as for a new form of self and (communist) society; for love provides one possible source of resistance to the obscenity of the market. [c]   

 

I have to say, for me, attaching this foreword is mistaken. Han doesn't need a formal blessing from Badiou, the old man of French philosophy, and doesn't need his text to be vouched for by someone who uses the phrase true love three times in the space of a single page and insists that this authentic form of experience is an affirmation of alterity and a radical refusal of the norms of globalised capitalism. 

 

I mean, come on ...! Reading this almost makes me immediately put the book down. I'm sure Badiou sincerely clings to such fantasy, but I'm hoping Han is going to offer a slightly more sophisticated take on the topic - though I already have my doubts, if, indeed, it's true that he essentially offers a strong reading of the former's own political thesis concerning the revolutionary potential of love.  

 

Anyway, let's find out ... Note that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's own.

 

 

III.

 

Melancholia

 

The crisis of love - taken as a given - is not due, argues Han, to greater freedom and unlimited possibilities, but to an "erosion of the Other [...] occurring in all spheres of life", along with its corollary, the increasing "narcissification of the Self" [d].

 

Now, that might be so, but it's hardly a new or original observation. D. H. Lawrence was saying much the same thing a hundred years ago [e]. And, without referring directly to his work, Han acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean Baudrillard by adopting the phrase l'enfer du même to describe the situation we now find ourselves in [f].        

 

We need to escape from this hell of the same and encounter the atopic Other in all their negativity, otherwise we are are heading for depression, says Han. But this escape might not be a particularly pleasant experience; for it seems that "only an apocalypse can liberate - indeed, redeem - us from the hell of the same, and lead us toward the Other." [3] 

 

To which one might ask: Is it really worth it?  

 

All this talk of healing and cleansing via a disastrous event, a terrible experience, or a sacrifice of the self, makes one wonder whether Han's been watching too many films by Lars von Trier and listening to too many operas by Richard Wagner [g].

 

Do we really want to reinvoke "the proximity of eros and death" [5] in order to liberate ourselves from narcissistic captivity? Does it really require courage to dream of the lovely Ophelia, surrounded by fallen flowers, "drifting in the water with her mouth half open - her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover" [6], or is it not simply plunging back into the same old Romantic (and Christian moral) idealism whose formula reads: salvation via catastrophic fatality ...? 

 

Over to you on this one Síomón ... 

 

   

Being Able Not to Be Able

 

Han says we are living in a neoliberal achievement society dominated by the can-do frame of mind; one in which citizens are self-motivated and self-exploiting. Foucault thought this an improvement upon disciplinary society and in his later work adopted a sympathetic attitude towards neoliberalism and the civil liberty it allows. 

 

But Han disagrees and thinks Foucault naive in his uncritical assumptions and failure to notice "the structure of violence and coercion underwriting the neoliberal dictum of freedom" [10]. Neoliberal freedom is the freedom of auto-exploitation and the will to achieve ends with the subject wearing themselves out.     

 

Han wants people to recognise their limitations; to see that love is a relationship "situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability" and ultimately finds expression "as a kind of failure" [11] and certainly not as sexual success. Indeed, Han seems to look to a time that is after the orgy when we revalue "dignity, decency, and propriety" [13] as methods of maintaining distance and thus preserving otherness. 

 

A time that is also post social media. For by means of social media, "we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance [...] to create proximity" [13]. But this simply results in "making the Other disappear" [13]. In other words - and in words that Heidegger might have approved of - the total abolition of remoteness "does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it" [13] [h]. 

 

So, the best thing lovers can do is keep apart - in every sense - and realise that love is not about enjoyment or the generation of pleasant feelings; nor is it about "inconsequential emotion and arousal" [13]. It is, rather,  "something that wounds or incites passion" [14] and often ends with injury.

 

I have to admit, I rather admire this model of love with built in negativity; "nourished by what doesn't yet exist" [16]. I'm all for secrecy, silence, and seduction rather than the guarateed satisfaction of needs. Indeed, I've been writing in favour of delayed gratification and the deferral of pleasure for years: click here, for example.        

 

Bare Life

 

The negative model of love, conceived in terms of injury and transformation, is, says Han, in danger of disappearing completely thanks to love's "increasing positivization and domestication" [18]. We no longer fall in love and risk madness, but enter into a relationship of mutual consent in which we are allowed to stay the same and seek only "the confirmation of oneself in the Other" [18].

 

Love has become a mixture of hedonistic calculation and stress relief; lacking all transcendence and transgression, there is nothing fatal (or even dangerous) in it. The modern day lover prefers bourgeois good health over "sovereignty and freedom" [19]. For Han, this is not the good life as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, but threadbare existence; life of comfort and convenience; the sort of life longed for by the Letzter Mensch who invented happiness. 

 

Again, I smile at all this as it reminds me of what I was writing a decade ago - in the essays collected in Erotomania (2010), for example. But I don't believe I ever arrived at the (neo-Hegelian) conclusion that "Love is an absolute end unto itself." [22] Probably that's because I always remember Lawrence saying that whilst in love one must give, one must never give oneself away and that it was all too easy to die for love - the hard thing being to live for it. 

 

Of course, Han is talking of death in a psycho-symbolic rather than a biological sense and he is thinking of Bataille when he insists that "The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience" [25]. Which, again, might be the case, but it all seems so overblown and old hat - as Houellebecq would say: "We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..." [i]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and writer based at the University of Bonn. He regards himself as a thinker in the post-Kantian tradition concerned with metaontology and metametaphysics. Gabriel has spoken out against government measures taken in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, believing them to be unjustified and a step on the road towards a cyber dictatorship (or virocracy). 

      See: Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

 

[b] Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, artist, and theorist who has held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia and Yale University. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. His concept of hyperstition also designates a method for the actualization in the present of ideas or fictions from the future. 

      See: Hyperstition (2015) a documentary film on time, narrative, philosophy and theory by Christopher Roth in collaboration with Armen Avanessian: click here for a trailer on Vimeo.   

 

[c] See In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou (with Nicholas Truong), trans. Peter Bush, (Serpent's Tail, 2012). 

[d] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Love, trans. Erik Butler, (The MIT Press, 2017), p. 3. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[e] See for example what Lawrence writes in his 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 329-336. 

      These lines give a good idea of how Lawrence anticipates Byung-Chul Han and the French theory he relies upon:

      "Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute [...]

      Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self-interest. [...] It is inevitable  when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. [...] The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow [...] what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness. 

      But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing." [335]     

 

[f] L'enfer du même is poorly translated by Erik Butler as 'inferno of the same', which - apart from sounding like some cheesy disco - thereby misses the fact that Baudrillard was explicitly playing on Sartre's famous phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres, commonly translated into English as 'Hell is other people'. I have therefore modified Butler's translation in this post. 

      Those interested to know more, should see Baudrillard's essay 'The Hell of the Same', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993).  

[g] Han's first chapter is essentially an interpretation of von Trier's Melancholia (2011); a film inspired by a depressive episode which prominently features music from the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  

[h] See my post of 22 September, 2021: On the Question of Distance and Proximity. 

[i] Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, (Serpent's Tail, 1998). 

      With this brilliant line, from his debut novel, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion which characterizes the early 21st century. And he does so twenty years before Byung-Chul Han picks up the idea and runs with it. 

 

This post continues in part two - from Porn to The End of Theory - which can be read by clicking here. 

The Scar is the Eye of the Violet: On Stigmatophilia and Sexual Healing

Illustration attributed to Jean Le Noir from 

The Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg (c. 1345)

showing Christ's side wound in detail

 

 

I. Long Live the New Flesh

 

In his beautiful erotico-blasphemous short novel The Escaped Cock [a], D. H. Lawrence has an almost fetishistic interest in the wounds and scars left on the body of the man who died, following his crucifixion and resurrection [b]. 

 

The climax of the tale sees the man stripping naked before a priestess of Isis and submitting to her touch, in order that he may be healed and released from past pain and old suffering:

"'Let me annoint you!' the woman said to him softly, 'let me annoint the scars! Show me, and let me annoint them!'

      He forgot his nakedness in the re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: 'What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life, the scar is the eye of the violet.'" [157]

 

This is an astonishing piece of writing - particularly the last line, which is one that David Cronenberg would have been proud of. 

 

Next, the woman of Isis chafes the man's feet with oil and tender healing, before directing him towards her goddess: "And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing" [158], the woman stooped in order to examine the scar "in the soft flesh of the socket of his side" [158]; a scar which resembled  "an eye sore with endless weeping" [158]. 

 

It was from this deep wound just above his hip, that the man who died had lost his life ...

 

"The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her palm over over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed his life again [...] And in the dark, wild pain and panic of consciousness rang only one cry: Oh, how can she take this death out of me? [...]

      In silence she softly, rhythmically chafed the scar with oil [...] while the vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power [...] gradually warmth began to take the place of cold terror, and he felt: I am going to be flushed warm again, I am going to be whole!" [158] 

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth [...] And the wailing died out altogether, and there was stillness and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stilless, wholeness." [159] 

 

At the same time, the man who died experiences a new sun dawning within the perfect inner darkness of his body. Not only that, but he feels the blaze of his manhood rise up. So he unfastens the woman's linen tunic and slips the garment down, exposing her white-gold breasts. Pulling her to him "with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire" [160], they fuck - not once but twice.

 

"Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his side with her finger-tips, and said:

      'But they no longer hurt?'

      'They are suns!' he said. 'They shine from your touch. They are my atonement with you.'" [160] 

 

 

II. The World Was Beginning to Flower into Wounds 

 

Of course, Lawrence isn't the only author to explore the eroticism of wounds as sites of perverse bliss and to imagine what Foucault would later term a new economy of bodies and their pleasures ... 

 

In his novel Crash J. G. Ballard provides the following tender (but disquieting) scene between the narrator of the tale - also named Ballard - and a severely crippled young woman, Gabrielle, in the back of her small, specially adapted car: 

 

"As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. [...] Our sexual acts were exploratory ordeals." [c] 

 

Ballard continues, in the uniquely erotico-clinical language that characterises the novel and which, almost impossible to paraphrase, can only be quoted at length:

 

"In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the imagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the small wounds on my own body [...] I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm - these were the templates for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created [...] As she sat passively in my arms [...] I realised this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act - breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris - failed to provide any excitement for us."

 

"Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. [...] Gabrielle's hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone [...] As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures [...]  As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast, as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of a sexuality made possible by our two car-crashes.

      My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. 

      My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile. 

      During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death."

 

Like the man who died and the priestess of Isis, it might be argued that Ballard and Gabrielle were implicated with each other in sacred mysteries - albeit within an age shaped by technology - though whether inseminating wounds with sperm might trigger the evolution of new sex organs, is, I suspect, rather fanciful ...  

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Lawrence's The Escaped Cock was originally published by the Black Sun Press (Paris, 1929). I am referring to the version of the tale published in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163.    

[b] I'm aware that this same fetishistic adoration of holy wounds was a significant aspect of medieval Christian worship (as the illustration to this post shows) and I also know that this has since become of great interest to those wishing to queer the gospels and feminise the body of Christ. I will develop this theme at length in a post to be published shortly entitled Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

 

[c] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). Unfortunately, I can't give page references as don't have my copy of the novel to hand. I'm relying here on a pdf made available on booksvooks.com: click here. All the material quoted is found in chapter 19. 

 

For an earlier post on Ballard's novel Crash, please click here.