On Luce Irigaray's Vegetal Idealism

Columbia University Press, 2016

Cover image: Jessica Hines

I.

 

When Luce Irigaray first approached Michael Marder with the idea of co-authoring a book on plant life - or vegetal being, as philosophers like to say - one wonders what he was hoping for ...?

Actually, I know what he was hoping for, as Marder conveniently tells us in the epilogue to his half of the work: he was hoping that he and Irigaray might produce a work that would "open alternative horizons for relating to the vegetal world". 

What he doesn't tell us is whether he feels they succeeded in this - or whether he was as disappointed as I was with her feeble and all too human contribution; one that tells us a lot about her, but very little about the plants of which she speaks (and, arguably, exploits). 

II.

Irigaray writes of her disillusion with the intellectual world and academic establishment which, she says, has treated her unfairly in the past; she speaks also of her desire to see a new order in which plants and people can bloom and her book sales receive the kind of numbers they deserve.     

Following professional and personal difficulties - including a car accident - Irigaray discovered yoga and turned to the healing power of plants which, like her, were often overlooked, objectified, or seriously maltreated: trees, for example, are today nothing but a material resource at the disposal of human beings (what Heidegger calls a standing reserve).

To be fair, following publication of Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray was expelled from the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, sacked from her university teaching post, and even snubbed by Simone de Beauvoir, but I'm not sure that these things attract the sympathy of plants - or indeed that they share her sense of being rejected and undervalued.

She likes sitting quietly with them - meeting them in silence - and that's fine. But when she suggests they like sitting quietly with her or exerting eco-therapeutic powers, then I'm more sceptical.

Similarly, a lot of her metaphorical rhetoric seems deeply suspect to me; particularly when framed within the untenable (because naive and idealistic) language of vitalism and nature, with the latter embarrassingly portrayed as something not merely hospitable but positively benign. In Irigaray's imaginary forest, plants peacefully coexist and thus provide a model for mankind of natural belonging in a world without strife or competition.

As Irving Goh notes:

"In this regard, Irigaray ignores or forgets how trees and plants compete with one another for sunlight and water; how parasitic plants feed on and off others for their own benefit; how weeds threaten the well-being or even survival of other plants [...] and how certain plants have features like thorns or bladelike leaves that can pose serious dangers to humans and animals, or how some of them are toxic to humans and animals [...]"
       

In short, all of the violence, cruelty and obscenity of the natural world - that which gives it much of its beauty (and which always shines through our attempts to idealise it) - is simply overlooked by Irigaray. Has she never heard of la vengeance des fleurs?

I don't want to come over all dark ecological, but Irigaray needs to address the question of evil in relation to vegetal being, otherwise she's offering us nothing but a romantic fantasy that is humanistic at the very least, if not just another depressing example of anthropocentric conceit. Her reductive insistence on the innocence of plants not only robs them of complexity - the vegetal world knows nothing of sexuated difference - it ultimately makes them boring.

Again, I can't help wondering what Marder makes of all this; he must have grimaced on more than one occasion as he read through her text - must have asked himself if, in fact, she'd even read his work on plant-thinking. Irigaray is (outrageously) forgetful of the otherness of vegetal being on at least two occasions:

"The first is when she says that 'looking at a tree brings me energy, whereas looking at a manufactured object takes energy away from me' (46-47), forgetting that the very book Through Vegetal Being to which Irigaray contributes is no less a printed, that is, manufactured, object, not to mention that its manufacturing process undoubtedly involved trees at some point. The second instance is when she declares herself a vegetarian (23) without any critical consideration of her consumption of plant life as such, not recognizing, in other words, her violence toward plant life as the latter becomes her primary dietary source. In both cases, I think it difficult for Irigaray to defend 'a sharing without infringing on the life of the other,' especially if 'life of the other' concerns plant life (44-45)."
  
At this point, I can't help but let out a small sigh ... I so wanted to like this work by Irigaray and was prepared to overlook many aspects of her writing that I have, in the past, found irritating. But how can one in good faith turn a blind eye to issues such as these raised by Irving Goh, or to sentences like this:

"It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me." 

Notes

Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being, (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 215 and 21.

Irving Goh, 'Le rejet of Luce Irigaray in Through Vegetal Being', research article in Differences, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 137-154. Lines quoted are on pp. 145 and 146-47. This essay can be read online via academia.edu: click here. 

For a reading of Irigaray's vegetal idealism in relation to D. H. Lawrence's work in Lady Chatterley's Lover, click here.

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Notes on Castration Anxiety with Reference to the Case of Oliver Mellors

Walk-Marcus: 04 Castration Anxiety

deviantart.com

I. Kastrationsangst

Castration anxiety is one of Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theories.

In brief, it's the conscious or unconscious - often overwhelming - fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense, that originates between the ages of three and five years old (i.e. the so-called phallic stage of psychosexual development in the child), frequently continuing long into adulthood. 

Freud suggests it's a universal male fear, tied to the Oedipus complex, though one rather suspects it's rooted in his own time and culture (parents in 19th century Europe would often threaten to punish their misbehaving sons by chopping it off - particularly if caught masturbating).  

In a metaphorical sense, castration anxiety refers more to a feeling of being insignificant or powerless - socially and/or sexually - and which expands into an existential fear of death, conceived from the perspective of the ego as the ultimate act of emasculation resulting in a total loss of self. 

II. The Case Of Oliver Mellors

Oliver Mellors - aka Lady Chatterley's Lover - clearly suffers from a form castration anxiety, as revealed, for example, in his astonishing rant to Connie about the shortcomings of his ex-wife Bertha. According to Mellors, Bertha would never simultaneously achieve orgasm with him, no matter how long he delayed his own climax:

"If I kept back half and hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting ..."

If this was bad enough, gradually things got worse:

"She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she's sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick."

Mellors is offering a variant of the classic vagina dentata myth in which a woman's cunt is said to be lined with sharp teeth - the implication being that coition was inherently dangerous to the male, as it might result in injury or emasculation (originally such tales were meant to be cautionary in nature and perhaps intended to discourage rape).

Camille Paglia argues that we should take these stories seriously and not consider them simply to be the product of sexist hallucination or misogynistic male fantasy. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she insists that the cunt is a dangerous place where insects and philosophers might easily lose their way.

The fact is, men enter the vagina in a state of phallic triumph, but invariably leave in a much diminished state. So maybe they are to some degree justified in their castration anxiety.   

Mellors, however, isn't just concerned about being nipped and torn by a vaginal beak - he's also worried that modern industrial civilisation, built upon the power of capital, wants to castrate working-class men like himself, robbing them of their spunk and making mincemeat of the Old Adam. 

Indeed, Mellors tells Connie that there's a global conspiracy on behalf of those in sexless authority to "cut off the world's cock" and they offer a cash incentive to those who help them achieve this: "a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls."   

Little wonder then, believing this as he does, that Mellors feels so threatened in his manhood and subscribes to a defianty phallocentric viewpoint.     

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Simone de Beauvoir: Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Pt. 2)

IV. BB and the Feminine Mystique

Four years after de Beauvoir published her fascinating little study of Bardot and the Lolita syndrome, the American feminist Betty Friedan gave us her seminal work The Feminine Mystique (1963).

In it, Friedan examines the problem that has no name - namely, the pressure exerted upon women to fulfil an ideal of femininity that is mysterious yet, nevertheless, rooted in biology and closely related to the creation and origin of life.

According to the proponents of this feminine mystique, it's a fatal mistake to think women are just like men, or can behave and become just like them. Instead, they should accept and value their own nature "which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love".

It is this kind of thinking that has succeeded, says Friedan, in burying millions of women alive. But it is this kind of thinking that Bardot seems to challenge. And thus whilst all men are surely drawn to her seductiveness, by no means are they kindly disposed towards her. BB simply doesn't play the game that they are used to and expect of her:

"Her flesh does not have the abundance that, in others, symbolizes passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she strips she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body, neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him. And that is precisely what wounds masculine pride."

In other words, BB silently asserts her equality and her dignity; she's never the victim and never anybody's slave or fool. She disturbs men by refusing to lend herself to phallocratic fantasy or idealistic sublimation, restoring and limiting sexuality to the body itself; to her breasts, her bottom, her thighs, etc.

De Beauvoir writes approvingly of the manner that Roger Vadim brings eroticism back down to earth in a society with spiritualistic pretensions. For when love has been disguised "in such falsely poetic trappings", it's refreshing to see a woman on screen who is libidinally prosaic.  

Having said that - and perhaps reminding herself that existentialism is, after all, a humanism - de Beauvoir regrets the rather dehumanising aspect of Vadim's project; i.e. the manner in which he reduces the world, things and bodies "to their immediate presence" (without history or a context of meaning).

Vadim does not seek the viewers' emotional complicity; he doesn't care if we find his films unconvincing or fail to relate to his characters. We know no more about Bardot's character (Juliette) at the end of And God Created Woman than at the beginning, despite having seen her naked. In effect, Vadim de-situates her sexuality, says de Beauvoir, turning spectators into frustrated voyeurs "unable to project themselves on the screen."

No wonder so many men describe (and condemn) Bardot as a pricktease [allumeuse].


V. Afterword on BB and Free Speech

De Beauvoir closes her little study of Bardot by expressing her hope that the bourgeois order will not find a way to silence her, or compel her to speak lying twaddle: "I hope that she will not resign herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity. I hope she will mature, but not change."

One can't help wondering what de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, would have made of the woman Bardot is today ...

Would she still declare her to be the most liberated woman in France and an engine of women's history? Would she regard her recent statements on immigration and Islam as a legitimate expression of free speech, or as an unacceptable form of hate speech?

Bardot certainly hasn't been silenced or resigned herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity - but has she matured, or simply become an elderly reactionary? She's certainly changed. But then, as Bardot herself says, only idiots refuse to do so and she doesn't give a fig about politically correct forms of feminism.  


Notes

Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (W. W. Norton, 2001).

To read part one of this post, click here.

Simone de Beauvoir: Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Pt. 1)

I. Initials BB

In 1959, Brigitte Bardot - the world's most outrageously sensual film star - was the subject of a 64-page study (with many half-tone illustrations) written by Simone de Beauvoir - France's leading female intellect.

De Beauvoir is intrigued by the sneering hostility that many of her compatriots feel for BB. Not a week goes by, she notes, without articles published in the press discussing her love life and analysing her personality; "but all of these articles [...] seethe with spite".

Many parents, priests and politicians seem to object to Bardot's very existence. At the very least, they call for her films to be banned in order to prevent her corrupting influence on society, particularly amongst the young. Of course, as de Beauvoir writes, it's nothing new for self-righteous moralists "to identify the flesh with sin and to dream of making a bonfire of works of art" that depict it in pornographic detail.

However, such puritanism still doesn't quite explain the French public's very peculiar hostility towards Bardot. After all, many other actresses have taken their clothes off on screen and traded on their physical charms without provoking such anger and dislike. So the question remains: why does BB arouse such animosity?


II. The Lolita Syndrome

If we want to understand why Bardot was regarded as a monument of immorality, it's irrelevant to consider what she was like in real life. The important thing, rather, is to place her within a modern mytho-erotic context and examine what de Beauvoir terms the Lolita syndrome; i.e., what is for some the shocking and deplorable truth that older men are often sexually attracted to much younger girls.   

Idealists want their arts and entertainments to have an element of romance. But they also expect things to remain wholesome and familiar. The male lead in a movie, for example, should be clean-cut and the object of his affection a woman who doesn't deviate too far from the girl-next-door. And at the end of the film there should be the sound of wedding bells. 

Post-1945, however, serious film-makers were heading in a rather different direction. Their model of eroticism was obsessive and destructive: amour fou. And they were interested in creating a new Eve who was part hoyden, part femme fatale and whose youth opened up that pathos of distance that seems so necessary to (middle-aged male) desire:

"Brigitte Bardot is the most perfect specimen of these ambiguous nymphs. Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. Femininity triumphs in her delightful bosom. The long voluptuous tresses of Melisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif. The line of her lips forms a childish pout, and at the same time those lips are very kissable. She goes about barefooted, she turns her nose up at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance."


III. BBeyond Good and Evil
      

But BB is not just sexy in a conventional sense. Nor even is this "strange little creature" fully human:

"It has often been said that her face has only one expression. It is true that the outer world is hardly reflected in it at all and that it does not reveal great inner disturbance. But that air of indifference becomes her. BB has not been marked by experience [...] the lessons of life are too confused for her to have learned anything from them. She is without memory, without a past, and, thanks to this ignorance, she retains the perfect innocence that is attributed to a mythical childhood."

In a sense, Bardiot is inhuman - or superhuman - or both; a force of nature who doesn't act before the camera but just is. Nevertheless, she does seem to reinforce traditional ideas of femininity; temperamental, unpredictable, wild, impulsive ... a feral child in need of taming and the guidance of an experienced male. 

However, this sexual stereotype and sexist cliché - which so flatters masculine vanity - is no longer tenable; cinema goers in the post-War period were no longer prepared to believe in this phallocratic fantasy in which the old order was restored and everyone lived happily ever after.

And this is why Roger Vadim's 1956 film starring Bardot - Et Dieu… créa la femme - is a great work; one that doesn't fall into triviality and falsity, but remains honest to the spirit of the times by presenting us with a character, Juliette, who will never be subordinated, or settle down and become a model wife and mother.

De Beauvoir writes:

"Ignorance and inexperience can be remedied, but BB is not only unsophisticated but dangerously sincere. The perversity of a 'Baby Doll' can be handled by a psychiatrist; there are ways and means of calming the resentments of a rebellious girl and winning her over to virtue. [... But] BB is neither perverse nor rebellious nor immoral, and that is why morality does not have a chance with her. Good and evil are part of conventions to which she would not even think of bowing."

She continues:

"BB does not try to scandalize. She has no demands to make; she is no more conscious of her rights than she is of her duties. She follows her inclinations. She eats when she is hungry and makes love with the same unceremonious simplicity. Desire and pleasure seem to her more convincing than precepts and conventions. She does not criticize others. She does as she pleases, and that is what is disturbing. [...] Moral lapses can be corrected, but how could BB be cured of that dazzling virtue - genuineness? It is her very substance. Neither blows nor fine arguments nor love can take it from her. She rejects not only hypocrisy and reprimands, but also prudence and calculation and premiditation of any kind."

Bardot is a woman who lives only in the present - now/here - and for whom the future is one of those "adult conventions in which she has no confidence". And this is why so many people fear and hate her. If she were a conventionally bad girl figure - coquettish and calculating - there'd be no real problem. But when evil "takes on the colours of innocence", then good people everywhere are radically disconcerted. 

In sum: BB is "neither depraved nor venal". She might lift up her skirt and flash her knickers, but there is a kind of disarming candour, playfulness, and healthy sensuality in her gestures: "It is impossible to see in her the touch of Satan, and for that reason she seems all the more diabolical to women who feel humiliated and threatened by her beauty."


See: Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).

Note: this post continues in part two: click here.

Le Visqueux: Notes on Existential Slime and Ontological Sexism

I've never been a great fan of Jean-Paul Sartre and fully endorse Heidegger's repudiation of the Frenchman's attempt to characterize existentialism as a humanism. Mostly though, my dislike of Sartre is an irrational one. Simply put, I've always found him physically repulsive; one wouldn't want to cruise his body, as Barthes would say.

To me, there's something slimy about him - which is ironic, since Sartre offers a controversial account of slime and the danger of all things gooey (including women) towards the end of his most famous and sustained work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943).

Le visqueux, says Sartre, compromises the masculine, non-sticky, sugar-free nature of consciousness or being-for-itself and threatens to submerge the latter in what Camille Paglia memorably describes as "the fleshy muck of the generative matrix" - just like a wasp drowning in the jam.

Slime, in all its base viscosity, affords us neither the reassuring inertia of the solid, nor the liquid dynamism of a fluid. It sticks to us and it sucks us in: it is the feminine revenge of non-conscious being that exists in itself beyond our knowledge of it.

The gynephobic character of this language - and let's not even get started on what he says about holes and the nature of the obscene - would be shocking, were it not so ludicrous and dated. But one can't help wondering what, privately, Simone made of it ...?

In her own writings, she happily adopted Sartre's ontology and seemed to turn a blind eye to his sexism. But what about in the bedroom? One likes to think she might have had a word in his ear about the nature of embodiment and how, whilst a dry soul is best, a moist cunt is the bestest thing of all.   

See:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1969), pp. 610-12.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.

See also Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, 'Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis', in Philosophical Forum, (vol. V, 1973), pp. 112-27.

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

On the Freedom to Hate: A Review of Camille Paglia's "Free Women, Free Men"

If interested in seeing Ms Paglia speak about her new book and take questions 

on her work, then click here to watch an event at Brooklyn Public Library 

that was live-streamed on YouTube on 16 March, 2017

Self-confessed Sadean schoolmarm, Camille Paglia, has a new book out and depending on how well disposed one is towards Ms Paglia will determine how one receives this retrospective collection of articles, excerpts, lectures, interviews, and half-a-dozen photos taken in her prime that "visually transmit [her] philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism". 

Those who can't stand her - and there are many such people - will dismiss it as little more than an exercise in nostalgia; a rather sad attempt by a woman of seventy to relive the past when, briefly, she seemed to have her finger pressed firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture. Those, however, who still find her a bold and brilliant - if sometimes bonkers - writer and critic, will doubtless accept her own assessment of the work and its value:

"I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behaviour in our time."

   

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

For when you start to read the book you soon discover that those heterodox ideas she refers to are often no more than a mishmash of secondhand and often highly suspect concepts and clichés borrowed from her favourite authors and TV shows and if they do continue to resonate it's only in the minds of those susceptible to her brand of messianic pop-philosophy.

Someone once compared Sexual Personae (1990) - the 700 page tome that established her name and for which she remains best known - to Mein Kampf. That's a little unfair, but you know exactly what they mean; the sweeping generalisations and violent assertions; the egomania and wild conflations of the personal and the political; the mix of vulgarity and rancour ... And then there's the bad points - ba-dum tss!

(Don't worry, Paglia loves witty one-liners like this and prides herself on her use of them "inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers".)

One gets the impression that Paglia, like Hitler, feels she's the victim of a conspiracy and that her entire career has been one long struggle against Lügen, Dummheit und Feigheit - or, in her case, poststructuralism, political correctness and the wrong type of feminism. Paglia argues that these forces curtail freedom of thought and expression and deny what she terms "the common sense realities of everyday life", such as gender binarism and the immutable laws of nature. 

Thus, Paglia wishes to make it perfectly clear in her introduction that whilst her "dissident brand of feminism" is grounded in childhood experiences of dressing up as Robin Hood, Napoleon, and Hamlet, this "passionate identification with heroic male figures" never for one moment encouraged her to think that she was actually a boy or that "medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life".

For whilst perfectly happy to engage in youthful transvestism and to later declare herself a lesbian, Paglia doesn't have much time for transsexuals who, thanks to "ill-informed academic theorists", have been led to believe that sex and gender are "superficial, fictive phenomena" and that they can refuse their biological destiny. Such thinking has not only "sowed confusion among young people", but "seriously damaged feminism", she says - but without bothering to explain how or why, or provide any evidence for these claims.

Somewhat strangely, having just insisted on the fact that "the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death", Paglia then boasts of being a gender rebel who exasperated teachers with her "blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot" and stubborn refusal to sing along with Doris Day whom, like Debbie Reynolds, she dislikes for being a chirpy, all-American blonde. 

Her only escapes from the "suffocating conformism of the 1950s" and the "repressive homogeneity of that period", were cinema, TV and "the brash, body-based rhythms of rock 'n' roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music". Oh, and archaeology; for even as a nine-year-old, Camille was fascinated by the "monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture".

By her early teens, thanks to Katherine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart, Paglia had discovered a feisty model of feminism that she could make her own. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, she was given a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's classic and was stunned by the "imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time". And so it transpires that The Second Sex - not Mein Kampf - is the literary source of Paglia's style and her inspiration to produce work "on the grand scale". 

Clearly, over a quarter of a century later, the "vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists" still rankle with Paglia. It would be nice, for her sake, if she could learn from Nietzsche - one of her philosophical heroes - not simply to forgive (for that is merely Christian), but to forget all the "outlandish libels" written against her and her work. But, alas, one suspects she's a woman who never forgets anything, enjoys holding eternal grudges, and passionately desires to have revenge upon her enemies. Maybe this will to vendetta, like her fetishistic fascination with stiletto heels, is due to her Southern Italian ancestry ...

Nevertheless, to witness her continuing feuds and bitching about long dead opponents, such as Andrea Dworkin, reminds me of Johnny Rotten still slandering Malcolm and moaning over his supposed mistreatment from forty years ago. You just wish they would let it go, but, like Lydon, Paglia probably believes anger is the source of her energy - that and the "uncompromising ethnicity" of Barbara Streisand who destroyed the "genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds regime", but never received due credit, according to Paglia, "for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism".

When not in awe of Funny Girl Babs and other Jewish-American women from NYC - all of whom were "politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free" thanks to the "harrowing experience of their grandparents' generation during the Holocaust" - Paglia was getting herself worked up over the "vivacious young women" of Swinging London, as well as the sexy Bond girls, Mrs Peel, and the lovely cave woman, Loana, from One Million Years B.C. (1966) who, like Honey Ryder, deserves to be "incorporated into the history of women's modern advance".

Not that Raquel Welch is the living person most admired by Paglia; even when wearing a "ragged hide bikini" she can't top Germaine Greer, about whom Paglia has written extensively and, for the most part, positively. It's a shame there's room in this present collection only for one piece on Greer - a review of her 1995 book, Slip-Shod Sybils - as it makes such a pleasant surprise to see Paglia saying nice things about another woman who doesn't happen to be a singer, a film star, or a member of Charlie's Angels.

Of course, we get her notorious New York Times article on Madonna from 1990, in which the Material Girl was declared the "future of feminism". And Paglia's piece written shortly afterwards on date rape, that caused "a huge backlash" at the time and remains one of Paglia's most controversial statements, although she insists that she stands by every word of it, including the claim that women "infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters [and presumably this includes rape] to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees".

Paglia also happily repeats and reaffirms her recent decision to endorse "the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate" and I have to admit to finding it disappointing to see a woman who at one time subscribed to chthonic feminism suddenly use cant phrases like the moral highground.    

Ultimately, one gets the impression that, like Judge Judy, Paglia has never changed her mind on anything. Indeed, the point and purpose of this book is to not only show she's right - but that she's always been right. In other words, it's a vainglorious display of the "consistency and continuity" of her libertarian ideas which reach all the way back, as noted, to a precocious childhood, thus pre-dating Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); a work usually credited with initiating the second-wave of American feminism, rather than Paglia's letter to Newsweek protesting the "exclusion of women from the American space program", also published that year.

I fear that what I've written here makes it sound as if I don't like Ms Paglia very much, or, worse, don't take her work all that seriously. But, actually, I do feel a certain degree of affection for Camille and would hope that the fact that I continue to read her books indicates I find them interesting, important and amusing. This sentence alone, for example, makes me smile and justifies the price of the book:

"The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love."     


See: Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, (Pantheon Books, 2017). All the lines quoted above are taken from the the author's introduction, pp. ix-xxvi.