Mario Perniola’s The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is one of those books that comes upon you unawares (rather than one’s coming upon it) , and that is so beautiful, so singular and unexpected, that it just blows you away. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is a philosophy book, and it is about a certain sort of extreme experience that, or so the author claims, philosophy and sexuality share. Perniola invents a new ontological category, that of the “thing that feels”: something that is utterly apart from the duality of subjectivity (which we usually equate with sentience) on the one hand, and of insentient objects on the other. The thing that feels “has” a certain sort of intense experience, but this experience is not a subjective one, not anything that is experienced by a subject. This has something to do with the impersonal affect described by Blanchot and by Deleuze, though neither of these authors is cited in Perniola’s text. The experience of the thing that feels is a sexual one: it is sexual contact, touching, caressing, licking, penetrating, and so on: but without orgasm, without a climax, without any release of tension, without any return at the end to a satiated self. The experience of the thing that feels is organs and orifices that are no longer felt as parts of larger wholes, bodily surfaces and depths in such intimate contact that one cannot be separated from the other, feelings cannot be attributed to one rather than the other, and yet this intimacy does not result in fusion either, because that would imply a larger unitary entity into which the two lovers, or more accurately the multiple parts and orifices and organs, would have merged. The experience of the thing that feels is a kind of utter abandonment: I desubjectify myself, detach myself from myself and turn myself into a mere thing, give myself (my body, my organs and orifices, my feelings) — give all this over to the other person to do with me what they will (and vice versa, though the two self-abandonments do not quite form a mutual and symmetrical pattern of reciprocity, because both these self-abandonments are limitless, formless, and cannot be measured).
Perniola does not only invoke the mysterious being of the thing that feels: he describes it, quite systematically, according to a series of cultural and philosophical coordinates. He compares it to, and carefully differentiates it from, sadism, masochism, fetishism, vampirism, and other “perversions” and “transgressions” that have been the obsessions of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century modernity. He shows the way that the sexual experience of the thing that feels resonates with various contemporary aesthetic states and expressions, with a quite amazing list that includes prog rock (!), cybersex, avant-garde fashion, deconstructive architecture, installation art, and the novels of Georges Perec.
And furthermore — since he claims that the experience of the thing that feels is a philosophical one as well as a sexual one — Perniola gives it a metaphysical genealogy as well, in a trajectory that runs through Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Perniola seeks, like many thinkers before him, to get rid of the mind/body dualism that has so long structured Western thought and culture. But he finds the vitalism of Nietzsche and other anti-Cartesian body theorists as unacceptable as the spiritualism of Descartes and all his idealist descendents; for Perniola, these are just two sides of the same coin. Descartes, in the cogito, defines himself as “a thing that thinks”; he failed thereby to conceive the non-subjective thing that feels; so it was the “think” part, rather than the “thing” part that was Descartes’ big error. Reification and alienation are good things for Perniola; one can never be alienated and reified enough; it is only through them that one can become — or more accurately, that one can be, a thing that thinks. Perniola therefore scorns those thinkers (Nietzsche explicitly, Bergson implicitly) who claim to undo that reification, and return us to some lived experience of the body.
In contrast, Perniola finds clues to the thing that feels in Kant’s ethics above all, with its rejection of subjective good will as inherently “pathological,” and its deeply paradoxical equation of freedom with the state of the “thing in itself” (it is highly significant that Kant’s realm of noumena is a realm of Things). Perniola also finds clues to the thing that feels in certain moments that Hegel denounces as inauthentic, but describes with incomparable rigor; in certain moments that are intimated, but then foreclosed, in Heidegger; and in the late Wittgenstein’s enigmatic discussions of “seeing as” and of the puzzling grammar of expressions of pain.
What this summary of The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic leaves out is the extent to which the book’s power and beauty is largely an effect of style. Perniola’s writing (as far as I can tell from the translation, which occasionally trips itself up with expressions that seem to be literal translations from the Italian in ways that come out sounding unidiomatic in English) is lucid, and concise, finely chiseled yet without suggesting any hardness or harshness. Nothing is argued or deduced; but everything is set forth calmly, clearly, and in a carefully structured order. Rarely has a call for excess and extremity been set forth with such classical care and restraint. In this respect, Perniola joins a small circle of “postmodern” writers who are starting to interrogate limits, push thought to extremes, and approach affect outside of the cognitive straightjacket, without any recourse to the tired 20th-century category of “transgression.”
Mario Perniola’s The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is one of those books that comes upon you unawares (rather than one’s coming upon it) , and that is so beautiful, so singular and unexpected, that it just blows you away. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is a philosophy book, and it is about a certain sort of extreme experience that, or so the author claims, philosophy and sexuality share. Perniola invents a new ontological category, that of the “thing that feels”: something that is utterly apart from the duality of subjectivity (which we usually equate with sentience) on the one hand, and of insentient objects on the other. The thing that feels “has” a certain sort of intense experience, but this experience is not a subjective one, not anything that is experienced by a subject. This has something to do with the impersonal affect described by Blanchot and by Deleuze, though neither of these authors is cited in Perniola’s text. The experience of the thing that feels is a sexual one: it is sexual contact, touching, caressing, licking, penetrating, and so on: but without orgasm, without a climax, without any release of tension, without any return at the end to a satiated self. The experience of the thing that feels is organs and orifices that are no longer felt as parts of larger wholes, bodily surfaces and depths in such intimate contact that one cannot be separated from the other, feelings cannot be attributed to one rather than the other, and yet this intimacy does not result in fusion either, because that would imply a larger unitary entity into which the two lovers, or more accurately the multiple parts and orifices and organs, would have merged. The experience of the thing that feels is a kind of utter abandonment: I desubjectify myself, detach myself from myself and turn myself into a mere thing, give myself (my body, my organs and orifices, my feelings) — give all this over to the other person to do with me what they will (and vice versa, though the two self-abandonments do not quite form a mutual and symmetrical pattern of reciprocity, because both these self-abandonments are limitless, formless, and cannot be measured).
Perniola does not only invoke the mysterious being of the thing that feels: he describes it, quite systematically, according to a series of cultural and philosophical coordinates. He compares it to, and carefully differentiates it from, sadism, masochism, fetishism, vampirism, and other “perversions” and “transgressions” that have been the obsessions of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century modernity. He shows the way that the sexual experience of the thing that feels resonates with various contemporary aesthetic states and expressions, with a quite amazing list that includes prog rock (!), cybersex, avant-garde fashion, deconstructive architecture, installation art, and the novels of Georges Perec.
And furthermore — since he claims that the experience of the thing that feels is a philosophical one as well as a sexual one — Perniola gives it a metaphysical genealogy as well, in a trajectory that runs through Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Perniola seeks, like many thinkers before him, to get rid of the mind/body dualism that has so long structured Western thought and culture. But he finds the vitalism of Nietzsche and other anti-Cartesian body theorists as unacceptable as the spiritualism of Descartes and all his idealist descendents; for Perniola, these are just two sides of the same coin. Descartes, in the cogito, defines himself as “a thing that thinks”; he failed thereby to conceive the non-subjective thing that feels; so it was the “think” part, rather than the “thing” part that was Descartes’ big error. Reification and alienation are good things for Perniola; one can never be alienated and reified enough; it is only through them that one can become — or more accurately, that one can be, a thing that thinks. Perniola therefore scorns those thinkers (Nietzsche explicitly, Bergson implicitly) who claim to undo that reification, and return us to some lived experience of the body.
In contrast, Perniola finds clues to the thing that feels in Kant’s ethics above all, with its rejection of subjective good will as inherently “pathological,” and its deeply paradoxical equation of freedom with the state of the “thing in itself” (it is highly significant that Kant’s realm of noumena is a realm of Things). Perniola also finds clues to the thing that feels in certain moments that Hegel denounces as inauthentic, but describes with incomparable rigor; in certain moments that are intimated, but then foreclosed, in Heidegger; and in the late Wittgenstein’s enigmatic discussions of “seeing as” and of the puzzling grammar of expressions of pain.
What this summary of The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic leaves out is the extent to which the book’s power and beauty is largely an effect of style. Perniola’s writing (as far as I can tell from the translation, which occasionally trips itself up with expressions that seem to be literal translations from the Italian in ways that come out sounding unidiomatic in English) is lucid, and concise, finely chiseled yet without suggesting any hardness or harshness. Nothing is argued or deduced; but everything is set forth calmly, clearly, and in a carefully structured order. Rarely has a call for excess and extremity been set forth with such classical care and restraint. In this respect, Perniola joins a small circle of “postmodern” writers who are starting to interrogate limits, push thought to extremes, and approach affect outside of the cognitive straightjacket, without any recourse to the tired 20th-century category of “transgression.”
Justina Robson‘s SF novel Natural History is a brilliant exploration of what it might mean to be posthuman.
In the future world of Robson’s novel, “Unevolved” human beings live side-by-side with the “Forged,” genetically-altered, enhanced, and engineered beings who combine human characteristics with those of other organisms and with machines. There are Forged in the form of birds, of jellyfish, of weapons of mass destruction, and of spaceships. The Forged are adapted for tasks that Unevolved human beings could not easily perform, and for environments (deep space, the bottom of the sea, the atmosphere of Jupiter) where the Unevolved could not easily live. The Forged all have recognizably human minds — in terms of language, rationality, and emotion — even though they differ greatly from the Unevolved, and from one another, in terms of life history and body-experience. Their biggest problem is that they have all been designed for specific tasks — their Form is determined by their Function — which means that their lives are constrained in ways that those of ordinary Unevolved human beings are not, even though their imaginations and senses of selfhood and freedom are as extensive as those of the Unevolved. Robson’s greatest accomplishment in Natural History is to make the Forged come alive as speakers and characters, so that their emotions and neuroses and desires and political activities make as much sense (are as unique, and at the same time as recognizable) as those of the Unevolved characters. The Forged are neither alien (radically other, utterly outside our experience) nor “the same” (belonging to some universal, essential, unchanging category of humanness, just as “we” allegedly do). No one is a “blank slate,” independent of the predispositions that have been built into them; but also, no one is determined by these predispositions. Will and imagination play too strong a role for these posthumans, just as they do for us.
So Robson imagines what it would be like to be, for instance, a sentient spaceship, gendered female, whose body includes a nuclear engine, whose senses involve what for us could only be readouts on various monitors, whose reaction times can be measured in femtoseconds, and whose sexual feelings are almost entirely auto-affective, focused upon her own bodily sensations. And who is driven by rage, fanaticism, vulnerability, ambition, neediness, and revolutionary fervor, and who is capable of sarcasm, irony, reserve, and manipulativeness — much as a human mind/body of any other shape might be. Actually, what it is like to be a sentient spaceship is not far different from what it is like to talk to one: for language is not only how one talks to others, it is also how one talks to oneself. Robson insists on distinguishing between living and speaking other-sentience, and mere artificial intelligence, which in the world of Natural History can calculate, and use and respond appropriately to language, but which cannot be creative or self-reflective, which cannot talk to itself, which does not express any sort of will, and which does not seek after higher Meaning nor regret its absence (307-308). In positioning consciousness in this way, Robson rejects the strong-AI position (that there is no difference between human mentality and what machines are capable of), but in a more nuanced and sophisticated way than John Searle (for instance) does. That is to say, Robson explores how consciousness could be different, or other, from our “common” experience; but she does this without reducing mentality to computation (as cognitivists are always prone to do).
The future society depicted in Natural History is one of immanent differences. There is no unity between the Unevolved and the Forged, nor among the Forged themselves. Also, the Forged have access — but the Unevolved do not — to a full-immersion virtual reality in which they can change their environments and body forms at will, interact with other Forged and have sex with them, and generally escape the limitations of their Form and Function. There are thus multiple perspectives which cannot be reconciled; and none of which can claim to transcend or overcode the others. This leads to a fractious politics: the Forged, spread out across the solar system, form unions and independence movements, fighting and negotiating both among themselves and with the Unevolved authorities on Earth. Here Robson explores the possibilities and impasses of what might be called a network-society, “post-globalization” politics, one where the traditional orders of States and territories play little role, and where traditional ideological myths of unification have ceased to function, but where questions of “identity,” together with economic power and the unequally distributed possession of military strength and of the tools of surveillance, continue to play major roles.
The plot of Natural History doesn’t resolve any of these issues — Robson suggests that, for all practical intents and purposes, they are simply not resolvable — but instead does an end run around them. The book narrates the encounter of its vividly imagined world with something truly alien, truly Other: a technology that entirely transcends the immanent differences among Unevolved and Forged, and that therefore seems to promise infinite power, magically driven by Will alone. Of course, things turn out to be much more complicated than that, and there are some wonderful passages where Zephyr Duquense, the most prominent Unevolved character in the novel, explores an alien architecture that is clearly the product of intelligence, but just as clearly uninterpretable in human terms. The social-emotional play of immanent differences, which cannot coincide but which are open to negotiation and mutual reflection, is here contrasted to a kind of absolute Difference, a limit in relation to which we face the alternative of either only getting our own expectations and presuppositions reflected back to us, or else of gaining access to this Otherness at the price of ceasing to be ourselves, of being irrevocably changed by what we encounter, and indeed absorbed into what we encounter. At certain moments, Robson presents this latter alternative (somewhat unfortunately) as a kind of New Agey mystical oneness, cosmic consciousness, oceanic feeling, with almost absolute power to affect the physical universe — but this is balanced out at other moments by a continuing harsh skepticism. At the end, you can retain your individuality against this alien, totalizing encounter by killing yourself before you are absorbed — suicide is not exactly an attractive or life-affirming option, but at least it does remain an option, a via negativa resisting an otherwise relentless dialectic.
So I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of Natural History, but I liked the way that Robson at least in part resisted her own conclusion. Robson’s novel is not really about my current overwhelming preoccupation — the ubiquitous culture and circulation of capital — but its passionate intelligence is a sterling example of how science fiction, at its best, works today as an experimental laboratory of embodied social and philosophical thought.
Justina Robson‘s SF novel Natural History is a brilliant exploration of what it might mean to be posthuman.
In the future world of Robson’s novel, “Unevolved” human beings live side-by-side with the “Forged,” genetically-altered, enhanced, and engineered beings who combine human characteristics with those of other organisms and with machines. There are Forged in the form of birds, of jellyfish, of weapons of mass destruction, and of spaceships. The Forged are adapted for tasks that Unevolved human beings could not easily perform, and for environments (deep space, the bottom of the sea, the atmosphere of Jupiter) where the Unevolved could not easily live. The Forged all have recognizably human minds — in terms of language, rationality, and emotion — even though they differ greatly from the Unevolved, and from one another, in terms of life history and body-experience. Their biggest problem is that they have all been designed for specific tasks — their Form is determined by their Function — which means that their lives are constrained in ways that those of ordinary Unevolved human beings are not, even though their imaginations and senses of selfhood and freedom are as extensive as those of the Unevolved. Robson’s greatest accomplishment in Natural History is to make the Forged come alive as speakers and characters, so that their emotions and neuroses and desires and political activities make as much sense (are as unique, and at the same time as recognizable) as those of the Unevolved characters. The Forged are neither alien (radically other, utterly outside our experience) nor “the same” (belonging to some universal, essential, unchanging category of humanness, just as “we” allegedly do). No one is a “blank slate,” independent of the predispositions that have been built into them; but also, no one is determined by these predispositions. Will and imagination play too strong a role for these posthumans, just as they do for us.
So Robson imagines what it would be like to be, for instance, a sentient spaceship, gendered female, whose body includes a nuclear engine, whose senses involve what for us could only be readouts on various monitors, whose reaction times can be measured in femtoseconds, and whose sexual feelings are almost entirely auto-affective, focused upon her own bodily sensations. And who is driven by rage, fanaticism, vulnerability, ambition, neediness, and revolutionary fervor, and who is capable of sarcasm, irony, reserve, and manipulativeness — much as a human mind/body of any other shape might be. Actually, what it is like to be a sentient spaceship is not far different from what it is like to talk to one: for language is not only how one talks to others, it is also how one talks to oneself. Robson insists on distinguishing between living and speaking other-sentience, and mere artificial intelligence, which in the world of Natural History can calculate, and use and respond appropriately to language, but which cannot be creative or self-reflective, which cannot talk to itself, which does not express any sort of will, and which does not seek after higher Meaning nor regret its absence (307-308). In positioning consciousness in this way, Robson rejects the strong-AI position (that there is no difference between human mentality and what machines are capable of), but in a more nuanced and sophisticated way than John Searle (for instance) does. That is to say, Robson explores how consciousness could be different, or other, from our “common” experience; but she does this without reducing mentality to computation (as cognitivists are always prone to do).
The future society depicted in Natural History is one of immanent differences. There is no unity between the Unevolved and the Forged, nor among the Forged themselves. Also, the Forged have access — but the Unevolved do not — to a full-immersion virtual reality in which they can change their environments and body forms at will, interact with other Forged and have sex with them, and generally escape the limitations of their Form and Function. There are thus multiple perspectives which cannot be reconciled; and none of which can claim to transcend or overcode the others. This leads to a fractious politics: the Forged, spread out across the solar system, form unions and independence movements, fighting and negotiating both among themselves and with the Unevolved authorities on Earth. Here Robson explores the possibilities and impasses of what might be called a network-society, “post-globalization” politics, one where the traditional orders of States and territories play little role, and where traditional ideological myths of unification have ceased to function, but where questions of “identity,” together with economic power and the unequally distributed possession of military strength and of the tools of surveillance, continue to play major roles.
The plot of Natural History doesn’t resolve any of these issues — Robson suggests that, for all practical intents and purposes, they are simply not resolvable — but instead does an end run around them. The book narrates the encounter of its vividly imagined world with something truly alien, truly Other: a technology that entirely transcends the immanent differences among Unevolved and Forged, and that therefore seems to promise infinite power, magically driven by Will alone. Of course, things turn out to be much more complicated than that, and there are some wonderful passages where Zephyr Duquense, the most prominent Unevolved character in the novel, explores an alien architecture that is clearly the product of intelligence, but just as clearly uninterpretable in human terms. The social-emotional play of immanent differences, which cannot coincide but which are open to negotiation and mutual reflection, is here contrasted to a kind of absolute Difference, a limit in relation to which we face the alternative of either only getting our own expectations and presuppositions reflected back to us, or else of gaining access to this Otherness at the price of ceasing to be ourselves, of being irrevocably changed by what we encounter, and indeed absorbed into what we encounter. At certain moments, Robson presents this latter alternative (somewhat unfortunately) as a kind of New Agey mystical oneness, cosmic consciousness, oceanic feeling, with almost absolute power to affect the physical universe — but this is balanced out at other moments by a continuing harsh skepticism. At the end, you can retain your individuality against this alien, totalizing encounter by killing yourself before you are absorbed — suicide is not exactly an attractive or life-affirming option, but at least it does remain an option, a via negativa resisting an otherwise relentless dialectic.
So I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of Natural History, but I liked the way that Robson at least in part resisted her own conclusion. Robson’s novel is not really about my current overwhelming preoccupation — the ubiquitous culture and circulation of capital — but its passionate intelligence is a sterling example of how science fiction, at its best, works today as an experimental laboratory of embodied social and philosophical thought.
Kelly Link‘s new short story collection, Magic for Beginners, leaves me as much at a loss for words as her previous collection did. Stories at once mundane (a New York family moves out to the suburbs; the husband is scarcely ever home, with his long commute and well-over-40-hours corporate job) and fantastic (the suburban house is oddly haunted; rabbits ridden by tiny people, armed with spears, throng on the front lawn) continually metamorphose, implode, or fall into dizzyingly self-referential mise-en-abime loops. One moment a bunch of middle-age guys, all failures in life, are sitting around a table drinking beer and playing poker; the next, a cheerleader is in a closet with the devil, experiencing her life flow backwards, and telling the devil a story about one of the guys sitting around the table… Then there’s the one about the TV series that unfolds entirely in an enormous library, with all sorts of supernatural happenings, and different actors play the same character each episode, only it seems the people who watch this series are also characters inside it, unless it is rather that the TV fiction somehow leaks into the “real” world… only there’s also all the stuff about teen awkwardness about sex, and wedding chapels in Las Vegas, and going on to the roof at night and looking at the stars…
Link’s stories have the dizzying ontological dislocations of Borges, but they also seem bizarrely, unreasonably cheerful (even when they are describing deeply troubling things), which is mostly because of the narrating voice, who remains bouncy like a fairytale storyteller, and yet remains matter-of-fact, no matter how outrageous what is being said. You can see this in the openings of her stories: “There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they lived together….” Or again: “Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.” The more convoluted and crazy the narrative line becomes, the more blithely the narrator tells us about it, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It is impossible to describe what these stories are like (in precisely the way that, according to certain philosophers, it would be impossible for a human being to experience what it is like to be a bat. And yet the stories do somehow convey this alien sensibility, that cannot be positively described).
The stories in Magic for Beginners are vertiginously weightless: they have an excessive clarity, I want to say, that makes them impossible to summarize or pin down. Nothing could be more postmodern, in the way the stories have no center, in the way all their affects are free-floating and highly mutable, in the way even their anxieties and terrors seem strangely objective or ambient, strangely devoid of any interiority. And yet they are also devoid of the cartoony hyperrealism, the flippant irony, the ultra-commodification, and the obsessive allusiveness, that we usually consider markers of the “postmodern.” (They are also too slippery, and too free of any programmatic transgressiveness, to be properly called “surrealist”). I want to say (though I am unable, for now, to say it at all convincingly; and though even to suggest it makes me seem, oxymoronically, like a monstrously upbeat and cheerful Adorno) that Kelly Link’s writing presupposes, and is only conceivable within, a world like ours that has been entirely colonized and subsumed by global capital; and yet, this writing proposes and enacts a sort of singular aestheticism that is utterly irreducible to this global totality.
Kelly Link‘s new short story collection, Magic for Beginners, leaves me as much at a loss for words as her previous collection did. Stories at once mundane (a New York family moves out to the suburbs; the husband is scarcely ever home, with his long commute and well-over-40-hours corporate job) and fantastic (the suburban house is oddly haunted; rabbits ridden by tiny people, armed with spears, throng on the front lawn) continually metamorphose, implode, or fall into dizzyingly self-referential mise-en-abime loops. One moment a bunch of middle-age guys, all failures in life, are sitting around a table drinking beer and playing poker; the next, a cheerleader is in a closet with the devil, experiencing her life flow backwards, and telling the devil a story about one of the guys sitting around the table… Then there’s the one about the TV series that unfolds entirely in an enormous library, with all sorts of supernatural happenings, and different actors play the same character each episode, only it seems the people who watch this series are also characters inside it, unless it is rather that the TV fiction somehow leaks into the “real” world… only there’s also all the stuff about teen awkwardness about sex, and wedding chapels in Las Vegas, and going on to the roof at night and looking at the stars…
Link’s stories have the dizzying ontological dislocations of Borges, but they also seem bizarrely, unreasonably cheerful (even when they are describing deeply troubling things), which is mostly because of the narrating voice, who remains bouncy like a fairytale storyteller, and yet remains matter-of-fact, no matter how outrageous what is being said. You can see this in the openings of her stories: “There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they lived together….” Or again: “Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.” The more convoluted and crazy the narrative line becomes, the more blithely the narrator tells us about it, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It is impossible to describe what these stories are like (in precisely the way that, according to certain philosophers, it would be impossible for a human being to experience what it is like to be a bat. And yet the stories do somehow convey this alien sensibility, that cannot be positively described).
The stories in Magic for Beginners are vertiginously weightless: they have an excessive clarity, I want to say, that makes them impossible to summarize or pin down. Nothing could be more postmodern, in the way the stories have no center, in the way all their affects are free-floating and highly mutable, in the way even their anxieties and terrors seem strangely objective or ambient, strangely devoid of any interiority. And yet they are also devoid of the cartoony hyperrealism, the flippant irony, the ultra-commodification, and the obsessive allusiveness, that we usually consider markers of the “postmodern.” (They are also too slippery, and too free of any programmatic transgressiveness, to be properly called “surrealist”). I want to say (though I am unable, for now, to say it at all convincingly; and though even to suggest it makes me seem, oxymoronically, like a monstrously upbeat and cheerful Adorno) that Kelly Link’s writing presupposes, and is only conceivable within, a world like ours that has been entirely colonized and subsumed by global capital; and yet, this writing proposes and enacts a sort of singular aestheticism that is utterly irreducible to this global totality.
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy‘s latest novel, No Country For Old Men. I think it’s McCarthy’s best book since Blood Meridian twenty years ago, which is to say that I liked it better than any of the “Border trilogy” novels that made McCarthy famous.
No Country For Old Men is spare and lean, McCarthy at his most minimal. It’s also set in 1980, which makes it the closest to present-time of any of McCarthy’s books. It’s set in the same southwestern desert territory as all his books since Blood Meridian. But there’s much less sublime description of nature than in the earlier books; instead, a lot of the action plays out in anonymous motel rooms in small West Texas towns. There are no accounts, either, to match the descriptions of wolves and wild dogs and horses in the earlier books. At the start of No Country For Old Men, one of the protagonists, Llwellyn Moss, is hunting antelope; but when he stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, with lots of dead bodies and a suitcase containing $2.4 million — when he decides to pick up the suitcase — nature and hunting disappear from the novel, never to return. No Country For Old Men is the story of Moss’ doomed attempt to make off with the money, and of Chigurh, the ruthless killer who wants to recover the suitcase, and of Bell, the sheriff who wants to solve the murders and make sense of all the violence.
In its spareness, the novel plays out like a very taut thriller; though contrary to genre expectations, certain crucial aspects of the plot are elided or decentered, and others are never fully explained. The first half of the novel — except for Bell’s monologues, which I will get to in a moment — are almost pure action; as the novel progresses, however, we finally get some of the metaphysics of which McCarthy’s earlier novels are full. However, there are no dense Faulknerian/Melvillean passages such as were found in the earlier books; here, the sense of fatality is all the more intense for coming only in the clipped and understated conversations of the characters, brief and plain statements punctuated by long pauses. The vision of life offered us in rare glimpses is almost unbearably bleak: god is absent, evil rules the world, fate cannot be averted. Of course such a bald summary does a great injustice both to the poetry with which McCarthy expresses these ideas, and to the extremity of his gnosticism (I refer the reader to my old friend Leo Daugherty’s article on the gnostic subtext of Blood Meridian, available here).
No Country For Old Men is a lesser work than Blood Meridian: but this is scarcely a criticism, considering that, in my humble opinion, Blood Meridian is the greatest American novel of the 20th century. In many ways, the new book is structurally similar to Blood Meridian, and can be seen as a less ambitious update into the near-present of the earlier book. In both novels, the landscape of the American Southwest is drenched in blood: the effect is existentially chilling, but the novels also go beyond the existential in that they comment on American history and society more generally. In Blood Meridian, set just after the Mexican War of 1848, America as the land of Manifest Destiny is at stake, especially with regards to the Anglos’ relations to Mexicans and Indians. The novel is a revisionist Western with strong cinematic echoes, though it is more lacerating and more fundamentally savage and negative than anything ever done in Hollywood movies. In No Country For Old Men, the historical field is more restricted: it is sort of about America after the 1960s and Vietnam, in a form that reflects the nihilistic crime genre more than the Western — though references to the latter genre, and historical continuities with earlier times, are also present.
There’s a fascinating figure of pure evil at the heart of both books; though Chigurh, for all his coldblooded singlemindedness, and seeming ability to inhabit Fate and become its agent (instead of just passively suffering it like everybody else does), still is ultimately human-all-too-human, in contrast to the superhuman ferocity and perversity and mythic perseverance of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Chigurh is recognizable as the samurai-esque gangster familiar from a lot of recent movies; though McCarthy radically demystifies this figure, in a way that Tarantino and others never do. Both books also turn on the figure of a witness: a (relatively) innocent character who observes — but is never able to really comprehend — the central figure of evil, and the monstrous actions all around him. In Blood Meridian, the witness is a young man (15 or 16 years old) who is never named but only called “the kid.” In No Country For Old Men, the structurally identical role is played by Sheriff Bell, who must be in his mid-fifties but feels (and sounds) much older.
Bell’s monologues are spaced throughout the book, offering a counterpoint to the third-person omniscient narration of the rest of the text. Some idiots have claimed that Bell provides a “moral compass” for the novel (I won’t link to them here, but if you are curious you can find them through Google). The fact is that, far from providing any sort of definitive judgment on Chigurh’s actions and the events of the novel, Bell always finds himself outside them, behind them, too late to do anything about them, unable even to contextualize them in any way he finds satisfactory. He’s a decent guy, and probably a Bush/Reagan voter (he complains lamely about kids with punk hairstyles, and at one point suggests that, with abortion legal, enforced euthanasia of annoying elderly relatives can’t be too far behind); but even if these are also McCarthy’s personal views (I have no idea), they don’t define the metaphysical perspective of the novel. Bell spends a bit of time lamenting how morals have decayed since the good old days — a notion of which he would have easily been disabused, if he had ever read any of McCarthy’s novels set in earlier times. But in the long run Bell admits that such idealizations are untenable; violence and evil are inscribed in the land, in our history, and probably too in our very nature as limited, imperfect and selfish selves (in what is the hyperbolic gnostic version of Original Sin). Bell never captures Chigurh, or saves Moss’ wife as he hopes to, or indeed arrests anybody, or even saves a man he believes is innocent from receiving the death penalty; at the end of the novel, he harshly judges himself a failure, feels that he has been defeated (which he is, and has been, but no more so than any other human being). (Perhaps because he gives up and retires, in acknowledged defeat, he is not murdered by the novel’s evil figure, the way the kid finally is).
The figure of the witness is necessary, in both Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men, because he is the only one who can experience the pathos, the affect, the tragedy of McCarthy’s vision. The new novel’s flatness (as I’ve already said) suggests a diminishment in comparison to Blood Meridian‘s utter sublimity (which is of Melvillean and Biblical dimensions). But in both novels it is only through the witness figure that the inhuman coldness of the universe (of McCarthy’s vision of the Universe) can be felt and registered, can itself be spelled out in humanly recognizable terms. No Country For Old Men has a sadness to it, striking a new tone in McCarthy’s fiction; and what’s most remarkable about the book, perhaps, is how this new tone overlays, but does not mitigate or sublimate, the unsparing, nihilistic ferocity of McCarthy’s overall vision. I felt that in the Border trilogy, as well as in his play The Stonemason, McCarthy was to a certain extent fleeing away from, and looking for some sort of comfort against, the extremity of his own vision in Blood Meridian. No Country For Old Men cannot be accused of such a withdrawal; he has indeed stepped back once again from the abyss, but only in a way that continues fully to acknowledge it.
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy‘s latest novel, No Country For Old Men. I think it’s McCarthy’s best book since Blood Meridian twenty years ago, which is to say that I liked it better than any of the “Border trilogy” novels that made McCarthy famous.
No Country For Old Men is spare and lean, McCarthy at his most minimal. It’s also set in 1980, which makes it the closest to present-time of any of McCarthy’s books. It’s set in the same southwestern desert territory as all his books since Blood Meridian. But there’s much less sublime description of nature than in the earlier books; instead, a lot of the action plays out in anonymous motel rooms in small West Texas towns. There are no accounts, either, to match the descriptions of wolves and wild dogs and horses in the earlier books. At the start of No Country For Old Men, one of the protagonists, Llwellyn Moss, is hunting antelope; but when he stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, with lots of dead bodies and a suitcase containing $2.4 million — when he decides to pick up the suitcase — nature and hunting disappear from the novel, never to return. No Country For Old Men is the story of Moss’ doomed attempt to make off with the money, and of Chigurh, the ruthless killer who wants to recover the suitcase, and of Bell, the sheriff who wants to solve the murders and make sense of all the violence.
In its spareness, the novel plays out like a very taut thriller; though contrary to genre expectations, certain crucial aspects of the plot are elided or decentered, and others are never fully explained. The first half of the novel — except for Bell’s monologues, which I will get to in a moment — are almost pure action; as the novel progresses, however, we finally get some of the metaphysics of which McCarthy’s earlier novels are full. However, there are no dense Faulknerian/Melvillean passages such as were found in the earlier books; here, the sense of fatality is all the more intense for coming only in the clipped and understated conversations of the characters, brief and plain statements punctuated by long pauses. The vision of life offered us in rare glimpses is almost unbearably bleak: god is absent, evil rules the world, fate cannot be averted. Of course such a bald summary does a great injustice both to the poetry with which McCarthy expresses these ideas, and to the extremity of his gnosticism (I refer the reader to my old friend Leo Daugherty’s article on the gnostic subtext of Blood Meridian, available here).
No Country For Old Men is a lesser work than Blood Meridian: but this is scarcely a criticism, considering that, in my humble opinion, Blood Meridian is the greatest American novel of the 20th century. In many ways, the new book is structurally similar to Blood Meridian, and can be seen as a less ambitious update into the near-present of the earlier book. In both novels, the landscape of the American Southwest is drenched in blood: the effect is existentially chilling, but the novels also go beyond the existential in that they comment on American history and society more generally. In Blood Meridian, set just after the Mexican War of 1848, America as the land of Manifest Destiny is at stake, especially with regards to the Anglos’ relations to Mexicans and Indians. The novel is a revisionist Western with strong cinematic echoes, though it is more lacerating and more fundamentally savage and negative than anything ever done in Hollywood movies. In No Country For Old Men, the historical field is more restricted: it is sort of about America after the 1960s and Vietnam, in a form that reflects the nihilistic crime genre more than the Western — though references to the latter genre, and historical continuities with earlier times, are also present.
There’s a fascinating figure of pure evil at the heart of both books; though Chigurh, for all his coldblooded singlemindedness, and seeming ability to inhabit Fate and become its agent (instead of just passively suffering it like everybody else does), still is ultimately human-all-too-human, in contrast to the superhuman ferocity and perversity and mythic perseverance of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Chigurh is recognizable as the samurai-esque gangster familiar from a lot of recent movies; though McCarthy radically demystifies this figure, in a way that Tarantino and others never do. Both books also turn on the figure of a witness: a (relatively) innocent character who observes — but is never able to really comprehend — the central figure of evil, and the monstrous actions all around him. In Blood Meridian, the witness is a young man (15 or 16 years old) who is never named but only called “the kid.” In No Country For Old Men, the structurally identical role is played by Sheriff Bell, who must be in his mid-fifties but feels (and sounds) much older.
Bell’s monologues are spaced throughout the book, offering a counterpoint to the third-person omniscient narration of the rest of the text. Some idiots have claimed that Bell provides a “moral compass” for the novel (I won’t link to them here, but if you are curious you can find them through Google). The fact is that, far from providing any sort of definitive judgment on Chigurh’s actions and the events of the novel, Bell always finds himself outside them, behind them, too late to do anything about them, unable even to contextualize them in any way he finds satisfactory. He’s a decent guy, and probably a Bush/Reagan voter (he complains lamely about kids with punk hairstyles, and at one point suggests that, with abortion legal, enforced euthanasia of annoying elderly relatives can’t be too far behind); but even if these are also McCarthy’s personal views (I have no idea), they don’t define the metaphysical perspective of the novel. Bell spends a bit of time lamenting how morals have decayed since the good old days — a notion of which he would have easily been disabused, if he had ever read any of McCarthy’s novels set in earlier times. But in the long run Bell admits that such idealizations are untenable; violence and evil are inscribed in the land, in our history, and probably too in our very nature as limited, imperfect and selfish selves (in what is the hyperbolic gnostic version of Original Sin). Bell never captures Chigurh, or saves Moss’ wife as he hopes to, or indeed arrests anybody, or even saves a man he believes is innocent from receiving the death penalty; at the end of the novel, he harshly judges himself a failure, feels that he has been defeated (which he is, and has been, but no more so than any other human being). (Perhaps because he gives up and retires, in acknowledged defeat, he is not murdered by the novel’s evil figure, the way the kid finally is).
The figure of the witness is necessary, in both Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men, because he is the only one who can experience the pathos, the affect, the tragedy of McCarthy’s vision. The new novel’s flatness (as I’ve already said) suggests a diminishment in comparison to Blood Meridian‘s utter sublimity (which is of Melvillean and Biblical dimensions). But in both novels it is only through the witness figure that the inhuman coldness of the universe (of McCarthy’s vision of the Universe) can be felt and registered, can itself be spelled out in humanly recognizable terms. No Country For Old Men has a sadness to it, striking a new tone in McCarthy’s fiction; and what’s most remarkable about the book, perhaps, is how this new tone overlays, but does not mitigate or sublimate, the unsparing, nihilistic ferocity of McCarthy’s overall vision. I felt that in the Border trilogy, as well as in his play The Stonemason, McCarthy was to a certain extent fleeing away from, and looking for some sort of comfort against, the extremity of his own vision in Blood Meridian. No Country For Old Men cannot be accused of such a withdrawal; he has indeed stepped back once again from the abyss, but only in a way that continues fully to acknowledge it.
I thoroughly enjoyed John Crowley’s latest book, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, though I don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s an amazing work of literary impersonation. Crowley’s conceit is to give us a supposedly lost manuscript of Lord Byron — his only novel, a semi-autobiographical Gothic romance — together with the circumstances of its loss and rediscovery. Crowley’s text has several layers: Byron’s novel itself (written in what is, to my untrained ear at least, a convincing channelling of Byron’s voice, style, and sensibility); a series of annotations on the text, by Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (his only “legitimate” child, whom he never saw post-infancy, and who grew up to become Charles Babbage’s collaborator upon the Difference Engine, and arguably the first person to conceive the possibilities of computer programming); and an exchange of emails, dated 2002, among the people who discover and decipher the manuscript (which Ada had encrypted to preserve it from her mother, Byron’s estranged wife, who would otherwise have destroyed it).
The novel’s puzzles and collections of fragments give pleasure; recurrent themes of estranged fathers and longing daughters, of exile and reconciliation, are worked out in the book’s various parallel layers; and Crowley offers something of an apologia for Byron, against feminist charges that he was a misogynist, together with a quite poignant reconstruction/celebration of the life of Ada Lovelace (one recent biography suggested that her fame was unmerited, but Crowley argues for a more generous look at her potential, squelched as it was both by restrictions on women in the 19th century, and by her early death). All in all, though the Byron novel is briskly entertaining, it’s the parts about Ada, together with the 21st-century plot involving a woman’s (partial) reconciliation with her own father (a filmmaker exiled from the United States for Polanski-esque reasons) that have the most emotional weight. Lord Byron’s Novel is finally a trifle in Crowley’s oeuvre, an elegant, seemingly effortless performance rather than a plumbing of the depths, but that’s OK. It gives us something to ponder while we wait for the final volume of Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy.
I thoroughly enjoyed John Crowley’s latest book, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, though I don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s an amazing work of literary impersonation. Crowley’s conceit is to give us a supposedly lost manuscript of Lord Byron — his only novel, a semi-autobiographical Gothic romance — together with the circumstances of its loss and rediscovery. Crowley’s text has several layers: Byron’s novel itself (written in what is, to my untrained ear at least, a convincing channelling of Byron’s voice, style, and sensibility); a series of annotations on the text, by Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (his only “legitimate” child, whom he never saw post-infancy, and who grew up to become Charles Babbage’s collaborator upon the Difference Engine, and arguably the first person to conceive the possibilities of computer programming); and an exchange of emails, dated 2002, among the people who discover and decipher the manuscript (which Ada had encrypted to preserve it from her mother, Byron’s estranged wife, who would otherwise have destroyed it).
The novel’s puzzles and collections of fragments give pleasure; recurrent themes of estranged fathers and longing daughters, of exile and reconciliation, are worked out in the book’s various parallel layers; and Crowley offers something of an apologia for Byron, against feminist charges that he was a misogynist, together with a quite poignant reconstruction/celebration of the life of Ada Lovelace (one recent biography suggested that her fame was unmerited, but Crowley argues for a more generous look at her potential, squelched as it was both by restrictions on women in the 19th century, and by her early death). All in all, though the Byron novel is briskly entertaining, it’s the parts about Ada, together with the 21st-century plot involving a woman’s (partial) reconciliation with her own father (a filmmaker exiled from the United States for Polanski-esque reasons) that have the most emotional weight. Lord Byron’s Novel is finally a trifle in Crowley’s oeuvre, an elegant, seemingly effortless performance rather than a plumbing of the depths, but that’s OK. It gives us something to ponder while we wait for the final volume of Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy.
The first thing that gets you about M.T. Anderson’s “young adult” science fiction novel Feed is the narrator’s voice: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. We went on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break. Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, ‘I’m so null,’ and Marty was all, ‘I’m null too, unit,’ but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them…”
And so on, for 300 pages. It’s the tone that does it. Feed isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s dead-on as an act of linguistic impersonation, or possession. No actual living teenager is this vapid and unreflective — in fact, even the most conformist, consumerist, trendy, and outwardly unreflective teens turn out to be filled inside with anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty, and a paralyzingly exacerbated self-consciousness — but Anderson has channeled instead the Platonic Idea, as it were, of the privileged and pampered male American teen, at least as the media (or better, Entertainment Capitalism) would want him to be.
In the future world of the novel, all of television, computers, mobile phones, and the Internet is available, interface-free, through a neural-interface chip implanted inside your head at birth. (At least, that is, if you are in the 73% of the American population that can afford it). It’s all a continuous feed: AOL-chatting with your friends, hearing music, watching comedies and dramas, getting the news if you are interested (most people aren’t), looking up words you don’t know and facts about any subject — and above all, getting those constant exhortations to buy, with ads that are context-sensitive and tailored especially for your own particular preferences. Fashions are continually changing, so there’s always something new to get, especially if you are an affluent, post-literate teen with an ample monetary flow and lots of time on your hands, since there’s so little you actually have to do.
Perhaps all this is obvious and predictable, but it’s almost uncanny the way Anderson captures the sense of the flow, the immersion in multimedia, the eternal Now in which everything is always changing, but for that very reason there’s this absolute monotony, since the mere fact of meaningless change is the only thing there is. Ernst Bloch’s unfair characterization of Bergson — “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was” — is an accurate description of the endless, kaleidoscopic “feed” that Anderson describes. How the genuinely New is actually possible in such circumstances — which is Bloch’s great question, as well as Bergson’s (though Bloch, with an ungenerosity that is quite unusual for him, refuses to concede this in Bergson’s case), and Deleuze’s, and above all Whitehead’s — is not directly addressed by Anderson’s novel.
Instead, we get satire that turns to tragedy. The narrator’s girlfriend attempts to revolt against the Feed. Her rebellion is quite tentative and uncertain: this is exactly right, because the whole point is that neither she, nor anyone else in the world of the novel, has any sort of external perspective to bring to bear on the Feed, precisely because it subsumes everyone and everything, translates whatever you encounter into a matter of mere/sheer commodity consumption. Nonetheless, however timid and incomplete her rebellion is, it is enough for the Feed to destroy her: both mentally/metaphysically/morally, and literally/physiologically. The book’s greatest accomplishment is to convey the full creepiness of this destruction, while/although the narrator himself remains utterly incapable of understanding it, or her. An unreliable narrator is one thing; but a narrator who is reliable as to the facts, but uncomprehending as to their import, is far more painful and disturbing. (Affect cuts deeper than epistemology). The resulting, slightly queasy, feeling of combined immersion and alienation is what makes the novel more than just a clever commentary that any NPR listener, or snob who refuses to watch TV, could approve of. It leads, instead, to a sense of complicity: the realization that I cannot pretend to be somehow superior to, or even external to, the object of my critique.
The first thing that gets you about M.T. Anderson’s “young adult” science fiction novel Feed is the narrator’s voice: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. We went on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break. Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, ‘I’m so null,’ and Marty was all, ‘I’m null too, unit,’ but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them…”
And so on, for 300 pages. It’s the tone that does it. Feed isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s dead-on as an act of linguistic impersonation, or possession. No actual living teenager is this vapid and unreflective — in fact, even the most conformist, consumerist, trendy, and outwardly unreflective teens turn out to be filled inside with anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty, and a paralyzingly exacerbated self-consciousness — but Anderson has channeled instead the Platonic Idea, as it were, of the privileged and pampered male American teen, at least as the media (or better, Entertainment Capitalism) would want him to be.
In the future world of the novel, all of television, computers, mobile phones, and the Internet is available, interface-free, through a neural-interface chip implanted inside your head at birth. (At least, that is, if you are in the 73% of the American population that can afford it). It’s all a continuous feed: AOL-chatting with your friends, hearing music, watching comedies and dramas, getting the news if you are interested (most people aren’t), looking up words you don’t know and facts about any subject — and above all, getting those constant exhortations to buy, with ads that are context-sensitive and tailored especially for your own particular preferences. Fashions are continually changing, so there’s always something new to get, especially if you are an affluent, post-literate teen with an ample monetary flow and lots of time on your hands, since there’s so little you actually have to do.
Perhaps all this is obvious and predictable, but it’s almost uncanny the way Anderson captures the sense of the flow, the immersion in multimedia, the eternal Now in which everything is always changing, but for that very reason there’s this absolute monotony, since the mere fact of meaningless change is the only thing there is. Ernst Bloch’s unfair characterization of Bergson — “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was” — is an accurate description of the endless, kaleidoscopic “feed” that Anderson describes. How the genuinely New is actually possible in such circumstances — which is Bloch’s great question, as well as Bergson’s (though Bloch, with an ungenerosity that is quite unusual for him, refuses to concede this in Bergson’s case), and Deleuze’s, and above all Whitehead’s — is not directly addressed by Anderson’s novel.
Instead, we get satire that turns to tragedy. The narrator’s girlfriend attempts to revolt against the Feed. Her rebellion is quite tentative and uncertain: this is exactly right, because the whole point is that neither she, nor anyone else in the world of the novel, has any sort of external perspective to bring to bear on the Feed, precisely because it subsumes everyone and everything, translates whatever you encounter into a matter of mere/sheer commodity consumption. Nonetheless, however timid and incomplete her rebellion is, it is enough for the Feed to destroy her: both mentally/metaphysically/morally, and literally/physiologically. The book’s greatest accomplishment is to convey the full creepiness of this destruction, while/although the narrator himself remains utterly incapable of understanding it, or her. An unreliable narrator is one thing; but a narrator who is reliable as to the facts, but uncomprehending as to their import, is far more painful and disturbing. (Affect cuts deeper than epistemology). The resulting, slightly queasy, feeling of combined immersion and alienation is what makes the novel more than just a clever commentary that any NPR listener, or snob who refuses to watch TV, could approve of. It leads, instead, to a sense of complicity: the realization that I cannot pretend to be somehow superior to, or even external to, the object of my critique.
What can you say about a science fiction novel that begins with a first-person account of a 16-year-old girl masturbating with her gun? Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (in print in UK only, alas) counterposes a present-day story in which gangs of teenage girls fight gun battles in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall (called the “maul” in a New Jersey accent), with a far-future story in which sperm is a precious commodity because most males have been wiped out by the “Y-plagues” (genetically engineered designer diseases — originally manufactured, we are told, by men rather than women — that target the Y chromosome). The present-day story is crazed and exhilarating, as teen girl gangs — versed in the poetry of brand names above all else — trash the cosmetics counter at Lord and Taylor, lock hostages into the oven at California Pizza Kitchen, and hide weapons caches in the prom dress display at Laura Ashley. The future story is grimmer (or at least, less of a high). It involves a society where the routinization of the “society of the spectacle,” and the commodification of all aspects of existence, is correlated with a suppression of male aggression, so that the restoration of testosterone-fueled stupidity, oafishness, and gratuitous violence comes across as something that’s potentially liberating for both genders. Both plots are messy and turn back upon themselves: the riot-grrl rampage eventually metamorphoses into a surreal video game, while the future-world plot starts out as claustrophobically self-enclosed, but mutates as it spirals outward, eventually junking plot closure in favor of a logic of accelerating contamination and infection. In both cases, what happens on the level of narrative structure mimics what happens to the characters within the narrative: so the book explodes conventional gendered identities from both ends. I’m not quite sure where Maul leaves us, at the end of its wild ride, but the book is great both for its extremity, and for the way it deliberately, almost cruelly, chafes at the wounds of gender in our “post-feminist” and ultracommodified era.
What can you say about a science fiction novel that begins with a first-person account of a 16-year-old girl masturbating with her gun? Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (in print in UK only, alas) counterposes a present-day story in which gangs of teenage girls fight gun battles in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall (called the “maul” in a New Jersey accent), with a far-future story in which sperm is a precious commodity because most males have been wiped out by the “Y-plagues” (genetically engineered designer diseases — originally manufactured, we are told, by men rather than women — that target the Y chromosome). The present-day story is crazed and exhilarating, as teen girl gangs — versed in the poetry of brand names above all else — trash the cosmetics counter at Lord and Taylor, lock hostages into the oven at California Pizza Kitchen, and hide weapons caches in the prom dress display at Laura Ashley. The future story is grimmer (or at least, less of a high). It involves a society where the routinization of the “society of the spectacle,” and the commodification of all aspects of existence, is correlated with a suppression of male aggression, so that the restoration of testosterone-fueled stupidity, oafishness, and gratuitous violence comes across as something that’s potentially liberating for both genders. Both plots are messy and turn back upon themselves: the riot-grrl rampage eventually metamorphoses into a surreal video game, while the future-world plot starts out as claustrophobically self-enclosed, but mutates as it spirals outward, eventually junking plot closure in favor of a logic of accelerating contamination and infection. In both cases, what happens on the level of narrative structure mimics what happens to the characters within the narrative: so the book explodes conventional gendered identities from both ends. I’m not quite sure where Maul leaves us, at the end of its wild ride, but the book is great both for its extremity, and for the way it deliberately, almost cruelly, chafes at the wounds of gender in our “post-feminist” and ultracommodified era.
Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was a thinker quite famous in the 1960s, but who seems to be little spoken of today. The very thing that made him popular in his time — his optimistically apocalyptic view of a liberating, Dionysian revolution in Western culture — means that now he is thoroughly out of fashion; indeed, the changes of the last forty years or so have made his sort of approach and writing almost entirely unthinkable. But it is precisely because he is unthinkable and untimely, that Brown is worth another look today.
Brown’s first major book, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), offers a close reading of Freud and psychoanalysis as the vehicle for a radically revisionary look at the human condition. In the 1950s, Freudianism was at the height of its prestige and influence in the United States; but the “Freud” people read (by “people,” I mean the public at large, and the intellectuals, as well as the psychoanalytic community itself) was a very conservative and normative one, the upholder of patriarchy and heterosexuality, the advocate of the necessity of repression, the therapist of strengthening the ego, in order to hold “monsters from the id” at bay.
But Brown reads Freud entirely differently, and from the hindsight of today, much more richly and insightfully. For Brown, Freud is the discoverer of the richness and plenitude of the unconscious mind, and the critic of just how narrow and restricted our conscious, “civilized” experience is. (Brown makes almost the same sharp criticisms of “ego psychology” that Jacques Lacan – unbeknownst to him — was making in France at the same time; though Brown could not be more different from Lacan in most ways, the two of them share a rejection of normative and normalizing approaches to psychoanalysis, and a commitment to taking seriously the speculative and philosophical dimensions of Freud’s texts). Brown emphasizes the role of desire, as against cognition, in how we relate to others and find our place in the world; he insists on the centrality of the body, and the need to understand Freudian mechanisms like repression and sublimation, and introjection and projection, in corporeal terms; he takes seriously such uncomfortable Freudian notions as the castration complex, anality, and the death instinct.
Brown is revising Freud, and using him to change the world, not just reverentially interpreting him; but he makes clear where he is following Freud, and where he is criticizing him, or extrapolating from him, or going beyond him. Basically, Brown draws radical conclusions from Freud’s admonition that the difference between neurosis and mental “health” is at best a matter of degree, and that everything we see in the minds of neurotics is present universally, in everybody’s psyche. Freud is very close to saying we are all neurotic; and Brown insists on this conclusion. Pushing further with something that Freud only said tentatively, Brown extrapolates these results from the individual to society in general: we can psychoanalyze cultures just as we can individual people, and trace social history just as psychoanalysis traces individual histories. Doing this, Brown says, we are led to the conclusion that society itself is neurotic; that human history in general is the history of a mass neurosis; and that psychoanalysis will never “cure” individuals unless it can radically change the society whose neurotic structure mirrors the individual’s own.
For some Freudians, changing society would mean a bit more openness about sexuality, and more liberal toilet training practices for small children — both of which have in fact happened in the time between the 1950s and today. But Brown scorns such reforms as petty, and says they don’t get at the main issue. Brown sees the denial of the body, the reign of repression, and deformations of desire as major structuring principles for all of Western culture, perhaps for all of human culture. The problem goes back to the basic psychological development and organization that for Freud take place in early childhood: the displacement of the “pleasure principle” by the “reality principle,” and the genital organization of the psyche. 20th century sex radicals like D H Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich in fact left sexual repression intact, Brown says, because they maintained the primacy of the orgasm and of genital sexuality. Brown calls instead for a return to polymorphous perversity, the state in which the entire body is eroticized, rather than there being a specific, specialized sexual function.
More generally, Brown mounts a remarkable attack upon the very notion of sublimation, which for Freud and orthodox Freudians was the goal of psychoanalysis and the one potential way out from neurotic suffering. Freud defines sublimation as the turning of sexual and aggressive impulses toward “higher” and more socially useful goals (I redirect my compulsions, and take control of them to become an artist or a politician instead of a neurotic); but it’s notorious that Freud has a very difficult time explaining what sublimation really is, and just how it works. Brown seizes upon this difficulty to argue that sublimation is largely a bogus category, and that it is not a substitute for repression but a continuation of it by different means. The very idea of sublimation — moving from something “lower” to something “higher” — involves stunting the potentialities of the body, and setting up a hierarchy between mind and body, or even a total Cartesian separation of mind from body. For Brown, a radical desublimation is the only way to go: a return to the wisdom of the polymorphously perverse body, a rejection of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment; an acceptance of death as part of life, instead of our dread of death which ironically turns life itself into a living death.
My summary of Brown’s argument doesn’t do justice to its richness of detail and depth of conception; not to mention the powerful insights that crop up along the way, particularly with regard to Freud’s notion of anality, which Brown discusses in great detail in relation to Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther, and the “Protestant ethic” at the base of capitalism.Life Against Death is both broad and deep, and it is astonishingly original. It argues passionately for utopian, apocalyptic, and eschatological speculation, as our only hope for “solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble.” Brown doesn’t have the sardonic sense of the hopelessness of the human situation that his contemporary William Burroughs does; but even to my cynical eyes, Brown does something almost as valuable: he makes a radical alternative to The Way Things Are thinkable, entirely tough-mindedly, and without turning to the sappy, saccharine, and zombiefied visions of all too many utopians, New Agers, and champions of Human Potential.
I have less to say about Brown’s followup volume, Love’s Body (1966), because it strikes me as a much less powerful and interesting book. Brown here draws much more on ethnography and myth, in addition to psychoanalysis, and he strives for a fusion of the pagan/Dionysian with a radical Christian mysticism. (This latter is noteworthy, because it calls upon potentialities in Christianity that are far different either from the “liberal theology” of Brown’s day or from the heavy fundamentalism that is the main face of Christianity in America today. Brown’s emphasis on the joyousness of the Resurrection, on the “resurrection of the body,” is diametrically opposed to the sadomasochistic body hysteria/disgust of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ). Brown also moves from the formidably learned and argumentative discourse of Life Against Death to a more poetic, more willfully fragmentary style of writing. Love’s Body is short on any concrete discussion of how we might get from here to there, from civilized repression to redemption in the body of Dionysus/Christ, but it’s ferociously visionary in a way that stands as a reproach to more timid social, cultural, and religious theorists.
Brown published two subsequent books: Closing Time (1973), which I haven’t read, but which is apparently an arrangement of citations/fragments from Vico’s New Science and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; and a much later collection of essays, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992), where among other things he takes stock of the relations between his own thought and that of some of the European poststructuralists (Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri) whose work came later (or, in the case of Bataille, of whom he was simply unaware when he wrote Life Against Death and Love’s Body). It’s an interesting comparison; while Brown’s mysticism is in some ways very American (it certainly goes back to Emerson, among other sources), there are deep affinities there as well (an insistence on the libidinal nature of economics and politics, an interest in Spinoza, a critique of the metaphysics/negativity of Desire and its replacement with a more affirmative emphasis on multiple pleasures/potentialities of bodies).
All in all, I find Norman O. Brown an inspiring writer: inspiring because of the joyous activity and originality of his own thought, which can only encourage us, his readers, to be similarly daring and adventurous in thinking outside the prisonhouse of our reigning ideologies. However, in more specific terms I am not sure how useful he is; I mean by this that I don’t really see how his particular theories and insights can be “put to work” today (well, at least, not by me). Such is always the problem with utopian thought, or with thought this sweeping, foundational, and broad: when you’ve diagnosed the neurosis at the root of all of human history, you are unlikely to have particular suggestions for dealing with the particular hell we are living in today, the hell of unfettered global capitalism, and unfettered religious fundamentalism. But I shouldn’t be churlish. Brown understands, and teaches us, that critique by itself is sterile, and will do nothing unless accompanied by imagination, and practices of metamorphosis.
Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was a thinker quite famous in the 1960s, but who seems to be little spoken of today. The very thing that made him popular in his time — his optimistically apocalyptic view of a liberating, Dionysian revolution in Western culture — means that now he is thoroughly out of fashion; indeed, the changes of the last forty years or so have made his sort of approach and writing almost entirely unthinkable. But it is precisely because he is unthinkable and untimely, that Brown is worth another look today.
Brown’s first major book, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), offers a close reading of Freud and psychoanalysis as the vehicle for a radically revisionary look at the human condition. In the 1950s, Freudianism was at the height of its prestige and influence in the United States; but the “Freud” people read (by “people,” I mean the public at large, and the intellectuals, as well as the psychoanalytic community itself) was a very conservative and normative one, the upholder of patriarchy and heterosexuality, the advocate of the necessity of repression, the therapist of strengthening the ego, in order to hold “monsters from the id” at bay.
But Brown reads Freud entirely differently, and from the hindsight of today, much more richly and insightfully. For Brown, Freud is the discoverer of the richness and plenitude of the unconscious mind, and the critic of just how narrow and restricted our conscious, “civilized” experience is. (Brown makes almost the same sharp criticisms of “ego psychology” that Jacques Lacan – unbeknownst to him — was making in France at the same time; though Brown could not be more different from Lacan in most ways, the two of them share a rejection of normative and normalizing approaches to psychoanalysis, and a commitment to taking seriously the speculative and philosophical dimensions of Freud’s texts). Brown emphasizes the role of desire, as against cognition, in how we relate to others and find our place in the world; he insists on the centrality of the body, and the need to understand Freudian mechanisms like repression and sublimation, and introjection and projection, in corporeal terms; he takes seriously such uncomfortable Freudian notions as the castration complex, anality, and the death instinct.
Brown is revising Freud, and using him to change the world, not just reverentially interpreting him; but he makes clear where he is following Freud, and where he is criticizing him, or extrapolating from him, or going beyond him. Basically, Brown draws radical conclusions from Freud’s admonition that the difference between neurosis and mental “health” is at best a matter of degree, and that everything we see in the minds of neurotics is present universally, in everybody’s psyche. Freud is very close to saying we are all neurotic; and Brown insists on this conclusion. Pushing further with something that Freud only said tentatively, Brown extrapolates these results from the individual to society in general: we can psychoanalyze cultures just as we can individual people, and trace social history just as psychoanalysis traces individual histories. Doing this, Brown says, we are led to the conclusion that society itself is neurotic; that human history in general is the history of a mass neurosis; and that psychoanalysis will never “cure” individuals unless it can radically change the society whose neurotic structure mirrors the individual’s own.
For some Freudians, changing society would mean a bit more openness about sexuality, and more liberal toilet training practices for small children — both of which have in fact happened in the time between the 1950s and today. But Brown scorns such reforms as petty, and says they don’t get at the main issue. Brown sees the denial of the body, the reign of repression, and deformations of desire as major structuring principles for all of Western culture, perhaps for all of human culture. The problem goes back to the basic psychological development and organization that for Freud take place in early childhood: the displacement of the “pleasure principle” by the “reality principle,” and the genital organization of the psyche. 20th century sex radicals like D H Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich in fact left sexual repression intact, Brown says, because they maintained the primacy of the orgasm and of genital sexuality. Brown calls instead for a return to polymorphous perversity, the state in which the entire body is eroticized, rather than there being a specific, specialized sexual function.
More generally, Brown mounts a remarkable attack upon the very notion of sublimation, which for Freud and orthodox Freudians was the goal of psychoanalysis and the one potential way out from neurotic suffering. Freud defines sublimation as the turning of sexual and aggressive impulses toward “higher” and more socially useful goals (I redirect my compulsions, and take control of them to become an artist or a politician instead of a neurotic); but it’s notorious that Freud has a very difficult time explaining what sublimation really is, and just how it works. Brown seizes upon this difficulty to argue that sublimation is largely a bogus category, and that it is not a substitute for repression but a continuation of it by different means. The very idea of sublimation — moving from something “lower” to something “higher” — involves stunting the potentialities of the body, and setting up a hierarchy between mind and body, or even a total Cartesian separation of mind from body. For Brown, a radical desublimation is the only way to go: a return to the wisdom of the polymorphously perverse body, a rejection of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment; an acceptance of death as part of life, instead of our dread of death which ironically turns life itself into a living death.
My summary of Brown’s argument doesn’t do justice to its richness of detail and depth of conception; not to mention the powerful insights that crop up along the way, particularly with regard to Freud’s notion of anality, which Brown discusses in great detail in relation to Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther, and the “Protestant ethic” at the base of capitalism.Life Against Death is both broad and deep, and it is astonishingly original. It argues passionately for utopian, apocalyptic, and eschatological speculation, as our only hope for “solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble.” Brown doesn’t have the sardonic sense of the hopelessness of the human situation that his contemporary William Burroughs does; but even to my cynical eyes, Brown does something almost as valuable: he makes a radical alternative to The Way Things Are thinkable, entirely tough-mindedly, and without turning to the sappy, saccharine, and zombiefied visions of all too many utopians, New Agers, and champions of Human Potential.
I have less to say about Brown’s followup volume, Love’s Body (1966), because it strikes me as a much less powerful and interesting book. Brown here draws much more on ethnography and myth, in addition to psychoanalysis, and he strives for a fusion of the pagan/Dionysian with a radical Christian mysticism. (This latter is noteworthy, because it calls upon potentialities in Christianity that are far different either from the “liberal theology” of Brown’s day or from the heavy fundamentalism that is the main face of Christianity in America today. Brown’s emphasis on the joyousness of the Resurrection, on the “resurrection of the body,” is diametrically opposed to the sadomasochistic body hysteria/disgust of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ). Brown also moves from the formidably learned and argumentative discourse of Life Against Death to a more poetic, more willfully fragmentary style of writing. Love’s Body is short on any concrete discussion of how we might get from here to there, from civilized repression to redemption in the body of Dionysus/Christ, but it’s ferociously visionary in a way that stands as a reproach to more timid social, cultural, and religious theorists.
Brown published two subsequent books: Closing Time (1973), which I haven’t read, but which is apparently an arrangement of citations/fragments from Vico’s New Science and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; and a much later collection of essays, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992), where among other things he takes stock of the relations between his own thought and that of some of the European poststructuralists (Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri) whose work came later (or, in the case of Bataille, of whom he was simply unaware when he wrote Life Against Death and Love’s Body). It’s an interesting comparison; while Brown’s mysticism is in some ways very American (it certainly goes back to Emerson, among other sources), there are deep affinities there as well (an insistence on the libidinal nature of economics and politics, an interest in Spinoza, a critique of the metaphysics/negativity of Desire and its replacement with a more affirmative emphasis on multiple pleasures/potentialities of bodies).
All in all, I find Norman O. Brown an inspiring writer: inspiring because of the joyous activity and originality of his own thought, which can only encourage us, his readers, to be similarly daring and adventurous in thinking outside the prisonhouse of our reigning ideologies. However, in more specific terms I am not sure how useful he is; I mean by this that I don’t really see how his particular theories and insights can be “put to work” today (well, at least, not by me). Such is always the problem with utopian thought, or with thought this sweeping, foundational, and broad: when you’ve diagnosed the neurosis at the root of all of human history, you are unlikely to have particular suggestions for dealing with the particular hell we are living in today, the hell of unfettered global capitalism, and unfettered religious fundamentalism. But I shouldn’t be churlish. Brown understands, and teaches us, that critique by itself is sterile, and will do nothing unless accompanied by imagination, and practices of metamorphosis.
Phallos, which came out last year (2004), is the most recently published novel by Samuel R. Delany. It’s a short work — a mere 95 pages — dense, playful, and delightful. The blurb on the back of the book calls it “a Lacanian riddle to delight,” and that isn’t far wrong.
Delany’s Phallos takes the form of a summary/synopsis/commentary, on the Web of a gay porn novel called Phallos, set in ancient Rome and apparently written in the 1960s, that is out of print and very difficult to find. So I guess it could be called meta-pornography: it’s a pornographic narrative that is only presented indirectly, through all the screens of a somewhat unreliable narrator choosing excerpts, and discussing issues of provenance and textual details about a book that (of course) only exists inside the book we are actually reading. As a result of this strategy, also, the copious sex of the pornographic narrative is not explicitly described on the page in any great detail, but mostly just alluded to. The book is allied, therefore, to Delany’s other sexual narratives (Hogg, Equinox, and The Mad Man) but in a reduced (in size and scope) and considerably more indirect manner.
This indirection is of course the point of the book, which is a book about the phallus of Freudian/Lacanian theory, the signifier of desire, and of erotic (& masculine) potency, but which (as a mere signifier) is always absent, or other than itself. The phallus in Phallos is both the unavailable, and only indirectly narrated, pornographic narrative itself, and also (within that distanced, non-present narrative) the missing male organ of an obscure god (or more precisely, of a statue or idol of an obscure god) whose absence, or quality of being missing, circulates through the narrative, and is the “absent cause” of its repetitions, permutations, and deviations.
Describing Delany’s novel in this way, however accurate, also sells it short, because it makes it sound as if the book were just an allegorization, or an “illustration,” of a philosophical idea: which it is not; because Phallos is not exhausted by its allegorical or ideational nature. This is because it is an affectively powerful work (with an intensity that is both playful and emotionally deep and compelling, if not — for me, at least, as a heterosexual reader — directly arousing). You might say that the novel embodies the absence, the non-identity, the simulacral emptying-out of virility, that is its subject: if embodying something non-present (if not quite a “lack” in orthodox Lacanian terms either) is not too much of an oxymoron.
Actually, the most accurate categorization would probably be to say that Phallos is a philosophical novel (or novella), in precisely the sense that Voltaire’s Candide and Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Jacques le fataliste, together with other 18th century fictional works by Sade and others, are philosophical novels. It’s a work of speculation, and even of wisdom — but one in which the thought is carried by narrative, rather than by theoretical argument. It touches on metaphysical issues, having to do with the nature of selfhood and of desire; but ultimately it is a book about how to live.
The absence that is the phallus/phallos means that desire is never sated by total satisfaction, but always awakened again; that life necessarily implies a certain degree of loss, disappointment, and unfulfillment. The phallus, therefore, always implies change and becoming, without the possibility of attaining a final state of peace: it is “that signification itself by which something else always molds us toward something better — or sometimes, something worse — than what we already are” (77). Desire is never entirely realized — there is no utopia or nirvana — but nonetheless “desire is as endlessly unquenchable as it is repeatable” (62).The novel — or, rather, the novel within the novel, indirectly refracted to is — is filled with orgies and all sorts of sexual extremity; but (as has been the case in some of Delany’s earlier works (and as I have previously noted with regard to his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue) this sex is not presented as transgressive: rather it’s seen as a rather civilized way of negotiating the delights and disappointments, opportunities and limitations, of life. There may be a “lack” at the center of desire; but (sexual) variety is literally the spice of a life of desire, and does not contradict, but supplements a main sexual and partnering relationship that is secure and lasting; as Neoptolomus, the hero of the novel-within-the-novel, reflects at one point (not too far from the end), “with such variety [of sexual experiences and pleasures] it becomes hard to hold on to where that lack lies, since that absent center moves about so: If I have learned anything in this time, is that losing track of it, in such a secure relationship, is surely the closest we can come to filling it” (75). I’m not sure if this difficult pronouncement is sufficiently clear apart from its context in the narrative; but it does express a kind of pragmatic utopianism, if I can dare to use such an oxymoronic phrase, that does not make its point, or achieve its hope, at the price of ignoring change and loss — though it is a perspective that is scarcely intelligible or admissible within contemporary American social, political, religious, and psychological discourse, and in fact serves as a terrible condemnation of the wretchedness of mainstream America’s hopes and fears today.
I’ll stop there, though Phallos, for all its brevity, is so rich and (indeed) inspiring a text that it calls out for a more extended, as well as less muddled, appreciation than I have been able to provide here.
Phallos, which came out last year (2004), is the most recently published novel by Samuel R. Delany. It’s a short work — a mere 95 pages — dense, playful, and delightful. The blurb on the back of the book calls it “a Lacanian riddle to delight,” and that isn’t far wrong.
Delany’s Phallos takes the form of a summary/synopsis/commentary, on the Web of a gay porn novel called Phallos, set in ancient Rome and apparently written in the 1960s, that is out of print and very difficult to find. So I guess it could be called meta-pornography: it’s a pornographic narrative that is only presented indirectly, through all the screens of a somewhat unreliable narrator choosing excerpts, and discussing issues of provenance and textual details about a book that (of course) only exists inside the book we are actually reading. As a result of this strategy, also, the copious sex of the pornographic narrative is not explicitly described on the page in any great detail, but mostly just alluded to. The book is allied, therefore, to Delany’s other sexual narratives (Hogg, Equinox, and The Mad Man) but in a reduced (in size and scope) and considerably more indirect manner.
This indirection is of course the point of the book, which is a book about the phallus of Freudian/Lacanian theory, the signifier of desire, and of erotic (& masculine) potency, but which (as a mere signifier) is always absent, or other than itself. The phallus in Phallos is both the unavailable, and only indirectly narrated, pornographic narrative itself, and also (within that distanced, non-present narrative) the missing male organ of an obscure god (or more precisely, of a statue or idol of an obscure god) whose absence, or quality of being missing, circulates through the narrative, and is the “absent cause” of its repetitions, permutations, and deviations.
Describing Delany’s novel in this way, however accurate, also sells it short, because it makes it sound as if the book were just an allegorization, or an “illustration,” of a philosophical idea: which it is not; because Phallos is not exhausted by its allegorical or ideational nature. This is because it is an affectively powerful work (with an intensity that is both playful and emotionally deep and compelling, if not — for me, at least, as a heterosexual reader — directly arousing). You might say that the novel embodies the absence, the non-identity, the simulacral emptying-out of virility, that is its subject: if embodying something non-present (if not quite a “lack” in orthodox Lacanian terms either) is not too much of an oxymoron.
Actually, the most accurate categorization would probably be to say that Phallos is a philosophical novel (or novella), in precisely the sense that Voltaire’s Candide and Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Jacques le fataliste, together with other 18th century fictional works by Sade and others, are philosophical novels. It’s a work of speculation, and even of wisdom — but one in which the thought is carried by narrative, rather than by theoretical argument. It touches on metaphysical issues, having to do with the nature of selfhood and of desire; but ultimately it is a book about how to live.
The absence that is the phallus/phallos means that desire is never sated by total satisfaction, but always awakened again; that life necessarily implies a certain degree of loss, disappointment, and unfulfillment. The phallus, therefore, always implies change and becoming, without the possibility of attaining a final state of peace: it is “that signification itself by which something else always molds us toward something better — or sometimes, something worse — than what we already are” (77). Desire is never entirely realized — there is no utopia or nirvana — but nonetheless “desire is as endlessly unquenchable as it is repeatable” (62).The novel — or, rather, the novel within the novel, indirectly refracted to is — is filled with orgies and all sorts of sexual extremity; but (as has been the case in some of Delany’s earlier works (and as I have previously noted with regard to his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue) this sex is not presented as transgressive: rather it’s seen as a rather civilized way of negotiating the delights and disappointments, opportunities and limitations, of life. There may be a “lack” at the center of desire; but (sexual) variety is literally the spice of a life of desire, and does not contradict, but supplements a main sexual and partnering relationship that is secure and lasting; as Neoptolomus, the hero of the novel-within-the-novel, reflects at one point (not too far from the end), “with such variety [of sexual experiences and pleasures] it becomes hard to hold on to where that lack lies, since that absent center moves about so: If I have learned anything in this time, is that losing track of it, in such a secure relationship, is surely the closest we can come to filling it” (75). I’m not sure if this difficult pronouncement is sufficiently clear apart from its context in the narrative; but it does express a kind of pragmatic utopianism, if I can dare to use such an oxymoronic phrase, that does not make its point, or achieve its hope, at the price of ignoring change and loss — though it is a perspective that is scarcely intelligible or admissible within contemporary American social, political, religious, and psychological discourse, and in fact serves as a terrible condemnation of the wretchedness of mainstream America’s hopes and fears today.
I’ll stop there, though Phallos, for all its brevity, is so rich and (indeed) inspiring a text that it calls out for a more extended, as well as less muddled, appreciation than I have been able to provide here.