WRAP Thesis Hall 2000

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Outside the Gate: A Study of Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation as Mediated via the Work of D. H. Lawrence. By Stephen Alexander Hall. A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Literature. University of Warwick, Dept. of Philosophy. March 2000 E.V.

Contents. Acknowledgements and Declaration. Abstract. A Note on the Abbreviations used in the Text. P.I. Outside the Gate: An Introduction. P.I. Part I: Formal Remarks. P.t4. Part II: Remarks on the Political and Social Concerns of the Thesis. P.t8. Part III: On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature. P.2S. Chapter I: Among the Ruins: Nihilism, Culture, and the Politics of Style. P.2S. Part I: Opening Remarks on the Death of God and the Emergence of Modern European Nihilism in Relation to Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love. P.31. Part II: Aspects of Nihilism as a Molar and Molecular Phenomenon. P.31. ILi. Cash From Chaos: Nihilism and the Question of Capitalism. P.36. ll.ii. 0 Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology. P.43. II.iii. A Dry Soul is Best: Decadence, Sexuality, and the Subject. P.49. ll.iv. Closing Remarks: No One is Free to be a Crab. P.St. Part III: Aesthetics and Ideology. P.St. III.i. Further Remarks on the Question of Culture. P.59. IILii. Art as the Counter-Nihilistic P.67. III.iii. Closing Remarks: From Among the Ruins to Beyond the Ruins. P.70. Chapter II: Beyond the Ruins: Love, Power, and the Politics of Evil. P.70. Part I: Opening Remarks on How the Disease of Love Infects Modernity Force par excellence.

and Its Politics in Relation to Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo. P.79. Part II: Power: The Philosophy, Politics, and Problem Of. P.79. II. i. Remarks on the Philosophy of Power. P.SS. II.ii. Remarks on the Politics of Power (a Politics of Evil). P.9S. II.iii. Problems, Concerns, and Dangers. P.I03. Part III: Beyond the Molar Level of Politics. P.103. III.i. The Reconfiguration of the Subject as a Power-Formation. P.I09. III.ii. No More Great Events. P.114. IIl.iii. Dig Deeper and You Will Find Yourself Standing on Pagan Ground. P.1l9. Chapter III: Only A Dark God Can Save Us Now: Quetzalcoatl and the Politics of Cruelty. P.1l9. Part I: Sulphurous Politico-Theological on Lawrence's Speculations: Opening Remarks The Plumed Serpent and the Re-Introduction of the Gods Back Into History. P.119. I.i. Outside the Gate. P.122. I.ii. "Jetzt war es Zeit, das Goiter trsten / aus bewohnten Dingen." P.l3S. Part II: The Politics of Cruelty. P.147. Part III: The Flight Back Into Paradise: Further Remarks on the New Innocence. P.155. Part IV: Closing Remarks. P.155. IV. i. Revolutions are so vieux jeu. P.161. IV.ii. The Question of Fascism Once More. P.164. IV. iii. Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. P.169. Chapter IV: Tenderness: The Philosophy of Becoming and the Politics of Desire. P.169. Part I: Theoretical and General Opening Remarks.

P.169. I.i. The Significance of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. P.I71. I.ii. From Pollyanalytics to Schizoanalysis. P.I74. I.iii. Towards a Politics of Desire. P.I79. I.iv. The Body. P.179. I.v. Towards a Philosophy of Becoming. P.IS6. Part II: Schizoanalysis: Of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and Becomings. P.IS7. II.i. The Case of Lady Chatterley: The Becoming of the New Eve. P.197. ll.ii. The Case of Lady Chatterley's Lover: The Becoming of the Old Adam. P.2IO. Part III: Postanalysis: Towards a Democracy of Touch. P.2IO. Ill .i. Opening Remarks on the Mystery of Touch and Lawrence's Notion of Democracy P.214. Ill.ii. An American Vision: Walt Whitman's Democracy of the Open Road in Relation to Lawrence's Democracy of Touch. P.216. III.iii. On a Woodpath: Heideggerean Aspects of the Democracy of Touch. P.219. III. iv. Closing Remarks on Nietzsche and the Democracy of Touch. P.223. Chapter V: The Escaped Cock: Revaluation and Resurrection: the Politics of Desire Part II. P.223. Part I: Versus the Crucified. P.223. I.i. Nietzsche as Anti-Christ. P.230. I.ii. Lawrence as Apocalypsist. P.237. Part II: Remarks on Lawrence's The Escaped Cock in Relation to Death, Sex, and the Resurrection into Touch. P.249. Part III: Political and Ethical Considerations. P.249. III. i. The Man Who Died and the Eternal Recurrence. P.257. III. ii. The Man Who Died as Overman and Uberchrist. P.265. III. iii. The Man Who Died as Risen Lord.

P.272. Part IV: Closing Remarks. P.272. IV.i. Nietzsche and Lawrence as Posthumous Thinkers. P.273. IV.ii. Towards a Final Conclusion. P.276. Outside the Gate: A Conclusion. P.292. Notes and References. P.354. Bibliography.

Acknowledgements. I am grateful for the critical encouragement and intelligent consideration given to this work by my supervisors at Warwick: Keith Ansell-Pearson of Philosophy and Michael Bell in the Department Literature. in the Department of English and Comparative If in writing about Nietzsche and Lawrence I have attempted, like Deleuze, to avoid saying anything that might make them weep in their graves; so too in submitting this work do I hope that there is nothing in it which might cause any sadness or embarrassment to Professors Ansell-Pearson and Bell. Thanks are also due to my wife, my parents, and my friends. Declaration. I, Stephen Alexander Hall, being the author of this thesis, declare that the work contained within is my own and that it has not been published in any form, either in part or as a whole. I also confirm that the thesis has not been submitted for a degree at another university.

Abstract. The aim of this study is to illuminate in a novel and original manner the political and ethical character of Nietzche's project of revaluation and to demonstrate its continued import and significance for thinking on culture and society today. In order to achieve this, I have placed Nietzsche's work in relation to the fiction, poetry, and prose of D.H. Lawrence, who, it is argued, provides the most imaginative and vital development of the above. In turn, Lawrence's thinking is exposed to more recent theoretical developments, thereby giving a good indication of the wider philosophical and political traditions within which the Nietzschean narrative and maintained of revaluation is produced, circulated, - and those against which it moves. It is argued that this narrative, although now widely studied and debated, remains an illicit and marginalized form of philosophical discourse; derided and condemned by those whose own narratives one that is often form the dominant and legitimized language games within modern liberal society. Nietzsche's philosophy thus provides a vital counter-discourse which allows things to be said and voices to be heard that few other forms of philosophical discourse dare to allow. It is crucial, therefore, that such a text be explored, developed, and enabled to perform a role in as wide a social arena as possible. In attempting to do this over the course of the five chapters that make up the work, of the major themes and concerns several of Nietzschean Nietzschean philosophy, such as power and the reconfiguration examined at length and the thesis provides of the subject, are an exciting contribution Nietzsche studies and to the critical work on Lawrence, demonstrating of Foucault's contention and post- that the relation between philosophy, both to the validity literature, and politics is permanent and fundamental. It is concluded that Nietzsche's and Lawrence's political thinking is of most interest and use to us today when it becomes molecularized and minoritarianized; a politics of desire that frees itself from molar ambition and ascetic militancy, and, perhaps, contrary, opens the way not to fascism as is often feared, but, on the to a radically new notion of democracy: the democracy of touch.

A Note on the Abbreviations Used in the Text. Where I have cited from Lawrence's novels at the heart of this thesis, the references are given immediately in the text and not in the Notes and References section, as is the case for all other writings. I have employed the following standard abbreviations for these novels: AR - Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Penguin Books, 1995).* EC - The Escaped Cock, in The Complete Short Novels, ed. Keith Sagar and Melissa Partridge, (Penguin Books, 1990). FLC - The First Lady Chatterley, (Penguin Books, 1986). JTLJ - John Thomas and Lady Jane, (Penguin Books, 1986). K - Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Penguin Books, 1997). * LCL - Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Penguin Books, 1994). * PS - The Plumed Serpent, ed. L.D. Clark & and Virginia Crosswhite-Hyde, (Penguin Books, 1995). * R - The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Penguin Books, 1995).* WL - Women in Love, ed. David Farmer et aI, (Penguin Books, 1995). * NB: Titles marked with an asterisk are based on the text established Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence. In The

Outside the Gate: An Introduction. Part I: Formal Remarks. The aim of this thesis is to illuminate the political and ethical character of Nietzsche's project of revaluation, by situating it within the context provided by the fiction, poetry, and prose of D.H. Lawrence, who, it is argued, provides the most imaginative and vital development of the above. In addition, thought is exposed to other strains of post-Nietzschean Lawrence's thought and theory where and when it becomes convenient and/or constructive to do so, giving an indication of the philosophical and political traditions within which the Nietzschean narrative is produced, maintained, and circulated - and those against which it moves. Most notably, the work of Deleuze is utilized here (including his studies in collaboration with Guattari), as is the thought of Heidegger. This is not to imply that the above all share the same political perspectives, social concerns, or philosophical approaches; quite clearly they do not and this work is not an attempt to produce a metanarrative that would suggest otherwise by illegitimately synthesizing above in some manner. That said, it is my contention the that there is a 'family resemblance' which is not merely coincidental among the above, and that there are obvious points of contact and signs of mutual infection worthy of investigation. It is claimed that there are five main consequences of the death of God and that these form the five themes of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean philosophy: 1. the destruction of the world (nihilism); 2. the dissolution of the subject; 3. the dis-organ-ization of the organism and the building of the body without organs; 4. the molecularization 'stuttering' and minoritarianization of culture and politics; 5. the of language. Coincidently, the thesis has been divided into five main chapters in which the above are crucial notions, although they do not determine the structure of the work. This, the structure, 1 has been determined rather by

Lawrence's sequence that begins with The Rainbow and ends with The Escaped Cock, tracing out Lawrence's attempt to articulate parts novels, following a chronological and further in order the revaluation of values. The chapters to facilitate an easier reading, are divided into and each is provided with preliminary material and closing remarks in order to supplement the more general Introduction and Conclusion offered to the thesis as a whole. They are united by the above themes of power, subjectivity, and the need to form new relations and new ways of feeling, as well as by the central argument that both Nietzsche's and Lawrence's work is of important social and political significance. I shall say more concerning this latter point shortly. First, I wish to offer a brief reading and summary of the five chapters in this thesis, so that the thinking behind them is made explicit. Chapter I sets out the central problematic of the work: modern European nihilism, and offers an initial response to this in terms of what we are calling here a politics of style; a politics which, as we show, bifurcates into a grand politics of evil and cruelty (examined in chapters II and III) and a molecular politics of desire (developed in chapters IV and V). Debate in this opening chapter takes place within a fictional environment (the Ruins) provided novels of modernity and nihilism: The Rainbowand by Lawrence's two great Women in Love. It touches on Questions to do with economics, technology, culture and the subject. I argue that whilst industrial capitalism is fundamentally nihilistic (reducing as it does life to market value and the logic of the machine and destroying conditions needed for cultural greatness as it does the as Nietzsche understands it), it may nevertheless release flows and forces which enable the emergence of new forms of self and society. Simply put, there may be positive aspects to the so-called crisis of nihilism, and the decadence that is both causal and symptomatic of it may yet prove to be vital for the advancement (and, indeed, enhancement) of man. Besides which, as Nietzsche argues, 'no one is free to be a crab'; i.e., there can be no 2

side-stepping or going back, modernity cannot be reversed and modern European nihilism has to be confronted, beyond explored, and experienced. The only way to move the Ruins may be via an active acceleration bringing of the processes unfolding, thereby whereupon it reveals itself not simply as an End (of Man and History), now nihilism to the point of its own consummation but as that which provides the very womb of the future. For if nihilism devalues values on the one hand, so too does it provide the opportunity other, by enabling man to form a new and uncanny for a revaluation on the perspective on himself and the world. Thus, as I conclude here, at the very least nihilism is an ambiguous state of affairs in need of calm and careful apocalyptic rhetoric that all too often surrounds consideration, free from the it. If it remains in a very real sense the impasse that dominates our horizons and determines the limits of our thought, so too is it the promise of a newly open horizon and of a thinking that exists beyond the old conventions of moral-rationalism. As mentioned, chapter I also examines a politics of style developed as a positive and appropriate response to nihilism; art being promoted as the counter-nihilistic force par excellence. For art, it is suggested, provides the possibility of another revealing for man (i.e., another way of being in the world) and allows him to regain connection with the physical (i.e., to come back into touch with the real). This construction of a new revealing, or what Deleuze calls a 'change of element', enables man to move from negation of the world to its total affirmation. It is my contention that a different revealing based upon art and an understanding of the tragic is a genuine possibility and not merely a form of utopian speculation; for when art allies itself with politics and ethics, then the revolt into style becomes very much a revolt into the real. Art helps us correspond to the nearness of things and the very thingness of things, awakening in us an intuitive awareness and a sensitivity to physical intensities. It is for this reason that art has long troubled a long line of moral idealists and political ascetics - from Plato to Stalin. 3

A radical politics heterogeneity, promote of style would contradiction, be characterized and difference; above all by plurality, a radical ethics of style would not only care and creation of the self (in the ancient Greek manner revived by Nietzsche and Foucault), but also a concern for others and otherness. At this point, the question of style bubbles over into and points towards more profound notion of desire; the major theme of chapters the IV and V, as indicated. However, prior to this, in chapters II and Ill, we necessarily explore a different but related theme: Power and, in relation to this theme, a politics of evil and cruelty. This is examined in the context provided by Lawrence's so-called 'powertrilogy' of novels: Asron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent; works which whilst experimental and speculative on the one hand (books for thinking - nothing else), seemingly fall into the programmatic concerning as they do the revolutionary and prescriptive on the other, seizure of history and the mechanisms of state power, and the imposition of a violent authoritarianism at a molar party- political level that is all too characteristic of modern political theory and practice on both the extreme-left of the ideological spectrum. and the far-right In an attempt to move beyond the Ruins and overcome the impasse of nihilism, Nietzsche and Lawrence consider a transcendent on a theoretical and fictional terrorism and transgressive and a radical aristocratism, combining elements that are peculiarly pre- and post-modern, and counter-modern politics based the latter as well as modern at one and the same time. Such a politics is certainly suggested by their cultural and aesthetic thinking, as well as their understanding of power, and although many critics (such as Mark Warren, argued that Nietzsche's aristocratism for example) have has no intrinsic relation to his philosophy (and thus can be legitimately divorced from such and thence abandoned), we argue here that there is a closer and more intricate link than such critics allow; even 4

whilst conceding that, ultimately, the above politics proves strategically to be of limited use in forming a workable contemporary Try as Nietzsche aristocratism, they frequently authoritarianism philosophy, and Lawrence that model. do to suggest the radical nature slip into a lazy and fundamentally reproduces not only the errors of their conservative of classical political but also several of the base stupidities of modem political theory. Somewhat disappointingly, it seems that neither Nietzsche or Lawrence could ever quite find the resources needed to endure the experience of nihilism, and thus each falls back into the quest for some dramatic means of transcending the Ruins and completing the history of Western metaphysics. This tendency in both writers to oscillate frantically from an advocacy of ever-further desperate attempts to reterritorialize deterritorialization to in the void; from a desire to accelerate the processes of decodification to a desire to recodify all the more completely, is, as will be illustrated, from the condition a marked feature of their writings. They too, at times, suffer of modernity which they set out to diagnose; thinking is never quite as untimely or resentment-free believe. Nietzsche and Lawrence are, one suggests, allows his preoccupations i.e., their as they would have us simply mistaken when each with the possibility of a new beginning to force him into assuming the role of an overly anxious mid-wife who prematurely to induce the birth of such via inappropriate (and potentially disastrous) Only by abandoning the politics of transgression attempts means. and hopes for a revolutionary transcendence will man save himself from the threat of fascism (an ever-present danger at both a macro- and micro-level, which is discussed in this work) and free himself at long last from the twin spirits of revenge and gravity; a crucial aspect of Nietzsche's revaluation. Chapters II and III are also both concerned with tracing that which lies outside of the political and, indeed, the human (i.e., outside of morality and reason). We 5

witness how the attempt is made by Lawrence in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent to bring a notion of the Outside into his thinking on politics and subjectivity; to reconfigure the latter in terms of the daimonic and the divine and to transform political thinking via the substantiation of mystery and the re- introduction of the gods back into history. This making of the political into an 'occult' project and the stressing 'theosophical' character of the revaluation, is a vitally important of the aspect of Nietzsche's and Lawrence's work, and it shapes the structure and concerns of this thesis from the end of chapter II through chapter III and into chapter V. Ultimately, it is argued here, Nietzsche and Lawrence are religious writers in the widest sense of this word, more concerned with Geist and the dark gods who perhaps alone can 'save' us, than with the mechanisms of the Reich or any partypolitical programme. Thus although each repeatedly attempts to express his vision and philosophical insights in socio-political terms, neither wishes to imply that the social and/or the political provides the final horizon of meaning. As shown in chapters III and V, Lawrence attempts to make a daring combination of politics and a reactivated paganism in order to further According to Habermas, it is precisely the nee-pagan the confronting reveals the the project of revaluation. aspects of the above (i.e., of Occidental reason and Christian morality with its Other) "political-moral insensitivity Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean and ... aesthetic tastelessness" that 1 in thought. Admittedly, there is an element of this in The Plumed Serpent of which criticism is perhaps justified. However, such an entirely negative assessment is challenged here, as I argue that Nietzsche's turning to Dionysus and Lawrence's resurrection (see chapter V), is a profoundly Habermas feels uncomfortable of the man who died (Jesus) as Osiris important (and profoundly beautiful) move. If with the 'spicing up' of political philosophy with talk of the dark gods, as poets, Nietzsche and Lawrence are surely entitled to "all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated" 6

(K., p.14) and, essentially, I am in broad agreement and sympathy with Heidegger's claim that it is to the poets that man must turn for guidance in this time of nihilism. Chapter II is also an important examination of the critique of Love (i.e., moralidealism), as developed by Nietzsche and Lawrence. It is shown how love infects all aspects of modern existence; including modern polities, as socialism, liberalism, and - crucially - as fascism also. All of these '-ism' narratives rejected that they are decisively by Nietzsche and Lawrence on the grounds merely a making 'natural' of Christianity are and behind each remains lurking the ascetic ideal. The critical and clinical analysis of love thus forms an important part of the genealogical project of revaluation; it is an analysis which brings Nietzsche and Lawrence into opposition not only with Christianity, but also the modern state and the reactive forces of civilization (forces they contrast to those productive of culture). In chapter III, whieh is essentially a continuation of and a conclusion to chapter II, we analyse Lawrence's attempt to not only make politics grand, but also sacred; and also his final attempt in The Plumed Serpent to develop a notion of transgression, i.e., a deliberate violation of human limits and norms, promoted in the hope that man may be able to kick his way back into paradise. Clearly this idea develops the Nietzschean notion of new innocence via an active immoralism, and I argue that the politics of cruelty rests additionally upon three other key beliefs found in Nietzsche: Firstly, a belief in an anti-humanist philosophy of power; secondly, a belief that society and culture require acts of violence and a hierarchical power arrangement; thirdly, a belief in the need to affirm a 'general economy of the whole'. These notions are all examined in detail in the course of chapter III. The chapter concludes in agreement with Lawrence's own view; namely, that the leadership principle has ultimately to be recognized as obsolete 7

and that the militant political ideal is redundant, no matter how one tries to dress it up. In contrast revolutionary to many of his contemporaries, politics of grandeur Lawrence realizes that the is as invalid and ineffective as it is nostalgic and romantic. However, this is not to deny that in his own work post-Serpent continues to seek out a politics that is beyond the limited option of liberal democracy, as well as a new ethic and model of self based upon an active understanding reactive of power in its naked representations Lawrence materiality, stripped from the negative and of slave morality. Thus Nietzsche's central, even if Lawrence identifies a need to reinterpret thinking remains it and to challenge it at those points wherein the former's personal political preferences and prejudices do not allow sufficient freedom to think the future opened up by the collapse of old values. In other words, political posturing mean a retreat even if there is a need to move away from inflated towards a micropolitics of desire and the body, this does not into the private sphere of the bourgeois individual, or isolate subject; desire is not a 'personal' affair, but always a collective-impersonal one. Thus if Lawrence examines and promotes a different kind of politics in his later work, there is no absolute break from the politics of the power trilogy; more a strategic withdrawal and the forming of different tactics and approaches. Certainly the goal - of revaluation - remains the same, and certainly there is no retreat to the old ideals of liberal humanism. In fact, I suggest that such a retreat were it to be made, would not only be inappropriate, but potentially the most fatal loss of philosophical nerve imaginable. For it is not the denial of such values, but their positing argument, in the first place, that leads to nihilism and political terror. This as addressed by Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism, closes chapter III. It is in this essay that we can locate a clue to a new ethic; something that opponents and critics of (post) Nietzschean thought often suggest is impossible to locate within an 'irrationalist ontology' and/or a politics and philosophy of power. 8

Here, we develop this clue as an ethic of letting be and letting go and relate it to the notion of justice developed by Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent and to his thought in the Lady Chatterley's Lover trilogy and final major work of fiction, The Escaped Cock. Just as chapters II and III essentially form one part of the thesis between them, so too do chapters IV and V. Leaving behind the power trilogy of novels, we place Nietzsche's project within the context of the above mentioned late works, radically reconfiguring and eroticizing his philosophy in the process. Moving away from the politics of evil and cruelty, we suggest there are good theoretical and strategic reasons why molar political ambitions can be replaced with micropolitics at the level of desire and the forces of the body; a politics of touch. There is no need to move through geo-political searching for a 'solution' of nihilism; the nomad thinker has to the 'problem' space or cultural time merely to travel in intensity and learn how to listen to his 'blood'. This is not an abandonment onto of social and political concerns, a different field of intensity. philosophy; on the contrary, Nor merely the transference is this a break from of them Nietzsche's by returning to the body we are of course following Nietzsche, who was one of the first to fully appreciate that the revaluation would not be achieved without the 'resurrection' of the body and the rejuvenation of the body's most active forces. Today, the task is not to seize the power of the state, but to affirm the potency of the flesh and revive the passionate instincts. Today, the task is not to organize into political parties, organism (or what Lawrence terms the 'corpse-body') but to dis-organ-ize the and begin the building of the body without organs; we illustrate how this can be achieved and make clear its significance within both chapters IV and V. Put simply, desire is a politics because desire is productive of and invests itself 9

within social reality. The body is a politics because it exists within history and history, of course, does not take place outside of bodies. Essentially, in chapter IV, following theoretical remarks on the politics of desire and the philosophy quintessentially that of becoming upon which it rests Nietzschean and anti-Christian (the latter being a ontology of difference), we argue Lady Chatterley's Lover, can most usefully be read as a schizoanalysis concerned with breakdowns, breakthroughs, and becomings. Concerned, that is to say, with the flows of desire within industrial capitalism and the strange, inhuman becomings of the human being subject to such flows and the above socio- economic conditions. It is argued that there is no longer a clear public/private dichotomy or distinction and that Richard Rorty's wishing to push Nietzsche's thinking into the 'private' realm is therefore untenable. Further, down within late modernity, because the above dichotomy has broken the work of the novelist becomes of increased relevance to political and social theory; for the novelist understands perhaps better than anyone the feelings, forces, and flows that constitute the subject as a subject. Certainly Lawrence has an uncanny insight into such and I argue in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari that his 'pollyanalytics' today than, for example, Freud's psycho-analysis, is of far greater use based as the latter is upon a reactive conception of power, sexuality, and the unconscious. If in the earlier part of the work it was the hero as political activist (and the poet) who was posited as the most valuable type, in chapters IV and V this status is given to the lover and man of active desire. The lover, it is suggested, is he who knows best how to revalue values and to make the world anew, having submitted to his own passion and found a level of fulfilment and joy. Thus we examine the possibility that man may be able to attain the 'peace that comes of fucking', even 10

if he cannot kick his way into paradise. To achieve this, is the ultimate aim of a politics of desire. But the latter, it should be noted, is not simply a form of sex radicalism and does not call for sexual 'liberation', nor claim that sex alone is the clue to everything (i.e., the great be-all and end-all). On the contrary, Lawrence is explicit in his argument that the sex urge has to be subordinated to a still greater urge, which he thinks of as a creative or religious impulse (and what he calls the 'power-mode' world-forming in his earlier work); this is the collective drive and the force in man. In several ways, chapter IV looks back to chapter I. For example, it returns to the idea that nihilism afflicts us as a physiological collapse of the healthy instincts, robbing the body not only of its strength, but also its value and meaning (making it sexless, sterile, rationalized). It also carries forward from the opening chapter profound the question of style, but this time in its more radical and form as a politics of desire, transforming culture and society in the process. Understanding Nietzsche's thinking on that the latter needs to become more rhizomatic, more molecular and minoritarian (to become-woman), Lawrence arrives at a social and cultural model that he calls a 'democracy of touch'. This, his major contribution to political theory, is investigated at length and in detail in chapter IV. where we relate the idea not only to the wider body of Lawrence's thought. but to the work of Whitman. Heidegger, and Nietzsche. It is shown how a democracy of touch is founded upon a new economy of bodies and their forces and forms a vision of individual and communal regeneration; - not a reactionary return to some pre-modern a democracy to come ideal. Prior to the establishment of a democracy of touch, however, must come an opening up of a new field of consciousness; awareness', what Lawrence terms 'phallic consciousness', the latter perhaps better indicating the non-logocentric new way of thinking which is productive knowledge or, elsewhere, 'cunt that Nietzsche terms nature of this of a sensual and intuitive body of die trohliche Wissenschaft. Like Nietzsche. 11

Lawrence sets out to arrive at a point of reckoning with the great saviours and If this means addressing 'the case of Socrates' teachers of Western metaphysics. and Plato on the one hand, so too does it mean confronting Christ; and thus we close the thesis with a chapter that explores Nietzsche wished it to be understood: Chapter V is a final consideration the revaluation in terms that Dionysus versus the Crucified! of Nietzsche's project in which many of the earlier themes of the thesis (power, love, the human etc.) all return for a critical reexamination. The discussion takes Escaped Cock and his final prose place primarily work, around Apocalypse. Lawrence's The As for Nietzsche's own enigmatic formula above, this we interpret as shorthand for the great conflict of ideals at the centre of his philosophy and which characterizes Western history. The chapter opens with a series of remarks understanding of Christianity on Nietzsche's and their (non-dialectical) and Lawrence's opposition established with the Crucified. In rejecting the latter and by saying yes to Dionysus (or the man who died as the risen Osiris), affirmation is given to the resurrection of the flesh, life as difference and becoming, and a plurality of norms. But, importantly, Dionysus also symbolizes for Nietzsche an urge to living unity; i.e., a principle which allows man to come back into touch with other men and women beyond egoism and the idealism which isolates him at present. In other words, Dionsyian magic (desire) is that which forms and seals the bonds between man and world; that which ultimately dissolves the little word 'and'. Lawrence's figure of the man who died, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, to retract his earlier teaching, having realized that immortality is prepared (i.e., creative fulfilment or blossoming) is achieved only via a coming into touch; for touch is the great atonement that puts us into vivid contact and allows us to affirm our lives as lived upon the earth and within 12 time. I argue that Lawrence's

reinterpretation of Christ's resurrection is crucial to the project of revaluation; as is his and Nietzsche's new understanding of death, time, and our mortal relation to both. If the importance of resurrection into new life is stressed, so too do we emphasize the necessity of firstly finding the courage to embrace the void of oblivion and to die out completely from this life as one dominated by reactive forces and egoism; the personal life of what Lawrence terms the 'Lesser Day'. Each of us must prepare his or her own 'ship of death', or, as Heidegger writes, Dasein must be able to face up to its own mortality. This does not mean, however, accepting the banal conventionality of a general biological extinction of death is (,heat death'), and this reactive understanding challenged and replaced with the positive notion of a 'fire death' (i.e., death as a true becoming, a flight, or passage). Courage is the key: the courage to live, to die, and to resurrect into new life. Men fail the test of the eternal return (examined in detail here) if they do not desire to resurrect earth and in time with all its limitations back into life lived on and problematic aspects (such as suffering and pain); if they long instead either for absolute oblivion, or an eternal afterlife of personal immortality. Trapped within old ideals and corpse-bodies, the question is how and when man will leave the tomb of incomplete nihilism and rise into the new flesh. The danger is he worit. But Nietzsche and Lawrence do all they can to encourage us to rise up as 'risen lords' and to move towards a transhuman becoming. They demonstrate how rising thus into an active and affirmative life means the forming of many connections and a wide variety of relationships; sexual, social, and political. The man who died rises as a whole man, keen to become a lover, a husband, a father, a comrade, a friend. He is far removed from the Cross-burdened Christ figure he was; i.e., one who wanted to be loved, but knew not how to love himself except in the most ideal abstract-universal manner, 13 afraid to physically touch or be

touched. The man who died also rises as a physician of culture, for he knows that there is a need for a collective healing of mankind (not its 'salvation') and that his own resurrection cannot be accomplished in isolation. Chapter V closes by suggesting that whilst it remains debatable whether Nietzsche or Lawrence achieved their declared goal of a revaluation of all values, at its best their work constitutes an important and significant starting point that has, in some decisive sense, changed everything. Part II: Remarks on the Political and Social Concerns of the Thesis. " .. the time is coming when politics will have a different meaning." - Nietzsche.? As will already be clear, this thesis is intended as a contribution to political philosophy as much as it is to literary criticism, concerned as it is with the social aspects and significance of Nietzsche's development appreciate and fictional illustration either writer's project of revaluation and Lawrence's of it. I believe that one cannot fully work without recognizing that each is concerned to effect a fundamental change in our way of thinking about ethics, politics, and society. It is not because they follow the standard investigation, methods of sociological or ask the usual questions of political analysis that they deserve to be taken seriously as thinkers in the above areas, but, on the contrary, they offer highly novel approaches, perspectives on old problems, suggest new questions, thereby transforming because and form different our notion of what it is to think the political and address the social. Thus whilst I have argued earlier that Nietzsche and Lawrence are far more than simply political writers, and whilst it is certainly not my intention to reduce their work to the level of 'ideology' propaganda, nevertheless or I would echo Foucault's assertion that the relationship between philosophy, literature, and politics is "permanent and fundamental". 3 14

If Nietzsche and Lawrence to ground a political are betrayed practice by those in Truth, readers who would use thought or seek out a systematic doctrine in their texts, so, on the other hand, are they sold short by those commentators would deny any substantive to work there contemporary is intellectual activity (pretending metaphor and stressing the relevance debate that symbol content concerning all is simply for private a playful public and Lawrence realm But, nor in someway domesticate abandoning the more contentious and controversial elements absolutely not my aim them humanism, for example. recuperative assimilation un(der)determined on their political succeed terms, whilst still for and relationship socio-political Of course, and I narrative line with manage to found showing by It is revised liberal this tendency to radically mobile and has in and important and dominant forms of place in the history of and practice. relevance the natural as a social commentator widely recognized and more encounters the claim that neither should, and that their primary import is an apolitical "the fate of the existential individual In both cases, here, it is argued the nature but also shows a pronounced Whilst thinking work their to the more conventional and Lawrence's only misconceives their I do not how become public thinkers In and Lawrence concerning frequently let us be clear, in Nietzsche on questions more In a newly it is true to say that in recent years Nietzsche's thought collective of their work. the to exercise avoid in discussing new style of politics own significance Hopefully, into and to the above debate, status, to bring relevant and self-contained self-enlightenment). of Nietzsche want to deny their unique the their who environment and man's carefully of Nietzsche's to it), have studied. And yet one still in fact, be construed who is far removed this is a profoundly relation (for example one concerned as with from the social world. mistaken and Lawrence's "4 view; one that not respective projects, ignorance concerning their notion of the individual. such a reading will be challenged throughout the course of this thesis, 15 it is

important to briefly say something of it here. There is, it is suggested by commentators hostile to the idea of Nietzsche and Lawrence as political thinkers, an 'irresponsibility' concern. for example, Rorty and Habermas, in their work that causes share the view that Nietzsche's influence upon social and political thought has been of a highly undesirable nature. But if liberal critics have a duty to express concern with the 'illiberal', 'irrational', and 'irresponsible' elements they detect in Nietzsche's thought and those related to him, surely Rorty is simply being crass when he suggests that whenever the above put forward a view about modern society, culture, or politics they become "at best vapid and at worst sadistic". 5 For Rorty, Nietzsche et aJ are magnificent when they stick to celebrating their personal canons and invaluable in helping us with "our attempt to form a private self-image"; not acutely dangerous) and promote but "pretty much useless:" when they attempt to address us as public philosophers views relevant to collective action. Rorty is prepared dismiss views he finds objectionable as 'idiosyncratic' of self-creation (if have "nothing in particular simply to and to assert that projects to do with questions of social policy. "7 If Rorty is right to criticize Nietzsche for attempting at times to suggest grandiose and ideal schemes to do with total revolution and for setting out on a quest for the sublime, he fails entirely to see why it is that Nietzsche cannot simply talk of overcoming the self as if the latter existed in isolated abstraction (i.e., asocially and ahistorically). For Nietzsche, self-perfection and socio-cultural concerns are not separable; they belong to one and the same project. In fact, as Keith Ansell-Pearson rightly points out and as is stressed in this thesis: "For Nietzsche the degeneration of political and cultural life in modern Europe could partly be explained by the absence of a vibrant and vigorous public life .... 16

Nietzsche ... would argue that Rorty's emphasis on self-creation represents a retreat from the social world, and as a private act is symptomatic of the degeneration of creative action that characterizes the modern period. "8 Symptomatic of a variety of solipsism that other liberal critics, such as Leslie Paul Thiele, also collapse into. The latter's notion of a 'politics of the soul' is not only entirely alien to the Deleuzean micro-politics I attempt to develop here, but is quite falsely ascribed to Nietzsche. The philosopher, writes Thiele, is "fated to remain apart from social politics ... he is a solitary. "9 In as far as this is the case, Nietzsche violently opposes such a 'fate' and describes such isolation as the 'sickness of the desert'. Lawrence too would condemn such twaddle as a form of depravity resulting from an atrophy of the senses. Both men never doubted that if the revaluation proliferation was to be accomplished of relations, it would require community, the and the development of a nourishing creative flow of desire and sense of physical kinship. They would have had nothing but scorn for Rorty's anaemic ideal of 'solidarity' between private individuals, each cultivating an inward sense of separateness and all the time afraid to touch one another. Arguably, the real 'irresponsibility' is not Nietzsche's or Lawrence's in opening up a space in which to think and form a new style of politics, but, on the contrary, belongs to those who refuse the challenge of occupying such a space. For by so doing they allow those forces of virulent reaction and base stupidity which they rightly fear - and which Nietzsche and Lawrence also abhor - to have exclusive access to this new terrain. Fascists have no more qualms about theoretical thinking space than they do geographical Lebensraum. do not agree with the way that liberal commentators occupying Thus although I such as Mark Warren and William Connolly occupy Nietzsche's texts and put them to work, at least they are to be commended for not funking the challenge of so doing. Unlike many critics, they do not mistakenly believe that Nietzsche's political visions can be ignored, 17

casually dismissed as poetic affection, or condemned as intrinsically too dangerous to be discussed and developed. They know that it is a question of finding the exterior forces that best put Nietzsche's writings to work in a manner that is faithful to the joyous and affirmative spirit that invests them. Part III: On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature. "It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split ... the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract dry. The two should come together again" - D.H. Lawrence.l" One consequence of the death of God and the subsequent collapse of values, is that genre distinctions and the dualistic hierarchies that support unprotected and thus vulnerable to challenge. The opportunity literature them become for philosophy and to reunite is thereby enlarged. Despite the best efforts made by the moral guardians of thought (i.e., those who would preserve the purity of genres), we witness today an increased level of intertextual promiscuity and intellectual miscegenation. Clearly Lawrence approves of this and actively promotes the union of fiction and theory, arguing that the world of thought needs to become inseparable from that of feeling. Nietzsche in his writings distinctions, setting is equally explicit about his desire to dissolve genre out from early on to demonstrate how philosophy and literature can have "a more profound and congenial relation to each other"ll and to life. In order to help achieve this, he develops a new style of writing and presents himself as the first of a new breed of philosopher; the philosopher-as- artist. Such a philosopher produces a text that is radically and openly figurative, drawing upon all manner of considerations, including those previously regarded as unacceptable or irrelevant to 'serious' investigation. J.P. Stern rightly claims that 18

Nietzsche's devising of a highly personal literary-philosophical mode of language and thought and his application infinite variety contemporary issues'<? is one of his greatest achievements. In reviving a pre-Socratic of such to "an almost of model of philosophy as literature which dissolves the opposition between metaphor and concept, Nietzsche risks inaugurating a style of philosophy that can no longer be clearly distinguished from poetry. This is not a risk that Nietzsche finds troublesome, Nietzsche is the continued 'imaginary' (or the 'true' and fanatic separation and the 'false'); damaged human consciousness. metaphor, or regrettable. Far more regrettable betwen the 'real' a separation for and the that has divided and In learning to think and speak once more in we perhaps move some way toward healing this fatal division of man, allowing the greater intelligence of the body and the fullness of life the right to expression. Certainly, for Lawrence, thought has to be what he calls "an adventure whole man" 13 - mental consciousness of the which thinks purely in concepts (or what Nietzsche terms mummified metaphors) is not enough: and that is why he goes on to say; "we cannot believe in Kant, or Spinoza. Kant thought with his head and his spirit, but he never thought with his blood. The blood also thinks inside a man, darkly and ponderously. It thinks in desires and revulsions and makes strange conclusions. "14 Of course, the effort to derive from 'blood-knowledge' new reality principle which is capable of providing attitudes, for practice, and for historical "standards possibilities a for existential appears as childish fantasy"15 to those critics such as Habermas, who regard Nietzsche's project as hopelessly infected with 'irrationalism' and 'aestheticism'. And yet Nietzsche and Lawrence both maintain it is vital that modern man learns how to listen to and write in blood; i.e., to think instinctively and intuitively outside the boundaries of moral-rationalism and to conduct thought-experiments, 19 rather than construct

theoretical systems which betray a lack of integrity on behalf of the thinker. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, and those related to them, art too not only produces knowledge about the world, but retains a determinate (realized as a passionate blood -experience) relation to philosophy - this is what Plato missed and those such as Habermas continue to miss. In a sense, then, I am arguing that literature is of far more use than theory in allowing one to "think through and move across established categories and levels of experience'T? and in transporting us outside the gate to those extreme places "where the highest and deepest truths rise up." 17 Of more use also in providing a sense of genuine solidarity, as Deleuze and Guattari stress in their study of Kafka; "not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation elsewhere" .18 The novelist expresses storytelling or act of 'fabulation', another that is lacking possible becoming via a creative that challenges the dominant myths and fictions of his time. Thus it is not merely because the novel forms a superior medium to theory for exploring notions of relativity and contingency here, but because it also offers a form of resistance. that it interests us Implicit in this claim is a belief in "the potency and relevance of the imagination ... as a way to step out of the political and intellectual stasis of these postmodern times." 19 And, further, a belief that the novel, at its best, can help us live more fully by setting free alien forces within us and registering more fully than any other medium "the complex and shifting world of relationships which for [Lawrence], as for Nietzsche, is the essence of reality." 20 Critics such as Habermas, however, reject the above arguments and continue to claim that in levelling genre distinctions between philosophy, literature, political theory the primacy of logic over rhetoric, and thereby interrogating and Nietzsche and those who have come after him and radically extended his project 20

(such as Derrida) fail to recognize important differences between the above, with the result that each discipline is lessened in a significant manner. Habermas thus writes for example: "The false assimilation of one enterprise to the other robs both of their substance. "21 He fears that if philosophy and literature are denied independent status and separate identity then the former becomes unable to operate successfully as a medium for problem solving; "robbed not merely of its seriousness, but of its productivity.r = The latter too is reduced, he claims, when enlisted into the battle against metaphysics. agree with Habermas, nor share his concerns. shown how the former's Quite simply, I do not Rather, I think that Derrida has prejudices which allow him to assume that rhetoric simply an adornment to logic, stop him from reading and interrogating is texts (not least of all his own) carefully enough. Nietzsche and Lawrence teach us to worry about the surface play of language and the question of style; this results in a radically different way of reading, writing, Greek sense (i.e., out of profundity). and thinking: superficial, but in a In casting the fear of incest aside, it becomes clear how extremely rewarding it is to explore the intertextual quality of writings and proliferate philosophy and literature, together. points of contact and mutual involvement between allowing thinkers from various backgrounds to come To 'rob' philosophy of its 'seriousness' and productivity, is to perhaps allow it to become gay and creative. Similarly, to give to poetry and fiction a seriousness of purpose is not to betray the 'integrity' of art, nor to slide helplessly along a confused and dangerous path towards fascism, but simply to acknowledge that the above can be used as a medium of thought, intellectual exchange, and problem solving. To postulate the unity of thought and poetry, of theory and fiction, is to understand that the latter term does not stand for "an aimless imagining of whimsicalities ... a flight of mere notions and fancies into the realm of the unreal." 23 21

I am, then, prepared in this thesis to place Lawrence and his work on an equal footing with Nietzsche and his writings. And prepared methodologically to experiment with and to test the claim that; "the most truly philosophical of a philosophical text ... is one that treats the work as literature, reading as a fictive rhetorical construct whose elements and order are determined by various textual exigencies ... Conversely, the most powerful ... readings of literature may be those that treat them as philosophical gestures". 24 Finally, before closing this Introduction, I would like to indicate why Lawrence was specifically chosen machine to which Nietzsche as a literary could be connected; and why Deleuze is also assigned a particularly important place within this work. By placing the Nietzschean project of revaluation within the fictional enviroment provided by Lawrence, I hope to ensure a metamorphosis of the former, sending it in a direction that is perhaps contrary to its own inner tendency (in as much as the latter can legitimately be said to exist and identified). But perhaps this could have been achieved just as well, some may argue, by placing Nietzsche's work within the space of literature provided by any of a number of other authors who have been 'influenced' by his work. Perhaps: but I think not. Rather, I would argue that Lawrence is the best author for our purposes here and that his relationship to Nietzsche is uniquely special. For not only is Lawrence the most self-consciously 'philosophicalish' of novelists, believing as he makes clear that "art is utterly dependent on philosophy'S>. but so too, as has been widely recognized within the critical literature, is he the most profoundly Nietzschean. Each belongs to that "order of genius which beats out the boundaries of human experience and widens the frontiers of life". 26 In fact, as Colin Milton shows, the intellectual kinship between Nietzsche 22 and Lawrence is so "intimate and

pervasive'<? that "an awareness understanding of Lawrence's vision" constituting as it does a "subtle and powerful interpretive of Nietzsche's thought is essential for a full framework for reading the novels". 28 This is illustrated here, but, in addition, so too is it argued that the reverse is equally true; i.e., a knowledge of Lawrence's work is essential for a full understanding of Nietzsche's project of revaluation. This I believe to be an original claim. What I am not attempting to do, however, is offer merely another study in influence a la Milton, For one thing, the latter has already quite adequately produced such and I accept his conclusion that Nietzsche profoundly Lawrence. Nor am I simply seeking out a series of appropriate affects parallels between the two authors and other bodies of work. For whilst such undoubtedly exist, it is arguably more inappropriate readings; to use a variety of authors not to supplement or bolster one another, but to stand one another on their heads from time to time and to pervert productive to develop 'inappropriate' parallels one another (Deleuze famously writes of buggering authors). mean having to mutate Lawrence's thought at certain junctures and offer This may - just as he mutates Nietzsche. But whilst I am not overly concerned with remaining 'faithful' to an author or his texts (nor, indeed, the tradition of criticism surrounding him and his works), I sincerely hope to avoid falling carelessly into the trap of simply working out personal concerns on Lawrence et al "without being able to relate [my 1 strictures important'S? to what it is that makes [them] positively interesting or in their own right. What, ultimately, I seek to do within this thesis is to give back to the authors central here via an intelligent and imaginative reading; "a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that reach 1 knew how to give and invent. "30 And surely Foucault is right to claim that the only way one can do this, and the only valid 'tribute' to thought such as Nietzsche's. "is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. "31 23

But why move from Lawrence to Deleuze? Because just as philosophical references abound within the former. so within the latter - the most Nietzschean of recent philosophers with the references are found everywhere. possible exception of Foucault - literary Deleuze defends his reliance upon literary figures from criticism by simply saying that very often novelists and poets know more about schizophrenia. politics. philosophers. or sociologists. If the overt Nietzscheanism frequently and desire than do psychoanalysts. of his writings has been remarked upon. the equally present Lawrenceanism has. so far. been widely overlooked. Part of the originality of this work is in showing how Lawrence's work as well as Nietzsche's enters into a vital relation with Deleuze's; and to show how one misses the mark in Lawrence if one simply ties his work to the tradition of English fiction. by ignoring the political. ethical. and philosophical dimensions that permeate his texts and give them such an important status in the history of both European and Anglo-American Lawrence suggests interference that very often the tale requires saving from an author's by the critic who knows how to put the tale to work in new and startling ways; this is particularly engaging thought. so when the author is prone to moralizing or in the kind of metaphysical speculations that betray fatigue and ressentiment. allowing blockages to form upon the lines of flight he himself has intitiated. Deleuze, as the most intelligent reader of Nietzsche and Lawrence both. arguably provides such a service as critic in relation to them. He is also. of course. very much a political thinker and as such recognizes the importance of Nietzsche's and Lawrence's nomadic thought in contributing to the invention and invocation of a people yet to come. Thus Deleuze is the perfect figure to complete our unholy trinity and form an effective philosophico-Iiterary 24 assemblage.

Chapter I: Among the Ruins: Nihilism, Culture and the Politics of Style. Part I: Opening Remarks on the Death of God and the Emergence of Modern European Nihilism in Relation to Lawrence's The Rainbowand Women in Love. Nihilism is of crucial importance and central comprehension of modernity. to Nietzsche's thought to his If Nietzsche is one of the first to accept what Camus calls the "burden of nihilism"! as his own, it remains for us today the great and unavoidable problematic dominating our social, cultural, and political horizons, determining the very limits of our experience. In short, "it stands like an extreme that cannot be gotten beyond". 2 And yet, if we want to live, surely it has to be gotten beyond; if accepted meanwhile as a painful transitional stage through which we must pass. The question 'how?' is the one to which the fate of modern humanity is tied. What nihilism is, both in its original and modern sense, why and how it emerges, are relatively straightforward questions to address. But how it can be survived and eventually overcome - and at what cost - remains an intractable problem. For it may well be the case that in order to move beyond nihilism, both as a contemporary phenomenon related to what Nietzsche calls the 'death of God' and as an originary process which has been uncoiling throughout European history since the 'fall' into Western metaphysics, man has not only got to overcome his own past but also that which is usually identified as the 'human' element of his make-up (i.e., his reason and his morality). Thus the advent or return of nihilism as an explicit phenomenon is a fate toward which our civilization has relentlessly been moving and it is an event which, as Nietzsche tells us, will determine our future for a long time to come. However, it is not a singular event that possesses its own meaning; rather, there are as many meanings as there are forces capable of offering an interpretation. 25 Thus the

phrase 'God is dead' can be heard both as a "great cry of loneliness">, marking the point at which man conceives of himself as a being "surrounded by nullity'< and living in a world suddenly devoid of value and sense; and as a great shout of defiant independence in which man can find his own pride and joy and which marks the point at which he accepts the task of himself becoming the creator of all things: shattered, "For with God's death, the absolute centered perspective ... is forcing the decentered human perspective to emerge as the foundation beyond this, a transhuman perspective. of meaning and value. "5 And, perhaps, But, as yet, man still doesn't know whether to laugh, cry, or rage; nihilism continues to afflict him as a disabling and disorienting condition which affects his ability to understand how to act in the new world in which he finds himself. This by Lawrence in The Rainbow (K) and its sequel Women in Love is illustrated ( WL). Set during the seventy year period leading up to the First World War, The Rainbowand Women in Love are Lawrence's two great books of modernity and apocalypse. Their potent mix of myth, social and cultural history, and post- Nietzschean philosophy make them essential reading for anyone concerned with developing an understanding of the 'crisis' of modern European nihilism. They are almost desperate attempts to think that which enframes us; i.e., to gain critical distance upon both the past and present, as well as attempts to speculate on the possibility of a postmodern and, indeed, transhuman future." Arguably, nihilism itself both obliges and enables us to do so. For, as Mark Warren "Nihilism not distances one from conditions of one's existence that are no longer adequate. "7 In other words, only forces consciousness but also writes: nihilism makes the world seem alien and uncanny and makes us strangers ourselves. Lawrence clearly demonstrates the to this in the above novels, showing how the familiar world of the Brangwen family in the early part of The Rainbow has become a lost possibility for the protagonists 26 of Women in Love; the death of

God ensuring that the comforting horizons of Christian-moral culture have vanished. Without any such horizons, without limits guaranteeing stability even of the self as a rational subject, access is suddenly granted to the Dionysian dimension as a "smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by human consciousness'< is once more subsumed within "the vast, uncomprehended and morality incomprehensible of nature or life itself, surpassing human consciousness. "9 If there is a mythopoeic quality to The Rainbow, there is a dream-like or nightmarish quality to the later work, as in a French surrealist text. Indeed, in a manner suggestive at times of Georges Bataille, Lawrence seems to celebrate and promote an elemental violence found in both the erotic and sacred realms of experience as he conceives of them; realms only fully opened up in a time of nihilism, as we suggest above, or in those explosive moments of transgression "when those categories fall apart that guarantee in everyday life the confident interaction of the subject with himself and the world. "10 This insistence in Women in Love on those things and forces that modernity both releases and yet remains deeply troubled by - irrationality, cruelty, strange fears and desires (all of which flood the social field as Lawrence illustrates) difficult and disturbing - makes the novel a sometimes one to read. Plunging deep into negativity, Lawrence attempts to explode the established dualities of enlightened thinking, stressing like Nietzsche before him the significance of madness in the unfolding history of morality and its surpassing. II The behaviour of Ursula and Birkin, Gudrun and Gerald, may no longer shock us, but it can still be disconcerting '''civilized' to be shown human beings as by no means fully under their own control, but impelled by forces within them well below the level of their conscious will or choice." 12 Not only, then, is the world of The Rainbow coming ever-further 27 apart at an

ever-increased velocity, but so too are the characters coming apart as Lawrence challenges the belief in a stable ego and of the human being as a fixed and predetermined entity; forever finding new ways to reveal man as a thing of forces, flows and becomings. This obliges him as a writer to find the language which can best "render and expose violence, disintegration and deadly excess" .13 That he achieves this with consummate skill cannot be disputed. But as Mark Kinkead- Weekes points out in his perceptive Introduction to the novel: "This poses ... a crucial question for the critic: is this a destructively violent and excessive work, or is it a diagnosis of violence and excess, enabling its author and its readers to come through the experience with better understanding of themselvesv'<+ It is a question which can also be asked of Nietzsche's philosophy: is it a diagnosis of nihilism, or simply a symptom of such? Probably recognized). And probably Lawrence's it is both (as Nietzsche Women in Love is also a work written at the very point at which modes of disintegration encounter the possibilities of new life. Above all, it is vital to stress that if there is decadence and deathliness in all of the characters, yet the crucial discovery is made that there is an active nihilism to be accelerated and perfected, and that "there is a kind of violence that can heal, as well as a violence that destroys." 15 Thus despite the end-of-the-world tone of the novel, we find in Women in Love, as in The Rainbow, something affirmative; a revolutionary joy or indescribable delight which, as Deleuze says; "always springs forth from the great books, even when they present things that are ugly, desperate, corruption or terrifying." 16 If there is and sickness here, so too is there a promise of tomorrow's health. And thus despite Birkin's insistence that we are all flowers of corruption living among the ruins, Ursula will "have none of his acceptance of deathliness (however necessary before new creation can come about). She isn't a flower of dissolution, but feels herself a rose, warm and flamy with life. "17 28

Finally, having for the most part offered comments on Women in Love, let us here say something specifically about the earlier novel, which has a strong affinity to a German philosophic Nietzsche to Spengler and Heidegger, concerned communal ties in favour of the competitive, and the triumph of 'civilization' tradition with self-seeking over culture.'? The Rainbow; a work "the that runs via breakdown of ethos of capitalism" 18 Lawrence opens the novel in 'about 1840'; a date chosen to mark the arrival of the modern industrial era. The old world of farm, village, and church is about to be displaced and replaced by the world of canals, railways, mines, factories, schools and new housing estates. If, initially, the Brangwen family farm (Beldover) remains "just on the safeside of civilization, outside the gate" (R, p.14), nevertheless its womenfolk in particular look toward this new world and wish for their children to belong to its future. Lawrence is ambiguous about this new order. If, on the one hand, he regrets and at times condemns the turning away from a life lived on the soil, on the other hand his text shows an acute understanding of how the inert pressure of the past, when uninformed by the vigour of the present, can stifle and suffocate life. This is the danger of a stagnant preserve and revere the past, described meditation. stability. 'antiquarianism'; the mindset of those who would by Nietzsche in his second untimely Keywords for such persons are tradition, Like Nietzsche, longer conserves contentment, rootedness, Lawrence knows that "when the historical life but mummifies it"20, then culture sense no needs its seeds of discontent (its decadents ), such as Ursula, who possess the "strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past"21, liberating the new and evolving forces and forms. Ursula, who, as Anne Fernihough points out,22 is as much a Nietzschean 'free spirit' as Birkin, deliberately and radically breaks from the word of her fathers and is transported from their world by the unfettered flows of modernity and modernization that push on toward an absolute threshold. Looking back more with shame and anger than love and loyalty, she knows, that for her, as for her sister, Gudrun, the old way of life has become something 29 to escape and

overcome. The sisters deterritorialization are born of the forces of decodification among the ruins of the old socius; they are In and every sense 'modern' women, and, as such, decadents. But, Lawrence knows, it is only via such independent and individual young women (as well as men like Birkin who belong to the "weak and quasi-feminine advanced and made more profound. times of corruption; type of the dissatisfied<'), that life is Culture, as Nietzsche realised, flourishes in the latter being "merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people. "24 Thus, ultimately, Lawrence supports the struggles made by his characters become who they are and he welcomes the conditions to in which this is made possible. And yet he also wishes to retain some form of socio-cultural unity; for, like Nietzsche, he believes that the individual will flourish only from out of the latter. Thus, in a manner similar to The Birth of Tragedy: "The Rainbow sets itself an impossible task, seeking out a social structure in which the full expression of the individual might be possible without causing the social fabric to fall apart. "25 Arguably, this could be said to be Lawrence's central dilemma; and the political problem at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy. To reiterate and conclude, modern experience no longer corresponds interpretive framework; "'seeing there's no God'" (WL, to any old p.58), as Birkin says, and that all the old ideals and guidelines are consequently as "'dead as nails'" (Ibid.) The religion which had meant so much to Ursula and her contemporaries as children, becomes as they pass into adulthood "a tale, a myth, an illusion, which, however much one might assert it to be true in historical fact, one knew was not true - at least for this present day of ours" (R, p.263). And thus it is that the world of commerce and industry - 'the weekday world' - triumphs over 'the Sunday world'; because, quite simply, the latter has lost reality to modern men and women and can no longer provide 30 them with "plausible subjective

identities in relation to everyday life. "26 The question is whether the weekday world can provide the conditions for the emergence of new and genuine cultural forms and active selves; or whether merely deepens and furthers the world of capitalism and technology the experience and expression of nihilism. Let us now examine this world of money and machinery. Part II: Aspects of Nihilism as a Molar and Molecular Phenomenon. II.i. Cash From Chaos: Nihilism and the Question of Capitalism. It is arguable that modern nihilism has not in fact resulted in the definite collapse of all values into zero, but, rather, the resolution of all values into one; in much the same way as original nihilism resulted in the replacement of many gods with just the One God. And this one value is commercial or exchange value: "When Marx says other values are 'resolved' into exchange value, his point is that bourgeois society does not efface old structures of value but subsumes them. Old modes ... do not die; instead they get incorporated into the market, take on price tags, gain new life as commodities. "1 The consequence of this is not only that everything is equalized and made the same but (one of the essential aspects of nihilism), everything permissible - providing it is economically possible and profitable. conduct are encouraged, all modes of consciousness people now look to the market place "for answers becomes All modes of allowed, if they pay, and to questions not merely economic but metaphysical - questions of what is worthwhile, what is honourable, even what is real." 2 Like Marx, both Nietzsche and Lawrence recognized the increasing dominion over 31

every aspect of modern life that money had acquired and both, whilst little interested in developing a detailed analysis of the workings of the market place>, repeatedly voiced their concern with and opposition economic idealism and increasing mechanization to this trend; equating the of labour in the name of productivity with the unfolding logic of modern European nihilism. Nietzsche's hostility to capitalism is evident from his very early writings. In The Greek State, for example, he claims that the "self-seeking, aristocracy" (i.e., the bourgeoisie) characteristic of the contemporary should be regarded stateless as a money "dangerous political scene", because they have undermined the "internally sturdy and sensitive'< bonds between rulers and ruled that existed in noble, despotic society and which were based on an ethical component; replacing these with a purely abstract-economic relation between employer and employee that is productive of class conflict and social discord. In other words, like Marx, Nietzsche condemns the bourgeoisie on the grounds that they have left remaining "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'''. 5 Counter this, Nietzsche advocates a strong model of communal life, of the kind that Lawrence describes the disintegration of (and yet anticipates and hopes for the rebirth of) in The Rainbow. For Nietzsche, then, the effect of the above all-dominant money economy is that society and culture are compromised and, ultimately, made impossible. In their place is imposed a systematic anarchy and aggressive philistinism which allows a man "only as much culture as it is in the interest of general money-making and world commerce as he should possess". 6 Because today the "greed of the moneymakers"? infects every sphere of human activity ("in the minutest and subtlest detail'") and dictates the standards and objectives of 'culture', Nietzsche feels obliged to conclude that capitalism is "the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed. "9 Ursula Brangwen, as a young student in The Rainbow, soon comes 32

to the same conclusion; everything realising the permanent substratum of money under causes a "harsh and ugly disillusion" (R, p.403) to come over her which, crucially, brings her to the political decision that she would rather " have an aristocracy of birth than money" (R, pA27). Like Nietzsche, she rejects liberal democracy as political degeneracy; for, like Nietzsche, she sees the latter merely as the political expression of capital and deeply resents how the bourgeois-class have not only ruined society and culture, but "learnt to misuse [the polity 1 ... as an instrument of the stock exchange, and ... as an apparatus for their own enrichment. "10 As for the 'freedom' and 'equality' opened up by liberal capitalism, Ursula rejects this as simply the freedom to buy and sell one another and the "equality of dirt" (R, p.427). The vital point is that whilst liberal democracy may produce and guarantee the 'rights' of the 'private citizen', it fails, lacking a genuine conception of culture and society, to produce the sovereign individual whom Nietzsche values and Ursula wishes to become. The non-emergence masters of themselves, of such sovereign men and women who are can largely be explained according to Nietzsche's and Lawrence's analysis, by the fact that the economic and political apparatus have today fallen "into strange hands" 11 and that we lack a dynamic and vigorous public life. These two facts combine to signal the fall of man into an entirely herd-like state and the dissolution of culture: all greatness and all potential for greatness is lacking. "Human rights" - as Deleuze and Guattari say - "will not make us bless capitalism." For human rights say nothing about the" .. meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered" .12 Not only does the universal scramble for money ('competition') of social order, otherness, but, threaten to result in an anarchic free-far-all naturally lacking in a 'societal instinct' destructive or respect for the capitalist may even have a fatally weakened instinct of preservation and a suicidal lust for death a la Gerald erich, who, as Lawrence shows would 33

ultimately prefer to "lie down and die on a sure nothing't l ", rather than struggle into a new way of being beyond the ruins. We are among the ruins: and yet there remains standing one final barrier which serves to protect the capitalist class from the very flows they have themselves released and which also negate those lines of flight which promise a different and greater experience of life: "Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is the fatal wall. It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth, as nothing can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of iron-bound religion can isolate us from the vital inrush of life and inspiration, as money can. "14 How do we break down or surmount this 'golden wall'? The very idea seems to us today utopian and faintly absurd: revolutionary Guattari, "So what is the solution? Which is the path? To withdraw from the world market?"15 - ask Deleuze and rhetorically. And whilst Lawrence does advocate side-stepping and retreat in his work on occasion.I" Nietzsche makes it clear that "no one is free to be a crab" 17 and that any withdrawal into private fantasy is to be decisively rejected. So what then is to be done? Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari go on to suggest, adopting Nietzsche's solution to the problem of nihilism in general, there is nothing to be done today other than to offer an affirmation of market forces and accelerate the process of capitalism: "To movement of the market, flows are not go still further, of decoding and deterritorialization. yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded that IS, In the For perhaps the enough from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. "18 What Deleuze and Guattari recognise is that money does not constitute a 'golden 34

wall' in the way in which Lawrence appears to conceive of it; and is thus not something that can be broken down, or stormed like a barricade. Rather, money - i.e., that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code or ethic - has "created an axiomatic of abstract qualities that keeps moving further ever-toward in the direction of the deterritorialization its own self-destruction most characteristic and important near to its [exterior and self-overcoming. of the socius" 19 and This constitutes the tendency of capitalism: "It continually draws and absolute 1 limit, which is a genuinely schizophrenic limit. "20 This theoretical understanding Deleuze and Guattari, is anticipated capitalism both deterritorializes reterritorialize of capitalism in terms of flows and limits found in by Nietzsche, who even describes how and decodifies, before then quickly attempting to and recodify: "Presupposing it knows itself sufficiently strong to be able not only to unchain energies, but at the right time also to yoke them .. "21 By advocating an acceleration of this process, Deleuze and Guattari hope that this presupposition will prove itself to be fatally mistaken (an overestimation own power to recapture); of its they hope that one day energies will be released (of an active and schizophrenic character) that will prove impossible to rope back in and then exploit; that lines of escape will go all the way to the Outside and there meet up, reforming on an aesthetic plane apart from and in opposition to the wagesystem; subversive of and fatal to the internal axiomatic of capital that can no longer contain them. It is ironic that perhaps: "Like all great historical systems capitalism will perish more as a result of its successes than failures. "22 And that capitalism itself, the economic system of modern European nihilism, provides the enviromental zero-point in which new models of culture and self-formations, new relations, become possible. To reiterate and conclude, we must, then, accelerate the process of capital in the 35

hope that we may yet be able to attain to a life established arrangement upon a different of forces. But let us not fool ourselves into believing that such an acceleration will have no casualties; the death of God is simply a beginning ("as Nietzsche puts it: in this matter, the truth is we haven't seen anything yet").23 Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps legitimate to ask in closing who would dare to begin this process of acceleration? Who would have the courage and strength for such an act? Perhaps the 'perfect nihilist' whom Nietzsche himself sought become (i.e., the active nihilist who affirms the negation of nothingness). to Deleuze and Guattari call him the 'schizo' and conceive of him as the one who seeks out the external tendency limit of capitalism beyond the golden walls; "he is its inherent brought exterminating to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire. "24 He is as Birkin is to Gerald's arch-industrialist persona. This is the real reason that Gerald fears and feels threatened by Birkin; refusing the friendship offered by the latter, and yet continually drawn to him, seeking him out. Gerald dies because having pushed himself beyond his internal limit, he mistakenly believes that death is the only option; having failed to see the possibility of the new life, the greater health, the other love that was offered him. Il.ii. 0 Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology. According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp "that from now on all the world's seriousness will be confined to science ... and to the prodigious power of technology. "25 Whilst he does not deplore this fact, happy, for example, to accept and affirm the experimental practices of science, Nietzsche by no means feels able to embrace the above development without reservation, because, for Nietzsche, modern science is very much the descendant and heir of Christian-moral i.e., a machine-embodied further expression unfolding and advancement culture; of the ascetic ideal and of the will to truth.26 Thus science and technology remains 36

fundamentally nihilistic; full of thinly-veiled productive of reactive knowledge-forms Christian-moral metaphysical prejudices and which may yet prove fatal not only to the culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se, as it 'puts on ice' all the illusions which are necessary, according to Nietzsche, to culture, and, indeed, to life itself. In addition to this antipathy between illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims science is incapable of serving as the foundation because it knows nothing of "taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, of culture exaltation, or exhaustion" 27, and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create; all vital requirements which characterize coupled to the huge resources building a tremendous the genuine cultural force. At best, when and forces of capitalism, industrial-technological science is capable of civilization, such as our own, but this is not a cultural formation, because, whilst it organizes the chaos of existence and whilst it possesses a system, it lacks style.28 Whilst the latter involves the constraint of a single taste, it does not impose universal laws and other ideal- abstractions that seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. These laws may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form (logic), but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer. Failing to make the distinction. the technocratic man of reason and will confuses bullying with a display of strength (force with powerr.t? This is illustrated for us in Women In Love by the figure of Gerald Crich: a man driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare.I" Gerald's world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow: "The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that 37

began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly .... The place had the strange desolution of a ruin .... rigidity of the blank streets, suggested death perpetuated, rather the homogeneous amorphous than life. ... The sterility of the whole The place was a moment of chaos persisting, chaos fixed and rigid" (R, pp.320-21). If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning according to Nietzsche. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give back to such a world meaning, value, and a little loveliness is the great concern of Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both know, however, that so long as the metaphysical-scientific perspective retains its authority, totalitarian perspective there can be no revaluation. has not only brought alienated, unhoused, recurrently For such a on and "made unavoidable, the barbaric estate of modern technological and mass consumption man" 31, but it ensures the destruction modes of being. And yet, perhaps, of all other perspectives and there is hope to be found, as within the economic system of capitalism, where we least expect to encounter it. This is the great lesson of encouragement given us by Heidegger in his essay entitled The Question Concerning Technology. At the heart of this work are the following lines quoted from Holderlin: "But where danger is, grows / the saving power also. "32 Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes: " to realise that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological suicide, is to realise also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready. "33 But let us be careful not to misunderstand science and technology themselves here; hope does not lie in the fruits of and it is therefore 38 not a question of

accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a machine can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and "curse it as the work of the devil"34 can justly be challenged, then, on the other hand, the technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater deserve also to be met with resistance. technological manipulation of life For here we agree with Lawrence, who writes: "The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. "35 If we are to find our way forward into what Heidegger calls a new 'revealing', then we will have to come back into living touch with and creatively manifest these 'naked forces'. If we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology then we will need to keep our senses alert. And it is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For the closer we come to the latter (i.e., to the danger) "the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine". 36 That an enhanced understanding of the essence of technology is crucial, Heidegger makes clear in the following passage: "What is dangerous is not technology ... the essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger .... man does not come in the first instance from potentially apparatus of technology. The actual threat The threat to lethal machines and has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience a more primal truth." 37 In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long prior to the actual machine age of modern capitalism - monolithically powerful and inherently expansionist, 39 is a way of revealing so that it may overwhelm man

and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell; commonly translated into English as 'enframing'. Rather than allowing man and other beings and things to come forth in their own right and thence letting them be as such, the revealing that rules with technology is a 'provocation', or 'challenging' (Herausfordern ); "which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. "38 Thus, for example, a tract of land "is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district". 39 But, more than this, it also reduces man and beings "to a sort of 'standing reserve' or stockpile in service to, and on call for, technological purposes. "40 Heidegger's own example of mining related to Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love; for Lawrence also illustrates his IS convenient for a study thinking on the question concerning technology in these novels via reference to the coal industry. In the latter text, for example, we see Gerald the industrial magnate acknowledge his destiny: "He had a fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter underground of the and reduce it to his will" (WL, p.227). Whilst in The Rainbow we encounter Tom Brangwen, another coal boss, who is of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs as a human resource; that outside of the great social- industrial machine of work man has become "'a meaningless lump - a standing machine'" (R, p.324). another Ursula, forever seeking to question technology and find possible revealing, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of "human bodies and lives" (ibid.) subjected to the machine and is aware that there is a "perverse satisfaction" (ibid.) to be gained from such subjection.U are told, via service of the machine, immortality (see TR, pp.324-S technology erich, man achieves and WL, pp.230-31); his consummation and Lawrence arguing not that makes us less human, but, on the contrary, for example, is transformed Even, we super-human. Gerald into a god of the machine, thereby fulfilling 40

the great promise of science; i.e., that man too can attain infinite power (or, at least, infinite knowledge, which for modern man is one and the same). The question is: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? transform himself; or destroy himself? If on the levels of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, Will he then so too have we arrived at the point of supreme danger: "Present day man is of the lowest rank, but his power is that of a being already beyond man: how can this contradiction greatest danger?"42 Rightly, Nietzsche predicts that not harbour the modern European nihilism will be a time of great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent to such dangers, men like Gerald push on m their quest to see life "wholly dominated by mind and will. "43 A will that negative in direction and composed of predominantly IS reactive forces, and which seeks the ego's triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge, Gerald is able to master and manipulate the world, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, the self "becomes exploratory, the hub of reality necessarily exploitative and relates to the world way. "44 But no matter outside in an how much Gerald 'knows', still he feels strangely empty; "as if the very middle of him were a vacuum" (WL, voraciousness p.233). As this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his grows: "And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself. "45 Such rampant egoism and intellectual conceit and greed is condemned repeatedly in the texts of both Nietzsche and Lawrence, and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man, who, it seems, will not rest content until he has "killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets. "46 Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new way of living and the world 'saved', then man must find some way to overcome his vanity and "paranoid and phobic 41

anthropocentrisrn'v+? To do so will not be easy and will involve the repudiation not only of our own metaphysical inheritance, but also the finding of a way into a new revealing. Yet, to return to Heidegger, we have already seen that hope lies ready at the moment of supreme danger where and when we might least expect to encounter it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that holds sway today. Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiesis and means by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having an entirely different relation to matter; a revealing which may enable us, perhaps, essential unfolding of technology European nihilism. And yet, to reiterate, harbours in itself the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply "gaping at the technologicalv+f and survive to confront our engagement the with modern it is this essential unfolding which and standing half in awe, half in dread, before the power of machine civilization, we must attempt to catch sight of that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology. Of course, to simply glimpse this does not mean that we are thereby saved, but "we are thereby summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. "49 And we are reminded that, as Heidegger points out, there was once a time and place (i.e., ancient Greece of the tragic age) when poiesis was also called techne and the fine arts were not distinguished from technology. At this time and in this place, the "outset of the destining of the West ... the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted unto them. "50 They allowed man to enter into a direct physical relationship with the real (i.e., with things as things and not as objects of knowledge and representation); and they allowed man to 'dwell poetically' on the earth. Can they do so again? Heidegger is uncertain: "Whether art may be granted this highest possibility ... in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. "51 But he remains hopeful. For as long as there are those, like Nietzsche and Lawrence, who can still be astounded by and before this other possibility and who can continue to reflect upon the vital questions concerning man, nihilism, and culture in a manner that is full of radical astonishment 42 and due reverence, there

remains a chance of inciting a new becoming and/or of opening a different revealing. And so there remains a vital task for philosophy: For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, merely prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge; and whilst such 'prepatory thinking' is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for "the possibility that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientificindustrial character as the sole criterion of man's world sojourn. "52 II.iii. A Dry Soul is Best: Decadence, Sexuality and the Subject. Having critically examined modern European nihilism as a phenomenon at the level of culture, capital, and the question concerning technology, we are primarily interested here with how it unfolds at the micro-level of the subject; i.e., we are clinically interested in the forces (active and reactive) and the flows (sexual and excremental) that constitute, condition, and, indeed, breakdown the human being, determining as they battle for supremacy within the will to power the value of the souP3 For nihilism is not simply about the death of God and the subsequent collapse of all values, but the collapse also within the body and 'psyche' of our healthiest and most primary nihilism represents instincts. a pathological It is in this sense that Nietzsche says transitional stage and is the expression of physiological decadence; and it is for this reason that he frequently uses biological and psychological language to describe the process. 54 Lawrence illustrates this "anarchical dissolution of the instincts"55 in his fiction and, like Nietzsche, argues that one of the side-effects mental activity, so that decadent individuals of such is an increase in are a "wincing mass of self- consciousness" 56 as well as corruption. In particular, decadents 'sex unconscious are prone to getting their physical feeling and creative 43 according in the head'; intensity to Lawrence, i. e. , transferring into mental sensation and

knowledge. 57 Thus it is not the case that, following the death of God and the devaluation of the highest values, man plunges self-sacrificially abjected values (animality, sensuality, materialism etc.); into his previously rather, he seeks to idealize these latter values and therein maintain himself, securing the old 'white' psyche: '''Even your animalism, It, - Birkin tells Hermione - '''you want it in your head. You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions to get a mental thrill out of them'" (WL, p.4I). Similarly, Hermione's deliberate and false intellectualism'" (Ibid.) consciousness decadent 'passion' and 'spontaneity' are condemned by Birkin as "'and more than For Birkin, decadent the most it is vital we overcome hide-bound our conceit of and be stripped of ourselves if ever we are to enter into a non- becoming and learn how to "'live in another world, from another centre'" (WL, p.4S). But, as we have previously indicated, this is not something that decadents are prepared to do; they fight to maintain their corrupt selves, secretly enjoying the sensation of being "threshed rotten inside"58 and of reducing "the complex tissue back through within outer nullity and their corruption; rewarded sensuality (see sensational gratification consciousness'P'' with WL chapter rottenness own egoism, sensational to its elements. "59 Circumscribed they surrender gratification IX for Gudrun's in the experiencing in the mind via the liberation to the flux of flesh via cheap of the latter), or of the "static data of or what Hermione calls "'the joy and beauty of knowledge in itself'" (WL, p.8S). For Lawrence, corruption is ".. only divine when it is pure, when all is given up to it. If it be experienced as a controlled activity within an intact whole, this is vile .... The static will must be subject to the process of reduction also. "61 He continues: "Insofar as we fight to remain ideally intact ... we are obscene .... 44

To destroy life for the preserving of a static, activity. But it is an activity which has become "62 'pornographic' mode according the "grey disease to Lawrence's of sex hatred" is this a desire to prevent definition away the physical intensity Eventually, decadent individuals to in mirrors'" (WL, p.42); i.e., of experience for mental representation. not only unable to differentiate lived find themselves the real and the simulacrum, speak, excrementory Lawrence but unable to distinguish in dissolution, profoundest are perhaps instincts Lady Chatterley's Lover: feelings excrementory flow, the the two is instant, of opposition between our the two flows. have gone dead, and then the III and IV respectively), as he conceives with regard guilt functions, was wholly dissolute creative if we may use such a word. use of an act of anal sex to demonstrate of revaluation of a yet they are, flow is the same thing to them. "64 see chapters which of it; namely, of liberating have become the overcoming and his attempts and buggery to "distinguish that was initiatory, 45 Lawrence's the greater entwined Lawrence something to the body and its flows. for this illicit sex act as a method the is the in Women in Love (and later in The Plumed Serpent and interestingly, and bad conscience and This is the secret of really vulgar and pornographical people; the sex flow and the excrement the project functions between human being the deep instincts two flows become identical. vital and strategic Sex decreation, human being the distinction However, sex direction. In the really healthy But in the degraded sex and comments: different flow is toward to trade between in the human being work so close together, utterly instincts based upon actions "The so of this term, a but it is also the lust to animal functions mode today; the free flow of active forces, own '''naked excrementory the dominant of dirt lust". 63 Not only our shit, or life and death. ... this is the lugubrious and the "yellow disease watch between rigid form with health makes crucial to of shame attraction and defeating both sexual and between buggery which the symbolic death before

rebirth'v> is clear even in The Rainbow, as revealed by the relationship between Will and Anna (see pp. 218-20). Exploring the full range of sexual pleasures enables them to discover the beauty and delight of their own bodies and to lose their fear and shame of themselves. Like her mother before her, Ursula also finds liberation and a fundamental gratification via the defeat of shame, following her 'night of sensual passion' with Birkin (see WL, pp.412-13). But more than simply feeling free and happy once she has accepted the physical reality of herself (her inhuman and 'bestial' nature), she is also enabled to move toward a new becoming and new self. In other words, the anal sex between her and Birkin marks the death of her old established belief in herself as an ideal being; she realises that she is not merely a rational-moral machine, nor just a "creature of light and virtue" (WL, p.413), but also alive in 'corruption' with a different reality that she needs both to know and accept. Lawrence develops this idea in another 'Birkinesque' essay, The Reality of Peace, which he concludes: "If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept the thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it ... let us go down into ourselves ... and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free. "66 Crucially, this descent into ourselves and a coming to terms with our full bodily reality, is not the same thing as getting our physical selves into our heads and developing a hysterical and decadent obsession with our sexual and excrementory flows. There are ways of knowing which make sane and innocent; others which make mad and corrupt. Thus: "The forbidden acts of Gerald and Gudrun; Birkin and Hermione ... are merely corruption or within the rind; the same acts committed by Birkin and Ursula ... are the acts of healthy human beings. "67 Anal sex is radically redemptive for the latter; reductive and deadly for the former. 46

Typically, and like Nietzsche, struggle to become alternatively, full of good nihilism. becomes a collective collapse speed, For eventually, process is like a great upon emotional drift. "69 toward of selves, egoism, to his thinking on culture and modern according to Lawrence, of reduction and social our world of its machines modern culture, ... a mere shell threatened with prides the itself Birkin feels rats' like Loerke whose banks grow phosphorescent flowers of sensuous lust for decomposition flowers of corruption Ursula and Birkin, motivated by a nostalgia life and decaying are one" (ibid.), nevertheless erich. the latter For following the whilst the 'Arctic' sensual moistness is himself or 'Nordic' perversity offered and turgidity by Ursula's Inger sever Birkin's reluctance 'bohemian' set. Birkin, ambivalent attitude profoundly understand, perhaps toward like the Greek thinker to more decadence after Heraclitus, so than opted for the attraction of succulent In for Miss with Hermione and Halliday's Ursula, cannot help having an he claims to and although that 'a dry soul is best', 47 (i.e., of break-down."! process and corruption, that 'souls take pleasure where still he has a taste for own adolescent ties of to men like Gerald of becoming-ice have of mud and the 'African' fact, we would do well to remember and it is seductive who who in the nostrils effect of a marsh, of abstraction), those "'white marsh-lilies (R, p.325) in the process process and along If the scent of such for mud."? nauseating the regressive like Gudrun (ibid., p.172); perfection'" "the same brackish "Beneath a river in which swim du mal smells "sick and unwholesome" having system: of life'" (WL, p.428) fleurs deadly on the sparkle, a decadent, 'sewer but activity whole and economic at the roots or, "till our the ruins runs the 'dark river of corruption'; "'gnawing the lugubrious insanity; Thus beneath beautiful on the individual's non-ideal rind full of corruption and the sophistication efficiency his thinking their itself. "68 Thus whilst technical relates conscience their fall into corrupt European civilization Lawrence in becoming moist' he is also aware (even whilst 'it

is death to souls to become water'). 72 Further, accepting that the river of corruption Nietzsche is prepared Birkin comes close at times to is our true historical to accept nihilism as such. Perhaps reality; just as there is therefore nothing to be done, he muses, but to follow the course of this river to its end."" Certainly this dark river of nihilism is nothing new; we have been drifting along in it for the last 2,500 years or so. That which we mistakenly believed to be the "'silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea'" (WL, p.172) was always really the black river of death and nothingness. As for the 'eternal sea' (i.e. God), this has now been exposed as a vast dead swamp of stagnancy, rather than a source of life everlasting_?4 Ought we then accept obscenity and pornography and affirm the process of reduction? Perhaps those such as Loerke who are, as Birkin notes, much further on in the above process, should be admired for their courage and thanked for undertaking the difficult and dangerous task of revealing to man his own essential condition. Is not Loerke the artist and exterminating angel whom Nietzsche awaited? No. For Loerke makes the fatal error of turning the process into a goal, thereby collapsing the possibility of a line of flight which could take us beyond the ruins into a black hole. As Birkin says, Loerke belongs to the river of corruption '''just where it falls over into the bottomless pit" ( WL, p.428), and not where it promises to form a fresh tributary. Loerke is not a perfect nihilist because although he '" hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him'" (ibid.) Rather, ultimate creature Loerke is closer to being a form of 'last man'; i.e., an who, as Gudrun recognizes, is "the rock-bottom of all life" (ibid., p.427). So we must not make a 'dangerous misunderstanding' in the case of Herr Loerke.I> He is not in the least interested in the creation of new hopes, new habitats, or new forms of self; but only in the artistic interpretation old world in its death throes and in the preservation of the old self in its egoism, in order that he may sustain the experience of organic disintegration 48 of the from which

he derives his greatest of in terms thrill. His notion of the overcoming of creative self-transfiguration and enhancement; effectively abort the human race. Whilst the former evolution, the latter is simply life's termination only lost faith in one's future itself. Thus ability to give birth it is that apart (WL, p.453) destruction" never talk of a time beyond of world destruction new future would embodiment forth some other humanity the ruins. passing . . . every more form the most on life, Loerke and creative mystery .. to carryon the and extreme by a tremendous powerful movement movement. of the transition of pessimism, It could be the to new conditions genuine of of nihilism, would This I have comprehended." - Nietzsche.?" come into the world. It is the above insight which we have attempted of nihilism, death of God, science and technology, There is nothing of is accompanied at the same time a nihilistic existence, etc. are not reversible is passed imaginations wonderful fruitful growth, the in "mocking Birkin may also have his fantasies growth sign of a crucial and most essential the 'truth' that one has not but so too does he always imagine a finer, every major away has also created that of life and its but lost faith in the for life, in which the "timeless being, to No One is Free to be a Crab. "Overall insight - Actually, and to the future, he opts (Ibid., p.479) of creation." II.iv. Closing Remarks: crumbling and an indication delighting and human extinction, of some description bring from rather, is a furtherance in which a death sentence Gudrun of man is not thought one thing rise is certain: of industrial the dissolution events. to illustrate there and consumer capitalism, models the back; the triumph of of subjectivity puts it; "no one is free to be a crab. for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step into further decadence". 77 This being the case, the question 49 But whatever can be no turning of old and stable As Nietzsche here. of how to move beyond

the rums IS no longer strictly pertinent to our present situation. Rather, we should be asking how best to survive among the ruins and how, perhaps, we may accelerate the processes of modernity to our own advantage. And yet although Nietzsche and Lawrence acknowledge this and claim that they are prepared when movement forward to a new epoch seems blocked (and movement impossibility) to sink deeper into the abyss, affirming corruption back an and chaos and the need for these things, still both writers refuse to abandon the hope that to do so is merely a necessary preliminary to a new period of growth and creation. As Lawrence writes in The Crown: "If we have our fill of destruction, then we shall turn again to creation. We shall need to live again, and live hard, for once our great civilized form is broken, and we are at last born into the open day, we shall have a whole new universe to grow up into, and to find relations with. "78 Essentially, then, modern European nihilism is and must remain an ambiguous state of affairs; one that signals the end of old hopes and old values, and yet also the distant (but distinct) promise of rejuvenation and revaluation. IS, Provided, that we do not funk the great challenge of nihilism, either by looking in a moment of panic and pure folly to some extreme rationality), 'solution' (as Socrates which merely postpones the moment of reckoning, looked to or by opting to become passive nihilists and last men; i.e., those who are content to stay at the level of the ruins and perpetual fragmentation, adopting a complacent quietude in place of an anxious and agitated state of tension, still not knowing which way to turn, but no longer really caring, or, worse, mistakenly assuming they have, as it were, arrived at their destination; modernity being taken for the very zenith of history and culture. Clearly what is needed is a little courage and a little intelligence; above all, the courage and intelligence to laugh at ourselves and our conceit of seriousness, 50 and

to become insouciant in a positive manner about nihilism."? This is not to deny that there is danger and uncertainty ahead, but simply to argue that "goodwill and fearlessness'<? is what is most needed in a period of transition. If we are to live at all, then we have to agree to 'live dangerously'; the process 'perfected' strategy, of nihilism and transforming one. Undoubtedly there an 'incomplete' is something accelerating condition disconcerting about into a such a but for Nietzsche "the only hope for avoiding the catastrophe, for turning its reactive collapse into an active revaluation is to will it. "81 Only if we succeed in perfecting nihilism will we be able to proclaim, like Jesus, 'consummatum est'. Only we will not mean that, for us, life is finished, but, rather, that our long journey into the void of moral-idealism has ended and we are ready to be born anew in the living flesh; shedding our old humanity like the tadpole that dares to abandon his tail and become-frog. For if we are not free to be crabs, neither are we free to remain the ideal creatures we have become and thus, crucially, the revaluation is "not simply a question of humans recuperating from the illness of nihilism. "82 Dare we let go of who and what we are and become-other? matters Have we the one thing that, as Ursula Brangwen recognizes, really at last: courage. everything'" "'Courage for what?' asked her uncle. 'Courage for (R, p.270), she replied. Part III: Aesthetics and Ideology. III. i. Further Remarks on the Question of Culture. It will have become clear that essentially Nietzsche is concerned with the question of culture and believes modern European nihilism as characterized contemptible "pursued money-economy" and the triumph of science by a "hugely and technology without restraint" 1, signals the coming of a new dark age. In fact, 51

Nietzsche says that when the philosopher examines that what he is seeing are the symptoms culture.V Almost - but perhaps his first publication", Nietzsche delineating the possibility the rebirth of culture to perfection For For even after continued to be preoccupied that modern Culture by which is the supreme of culture then, and/or maintains hopes of with exploring and may also coincide with can be brought an important can be no doubt civilization has become so uneven, "History now appears in history form of agency a remarkable distinction appears that the struggle it is the not merely it is probably in their favour. but the principle whereas today to have become an urgent the forces more accurate reactive forces The triumph occupies place in Nietzsche's work. which begins and 52 of culture take possession of reactive forces history'. and the triumph something i.e., he often whereas and to say: of is not "4 of civilization It is, as Deleuze reminds Greek; he has see fin II. iii. 28). and meaning of 'universal disappointment man (two terms between which between as the act by which of that does of becomes more, as we noted earlier: of culture becoming-German but, of culture; level of civilization or becoming-reactive of his greatest (sovereignty) Culture degree This 'degeneration' a central realm in the Genealogy, modern ironically contra civilization its course the Dionysian allow a man to 'be', remarks one, there and divert highest a highly advanced If the issue of culture source the misplaced of make safe. If these goals defined the species activity as Nietzsche merely developed an accident thinks and uprooting if and when the former becomes and self -overcomes. be said to have achieved culture nihilism way of ordering does not simply man to preserve Nietzsche European and tragic wisdom; culture guarantee could of a total extermination not quite. chaos into a world in which man's means "he almost and finally left behind. Nietzsche, a possibility. this today thinks culture us, the of as a in ancient

Greece was something fundamentally concerned with Geist (the active and affirmative life of a people). it ends confused with Reich (the coordinating power of the state) in the modern world of late 19th century Europe. So successfully has the former been encased within the ideal molar formations the "social organizations, parasites associations, which cover it and absorb communities of the latter, that of a reactive character. it"S have become mistaken for cultural formations in themselves. If there is to be a new flowering of culture then at least two things need to be done: Firstly, we need to recognise that culture and the state are not one and the same; that they are, in fact, antagonists. As Nietzsche writes; "the 'cultural state' is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, expense of the other. "6 The state Zarathustra - that 'coldest the one thrives at the of all cold monsters' as describes it 7 - sucks the very blood out of the people over whose body it has grown like a face. Secondly, having recognized the above and having withdrawn our love and allegiance for the 'new idol'. then we need to find a way to release Geist (as defined above), from the hard shell of civilization and its state-formations. In Nietzsche and Lawrence, and continued in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate task of the philosopher and the artist remains the same: "It is always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned'f and overcoded by molar ideals. This may be a slightly forlorn hope, more suited to a young woman overcoming a period of trauma, such as Ursula Brangwen at the end of The Rainbow, but for those who refuse to accept that civilization goes all the way down, there will always remain the possibility that "the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption living still" (R, pp.458-9) soundness of instinct, disintegration" so that were and that they would one day find the strength, the and the courage to "cast off their horny covering of "new, clean, naked germination, to a new growth" (ibid, p.459).9 53 bodies would issue to a new

But how? How to throw off old selves and dead forms? It is here that Nietzsche once more looks to the phenomenon of modern European nihilism and declares 'accelerate the process!' Like Lawrence, Nietzsche welcomes the deluge and the flood, because only after such will the rainbow stand in the sky as a symbol of a new beginning and as a bridge toward a transhuman future. As Deleuze writes: "Confronted with the ways in which our societies become progressively and unregulated, decodified in which codes break down at every point, Nietzsche ... makes no attempt at recodification. "10 In other words, Nietzsche forgets or throws aside his umbrella, just as Lawrence rages against the great social umbrella that man in his terror of elemental chaos "erects between himself and the everlasting whirl"ll here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt of life. But let us be careful to recodify along old lines and Lawrence no attempt to repair the holes ripped in the great social umbrella by poets and other enemies of civilized convention, this is not to say that they do not hope to bring together newly liberated forces onto a plane of consistency. Thus if they are, on the one hand, rightly thought of as great iconoclasts and opponents of the idee fixe, rejecting most, if not all, of the legal, contractual, and institutional bonds relating to and founded upon the interior forces of the modern state, they are also, on the other hand, keen to reorder, revalue, and "regain mastery over that which has been totally released." 12 Nietzsche and Lawrence are not anarchists and, in fact, the question of culture "is badly considered if it is posed in terms of anarchy versus organized molar politics" 13 However, this is not to say they are crypto-systematizers after all. Let us be clear on this point, as it is of fundamental importance for an understanding of Nietzsche's thinking on culture and his politics of style: Central to the notion of a 'healthy' culture, for Nietzsche, is the idea of "harmonious manifoldness or unity 54

in diversity"; contraints culture is not an artificial homogeneity "imposed by external ... but an organic unity cultivated on the very soil of discord and difference. "14 In other words, as we indicate above, culture is the giving of what Nietzsche was fond of calling 'style'. activity and an aesthetic process; For Nietzsche, this is both a 'natural' art being understood by him as an organic function of the will to power. He writes: "Culture is, above all, unity of style in all the expressions of a life of a people." 15 Adding that 'barbarism', the opposite of culture, is "lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles."!" Crucially, a little later on in the same essay he will clarify this distinction by stressing systematic and "oppressive a culture, inferior culture, philistinism does not constitute merely because it possesses a system: even an it must always be the antithesis of a culture, namely a permanently established barbarity." For Nietzsche, the systematizer that is a fraud; a mere play-actor 17 pretending to be a "whole and uniform nature" 18, but knowing nothing of the genuine discipline required for style. Gerald Crich is one such actor. Behind his 'composition mask' lies an iron will, but not integrity. He knows how to organize into a system, but he is not a man of culture. Rather, he is a pure German who imposes the former over the latter and translates organization" indicative (WL, p.227); not only a sign for Lawrence of barbarism, of systematization productivity the "mystic word harmony into the practical word the profoundest nihilism. Of course, from the but also mechanical of life imposed by those such a Gerald, "there is vast material to be gained. "19 But it is only from culture that we shall "produce the real blossoms of life and being. "20 That is, those sovereign men and women of active power and affirmative will, newly risen in the flesh, different one from the other and who acknowledge their differences as degrees of power across a 'pathos of distance', whilst at the same time accepting their place within an 'order of rank'. 55

One is obliged at this juncture to concede what has become obvious; culture, for Nietzsche and those related to him, is inherently an aristocratic notion and arrangement and his theory of culture has definite social and political implications: "Nietzsche himself clearly thought so and did not hesitate to draw them". 21 And this is precisely where many of the 'dangers' work begin for those commentators and/or 'problems' of Nietzsche's who convince themselves (mistakenly I believe) that the above implications are, or are destined to become, 'fascist'. Mark Warren, for example, claims that when Nietzsche'S notion of culture based upon the aristocratic context model of ancient Greece is transplanted of modern into the socio-political Europe it "goes beyond nostalgia for a vital hierarchical community and moves toward a cultural-aesthetic fascism. "22 Such a claim is met and challenged in the course of our discussion in chapters Nietzsche'S 'politics of evil' and grandeur II and III, wherein based upon his cultural aesthetic are examined at length. However, briefly, I would like to offer a preliminary response to this claim here and now. Firstly, one cannot and should not attempt to deny the 'cruel sounding truth' that for Nietzsche notions of mastery and hierarchy are at the very heart of culture and that he has no qualms about the need for exploitation and oppression. Simply stated; "for Nietzsche, a choice must be made in the end between the needs and claims of noble culture whose goal is art, and those of a democratic one whose goal is justice and compassion, for the two cannot be reconciled". 23 But nothing in the above necessarily implies fascism; exploitation and oppression belong just as crucially to liberal capitalism, resting as it does upon a universal system of wage-slavery and debt. The ideals posited by a spurious form of democracy that Lawrence brands as 'robot' or slave-", should not, as we quoted Deleuze and Guattari saying earlier, make us bless the present system without reservation. Nor should we be bullied into accepting the crass and simplistic 56

alternative of either liberalism or fascism. There is always a line of flight that escapes from in between such points of blackmail and Nietzsche's founded upon and furthers thought is such lines. If it carries us away from the vulgarity of liberal democracy, so does it carry us away from the stupidity of fascism. Thus it is, for example, that Rupert Birkin, no friend to liberalism, also dismisses the growing Italian nationalism that so seduces Hermione as no more than another expression of modern industrialism "'and a shallow jealousy that I detest so much'" ( WL, p.299). Nietzsche is saved from nationalism, fascism because, the ressentiment-ridden like Sirkin, he detests racism, and the state-idolatry the petty of fascism. Nietzsche's philosophy of culture, art, and style does not only suggest the kind of politics that we examine in chapters II and III and which can, for one reason or another, be made to resemble and thereby be confused with faseism; also it suggests a new and radical politics (of desire) which we shall develop in chapters IV and V. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, from out of even the tightest knot of roots a rhizome authoritarian can sometimes shoot; i.e., Nietzsche's arborescent and model of culture engenders its own escapes and self-overcoming. Finally, and above all, it is important to realize that, for all his talk of things Greek, Nietzsche is not advocating an attempted return to, or reterritorialization upon, an ancient model of culture; transplantation nor, as Warren seems to suggest, the of a classical model into the modern world. Nietzsche is fully aware that what cannot be built anymore is a culture in the oldest sense of the word (even whilst he would remind us of this sense); for modern man is fundamentally no longer suitable material for such.25 Nietzsche simply hopes to reactivate something of the Greek Geist (i.e., the creative spirit or potential) that lies dormant within the present as a different order of sensibility. He knows he cannot designate a new culture in advance and knows too, after 57 The Birth of

Tragedy, that it cannot be imposed by force. But Nietzsche hopes that the philosopher can, perhaps, remove some of the restraints upon the formation of such and release the necessary forces via experimentation. Such experimentation (essentially of an artistic character), is primarily directed to the bonds that exist between people. Thus the goal of a politics of style is to proliferate and intensify relations; relations of a kind which are presently either dissolved or carefully regulated by capitalism "through its capacity to fragment, privatize, and segment the socio-economic field"26 and which has today overgrown and overcoded the political and cultural arenas. Fragmented and isolated as modern man has become, he must endeavour to come back into touch with others and with the world; regaining what Lawrence calls his "living wholeness and his living unison'S? But this will involve submission, according to Nietzsche and Lawrence, to those men in whom life is more vivid and more powerful and presently protest at such a suggestion. our entire democratic sensibility rises up in Nietzsche insists, however, that "only he who has attached his heart to some great man is by that act consecrated to culture' 28 and that only via such an act will man find his own sense of power-fulfilment (i.e .. his value and joy). When he is at a low ebb, Birkin wonders why he should bother striving for a "coherent, relationships? satisfied life" and asks himself: "Why bother about human ... Why form any serious connections at all?" (WL, p.302). But when feeling stronger once more, then he knows he must form connections between himself and others if he is to live seriously as a fulfilled and, indeed, as a free man; for freedom lies in having duties and obligations toward others (these are what the noble man understands by 'rights') and in having a place within a communal order. Birkin realizes that his individuality is a social and cultural effect that has to be striven for and that his 'singularity' 58 means nothing outside of a

social and cultural context. Of course, it is possible to "deny connections, break them, and become a fragment. "29 But then, according one is to Lawrence, wretched. And so: "What we want is to destroy our false inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections'<" (i.e., form a culture that is based in physis and not upon capital). How to achieve this is the main concern of this thesis as of Nietzsche's project of revaluation. III.ii. Art as the Counter-Nihilistic Force par excellence. We have seen in II.ii how the question concerning technology becomes a question 'answerable', perhaps, in terms of a different revealing (poiesis ). And we have seen in III.i. how the question of culture understood essentially as a question of style, also leads us back to art; back, that is, to a process which via creative experimentation disengages forces that may carry us toward a new becoming and contribute to the formation of a 'people yet to corne'. Art, then, is central to our concerns to do with nihilism, culture, and the self; the aesthetic critique of modernity playing an important role in the philosophical critique. In fact, for Nietzsche, art is the first and last great hope; quite simply, if we are ever to move beyond the impasse of the present and give birth to new forms of relation then "unheard of artistic powers will be needed to break the unlimited knowledge drive'l.:'! Whether such powers will prove forthcoming in an age of nihilism is debatable. But that such powers will have to be 'artistic' is a point on which Nietzsche insists. For art alone is; "the great means of making life possible, great seduction counter-force to life, the great stimulant of life. Art is the only superior to all will to denial of life, as that which is ... anti-nihilist excellence. " 32 59 the par

The above is not simply Nietzsche giving "hyperbolic expression to his private preference for art over science. "33 Rather, he is, as Daniel Breazeale correctly claims; "drawing the logical conclusion from knowledger P and, indeed, from his understanding to power. It is important Nietzsche's 'aesthetics' his analyses of culture and of life and art in terms of will if one wishes to form a clear understanding of (and his politics of style) to appreciate the latter point. For ultimately, Nietzsche does not "inquire into art in order to describe it as a cultural phenomenon ... Rather, by means of art and a characterization of the essence of art, he wants to show what the will to power is. "35 This is why Nietzsche very rarely talks about specific art works; he is essentially interested in art as a process and a practice in which the will to power most clearly reveals itself. And thus it is that Nietzsche is also keen to understand art in terms of the artist and the artist's will to power, 'intentions') 'health'. For as an organic function of the art can only be understood present within the artist. in terms of the forces (not the For Nietzsche, the genuine artist, whilst very often of frail health in many obvious respects, nevertheless is full of active and excessive energy. Via his art, he not only copes with the tragic character of existence, but affirms it and demands more chaos, more suffering, more danger. For these things are not only the source of his work, and, indeed, his life, but via art they are transfigured; "the horror and absurdity of existence" becoming something which is "compatible with life"36 and not destructive it. When man feels himself strong, then he takes delight in his ability to enrich everything from out of his own strength; not merely significant, or prohibitive of his ability, that is, to make the world but sublime: "This compulsion to transform into the perfect is - art."37 But of course: "It would be permissible to imagine an antithetical condition .,. a mode of being which impoverishes and attenuates 60 things and makes them

consumptive." 38 To imagine, that is, the artist as decadent and art as something which serves reaction and corruption. This is what Lawrence imagines in Women in Love; portraying the two artists of the work, Gudrun and Loerke, as fleurs du mal. Unfortunately, to imagine the becoming-decadent of the artist is not very difficult. For as Nietzsche notes; "nothing is more corruptible than an artist." 39 Just like the philosopher or scientist, the artist can suffer from a collapse of the primary instincts and become a sick animal, in thrall to the ascetic ideal and ready to serve the "approaching barbarity't.w Or, at the very least, be willing to accept a role in which he is reduced to the level of one who interprets nihilism, rather than struggling to create a new vision, form new hopes, and build new habitats. Thus Herr Loerke, who, explaining to Ursula and Gudrun why he has accepted a commission to produce a great granite frieze for a factory in Cologne argues; "'since industry is our business now, then let us make our places of industry our art - our factory area our pantheon'" (WL, p.424). believes, then, that art should subordinate Gudrun asks whether he itself to industry and Loerke replies: "'Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion'" (ibid.) This, however, is clearly not Lawrence's view; any more than it is Nietzsche's. For both, art should create the world - not merely interpret, represent, flatter, or sustain it. Indeed, if need be, the artist should assume the role of worlddestroyer; i.e., one who is prepared to challenge the present order by "returning it to its originally explosive character. "41 That is to say, artists are those who are obliged when life becomes stifled beneath the great grey umbrella of convention and the ready-made, to tear open the artificial sky that has been painted on the underside of this umbrella, allowing us to breathe a little fresh air and to form a new vision. For the artist, as for all men, the struggle against chaos (the struggle to give style to chaos), is a human necessity. But this is not the only necessity, 61

nor the limit of the artists duty: "It IS as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself. "42 For Deleuze and Guattari, paraphrasing mirrors quoted above, as for Lawrence whom they are here, the role of the artist goes far beyond simply holding up fifty to the world. If, on the one hand, the artist does have an obligation to "live out and give expression to the reality of his time"43, so too, on the other hand, must he become 'untimely' and not rest content with serving the order of his day (be it the order of the Church or the Reich). Only by becoming in some manner untimely will the artist be able to bring to presence the greater reality that lies external to the cliches of motley-spotted modern man and his molar daubs painted crudely over himself and every living thing. But alas, the becoming-decadent of the artist IS far more common than his becoming-untimely; and thus there flourishes a style of art "whose secret essence is scatological't+' For, as discussed earlier (II.iii.), decadence results in man's inability to distinguish between the creative and excremental forces and flows; all becomes dirt and foulness in his mind and he becomes paralysed with fear and hatred of his own body. According to Lawrence, this is doubly disastrous for the artist; because to lose his instinctual health and to become gripped by a horror of his physical being, both distorts his life and thwarts his artistic vision. For it is from out of our physical (specifically our sexual) being that arises an intuitive awareness of beauty and form. If, on the one hand, Lawrence claims that this hysterical fear has become particularly acute during the modern period, it is nevertheless the case that, on the other hand (and like Nietzsche), so too does he suggest that the slow-death of the healthy 62 instincts and man's intuitive

consciousness (his phallic or blood consciousness), since the triumphant rise of Socratic reason, has been an on-going process Platonic idealism and Christian morality. Lawrence writes: "The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body". Adding: "Art, that handmaid, humbly and honestly served the vile deed, through three thousand years at least. "45 This history is the history of man and nihilism; the slow death of culture and the body. As a result, we have become knowledgeable and productive, but we can no longer feel or create. Having lost our sense of live beauty, we have become radically impoverished in world and surrounded by ugliness which undermines our feeling of power and well being.46 For Lawrence, then, we are all now to a greater or lesser extent born corpses; inhabiting a world of shadows or simulacra of the real. The number of genuine artists and artworks (i.e., works which exhibit a new becoming and which do not reterritorialize back onto the cliche), is extremely small. And yet Lawrence, like Nietzsche, retains a stubborn faith in the promise of art; if, on the one hand, avant garde artists such as Loerke represent and corruption, the last word in self-consciousness then, on the other hand, "it is through art that Lawrence seeks redemption from this 'fallen' condition. "47 And - let us be clear on this point the 'promise' of art (i.e., the redemption it offers) is a restoration of the real; that is, the restoration of the libidinally material realm of the physical and sensual; the resurrection of the flesh, be this the flesh of man, beast, or fruit. Naming Cezanne, and referring to the latter's attempts to overcome the cliche and resist the ideal forces of the dominant socius via the painting of an apple, Lawrence writes: "It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first sign that a man has made for thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists. "48 63

Thus, crucially, great art is not an escape into fantasy, or a move away from the world of experience. Rather, it is a way of coming into touch with things; be they apples, shoes, sunflowers, stars, vases, landscapes, or - ultimately - the bodies of men and women. Art, as Deleuze and Guattari write, is a means of awakening in ourselves a greater sensitivity to intensities. We do not retreat into it, so much as use it as: a tool for blazing new life lines ... all those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art, and all those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art". 49 Loerke, of course, would find the above view anathema. For him, a work of art: "'has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and the other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none'" (WL, p.430). And the greatest error is to "'confuse the relative world of action, with the absolute world of art'" (Ibid., p.431). Gudrun agrees. But Ursula still has the health and naivety to challenge this idealistic and ultra-sophisticated view of art preached by Loerke and subscribed to by her sister. She tells them; "'you have to separate the two [ie, the world of art and the world of realityJ because you can't bear to know what you are'" (Ibid.) For Ursula, art reveals the 'truth' of the artist and of the real world and only the decadent who is "'too far gone to see it'" (Ibid.) would wish to deny this. 50 Thus Cezanne's apple may seem, as Lawrence says, a small act, and yet "it is the first step that counts, and Cezanne's apple is a great deal more than Plato's Idea. Cezanne's apple rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb ... he gave us a chance. "51 A chance, that is, to live and to "displace our present mode of mentalvision consciousness . .. and substitute a mode of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness of touch. "52 In other words, art forms not 64

only a tool for blazing new life lines, but also allows for the development Marcuse would call a new 'reality to principle the which principle'; is currently central Freud, and others since, have disputed cannot supply itself become regression. That the magical great umbrella rather of his own project. Arguably, Cezanne more beginning of an actual revaluation between man and man (and man than just arguing that art a serious human by artists a revolution; the Christian consciousness, and the substitution to be primarily an apple like Cezanne is signals the man and fruit, but ... the foreword but to the collapse of another he said there, and be truly non-moral. to his to the fall not of our whole way of way. If the human being is going ... then you are going to have a new world which has very That is, a world the as fruit). Thus it is that: idealists world flawed to retain his work of values - not just between an past ... seemed he wishes affected 'Be an apple! Be an apple!' he was uttering only of ... towards of art is as seriously "When models: civilization. of art could point and, ultimately, not in line with the politics affects of such, without understanding The revolution antagonistic industrial than its (badly) conquered of sex and power; of civilization. reality and sounds a nice utopia. "53 But Freud's as his understanding to Western the possibility a future images future of mankind "unconquered to Freud or one that is fundamentally of what of men: a little to say, men that can sit still and just be physically 'beyond "54 good and evil', as Nietzsche and women who have left behind their personal-egoic would say; a world and human, of men all too human selves full of shame and bad conscience. The promise 'save'55 golden age in which we have become the us and lead towards a delicious apple plucked by Eve. When Birkin accuses Hermione forever stuck in her throat ( WL, p.40), he is implying 65 of art is that it alone can of having the 'eternal apple' that what she needs to do

is to swallow the thing at last and fully digest it; to become-apple herself, i.e., a creature who has had the full experience of good and evil (and not merely knowledge of such in her head) and is thus able to move beyond such to an extra-moral future. A golden age: and why not? Nihilism is, in a sense, the ne plus ultra: "So why shouldn't it be a prelude to a golden age?"56 But let us not deceive ourselves on the likelihood of this. For if the return of the apple in Cezanne's work marks the promise of the above, it is worth noting that after a forty year struggle Cezanne himself only achieved limited success in his goal of revealing an apple; and never, according to Lawrence, managed to capture the appley quality of man or woman. It took thousands of years to kill the body and construct an ideal organism; who can say how long it will take to dismantle the latter and build once more a 'body without organs'v>? apple abstracted Cezanne, for all his efforts, into 'significant form'; revaluation of values was postponed was soon emasculated and his the resurrection of the flesh and the once more - as it will be postponed "ad infinitum by the good bourgeois corpses in their cultured winding-sheets". 58 But art remains, we may conclude, the great counter-nihilistic force par excellence that Nietzsche recognized it to be. Certainly it can itself become a tool in the service of reaction. But those who would make art subservient the capitalist upon schizophrenia, rely, like on releasing chaotic forces in order to invest their systems with a certain necessary dynamism. The hope has to be that one day they will find they have allowed too great a hole in their umbrella to be repaired and there will be an irruption of desire the likes of which we have not yet begun to imagine and which will "bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, ... new forms of consciousness, of being (WL, p.4S3). 66 new forms of body, new units

III.iii. Closing Remarks: From Among the Ruins to Beyond the Ruins; From a Politics of Style to a Politics of Evil. We have examined how modern European nihilism manifests itself in various forms and why it must be explored at numerous points, in a number of ways. The revaluation of all values longed for by Nietzsche and Lawrence is achievable, if at all, only once the above has been perfected. nihilism and the revaluation is essentially But if the consummation a cultural-philosophical concern, of it cannot be divorced from a social, economic, and political context and thus the question of style is more than an abstract one to do with aesthetics or 'art for art's sake'. Acutely aware of this, both Nietzsche and Lawrence show a pronounced interest in how power manifests itself at a political level and each seems attracted to the idea that a revolutionary solution to the problem of nihilism can be found that would enable man to gain control of the forces of history and forcefully push or kick his way beyond the ruins and over himself. If they do not wish to posit systematic metanarratives of the kind that characterize modernity, then still they are keen to arrive at a 'grand politics' of their own in which an uneasy balance is struck between a desire to 'take over' and a radical-nomadic away from the world's somewhere's'" wish to '''wander (WL, p.315). As strong as this latter desire to drift outside the gate is within them, like Birkin, Nietzsche and Lawrence realize that they cannot simply cut themselves off from a 'degenerate' society merely by taking flight and, in fact, all that they have gained in 'free, proud singleness' becomes meaningless and wasted without their being able to operate and create within a wider social context. Thus Nietzsche and Lawrence affirm an ethos, or way of living and relating, which is constructed between people. 67 ultimately in the bonds

As artists too, Nietzsche and Lawrence cannot resist the temptation to give style to the ruins and dress the chaos of existence with new myths and illusions, thereby enabling man to form a new conception of reality or 'truth' (the latter not at all loving to go naked as romantics like Rousseau and scientific voyeurs choose to believe). This is not to suggest that Nietzsche and Lawrence argue for the reformation of a unified and centralized whole, reorganized out of heterogeneous bits and leftovers; but they clearly do wish to do more than merely play with these fragments in an 'ironic' fashion. Having recognized the danger of slipping toward totalitarianism or absolutism, in which all value is mistakenly assigned to the whole and one forgets that the latter is simply an abstraction the parts, Nietzsche and Lawrence are also alert to the contrary danger which mutates what is an undoubtedly towards metanarratives">? healthy attitude that overcodes (yet related) of "incredulity (i.e., an unwillingness to accept any ail-encompassing truth claim except as a possibly convenient fiction), into a hopeless relativism and a counter-belief in the ruins that invests the latter with some kind of intrinsic last value; the fragmented and heterogeneous the good-in-themselves. becoming celebrated and promoted as Croire dans les ruines! is ultimately no more than a nihilistic slogan mouthed by disappointed slaves on the recoil from a belief in the Whole. Robbed of the resources needed to move forward and the courage to do so, the latter "consider it ludicrous and shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world"6o (or give it style) and thus opt to remain content at the level of disintegration, frustrating all attempts at revaluation and deriding all efforts to build new little habitats and hopes as 'reactionary'. Nietzsche and Lawrence, predetermined to conclude, were both weil aware that life is not and does not come ready made; i.e., that there are no ideal forms in the past to which we can return, nor any ideal forms in the future to which we can progress. Thus a move beyond the ruins must involve more than a vain attempt to reterritorialize along old lines, or the reconstructon 68 of old unities and

old selves. Similarly, transcendent utopia it must to come. involve more than the desperate But it still seems doubtful Lawrence whether man can live without concerning his origins and his destiny; forming without some hope of a to Nietzsche kind and of narrative positing some kind of 'grand politics' that is founded upon the Nietzschean formula for human fulfilment ("a Yes, a No, a straightline, disintegration, a goal "61) and which understands that destruction, and dissolution remain "merely the propaedeutic to [the 1 positive activity of creation and invention. "62 Thus Women in Love ends, but does not conclude. Having achieved an almost total devaluation of values, Lawrence looks for a way forward - but a way that doesn't rest upon the social optimism with which he concludes The Rainbow. Like Nietzsche, he affirms a new philosophy of power and a politics of evil that furthers his thinking on art, culture, and society. 69

Chapter II: Beyond the Ruins: Love, Power, and the Politics of Evil. Part I: Opening Remarks on How the Disease of Love Infects Modernity and Its Politics in Relation to Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo. Aaron's Rod (AR) and Kangaroo (K) are the first two novels in what is commonly known as Lawrence's 'power trilogy'; the third, The Plumed Serpent, forms the focus of our next chapter. Both works are written against a background of postWar crisis and collapse, Lawrence adopting an episodic style in order to reflect the chaos and uncertainty of the world in which they are set. The Great War itself, however, is regarded as an overt symptom - and not the cause - of the underlying cultural malaise that Nietzsche terms modern European nihilism (as discussed in chapter one). Nor does the War's end signify the termination of the latter's unfolding, for when peace finally returns in 1918 it results merely in the resublimation of violence back into "the general air" (AR, p.S). This is not to say that nothing has changed, the conflict did cause a break of some kind and for Lawrence "the world before the War is no longer thinkable; it has been deranged by a historical nightmare whose significance cannot be contained by the familiar categories of the world that has been disrupted." 1 Thus we see Aaron Sisson take up his 'rod' and abandon his old life as he seeks to embrace the 'incalculable'; and thus we see Richard Somers, the Lawrencean protagonist of Kangaroo, set off on a quest for a post-moral transhuman future, segmentation (husband/worker/citizen), in which power, not love, is the and, if need be, key. Refusing all Aaron and Somers go with the flow of desire, breaking away from one form of bondage after another and "everywhere setting the molecular charges that will explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape" 2, rejecting slave values and conventions. 70

But as much (AR, everything" forces as both characters p.178) and want are away from reconfiguring the are acutely aware that their individual quest primarily of the soul, Aaron and Somers for a new self and a more meaningful from a general political relations and accepts stand from apart (AR, p.241). from all 3 their fellow men, into an and fufilling Thus in the 'horrible violently with way of life is not "separable each strives to form a new series "'you can't keep on being alone'" does not promise or promote or and freedom of vital to be able to stand aside and ultimately Lawrence ideal "almost concerned that whilst it is sometimes Like Nietzsche, ties "implication context". to move individuality he a liberation concedes that human affair' cannot be avoided by one who seeks the new age"." However, as indicated above, Lawrence individual and collective being: power novels is essentially Lawrence developing hand, his critique If the power (AR, p.166), - contra love. with the struggle Nietzsche's philosophy is our concern to a once healthy in Part process a new basis for And the power trilogy of between and politics these two life-modes, of power on the one a disease to us. We refer which II, here we shall examine of the "incomprehensible but which has now mistakenly moral-idealism to suggest of love on the other. mode which we refer become concerned wishes 'love', human into a goal and, as such, also to the altruistic and egalitarian values of are symptomatic of the love-disease; values such as pity which lie at the heart of Christian It is interesting to ponder why it is that so many still cling to the foot Cross the death of God. For, any law to remain faithful shown of base and reactive to be born soul" been turned and self-sacrifice following by after of the all, we are none of us obliged to our old ideals; origins. 71 culture. particularly once they by have been It is not only unintelligent and

lazy to persist faithfulness with such values, we are injuring "we have to become done: ideals'< our higher traitors, if we are to advance will involve a degree Zarathustra demands but, from of pain as Nietzsche self". 5 There points again and again abandon one mode of life into another. man will thus need of him. But if we do not do this, sensitivity today?", to grow still more acute, "through which has produced this is thus only one thing to be be unfaithful, and excessive out; to Of course 'become if, rather, many of the "enormous then we may possibly our this hard' as we allow our social problems enter a terminal separate men", decline as a species. Richard Somers Kangaroo, in order mistaken responds they identity; '''Let's be hard, one another Kangaroo, with the request uncomfortable to understand the latter of wanting Aaron too is prepared Somers, to betray to abandon refuse to surrender their burrow contentedly into the corpse veritable perfume of love. Nietzsche and insisting Therefore who would preserve evolution not only break the old law tables, but also "shatter the urge to show pity; as Somers resists accept this. But Somers looks on impassively made to his pity. Refusing, all along - his unconditional love. Ultimately, 72 to of decay is the of men are, of tomorrow to resisting lies dying in his hospital and imploring and in silence; for and social the good and justt''", (K, p.323) that is, to give Kangaroo he and self-overcoming. the promise when Kangaroo that "'Love is the greatest'" when preferring this is how the majority creative and so But most men when shown that the stench to man's bed still insisting wrong old faith and old selves, knows at a level his ideal human status which is why they are a threat he calls upon those is not tells his human self. he too wants to become hard and unlovable. corpse, he may meet and understand in his attempts by accusing Like Somers, God's that this: than love" (K, p.209). "deeper often understands refusing Somers to the appeal that which the latter wanted all his talk of giving love,

Kangaroo has perceptively only ever wanted to given be "The man of ressemiment writes: love all along. As Deleuze does not know how and does not want to love, but wants to be loved. "9 It's not that altogether. part. Somers is incapable In fact, he concedes: And when it is treated p. 328). It is this Somers hates and resists, only, exclusive And this something In expressing his discontent itself exclusively 'love thy neighbour of modern (i.e., course, such a claim is anathema that it radically admits that naturally recognizing falsifies this moral the more the precept obliged from the outset for man's healthiest expression hostility'; i.e., Freud, civilization will expressed universal has attempted to as the command consideration of others who would protest of the relationship between Of men. Even Freud to fulfil"!" for beings who are not who want to be loved". 11 But civilization admonishes us that the harder it is to do so." 12 Thus viewing Freud threatens describes destruction in the same manner 73 would as IS animal says this is unfortunate, That which Nietzsche power, it is to civilization man as a dangerous that is love. Freud to Somers finds himself in and Lawrence, that which perpetually is understood however, to Nietzsche meritorious own benefit. else'" or distinction). to be oppressive, of which of difference "it merely need of taming via the expedient necessary love ... There is something usually practice inclined to be "gentle creatures obey on which diktat is "impossible to this fact: insistence (K, no marks the nature pays no attention a disease" civilization upon this ideal, most and impartially, it becomes a that which love hates. with the love-ideal, equally love that love is not and never can be "'the one and else is power: as thyself' to deny part of life. But it is only of living inspiration edifice he wishes disease-producing adamant force or mystery found that "Love is an eternal monomaniacal, to the great nor as if it were a whole, (K, p.134). opposition of pity, In but regard as man's man's 'primary and chaos. that Nietzsche Thus, for characterizes

liberal-democracy; as a sort protection the unrelenting against impulses of 'quarantine Where these cannot 'soul', they are denied expression In addition, civilization identification with one another, of mankind.vl+ unity declaring flatly that never with a recoil "can to insist (which he exclusively for associates instinct', for Nietzsche and Lawrence nihilistic will to negate difference mechanical sameness insanity, with human individuals, into one great unity, this the process; and unbroken" latter is permeated it is the love-ideal and 15 (the so-called all that does not conform life) the of man results and violence with a 'death displays a thereby preserving a state of on man's instinctual life and the and becoming, itself with that and fixed being. points out, the continual restrictions frustration of his most active forces (i.e., the 'civilizing' the of weakening and of thereby ironically, the above reactive. Thus, attempts to deny the active powers thinking comes very progress into "single As Marcuse effect the people universal Freud, within incite on such and deny the instincts Whereas etc." 13 to oppose be love cruelty themselves intended Lawrence "systematic destroyed). and nations, at last into hatred, of the repressed'). against to merge peoples there ultimately Eros attempting and that the attempt 'return varIOUS methods Nietzsche arguing turned (and, if possible, then races, forming of sex ... aggression, be usefully uses and after that families, impulses arrangement', the forces of nihilism and triumph destructive forces. extremely dangerous anything. Whereas of the latter Appreciating disease: think love and benevolence we have been made into 'interesting' are that their has becomingby those Thus it is that Freud's of civilization" characterizes i.e., 16; benevolence 17 animals full of potential the of increasingly moral-idealism love and are our poison." 74 ultimately strengthened leads to the accumulation this, Lawrence "We ensuring a place within the will. "face to face with the fatal dialectic of man), as an will cure If, on the one hand, via morality, so too

have we been turned into sick animals ill-will for all that is non-self, revenge, civilized full of secret or other. Driven man is willing to murder and give their love to him and prepared self-loathing and profound by ressentiment and the spirit those who refuse also to throwaway to accept of his love his own life in an act of self-sacrifice. Aaron's This is illustrated by Lawrence In Christian-socialist character the Nietzschean-like because in "'sacrificing oneself of these novels, are the finest things confesses a process struggle, into a goal. suicidal, so that recoil''' (AR, But ideal-love the murderer p.294). Thus too it is merely is that paramilitary of Kangaroo is at his happiest and boasting of it afterwards with p.319). It is because becoming deadly. too much. If this is bad enough collective or also Jack ideal love cannot recognize becomes as happens of turning homicidal to love as well as lover acting on the Callcott, sentimental fascist the heads with an iron bar gloating joy in his tones" (K, limits of any kind that it ends by at an individual such for an "extreme Men cause or accept death not because mass-scale, '" in the strength consequence when breaking "indescribably the ad infinitum To Lilly, this lusting and lacking and an inevitable to a in life'" and the greatest (AR, p.77). to love" is the sign of one who is world-weary accept life as a continual from first Lilly that he would be happy to see '''crucifixions for him '''love and sacrifice joy resides suicide in Rod and Kangaroo. Jim BricknelI, they love too little - but level, it is obviously worse on a when our social love infects organizations and Nietzsche warns above all we should be wary of underestimating "the fatality that has crept out of Christianity wish to make a few remarks According to both Nietzsche's a series of 'slave revolts and what Nietzsche even into politics!" I!! about which I reading there have been below. and Lawrence's in morality'. calls the 'ascetic of history, Behind these they detect a spirit of revenge ideal' (i.e, essentially 75 a will to negate power).

The 'politics in its of love' in the modern liberal and socialist and results, according base politicians" period manifestations to Lawrence all wielding the "insentient unfolds in a manner not story of physiological suggestive spiritual decline; a story and the destruction conception and intellectual of love's of the classical the consequences, conclusive slave even evidence the metaphysical politics reading of European speculative argued and socio-economics. to both this and the seemingly liberal-democracy for equal to emphasize reductive moral nature no more tradition than surely suggests in important was implicated In Aaron's democracy, liberal that: democratic aspects sets do he was justified Kangaroo, out to explore no teaching at level of and modernity. manner But despite of Christian-moral promise'S"), on the significant in holding highly which characterizes views reveal and and rhetorical the Christian-moral "Nietzsche's culture in the crisis of modern Rod and is in fact a secularization it has and there moral social true to say that Nietzsche's of an interpretation ("a demand that the actual world embody Christian IS of forces at the secular in a dramatic culture to be conceded it of and hatred and Christian rights but political that is and affirmative the Genealogy is an imaginative in the Christian as being man, an active molar link between Certainly by at a micro-level critics a decisive designed upon has to prove history made nevertheless have that of Geist. Only Nietzsche's and continuing some 19 a story but also of revenge ideal based though account, his opposition revolt and even power of mediocrity". progress triumph, level and the demand modern inferior tells his tale of the slave revolt; of power and life. Beginning values, bullying not exclusively of this slave revolt of "painfully of Hegel's philosophy and though - is a continuation in the triumph In the Genealogy (11.16), Nietzsche a - particularly, continuity affinities. of This that liberal democracy European nihilism. "21 Lawrence, having already rejected liberal alternatives on offer in the the two dominant 76

1920's: work, socialism Aaron dreaming thrilling crime' and fascism. Thus, for example, falls in with some middle-class, naively to the thought of a violent Lawrence upheaval a lusting for brutal behind the fairest idealism. Jim Bricknell, Lilly pours scorn gives the latter illustration socialist revolutionaries, Christ spectacle and it is the latter that only thinly veiled and sensation, insists explicitly "two or three of love, Bricknell that the only hope for leaps up in a violent hard blows with his fists" of the repressed whilst of 'blood whilst hoping for social and political revolution. on his creed of the return and a whole drama is keen to show to what extent really motivates; man lies in imitating would-be VI of the earlier liberte, egslite. and tretcrnite on the one hand, of on the other. in chapter (AR, p.82); rage and aggressiveness When rage and a dramatic that lies in the souls of the good and just. Later, this Lawrence time another socialist one of the Marxist-Hegelian inevitable present introduces next path step'" (AR, p. 279). of idealism, Kangaroo, Somers then insistent Lilly agrees that if we continue is indeed likely to be the when considering old ideal had still a logical leaf to put forth, before the lily-tree of humanity rooted is not wrong: society formed upon the logical development (AR, p.166). For the latter, (e.g., the unity has gone dead: sequence is only a stink'" case. this argument is '''the along the And in that "if the - as the perfectibility of human of an ideal, is what Lilly and Somers of mankind into "a sort of slime and merge" the idea and the ideal of love and all that this implies of mankind, sacrifice), socialism it was this last leaf of communism but what he welcomes the final degeneration that in love died its final death" (K, p.265). Thus Levison both dread; into Aaron's Rod, Levison; variety, this will also conclude character the sanctity '" And when of human life, the notion the ideal is dead and putrid, (ibid., p.280). 77 of selfthe logical

Unable to see anything other asks (political) Lilly what his it is an important answered. question And even counter-nihilistic, ambitions Somers Lilly as Levison in the revolutionary later demands it merely to be raised quasi-Nietzschean problems 'modern' and aristocratism in its own right and just as mistaken. novel move from begin to away (and even then he doesn't and Jack, via his contact all hopes for a seizure with the same poison: Having in convinced Christian-moral idealism and political at the democratic rotten with already world, which, liberalism, alternatives to consider upon life accordingly. the disease nature To conclude. impossibility. traditional we recognizes. political workers For as he even his own. connection between initially aims his critique Callcott, is "'fermenting rejects by Left and Right; and fascist an injustice" 22 infected also realizing paramilitaries who and who seek revenge as we will see. that it is modern that whilst those and and all grand But he eventually to democracy political man with the political virus and dangerous. the real issue concerns the bourgeois civilization become an itself. may standing the Somers aristocratic far). p.89). of love may be particularly of our humanity the (K, I their 1 existence per se who is the problem; of In It will fall to Jack offered Somers to be with that it is not just liberals but also socialist have "learned is meant he agrees ... the will of the people'" the revolutionary to be of history are fatally contaminated Australia deserves with the likes of Jaz, political projects arrived nevertheless and get terribly to realize (AR, to be addressed. is in his socialism; to in his Levison nihilism?'" grandeur but increasingly Kangaroo, "'Is political altogether vaguely Struthers, which if Lilly's is as is: position, irony in his asking of this question, it does present ways, comes alternative If there is an undoubted p.281). many than the logic of his own socialist say that if as it does upon a ruined alternatives become redundant. 78 moral support, What has so too have the is needed is something

radically different; a politics which works not to preserve man as he is, but to further his transfiguration and self-overcoming and a politics that opens up an order of rank between men, doing away with the aggressive overfamiliarity and "promiscuous mixing in" (K, p.36) that characterizes the virulently egalitarian and highly authoritarian politics of love. We travelled far in the direction of Christ but it turned into a dead-end at last: "No further progress is possible in that direction, we have reached breakdown and failure. If life is to continue, a shift must be made to the power-mode". 23 Part II: Power: The Philosophy, Politics, and Problem Of. II. i. Remarks on the Philosophy of Power. Having reflected on "the conventionally bonoriti term 'love'" 1 and found it to disguise a good deal of hatred and resentment, I wish now to examine the attempt made by Nietzsche and Lawrence to revalue the complementary term 'power' and form a critical conception rational beyond the reactive idealism. That is, a conception representations of moral and which is free from "the superficial contempt for power which most of us feel and express today"; contempt born of the fact that we moderns "only know dead power. which is force". 2 But power, Lawrence insists, is not mere force and has nothing to do with bullying authority. For Lawrence. as for Nietzsche, the distinction between power and force is vital, not least of all if they are going to be able to develop an effective critique that can be taken seriously once truth claims have been abandoned in favour of power claims. The former is usually construed as something predominantly active and affirmative that deserves to be esteemed, obliging as it does a man to act with profound obligation; the latter, force, is portrayed as reactive and negative which deserves to be devalued and regarded as fundamentally 79 base and irresponsible.

Unfortunately, as indicated above, common within Western thought the traditional representations of power and modern political theory from Hobbes to Hegel, have been ones in which the latter is characterized in a: "strangely restrictive way, in that, to begin with, this power is poor in resources, sparing in its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed to repeat itself. Further, it is a power that only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no; in no condition basically anti-energy." to produce, capable only of positing limits, it is 3 Deleuze anticipates Foucault's analysis above in his 1962 study of Nietzsche and Philosophy, arguing that the problem resides in the fact that when we make power an object of representation, we necessarily make it dependent upon the factor according to which a thing is represented or recognized or not: "Now, only values which are current, only accepted values [i.e., herd values 1 give criterion of recognition in this way. "4 We need thus to form a new non-representational energy-based and model of power outside of accepted values and beyond the "negative and emaciated forms of prohibition'f that are currently mistaken as the only possible manifestations of power. Somewhat ironically, it is power itself which has today to be liberated from the 'repressive hypothesis' which assumes dominance within modernity and provides a generally acceptable model of thought. Power has to be allowed to regain something of its Dionysian and positive aspect. If this seems disconcerting to the modern mind, the fact remains that beneath the dull grey representations of power given us by the puritan, power has always remained gay, which is why as Foucault concludes: "What makes power hold good is simply the fact that it doesn't weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces produces discourse. "6 80 pleasures, forms knowledges,

In other words, and importantly, power is the great "productive network which runs through the whole of the social body"7; i.e., power _ and not love _ is that which keeps us alive to one another and in touch. This is why Lawrence argues that power is not only prior to love, but that the latter is also ultimately a product and secondary form of power: "Even the phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to call power into motion: but it is probably the reverse; that the slumbering power calls love into being. "8 This reversal Lawrence, in which power is now posited as the "first and greatest mysteries"? behind our being and existence, brings of all us back once more Nietzsche's assertion that we, like the rest of the world, are will to power by II_ to and nothing else besides!" 10 Thus it is that despite Jesus, despite Freud and all the other moral-idealists castrati, and man wants more than simply to love and be loved and will always ultimately value as the good that which brings him a "deeper flow of life and lifeenergy"!", heightening his sense of power; whilst, on the other hand, branding as bad that which impairs this flow and "proceeds from weakness." 12 At least this is what Nietzsche and Lawrence pin their hopes for a revaluation of values upon. Thus power, to reiterate, so often thought of as 'evil' by the conventionally moral (the weak and tame), is affirmed by Nietzsche and those who follow him in their thinking as the good. So it is that when Nietzsche describes his politics of power as a politics of evil, we need not imagine fascist brutality or the torture chambers of the Marquis appropriated de Sade.l ' Evil Nietzsche's word for power, from the moral vocabulary of the meek and assigned a new meaning and a new value. As a philosopher processes is simply that flagrantly of power, Nietzsche is affirming "those violate all human utility, all accumulative reason, all stability and all sense" 14, convinced as he is that these criteria are rooted in the reactive impulses of self-preservation belonging to a "peculiarly sordid, inert, and 81

cowardly species" 15 of man and herd animal who has learned to believe as Truth that: "Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy." 16 Nietzsche, after Blake, wishes to argue that the above is not in fact the case; to demonstrate that: "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body" and that, ultimately: "Energy is Eternal Delight." 17 He attempts to do this by stripping away the regulations that have been used to control and legitimize power within a philosophy of right; revealing thereby power in its 'Machiavellian' nature: "pur. sans melange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son aprete."18 Let us not, however, be mistaken into thinking that Nietzsche's understanding power is one that somehow purifies of the latter of all harmful and dangerous aspects, even if it does, in a sense, seek to sanctify power. Nietzsche does not, for example, deny that power even at its most life-creative contains within it a destructive and life-affirming element and is anything other than that which preserves life. Rather, when a man or animal is full of active energy, they are full of the desire above all to increase their feeling of power (Machtgefiihl ) and they achieve this, paradoxically, via an expenditure of strength and via the process of self-overcoming. Thus what a man most wants is not simply length of days; he wants intensity of life, not duration. But how, it might be asked, does one acquire such active life and enhance one's power to begin with? Nietzsche answers by saying that one must first of all need strength; "otherwise one will never have it." 19 This is also Lawrence's reply to the above. But as he and Nietzsche also both stress it is by no means a question of consciously seeking after power. As Deleuze rightly notes. to want or seek power is "only the lowest degree of will to power, its negative form, the guise it assumes when reactive forces prevail'<"; 82 i.e., it is the will of the slave who

understands power only as something he lacks. Radically, Nietzsche frees his notion of will to power from all egoism and consciousness; i.e., from all residues of philosophical humanism. We cannot know power, nor possess it, nor seek it out. We can only accept it as a gift which "flows into us from behind and below. We must turn our backs to it, and go ahead. The faster we go ahead, the stronger the river flows into us. "21 That is, the more intensely we live, the more power we need, the greater the power we will receive. "From earliest times, man has been aware of a 'power' or potency within him and also outside of him - which he has no ultimate control over. "22 Traditionally man has thought of this power in terms of the divine and/or the daimonic. The saying of Heraclitus - 'ethos anthropoi daimon' - more than simply meaning that a man's character or fate is determined by his 'demon', means too that a man is produced and constituted by the element of power; that is to say, he is formed between the forces that he contains in relation to and combination with those forces external to himself (solar-cosmic forces, environmental forces, social, cultural, and technological forces etcetera). Thus Richard Somers's confession to the all-too-human Kangaroo that he identifies primarily with his demon: 'tilt's my best me, and I stick to it'" (K, p.137), means that he prefers to essentially think of himself as a creature of power and not a spirit of ideal-love. And when, as we will see, Somers at the end of the novel declares it is his intention to seek out 'dark gods', he means that he wishes to find new and alien forces with which to forge a new relationship, pre-Socratic thereby reconstituting the self. Somers knows what the Greeks (and Nietzsche) also knew, namely, that it is only by listening to one's demon (the voice of active power and affirmative will inside one) that man will be able to move forward beyond the ruins and find new values. Zarathustra For as says; 'timan needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him"'.23 83

Thus once more we arrive at the equation power the anti-humanistic = evil. And once more we note element in the thinking which leads to such an equation. This should not surprise us; for what is humanism after all other than "everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power "24 and the flow of power. Everything which accustoms us to see the figure of Man (or a God made in the image of Man) behind every event, every phenomenon, blinding us to "the other realities, and especially the reality of power"2S in its active and life-creative form and as that which produces us. The culture of love which rests upon such humanism, is one that ultimately lacks the ability to give birth to the future; for it is the power which such a culture would deny that alone can "bring about that which may be"26 and produce the radically new and different. Thus such a culture ossifies into a fixed mechanical form (a 'civilization') which merely ensures the continuance and permanence of the present. Similarly. the man who denies power fears change; the ego, being the automatic principle in a man, having declared 'I am', wishes to know nothing of difference and becoming. And it is right for the static ego to fear the active forces external to itself; for the latter are destructive of the former. Power is monstrous, immoral, unreasonable. But Lawrence, like Nietzsche, is adamant preferable to experience destructive "than to live like a well-to-do the Dionysian nature of power that it is even at its most American, and never know the mystery of power at all." 27 What does it matter to secure all the benefits of civilization ('good food and good plumbing'), and without meaning? they go on to ask, if our lives are inglorious Men remain fundamentally fulfilled in their 'power-souls'. depressed if they are not which is to say, in their collective selves. Only when a man feels himself satisfied here is he able at last to become "almost happy - as happy as man and demons can be. "28 And this happiness, although not directly informing the will to power itself (which cares neither for pleasure or displeasure, but only for more power), is crucial to a Nietzschean ethic; for. 84

Nietzsche argues, contrary to Christian teaching, only if a man is happy will he be good (and that he is not happy feeling righteous, but powerful). If Nietzsche's anti-humanist philosophy of power does not consider producing goodness as its primary aim (and clearly it doesn't), nevertheless there is a notion of joy connected with the exercising of power and of overcoming resistances from out of which the latter can flourish. The key, then, is surely to proliferate "complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and inticernenr'<? the via which feelings of fulfilment and pleasure can be increased and intensified. Deleuze rightly argues that due to the negative representations humanists of every description given to us by Christians and "what we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown god." 30 This is the dark god whom Somers seeks and affirms; the god whom Nietzsche baptizes as Dionysus. III. ii. Remarks on the Politics of Power (or a Politics of Evil ). It is not simply the case that having developed a critical ontology of power, Nietzsche and Lawrence then seek to construct a political philosophy of power upon this. For in fact, their ontological speculation is entwined with their political thought in such an intimate and pervasive manner that one is dubious about the attempt to divide the one from the other. This is not to argue that there is necessarily an intrinsic connection between the philosophy of will to power and the 'natural aristocratism' of Nietzsche and Lawrence, merely that there is a much closer and more carefully thought out relation than is often suggested in some of the critical literature. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, the need for the feeling of power gives rise to a call for such a 'grand politics'; this need is the strongest 85 tide which carries the latter

forward and it "streams up out of inexhaustible wells not only in the souls of princes and the powerful but not least in the lower order of the people. "31 It is a call, ultimately, for new social relations and new bonds between people formed on the basis of a newly active conception of power and a newly affirmative will. They simply attempt to give voice to this call - and answer it as best they can within their work. In Aarons Rod, for example, Lawrence hints that the "shadowy relation" between Aaron and Lilly "is nothing less than the birth of a new society", as if he were attempting to realise the "vision of fraternity between men that is glimpsed momentarily in Fantasia". 32 So argues Steven Vine in an introduction to the above novel (1995). unfortunate Essentially and careless, he is right, but his use of the word 'fraternity' is for Lawrence frequently and explicitly dismisses this notion in his work, and as Somers makes clear in Kangaroo the relationship that is sought as the basis of a new social and political order is a 'living fellowship' not of "affection, not love, not comradeship. mingling. Not blood brotherhood. foundation the new relationship Not mates and equality and None of that" of active power IS (K, p.l07). Upon what then to be based is not something Somers is sure of: "Perhaps the thing that the dark races knew ... the mystery of lordship ... The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority. The other mystical relationship between men, which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any arbitrary caste or recognition of difference and innate priority, birth aristocracy. But the mystic the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority" (K, p. 107). If there are key passages m Nietzsche's work, such as Beyond Good and Evil, 257, or The Anti-Christ, 56, which conveniently summarize much of his late political thinking, the above must constitute such in Lawrence's mid-period; 86 this

passage forming the heart of what it is he is attempting to explore in the 'power trilogy'. Essentially, we are given here almost the entire vocabulary of Lawrence's political philosophy at this time. If most of these terms (frequently employed by Nietzsche also), are regarded as 'politically incorrect' or simply redundant in this liberal-democratic (and secular) age, yet it would be impossible to discuss a politics of evil without recourse to them. It is a vocabulary with which Rawdon Lilly would feel perfectly comfortable; for, like his author and like Nietzsche, he is prepared to accept the need for some form of slavery as a social and political necessity if culture and the cultural production of greatness is to be guaranteed. But cultural greatness is not the only concern of the above; they make the troubling leap from the latter to a concern also with biological advance or species development, often equating the two things under the general heading 'life', which in turn is then reduced to a political problem. Because they believe that culture and evolution both depend upon the subjugation and exploitation of weaker powers (without which, they argue, there can be no higher forms), Nietzsche and Lawrence are both prepared to see these things inscribed and reinforced socially as well as promoted politically. In the name of life as will to power, they insist on the need for "'a real committal of the life-issue of inferior beings to the responsibility of a superior being'" (AR, p.281) Not the submission of man to the will of the People, or to the State-machine, to capital and industry, or but to those others in whom a greater degree of active power is manifest and who are moving on toward a new consummation of some kind. According to Lilly, we have little choice in the matter; "'once the love-mode changes, as change it must ... then the other mode will take place in us'" (AR, p.298); i.e., the power-mode, which demands life be lived on the basis of submission and obedience. Aaron is sceptical of this ever happening. 87 But Lilly

insists that all men have the urge to submit and offer obedience; have been 'Oedipalized' upon itself submission find and had their desire as a desire for to the greater soul and by offering collective and individual relationship of power sense). man most that its own so perverted oppression. fulfilment. and a social but because desires; it is this. that back it is only via that they can hope to (not individual order passionately that it has turned obedience And not because they which fulfilment within a autonomy in an ideal Lawrence calls man's 'living wholeness'. Anyone who genuinely cares about man and his fulfilment will. argues wish to see "a society of power in which men fall naturally into Lawrence, collective Thus wholeness" obedience 33 and can give obedience. becomes an ontological and existential one inscribed in nature. as it is for Zarathustra. are obeying creatures'''. 34 In Beyond some length on the essential importance of that there always emerges to live on earth". obedience 35 who says: for Lawrence. '''All living creatures Good and Evil, Nietzsche also writes at of obedience, that "from out ... something In addition. imperative suggesting for the sake of which it is worthwhile he claims that the people which has lost the art of for itself'.J" "shalt perish and lose all respect" It should be clear, then, that it is absolutely not the sign of the slave to submit and of a noble give obedience; struggle to themselves their their produce "pride rather, greatness, the mark find fulfilment, via an act of self-overcoming. responsibility command. but. to master on the other in obeying" hand. and, people engaged ultimately, in the transfigure If such a people on the one hand accept the inferior what really cycles and forces of life and give distinguishes them as aristocratic is those cycles and forces of life which are over and above and moving beyond them. The danger and resents giving IS that 37. that is, their willingness the slave, although he cannot 88 to yield before command

obedience, does know how to bully and is only too happy to conform; reactive aspects representations of command of slave-morality. and obedience as understood the in the negative And this danger is compounded by the fact that the need to obey, practiced and cultivated among mankind for so long that it has become established as a sort of 'formal conscience', has been inherited far more successfully and at the expense of the much more difficult art of command. Nietzsche warns that if the above trend is taken to its 'ultimate extravagance'. then there will be "no commanders or independent men at all". or, if a few such still remained, "they would suffer from a bad conscience". 38 Arguably, exactly what has come to pass within the modern democratic this is political order, where nobody rules in their own name or accepts the obligation of power. and where the slave has assumed authority and control. What Nietzsche hopes to do via his attempt to revive a noble ethic and memories of aristocratic political culture, is restore a good conscience to commanders and those men who still feel themselves to be full of a degree of active power. For Nietzsche, it is vital that such men can be preserved; for without such, as even Freud concedes, there can be no healthy group formation, nor any higher collectivity than that of a herd (without meaning, without justification, without direction). Masters are not just a luxury formation; they are also a social necessity. Deny their existence - as the slave would - and you deny power. Deny power and you are not simply acting in an anti-social manner, but are also revealing a will that is anti-life (i.e., fundamentalIy nihilistic). This wilI, according to Nietzsche and Lawrence, is today uppermost, and thus we witness "a grim determination to destroy all mastery, all lordship, and all human splendour out of the world, leaving only a community of saints as the final negation of power, and the final power." 39 And the above is carried out in the name of what the slave thinks of as 'freedom'. Whilst Nietzsche and Lawrence do have a notion of such themselves (freedom = fulfilment within an order of rank), they rarely use the term, so vitiated has it 89

become by its usage within the vocabulary of idealism. Lawrence, the reactive conception of freedom (i.e., freedom freedom for) hopelessly is simply uninteresting of no value, For Nietzsche and from rather than even when achieved: than accomplished liberty?" is more asks Richard Somers himself, adding: "The vacancy of this freedom is almost terrifying core or pith of meaning" (K, p.2?). "What of ... without any In an age of nihilism, freedom is simply another exhausted ideal and has no relevance to a politics of evil. Thus Nietzsche says explicitly: "My ideas do not revolve around the degree of freedom ... but around the degree of power ... and to what extent a sacrifice of freedom ... provides the basis for the emergence of a higher type. "40 If freedom is thus dismissed as an empty and boring slave-ideal, so too does the politics of evil do away with the notion of equality. For, as Richard Somers argues, new values can only be reached via "'an awakening of the old recognition of the aristocratic principle, the innate difference between people'" (K, p.277). Critics such as J.A. Bernstein are therefore not wrong to identify the desirability of inequality as "the basic doctrine" of Nietzschean political philosophy. 41 For it is certainly the case that Nietzsche thought it crucial that a pathos of distance be established not only within the soul, but in society too, so that men could form a sense of their own value and power in relation to, but also as a mark of distinction from, one another. Only a society which believes in and establishes an order of rank and difference between man and man, and which limits freedom, will produce the true blooms of culture. That is to say: "Every elevation of the type 'man' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic order - and so it will always be". 42 In an ironic reversal of liberal thinking, Lawrence even goes on to suggest that freedom, if it is to mean anything at all, must mean the freedom to be different and unequal; not the right to sameness and equality: "How can there be liberty 90

when I am not free to be other than fraternal and equal?", he asks.s ' Equality, which denies power differentials is thus too a form of decadence, or a principle of "dissolution and decay+' which reveals a will to the denial of life. And this is why Nietzsche argues liberal institutions are subversive of a healthy will to power and democracy should be regarded as "a symptom of waning power, of approaching senescence, of physiological fatigue". 45 But if democracy and liberalism are to be overcome, what is to replace them? This is what Somers sets off to discover. At first his search for an alternative political creed Ultimately, leads however, him to militant fascism and revolutionary he rejects both of these options, recognizing socialism. the same decadence (the same reactive forces and negative will) behind them as behind the politics of equality and freedom; and an even more virulent form of acute rcsscn tim en t. What he wants is not merely something different from modern liberalism, but something other to modernity and its slave morality itself. Like Nietzsche, whom Lawrence indicates Somers is familiar with, he decides that what is needed is a revived and radicalized notion of aristocracy; for only this form of society and political culture breathes power in an active and affirmative manner. Thus in Lawrence's text Zarathustra's call is echoed: '''0 my brothers, there is a new nobility needed; to oppose all mob-rule and all despotism and to write anew upon law-tables the word 'Noble'. "'46 This new nobility - a natural aristocracy - shall form the "'cultivators and sewers of the future'r+? What Zarathustra/Nietzsche aristocracy wants is what Somers/Lawrence wants; a form of in which power manifests itself inside a man and is acknowledged with reverence by all men. They do not want an economic elite, such as the bourgeois class of capitalism ("'a nobility that you could buy like shopkeepers with shopkeepers gold"'48). Nor do they want an elite composed of a tiny handful of men all of similar type and disposition: 91 "'for many noblemen are needed, and

noblemen of many kinds, for nobility to exist! "'49 This latter is an important remark, for it demonstrates how Nietzsche saw his new aristocracy as one founded upon difference and plurality; i.e., a multiplicity of types all in relation with one another within the communion of power. Difference does, for Nietzsche, as for Lawrence, imply 'higher' and 'lower' human types, but they posit an infinite variety of such within an ever-changing rank. For just as power continually flows and transforms, order of so the selves and the relations between selves formed on the basis of and by power change and mutate. Politics is, in fact, nothing other than the problem of these changing relations; an interplay of mobile power-forms of pluralism and opportunity and becomings. Ideal democracy, for all its talk for personal growth and self-expression, is actually far less dynamic (because based upon reactive and inactive forces) than the sort of society envisioned by Nietzsche and Lawrence. The former signals the end of politics understood in terms of the agon (i.e., struggle and change) and collapses at last into the "tyranny of No-power" that is nihilism.V' Nietzsche's and Lawrence's political and social model is based upon caste and hierarchy "in which a people gradually culminates'<i! and relates closely to the model Nietzsche finds support for in the 'Law-Book of Manu'. Nietzsche claims, noble values are to be found everywhere In this text, and it constitutes a magnificent affirmation of life as will to power, encouraging a people to "become masterly, to become perfect - to be ambitious for the highest art of living. "52 The (religious) sanctioning caste system "a natural posited by Manu, law of life of the first is praised by Nietzsche for rank over which no arbitrary caprice, no 'modern idea' has any power" 53, thereby returning us to an argument we found in Nietzsche and Lawrence earlier, namely, that there is to be found a categorical difference between classes which is also a distinction at the level of being or nature. Anne Fernihough reminds us in her study of Lawrence that as 92

soon as the 'decadent' forces of modernity are linked to democracy, is quickly and easily made by opponents "to 'natural hierarchy' problem grounded in biology'<+; the according Nietzsche categories' with then recourse and to a 'natural this will be dealt with shortly. Problematic or not, essential classes happiness and fulfilment: to of "divergent physical Lawrence once society is divided tendency'P>, each can find It is a classical agrees. division society (almost Platonic in its claim that the great man justifies men), which reveals seemingly theory at odds of power. when Nietzsche posits Nietzsche radical In order to resist this conclusion, determine the forces desire his insistence that compose or artist, or would-be leader in one man, is an unhealthy to give obedience what is an affirmative will to mechanical of men. ideal order in another. wanting example, who, other for like Nietzschean in his pronouncements This on power it is because he is a healthy desire to what is an active to conform in another; in one man, is a negative is why fascists, that of being able to wish to bully in another; and to assume that the will takes in a What will to social and political stability of his own in Plato and political on the importance in one man, is a reactive Kangaroo, and it is necessary a will and the direction of man and traditional implications to that found own of all of his aristocratism will behind his own thought thus and their its the existence philosophically aspects on the radical nature since Plato; command most the more philosophy philosopher, his with insists a different at into at it is crucial times and politics, sounds that overtly is not to be mistaken as such. What, then, to conclude task? It is to learn to perform recognize the difference others. Or, as Lawrence this discussion of the politics genealogical between active investigations and reactive puts it, we must 93 of power, is our primary of our own and thus to forces in ourselves learn to see; "the spark and in of nobleness

inside us, and let it make us. To recognize the spark of noblesse in one another, and add our sparks together to flame. And to recognize the men who have stars, not mere sparks of nobility in their souls, and to choose these for leaders. "S6 Thus Lawrence terminates his political thinking with a vision of the stars and a rather wistful hope that men will be able to form a 'solar aristocracy' each man is adjusted to another in which and the small "are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. ... And the joy of each is that it is so. "57 That there could be a social order such as this may seem fanciful at the very least. But, as we will see in the following chapter, post- Kangaroo Lawrence looks to Mexico and the Aztecs to find support for the idea of an aristocracy of the sun; a social order based upon the materiality of power, a politics of cruelty, and a notion of a general economy. Far from abandoning politics in favour of the gods, Lawrence reconfigures political thinking in terms of the daimonic and the divine, reintroducing back into history and seeking out those prepared earth' and form a "new aristocracy, the gods to become 'the lords of the irrespective of nationality ... a confraternity of the living sun, making the embers of financial internationalism internationalism his and industrial pale upon the earth. "58 This again reflects Nietzsche's view that from now on politics will assume a different form and be absorbed into the larger question of competing moralities, or a "war of the spirits". 59 And it is clear that whilst both authors were prone to speculate metaphorically and imaginatively, each also is genuinely concerned with developing a grand political project that involves the seizure of history, the domination of the earth, and a revaluation of all values. It seems appropriate before going any further, to discuss our concerns with the above and address the problems and dangers raised by such a philosophy of power and politics of evil. 94

III.iii. Problems, Concerns, and Dangers. The philosophy and politics of power developed by Nietzsche and Lawrence poses a provocative challenge to modernity, standing opposed to the ideals shared by Christians, liberals, and humanists of all varieties. It is important to concede this point and mistaken to try and pretend otherwise by arguing, for example, that: "Even in Nietzsche's statements actual ostensibly political most politically power and "Lawrence's distinction between 'aristocrat' of the undertones of authoritarianism oriented leadership and power is not and 'democrat' hungry foreseen". 60 Or: does not involve any or .. 'fascism'. Lawrence's view of man is deeper: it is not political but spiritual". 61 We have hopefully shown why both these statements can be challenged as inadequate and misleading. Here, then, in an attempt to be honest, we will say something in reply to the concern that Nietzschean political philosophy dispenses with a notion of 'human rights', and address the danger that by so doing it veers too far towards fascism. It should be noted, however, that this concern and the related danger are dealt with in rather more detail and at length in chapter three and that our primary concern here relates to the charge that Nietzsche's (and Lawrence's) politics of evil is not critical enough, disastrous resides on an untenable and potentially naturalism, and, finally, betrays the radicalism of their own thinking on power to which it has an uneasy relation. For liberal commentators, the main difficulty is that a Nietzschean politics of evil will be vitalist at best; anti-humanist at worst. That is to say, it will concern itself primarily with flows and forces, 'dark gods' and strange desires, and not with the principles of Enlightenment or the defence of civilization and its values. Such commentators and barbarism: are convinced that such a polities will lead to monstrousness "This will be, they argue, the inevitable result of an analysis that 95

denounces all notions of subjectivity and all humanism while regarding society to be an arena of competing forces. "62 Firstly, neither Nietzsche, Lawrence, or any serious post-Nietzschean denounces 'all notions of subjectivity'; section of part IV of this chapter, thinker, as we we will make clear in the first the above are at pains to reconfigure the subject on the basis of an active conception of power - not denounce or do away with altogether. Secondly, whilst it is the case that Nietzsche does not allow space for the metaphysical notion of 'human rights' within his texts, he does not deny rights altogether. Rather, he simply argues that these cannot be thought as things which can be fixed eternally and made universal. Just as there is no 'man as such' outside of history, time, and culture, nor can there be acontingent 'rights of man' as such, outside, that is, of what Nietzsche terms the anthropomorphic vanity of idealism. Affirming as he does the world as will to power, means that Nietzsche is obliged to define rights as things produced by and coordinated within the continuous struggle of competing forces. In other words, rights are "recognized and guaranteed undergo degrees of power" any material alteration and, importantly, rights disappear", if "power-relationships to be replaced by newly created ones.s ' So, to reiterate, Nietzsche does not deny the subject and does not deny rights; he simply attempts to materialize these notions theory of will to power. Further by showing their relation to his to this, whilst celebrating and appearing to promote the 'Dionysian' aspects of power on the one hand, he also concedes the importance of reaffirming the human (all too human) need for a degree of stability, statute, and structure. The need, that is, to impose limits and to form habits; to give style to chaos. If the latter can no longer be legitimated via an appeal to God and the old values, then, Nietzsche argues, maybe it is possible to do so on aesthetic grounds; thus the vital importance of art as a counter-nihilistic 96

force par excellence (and as an organic function of the will to power) within his work (see chapter one where this was discussed). Of course, it is precisely the attempt to turn philosophy into an art and to 'aestheticize' the political realm, coupled to an active and aggressive conception of power, which lays Nietzsche's thinking open to the charge of 'fascism'. And fascism is the great danger and most pressing concern for many commentators, disturbed by the potent mixture of art, ideology, and the daimonic in Nietzsche's texts. Again, we have said something about fascism in relation to Nietzsche's work in chapter one, and will say more in chapter three to follow. But let us make some additional remarks here. It is perhaps best to once more begin with a confession: "Whether one likes it or not ... Nietzsche's thinking will always remain susceptible to fascist appropriation simply because, in its political mode, it does not conform to the liberal view of 'man' and 'society"'. 64 The same can be said of Lawrence's thinking: Both offer a non-egalitarian vision of the future in which hierarchy, discipline, and breeding all come far more into power and play, as we have seen; both argue for the establishment of a new master race, which, if predominantly thought of in cultural and religious terms, is nevertheless socially instituted and politically secured with violence where necessary; finally, both were prone to using an extreme apocalyptic rhetoric and to advocate the sort of despotic terrorism and that, when associated by Nietzsche in his mid-period works with militant socialism, he is quick to condemn. thinking 'appropriation' Is, therefore, their not merely open to fascist as suggested above, but also on some level essentially fascist in its own right? I think the answer here is no. If there are similarities as we have indicated, nevertheless Bataille is justified in his claim that: "Between the ideas of the fascist reactionaries and Nietzsche's notions there is more than simple difference - there is radical incompatibility. "65 And this is because Nietzsche's 97

political philosophy and fascism express entirely different wills to power, the former, in stark contrast to the latter, having freed itself to a radical degree from the spirit of revenge and the poison of ressentiment. Thus it is, for example, that one does not find in either Nietzsche's or Lawrence's writings, justification for their political beliefs along either nationalist or racist lines; the former claiming that if he and his kind are not 'French' enough to love humanity, neither are they 'German' enough to resort to such base stupidities (described by him as "scabies of the heart").66 And this is why, despite speaking in terms of the great man as commander and of the mass whose destiny is to serve, Nietzsche and Lawrence do not pervert desire; as fascists pervert desire and as all those who use the above figures to Oedipalize history pervert desire. For they do not seek to reduce the social field to the familial, or the level of the nursery (exactly the enviroment that Aaron, Lilly, and Somers wish to flee from). If Nietzsche and Lawrence encourage submission to the greater souls and promise fulfilment via obedience, they want men to submit as free men; not as infants or slaves.s? It is only by denying the new spirit (of innocence and affirmation) their texts and by offering a reactive interpretation in of the latter, that justification can be found by those political nihilists who would commit their crimes not beyond good and evil, but in the ethical void beyond good and bad. Fascism is not inherent in Nietzschean political philosophy; it is the cancerous mutation of it, if formed on the same (or at least a parallel) line of flight. Lawrence understands this, as is clear from a careful reading of Kangaroo. If not inherently fascist, still Nietzsche's political thinking may be inherently flawed, or limited. J.A. Bernstein, for example, claims that Nietzsche ignores the problem which had so troubled Plato in The Republic, namely; "that those fittest to rule are those who genuinely do not wish to do so" .611 But, as with many of the criticisms of Nietzsche, this seems to be based upon only a partial reading and 98

is thus of reduced validity. The fact is, as we have shown earlier in this chapter. Nietzsche does importance of being able to overcome what he terms commanders'. not ignore this dilemma; rather he emphasizes the crucial the 'bad conscience of Only when this is accomplished, will the best then want to rule and accept their obligation or duty to do SO.69 A rather more serious charge is that Nietzsche fails to address the fact that his positing of a neo-aristocratic political order as a counter-modern democracy is self-defeating because, by reaffirming and a hierarchical of society, ordering originally productive of ressentiment. he recreates alternative to the master/slave dichotomy the conditions that were In other words; "his great politics do not address the major cause of the rise of the metaphysics of resentment. namely, the experience of political alienation. "70 Here again though, such criticisms can be challenged. For surely Nietzsche does address the problem of ressentimeru. arguing, rightly or wrongly. that the latter is only produced in those socio-political unfulfilled and impotent (i.e., direction). His aristocratic arrangement systems in which men feel themselves feel their existence is lacking in meaning and is specifically designed to make all men - even the lowest - feel fulfilled, and to allow each man the opportunity experience and express to his own degree of power; each will feel his existence justified by serving greatness. 'Alienation' and feelings of resentment will simply be dissolved within a vital community of power-relation and an order of rank which assigns each man a place within the former. In addition, Nietzsche's model of society is designed to solve the problem of how those rich in power and health can give (of themselves) dishonour to others without the and debilitating effect of pity; another prime cause of ressentiment. Christian charity and social welfare programmes 99 make men feel small and paltry;

he naturally grows resentful at having to receive in such circumstances (and those who give are also denied pleasure in the act of bestowing). Nietzsche assumed, again, rightly or wrongly, that within the new order he envisioned where power could flow between all men (and be the property of none), that each would be enabled to a greater or lesser degree to give and receive with reverence and gratitude. Admittedly, Nietzsche does at times sound more hopeful than convinced of his own arguments, and the latter are underdeveloped in his texts. Unfortunately, although Lawrence adopts many of these arguments as his own, illustrating and debating them in his fiction and essays, he doesn't do much to actually develop them in detail and in relation to the dominant realities of his time. Ultimately, one has to ask whether particularly it isn't the case that their understanding of power, the politics of power, lacks complexity. Critics claim that when the attempted move is made from a philosophy of power to a politics, Nietzsche and Lawrence betray employing their own thinking and expose its shortcomings; the former as a "metaphysics of domination mistakenly specifically to justify political domination". 71 Too often, Nietzsche and Lawrence appear to slip back into thinking of power as some kind of essence which can be located within and possessed by the great man and from which all kinds of empirical manifestations follow. Clearly this is not the case; power is today disseminated and dispersed throughout an incredibly complex network individuals, in a decentralized of institutions, bureaucracies, and manner much closer to the Dionysian flux that Nietzsche imagines in his philosophy of power, but seems unable to coherently and consistently conceive of in his political thought. Mistakenly, he and Lawrence both resort to outmoded and redundant molar models which are of no use for conceptualizing the micro-physics of power or the molecular nature of politics. Thus, one is obliged to agree with Mark Warren here: "Nietzsche did not give his own philosophy a plausible political identity. 100 He failed to elaborate the broad

range of political possibilities owing to unexamined that are suggested assumptions of the political. "72 such as markets and bureaucracies, in terms and technology, to the social, political, age, may have made Nietzsche an 'untimely' other, result it had the unfortunate in large part about the nature Failing to conceptualize relevant by his philosophy and economic thinker information realities of his own on the one hand; but on the of significantly reducing his critique of modernity. Finally, and perhaps thinking, is its thought, such as the assumption legitimate human practices although attempting political, nevertheless that damagingly operating was common remains most upon certain that and justify to be radical untenable one could ends up subscribing to political so not due to any necessity from Plato metaphor Warren to his philosophy he lacked the conceptual categories to Hobbes, of will to power. appropriate (as we have 'nature' (or Nietzsche political ideas; but this is due to the fact that he used the same terms both his philosophy that his thinking decadent and 'unnatural' the former (understood The problem to the by referring back to was able to find convenient justifications for his Nietzsche claiming but and because and his understanding With undue confidence, and that he did late 19th century 'life'), said above). the for society suggests of analysis to Nietzsche, ways of thinking through of world' arrangements. traditional even today."73 internal traditions look to the 'natural to "the organic philosophy social and political conservative social and cultural and challenge in use among conservatives simply because of all for Nietzsche's moves on the latter of the processes back and forth is more ideals of liberal-democracy, and 'laws' of nature. from nature valid and more because to cover to society, vital he stays than the faithful to as will to power). with this is twofold and has been identified 101 by Keith Ansell-Pearson:

Firstly, seeking justification for the political in a theory of nature; i.e., seeking to disguise the noble lie with the natural law, is precisely that which is no longer credible in the modern age of nihilism?": and, secondly, anyone who "attempts to derive ethical and intellectual values from the 'laws of nature' 'extreme anthropomorphism', is guilty of an and ... of an employment of reason that oversteps the bounds of the permitted'T" Here then is the major problem and illegitimacy of Nietzsche's political philosophy; not only are all attempts to establish a 'natural' aristocracy untenable, but may very well be as "philosophically dubious and pernicious as the attempt of social Darwinism to derive social and political values from Darwin's original theory of natural selection. "76 To conclude, we must concede that there are genuine problems, concerns, and dangers with Nietzschean political thought; and that there is a disjunctive tension between this and his Dionysian philosophy of power. This tension, however, often characterized as existing between the postmodern style of the latter and the pre- modern content of the former, cannot be solved - as liberal critics are wont to do - by simply decoupling the philosophy from the politics and abandoning latter; they are too intimately connected for any such clean division. the Besides which, such tension need not be a problem; least of all for those who are strong enough not to require harmony and intellectual consistency, and who know how to paradox use the contradiction. tension to challenge Due precisely to thinking which its disjunctive fears and underdeveloped and self- nature, Nietzsche's political philosophy is of much greater value to us today in thinking about our modernity than any grand narrative in which all loose ends are tied, all solutions finalized, and all freedom to experiment prohibited. bemoan the fact that his aristocratism Those critics who is incomplete and who apparently long for the certainties provided by those totalizing blue-prints 102 of Utopia so common to

modern theory, have missed advantage). If the relations no interest to us, then point of Nietzsche's work the politics) he proposes of power (i.e., the way is still open It is our problem models. the to decide upon for different these, (or at least are today of relations, to search its for different them, and to and Lawrence at develop them. Part IV: Beyond the Molar Level of Politics. IV.i. The Reconfiguration of the Subject as a Power-Formation. If the move made from love to power is played out by Nietzsche a molar political level, so too is it described competing forces within (and constitutive real sense Aaron's quest form a new 'single' self; the shattering of his old identity chapter 1 of Aaron's Rod). deterritorialized thrown toward recombine primarily Indeed, in a very to define and of the blue ball symbolizing the breaking which reinforced With his old self exploded without in which the above forces technological that identity into a myriad back into a primal chaos of forces with the social, cultural, at the level of as an attempt and the world a new becoming process of) the human subject. can be regarded and loss (i.e., as a molecular and other (see fragments form), Aaron is of the will to power external forces to give rise to the form 'man'. By developing a notion of the consciousness or fixed essence Nietzsche Lawrence and individual other such a notion beyond temporality selfhood, "Aaron's (i.e., foreclose transcendent words, self that in the terms the undermines Rod refutes defined in terms either of rational and moral idealism), possibility able to "attribute and contingency. is not a senseless of positing importance any notion to himself". the idea of a self as an eternal Thus despite its celebrations of of a I In unity of singular the idea that the self is a fixed or given entity; 103

instead it pictures characterized the self as a movement as difference. As becoming; Lilly i.e., insists; a travelling "'there are lots Thus the self, as Lilly goes on to argue, and lived; representation. singleness never perfected One shows i.e., and suggestion'" thy ego; rather, and crucially, power that the generates by one's 'Holy Ghost' unseen, overcome reiterate, increase phenomenon not only of just one myself our power alien forces). standard by accepting that say own soul's inflow of from behind thyself most it means know that the mysterious and below (i.e., it is not it means accept the unknown that the self not an inner essence. only by the grace is a product of power "I am myself", writes of the powers that enter newly myself. "4 If we want to bud as (all-too-human) If love preserves status, we need to form connections and keeps transfigures then safe, then power, god or is raised of becoming Kangaroo Lawrence the more radical Nietzschean puts forward other in the sense of overcoming and a Lawrence, me, from the a species and to find a way to with (inhuman more than and simply us. If in Aaron's Rod the possibility latter possibility, one's than to become who of your But become or not mean and find new powers moving us mechanically, of fate' an ideal your actions within you-' and make me forever present with - only made does self comes we may of the Outside; our 'love own will), and, further, who develops "and I remain in conformity (AR, p.296). assert derivative I'm "'The only goal is the fulfilling desire to of meso that we have no duty other active Thus, a multiple can never be fully 'known' a Nietzschean is one's destiny; we are. As Lilly says: generated and Being is thus 2 (AR, p.103). proposition'" manifest or .. a blossoming." our humanity. 'single' However, in idea of becoming- before we examine we need to first make clear what Lawrence, 104 (or sovereign), following this Nietzsche,

understands by the 'human' and why both of the above write of distinct classes within this form; i.e., master and slave types. In other words, we need to first see what hope, if any, lies in the animal man, before we perhaps prematurely speak of his death. The Nietzschean idea of the overman presupposes, unfortunately of course, for those who would will the former as Zarathustra are within democratic and love-sodden the man. But, instructs, there modernity very few of the latter. As Lilly says, there are today for the most part only 'people', and people are not men; "they are insects and instruments, and their destiny is slavery'" (AR, p.281). Nietzsche claims that genuine philosophers despise such ideal representations of men who form a universal 'humanity' which reflects all that is sick and absurd. How much more valuable than "the 'desirable' man of any ideal hitherto'" is what he calls an 'actual' man of flesh and blood. The latter "makes up for and redeems" man as a species and "enables us to retain our faith in mankind! "6 Such actual men are those whom Nietzsche and Lawrence also think of and refer to as 'natural aristocrats'; i.e., those who have attained their own singularity and are full of active power and an affirmative will. "There is no getting away from it", writes Lawrence, "mankind falls forever into the two divisions of aristocrat and democrat''": i.e., master and slave. Crucially, he adds: "We are speaking now not of political parties, but of two sorts of human nature: those who feel themselves strong in their soul, and those who feel themselves weak. "8 Likewise, Nietzsche primarily thinks of the division as an ontological one in terms of will to power and how one styles the forces that one is, even if he does also attempt to construct a sociology and a politics upon this in order to accentuate the pathos of distance between higher and lower types. This he regards as vital, because: "It is this operation in which certain men are 105

separated off and isolated from the others that will constitute the condition for the possibility of the production of beings surpassing man. "9 Importantly, having said this, we need to note that both Nietzsche and Lawrence recognize that no man is pure aristocrat, confesses; or pure slave. There is, as Nietzsche "master morality and slave morality ... even within the same man, within the one soul." ID And Lawrence, once more echoing Nietzsche adds: "Every man has two selves among his manifold self. He has a herd-self, common, ugly ... And he has a better self"!", which is vulgar, which is individual and noble. Such remarks save Nietzsche and Lawrence from the charge that they posited master and slave in terms of an untenable and lazy biological essentialism (i.e., a material idealism) and demonstrate that they were using what appear to be a set of binary concepts strategically, in order to challenge and subvert other dualistic models. Because power is not stable, but, arrangement rather, constantly of forces within the individual is therefore flows, and because the constantly shifting, so man's status or rank can never be finally determined. However, still Nietzsche and Lawrence insist on the need to distinguish forces predominate between those in whom active-noble from those in whom reactive-base hand. And they make such a distinction forces have the upper- by observing whether a man seeks to possess power and preserve himself, or release flows of power in himself and in all men, thereby opening up the possibility of new becomings and providing life: "The providing of life belongs to the aristocrat. action, makes life, he is an aristocrat.") If a man, whether by thought or 2 Without such men, mankind in general falls out of touch with desire and the flows of power, thereby "exhausting its human possibilities ... degenerating repetition, torpor, ennui and lifelessness")3; i.e., what Nietzsche describes into as slavery and nihilism. The problem is, does mankind know of anything other than 106

this condition of becoming-reactive? To answer no to this question would be to reach what Deleuze rightly describes as a "distressing conclusion". 14 But is there another possible answer; another possible becoming of forces (i.e., a becomingactive)? "Everything tempts us to think perhaps there is", says Deleuze hopefully: "But, as Nietzsche often says, we would need another sensibility, another way of feeling." IS That is, a way of feeling beyond moral sentiment and rational calculation; a way born not of love or logic, but of power. Can we achieve such and if so, how? Politics and revolution we will suggest as Somers concludes, are not the answer; they do not and cannot provide a new sensibility. Thus we need to look beyond the political (certainly in its conventional and molar terms) and, indeed, beyond and over the human. And Nietzsche spends a good deal of time seeking out the signs of a different becoming; "an involution of forms and forces, in which novel kinds of self-overcoming can be cultivated.r '" Here, with reference to Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo, let us briefly examine such novel kinds of self-overcoming Aaron-Lilly-Somers: as suggested by Lawrence. if they are single and distinct, like stars, nevertheless each is in some ways the becoming and overcoming of the other. None of the above is ever quite at ease with themselves to be thought of 'sovereign' individuals in the classical sense; each is too restless and discontent and they are perhaps all three best thought struggling of as characters convalescing from the disease of love and still to shed their ideally formed selves. In other words. they are best described as 'free spirits' of the Nietzschean variety. Or, arguably, we can even see anticipated in the above trio the 'schizo-nomads' of Deleuze and Guattari; men fighting to be free of the Oedipal yoke and keen to liberate themselves from the last vestiges vertigos of slavery. and sicknesses. Thus it is that: "They know incredible They have their spectres. sufferings, They must reinvent each gesture." 17 But ultimately, if successful in this, such men produce themselves as those who are "finally able to do something simple in Itheir] own name, without 107

asking permission ... a name that no longer designates any ego whatever." 18 Such men make it clear that even in this age of universal wage-slavery, they do not believe for one moment in the 'dignity of labour', or that their pride resides in their pockets. Rather, they arrive at the conclusion that men of their class who would retain their dignity and pride must refuse paid employment and flee abroad; "to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world ... to keep moving from place to place as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten". 1q Thus Aaron flees to Italy and Lilly decides to get out of Europe altogether, whilst Somers finds himself wandering in the Australian bush and, at the novel's end. on board a ship sailing for America. All three are thus on what Lawrence himself set out upon and termed a 'savage pilgrimage'. "Good people say that we must not f1ee"20 - but the nomad knows that there is nothing else to do but to run and keep running (for the old world is behind him). As for the schizo, everywhere "continually wandering about, migrating as best he can"21, he pushes still further deterritorialization: here, there and on with the process of which does not simply mean travelling in foreign lands. but involves a trip along the Open Road-? in order to escape from the choice with which he is threatened by civil society "of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a lpolitical] party". 23 Thus Aaron-Lilly-Somers all opt to step outside the gate and to flee; seeking new lands and strange regions "where the connections personal ... where desire functions according are always partial and non- to its molecular elements and flows. "24 This is not, as Deleuze and Guattari add, a promised and pre-existing utopia, but is rather a world created in the very process of deterritorialization. For the above type, there is no option; all they can do is become hard, love their fate and live dangerously as they make themselves homeless in "a distinctive and 108

honourable sense". 25 Like Zarathustra before them, Aaron-Lilly-Somers are men who feel "unsettled in every city" and thus look to "depart from every gate". 26 And like Zarathustra they never dare speak of their love for present humanity; rather, they content themselves with the thought that: "There has been and will be life, human life, such as we do not begin to conceive" (AR, p.265). To conclude, we may say that man is more than merely human being as defined within the moral-rational tradition and that he exceeds the definition homo sapien (i.e., a creature of 'same-wisdom' reactive consciousness). Man is also beast and superbeast; a creature of difference and active power. Perhaps, therefore, making Somers's or common sense, and the known forces of identification significant and appropriate. the term hetero daimon defines him better; with the demonic elements in his nature both It is this identification which obliges him to move from the humanistic politics of love and the revolutionary politics of grandeur, towards a concern with the daimonic and the divine and an altogether different type of politics. IV.ii. No More Great Events. Realizing that there were problems with left and right-wing attempts to formulate a grand politics (and perhaps uncertain how to address these), Lawrence begins to move beyond the political in conventional terms; indicating that revolutions and great events are not what are needed, if a new sensibility is to be evolved and new feelings produced. This is well illustrated "comes to an understanding in Kangaroo, as Richard Somers that his alienation from the currents of political history is something he has no choice but to sustain. "27 Particularly if he is to safeguard the degree of freedom in his own thinking he has fought so hard to secure and be able in his writings to "transmit something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified'v" within the modernist 109 political monologues

subscribed to by party-men such as Kangaroo and Willie Struthers. Thus Somers opts to stand aside and stand alone; remammg loyal to his own singularity and exercising, as Foucault would say, a 'decisive will not to be governed'. From early on in the novel it is evident that Somers does not feel comfortable within the realm of political action; despite the fact that he has made an international name for himself as a writer of essays on political and social themes. He tells Jack Callcott: 'ttl never take any part in politics at all. They aren't my affair'" (K, p.46). Later repeating this claim to an apolitical status to Jaz: '''1 really don't care about politics ... I'd rather have no country than be gulfed in politics and social stuff" (ibid., p. 63). This being his so, it is not unreasonable for his wife Harriett to want to know why it is he is flirting with two would-be revolutionary political movements. His attempts to explain his actions to her fall far short of convincing. He says, for example, that he feels he must "Tight out something with mankind'" in order to '''make some kind of opening'" p.68). (K, (more than Harriett) With an increasingly of the rightness desperate need to convince himself of direct political action, Somers even suggests at one point that it may only be via militancy that a new life form can be created; i.e., he foolishly adopts the mistaken view that the revolutionary seize control not only of the state and of history, can but also impose human direction over the process of evolution. Harriett is quick to point out that such anthropomorphic conceit is in complete contradiction to what he himself has long believed and reminds him also that '''life doesn't start with a form. It starts with a feeling, and ends with a form" (K, p.98). And you cannot create a new feeling via political violence (at most you may be able to shatter an old form). Further, Harriett also reminds Somers that that which has been truly of value in a cultural sense "has been apolitical, even anti-political the Roman Empire with a revolution. tt .29 She says: "You didn't change Christianity grew up for centuries without having anything at all to do with politics - just a feeling, and a belief" (K, p.98). 110

Somers, even when his infection with the political virus is at its most acute, is not unaware of this; not unaware that he himself has said often enough that "a new religious inspiration, and a new religious idea must spring up and ripen before there could be any constructive important change" (ibid., p.99). He knows that it is to be patient and that education must also play an important part in producing change; that if one is to develop a 'second nature' and new sensibility one should endeavour to "build on the reason and virtue that already exists" 30, not smash everything back down to an ideal zero-point. And yet, still Somers felt "that preaching and teaching were both no good at the world's present juncture" and so there had to be "brave action, brave, faithful action: and in action the new spirit would arise" (K, p.99). Clearly, this is a question at the centre of Lawrence's power trilogy: do we need men of action, or those who "know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, constant in invisible activities'Y '! particularly of course and Heidegger too is troubled by this question; following the experience of national socialism and his involvement in it. For Heidegger, what he terms 'transcendence' is a distinctly human capacity which gives "to every single person the power to start over, to begin anew - to take up, reshape, and transform the world."32 However, following the war and his own 'turning', Heidegger "in effect tried to purge transcendence not metaphysics of its conventional ties, simply to logic, morality, and ... but also to the 'very possibility of taking action'." 33 What was now required, he argued, was not action, essentially reverent contemplativeness of a new neo-pagan but rather "a silent waiting, an that might keep open the (slight) possibility religion" .34 As we will see, Lawrence comes very close to anticipating this Heideggerean position. And yet, for one reason or another, it seems that attempts by both Lawrence and Nietzsche to work on a micro-political level and develop a genuinely 'postmodern' theory of power, self, and society, are always betrayed by their own modernist ambitions and molar concerns. 111 It would

be left to a later generation of Nietzschean thinkers (with Deleuze and Foucault at the forefront) to finally abandon all dreams of a global and total revolution, which whilst perhaps involving a cosmetic reconfiguration of certain power relations tend to ultimately "leave untouched the very relations of power that make possible the functioning nevertheless, of the state apparatus." 35 What remain impressive, about Nietzsche and Lawrence, is the fact that they were able to intuitively anticipate this necessary prepare does surrendering of political sentimentality the way for a new type of political thought and based upon the view expressed via Harriett in Kangaroo that revolutions were something that could no longer be taken seriously; that they were, in fact, "vieux jeu, out of date" (K, p.103). Eventually, Somers is able to echo his wife's view, and to tell his friend Jaz that; '''like Nietzsche I no longer believe in great events. The war was a great event and it made everything more petty'" (K, p.161).36 And later, Somers tells Jack that he cannot, after all, lend his support to '''revolutions benevolence and feeling righteous" - and public love and (K, p.290) having clearly made the connection in his own mind between all of the above. Having tried so hard to become a revolutionary man of action, Somers ends at best as a rebel of the kind that Camus finds so admirable. Because of this, he ends by "taking sides against the revolurion'T' and detecting in the revolutionary a mixture of policeman, judge, and hangman who is fundamentally opposed to all genuinely rebellious forces and flows which move outside of (and are subversive of) party politics and the state machine. In the end, Somers is more interested in how via a number of alien becomings and by following unfamiliar lines of flight he can make the present order explode: "Well all right then, if I am finally a sort of bomb ... I hope the hour and place will come for my going off: for my exploding with the maximum amount of havoc. Some men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in 112

the walls that shut life in" (K, p.165).3H Mac Daly is right to refer to the 'spiritual in his introduction problem is that to ... he cannot give this eventuality grace - not meaning. his 'problem' something dreary find 'faith' the Kangaroo; "39 For superiority, inhuman and non-human notes brought Somers absolute statement'''. Thus, Somers of the novel: that "Somers's faith in any cause that might strength and saving deteriorating into such as a fascist or socialist. If Somers cannot what a sign, he is looking and the dark Somers "The search as we have for by making gods outside refuses said, of his a turn to the the gate. Accepting to limit or coordinate formation.s" it into an ideal political to Australia nihilism him from worlds to channel to claim this is Somers's a party-believer, he finds in this case that: actually European prevents life as a play of will to power, vainly attempting up enough - it is what to become of modern he is mistaken summon and political, spiritual but vacuum' for a satisfactory Daly correctly metanarrative ... but once there he discovers to the question asked of himself this by is what has that 'life makes no 41 finds an answer "Why had he come? ... What was he looking for?" at the beginning (K, p.l3); even if it isn't the political answer he had anticipated. Kangaroo and Struthers were, their own way, "both right, both of them" (ibid., p.327); but something else was also true and more vitally so - something sometimes when the reactive he would '" give anything, spirit pp.161-2), and simply leave then he doesn't turn to the gods'" of revenge (and beneath) is strong "'just at other people care about times, (ibid., p.162). 113 revolution, If feels in this social-industrial when he realizes - the same after bloody the political. within him, Somers soul and body, for a smash-up world we're in" (ibid., p.161), nothing beyond in this would solve it as before'" (ibid., but feels "it's time to

IV.iii. Dig Deeper and You Will Find Yourself Standing on Pagan Ground. If Nietzsche is to be believed and democracy is Christianity made 'natural'. perhaps the "sulphurous Somers/Lawrence politico-theological in the latter speculations+? half of Kangaroo offered is Nietzsche's as unnatural then by own radical aristocratism made not so much supernatural (alien, occult); i.e .. transformed into a secret doctrine that the profane will condemn and dismiss as: "Jargon, rant, mystical tosh and so on" (K, p.297). What Lawrence seems to be suggesting is similar to Heidegger's claim that 'only a god can save us'. and we here wish to explain what is meant by this and why they reach such a conclusion. This may not be easy, for "the language of Somers's musings regularly wanders into a semantic fog"43, as, arguably does Heidegger's philosophy. However, whilst conceding this point, one does not agree that the above thinking often collapses into "fatuous bombast". 44 Wittgenstein says in a well known section of the Tractatus (6.5.22) that: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They are what is mystical. "45 They are also the things which our electrically luminous civilization has attempted to banish to the outer darkness; those things deemed threatening because resistant to codification and therefore interpreted as evil, irresponsible, perverse. Most thinkers and writers choose to ignore that which falls outside of man's selfrepresentation and belongs to the Unthought, but not Lawrence or Heidegger. both of whom display an uncanny and almost preter-human awareness that: "There is always something outside our Iknown I universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul" (K, p.296), where it knocks and awaits entry. Unlike the majority who hear nothing (or pretend to hear nothing) of that which goes bump in the night, Lawrence and Heidegger strain their ears and attempt to find some way in which to think of such, experimenting with the full resources of language. I would argue that their efforts should be admired - not 114

dismissed as 'fatuous bombast'. god as a piece of portentious For whilst it is easy "to regard Lawrence's dark flummery'l+", it is more becoming of the serious critic or commentator to accompany the artist-philosopher the gate to that non-site 'theological' character, as he ventures outside where forces arise. If the language used takes on a this is perhaps necessary if one is to express values beyond the conventional political terms and "point up the inadequacy of the whole sphere of the political in respect of the life-form which must ultimately underlie politics. . .. In particular the political cannot encompass the realm traditionally addressed by religion. "47 Heidegger was fond of citing the following saying: "Dig deeper and you will find yourself standing on Catholic ground. "48 If this is the case, perhaps it is also true to say; dig deeper still and you will find yourself standing on pagan ground. Both propositions make clear that beneath the political paving stones, lies the sand of religion. Thus whilst God is dead and the holy age has seemingly passed, Somers nevertheless finds himself awaiting the arrival of a dark god who is coming from the Outside to enter him from behind and below: "The god you can never see or visualise, who stands dark at the threshold of the phallic me" (K, p.l35), informs an irritated and shocked Kangaroo. surprised by this turning in Lawrence's thought, We as readers as he should not be however, for there are clearly pagan and occult elements in his work, as in Nietzsche's. Of course, if readers should not be surprised by Somers's talk of dark gods, the living unutterable, the phallic self, etcetera, repudiate such as dangerous nonsense. nevertheless many will be quick to But Somers: "As a poet ... felt himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary have repudiated" (K, p.l4). man would Lawrence, anticipating the response to this, playfully concedes: "It is always a question whether there is any sense in taking notice of a poet's finer feelings. The poet himself has misgivings about them" (ibid., p.l5). 115

But of course, Lawrence does think we should listen to our poets; particularly those poets who have in turn dared to listen to the voice of their daimon, as all truly great poets - and philosophers - have. Heidegger also reaches the conclusion that it is to the poets men must turn for guidance in this time of nihilism; that the poet, acting as an emisary of the gods, is he who can best show man a way back to himself and forward to a new revealing: "In the midst of nihilism and waste of spirit ... it is the poet who, supremely, perhaps even alone, is guarantor of man's ultimate Heimkehr ('homecoming')". 49 This means of course that salvation lies not within the political, but the poetical; "not praxis but poiesis" . so Thus the man of action is forced to give way before the man of spirit; the poet, the artist, the philosopher. And thus it is that the god who can save us "that emerges in Heidegger's late writing is a profoundly tradition, the Judea-Christian and counter poetic god">! in the pagan idea of God as a being of logic, jealousy, and moral insistence. Nietzsche calls him Dionysus. Lawrence thinks of him as Pan, or, in The Plumed Serpent, as QuetzaIcoatl. What we call this god and how we conceive of him is perhaps somewhat irrelevant, for he is: "The god who is many gods to many men: all things to all men" (K, p.266). But still the question of how this dark god can save us remains unanswered; what does such a gnostic saying mean? The answer returns us to the problem of nihilism and how to move beyond it; and in making this return we simultaneously revive the political aspect. We saw how Somers, prompted by Harriett, reaffirmed that one cannot legislate a new understanding of being, or a new sensibility. But perhaps it is the case that; "some of our practices could come together in a new cultural paradigm that held up to us a new way of doing things ... An object or event that could ground such a gestalt switch in our understanding 116 of reality

Heidegger calls a new god, and this is why he holds that only a god can save us. "52 In other words: "only by finding some set of shared meaningful concerns that can give us a new focus ... and enable us to resist acquiescence to a state that has no higher goal than to provide material welfare for all"53, can we overcome the nihilism of the modern age. Heidegger is essentially arguing that following the death of God we revolve around a void, lacking as we do any socially recognized meaning or goal "that would enable us to decide collectively what is the right course of action for humanity to pursue. "54 If we are to change this, then we will need to find a new 'god' to save us in the above sense. But some of course do not see the absence of any unified centre as a problem; God's death is for them a liberating experience to be positively welcomed and affirmed. They would suggest that: "Not only is it futile, but it is also deeply unintelligent to lament the loss of a centre of gravity". 55 As we saw in chapter one, even nihilism may be something to be explored supports and experienced, the strategy consummation not postponed of acceleration or defeated. and affirmation Whilst Nietzsche (in order of nihilism) on the one hand, on the other, to reach the he too seems, like Heidegger and Lawrence, to have hopes for divine and daimonic intervention and assistance. Leaving aside the question of whether such hopes are valid and legitimate philosophically (or merely futile), our task in the next chapter and in chapter five is to examine this turn Lawrence down the 'dangerous' to the gods and follow Nietzsche and pathways they choose to take (dangerous because they lead us outside of love and the light of reason, away from the moral autonomy so cherished by liberal-humanism). In order to secure the promise of renewal, Nietzsche and Lawrence commit themselves to the demonic event that may well also bring disaster; in taking note of the immense changes taking place in the Godless world around them, they risk 117

concocting "a horrible theology" .56 In order renewed p.328), than sense modern of project transferred consciousness It is, as Habermas vague science, to initiate the revaluation of "passionate the political 'grand'; mix in Nietzsche to a "sacred can be decentred says; all moral elements'P", religiousness "the dream directed confused and and the fascist canalizing shall address in chapter three, dubious inward (K, ... magnificence" and Lawrence becomes 'mythical' rather primal outside the gate, so that site"57 via contact "the god which arises once more is: "how the subversively forces and of values and give back to man a with archaic of an aestheticized, towards VISion, and alien forces. poetic politics purified who is coming". Sq The question spontaneous expression of these of them really differ. "60 This is the question as we examine and the politics of cruelty, abandoning good plumbing, and the happiness Ramon's still further of the last man. 118 of plumed serpent we revolution the civilized world of welfare,

Chapter ITI: Only a Dark God Can Save Us Now: Quetzalcoatl and the Politics of Cruelty. Part I: Sulphurous Lawrence's Politico- Theological Speculations: The Plumed Serpent and the Re-Introduction Opening Remarks on of the Gods Back Into History. I.i. Outside the Gate. Just as there is a hardening of attitude Nietzsche's work post-Zarathustra, towards the political question so too in Lawrence's fiction and essays during the period 1915-26 is there a decisive move away from the liberal-humanist Christian-moral tradition In and of the West. This move comes to a climax in The Plumed Serpent (PS); a novel which provides an interesting and instructive point of central reference to this chapter. Richard Aldington says in an introduction to the above that it is "a curious and original novel with no affinities" 1, but this is not so. For in fact, the novel has many affinities and does not appear to be half so curious if one has knowledge of the cultural, philosophical, and political context in which the book was written and first published. As Frank Kermode rightly argues in his study of Lawrence, even the novel's modernist evolutionism, occult circles: preoccupations were "A theosophy, religious blend of primitivism, surprisingly common socialism, was common enough sexual ones within reformism, in the avant-garde thinking of the time". 2 It is precisely the above blend of politics, religion, and art that I wish to examine here, via reading of The Plumed Serpent, a work that has remained controversial, not only due to its anti-democratic politics, but also because of its experimental 119

nature at the level of language, disquieting this in content. regard (a work increasing frustration expressing those Lawrence struggle to it related). which forces, to articulate Lawrence, like Nietzsche, the novel, those presuppositions modern and prejudices surrounding perspective categories that is strangely real Mexico of the 1920's) universe that Lawrence Lawrence does not Michael Bell points out, aesthetic new realms of knowledge. Lawrence literary manages creates within regardless; each is impoverished when we are able to gain a nihilism and critically modernity. and "loosen present". 4 examine In other words, the aura of necessity And we do this and from a he constantly in order of the above. set in the fictional novels. The 'problem' from the other, so that, as to advocate straying beyond any of action and narrative techniques and conventions of the his own off one world cleanly seems to explore new possibilities Via the use of idiosyncratic which transgress to make plausible quest for the impossible (ibid.) But us to adopt an alien perspective. and yet is also outside limits, devices the of the want to stop" (K, p.297) new territory that characterize of the machine both in time and space (the novel takes place in the divide appropriate radical onto European The Plumed Serpent allows us to interrogate sanctity man does not want "For (even at the risk of becoming-fascist). upon of so too does "Evil and anti-civilization" 3 Each also obliges outside his new 'life-urge', ideal, doesn't thought to best has difficulty doxa and each reveals how "thought perspective that move his Ramon, in an alien tongue: pushes indicates it comes aware that modern as anathema: it fails to think relentlessly". By becoming-Aztec gods') character, of articulating uttered new word to dwell within other central once wound up to a certain every ('dark when as it is Zarathustra in Lawrence of language and flows method and treats wholly is closely the limitations to hear a new conception refuses in style only to Nietzsche's Just as the book's an appropriate as irritating it is second powers, in finding human psyche. at times Arguably, with human consciousness. being the usual that which is improbable into an apparently 120 reasonable demand. is that novel, and transform Thus: a "Who is to

say just In how understood?" Again, one speculative the this presents strengths philosophy-art Lawrence literal a spirit and brings together of creative Lawrence's significance everyday and exclusively directs a problem attractions. can have a more substantiation In profound prophecy, mystery. project fantasy, lies in his attempts communal realms". 6 is to be Jurgen life as something great importance Nietzsche and not by transcendence, of everyday and Lawrence one would derivative his things. What inhuman outside environment and reason the gate. to fasten the door so tight, with electric light, there (K, p. 285). It is because the outside notions to the majority interior such as Habermas), agree that "much that of people today to glide over the But this 7 is immanence is of thinking say, overcomes is that by 'world' the space in the whole world; rather, "the wondrous and light up the compound it is darker, Victorian so brilliantly it was all in. The Unknown and the extraordinary (not just in his he has his full being within. Unfortunately; writers that we still find it difficult 121 Nietzsche do their thinking for of vision to the fenced off from the wider, was no outside, became a joke: is still a joke." of this, because attempted wider than simply they argue, age managed that really, an itself in the body and in the is true something is not, of morality to each other, suggests 'successors'; how in see in this thesis, which man acts on a daily basis and likes to pretend simply a little clearing life- or inauthentic". but by grounding do understand the known world, show so that they "contemptuously not the case. As we will increasingly This latter, politics Habermas simply realm and it is relation the gaze of those who, like Lawrence, to to for others, to relate his ontological of everyday metaphysics with the work; and congenial practice Nietzsche Utopian endeavouring Personally light to that which is extraordinary, sensual its 5 for some critics of or remain and guardians ludicrous of the to take what Nietzsche

and Lawrence say seriously; we stimulating, stylish, disturbing, but without that were they substantiation conventional right. Right, of the forces find for analysis of to seek modernity the possibility a connection with the gate and by so doing effectively and models of political Foucault terms espace d'une exteriorite sauvage; i.e., that "still almost unexplored marvels full of "tigers remains and Nietzsche and Lawrence challenge Lii. human sacrifice with and palm trees and rattle the realm where in the darkness of primordial a new relation the hot sun hatches; bristles have tragic results to form That is to say, Lawrence knowledge'< to wish shatter and and all the other right thinking. and Nietzsche realm of dangerous are critical ever really considering example outside political frameworks their sacred here; thinking for man and yet may also help us restore snakes"? King Kong still the most us to do our thinking what ritual. which may to the world an aura mystery. "Jetzt wilr es Zeit, dass Getter triiten / aus bewohnten Dingen. " 10 Richard Somers, as we saw in the last chapter, whatever is not enough. variety, and left-wing revolutionaries the outer dark" (K, p.265). ultimately And so he turns to "the old dark gods, - whom Lawrence Initially, one is dubious eternally; skeptical establish a Essentially, is today grown politics about all mention about the attempt upon an understandable exhausted right-wing of paramilitaries who had waited so long in and a spiritual Christ" (ibid., invokes in The Plumed Serpent. some "weariness by the of the gods and the 'god-stuff' to re-introduce manner one is tired of the gods. tired, that politics, It is these pagan deities, older than and entirely other to those given us by the Jews - "a mental Jehohav, p.206) from realizes of them back into history post-Christian For as Nietzsche correctly occult 122 symbols" .11 This and ontology. recognizes, in regard to religion: people weighty roaring there have finally weariness, itself a

symptom Kate's of course reaction of our own decadence, to Ramon's claim that one is always driven God: '''I rather hate this search-far-God 'And you can't really 'find God'!' creeping business she said. will serve who acts throughout to bring about 'It's '''No!' change obliged to concede sense. I know its sentimentalism, if I pretend argues, is to locate the source of that which find the source and non-human) counter-modern Nietzschean the mystery in its challenge art (and perhaps of power in pragmatic earlier: "Lawrence's vision IS, things little, everyday way, extraordinary. he claims politics arrangements which is and overtly hand: "More of as a work of than 12 on any other revolution And this because, at least as seen levels of both with the is concerned of the surface and with those things which are, For cannot rest content with divorced from the 'real' and artificially that two Lawrence that are entirely wishes to transform it originated); and contentiously, terms." worked like Nietzsche, Lawrence i.e., with the wider world (both human on the other political when realized That himself; as he calls it) and remain this novel moves on a social level .,. a spiritual creative is of all values. becomes speculations within via a revolutionary work, .13 is god-given to liberal-humanist text), else, find God in the old The Plumed Serpent should be thought a religious and that only religion or anywhere 'I can't Further, Lawrence truthfulness" said Kate .... to'" (Ibid.) But what he can do, he new relations in its aim of a revaluation Thus if, on the one hand, for of sentimentalism, in Mexico, (or 'man-hood', on the basis of this power. he can substantiate a sort he said slowly. of his own strength loyal to this, whilst also forming and religiosity,' the novel on the conviction fundamental this point: at last to search (PS, p.73). back into old, hollow shells'" Even Ramon, in The Plumed Serpent by is illustrated in some theosophical world; he the Word back into the Flesh (i.e. back into that from which just as Nietzsche wishes to translate 123 the Ideal back into a non-ideal

and immoral nature. It is when this project of cruelty and evil, of revaluation that political violence familiar to those with many becomes readers and neo-paganism the cult of Quetzalcoatl (PS. p.103). founded as merely to examine why it seemed politics and religion and advocate perhaps several lie' as a socially towards this coming into being via a living connection sometimes calls the 'Fourth (a) It is perhaps 'psychology mistakes of error'; unseen pressed outside that QuetzaJcoatl It is of mystery. There are of culture useful (b) the belief to be the most important requires and politically that myth and the expedient means man can only achieve his full to the sacred realm or what Lawrence Dimension'. from sense of power what Nietzsche to be the result of the gods, gate. he is prepared is "just a living word" mystic than of his elevated well he appears If he genuinely nonetheless (K, p.209) a rather it is hard to tell. For on other occasions the terms in which the religious that his belief in the gods is itself the effect god socialism" Ramon.I" of - a substantiation much more of a 'noble liar'. than a genuine 'holy fool'. the hotel manager to bring i.e .. from a form of delusion But with Ramon. it is interesting to Lawrence the case that Ramon is suffering his heightened acknowledging being. Secondly, of so vital (a) the belief that the regeneration end. fantasies but I will focus on what appear of the 'holy Indeed, form of "national the leadership together recognition another upon important of a politics The mixture in the novel - a German therefore two: Firstly. uncomfortable. revolution. primarily reasons. in terms in The Plumed Serpent seems all too of Hitler's to note that one of the minor characters dismisses become detailed knowledge materialized to be believes in to admit when for the consumption of the people. At best. we can perhaps think of Ramon as one of Nietzsche's 124 'higher types'; a

combination who of creativity, understands the importance cruelty and transgressive political stability understand and ecstasy. of history, A philosopher the people's spectacle and the usefulness and cultural unity. Nietzsche just as he will make use of existing need for for his work of education political and economic faith of a religion inscribed age of nihilism into unity and to ground 17 unity in the But the problem that is that faith is no longer possible in this modern in which the holy lie has been revealed as such. As we saw in illusions as necessary chapter one, the artist-philosopher cultural life, but he is opposed Henry Miller. WHAT WAS is precisely may wish to preserve in this by the unrelenting the 'tragedy' IMPOSSIBLE 18 politics in the fabric of civil society." Ramon soon comes up against FOR of Lawrence's US ANY If this is so of Lawrence, will to truth. however, their politics again as we saw in chapter art, both that you cannot either fatally reactive one senses LONGER: A also realized FAITH then so too is it true a frustration of excess in the former (as in the Christian) the athiest). And this because, all art religious and response. Lawrence. like Nietzsche, he accepts it as st ill the primary AN texts; Although, the importance for religious when religious of faith and responses are or inactive (as in the Ugliest Man; i.e., as Lawrence therefore in their no substitute one's AND of Nietzsche. transgression. one, both men valued and stressed take refuge This, says of their own demands. and a despair and violent that art itself forms to life: "THAT HE SOUGHT each seems to delight in the very impossibility out of which grows is 15 as he a la Rousseau to "dissolve times. and conditions." religious we right to tell lies." 16 Thus Ramon acts with good conscience attempts At other as ever "their Sometimes. of teacher doubted AUTHORITY." displays "The philosopher Twilight of the Idols, he adds that no major in of the future of the holy lie in preserving writes: him ... will make use of the religions breeding, Later, skepticism simply puts it, the essential demands and requires does not therefore issue - even after 125 an active feeling in religious avoid the religious issue; (if not especially after) the

death of God. establishing He understands the sacred that the revaluation character of life, in the knowledge outside the gate (the very word deriving belief, and related belonging to 'occult', i.e., from 'cult', that culture i.e., that which remains to do with a system outside re- is born of religious of knowledge and to the dark). "The true religious he exercises creative is ultimately faculty". says Lawrence, it. And by the religious life-mystery" .19 "is the highest faculty But not dogma: of nullity". to exercise his religious 20 for But how is modern faculty religion is always both look for assistance and Romans. Aztecs and Etruscans. a question man to be encouraged to other of the of thing is the death of feeling, in an active and affirmative and Lawrence in man, once we mean the inward worship feeling and not fixed belief; "and the only irreligious the causing faculty peoples and enabled manner? in other Nietzsche times; Greeks It is not that they believe it possible or even desirable to go back to such a way of life, but that they think a clue can be found amongst these former Nietzsche. cultures in an important "One, certainly about how to live with vitality, passage, and religious has been attained concepts and fears to take a retrograde step: he has to grasp when a man emerges Then, however, ... the historical justification in such ideas. likewise the psychological; he has to recognise most of mankind and that of the best that mankind responsible retrograde produced. step for the advancement he will deprive himself he needs that resides that they have been without such a has hitherto "21 In The Plumed Serpent. Kate recalls her former the lapsing Isn't and feeling. stresses: very high level of culture from superstitious faith, back to old life-modes this precisely what Nietzsche husband telling her that "evil was that have been surpassed is advocating 126 above, in us" (PS, 137). however? But isn't the

notion of a return p.138) also a form of romantic Kate declare to the primitive to herself (PS, and "the old savage form of expression" decadence? Wary of such a charge, "No: It's not a helpless, and to us as readers: reversal. It is conscious, threads. We must take up the old, broken mystery of the cosmos carefully chosen. Lawrence We must impulse has panic go back to pick up the old that will connect us with the now that we are at the end of our own tether." again, (ibid. ) Of course, the Question IS 'how?' it would seem only Are song, and the answer? for, like Nietzsche, but Lawrence refuses to let go of a belief in the need for political say that politics doesn't vieux jeu .., (ibid .. p.166), author's his matter echoing Nietzsche about involving would condemn and revolutions action. Kate may so, so stupid but this in the political as the 'bad conscience and is not The Plumed Serpent. And Don Ram6n, himself there is a need for direct action: '''are in Kangaroo, Harriett view at the time of writing doubts of the answer, prayer Perhaps, really a part dance, her for all sphere (displaying what of commanders') ultimately feels "'The change has to be made. And some man has to make it ...' (PS, pAD7). Thus the turn environment problem to the gods and involves arises movement that the supposedly is made knives within and guns, attempt expressive to and military as well as song and dance. But the rekindle feeling soon requires "manipulative itself against those of such, regulations to sustain strictures. "22 And thus, as we will see, Ramon's something sinister: "The whole country of new energy. touch of horror" because for political, religious and coercive release a social, who resist vision collapses was thrilling via a political or evade all his eloquence the country and showmanship with a new thing, 127 falls into civil war. (indeed, its in the end into But there was a sense of violence and crudity (PS, P .420). Finally, controls for all his with a in it all, a And this sincerity),

Ramon can only ever generalizable speak to and for the few; the cult of Quetzalcoatl in the modern Cipriano to support Ramon's concerns alliances are still military the tension "Politics age in which it is offered it and crush within of mystery, A politically of culture it cannot his practical And it is this combination which causes for those mayor violates conclusion in chapter culture but the inquisition. in advance, supported the notion of what a culture one: culture who hold the view that: may not require be designated rubber-stamped force effectively drawn artistic, largely or, if it is, then it is nothing Thus whilst the regeneration existence. "23 force of that although and his affinities and political. the armed necessity the novel and a concern is not religion, substantiation It is from opposition. "are religious without is not "24 violence and the or legislated by the threat into of armed is. We have again reached and the state are irreconcilably a opposed to one another. (b) Lawrence, we have fundamentally a religious question, And certainly Nietzsche himself assumed, in fact, argues understands he is happy noble and life-enhancing Christianity seen, project of revaluation as or cultural one. as much as a philosophical does not object to affirm (and/or Nietzsche's to religion per se, as is often the holy lie, providing a politically useful) end. that it serves a His main objection to is that it does not serve such an end - quite the contrary. Nietzsche that just as one can deny God in either an active or a reactive too can one affirm the sacred in either a healthy or degenerate to free man from the disabling 'beyond' this one and 'after' religious feeling life. He wishes into a faith in this world, for Nietzsche "because Consequently these passions an attempt belief in 'other to rekindle it has proved passion 128 manner. so His aim is that are supposed to exist to substantiate mystery and channel this life. Modern culture is decadent religious passions. incapable have atrophied. religious worlds' manner, "25 of sublimating Thus, and to form to reiterate, a 'faith' revaluation in contrast is and

opposition to the Judea-Christian tradition; i.e., pantheism in which man is offered the opportunity a neo-paganism and neo- to regain 'paradise' here and now (paradise simply being another name for the earth itself). Evidence for the above reading of Nietzsche is provided throughout his texts. But one of the most important sites is to be found in the second essay of his Genealogy. speaks Here, Nietzsche positively and unambiguously about the conception of the gods. As claimed above, he does not condemn the god-idea as such, only the Christian version of this, which strikes him as feeble and radically false: God as the denial of will to power, rather than as its highest expression. That there are other, non-perverse and non-decadent, ways of conceiving of the gods is proved, he argues, by the example of the Greeks; their gods being: "reflections of noble and proud men in whom the animal in man felt deified, did not tear itself apart and did not rage against itself! Those Greeks, for most of the time, used their gods expressly to keep 'bad conscience' at bay so that they could carryon enjoying their freedom of soul ... They went very far in this, these marvellous, lion-hearted children". 26 So too did the Aztecs of course, and many other pagan peoples around the world. The question is: can we go still further? Or did the above take the god-idea to its very limit (to the point at which it collapsed into the exhausted Christian notion)? Perhaps, in order to mature, these 'lion-hearted children' had to develop bad conscience and refrain from using their gods to keep it at bay. For although it is a sickness, so too is it a sickness 'like pregnancy' according to Nietzsche (from out of which we modern human beings have been born). Now, however, in order for us to mature, it may be necessary to overcome bad conscience and enter into a new innocence, even if this means having to overcome our own humanity as we have understood it within the rational-moral 129 tradition. We cannot go back: our

post-Christian our forefathers; paganism will not be the same as the pre-Christian paganism of our second innocence will be an advance upon and something other than Greek naivety. We move beyond good and evil; we do not slip back before it. Can there be a religious sensibility beyond good and evil? Nietzsche answers in the affirmative, suggesting even Buddhism is an example of such - albeit still a form of decadence in his view. In a note from The Will To Power he says that in principle it should be perfectly possible to conceive of a post-moral god: "God conceived as an emancipation from morality, taking into himself the whole fullness of life's antithesis and, in a divine torment, redeeming and justifying them. God as the beyond and above of the wretched loafers' morality of 'good and evil'. "27 Such a god would be non-ideal, non-anthropomorphic, and non-humanitarian. A god rather like Quetzalcoatl; one of power who has been stripped of all other traits and sentimental trimmings: "Let us remove supreme goodness from the concept god: it is unworthy of a god. Let us also remove supreme wisdom: it is the vanity of philosophers that is to be blamed for this mad notion of god as a monster of wisdom ... No! god the supreme power - that suffices! Everything follows from it, 'the world' follows from it!"28 This affirmation of the world is central as we have said to both Nietzsche and Lawrence. Yet it is arguably Heidegger who best illustrates what is implied by this and whose work plays an important role in helping us understand the revaluation as an overcoming of metaphysics and, indeed, allows us to develop a philosophically informed reading of The Plumed Serpent's mysticism. Firstly, and most importantly. it is crucial to recall that when Nietzsche refers to 130

'the world' he, like Heidegger, "does not in any way imply earthly, as opposed to heavenly being, nor 'worldly' creature as opposed who has being in the world, understood to 'spiritual'. "29 Likewise, man, a is not "merely a 'worldly' creature in a Christian sense, thus a creature turned away from God and so cut loose from 'Transcendence'vr '? Rather, man, as Heidegger puts it, 'ex-sists', that is, he stands out into the clearing of Being on the basis of his own essence, that which we saw Ramon call his 'man-hood' and which Nietzsche would identify in terms of power. In other words, man comes into his own outside the gate, bubbling over the confines of his own humanity. beyond the earth, any more than over-human But outside the gate is not is non-human. As Heidegger writes: "Thought in terms of existence, 'world' is in a certain sense precisely 'the beyond' within existence and for it. "31 It is world in this wider sense which Lawrence sometimes calls the 'fourth dimension'; the sacred realm in which things - flowers as well as men as well as beasts - have their creative-being fulfilment. Only in the fourth dimension does man achieve sovereignty, and wherein "he knows himself royal and crowned with the sun". 32 The actual possibility or impossibility of the gods is not touched on by such a definition, which balances mid-way between theism and atheism, making any easy identification with one side or the other unnecessary and inappropriate. Unlike nihilistic indifference on the religious question, this opens up the opportunity "to reflect freely on the nature of the holy and hale, as of the malignancy and rage of evil" 33, i.e., to begin to think that which is today left almost entirely unthought and locked outside. But to do so does not involve thinking experience. Rather, it involves the substantiation beyond lived- of mystery in order that we are thereby able to think the sacred as the near at hand. To quote Heidegger once more: "Thinking surmounting it, does not overcome transcending it metaphysics somehow 131 or by other; climbing thinking still higher, overcomes

metaphysics by climbing back down into the nearness of the nearest. The descent ... is more arduous and more dangerous than the ascent." 34 This important fundamentally concern with the everyday and the close by is of course Nietzschean, although it is a concern that can be traced back to Heraclitus who, concerning the everyday world of the familiar remarked: "Einai gar kei entautha thea us " - i.e., 'here too the gods come to presence'. 35 Thus we see again how deeply mistaken Habermas is in his view quoted earlier. And we repeat that immanence is one of the key terms for an understanding Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean fourth philosophy; of the giving back to things their dimensional quality and allowing them to exist in their own right (a la Cezanne's apple: see chapter one). For Heidegger, the thing is the place where 'the Fourfold' (das Geviert ) meet in correspondence; earth, sky, mortals, and the gods - i.e., this fourfold consisting of precisely the fourfold concern Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent, symbolized by Ramon as the man-god eagle-snake (sky-earth) of and assemblage Quetzalcoatl. Such thinking to do with the mystery of immanence, forms an important part of Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy; i.e., a post-Christian and being which is being-in-the-world doctrine of will to power and being-in-the-flesh. We shall develop this at length in chapters IV and V. What is of interest to us here, however, is the way in which Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Heidegger, all insist on relating their onto-theological insights to the political. We are aware of course what this meant in the case of Heidegger during the 1930's, who unfortunately thinking to become entwined with German racial-nationalism. allowed his Without wishing to 'excuse', 'justify', or 'defend' Heidegger's political option (and without wishing to suggest that either Nietzsche or Lawrence would have made the same mistaken choice had they lived during the Nazi period), it does seem to be one which is 132

closely related to the above beliefs. And interestingly, if there is one area in which both Nietzsche and Lawrence do allow themselves to think in racial-national terms, it is when it comes to the substantiation of mystery. Like Heidegger, they seem to believe that "every nation ... must find for itself, the grandeur and the truth of its Bestimmung (its 'determination', its 'assignment through its calling'). "36 That is, its own national form of faith; it's own gods. Thus when Lawrence looks at Mexico he decides that Christianity has essentially failed there - and failed with disastrous consequences for the native people thereof. In other words, it has proved impossible "to graft an alien myth onto a native tree with any lasting success, without damaging the tree beyond repair. "37 There is a need, Lawrence thinks, for each people to find its own myths: Ramon tells Kate toward the end of the novel to spread the religious revolution he has begun in her own country (Ireland) when she returns. When, not unreasonably, she asks how, he replies: '''Let them find themselves again, and their own universe, and their own gods. Let them substantiate their own mysteries'" (PS, p.427), having earlier declared; "'if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzacoatl, it is because want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood'" (ibid., p.248).38 Again, such thinking can be traced back to Nietzsche's texts. In The Anti-Christ, for example, he writes: "A people that still believes in itself still also has its own god. In him it venerates the conditions through which it has prospered, its virtues - it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power on to a being whom one can thank for them. He who is rich wants to bestow; a proud people needs a god in order to sacrifice." 39 Only when, Nietzsche goes on to say, a people feels itself weak do you get a 'cosmopolitan' god; poking his nose everywhere and moralizing: 133

"There is in fact no other alternative for gods; either they are the will to power - and so long as they are that they will be national gods, - or else the impotence power - and they necessarily become good"40 (and universal). Whether thinking one nationalism, decides such or a healthy Judeo-Christianity (perhaps the re-introduction something closing It is interesting revolution positively, new form and the great government, crisis but as the Ayatollah spirituality' Undoubtedly, out promise of a that it "held of Islam their entire the Iranian an attempt to not only He wondered as t 979 then the "chimera of in February against by the reality of a ruthless with events overthrown for the latter, "whenever the inevitable Mexican general, own personal ambition and imposing if the of revolt. "42 But of course, in Ramon's and either or found himself Foucault, world. the form disillusioned scene, 'since insurrection through. become in the West For signified the great modern control '''41 to follow the revolution quickly of t 978. Here, Revolution arguing the same would have happened chosen to recall in greet "the first was dispelled as radicals to transform assumed be regarded foremost of Christianity. mad and most not to see one of France's the mystery might not represent the most to the Iranian 'political spirituality', unknown of change Lawrence surprised on the turn to the gods and thinker. of Michel Foucault of may depend only longed for by the reactionary to substantiate 'political and polytheism), else. However, racial- to the monotheism should attempt soon response in its history Renaissance back 'dangerous' into a religious system, plurality before anything the world was somewhat revolution into of the gods the response welcome inherently naive) religious (a flowering one's political persuasion is of by Cipriano theocracy. neo-Aztec Probably removed by the opportunity his own personal 134 "43 Mexico, had Ramon would have himself whom he distrusted he was away on his own for sometime, fascinated the planetary from the and feared, slipped back into for furthering will" (PS, p. 253). his

Ultimately, Lawrence is too great an artist not to concede the truth of even his own revolutionary fantasy; i.e., it is doomed to failure. Thus, as we will see, he backs away from the edge of the abyss and ultimately rejects bloody revolution as an option, even whilst not surrendering his faith in the dark gods, his concern with politics, and his desire for a revaluation of all values. Part II: The Politics of Cruelty. If a non-metaphysical 'transcendence' of metaphysics is to be achieved then, along with a substantiation of mystery, Nietzsche and Lawrence suggest that a 'politics of cruelty' is also required, based upon: (i) an anti-humanist philosophy of power or 'evil' (see chapter two); (ii) the notion of a general economy of the whole; (iii) the belief that violence and oppression are essential to society and culture (see chapter one). In other words, violation transcendence of the norms is accomplished via transgression; of behaviour within liberal-democratic a deliberate society and a forceful breaching of the limits of our own humanity. Through hell, the theory suggests, we shall reach heaven; or at least enter into a new becoming. Certainly transgression, by its very nature, opens up new possibilities of action and new fields of knowledge; for by shattering established limits and calling into question the status of established dualities which have largely determined our thinking, it allows us to tap into the Dionysian forces outside the gate and form a new understanding of the primal mysteries. But if transgression always involves the graspmg of new knowledge (a la Eve's plucking of the apple), so too does it always seem to involve murder (cl la Cain's slaying of Abel) and, as we will shortly see, one of the key scenes in The Plumed Serpent is the ritualized execution-cum-sacrifice 135 of political prisoners, Lawrence

seemingly sharing the view that is found fully developed in the work of Bataille, namely that; "in a fundamental way the impetus of the sovereign man makes a killer of him" and this because "by killing he escapes the subordination that he refuses, and he violently rids himself of the aspect of a tool or thing." 1 That is to say, he comes into his own full being, which, in the case of man, means achieving divine status: becoming a god in one's own right. I shall return to this essentially occult idea shortly. Firstly, I wish to say something in addition to the remarks made last chapter about 'evil' and to discuss the three things upon which I have suggested a politics of cruelty is founded. In a letter, Lawrence writes: "The real principle of evil is not anti-Christ or anti-Jehovah, but anti-life. "2 And what is life? Life is will to power, according to Nietzsche as we have seen. Thus when Nietzsche writes of evil, he simply means power and means life; means the world understood in terms of monstrous energy, without beginning or end; means all those forces and flows which violate human order and stability. He uses the word evil because it is the term which the Christian-moral world uses, in its fear, to describe these forces and flows. He calls himself an 'immoralist' and advocates the cultivation of evil, because he wishes to restore vitality and health to mankind; to make life strong once more and rooted firmly in the instinctive and intuitive (i.e., in the body), instead of feeble and sickly and based upon bloodless ideals which the impotent mistake as the 'good'. In many ways, Nietzsche and Lawrence are both continuing a romantic tradition when they write positively of evil, a tradition which ultimately suggests that it is better to be one of the damned than to live a 'good' life in the Christian sense; i.e., a life which Nietzsche would condemn as a form of cowardice and sterility. Damnation becomes, paradoxically, a means of salvation; what T.S. Eliot calls the "ennui of modern life. "3 136 redeeming one from

The evil of the slave may in practice be every bit as 'banal' as Hannah Arendt found it to be; just as the goodness of the slave is as insipid and ressentimentridden as Nietzsche described it, but the evil of the master is something else. In fact, the evil of the strong is, according to Nietzsche, man's best strength and it is this he wishes to see cultivated by a new social and political order in order to counter the Christian-moral tradition. He writes: "What is mediocre in the typical man? That he does not understand the necessity for the reverse side of things ... that he combats evils as if one could dispense with them; that he will not take the one with the other ... Our insight is the opposite of this: that with every growth of man his other side must grow too ... That man grow better and more evil is my formula. "4 Essentially, Nietzsche has gained this insight (as so many others) from his reading of ancient Greek culture, strength'; as founded upon what he terms a 'pessimism of i.e., a tragic philosophy which affirms life in its totality, or as what Nietzsche calls a 'general economy of the whole', in which the natural drives and instincts of man (his evil qualities) were regulated, but still allowed some measure of expression - not repudiated as within Christian-moral culture, which works for the extirpation of such drives and the complete taming of man. The above notion Nietzsche's of a general economy politics of cruelty; is crucial to an understanding of arguably, as much linked to it as free-market economies are linked to liberal-democratic politics. According to Nietzsche. the festival of passions and evil inclinations staged within Greek society as spectacle, sport, and drama, constituted the real paganism of the non-Christian world and allowed instinct a clear place and value (if of the second rank) within social and religious life: "This is the root of all the moral free-mindedness granted to the evil and suspicious, of antiquity. One to the animal and backward ... a moderate 137

discharge, and Idid] not strive for their total annihilation." 5 And cruelty was central as "one of the oldest festive joys of mankind" and as a means via which man experienced "the highest gratification of the feeling of power. "6 But of all the methods of producing this gratification and joy, one has long stood out: "it has been human sacrifice which has at all times most exalted and elevated man. "7 Interestingly, The Plumed Serpent contains acts of cruelty and human sacrifice. The novel opens in fact with an ancient ritual of public cruelty, a bull-fight, experienced by Kate as something sordid, however, rather than exhilarating and reflective of the "squalid evil" (PS, p.2l) she senses crawling uncomfortably close to the surface of everyday life in Mexico, and which threatens to erupt in one form of atrocity or another at any moment. If Kate has been driven to the bullring by the modern 'will to happiness' (i.e., a will to find and experience life as thrilling and sensational), she nonetheless is not infected with what Lawrence calls the "insidious modern disease of tolerance" (PS, p. 26) and is thus able to reject that which seems to her base and profoundly objectionable. Men! she thinks to herself: "They all had this soft rottenness of the soul, a strange perversity which made even the squalid, repulsive things seem part of life to them. Life! And what is life? A louse lying on its back and kicking? Ugh!" (Ibid.) Here we must pause for a moment, however. For whilst Nietzsche too rejects any notion of queasy liberal tolerance (tolerance as a form of decadence) he does insist with his notion of general economy that we acknowledge al1 aspects of life even the squalid, the perverse, the repulsive, and the cruel, allowing each the right to find expression. For what is life? Life is will to power; and even a louse lying on its back and kicking, the thought of which makes Kate shudder, is life as will to power. Lawrence, who also formulates 138 and subscribes to an economic

model of the whole in his work, nevertheless has as much difficulty as Kate in accepting the full implications of the notion. Like Kate, he sometimes insists that: "A thing isn't life, just because somebody does it. "Il And this because, for Lawrence, true life is a creative flow and not merely sensational activity experienced within and worked from the fixed self; it has a fourth dimensional quality. It is this quality Kate is searching for; "a strange beam of wonder and mystery, almost like hope. A strange darkly-iridescent beam of wonder, of magic" (PS, p.58). However, as she is obliged to learn during the course of the novel, this quality grows out of something other than this - just as the lily grows from out of the marsh. For Lawrence concedes - even though he does not appear to be fully comfortable with the fact - that although certain forms and experiences are sterile, mechanical, or degenerate in some manner, nevertheless they have an important part to play in life as a whole and that there is no pristine life, purely active, purely affirmative, free from all taint of death and corruption, except in the ideal-realm, which is, of course, the greatest expression of hatred for the actual world ever conceived by sick brains. Thus when Kate expresses concern about accepting a marriage proposal Cipriano on the grounds that she is fearful of letting Mexican horror soul, Lawrence has the latter reply: '''Horror from into her is real. Why not a bit of horror, as you say, among all the rest?" (PS, p.235). However, the oscilliation experienced by Kate to the very end of the novel (and not resolved even then); from attraction to repulsion and from acceptance to rejection of Ramon's plumed serpent religion and political philosophy, is shared by many readers. Even the most sympathetic to Lawrence and Nietzsche cannot simply discard their human, all too human selves and embrace the dark gods they offer us. Contemplation of cruelty and the reality of pain, is something modern man finds extremely difficult; it is his most dreadful thought. To admit that the 139

above is not only an essential intimate part part in our own self-formation the Genealogy of Morals, truth is hard; but the truth, Perhaps the question for Nietzsche, might pain and why he seems and history, Sublimated and internalization to suffer Foucault shows of criminal, the intensified of physical of cruelty of torture violence raises within little of the treatment refining and and the touch of another and the suffering caused the confines objection, even though the in fact, as of the insane and the punishment 'spiritualizing' cruelty, suffering has been genuine is what we shrink Thus we are uncomfortable sexual contact 'inhumane' . The most (i.e., physical insidious from. non-headbound), discipline forms as belonging of blackmail, are accepted a flogging sends us into a state of near nervous out within the context form of human coition." of passion, 10 In fact, power, and cruelty, causing bullying and and of even whilst the latter, if to Lawrence; is put forward of reason the animal in man to become 140 not but the thought to have a passionate than an ideal politics of passion us as 'barbaric' emotional-spiritual hysteria, we but also with corporal which strikes is, according the argument that it is far preferable the above, interchange to a morally just society, and Nietzsche, desire, of the physical; physical or any overtly suppress of the soul. of any kind of genuine punishment, carried of physical and made more effective." stand the thought only with The For he No doubt part of the answer is to do with our fear and hatred cannot in cruelty? does not in any way lessen the pain caused; in his studies by and courage. man is so afraid so at the thought and all manner of cruelty by Nietzsche rests upon cruelty. be asked why modern disguised and is that the origin of man and the state does not object to the internalization by bad conscience as revealed is a huge test of our own honesty is a violent one and that culture clearly of life, but has also played a profound "a natural by both Lawrence politics of externalized and will to love which perverse and full of

self -loathing. Like Blake, then, Nietzsche and Lawrence seem to be of the view that: "He who desires but acts not, Nietzsche writes breeds approvingly pestilence." 11 However, of restraint there are times when and the internalization describing it as a positive advance upon the splendid but half-idiotic of cruelty; spectacles staged in the Roman arenas, because it was the moralization of man which made him an interesting creature full of tremendous possibilities for the future. But now is the time for man to once more direct his violence outward; for, according to Nietzsche, the crisis of modernity is so great and modern man so enfeebled, that we require "not merely war but the greatest and most terrible of all wars thus a temporary relapse into barbarism "12 if we are to overcome the above and find our best strength once more. New barbarism is necessary not only for the establishment of new culture, but for the survival of man as a species. Lawrence echoes the call for a new barbarism in The Plumed Serpent, as elsewhere in his work. Thus we see Ramon declare it impossible for him to go on being "gentle, good, and loving, and trying to make the whole world more gentle, good, and loving" (PS, p.206). For despite the frenzied protests of his devoutly Catholic first wife, Carlota; "it was borne in upon him that the world had gone as far as it could in the good, gentle, and loving direction, and anything further in that line meant perversity. So the time had come for the slow, great change to something else." (Ibid.) That is, something other than ideal-love worked from the white will which we discussed last chapter, and the 'cruel kindness' of Christian charity; something similar to the politics of evil and cruelty we have been attempting to describe here: "'I serve Omnipotence!'" (PS, p.343) says Ramon, at the opening ceremony of the church of Quetzalcoatl. And as such, as a man of power, Ramon belongs to 141

the type whom the world brands evil; dangerous perceived as world-destroyers individuals who are rightly as much as culture-founders. Neither Nietzsche or Lawrence would deny this, nor flinch in the face of such a truth; the former in particular had a penchant for such figures in the Caesar-mould; inhuman and superhuman. a mixture of the Perhaps the predilection d'ertiste is always for the natural aristocrat who puts us in touch with fire and ice.13 For Lawrence too sees the greater danger presented not by the powerful and sovereign individual, but by the vast herd of slave humanity: "It is not the leopard or the hot tiger, but the masses of rank sheep" 14 that are nibbling the face of the earth into a desert. And they need, he thinks, this herd, to be either mastered - or slaughtered. Lawrence writes: "Sweet, beautiful death, come to our help. Break in among the herd, make gaps in its insulated completion. Give us a chance, sweet death, to escape from this herd and gather together against it a few living beings." 15 And he continues in the same vein of anti-humanist rhetoric so characteristic of a politics of cruelty: "Smash humanity, and make an end of it. Let there emerge a few pure single men." 16 Whilst such rhetoric is probably not meant to be taken literally, still the extremity and violence of the language used is shocking all the same. And, as we saw in chapter one, there are times when Lawrence does seem to view death as a genuine solution to the nihilistic frustration of life and life's movement and becoming, arguing that before new forms and species can evolve and "gain strength enough to assert their vitality" there will need to be "a holocaust of individual deaths" .17 For, as Lawrence puts it: dead men make good mould.I" But as we also argued in chapter one, death is only a pure thing when it is free of egoistic self-will and "life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss." 19 That is, when man no longer tries to save himself 142

inside an old form, but is prepared to let go and accept that he too belongs to the solar-Dionysian economy of energy and chaos; when man realizes that as he begins his descent from Pisgah he must once more use the 'ladder of religious cruelty' up which he climbed. For having attained the third rung (the sacrifice of God), he must step once more onto the second; the sacrifice of self from self. But if on the ascent he was obliged to sacrifice his instincts, passions, and desires, he is on the descent restored once more to his healthy, natural state and asked to sacrifice instead his ideal-illusions, forms, along with all: "the obstructions his logical obsessions, and his static to life" and anything that belongs to him and yet is an ugly impediment to the "free motion of life". 20 Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec deity of life and death who demands human blood, wishes for man to "slay not the best bright proud life" that is in him - i.e., "not that which is noble and generous and spontaneous" - but that which is "mean and base and squalid and degenerate.U Sacrifice, then, IS a central notion in Nietzsche and Lawrence. But not just sacrifice of and from the self, whilst the latter remains essentially unchanged, unharmed. sacrifice. For the final rung on the ladder of religious cruelty is human It is this, the death of man as human being, and this alone which fascinates Nietzsche and Lawrence as it does Richard Somers: "Human sacrifice! he could feel his dark, blood-consciousness tingle to it again, the desire of it, the mystery of it" (K, p.238). It would be comforting to once more insist that what Nietzsche and Lawrence are thinking of here is sacrifice in a purely philosophical and metaphorical sense; not as a real act to be carried out in the real world; to assimilate the notion of human sacrifice to the project of man's self-overcoming. question However, in answer to the what role ought cruelty and violence play within society once it is acknowledged that they cannot be done away with, Nietzsche and Lawrence seem 143

to suggest that a substantiation of the mystery of sacrifice is an appropriate measure.P In other words, they do wish to see externalized acts of blood-shed and the projection of cruelty back into the world. They are both keen to stress that the great man must be able not only to sacrifice himself, but others; not only endure suffering, but inflict pain. As Nietzsche writes in an aphorism entitled What belongs to greatness: "Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering? Being able to suffer is the least thing ... But not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering - that is great, that belongs to greatness. "23 The sacrificing of political opponents 'compassion', is more than an act of expediency and as Machiavelli argues.P It also constitutes would be leaders; a test of their strength a test upon those who and greatness. And yet if a man's greatness and sovereignty makes of him a killer (as we saw Bataille suggest earlier), so too, paradoxically for the moral and rational-minded, does it allow him to achieve a state of grace; i.e., to come into a second innocence: for innocence too belongs to greatness and the final perfect strength. which will, perhaps, It is this fact enable the very greatest of men to not only kill in good conscience, but to let go and advocate a new justice and a new mercy. To become a Dionysian god and man who "cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable, but even the terrible deed"2s, and who can also, finally, be capable of noble pity. Let us explore the above ideas in the context once more of The Plumed Serpent. Chapter XXIII of the novel, HuitzilpochtJi's Night, is perhaps the most infamous. At its centre sits a ritualized scene of political execution-cum-sacrifice. captured after a failed attempt on Ramon's life, are brought 144 Prisoners, to the church of

Quetzalcoatl and then stripped, bound, and killed. with a cord; three are stabbed through the heart with a dagger man, however, is pardoned; having received lies a clue as to what kind of strong justice appears form to be the most executions, during there is a private, church, Kate depressed her. home gloomy could possibly at all an act of spontaneous of punishment. Following the public ceremony within the church, held offered. uneasy. The executions shocked and will, the assertion of pure, awful fixed and mechanical; passion. But Kate's something bullying reaction eventually to engage in a little initial of her new husband's ritualized murder, she realizes, he kills in good conscience innocence that truly of the experience of a transgressive seen in chapter makes one) frees leads to innocence cultivation him which becoming-wild discourse Of forgetfulness, beasts. shame, so too it is suggested immoralism and cruelty nevertheless furthest; This, that surely, the Three Metamorposes, a new beginning'<v, in this thesis, sexual one from The hope of a new beginning seen earlier as profound as we have to compassion. appears a dubious If the active way of freeing there are, as Kate realises, like a little child" (PS, p. 393). leads Just anal sex in Lawrence, of evil and a politics of transgression road gods. and with an (usually in a wider context; than one of becoming penchant - nature oneself from bad conscience, likely one and here out of what gives way to an acceptance because, One "When the women were shut out of the and That is, something by Cipriano. develop ... It seemed to her all terrible will" (PS, p.387). necks broken leaf of Malintzi', onto a fire and prayers Kate is at first horrified: went the 'green male-only, which human blood is sprinkled Understandably, not reactionary Two have their And perhaps we will become-children is what Zarathustra "more ways it is the least only by first is teaching in his in which the child who is "innocence and is reached by way of the camel and the lion. (of reversing the myth of the Fall) is, as we have crucial to Nietzsche's 145 and Lawrence's thinking; only a

new beginning will allow us to arise as pristine beings, unashamed before ourselves and free of all guilt. Beings with evil desires and capable of cruel acts, but who are not made wretched and insane by the thought of such desires, or by guilt over one's own deeds. When one becomes newly innocent, one becomes as a child in spirit and, further; "one realizes one is among the gods" (PS, p.394). It is this, the divine status of Ramon and Cipriano, who have become the living Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilpochtli respectively, which ultimately sanctions their 'swift cruelty' and murder of political prisoners in Kate's view: "when she remembered his stabbing the three helpless peons, she thought: Why should I judge him? He is of the gods ... what do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean." ( Ibid.) This is certainly a remarkable leap of faith made by the woman who demonstrated such a strong aversion to cruelty at the bull-fight which opened the novel. The question is: are we, as readers, also as convinced by Don Ramon and Cipriano, to the point at which we too can accept their divine revolutionary justice? Most readers are not. And it undoubtedly does not help matters when one recognizes that Lawrence himself is undecided on this question; seemingly losing faith in his own project as carried out in The Plumed Serpent. Typically, Lawrence leaves things radically incomplete so that we are never to find out whether the green leaf of Malintzi sprouts into something worth cherishing, or simply whithers away. Historical experience (gathered from such events as the Iranian Revolution we mentioned earlier) seems to suggest the latter is the more likely scenario. Ramon and Cipriano are never really given the opportunity to show that having learnt how to kill in good faith, endure and impose great suffering, they have learnt also to let go and show pity, not in a reactive manner, but in a truly noble fashion. They are, that is to say, never given the chance to sit Zarathustra's 146 final test:

'''I desire beauty from no one as much as I desire it from you, you man of power: may your goodness be your ultimate self-overcoming. I believe you are capable of any evil; therefore I desire of you the good. In truth, I have often laughed at the weaklings who think themselves good because their claws are blunt!'''27 Part III: The Flight Back Into Paradise: Further Remarks on the New Innocence. "But we storm the angel-guarded Gates of the long-discarded Garden ... and as victors we travel To Eden home. Back beyond good and evil Return we." 1 As we saw in chapter one, for Lawrence and Nietzsche it is imperative that man smash the hard-shell of himself and his civilization, so that he can be re-born beneath open skies. Both shared the belief that the gates of the latter and the selves we have been given do not protect us from evil and insanity, so much as lock us into morality and reason; i.e., that these molar overcodings form more of a prison to man than a genuine dwelling place, keeping us from the home outside the gate from which we have long been exiled. And where is man truly at home? Only in the presence of gods and demons and in contact with other men and women, and with animals; his feet planted firmly on the non-ideal soil of a genuine blood-homeland. This, at least, is the idea that Lawrence continually returns to; even after having described the disintegration of and future impossibility of such in The Rainbow. Nietzsche too seems unable to 147

surrender the idea of paradise regained. Here, I would like to explore this notion by picking up once more the debate to do with innocence and the question of civilization which has been opened in the earlier chapters. For in Civilization and Its Discontents, the problem Freud, straightforward is simple and and can be reduced to the "irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization. "2 Like Nietzsche before him, Freud argues that civilization is founded upon a repression of the instincts and the 'guilt' which results from this repression, of cruelty and the formation of a 'super-ego' achieved via an internalization (conscience). For Freud, as we saw last chapter, this non-satisfaction of man's most powerful instincts is not only necessary, but positively a good thing; civilization working in the service of Eros and for the benefit of all men who are better off tamed in the name of a universal love-ideal which Freud associates with life itself, than allowed to give free expression to wild desires and passions which Freud claims are derivative of and 'representative' of the 'death drive', or will to destruction. As for the suffering caused by the development of guilt and the admitted loss of instinctive happiness, this, says Freud, is simply "the price we pay for our advance in civilization". 3 Effectively, then, Freud is arguing that we must choose between civilization - or death. The former is thus sanctified as the sole means capable of resisting man's destructive impulses and psychoanalysis reveals itself to be weakly pessimistic in its fear of the 'unconscious' whilst naively optimistic in its faith that it can prevail on behalf of civilization against the 'horror' it believes to be lurking there. Politically. for all its surface radicalism. it forms a conservative force and ends serving the powers of reaction and normalization. Thus Freudians ultimately part company with true radicals such as Nietzsche and Lawrence. Whilst the latter 148

accept the need for discipline and breeding (the active stylization of man and culture as an aesthetic project), they reject the taming and repression of man (the reactive subjectivation of man as a moral-rational liberate those forces destruction, presently machine). Further, they seek to denied; not because they wish for death and but because they wish to make people happier and free of bad conscience. Nietzsche writes: "Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion barbarism? to because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves!"! But there is a problem with hoping for a new barbarian force to come from the outside; a problem that Lawrence identifies: "there are not now as in Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life ... The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own and they all have our vices, all our mechanisms". 5 This being the case, it falls to a few relatively strong and healthy 'barbarians' within to find a way forward. The meek have inherited the world and so, as Ramon realizes, he must act to somehow 'un-tame' his people and rekindle the active forces within them. But this will not be an easy task to accomplish, after man has, as Nietzsche says, "inherited millennia of consciencevivisection and animal torture'< inflicted on himself; viewing his most natural inclinations with an 'evil eye'. As Lawrence concedes: "it is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be undertaken seriously. "7 But although the task may not be easy, it is not necessarily an impossible one. Providing there are those few with sufficient vitality, then a 'reverse experiment' should be possible, says Nietzsche, by which he means: "an intertwining of bad conscience with perverse inclinations, all those other-worldly aspirations, alien to the senses, the instincts, to nature, to animals, in short to all the ideals which up 149

to now have been hostile to life and have deformed the world. ,,!! This important passage not only provides us with a clear statement of what the revaluation of values means (i.e., not just an escape from morality and reason, "but an affirmation of and trust in all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, accursed:"). but reminds us once more that Nietzsche does not oppose all forms of cruelty and experimentation practiced on the self; merely those attempts made to devalue the flesh and life on earth. Essentially, what Nietzsche is argumg - and Lawrence follows - is that both individual and collective health can be restored only by accepting back into our life as it is lived the repressed and rejected. This involves a sinking down into the "the darkness and elemental consciousness of the blood" 10 and meeting one another there. It is in this rather special sense that Lawrence affirms a new 'dark age', which Henry Miller accurately describes as "a long night in which ... the few rare spirits work with knowing mystery for the resurrection of a new body, a new spirit, a new culture." 11 By suggesting that we need to listen to our blood and the dark gods which flow through our veins, Lawrence counters the Christian prayer of baptism: "0 merciful God, grant the Old Adam in this child may be buried." 12 For according to Lawrence, the 'Old Adam' or demonic aspect of man should be held in innermost respect. And while church fathers and Freudians may view the latter as a "monster of perversity", it is they themselves who see with "the perverted vision of the degenerate tame: tamed through thousands of shameful years." 13 Our task, then, is to seek out the Old Adam buried within; to become-blonde beast and new barbarian. But this does not mean become savage and degenerate. Rather, we seek the man whom Lou awaits in St Mawr, a short novel written by 150

Lawrence shortly before work on The Plumed Serpent. Sick and tired of welldomesticated modern man, Lou suggests to her mother that "'there's else besides mind and cleverness or niceness or cleanness. Perhaps something it is the animal. "'14 Her mother, Mrs. Witt, is not impressed. But Lou knows her mother misunderstands her position and attempts to stress she is not arguing for mindlessness, but, rather, for a complete animal-man (i.e., a combination of beast and superbeast) who lives from the body and not just the mind alone. Still Mrs. Witt is unconvinced, and suggests that her daughter is simply looking for a cave man to come and club her over the head before then carrying her away with him. To this, Lou replies: '''Don't be silly mother! That's much more your subconscious line. You admirer of Mind. I don't consider the cave man is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath .... He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves. "'IS And if only, says, Lou, echoing Nietzche's desire, such men were commanders in the world today! Thus we can conclude that irrationalism and anti-humanism stupidity; that the latter, like spiritual-intellectual perversion do not lead to brute over-refinement, results from a of instinct and a falling away from the wholeness of complete being into degeneracy. And just as the Old Adam would be other than the fear- distorted caricature of the priestly mind, so too, Nietzsche and Lawrence insist as we saw in chapter one, would a genuine civilization be other than an institution for the taming of man, replete with barb-wire fences; it would be, above all, founded upon other than guilt - a culture of innocence and the mystery of lordship. A culture too formed upon the 'Morning Star' which rises between men 151

collectively. For one achieves one's own perfect strength only Via relationship with others and as part of a living-fellowship. The realization that we have no individual selves in isolation is one of the great shocks suffered by Kate: "She had thought that each individual had a complete self, a complete soul, an accomplished I. And now she realized as plainly as if she had turned into a new being, that this was not so" (PS, p.1OS). Hard as she finds it, Kate has to accept that there is no ideal-individuality; only a self formed in relation to others. Thus, as we have stressed throughout this thesis, for all their talk 'anti-civilization', Nietzsche and Lawrence posit community and relationship at the heart of their thinking; rejecting the very notion of the individual which is so central to liberal thought. We find our best strength in relation to others and from out of this comes also the power of innocence; the power to accept oneself as a thing of forces and flows and to forgive oneself for past 'crimes' (from scrumping to deicide). Indeed, innocence also involves the ability to forget past deeds, past shames, past stupidities, past fears and uncertainties; guilty about, to forget that there is anything to feel or apologise for. When man can forget, then too can he rise innocent before each new moment as though the past had no claim over him. Man's self-overcoming is, then, in a very real sense, an overcoming of himself as a historical construct. By liberating himself from the past, he is able to interpret himself anew in the present and project himself differently into the future. As we saw in chapter one, it is fatal to the living thing - be it the individual or the collectivity - if it cannot close itself from the past, learning how to discriminate and evaluate among memories (i.e., exercise a healthy will to power). The stronger an individual or a people, however, the more history it will be able to recall and assimilate without developing a bad conscience; the less it will be 152

obliged to forget. Nietzsche refers to this as the 'plastic power' of an individual or people. Those who could incorporate the entire historical experience of modern humanity as their own and endure such (i.e., exhibit plastic power of superhuman proportion), would consitute, according to Nietzsche, a new nobility: "the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of." 16 Not only would such a new nobility be innocent, but they would be happy too Nietzsche claims, for "if one could burden one's soul with ... the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god .. " 17 Essentially, Lawrence agrees with this; agrees that what is important having bitten and swallowed the apple of knowledge and fallen into self-consciousness and bad conscience as a result, is that we need now to digest the fruit (maggot and all). The revaluation is an attempt to help man over his indigestion. When this is achieved - when the Old Adam is able to be free of belly-ache - then, and only then, will man be free to re-enter Paradise and the New Eve pick fresh fruit and consort with serpents as she pleases. Lawrence chose to discard the following passage from The Plumed Serpent, but it is particularly pertinent to our study here and forms a good conclusion to this particular section of the work. Ramon tells Kate: "'Go! tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches. Tell them the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head. The fruit of knowledge is digested. Now we can plant the core'" (PS, appendix Ill, p.459). 153

'The Cross is a Tree again' - i.e., a symbolic instrument of torture and sacrifice upon which man has for the past 2000 years been crucified and self-divided into a fatal dichotomy of mind and spirit contra flesh and blood, has been transformed back into the sacred Tree of Life. And the fruit of this tree may be eaten; for there is no longer any divine law or categorical imperative to prohibit us (God is dead) - providing, that is, we can reach the branches; i.e., providing we are able to surpass ourselves as a species, overcoming our humanity as formed by the old morality and dare to live as giants and gods upon the earth. 'The snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head' - i.e., the New Eve in her nakedness and her new innocence has overcome the burden of shame and fear which had robbed her and all the world of sunshine and happiness. The serpent of desire has been accepted: "It has its own raison d'etre. In its own being it has beauty and reality. Even my horror is a tribute to its reality. And I must admit the genuineness of my own horror, accept it, and not exclude it from my understanding .... I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my secret shame and most secret desire ... who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me, my stem and branch and root. ... I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. The serpent will have his own place in me, and I shall be free." I!! 'The fruit of knowledge is digested' - i.e., not only can we at last move beyond good and evil, but so too can we overcome our obsession with having to 'know' everything in our heads; overcome our fanatical will to truth. 154 For 'now we can

plant the core' - i.e., now we can be free to experience life directly and come into our own full being as creatures with bodies, not just minds. Now we can develop a new culture based upon innocence, laughter, and forgetting, (intuitive) consciousness as well as a wider and a new ethic; now at last we can have a true civilization in which men are more than house-pets. Back then to Eden; the garden of earthly delight which lies just West of Nod, that twilight zone of sleep and death in which we have dreamt suffered from ideal-delusions mad dreams and for far too long: '''Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!'" (PS, p.12S) sing the men of Quetzacoatl. And men shall awaken they say in the way of the snake; ie., into earthly, sensual life. This, then, is what Nietzsche's revaluation as mediated and illustrated by Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent, means: the regaining of innocence and the flight back into Paradise. This is where a politics of evil and cruelty, transgression and the substantiation of mystery, is designed to lead us. But, as we concluded at the end of chapter two, there are dangers and concerns to be faced here, as well as delights to be won. For the road to Paradise is pitted with numerous black holes and I would like to reopen discussion of these and offer some closing remarks. Part IV: Closing Remarks. IV.i. Revolutions are so vieux jeu. For a while at least, Lawrence was to insist in letters that he did mean what Ramon meant - 'for us all' - and that he regarded most important revolution, The Plumed Serpent as his novel. But before long, the reservations evident throughout the novel, resurface concedes with direct reference to the above that: 155 concerning Ramon's and Lawrence eventually

"The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number. After all at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal militant, seems to me a cold egg. We're sort of sick of all forms of militarism and militantism ... " 1 In part, the above was the result of Lawrence reacting to his own experience of Italian fascism and German militarism. It now seemed clear that the only sure outcome of revolution, be it of the fascist or the socialist variety, was an increase in the bullying power of the modern state over the individual. Even a predominantly religious revolution cl la The Plumed Serpent, with its establishment of a "strange priest-controlled, ritual-fulfilled'< political order was now to be rejected. I have mentioned last chapter how Nietzsche's political philosophy is insufficiently complex; his grasp of the economic and social realities of the modern world remaining superficial. Although Lawrence does make some attempt in The Plumed Serpent to accommodate his neo-Aztec revolution to the realities of modern Mexico, ultimately the same criticism can be made of his social and political thinking: naive and "no more trenchant 'romantic anti-capitalist'.":' or adequate than that of the typical W.H. Auden is not far off the mark therefore when he says the political musings of The Plumed Serpent are not so much dangerous, as silly, because they "treat the modern state as if it were a tiny parish and politics as if it were an affair of personal relations". 4 Here, then, is a serious criticism of Nietzsche's and Lawrence's thinking: both seem unable to resist the temptation differences to blur the "categorical and experiential between the personal and the collective" and thus each frequently attempts to "recast the collective in terms of a unitary personal image rather than the difficult, plural realities of community. "5 It seems that each felt justified in 156

doing this because each held onto the outmoded belief of conservative political thinking, that one can equate the organization of the soul with that of the city, or state. Thus there is a leaping back and forth from ontology to sociology and from physiology to politics, with either an unawareness of the illegitimacy of so-doing, or a wilful defiance of what is seen as a decadent notion of legitimacy. 6 This becomes particulary problematic for some critics when the advocated is one that 'promotes' cruelty, based on observations, politics being experiences, and intuitions gathered in the personal realm. For whilst it may be the case that that what doesn't kill the individual makes him stronger, this does not mean that we need to affirm and promote pain and suffering unreservedly, nor institutionalize them within society. Nor need our politics be based upon and reflect the fact that life is violent, immoral, and unjust. The mistake that Nietzsche makes is that he; "rushes from the insight that every person's life and actions involve a necessary and sometimes exploitation, desirable amount of suffering to the conclusion that misery, and violence in social and political life are inevitable and perhaps desirable - so much so that their reduction ought not to be a goal of politics. "7 By 1929, Lawrence was prepared to admit of his own limitations, saymg that: "As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern ... to know the feelings inside a man, and to make new feelings conscious. "8 But as to then deciding what changes in the socio-political realm based upon these new feelings need to be made, Lawrence now concedes that he does not know. Or, at least, other men know better. But this is not to say that Lawrence turns away completely from politics; merely from politics on a macro- or molar-level and of a grand revolutionary nature. As we will see in the following chapters, his political concerns post -Plumed Serpent stay on the micro- or molecular-level to do with consciousness, 157 the body, and

desire; a radical politics interested in exploring new pleasures and new forms of relation, in promoting new becomings and transformations up-rising for man, not in armed and seizing the power of the state; a politics of tenderness and touch, not terrorism and transgression. A politics also of survival and resistance, designed to help the Old Adam and New Eve struggle through the Ruins and their engagement with nihilism and the mechanical forces thereof. Without wishing to anticipate too much of what is to be developed later on, or repeat what has been said so far, I would like to make a few remarks about the move from revolution to radical resistance. Perhaps the first and most obvious question that presents itself is resistance against what and against whom? The answer has to be against state power itself and against all those who serve the bureaucracy of state power, flirt with state power, and/or desire state power for themselves; including the would-be revolutionaries and ascetic political militants such as Ramon and Cipriano. Resistance also against the temptation to find an easy and absolute solution to the problems which face us; solutions of the kind offered by the above and all those who subscribe to and promote the ideal '-isms' of the twentieth century ("the various swindles of late modernity"). 9 According to Daniel Conway, Nietzsche teaches us in Ecce Homo that one of the most important things we can do today is; "commit our remaining volitional resources to the resistance of idolatry and thus survive perhaps our engagement with nihilism. Nietzsche consequently advocates a politics of resistance rather than a politics of redemption or revolution. "10 By learning how to laugh at ourselves and those who would be our leaders, we may be able to offer at least a "temporary defence against our 'natural' impulse to implement a final resolution of our constitutive contradictions." 11 One of the failings of The Plumed Serpent as a novel, is that it lacks this ability to laugh; even if it does veer towards the unintentionally self-parodic 158 at times. Realizing

this, Lawrence allows a good deal more humour to enter into his post- Serpent writings, the only 'sane' revolution now being one made for fun.12 But if Lawrence turns away from large-scale revolutionary politics it is not only due to a sudden distaste for the perceived puritanism of militant leaders such as Ramon, but also because he realizes that the above has to be if it is to be successful in the modern world a mass ideal. Ramon is prepared to reluctantly accept this, but Lawrence, ultimately, is not. And neither, for most of the time, is Nietzsche, who writes: "the demagogic character and intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties; on account of ths intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall." 13 Nietzsche concludes the above passage by quoting Voltaire: "Quand la populace se mele de raisonner, tout est perdLi'l4 and, mostly, he argues that the noble few must not simply become shepherds to the herd (i.e., leaders of the People). Lawrence too stresses that the greatness of the great man resides in his ability not merely to step ahead, but also step aside and his realization that there is no need to concern himself with violent revolution and the smashing of city walls, when he can simply "walk through the gates into the open world" 15 if he finds the courage to do so. The great man knows at last that a new order of life cannot consciously be pre-determined. Lawrence himself knew this before writing The Plumed Serpent and realized its truth once again upon completing the novel. That said, even after The Plumed Serpent Lawrence is not entirely able to conclude that revolutions and cataclysms are unnecessary. But he seems to hope rather that the cultivation of a new sensibility via education of the feelings is man's best hope for the future. Of course, this is not as dramatic as the call to arms, but if what we want is "to produce the new society of the future, gradually, livingJy" then it will be "a slow job, but why not?" 16 It is a question of hatching the egg and not 159

smashing it, or simply cleaning the nest in which the latter sits. In his stillest moments, Ram6n knows this - even whilst half-tempted by Cipriano's desire to crush the whole world like an egg in the coils of a serpent. Lawrence writes; "if we are to break through, it must be in the strength of life bubbling inside us. The chicken does not break the shell out of animosity against the shell. It bursts out in its blind desire to move under a greater heaven." I 7 Nietzsche too, revolutionary in his less hyperbolic would agree that although violence can be the source of stimulation in a mankind grown weak and decadent via the "resurrection long-buried mid-period, of the most savage energies in the shape of the dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" 18 it can do no more than this. Thus for a change of a truly profound nature, it requires something other than this; not something bigger, more excessive, more violent, but, on the contrary, 'small doses' of change over a long period of time: "If a change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke ? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence .. " 19 This crucially important passage on 'small doses' concludes with explicit remarks on the folly of revolutionary politics: "It is now, indeed, also beginning to become apparent that the most recent attempt at a great change in evaluations, and that in the political field - the 'Great Revolution' - was nothing more than a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery which knew how, through the production of sudden crises, to inspire in credulous Europe the hope of a sudden recovery - and there with made all political invalids 160

up to the present moment impatient and dangerous."2o The above has, one would argue, to form a central part of any discussion of Nietzsche's politics, particularly to do with the question of whether he is or is not a revolutionary. If the above is no more indicative of the 'authentic' Nietzsche, or any more quintessential than the later writings that do demand grand politics and the seizure of history, nevertheless it does seem to offer a much more useful and credible teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first mark the end of politics as understood Having, in the twentieth century, century and can perhaps and practiced within the modern age. seen both Russian and German revolutions collapse into state terror and stupidity, we must surely have learnt in a brutal and impressive manner that the greatest danger lies in accumulations of state power and in those political options which whilst calling for great change. merely recodify and reinscribe relations, leaving in place all the old mechanisms of the state-machine. IV.ii. The Question of Fascism Once More. Firstly, it is important to stress that if Lawrence abandons revolution and professes his distaste for militantism and militarism, he does so because he feels such tactics are doomed to failure; i.e., he makes a strategic withdrawal from his position in The Plumed Serpent and does not beat a horrified retreat. as is often suggested, tacitly conceding the fascism of his own text and the need to reaffirm a more liberal and humanist position. Those who argue that the letter quoted earlier provides evidence that Lawrence drops his concern with power are mistaken; or, as is frequently the case, deliberately misreading the above in order to bring Lawrence closer to their own philosophical and political positions. We often see this happening with Nietzsche too; liberal-humanist fish commentators around for edifying passages with which to somehow neutralize the material which 161

they find distasteful and disturbing. The fact is, however, that neither Nietzsche nor Lawrence at any time renounce their philosophy of power, nor abandon hopes of overturning values and democratic political arrangements. Christian-moral They understand the risk that they run by advocating the philosophy they do, namely that by giving assent to life as will to power and the general economy of the whole "the way was open to others .. , who would gather strength from lies and murder. "21 And, indeed, they do make some attempt to ensure their work is not misused by the ressentimentridden, whilst ultimately accepting this risk; the risk of a fascist appropriation which sees their call for a new substantiation of mystery degraded into party- political dogma and a debased form of idolatry. However, the unfortunate fact is that The Plumed Serpent gives us an imaginative glimpse of a positive potential culture and an uncanny prefiguration of what is to follow in Nazi Germany. For some critics of course, there is no distinction to be made between the philosophy and politics of The Plumed Serpent and national socialism; the latter is not the doppelganger of the former, but one and the same. Both can be described as volatile mixtures of "rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideals". 22 Admittedly, the novel does attempt to "retrieve old, supplanted faculties [and] use them to advance some form of cultural evolution.v= For in a very real sense, as we have mentioned earlier, The Plumed Serpent is Lawrence's fantastic and frantic attempt to recodify both the world within his own fiction and wider society, via his own mythology; fragments, i.e., resuscitating Unfortunately, such to form neo-territorialities old codes, inventing neo-territorialities are, pseudo-codes at archaic"25 and, at worst, fascistic. But, importantly, description by "reintroducing best, or code jargons." 24 "artificial, residual, if the above forms a valid of the process being carried out in The Plumed Serpent, it also provides a model by which the entire experience of the modern world can be 162

understood; decodification a model of oscillation from one pole of delirium to another; to recodification; Liberal-democratic from deterritorialization from to reterritorialization. society operates in this manner under capital, just as surely as does fascist or nee-Aztec society. As Deleuze and Guattari say: "Born of decoding and deterritorialization on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold ... they are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, nee-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia ... They are continually behind or ahead of themselves. "26 Because there are numerous and "astonishing oscillations of the unconSCIOUS, from one pole of delirium to the other" 27. however. sometimes an unexpected force of radical change can break free "even in the midst archaisms" 28 or. on the other hand, revolutionary reproducing old power-mechanisms of the worst force can quickly turn fascist. and falling back into the most terrible stupidities of the past. To reiterate and conclude, we are conceding the relation between fascism and Nietzschean philosophy; both involve intense lines of flight into the heterogeneous realm and both can legitimately be characterized as war-machines. offer a consummation Further, both of modern European nihilism; but it is here they differ radically. For whereas Nietzsche's perfected nihilism is a form of pure destruction in terms of self-overcoming and the negation of the negative itself, fascism is a form of decadent disintegration which refuses to surrender self-identity to the process of death and resurrection. preservation and love of self which differentiates its own fixed will and It is this fascism from will to Nietzschean thought. Ultimately, fascism is only another form of grand idealism acting in the 163

name of love (as we suggested last chapter): love of self, of nation, of race, of leader. Community-Identity-Stability: these are the ideals of the Third Reich (in theory, if not practice) as of Huxley's Brave New World; the literary counterpart to Lawrence's Plumed Serpent. 29 The ideals in fact of utopian thinkers and prison camp builders; i.e., those who secretly lust after that which they fear most - anarchy and corruption. Of course, again as we saw last chapter, if love can become corrupted from a divine process into a fixed goal and obscene ideal, so too can power. For it too can be transformed into a metaphysical 'thing' to be possessed and worked from the will. When power becomes degraded into something mechanical and an attribute of the human will, then it too has ugly consequences. And if Lawrence edges away from Ramon it is because he realizes the error made in fixing power into a revolutionary political form and substantiating the mystery of power in terms of the military. IV.iii. Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. If Lawrence does not move away from a philosophy of power, neither does he abandon his anti-humanism, unlike those post-war the only possible to totalitarianism response intellectuals who thought that and the only possible way to safeguard Europe from future tyranny was to make a retreat to the safety limits of rational-humanism (coupled to the politics of Marx). Of course, after all the many horrors and atrocities of the 1930's and '40's, it is understandable to hide behind the Enlightenment. tricolore once more and reaffirm But it is a mistaken response the principles nonetheless. And what to want of the IS not understandable and what must represent the greatest loss of philosophical courage imaginable, is how a number of the so-called 'new philosophers' in the 1970's and '80's also advocated a return to old values; in order, they claimed, to counter the 164

threat of neo-fascism and to provide themselves with the grounds upon which to assemble a defence of 'human rights'. We feel as Kate felt when Ram6n announced he was looking for God once more - it's a creeping back into old forms and hollow shells due to a sort of sentimentalism. I would argue that the very last thing we need to do today is make a return to the metaphysics of the subject and a humanist philosophy founded upon a revised understanding of the cogito. Of course, it may well be that Camus is right in saying that if a man wishes to live and die as a man, then he must "refuse to be a god". 30 Lawrence concedes this point after The Plumed Serpent, writing for example in Lady Chatterley's Lover with no doubt an ironic backward glance at Ram6n and Cipriano that: "'One has to ... have a heart and a penis, if one is to escape being either a god or a bolshevist - for they are the same thing: they're (LCL, p.39). return But if this marks a turning of some sort. to the old understanding maintains both too good to be true'" as strongly after it does not signify a of the humanitas of homo human us. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent as before it (in essential agreement with Nietzsche), that it is not the denial of humanism and humanist values that leads to nihilism, but the positing of such ideals in the first place. For when, inevitably, such values collapse and man is forced to realize that he has dedicated himself to nothingness all along (the nothingness he sought to avoid and counter), then love recoils into hatred and the malice of rage. Thus it is not Nietzsche's philosophy of power (or evil) which is the real and continuing danger today, but the insistence on love and an old morality even when the latter has been exposed as the product of impotence and ressentiment. It is the 'new humanism' which constitutes the reaction within politics today; not Nietzsche's aristocratism. There may well be the need for a new ethic; but fear does not form such, any more than pain constitutes an argument. longer indulge in Nietzsche's somewhat romantic immoralism, 165 If we can no still we can point

out that it is not the latter that leads to nihilism, but the metaphysics of love and reason. The neo-humanists are not wrong to argue that a Nietzschean politics is vitalist and more concerned with power than 'rights'; not mistaken when they claim this will mean that questions of justice, for example, will be resolved upon the basis of strength. inherently But they are wrong to automatically assume this is undesirable and fascistic; as if somehow weakness is morally superior and that innocence equates with impotence and is more likely to guarantee the security and well-being of man. They either fail to grasp, important lesson of Nietzsche's or refuse to see, the crucially Genealogy: real goodness grows from strength; out of weakness comes spite, pettiness, fanaticism and the will to the denial of life. Ultimately, it is the strong alone who can grant and guarantee the rights with which the neo-humanists are so concerned. And ultimately, as we have seen, only those with claws can show compassion. This entire debate is perhaps best summarized and, to my mind, resolved in Heidegger's Sartre's Letter on Humanism which, in providing a magnificent response to Marxist-existentialist brand of post-War defence not only to his own philosophical position, humanism, gives a strong but that of Nietzsche and Lawrence too. In a crucial section, Heidegger writes: "Because we are speaking against 'humanism' people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more 'logical' than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity? Because we are speaking against 'logic' people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness feelings be installed and thus that 'irrationalism' of drives and be proclaimed as true, For what is more 'logical' than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the 166

alogical? Because we say that the Being of man consists in being-in-the-world people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more 'logical' than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human beings holds only this life as valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all 'Transcendence'? Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the 'death of God' people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more 'logical' than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless? ... What is going on here? People talk about 'humanism', 'logic', 'values', 'world', and 'God'. They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things as positive ... they immediately assume that that which speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is 'negative' in the sense of destructive .... But does the 'against' which a thinking advances against ordinary opmion necessarily point toward negation and the negative? This happens ... only when one posits in advance what is meant by the 'positive' and on this basis makes an absolute and absolutely negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. ... To think against 'values' is not to maintain that everything interpreted as 'a value' ... is valueless. Rather, it is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as 'a value' what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man's estimation. "31 In other words, valuing does not let things be in their own right; it allows things validity only when useful to man. This is what Nietzsche thinks of as nihilism and Lawrence describes as 'blasphemous project of revaluation. living'. It is this they challenge via the And it is in this challenge that one can locate an ethic; 167

something which those who oppose the revaluation within an 'irrationalist say is impossible to find ontology' and/or a politics of evil (philosophy of power). Despite what some may choose to believe, there can thus be a post-moral ethic, just as, prior to Plato, even though thinking knew not of morality, it still had an ethical content and concern. Beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche emphasized on a number of occasions, does not mean beyond good and bad. As we saw in Part I of this chapter, there can even be a post-moral religion, with post-moral gods, should we desire to formulate such on the basis of a newly affirmative will to power. But any such post-moral ethic or religion will have to be grounded in two things above all: the body and the earth. This is not to posit a form of blut und baden idealism, or a spurious racial-national rather, mysticism as the Nazis attempted; it is to suggest the need for a genuine libidinal materialism which values the physical and sensual world of desire and which encourages a respect for all living things as things in their own right. "Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the Fourfold in its essential unfolding" 32, says Heidegger. That is, mortals dwell in that they save the earth, receive the sky, await the gods, and, finally, in that they initiate their own becoming. As George Steiner says: "There are meaner metaphors to live by.,,:n 168

Chapter N: Tenderness: The Philosophy of Becoming and the Politics of Desire. Part I: Theoretical and General Opening Remarks. I.i. The Significance of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,' We concluded the last chapter by arguing that there is a need ultimately to move away from theoretical terrorism and molar ambitions, toward a micro-politics at the level of desire and the body. It is precisely such a move that Lawrence makes in his late fiction, which includes his most controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (LCL), and the two-part tale entitled The Escaped Cock (EC), which forms the main point of reference in our next and final chapter. Often, commentators have failed to understand the significance of the above move made by Lawrence. Thus it is that we frequently encounter the following sort of remark appearing in the critical literature: "tenderness is to be a private and sexual thing, without any of the political overtones we have become accustomed to in recent novels. "2 This remark fails to appreciate what Lawrence means by 'tenderness' and misses the significance of what Lawrence is attempting achieve. As I will argue and seek to demonstrate here, tenderness to (essentially Lawrence's term for desire) is productive of social reality and sexuality far from being a private and apolitical matter is very much of social and political import. As Bataille says: "The world of lovers .. lis I .. no less true than that of politics" 3 - in fact, it is one and the same world. We should not, therefore, error of thinking that significant Lady Chatterley's fall into the Lover is any the less a politically and engaged novel than the earlier works concerned with power, simply because it deals primarily with sensual pleasure. If this 'obscene miracle' of a book eroticizes Nietzsche's philosophical project, the central objective remains 169

the same (revaluation development of all values) of Lawrence's customary constraints own earlier fiction. the mistake and flows outside phantasms that had infiltrated unconscious desires, Ultimately, then, concerned as capitalism and our speech acts, functioning as the most sinister that Lawrence's it is with examining the workings strange becomings of the value to carefully kind fully theorized of which they provide. and Guattari, physicians' to push thinking stake in all philosophizing us say, health, future, In other words, Deleuze and Guattari what of its growth, Lawrence attempt Lover, desire within industrial central characters, a IS Guattari in Anti- makes sense and proves of great and and to discuss it in the are differences between we find before us those there but in all three anticipated; i.e., was not at all 'truth' power, most 4 Lady Chatterley's those who muster to its limits and risk the proposition hitherto to the archaic kind of fifth column". by Deleuze Obviously whom Nietzsche this time and our deepest, the above novel to these works and Deleuze 'philosophical courage relate terms but without our hearts Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It therefore Lawrence the gate, to argue 'schizoanalysis' philosophical of the body and to reconnect I wish the experimental is still to challenge The Plumed Serpent and "surrendering of with a radically The concern applied to the active powers man woman with those forces making and it constitutes that: the "what was at but something else. Let life. "5 in Lady Chatterley's attempts in their work, is to "listen Lover and what to the voice of the healthy body" which alone speaks "the meaning of the earth". b An of Lady Chatterley's Lover is one that has in turn listened to this voice echoing within the experience directed against all that is egoic and celebratory of all that belongs to impersonal joy. For in the vocabulary of desire. text; the voice which joy is one of the most important there is horror and death affirms words the in Lady Chatterley's 170 body's own incisive reading Thus whilst Lover, there is also much gaiety

and, indeed, eroticism as Bataille without is excessive" in closing, that 7 claims: saying essentially "It would that it centres and which takes place beyond that we are not suggesting laughter world. correctly is the great As Lawrence solution be inexcusable on joy. A joy, moreover, good and evil. However, to the problems presented so full of cant and spurious emotions, the most decent mock it all. One must be able to laugh at everything. cannot laugh everything away" (FLC, pp.211-12). also retains As conceded above, the most important are differences but there allow us to legitimately between are enough of these being the shared on an element us somewhat to earth. analysis interpretations, materialism. bourgeois The above for one of desire and are not content and desire constrained by the consciousness them and that of of contact and similarity to hostility to Freud's not least claims to be grateful "thankful as for founded motifs, love work, as of to Freud that Freud Deleuze to see sex reduced for pulled and Guattari, it is upon ego, reactive and a false to the level of the within oedipal mythology. Nor are they of the entire world to a series of representations of a rational human subject. the oedipal and the egoic are precisely against work perhaps Lawrence unacceptable, fantasies to accept the reduction and Guattari, Lawrence And yet, "9 is ultimately little secret' fight thing one could do was to schizoanalysis; of sex in all human relations; they was At the same time, move freely from pollyanalytics insisting formed "the world Lawrence's points of desire. prepared by the modern And thus the politics of all his understanding 'dirty nor to Schizoanalysis. there and Guattari, Freudian let us note the right to make war as well as love. Lii. From Pollyanalyticsf Deleuze of that that joy is the great be-all and end-all; in The First Lady Chatterley (FLC): writes to speak ferociously and unceasingly weapon at their disposal. 171 For Lawrence, Deleuze, what must be overcome in their works with and every

Thus, whilst as Frank Kermode argues, Freud and Lawrence "were in a sense talking about the same thing, an epochal sickness with deep roots in the past and ... a malfunction of sexual relationships within the culture" 10, Lawrence soon parts company from Freud and evolves an essentially different project. (and opposed) For Lawrence, again as for Deleuze and Guattari, Freud does not go far enough; he is seen to be constantly retreating from the radical implications of his own theories and such conservative timidity is the reason that he fails to reach the unconscious that he intially sets off in search of with such courage; this and the fact that he does not know how to approach or handle the body, fearing the flesh in its naked materiality. Because he has no real appreciation of the body and its active forces, Freud's unconscious is little more than a negative projection of consciousness itself, and it means that his understanding of sexuality is also formed by the reactive forces of rational consciousness and bad conscience. Deleuze and Guattari are keen to stress that Lawrence has a more accurate and profound Freud; one that is 'cosmo-illogical' evaluation of sexuality than rather than 'psycho-logical'. They write: "we admit that any comparison of sexuality with cosmic phenomena such as 'electrical storms' ... in the end appears to us more adequate than the reduction of sexuality to the pitiful little familialist secret ... even from the viewpoint of the famous scientificity. "11 What is particularly remarkable about Lawrence's reading of Freud, however, is how unusual it was for its time. As Anne Fernihough reminds us; "Freud was more to have subverted, commonly seen by his own contemporaries not reinforced, this rationalist tradition." 12 That is to say, more commonly seen as a great liberator, not as someone who sets out to posit an ideal ego as the ultimate coercive and imperialistic force of occupation. Lawrence reacts with horror to the formula that reads 'where id was, there 172 ego shall be', seeing in this the

declaration of the mind's ambition to triumph over and murder the body; "a subjection of the spontaneous sources of living to the 'psychic mechanical law'." 13 Deleuze and Guattari agree; Freud offers a reactive and tyrannical model of the human 'psyche', from which he draws conservative political and social conclusions in works such as Civilization and Its Discontents (see chapters two and three). Today, perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, psychological categories and political categories continue to reinforce one another. As Nietzsche predicted (and feared), the state has entered the soul in terrifying and previously unimaginable new ways and thus needs to be engaged on a micro-political level. Marcuse writes: "The traditional border lines between psychology political and social philosophy condition on the one side and on the other have been made obsolete of man in the present era: formerly autonomous by the and identifiable psychical processes are being absorbed by the function of the individual in the state - by his public existence. Psychological problems therefore turn into political problems. "14 There is therefore no longer a public/private dichotomy or distinction to be made and "private disorder reflects more directly than before the disorder of the whole." 15 This is something which Deleuze and Guattari also stress in their work, as they seek to demonstrate how "almost all personal and private problems ... have social, political, and economic sources'T" and how, on the other hand, the desires and drives which work through the individual also infect and invest social reality, producing subjects and cultures alike. Schizoanalysis exposes time and again "the influence of the unconscious on the conscious, the role of the preconceptual and nonconceptual in the conceptual, the presence of the irrational ... at the very core of the rational." 17 If we have become only too expert when it comes to examining the mechanical functions and reactive forces of consciousness 173

and then mistaking these for life in its entirety, schizoanalysis is a means by that belong to which we can begin to understand a little better the active forces the economy above; forces of desire mentioned two and three branded forces of the Old Adam triumph). because and by moralists If in this and rationalists transpose the we argue the affirmation for and the to transform revaluation of values: New Eve in her of these man (making And forces, (the cuntit is lovers of us all) only that they is stronger .... His it is not the feeling of values; "the whole economy is richer lover than before, who do not love. The lover becomes he dares, as 'evil' and monstrous glory thesis about which we saw in chapters in his phallic they alone have the potential bringing those becomes an adventurer, is more valuable, more complete than in those more powerful, a squanderer: becomes he is rich enough for it. Now and innocence an ass in magnanimity .. , this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities" . IX As we shall see in part Il.ii., of this; via tenderness Mellors making the leap into the Fourth 'peace that comes of fucking', who cannot love, a perfect Dimension merely as a lover, a world-creator. bully with become at last world-destroyers their and life-haters. the political fight is a fight waged by lovers will-worked Today. illustration of bliss and the as well as back into the social world And we shall see also how he becomes, those - the lover - provides of existence. as opposed benevolence, to paraphrase to who Marcuse. for life itself - and this is a politics of desire. Liii, Towards a Politics of Desire. We ask the wrong question if we ask the metaphysical For this demands a metaphysical as desire has no fixed essence response which cannot to be identified 174 as such. question what is desire? legitimately be supplied, Better, to ask how then,

does desire work (i.e., what effects that desire brings into touch "things functions primarily as a "strange and men, and men and women, current of interflow even though decadents flow of desire cannot is beyond across place and stabilized: perfectly those rivers of sex, madness, it should be, to force the is planked This fear convinces and to believe that because of rivers everything can thus they be held in over so that it can be walked upon is in flux'. "21 Only now, in this our bridges are falling down and our 'eternal Like it or not, we are obliged to once more sink of desire into our industrial this constant attempt to themselves. own senses nihilism, have likewise collapsed. or swim within rivers European men as they are of all that isn't fixed and so the greatest "When water invariably he is not believed who says 'Everything time of modern values' of their Crucially, of the ego; or, at least, Chatterley 19 and that flows between and men and things."2o the control by saying incommensurable" of interchange of all that flows external bridges ... truly, current such as Clifford them to deny the evidence Here we can answer which are otherwise via the ego, frightened be known; can build does it have)? sewerage literature, which we thought systems: "solar we had integrated rivers, and plague which refuse pathological so rivers, to slumber wretchedly of flows; but perhaps in their banks. "22 We wish, then, to think of desire in terms of all kinds above all in terms of sexual and social flows and the intimate relation them. The politics of desire, certainly as developed by Lawrence and later in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, stresses how "beneath the conscious investments economic, political, etc. investments that attest religious unlike Wilhelm here. For whilst the question Lover as to Lawrence's Reich, there are to the way in which desire is present But we need to be careful Lady Chatterley's formations, for example, work sexuality 175 unconscious at the core of sexual in the social field". 23 of sexuality in general, between he does is central to not posit, of his cultural and

political thinking. In fact, that all is sex. works, For unlike Lawrence that whilst an element does not mean everything is not to be attributed therefore, further Freud to all human activities. as it does a creative that is distinct from the sexual urge though but which the reactive forces For is perfectly whilst accept and capitalism believe demonstrated), creative in sex it is not impulse; i.e., great unison of manhood What Lawrence argues made new and there or obscure by its reducing truth with the desire like the original craving and oblige of ourselves (as unregulated expression Foucault fucked towards "the is anew. Connie Chatterley than his to a social desire to find of industrial-capital Lawrence asks: and with whom "Is this new craving for a new vision, and answers is it sexual, in the negative. that the "meeting of many in one great passionate purpose never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the opposite 176 has of the to make the whole world this craving for the woman?"26 us to the blood of both parties for the woman, community. with others, society purpose. "25 with whom to fight the forces communion all to sex. also seek to suppress. is iibersexusl and an urge has Mellors a sexual desire he can found a new, non-slavish, for polarized to eroticize great a subsequent switches male comrades content capitalism is that after the act of coition, desire drive, to it. deny. in some passionate as we shall see, no sooner impulse is the world-forming which is not, 'religious') argues. as the Thus. from terms Lawrence comfortable arises of desire It is far more subtle and much related of corporate-media that drive The politics (or what Lawrence which not only does psychoanalysis this is more than just the flow of sex alone. incorporating which, all human activity, to sex: "And a sexual motive "24 form of sex radicalism. impulse, does not argue out in fantasia and other of sex can be said to enter than this; just as desire It is this creative Lawrence is at pains to point can or should be reduced simply another reaching and his followers, insisting is not sex, and should direction.v-?

and again contra the sex radicals, Thus for Lawrence, be-all and end-all to our social, emphasize of human existence, political, nor is 'sexual and cultural his difference from crisis those who would argue as the prime or exclusive would drift and anarchy". 28 motive has to be subordinated mean denial, however, sex established on a new basis; a non-oedipalized fulfilment in the vast majority as Lawrence our argues, main concern conscious in this of desire "ideal purpose purpose. basis. that This does that we cannot we get our not afford sexual life If we do not accomplish this via a politics of desire is doomed to of individuals of the sexual passion. For sex, consciousness "29 and a 'democracy - will only be initiated of touch' by those - phallically women who have risen out of the blood and into transformed and fulfilled (or, as Nietzsche which has no roots still" 30, leading in life, then the world upon the as an end in itself leads to disaster, disaster creative of touch will be fucked into existence libidinal culture that he says if long unless it is established chapter men and cunt-aware to can endure is our deepest the new flesh as sexually democracy passion otherwise, motive It is crucial to create a new social order fail: "no great purposive solution So keen is Lawrence of desire emphasizes to ignore then any attempt concern. the great If we are to avoid this, then the sexual to the greater and the politics as a vital liberation' of values. sex were ever accepted "into despair just as sex is not the great between would it remains beings. In other sterility the man and woman both; a as physis). If sex say, culture the case on the other in the deep sea of passional to the barren words, of modern hand that: sex is a greater business and political life. If the reactive distortion perhaps the instinct. For when man experiences lost. greater and commercial problem is the manipulation frustration of our sex is an issue, of man's the denial of this latter and is lost. "31 And what is nihilism from and to himself? 177 at last other creative drive. and social then "he feels than man losing his way

But if man is lost and 'alienated' others perfects as our civilization a kind of 'anti-desire' that from world results and enclose existence. "32 their and repress". level, as Lawrence But, 33 is he cut off from from every other living retreat into know that the is that of: "tirelessly the with out of touch and into the Deleuze and Guattari liberating importantly, and vibrates Man makes a mistaken task of schizoanalysis presuppositions; recoil and further and the simulacrum. first and most important egos in "physical of his own ego, falling further of representation still more itself ideally via its technology thing and every form of physical the isolation himself, pre-personal taking apart singularities they this can only be done on a collective also recognized: "for it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his own true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated isolation, their own absoluteness, nothing is possible but insanity which a normal humanity: again into true relatedness. Essentially, In that mirror and thus ends Although his failure is instructive, Rather, it is the positive-becornings to examine relatedness'. carried relations; in Part Following, by desire how their or an idea, Men must get back into and the noli me tangere of break the present great picture in which we all live grimacing: the above sets the agenda for schizoanalysis of the above wish vanity a picture of and fall "34 Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence any their also they must utterly shatter all but more or less pronounced. touch. And to do so they must forfeit their own absoluteness: is after by their II; in Part towards shows how Clifford Chatterley in a state of degraded and infantile we are not here concerned of the lovers, to see how they manage lunacy. with Clifford's Connie and Mellors, do fails to do case. which we to fall into 'true III, we shall go on to see how the lovers a new tomorrow tale hints and the politics of desire. at a 'revolution 178 and an ever-greater of desire' network which promises are of a new

social body (without organs) which Lawrence terms, as we have seen, a democracy of touch: "neither an ideal society, nor the result of an anticipated historical development. Instead, it is immanent 'here and now', present in the bonds that exist between people ... the aim of the politics of desire is to intensify these bonds". 35 I.iv. The Body. All of philosophy to date has been, says Nietzsche, a misunderstanding body. This would be regrettable enough of the if the above misunderstanding had resulted merely in a stupid and unnecessary amount of suffering imposed on the body (most obviously but not exclusively in its sexual aspect), but it has also had a far wider significance and effect. Precisely because contempt has been taught for the body and for the earth: "All questions of politics, the ordering of society, education, have been falsified down to their foundations". 36 The body, then, is never exclusively a question of biology. Not only does the body not exist outside of history, but, perhaps more importantly, history does not exist outside of bodies. Thus a concern with how the active forces of the body have been 'tamed', 'silenced', regimes (and how the body constructs and 'exploited' via a great many distinct resistances) obliges us to simultaneously produce a political analysis. Radical political theorists are today not those who instruct on seizing the power of the state, but on how to regenerate the body and revive the passionate instincts, proliferating the number of resistances. If, as argued in chapter one, nihilism is the logical outcome of what Nietzsche identifies as a 'pathological condition', and sexual decadence is related to this, then perhaps sexual regeneration to rethink may prove vital to the eventual overcoming of nihilism. Thus the question of the body is imperative and is precisely what many post-Nietzschean writers (including Lawrence) 179 have attempted to do,

transforming philosophy in the process. In Lady Chatterley's Lover the suggestion IS given that we must return to the body and seek there other (active) forces and a different form of consciousness. If we are to establish a democracy of touch, then we will need to change the way we think, speak, and understand the world; including ourselves as part of - and not apart from - the world: "There are many ways of knowing, there are many sorts of knowledge", writes Lawrence. "But the two ways of knowing, for man, are knowing in terms of apartness, knowing in terms of togetherness, which is mental, rational, scientific, and which is religious and poetic." 37 He continues: "When the great crusade against sex and the body started in full blast with Plato, it was a crusade for 'ideals' and for the 'spiritual' knowledge in apartness." What Connie and Mellors attempt is to know in togetherness; 38 accepting that the most vital knowledge comes, as Tommy Dukes (a minor but important character in the novel) puts it; '''out of the whole corpus of the consciousness, out of your belly and penis [or vaginal as much as out of your brain or mind'" (LCL, p.37). This, of course, is what Nietzsche refers to in Zarathustra as the 'greater intelligence' of the body. 39 When man 'falls' he does so not into 'sin', but into abstraction and apartness; own ego i.e., he falls out of touch and into the isolation of his a la Clifford Chatterley. Lawrence, following Nietzsche, puts the blame for this on Socrates, Plato, and Christ, and he continually rages against a life lived outside of the flow of desire and which denies the body and the body's instincts; because such a life invariably becomes hateful and destructive physical world. It is this anti-physical of the will to negation which so shocks and depresses Connie as she drives through the mining districts of industrial England; "it was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything, the utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life ... the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling" (LCL, p.152). 180

It is such despair that forces Connie to do two things: firstly, seek out refuge in the arms of her lover, Mellors, a man in whom the 'intuitive faculty' was relatively unmaimed (certainly in comparison to her husband); and, secondly, set out on a quest to 'get back' her own body, hope residing in the mystery and complexity of the resurrected flesh. In fact, so convinced is Connie of this latter point that she imagines a whole future not just for herself, but for all men and women, based upon the body; a future contra Clifford's 'spiritual' life hereafter and a time of: '''amazing physical awarenesses! and marvellous delicate contacts, touches, between men and women ... with quite different sorts of consciousness from ours: silent, and intuitive, and physical like perfume'" (JTLl, p.244). Of course, such men and women of the future will be transformed beings; over and beyond their old humanity as defined and characterized by moral-rationalism. And perhaps equally obvious is that the first such 'over-human' men and women (as well as those higher human types who hint towards them) will be feared and hunted down by civilized modern man. Thus it is that we see Mellors, example, forced out of his job, his home, and his community; local people as "more monstrous for regarded by the and shocking than a murderer like Crippen" (LCL, p.267).40 This is not due to his sexual relationship with Connie per se, but more because of the fact that neither he nor Connie show any signs of guilt or shame even when the affair has become public; on the contrary, they find a source of pride and strength in their illicit lovemaking. It is the forming of a new sensibility (a new innocence) being beyond good and evil which is so intolerable; for it threatens to overturn 2,500 years of Christian morality,which, says, has "taught deprecation, neglect, or tormenting as Nietzsche of the body and men to torment and deprecate themselves on account of the drives that fill them". 41 It is because of this that, even today, we still do not know what a body can do or is capable of; still cannot accept that the organism with which we have overcoded the body's forces is simply an invention and imposition of reactive consciousness. 181

Constructing a new form of consciousness and a 'body without organs' is one of the central concerns of Lady Chatterley's Lover and this chapter. We shall illustrate how Connie attempts to achieve this in Part I I.i., but let us offer a few brief theoretical remarks here first on this operation. The orgamsm, as indicated above, is an ideal imposition of the mind itself; an ideally organ-ized body that Lawrence refers to in his writing as the 'corpse- body'. The task that schizoanalysis sets itself is to dis-organ-ize and to build a body without organs; reactions. can only be reached via a breaking down and a Such a breakthrough delivering the organism man from all his automatic breaking open. But this is not accomplished with tricks and nor does it have anything to do with the modern pornographic desire to expose the body, which is a self-conscious "flaunting of the body in its non-physical, merely optical aspect+? and which indicates simply how undesirable we have become to one another. The less individuals receive and transmit the flow of desire, the more desperately, according to Lawrence, do they expose their corpse-bodies, but without ever reaching their true nakedness (for they have none); in or out of her knickers makes very little difference to the desirability of the modern woman: "She's a finished off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doli's". 43 Connie's greatest achievement is reaching her nakedness and reclaiming her mystery. And she does this by opening herself up to the flows of desire and allowing these to dissolve the organism and ideal self she was. But it is important not be misunderstood exist prior to the organism here: the body without organs does not and so cannot simply be returned something we can own. Further, as Deleuze and Guattari say: It to; nor is it It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice: a set of practices. "44 In other words, the body without organs is a work in progress; something one must create. All three major 182

characters in Lady Chatterley's Lover understand this and all three attempt to construct for themselves bodies without organs. But whereas Connie successfully achieves a body without organs full of gaiety and dance, Clifford manages only to build a body without organs that belongs to that "dreary parade of sucked dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn up bodies"45 that Deleuze and Guattari describe. And the reason that Clifford botches the job is because he refuses to surrender his ego. Ultimately, Clifford's real concern is to experiment with the disintegration of his physical self and increase his knowledge of sensation. Unlike his wife, Clifford closes himself off from the flow of desire that would put him physically into touch with others and the world and plugs himself instead as business-machine into the flow of capital. His is not a self-overcoming, destruction, and he constructs so much as a willed self- a body without organs over which only radio waves and the ecstasy of disintegration can pass: he becomes an untouchable with a heart as "'numb as a potato'" and a penis that '''never lifts his head up'" (LCL, p.39), as he recoils from the physical further and further into abstraction and towards death. This is why Clifford's story has no positive interest to us; for, as Deleuze and Guattari stress: yourself; but rather "Dismantling the organism has never meant killing opening the body to connections't+" and the nourishing creative flow of desire. Thus when building a body without organs one must be sensitive, intelligent, and, above all, cautious. In an important passage Deleuze and Guattari write: "You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn ... and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. - You don't reach the body without organs, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. "47 Nor indeed by disintegrating into a squalid mess of obscenity cl la Clifford Chatterley. Breakdowns must always be transformed into breakthroughs, and if one is to fail in building a body without organs, better to fail due to being overly cautious than reckless, 183 for:

"Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. "48 The worst that can happen, in other words, is that what begins as a line of flight turns back upon itself as something cancerous and oppressive and carries us still further into nihilism. I.v. Towards a Philosophy of Becoming. As is perhaps clear, a politics of desire rests upon a philosophy of becoming; the latter understood not as an unfolding of any essence in a process that terminates in the formation affirmation process of an ideal self, but rather as something which involves "the of the positivity of transformation. becoming-other. "49 of difference, A genuine meant as a multiple and constant becoming And it is always an unwilled process; always, IS therefore, a an opening up to the strange forces of desire, not a question of filtering these through the ego and attempting to know them as conscious sensation, or even of experiencing the process of becoming in one's imagination. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that: "A becoming is not a correspondence between relations resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification .... to progress .. . neither is it a To become is not or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination. "50 It is important to realize therefore that becoming is a real process and that the very special becomings we shall examine here are real events at the molecular level. Lawrence's fiction is particularly amenable to a reading in terms of a philosophy of becoming as Deleuze and Guattari recognize, declaring Lawrence to be "another of those writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration, are able to tie their writings because they to real and unheard of becomings. "51 But what 184

makes the philosophy of becoming quintessentially Nietzschean is that it is counter traditional ontology thought in terms of fixed 'being', and wholly antiChristian; as Christian theology and morality is also founded upon a notion of an essential and eternal self (the 'immortal soul'). As Deleuze and Guattari write: "Theology is very strict on the following point: there are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is because there is no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable and only entertain relations of analogy." 52 But not Nietzschean philosophy does concerning itself with the non-human worry about Christian law, happily and inhuman aspects of the human being, and whilst well aware that the latter cannot become animal at the molar level of reality, nevertheless insists that there is "a demonic reality of the becoming- animal of the human being. "53 Thus, suddenly, the supposedly 'occult' aspects of Nietzsche's and Lawrence's project of revaluation no longer seem quite so outlandish. Ultimately, becoming is as much a 'black art' as it is a gay science or radical ontology, and if it is designed to upset theologians, so too does it disconcert and irritate those secular priests the psychoanalysts. For, like Christianity, psychoanalysis understands very little of the nature of becomings; refusing to admit the fact that a man or woman can in a very real sense transmutate and wishing only to deal with the human, all too human. Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, fully recognizes that our 'thisness' "longitude at a sub-atomic and latitude, level is not a question of the personal, a set of speeds and slownesses between but of unformed particles" 54, that men and women are no longer identifiable in human term s, but exist rather as a chaos of non-subjectified effects and what Lawrence calls 'vibrations' . When thought in terms of will to power, being is always a process of becoming. Of course, the question that arises is: to what end do all these becomings move? 185

Deleuze and Guattari seem to be uncertain here; for, on the one hand, they insist that "a line of becoming has neither beginning or end, departure origin nor destination'P>, nor arrival, whilst, on the other hand, they suggest that there is a becoming towards which all other becomings rush - what they term a 'becomingimperceptible': "The imperceptible is the inherent of becoming, its cosmic formula. "56 At this point the philosophy of becoming again resembles an 'occult' teaching of some kind, into which one can only be initiated via an experience in intensity. If it can be 'explained' or 'interpreted' at all, it can only be done so by relating it to Lawrence's thinking on the fourth dimension, which is itself far from clear and bordering on the mystical. The fourth dimension is the place wherein we arrive after travelling in intensity, according to Lawrence; "the realm of calm delight, it is the other kingdom of bliss"57 and here we "accomplish perfection'P" and have our greatest experience of being. Mellors and Connie reach this transcendent state via their relationship with one another and by surrendering to desire. But also, crucially, by affirming themselves as creatures of flesh and blood who belong to time and space. For, according to Lawrence, like a rose, man blossoms in the fourth dimension, but has to have his roots firmly planted and fed in the realm of existence. He writes: "The clue to all existence is being. But you can't have being without existence ... Being is not ideal, as Plato would have it: nor spiritual. It is a transcendental form of existence, and is as much material as existence is. Only the matter suddenly enters the fourth dimension. "59 - Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, becomes-imperceptible. vanishing, It is not a question of but of establishing a new relationship with the cosmos, and can be accomplished by man, bird, beast, or flower: "It is into this perfected relation that every straightline curves'v? and towards which every becoming moves. Part II: Schizoanalysis: Of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, 186 and Becomings.

II.i. The Case of Lady Chatterley: The Becoming of the New Eve. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Connie is not so much broken down, as stripped naked": recognize her 'Ladyship') rational-moral stripped not only of her social status (for desire does not but also of her very humanity as defined in the tradition. And thus she reaches what Lawrence terms her 'ultimate nakedness' and by which he means the state in which she is free of all shame and bad conscience concerning her body and all its secret openings, flows, forces and desires. Only when released from her white-faced personal self characterized fear (her oedipalized subjectivity which some feminist commentators by would mistakenly have her cling onto), does Connie become the New Eve and enter into the fourth dimensional realm of bliss, innocence and imperceptibility. But this she achieves not by denying her womanhood and sexual difference from the man, but, rather, by affirming it and rejoicing in the fact that she is the: '''Best bit 0' cunt left on earth'" (LeL, p.177). And, importantly, as we shall see, Connie learns also to submit before the knowledge of her absolute dependence upon the man; just as Mellors in turn is obliged to recognize that he needs her for his fulfilment and perfection. Individually the lovers may well exist as readymade personalities, but only when united into what Lawrence calls the 'phallic body' do they become at last who they are in a greater (non-personal or egoic) sense. Thus sex does offer a vital clue to being within Lawrence's ontology; Connie is transformed if via the intrusion of the phallus into her body (via both vagina and anus). so too is Mellors transformed by his experience of 'cunt'. Michael Squires says in his 1994 introduction to the novel, that Connie's cries at the point of orgasm "yield at last a 'life exclamation', an affirmation'< and this is indeed so. But he is mistaken to suggest that these cries have 'human significance' 187

or some kind of anthropomorphic value; rather, they simply echo the 'peep! peep!' of the tiny chick that Connie balances in the palm of her hand (LCL, p. 116) and demonstrate that she has learned how to make "weird, wordless cries, like the animals" (K, p.333). Squires is wrong also to suggest that Connie achieves this becoming-animal simply by opening herself up to the "unknown, unexpected, unleashed forces that roil unconquerable in the self." 3 On the contrary, it is by opening herself up to the forces that belong to that which is external and other to the self (forces partly destructive, partly regenerative) that Connie is transfigured. this is, for Lawrence, the heterosexual And central to coition and a genuine letting go of self within the flood of non-self induced orgasm." This is why Squires is mistaken too when he informs us that throughout the process of physical awakening and sexual becoming, Connie retains her 'personal integrity'. For whilst, as we argued in Part I.v., it is vital to retain small amounts of subjectivity, the essential point is surely that in a very real sense the above is precisely what to a fateful (though overcomes. In becoming-animal, sexed and embodied), becoming-woman (i.e., And as for the nature of her 'integrity', it is anything (a word which Lawrence himself frequently uses in his texts, but always pejoratively); integrity'), becoming-elemental, and she becomes so much more than merely human in the sexless and abstract-ideal. but 'personal' not fatal) degree Connie surrenders rather, it is a 'fertile integrity' i.e., a (pro- )creative sexual integrity (cf. Mellors's 'virile founded upon difference and becoming, not unity of self and identity. Ultimately, 'personal integrity' can be nothing other than the sterile "integrity of the mind" (LCL, p. 31) which Clifford and his intellectual Cambridge friends believe in defending. Let us step back for a moment at this point: for it 188 IS important to avoid

confusion here. When we say that the forces Squires identifies are entirely outside of Connie's self, we mean only her known-conscious self (i.e., external to her ego). This is not to deny that they were undoubtedly present within Connie's body and Lawrence restlessness makes clear that that was "taking possession they are responsible for of her like a madness" a growing (LCL, p.20). Naturally, Connie is at least semi-aware of her condition: "Vaguely, she knew that she was going to pieces in some way." (ibid.) But, if disturbing to Connie, Lawrence makes clear that this is not, in his view, necessarily a bad thing, nor a process to be halted or reversed. Echoing Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack Up, Lawrence affirms that life itself is a process of breaking down and it is only via such that one can achieve a breakthrough to a new life. Nietzsche also stresses that iibergehen procedes via untergehen; i.e., those who would overcome must first be prepared to undergo a trial of some kind in which they sacrifice from the old self. But, to reiterate our earlier conclusion, the crack up or breakdown is not an end In itself; reterritorializations deterritorialization is a process, not a goal. And are a vital part of that process; not as goals reached or ends in themselves, but as temporary - though vital - arrests and formations en route. It is not just physically that Connie is aware of herself going to pieces, she also experiences nihilism as a breakdown of values and beliefs: "All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation" (LCL, p.62). As this process increases in velocity Connie feels her life become more and more dreamlike, less and less real, with no substance "to her or anything - no touch, no contact" (LCL, p.18), just empty signs and hollow men and women. This simulacrum of reality is challenged, however, when Connie chances upon Mellors washing himself; this is a great moment of revelation for her, a "visionary experience" which makes itself felt "in the middle of her body" (LCL, p.66). It is not that Mellors is particularly well-built, he has a creature's pure singularity; or even young and good-looking, but "the warm, white flame of a single life 189

revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!" (ibid.) In fact, the nature of Connie's visionary experience is of the kind craved for by Lou in St. Mawr and which we discussed briefly last chapter; a glimpse of the physically present animal-man. When, following this secret encounter, Connie stands naked before her full-length bedroom mirror contrast, to gaze upon her own body, she is horrified to see that, in her flesh lacks any beauty or mystery; that there is nothing to wonder at or yearn to touch. Her body: "was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant It made her feel immensely depressed, substance. hopeless ... She was old, old at twenty-seven, flesh" (LCL, p.70). Instinctively, and with no gleam and sparkle in the Connie realizes that it has been the life that she has been leading at Wragby which is in a large part to blame; the sexless life of 'personal integrity' that leaves the body wretched and frustrated in its desire to be in touch with other bodies and the physical world: "The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!" (ibid., p.71). She is contemptuous of the ideas expressed by two of Clifford's 'feminist' friends (Lady Bennerton and Olive), who argue for the 'immunization' of women against the sickness that is pregnancy and the future breeding of babies in bottles, ensure that 'functions', they need no longer be 'dragged and will thus be 'liberated': down' by their to reproductive '''So long as you can forget your body, you are happy ... So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily, without our knowing it'" (LCL, pp.74-5). But what sort of sleep-walking 'happiness' is this? It is, of course, the happiness longed for by the last man (or, in this case, the last woman), living in his (or her) brave new world; a civilization that wants to deny the experiences of the body (for these may bring pain and inconvenience) and live as exclusively as it 190

can do at the level of the asexual 'spirit'. instinctively feels in active opposition would brand as a 'discontent'. It is a form of civilization that Connie to and she becomes one whom Freud At first, realizing the necessity of her opposition to the social order she is very much a part of (as her title indicates), frightens her: "She was ... afraid of the horrible power of society and its commandments which she had broken" (FLC, p.155) and yet she cannot help but feel herself "dynamically an enemy of society" (ibid.) and refuses to apologise for this, or surrender to any sense of guilt. Consciously, she knows that our civilized industrial order is 'insane' and instinctively she wishes to flee from "the insanity of the whole civilized species" (LeL, p.110). Does Connie's discontent and her becoming a woman of desire make her into a 'revolutionary' however? Deleuze and Guattari would undoubtedly answer 'yes' to this question, and they would do so because, for them: "Desire does not want 'revolution' ... it is revolutionary in its own right. "5 Thus, to very slightly paraphrase what they argue in order to relate it to our study here; "desire does not threaten a society because it is a desire to sleep with the (gamekeeper], but because it is revolutionary. And that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom[s] of [Wragby], they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order." 6 Connie decides she has to break out from her old life and cut herself loose from the reactive forces of civilization that hold her in place: "She had been fastened by a rope, and jagging and snarring like a boat at its moorings" (LCL, p. 86). But once loose and adrift, life without aim. Connie does not simply float through Rather: "She seemed to get into the current of her proper destiny" (ibid.) via a 191

listening to her blood and the greater intelligence of the body. If sailing against the tide, she has no thoughts of scuppering the little boat of herself; rather, she wants to find new seas and new lands (not sink and drown). However, she cannot achieve this alone; desire is a collective and social affair which at the very least joins together constructing two things, two people. If securing her own freedom and her own body without organs is to be achieved she needs to come back into touch with others. And sex, says Lawrence is the deepest form of touch. Thus Connie seeks out and takes in Mellors a lover. But at first things do not seem to go well between them. During their first two sexual encounters, Connie remains bound within her egoic isolation: "And she knew partly it was her own fault. She willed herself into this separateness. perhaps she was condemned to it" (LCL, encounter there is a significant Now P.126). However, during their third breakthrough. Now, for the first time, she experiences an orgasm which has not been worked from her own will; une petite marte, rather than merely un petit mal. And this 'little death' is the death of the old Connie and marks the beginning of her becoming-woman and the New Eve: "Connie went slowly home, realising the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft and sensitive in her womb and bowels" (ibid., p.135). In the earlier second version of the novel, Lawrence makes clear that this other self refers not to the embryo conceived, but to the woman Connie is to become, by adding: "Why had no one warned her of the possibility of metamorphoses, or metempsychoses, the strange terror and power and incalculability of it all?" (JTU, p.135).7 This other self is new not so much in its passion, as in its willingness to abandon willing and submit before that which it is not and those powers external to and greater than itself. Lawrence tells us that Connie had always feared adoration: "For it left her helpless. She feared it still. For if she adored him too much, then 192

she would lose herself, become effaced. And she did not want to be effaced. A slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave" (LCL, p.135). So, even in the midst of her 'awakening', Connie allows a certain willed resistance to remain in place. Ultimately, however, Connie does not want to see the triumph of the will: "It was known and barren, birthless", and she accepts adoration as her treasure, sinking into "the new bath of life" (ibid., p.136). The ideas of submission and adoration, touched on in chapter two, will be discussed in relation to the democracy of touch later. Here, let us examine how they relate to a philosophy of becoming. Connie does not want to be 'effaced' we are told. Yet in having to surrender the personal self this is precisely what she must be, as, at times, she knows. There is an interesting passage on 'faciality' and the question of losing one's face in The First Lady Chatterley: Connie asks Clifford if he doesn't think that "'it is rather a pity that we never see anything of people but their faces?'" (FLC, p.29). When Clifford replies that it is the face alone which reveals the personality, Connie then asks: "'Mayn't there be something else besides the personality'"'' - meaning of course - '''Mightn't personality?'" (ibid.) the body have a life of its own - perhaps truer than the Clifford is deeply irritated. For talk of the body is 'dangerous ground' for those such as Clifford who would live in triumph over and denial of the physical reality of man. But Connie discovers "a new vague idea to ponder: the body, living a pure, untouched life of its own, apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!" (ibid.) Deleuze and Guattari theorize the above in their work: "If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics becoming-clandestine. "8 involving Thus we see the 193 real becomings, proto-Connie of an entire The First Lady

Chatterley retire to her bedroom one evening and: "put a thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman ... And thus she stood naked before her mirror and looked at her slow, golden-skinned, silent body" (FLC, p.30). becomes after all the 'savage woman' that the later Connie half-fears, to become; the non-western, coloured non-Christian, in this scene, non-white). This Connie half-wants alien woman (even her skin is golden Connie becomes-minoritarian and, for a moment, escapes the tyranny of the face. But does she also become a slave? Many feminist commentators effacement in entirely fear so and see this taking up of the veil and self- negative terms; concerned as they are primarily with 'personal' freedom and 'individual' rights; not with impersonal fulfilment via the surrendering of one's individuality. However, I would argue that Connie does not become a slave - in fact, just the reverse. For as Lawrence writes, the modern slave is not she who escapes the face (i.e., the self she has been given), rather: "The modern slave is [she] who does not receive [her] powers from the unseen, and give reverence, but who thinks [she] is [her] own little boss. Only a slave would take the trouble to shout: I am free! That is to say, to shout in the face of the open heavens. In the face of men, and their institutions and prisons, yes - yes! But in the face of the open heavens I would be ashamed to talk about freedom. I have no life, no real power, accomplish nothing, unless it will come to me. And I not even my own fulfilled existence, unless I go forth, delicately, desirous, and find the mating of my desire". 9 And this requires submission: not of the woman to the man (nor of the man to the woman); but of the personal to the impersonal; the egoic to the cosmic; the human to the daimonic. Before these forces men and women must learn submission and reverence; forces symbolized in Lady Chatterley's Lover by the phallus, as Connie comes to appreciate: "Vaguely, she realised for the first time in her life what the phallus meant, and her heart seemed to enter anew, 194 wide

world" (JTLJ, pp.236-7).lO The slave revolt in morals begins, arguably, as a revolt against the phallus; the free man and woman (free of fear, free of shame, and free of self-contempt) is happy to submit before the phallus and accept it as a bridge to the future. When the 'phallic wonder' is dead in us, we become wretched, Lawrence argues; and he means that without such an experience of wonder we can have no understanding of the beauty in things as things. Only when the phallic wonder is healthy and strong can man come into living touch with the physical world and transcend the subject/object frustrate divide which usually serves to sever us from the latter and our desire to actively participate in the mystery of life. By daring to acknowledge the phallus as she does, Connie slowly learns how to respond to and come into touch with not only the body of her lover, but with animals, trees, rain, moonlight and even the most seemingly mundane of everyday objects (such as the kettle in Mellors's cottage), all of which sparkle with a fresh glamour and delight. Connie is thus obliged to accept that which Kate had also to accept in The Plumed Serpent (as we saw last chapter); independent and autonomous the need to surrender any abstract notion of an self and concede that an achieved wholeness is perfected between the two (and the two in relation to the many); i.e., is a sexual and social accomplishment. Desire is never about the one or that lonely grammatical fiction of the 'I', and a politics of desire is always in opposition to liberalism and capitalism in as much as the latter are based on the politics of the ideal individual and the economics of the self (isolation, egoism, and greed mistaken for freedom and happiness). Becoming is never straightforward however, and thus it is that even after her experience with Mellors in the woods, Connie slips back into her wilful personal mode, so that when she and he next fuck she is struck by the absurdity 195 of the

sex act: "Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart" (LCL, p.172); i.e., Connie makes the error of surrendering a moment of sheer intensity and of translating experience into mere representation. As Lawrence would say, she gets her sex into her head (see chapter one). Not until she is fucked once more by the seemingly ever-virile Mellors, does she dare to again let go of herself within the flood of desire. Finally, when fucked for a third time in succession: "Her whole self quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm" (ibid., p.173) and she rises full now of scorn and contempt not for the body of her lover, but for the ideas of her husband. Thus when Clifford quotes to her from one of "the latest scientificreligious books" (ibid., p.233) that he is reading, that the universe is physically contracting on the one hand and spiritually ascending on the other, startlingly Nietzschean in response, saying of the author: Connie is "'It only means he's a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure"', adding; '''the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life" (ibid., p.234). Clifford looks at her, once more, with astonishment and disgust: "'The life of the body''', he says, "'is just the life of the animals. '" Connie replies: '''that's professorial corpses'" better than the life of (ibid.), as she thinks of her own body and how she has danced naked in the rain with it, rejoicing with the "sound healthy selfishness that issues from a mighty soul" and a "beautiful, victorious, refreshing body" .11 The above narcissistic JOY - beyond all immature autoeroticism "contain the germ of a different and which may reality principle"12 - is made complete once Connie passes through the final stage of her 'initiation' into phallic wonder; the 'night of sensual passion', as Lawence calls it. Not surprisingly to readers of the earlier novels, this involves an act of anal sex as a transgressive and transforming means of consummation and becoming: "the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, of her .... stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock 196 of her nature, and

was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed" (LCL, pp.246-7). As we have seen in chapters one and three, the overcoming of shame and bad conscience regarding one's physical self is crucial to the project of revaluation; above all men and women must liberate the mind from its "old grovelling fear of the body and the body's potencies." 13 Connie accepts and affirms herself in full and, like her Lawrencean sister Kate, in The Plumed Serpent, allows the snake to coil in peace about her ankle as she rises as the New Eve: naked, innocent, joyful, and defiant. II.ii. The Case of Lady Chatterley's Lover: The Becoming of the Old Adam. In terms of becoming, Mellors is perhaps the least interesting of the central characters in Lady Chatterley's Lover. For although he too is 'broken open', his most profound transformation occurs between the three versions of the novel; Mellors is in effect the becoming of Oliver Parkin, which, as we shall see, is a becoming-woman and a becoming- hors c/asse (as well as a becoming apolitical at a molar, party-belonging level). Mellors is also the overcoming of Parkin, as the latter proves too limited for the role of advocate which Lawrence demands of him, as Nietzsche of Zarathustra. Mellors makes a dramatic first entrance in chapter five of Lady Chatterley's Lover and somewhat frightens Connie as he emerges from the woods. His red-face and red-hair indicate he is very much a son of the Old Adam (the man of red earth). A man very different to her husband Clifford - but also very different from the man that he had once been; i.e., Oliver Parkin, as conceived by Lawrence in the earlier two versions of the novel. Even between the Parkin of The First Lady Chatterley (henceforth PI) and the Parkin of John 197 Thomas and Lady Jane

(henceforth P2), there are crucial differences. Here we shall indicate some of these as we trace the becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin. It is a process which tells us something of import about Lawrence's changing thinking to do with politics, revolution, class, and the best strategies for engaging with and surviving in the modern world. Towards the end of John Thomas and Lady Jane, Connie writes in a letter to P2: "I was afraid you were just going to deteriorate into a socialist or a fascist, or something dreary and political" (JTLl, p.369). It is as if she were remembering what had happened to her lover in The First Lady Chatterley: for this is precisely what happens to PI, who ends by becoming a worker in a steel plant and secretary Connie by revealing of the local communist league. PI disappoints himself to be as firmly class-conscious and class-entrenched Clifford is self-conscious and ego-bound. Fortunately for Connie, P2 does not fall back into political asceticism transmutates and sentimental militancy; as her husband on the contrary, he into the superior figure of Mellors. There were two major problems presented by the semi-literate Firstly, he does not and cannot form a fully satisfactory figure of PI: lover for Connie; and, secondly, he does not and cannot form a fully satisfactory advocate for Lawrence. At times Lawrence does make a rather half-hearted suggest that PI is a 'natural aristocrat', and unconvincing attempt to and yet clearly he is no Birkin or Aaron, Somers or Ramon. Connie sadly resigns herself to the fact that "culturally, he was of another race" (FLC, p.82) from herself; even she fears him and his class, for "perhaps they were the destroyers of her class?" (ibid., p.93). And, indeed, as would-be communist revolutionary PI is the destroyer of Connie's class and he admits that his intention is to make the upper-classes "'climb down an' be like other folks'" - even if he sees no need to kill them; "'except maybe a few" (ibid., p.237). 198

In some ways, PI doesn't interest us at all with his dreary political ambitions and posturings. And yet, in other ways, he is more interesting either P2 or Mellors, working-class become her than precisely because he seems believable as an uneducated man during the mid-1920's; simply as a character Ladyship's lover, as readers we respect his refusal to or Lawrence's mouthpiece. PI IS undoubtedly a bore; but he is no fool and neither has he allowed the 'false consciousness' so often subscribed to by his class to blind him to the reality of work: '''Do you think a man loves draggin' his guts out all day long .. ?'" (ibid., p.223) he asks Connie, naively unaware that some men (many men) do. His desire, then, has not been perverted an industrial wage-system: into a desire for his own oppression within "'But I'm a slave, doomed an' damned an' I know it'" (FLC, p.224) he confesses with bitterness, or destruction his only hope residing in the collapse of capitalism: ""appen the bloody show'll smash up. It would if I could make it!'" (ibid.) Of course, PI's anger and resentment is an understandable him within an economic system based upon profit by-product of placing via exploitation of labour (something we have seen Nietzsche fail to address in his thinking). When tied to a politics of revenge, revolutionary such anger and resentment is undoubtedly a dangerous force. However, ressentiment is something that is best overcome - not politicized. It is hopeless and mistaken holding out for for either they don't come, or, worse, socialist 'smash up', they do happen, but result in more slavery, more stupidity, and a huge increase in the bullying power of the modern state machine. Those men who genuinely wish to extricate themselves from the present system need to stand aside from it and come away from the herd; not get involved in mass movements and seek party-political solutions. Certainly this has been our conclusion so far in this study. However, if PI is politically naive and personally stubborn, 199 he is to be admired

for showing an awareness that any solution will have to be at some level a collective and not simply individual one. PI is not wrong to express sympathy for his fellow men; merely mistaken in thinking that his sympathy should take the political form that he seeks to give it. Essentially, this is where P2 is an overcoming of PI: for he is far less prone to allow his sympathy get the better of him and is not prepared to sacrifice his own integrity in the name of 'class solidarity'. There are, he knows, other ways, better ways, of showing sympathy with his fellows than becoming secretary of the communist league and calling for bloody revolution. If PI cannot let go of the molar political struggle - and he admits: "'It's something as I've hold of, an' I can't let go'" (FLC, pp.239-40) - P2 decides instead to keep his hands placed firmly round the body of the woman and go with the flow of transformative desire. P2 is much closer to the man Mellors he will become, than to Pl. Much more aware of his own uniqueness and difference from other men, whilst not denying the vital need to remain in touch with others. This awareness relates very much to the fact that P2 overcomes PI and moves towards becoming-Mellors becoming-woman. Throughout John Thomas and Lady Jane, P2 is described as and admits to being like a woman in his sensitivity, movements. via a And the production his consciousness, and his of a molecular woman within the molar male subject is something that Connie encourages in her lover. For Connie can see that it means a greater awareness of his own singularity liberating him from his restricted becoming-woman and restrictive and will thus assist class-consciousness. in Further, leads to the forming of a more intuitive intelligence; a greater appreciation of the near-at-hand, for his own body, for a tactile understanding of the world and the beauty of the world. Thus it is that the development of what Lawrence calls 'phallic consciousness' is closely related to the becoming-woman 200 of

the molar male subject. However, although P2 concedes that he needs to abide by the molecular woman within himself, the idea is not one he is happy or comfortable with. In fact, he speaks of his becoming-woman with "intense "terribly humiliating to him" (]TL], pp.332-33). have a very good understanding bitterness" and the notion is But this is because P2 does not of the process; he confuses becoming-woman at the molecular level with a loss of manliness at the molar level. Connie is rightly angry with his stupidity becoming-woman, regarding or minoritarian. himself and regarding the process of She knows that the process does not in the least involve a loss of manliness; merely a loss of the stupidity and unimaginative insentience that is all too often mistaken for and confused with being a man. As Lawrence writes: a man can become woman and still retain "the finest maleness, once it is put to the test." 14 P2's becoming-woman, outsider; encouraged by Connie, obliges him to become more of an for woman is the gateway to otherness within phallogocentric culture. Specifically, P2 makes the move outside of social class, effecting a becominghors-cJasse. Michael Squires says in his introduction to Lady Chatterley's Lover that "class differences wither in the fires of physical attraction'v> and partly this is so. But in a very real sense by the time of writing the third and final version of his novel, Lawrence has already decided that such differences no longer exist within modernity. Keith Sagar writes; "the class problems which had been so inescapable between Connie and Parkin disappear 'gentleman', because Mellors is given all the credentials of a including an education and culture which ... enables him to move freely through all classes." 16 And certainly it is the case that Connie finds Mellors unlike a working man (whilst retaining 201 something in common with the local

people). But Sagar is wrong to suggest Mellors represents a bourgeoisification of Parkin; the former is not a 'gentleman' and in fact we are told that he explicitly rejects an opportunity to move into the ranks of the middle class. Further, he does not move freely through all classes (in as much as they remain), but outside of them altogether. "The lower classes of unlearned men are now our only hope. The learned and cultivated classes must be abandoned" 17 says Nietzsche, and initially Connie acts in the spirit of this, turning instinctively away from the men of her own class and towards the working man Oliver Parkin. But it does not take her very long to discover that this doesn't form a viable option; that if Nietzsche is right in the second proposition, he is wrong anywhere, as Connie discovers, nevertheless in the first. Hope, if it lies lies only with the few individual men and women who can manage to move outside of social class. For if persons of Clifford's class are passionless and out of touch, then the working class are limited in another manner: "narrow in outlook, in prejudice, and narrow in intelligence. "18 This again makes a prison. says Lawrence, who thereby arrives at the conclusion that one can ultimately belong to no class if one wishes to be free. The bridging of the gulf between classes via tenderness was Lawrence's original goal when he began to write the story of Lady Chatterley and her lover. But quite simply. the first version of the novel fails to resolve the problem of how this can be achieved. The class gulf that is firmly established between Connie and PI remains unbridged. Thus Lawrence rewrites the novel and attempts to rethink the class issue. In John Thomas and Lady Jane we are suddenly informed: "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie. or the proud aristocracy. 202 Bolshevist or fascist. the world

was proletariat, a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity" (JTLJ, p.293). In other words, the whole of human society was - in a word used frequently by Lawrence at this time - 'robot'. If he was prepared to still acknowledge that "the homogeneity of the proletariat was divided between haves and have nots, owners and wage earners, capitalists and workers" (JTLJ, p.293), Lawrence now repeatedly argued that it was no longer helpful to think politically in terms of opposing classes. Such a view finds support Guattari. In chapter ten of Anti-Oedipus, in the thinking of Deleuze and they write that there is only one class within the capitalist socius; though - contra Lawrence - they claim this should be thought of not as one huge proletariat, but rather as one vast bourgeoisie. Whatever we decide to call this robot-mass, represents the negation of all genuine social order as exists in pre-capitalist pre-modern the key point is surely that it society, and as Nietzsche wishes to see reinstated and within a post- modern political culture. When all forms of status and caste have been decoded by the anarcho-nihilistic forces of capitalism, the end result is a non-society wherein the only distinction between people rests on how much money they own and/or earn. Slavery in the old, despotic sense, at least implies the existence of masters. But within capitalism there is instituted; unprecedented subjugation: "an unrivalled there are no longer any masters, commanding other slaves ... The bourgeoisie slavery, an but only slaves sets the example ... more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine" .19 Deleuze and Guattari continue (and again can be seen to offer support for Lawrence's analysis): "It will be said that there 203 IS nonetheless a class that rules

and a class that is ruled ... the distinction between the flow of finance and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two in the differential relations and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. "20 Thus it is that Clifford, for example, doesn't really rule; he is no real master, merely another robot himself. Connie is right to say to him: '''You don't rule, don't flatter yourself! You have only got more than your share of the money You only bully with your money" (LCL, Clifford's class is now robot-degenerate pp.I93-4). In fact, the whole of and impotent (not just him personally) and so must be abandoned, as Nietzsche rightly says. But, unfortunately, so too is the whole of Parkin's class robot and rotten through with the money-disease: "Connie thought how extremely like all the rest of the classes the lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again ... There was only one class nowadays ... the only difference was how much you'd got, and how much you wanted" (LCL, p.I05). Realising this, i.e., that class is essentially a redundant notion to think in terms of, helps free Connie from her old fears and prejudices; she concludes "few that the only people who really matter individuals who have not been proletarianized" Guattari say: "the theoretical opposition (JTLJ, for her are those p.294). As Deleuze and is not between two classes ... Ibut I between the class and those outside the class. Between the servants of the regime, and those who sabotage it or its cogs and wheels. "21 Thus a politics of desire is fought not by class warriors such as PI, but by those nomads such as P2 and Mellors, who do not belong or fit in - and who do not want to belong or fit in. These discontents and deviants are not so much declasse as Ies hors-classe (the latter term having an affinity to both hors-caste (outcast) and hors-le-Ioi (outlaw)). It is with these men and women hope for the future lies; they, if anyone, will establish the democracy of touch. By daring to become- 204

woman and become-outsider, P2 avoids the fate of PI and moves toward becoming the phallic man Mellors whom we can now return to and examine his attempt to form a politics of desire. We know now that Mellors is a man in the process of becoming-woman and one who moves on the outside. As an outsider he is marked as if with the mark of Cain and feared as if truly a son of the Old Adam. But Cain - from the Greek kainos - means 'newness', and thus although Mellors is a transgressor of moral and social laws, so too is he a new man beyond good and evil; innocent in the radical Nietzschean sense. Thus Lawrence tells us that Mellors has: "No sense of wrong or sin: he was troubled by no conscience in that respect" (LCL, p.120). Mellors - the shameless one - is broken open between his desire for Connie on the one hand and his dread of society on the other. He knows from experience that his affair with her ladyship will inevitably bring him back into contact and conflict with the latter; for just as a man alone can never finally withdraw into privacy, nor can lovers find sanctuary in a world of their own creation: world allows no hermits" (ibid., p.ll9) Sensing her lover's post-coital (ibid., p.ll8), "The and couples do not fuck in isolation. angst, Connie says cheerfully '''It's just love'" but Mellors knows that love is never just something on its own; it means life and all the complications and entanglements of life, and, in away, he regrets being thrown back into the struggle once more: '''I thought I'd done with it all. Now I've begun again'" (ibid.). Coming into touch means opening oneself up to suffering as well as pleasure and by taking Connie as his mate so too does Mellors consciously bring on himself a "new cycle of pain and doom" (ibid., p.119). But, crucially, Mellors also knows that it has to be thus - if he is to live and become a little human again then there can be no splendid isolation: "'There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep clear, you might as well die. So if I've got 205

to be broken open again, I have'" (ibid., p. 118). In fact, as soon as Mellors emerges from an illicit piece of fucking with Connie, he begins to offer a critique of society; convinced that if he is to protect their love then he will have to engage with the world of the mechanical and greedy. Mellors wants to see a new order of tenderness and this is due, according to Lawrence, to the fact that a sexually fulfilling contact alters the very composition of the blood and gives rise to a new post-coital social urge: "Men, being themselves made new after the act of coition, wish to make the world anew"22; i.e., the will to power in the lover craves a new affirmative and collective activity: "That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men. "23 This is why desire is of great social and political import; once he is broken open once more and alive within the flow of desire, Mellors longs for wider comradeship: "Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling-electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life ... and the natural riches of desire" (LCL, p.120), he thinks to himself. For alone he knows there is little or nothing he can do to defeat the 'vast evil thing' (Mammon); even he will not be able to protect himself and Connie for very long from the overwhelming forces of "the insentient iron world" (ibid, p.119). But where can he find comrades? PI of course turned to members of what he identified as his own class and to the communist party, but Mellors doesn't have this option, existing outside of class and molar politics. working people (even the communists) He knows that the are as hopeless as the degenerate middle and upper classes, all glorying in the great social machine: '''All the lot. Their spunk's gone dead'" (ibid., p.2l7). During his bleakest moments he finds some solace in the fact that if modern man continues along his present path, he will end by killing himself in a grand suicidal auto da fe. But Mellors cannot help also having hopes for a (transhuman) mankind to come. For whilst he may at some 206

level be at war with society, he still wishes to retain his "deep peace with mankind ... preserving mankind'<+, ultimately, [his] peace of soul which is peace with the living, struggling i.e., the non-slavish real mankind assembled upon active forces. This, is all Mellors can do; keep his peace of soul and abide by the little forked flame fucked into being between himself and Connie. As much as he may like to personally '''wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial era absolutely, like a black mistake"', he realizes he can't '''an' nobody can'" (LCL, p.220), so he had best hold his peace and try and live his own life as best he can, waiting, perhaps, like Lilly tells Aaron to wait, for another to come along with whom he, and he and Connie, can form a new society. This society we are calling here, after Lawrence, a democracy of touch. And we are essentially in agreement with Mellors that such a society will grow out of a new economy of bodies and their pleasures and from a warmth of heart between men and women: "'I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right'" (LCL, p.206). Admittedly, as a piece of 'political philosophy' - if it is this at all - this appears vacuous and banal. Can anyone seriously be expected to believe that it is possible not only to fuck one's arrangements way into bliss, but into new social and cultural as well? It is certainly the very last hope and one can detect a certain despair here. And yet, as Connie says, if there is to be a future at all for man there will have to be established a new touch between bodies and the development of a new sensibility which she calls 'tenderness'. Mellors picks up this term and employs it in his own thinking, agreeing with Connie that what is most needed is "'that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way'" (ibid., p.277). We should note, however, that this tenderness of touch is also a tenderness strength; of not weakness, and it bears little relation to the Christian ideal of love. 207

If Mellors is warm hearted in his fucking, so too is he passionate with anger against the Clifford Chatterleys of this world; not full of charity, forgiveness, or the rancid milk of human kindness. Let us close this study as Lawrence closes the novel; i.e., with the letter from Mellors to Connie which sets out in further detail his vision of the world to come. In one of the most important passages, Mellors argues that the majority of people would be sound and healthy: "'If you could only tell them that living and spending aren't the same thing! ... If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend ... if they could dance and hop and skip and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash .... They ought to be naked and handsome, all of them, and to move and be handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own emblems. Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness without needing to spend .... They should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He's the only god for the masses, forever. The few can go in for higher cults if they like. But let the mass be forever pagan'" (LeL, pp.299-300). The above is an extraordinary passage, Lawrence's own concerns - cultural, incorporating at it does many of political, and religious - and serves as a useful summary of his philosophy. It also, of course, returns us to many of the themes of this thesis; including, for example, the notion of a god who can save us (in this case Pan). As with the closing of The Rainbow, Lawrence offers us in the above passage a vision of "individual and communal regeneration inhabitants of the contemporary industrial world are transformed fulfilled and joyful beings". 25 And, crucially, 208 in which the into free, the vision in as much as it

anticipates a general transformation of society as a whole, can be said to be 'democratic' . Of course, as we shall discuss shortly in III.i., democracy and his use of the term is particular. commentators contrary, Lawrence's And, understanding indeed, for of many there is nothing at all democratic about the above vision; on the they find it suggestive of something politically sinister, full as it is of the volkisch imagery that the Nazis were to employ and exploit so successfully. Admittedly, the communal singing and dancing, the handicrafts, the neo- pagamsm, and the obvious privileging of the physical over the intellectual, make one think not only of Ramon's plumed serpent experiment, do but of the 'strength through joy' programmes of the Third Reich. Thomas Mann is said to have once described national socialism as: "an attempt to take over the world in the name of thatched roofs, folk dances, and solstice celebrations'S? and critics of Lawrence are quick to latch onto such (rather lazy if mildly amusing) characterizations and apply them to his political thought. But, just as when Heidegger, for example, refers to Black Forest farmhouses in his work he "in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses" 27, nor does Lawrence ever mean to suggest we could go back to a preindustrial, pre-modern could be a return Yolksgcmeinscheit (any more than Nietzsche thought there made to ancient Greek culture). However, Lawrence, Heidegger and Nietzsche, does hold out some hope for a future like based upon another becoming for man (or, another revealing, a different will to power). Each dares to philosophically experiment and poetically explore; each dares to demand and advocate the impossible; each dares to dream, believing the answer to the question raised by Andre Breton in the first Surrealist manifesto - "Cannot the dream also be applied to the solution of the fundamental problems of life?"28 - to be a profound Yes. 209

Of course, even dreams can, if we are not careful, dangerously mutate into nightmares and totalitarian utopias cl la Fourier et a/. But Lawrence and Nietzsche are saved from such fascist dreaming by their anti-idealism and by their thinking in terms of desire, difference, and becoming. Thus if Mellors wants people to sing, this is surely different and preferable to wanting them to sieg heil; if he wants them to dance, this is because he dreads the thought of them marching in step; if he wants them to be naked and handsome, this is so they need never again be dressed in ugly uniforms. And by acknowledging Pan rather than the new idol of the state, people are saved from all manner of stupidity and able to affirm cultural and religious pluralism, as well as their own lives in the flesh as lived on the earth and within time. The vision, then, set out by Mellors in his letter to Connie, is of value; he gives us the first glimpse of a democracy of touch behind which lies not fascist idealism, but the "inexhaustible vitality of a common physical life." 29 Part III: Postanalysis: Towards a Democracy of Touch. Ul.i. Opening Remarks on the Mystery of Touch and Lawrence's Notion of Democracy. Mellors doesn't actually use the expression 'democracy of touch'; it is in fact a coinage belonging to Tommy Dukes, who is of the view that '''our civilization is going to fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus!'" (LCL, p.75). This 'bridge' will lead us to a new social phase in which there will be 'genuine' men and women beyond the '''mechanical and intellectual experiments" (ibid.) in decadence that modern men and women have become. This new social phase Dukes calls the 'democracy of touch', and he contrasts it with the liberal-capitalist pocket'. 'democracy of Connie is intrigued by Dukes and his talk of the 'resurrection 210 of the

body' and the democracy of touch: "She didn't at all know what the latter meant, but it comforted her; as meaningless things may do" (ibid., pp.75-6). But is it simply a meaningless (if comforting) notion? And if not, what then does it mean and how can we use it theoretically in relation to other radical political notions? These are the questions I hope to address below. Clearly, for Dukes himself the democracy of touch is just another piece of fanciful talk; this is his limitation as an impotent intellectual. But equally clear is the fact that Lawrence wants us to explore and develop the notion further as readers; to invest it with concrete meaning and put it to work as a productive idea. He himself also uses the phrase and expands upon it outside of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in both his poetry and essays and we shall shortly draw upon these in our attempt to substantiate the mystery of touch. Firstly, however, let us see what is said of the democracy of touch in the earlier versions of the novel. In The First Lady Chatterley, it is not Tommy Dukes, but Duncan Forbes, who speaks of a democracy of touch; suggesting that what is needed in the future is not a soviet style communism (as Parkin wishes to see established), but: "'Contact! Some sort of passionate human contact ... a new relationship between men: really not caring about money, really caring for life, and the flow with one another'" (FLC, pp.242-3). By John Thomas and Lady Jane, however, Dukes has taken upon himself the role of advocate for the mystery of touch. He says: "'We've never had proper human contact - we've never been civilized enough. We're not civilized enough even now, to be able to touch one another ... The next civilization will be based on the inspiration of touch'" (JTLJ, pp.64-5).1 very antithesis And, according to Dukes, this will be the of our modern knowledge-based scientific-industrial civilization; the democracy of touch will allow for the opening into existence of a whole new 211

field of consciousness and a new innocence, and present day man will either be swept away or "'properly used in the next phase'" (ibid., p. 65) as material by a new breed of men born of active desire. "'I don't get your democracy of touch, you know,' said Olive in her casual, brutal way; 'touch what? '" (ibid., p. 66). Of course, the answer is touch one another and all things as things; touch life and be touched by it. As Lawrence says, by touch he means: "The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love: it is life itself, and in touch, we are all alive" (ibid., p.114): out of touch, we are merely walking corpses. Olive and her kind, this is simply getting 'mystical', To but as Dukes knows in attempting to substantiate and articulate the mystery of touch he is attempting to climb back down Pisgah; i.e., to come back down to earth, not lyrically ascend into the clouds, nor transcend into mysticism. And just as this is not mysticism, nor is it an ideal materialism; but, rather, a genuine libidinal materialism of the kind that the ancient Greeks and Etruscans founded their cultures upon; the democracy of touch is an attempt to reactivate the idea of culture as physis (see chapter one). As to whether or not such cultures were 'democracies', that's another question. In The First Lady Chatterley, Duncan Forbes stresses that coming into touch socially will have to be achieved via a democracy of some description: "'I've hated democracy since the War. But now I see I'm wrong calling for an aristocracy. What we want is a flow of life from one to another - to release some natural flow in us that urges to be released '" (FLC, p. 243). It is difficult not to believe that this is Lawrence speaking directly here in his own text (as he was prone to do); Lawrence seemingly confessing his error in the power trilogy of insisting on the 212

need to smash democracy and establish a radical new order, based on broadly Nietzschean lines. But, as always, we need to be subtle in our reading and exercise caution before claiming that this late development in Lawrence's thinking marks a significant break with his earlier thought. In fact, I would argue that Lawrence's use of the term 'democracy' is as 'idiosyncratic' as Nietzsche's use of the term 'innocence' and needs to be carefully interrogated if one is to avoid confusion. However, this reinterpret his earlier thinking on the question of what is the best social and IS not to imply that Lawrence doesn't seek to clarify and political form, and in John Thomas and Lady Jane he goes still further than above in admitting past error on this question. Thus when Jack Strangeways - another of Clifford's unattractive friends - is described as "a neo-conservative aristocrat and everything that was anti-democratic" and a neo- (JTLJ, p.61), just like many young intellectuals after the War including Lawrence himself, we are told that: "This bored Constance. Even in Clifford, when he kept saying democracy was a dead dog, most people should be put back into slavery, there should be a small and ruthless armed aristocracy, and so on, she felt it was mere stupidity, really (ibid., pp.61-2). Lawrence clearly wants us as readers to share ineffectuality" Connie's 'boredom' with such impotent talk and ineffectual political posturing; wants us to question what type of will it is that motivates Clifford and company and, indeed, what type of will it is at work within his own (and by extension Nietzsche's) desire for a new political elite. However, whilst Lawrence is daring in this manner to open up his previous political views to interrogation, Rather, he is most certainly not abandoning them entirely. he is seeking to make his position vulgarize and brutalize reactivity and resentment his (and Nietzsche's) distinct from those who would thinking with their own slavish (i.e., those who would 'fascisize' his thought). 213 That

Lawrence still holds to an essentially non-democratic illiberal and not founded upon the 'enlightened' should As Frank not be doubted. tone, the basic diagram of Lawrence's Arguably, it democracy clearest: willing serve" 3, Lawrence to submission. Kermode is in his poetry For Lawrence recognise 'real maintains "Despite his democracy' democracy' Revolution), the change of life" in these them and pure submit before service will this second class be restored m based understanding of in which "nobody is upon service that there are those who have either to resurrect (i.e., "2 makes the "clean flame in "homage says: Lawrence fallen from life", or who have managed who rightly to ideal or 'robot posits of democracy ideals of the French beliefs is unaltered. where in contrast notion and "never back into life and that those rare passion men and women of service">, for should only into fulfilled being themselves via and cease to be robot. It becomes clear then, new democracy that when Lawrence (of touch), nor even says the world is moving he does not mean: "a democracy property, / the emotion democracy with which we suggest Firstly, however, let us explore writers and thinkers lII.ii. An American Vision: Walt of brotherhood." the democracy with whom Lawrence Whitman's Rather, would of touch shares a of idea or ideal, nor 5 below even Nietzsche towards he means a be comfortable. in relation to other a certain affinity. Democracy of the Open Road m Relation to Lawrence's Democracy of Touch. Whilst there think of these primarily distinctions within are divisions as within his democracy between men within a democracy as based upon difference a 'democracy of the pocket'. in 'soul'; we should not relating It is Lawrence's men will have pride in themselves 214 of touch, and their to cash hope that strengths and

abilities and realise that if they have their bodies they lack nothing. In the democracy of touch, all men and woman learn how not only to be naked and handsome, but to walk naked and light. Lawrence writes: "If we are to keep our backs unbroken, we must deposit all property on the ground and learn to walk without it. We must stand aside. And when many men stand aside, they stand in a new world .... This is the Democracy, the new order. "6 And this is not only the democracy of touch, but also the democracy of the open road according to Lawrence's reading of Whitman, in which he examines the above vision of an open road in relation to his own thinking on the question of politics; subtly developing the former in line with the latter. For whilst Lawrence accepts Whitman's notion of the open road as "a great new doctrine" and perhaps even "the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself=". still he has problems with certain aspects of it. In order to indicate what these are, let us make clear first of all what the doctrine of the open road involves: Essentially, it involves a journey in intensity; a journey not dissimilar to the one undertaken by the Deleuzian schizo-nomad. A journey: "Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whoever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road. Having no direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going. Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them, and how pass? With sympathy says Whitman. "8 It is here - at the point in which Whitman introduces a notion of 'sympathy' his doctrine - that Lawrence balks; for he feels, not unreasonably, into that Whitman thereby funks the radical nature of his idea by confusing it with Christian charity and the poisonous ideal of pity. Unable to move beyond good and evil, Whitman 215

confuses the open road with the highroad of love. But Lawrence insists: "The highroad of love is no open road. It is a narrow, tight way, where the soul walks hemmed in between compulsions. "9 And ultimately, we know precisely where the highway of love is taking us: "The highway of love ends at the foot of the Cross"!", that is, in self-sacrifice, suffering, and death. Lawrence is in little doubt that if Whitman's ethic of sympathy and his vision of the open road is to be salvaged, it must be disengaged from Christian and socialist moralism and coupled instead to his own creed of phallic tenderness. When this is done, then sympathy, as a form of compassion, is understood correctly in terms of touch and a meeting within the flow of desire. It does not have anything to do with merging into oneness via an ideal identification with those who suffer, or self-sacrifice, as Whitman continued to mistakenly believe; and, indeed, as Parkin in The First Lady Chatterley believed. Essentially, Lawrence's post-moral sympathy is related to Nietzsche's notion of 'benevolence' as developed in Human, All Too Human (see: vol. I., 2.49), and it involves 'good naturedness' which Nietzsche argues libidinous) culture and a 'politeness of the heart', are vital in the construction (of touch). but not pity; traits of a genu me (phallic- Once Lawrence has 'demoralized' the ethic of sympathy, he is happy to accept and affirm Whitman's teaching of the open road as a vital contribution tenderness: to the development of a democracy of touch and "The true democracy, where soul meets soul ... and Iis I passed by or greeted according to the soul's dictate." 11 And thus the democracy of touch becomes finally a glad recognition of souls; "and a gladder worship of great and greater souls, because they are the only riches." 1 2 IIl.iii. On a Woodpath: Heideggerean Aspects of the Democracy of Touch. If, as Blanchot says, courage consists in daring to flee along the open road 216

"rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges" 13, so too does it involve sometimes straying off the above road and wandering instead along what Heidegger calls 'woodpaths' (Holzwege). To be on a woodpath means in everyday German to be on the wrong track (to be confused and lost). Heidegger, however, does not quite mean this when he uses the term; and certainly he does not regard woodpaths negatively as dead-ends, or ways that lead nowhere. Rather: "woodpaths always lead somewhere - but where they lead cannot be predicted or controlled. They force us to plunge into unknown territory, and often to retrace our steps." 14 So, at the risk of getting lost, let us briefly explore a wood path and see where it takes us. By retracing our steps somewhat, we return to the idea of a democracy of touch as one firmly rooted in the body and in the earth; it is an organic notion of culture as physis. Rootedness and organicism may have very little to do with Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic and machinic thinking, but they are important notions work in Lawrence's and in Heidegger's democracy of touch cannot be fully understood notions and without acknowledging philosophy. the without giving reference to these that it has a closer relation at last to the nineteenth century surrealism of radical French thought in the twentieth century. Volkisch Ultimately, German tradition than it does to the anarchoThus whilst the democracy of touch does involve fleeing and travelling along the open road, so too does it involve dwelling. There seems to be a contradiction and rootedness. here: between fleeing and dwelling; nomadism But actually, when we start to think both notions carefully, we discover that there is no contradiction, or paradox. For the journey along the open road is in intensity, not space. The trip is real, but is one made within the fourth dimension, constantly attempts not necessarily in the realm of actual existence. Deleuze to stress this fact; "the nomad is not necessarily one who 217

moves: some voyages take place in situ" 15; i.e., if nomads move in order to evade the codes and fixed ideals of settled peoples, this does not mean they are migrants forever wandering the face of the earth, nor that they do not, in their own way, dwell. For to dwell (Wohnen), in the philosophical sense developed by Heidegger, does not mean to be static and to stay put: "When we speak of dwelling we ... think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities ... We do not merely dwell - that would be virtual inactivity - we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and find shelter on the way, now here, now there." 16 In other words - and to reiterate - we travel and we dwell in the fourth dimension, but we live all the while in this world too. To say that we dwell within the fourth dimension is perhaps still to leave the question of wherein this dimension we dwell. The answer is that man dwells within language and desire and thus the tremendous importance of developing a language of the feelings, as Lawrence attempts to develop in Lady Chatterley's Lover, so that we may thereby be able to touch one another with our words. Thus too the importance of responding to and moving within the flow of desire: "It is desire which keeps the whole world living to me, keeps me in the flow, connected", writes Lawrence, continuing: "It is my flow of desire that makes me move as the birds and animals move ... In a kind of accomplished innocence, not shut out of the natural paradise." 17 And so, as we suggested last chapter, it is possible for man to regain and dwell within paradise; even if the thought of paradise has become for most men today merely an 'inadequate fiction'. But this dwelling in paradise is not to reside in a state of lazy contentment, such as the last man longs for. Rather, it is to experience the peace that comes of fucking and which follows victory in war. This peace and fulfilment is the positive 'freedom' Heidegger refers to in his work and 218

which Nietzsche also promotes: "To free actually means to spare ... and takes place when we leave something in its essence, when we return it specifically to its essential being". 18 This is illustrated in Lady Chatterley's Lover by Connie and Mellors, who 'free' one another in precisely this manner; the phallic body which they constitute between them does not compromise the integrity of either, nor does it bridge the pathos of distance between them as differently sexed creatures. Each finds peace and freedom within this sanctuary peace as mortals who have intitiated becoming and as those who preserve of tenderness and desire; their own being within the process of the fourfold under the sky, on the earth, and before the gods. IIl.iv. Closing Remarks on Nietzsche and the Democracy of Touch. The question to be asked at last is to what extent Lawrence's democracy of touch is compatible with Nietzsche's own political philosophy and project of revaluation. It is, of course, easy to find in Nietzsche's writings statements which appear to support almost any perspective or argument; to occupy them and invest his aphorisms invite us as readers them with our own interpretations and forces. However, I do not feel that one has in some way to abuse the generosity Nietzsche's texts, or bring shame upon him as a thinker, Lawrence's notion of a democracy of touch is profoundly of in claiming that in keeping with the spirit of the above. It is not just that the democracy of touch is rooted in the body and nature, that it is based upon an aristocratic division of men into greater and lesser souls, or that it is vehemently opposed to the scientific-industrial modern age of liberalism and capitalism. It is also the fact that there are radical and positive aspects to the democracy of touch which resonate closely with the ideas Nietzsche puts forth in his mid-period work in particular. the poem Future States Lawrence claims that: 219 For example, in

"Once men touch one another, then the modern industrial form of machine civilization will melt away and universalism and cosmopolitanism will cease ... and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness; many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope ... and all the differences given expression." 1 9 Such pluralism is consistently supported in Nietzsche's writings; he would have been one of the first to attack the cant ideal of a 'global village' and seen that the 'new world order' super-state (or California uber al/es) threatens serving the interests of corporate-media great movement is towards a mass-standardized 'multi-cultural' to become a monstrous capital and in which the identity behind an illusion of and 'individual' freedom. When Lawrence in a related poem entitled Future War, claims that the recoil into genuine multiplicity and difference will alone guarantee a meaningful peace, he can once again find support for such a view in Nietzsche. For Lawrence's desire for peace is not a 'rational' one based upon what Nietzsche calls the "liberal-optimistic world-view'r". rather it is the desire for peace that comes from difference and from touch; a non-Christian longing for peace which Nietzsche - so often thought of simply as the advocate of war and struggle - himself speaks of with hope: the peace that is hard fought for and won by the brave and courageous; the peace that comes on that 'great day' when: "a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking .. , will cry of its own free will 'we shall shatter the sword' ... and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility - that is the way to real peace",21 220

Later, in the same work, Nietzsche concedes that even democratic institutions they are presently arrangements understood and operated, are valuable as as "quarantine to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring." 22 But ultimately, Nietzsche wants to see the overcoming of such a reactive and limited (and boring!) notion of democracy; i.e., to see a democracy of fear give way to one of exuberance and strength which, like the democracy of touch, will: "create and guarantee as much independence as possible; independence of opinion, of mode of life and of employment. "23 Such a democracy yet to come is in stark contrast to the modern ideal: "That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels. "24 That is, the wheels of the moral-rational state machine which grinds man ever- smaller, ever more alike, ever closer to the level of the last man; that is the streets are the same ones that Connie found so hideous and depressing, lined with row after row of scab-like similar constructions, houses of the kind which, when Zarathustra saw caused him to ask: "'What do these houses mean? ... Did a silly child perhaps take them out of its toy-box? ... And these sitting-rooms and bedrooms: are men able to go in and out of them?"'25 Zarathustra wants what Connie wants and Nietzsche wants what Lawrence wants: new houses and new streets; houses which are also dwelling places, streets which are also open roads. And they want too new social, economic, political, and cultural arrangements, in which the "three great enemies of independence in the above threefold sense"26 have been abolished as classes of men: these enemies being the indigent (i.e., the resentment-ridden poor and envious); the party- political ascetics and militants who call for revolution and lust for revenge (eg., communists such as PI); and the rich who have lost touch and all understanding 221

of the aristocratic motto Noblesse Oblige (eg., those like Sir Clifford Chatterley). Thus, to conclude, we may say that Lawrence's democracy of touch is very much a model that Nietzsche would have approved of - and, in fact, anticipated in several ways. If it is a vision of a possible future, nevertheless it does involve a return to forgotten forces and past values; our task being to reactivate these in some manner and then construct determining conditions new forms on the basis of them under the and within the context of the present. The project of establishing a democracy of touch ties then closely to that of the revaluation; it is a call, ultimately, to: "reestablish the great relations which the grand idealists with their underlying pessimism ... destroyed for us: Buddha, Plato, Jesus, they were all utter abstracting pessimists as regards life, teaching that the only happiness lay in oneself from life, the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit. But now, after almost 3000 years ... we realise that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings dull inertia. And the great saviours and teachers only cut us off from life. "27 And thus the politics of desire expands into a 'reckoning' (auseinandersetzung) at last with the 'great saviours and teachers'; which means for us in the West, above all, a reckoning with Christ: the Crucified. 222

Chapter V: The Escaped Cock: Revaluation and Resurrection: the Politics of Desire Part II. Part I: Versus the Crucified. I.i. Nietzsche as Anti-Christ. In an early note from the Nachlass material Nietzsche writes: "Even mockery, cynicism and hostility toward Christianity have run their course ... A considerate and seemly abstention seems to me to be the only appropriate attitude". I And yet by the end of his intellectual career Nietzsche has publically styled himself as the 'Anti-Christ', and is only too full of mockery, cynicism, and, above all, hostility toward Christianity, which he now regards as "the extremist corruption one great ... the curse, the one intrinsic thinkable form of depravity ... the one immortal blemish of mankind"? Daniel Breazeale notes with regard to this increase in hostility over the years that it suggests Nietzsche's later, more negative appraisal of Christianity, upon a more profound analysis of religion in general is "based and Christianity in particular, rather than being in any sense a vestige of adolescent rebellion." 3 And certainly, if one traces Church throughout the development of Nietzsche'S attitude towards the the course of his work, this is revealed to be the case. To trace such a development is to discover why Nietzsche is not simply being crassly reductive in declaring his entire philosophical project can be understood in the formula Dionysus versus the Crucified, nor simply being melodramatic to declare himself the Anti-Christ. Of course, to trace such a development in any detail is outside the scope of this thesis, limited as it is in length. However, we can and must make a few brief remarks on Nietzsche Christianity. 223 and his complex relation to

Whilst Nietzsche is keen to retrospectively crypto-anti-Christ persuade us that he was already a in The Birth of Tragedy, the fact is that it is not really until Human, All Too Human that his attitude towards Christianity begins to decisively harden. For Nietzsche begins to realise that one cannot simply turn one's back upon a phenomenon such as Christian-nihilism. Ultimately, one has also to attack and offer an affirmative attempt at destruction (i.e., an active negation of the negative), expressing new feelings and new drives as they come to dominance within the will to power: "We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm". 4 However, the overcoming of old ideals and beliefs, does not mean their complete denial; Nietzsche is not one to dispute his own Christian inheritance and moral background, no matter how great his hostility for the Crucified. As he confesses in The Gay Science (V.377), if he is one of those who has outgrown Christianity and who now feels adverse to it, this is "precisely because we have grown out of it" .5 Nietzsche attempts to be as 'uncompromisingly upright' in his opposition to Christianity, as his forefathers were in their loyalty to the faith. In fact, Hollingdale suggests in the introduction to his translation of Zarathustra, that in this work all of Nietzsche's ideas are an unconscious return of his youthful Christian (specifically Lutheran) beliefs, if now "transformed and distorted almost beyond recognition. "6 Certainly the work is written in a quasi-biblical there is to be found a surprisingly and integrity Zarathustra expresses style and positive portrayal of Jesus, in whose honesty confidence, have, had he lived, recognized the error arguing that the latter would of his moral teachings and retracted them accordingly: '''Truly, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and that he died too early has since been a fatality for many. ... 224

Had he only remained in the desert and far from the good and just! Perhaps he would have learned to love the earth - and laughter as well! Believe it my brothers! He died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching had he lived to my age! He was noble enough to recant! But he was still immature. The youth loves immaturely and immaturely too he hates men and the earth. "'7 This remarkable passage, in which Jesus is described as 'noble' and condemned only on the grounds of 'irnmaturity'", essentially forming a foreword is hugely important to Lawrence's to our study here, The Escaped Cock, which it anticipates. For, as we shall see, what Lawrence attempts in this tale is to imagine a resurrected and mature Jesus living a full life on earth and in the flesh, who explicitly does retract his earlier teachings and renounce his mission. Ultimately, Nietzsche and Lawrence cannot resist making an attempt (like William Blake and others) to save Jesus from the Christians. Deleuze comments: certain number of 'visionaries' have opposed Christ as an amorous Christianity enterprise. as accommodating a mortuary attitude towards Christ, Not that they have "A person to an overtly but they do feel the need to avoid confusing him with Christianity. "9 This project of redeeming the Redeemer is not merely a theological one. Rather, Nietzsche and Lawrence hope that by 'saving' Jesus via a reinterpretation of his life and death, they may be able to secure and guarantee the entire human future, which they believe to be under threat from the sublime poison of morality. For Nietzsche in particular, it is imperative unmask Christian teaching and reveal it as a form of anarcho-nihilism. to That is to say, he wishes to meet the challenge of the Crucified at a political and cultural level, as well as on an ethical and religious level. In the works following Zarathustra, this becomes far more evident. Thus in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche is convinced of the fact that the above struggle must be intensified; for 225

if, on the one hand, we have inestimable benefits to thank Christianity for, on the other hand it has been responsible for the "corruption of the European race" 10 via its revaluation of all antique values and its preserving (and deification) of that which and those who should be allowed to perish. The will within Christianity to make of man the most "sublime abortion" has been the most terrible of events: 11 forces Nietzsche to conclude that it "without any exaggeration ... the real catastrophe in the history of the health of Europen man." 12 Having identified Christianity primarily in terms of sickness (a moral plague), the Genealogy of Morals offers a critical and clinical diagnosis of the above via the construction of a symptomatology t resscntiment, bad conscience etc.) and an aetiology (the tracing of its causes in terms of forces: the genealogical method). Nietzsche also offers us a prognosis (Christian morality will overcome itself) and a course of treatment (the revaluation). It is not without good reason, therefore, that Nietzsche thinks of himself as a 'physician of culture'. And nor is it merely coincidental that the man who died rises as a healer, carrying a cock under his arm a la Aesculapius.U The man who died as Aesculapius determines to heal the soul of man which has been "voluntarily split within itself" 14 in a diabolical process of "secret self-violation" .15 When asked by one of his former disciples why he carries the bird, the man who died replies: "'I am a healer ... and the bird have virtue'" (EC, p.S73). Undoubtedly the virtue of the cock is the virtue of life as active power and affirmative will; it is the Orphic bird of resurrection and fertility, symbolizing a different ideal to the ascetic ideal of self-division and selfdenial. The crowing of the cock is a call for man to renounce his renunciation of worldly pleasures. We cannot conclude this section without mentioning Nietzsche's most sustained polemic against Christianity and the figure of the Crucified: The Anti-Christ. Here too his real opponent is not Jesus, but that "genius of hatred" 16 Saint Paul. 226

Deleuze writes: "In Nietzsche, there is the great opposition between Christ and St. Paul: Christ the softest, most amorous of the decadents, a kind of Buddha who frees us from the domination of priests and the idea of fault, punishment, reward, judgement, death ... this bearer of glad tidings is doubled by the black Saint Paul, who keeps Christ on the Cross, ceaselessly leading him back to it, making him rise from the dead, displacing the centre of gravity toward eternal life, and inventing a new type of priest even more terrible than its predecessors. "17 It is in their longing for judgement and retribution that those who call themselves 'Christians' (already a misunderstanding as Nietzsche says) are at their most unevangelic. But if Nietzsche did not consider Jesus as one full of ressentiment and the will to revenge, he does describe Jesus in The Anti-Christ also an 'idiot' and a case of 'retarded puberty'; as a decadent; a 'holy anarchist' and one suffering from a profound fear of being touched. Of all these charges made against Jesus (repeated by Lawrence in his own work), it is the latter which most interests us here; the notion of touch being so central to a politics of desire as conceived in this thesis. Nietzsche argues that due to his "morbid susceptibility of the sense of being touched" 18, Jesus shrank from every form of physical contact and developed an "instinctive hatred of every reality" coupled to a "profound Christ's retreat discontent with the actual'T? world. In other words, into idealism and symbolism is a consequence of his "extreme capacity for suffering and irritation". 20 His not wanting to be touched (noli me tangere) is due to his feeling every contact too acutely. This is well illustrated by Lawrence in The Escaped Cock. Even towards the end of the tale, when the man who died wants more than anything to experience the touch of tenderness and form a sexual relationship and with the woman of Isis, he is deeply troubled 227

hesitant: (EC, "And inwardly, he was tremulous, p.585). The problem is that thinking: 'Dare I come into touch'" the man who died equates touch with compulsion and a violation of his intrinsic solitude (see p.574 of the tale). What he has to learn is that there are forms of contact which heal and liberate, and his relation with the priestess teaches him this. But it is not easy to come into living touch and it requires courage: "I have dared to let them lay hands on me and put me to death. But dare I come into this tender touch of life? Oh this is harder -" (EC, pp.585-6). Finally, however, the man who died does find the required courage, deciding that touch is the great atonement that puts one into vivid contact with all the world and lies beyond prayer; that touch is the great fulfilment for man; '''if I am naked enough for this contact, I have not died in vain'" (ibid., p.591). The man who died thus finds the delight of physical love and the peace that comes of fucking; his only sorrow being that his Father kept the secret of tenderness and desire hidden from him for so long. But Christ as St. Paul would conceive of him, is forever denied such fulfilment in the flesh; he is left to find what satisfaction he can via a life of inner experience and sensation; completely out of touch with other men and women. Inhabiting the 'kingdom of heaven' which lies within as a condition of the heart, may result in blessedness understood as the absence of any contact or conflict, but it cannot lead to bliss as we defined it last chapter in terms of desire. And if Christ's understanding upon inner truths, with "everything of life based exclusively pertaining to nature, time, space, history" simply seen as "signs or occasion for metaphor'S! makes him into the greatest of all symbolists, so too does it make him a case of "retarded puberty'<-. as Nietzsche memorably puts it, and by which he means to imply Christ lacks any adult desires (for sexual contact, for friendship, for work and active engagement in the social world), or complex and conflicting feelings. Michael Tanner correctly writes: "Christ didn't suffer from his passions, because he didn't have any, at any 228

rate not the ones that usually accompany adulthood. "23 Adding: "to cultivate inwardness and nothing more, as Christ did, is to avoid life in an absolute ... ultimately perverse fashion. "24 Again, this is what the man who died realises to his acute shame; that what he was ultimately offering was not live love, but, rather, the corpse of love. And what he asked for in return was a disembodied, abstract love full of death and betrayal (see EC, p.S94). To conclude then, we may say in agreement teaches one profound misunderstanding with Nietzsche that Christianity above all others: a misunderstanding of the body. And Christ's phobia has thus been interpreted as a sign of 'purity'; i.e., a sickness has been mistaken for holiness; a childish self-obsession for innocent wonder. The result has been to turn making sick and making infantile into the "true hidden objective of the Church's whole system of salvation procedures. "25 The symbol of Christ Crucified is thus the symbol of "the most subterranean conspiracy there has ever been - a conspiracy constitutedness, against health, beauty, natural, IS well- bravery, intellect'S" and adulthood. But if Christianity is a revolt against everything against the social order and culture. against all forms of hierarchy. who roused it a revolt as we have indicated. That is, a revolt caste, privilege, distinction reason that Nietzsche brands it as 'anarcho-nihilistic' "a holy anarchist so too etc. It is for this and accuses Christ of being up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners', the chandala within Judaism. to oppose the ruling order". 27 Jesus was therefore not just an 'idiot' on Nietzsche's reading, but also a political criminal ("in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society'<"). Perhaps not a particularly successful political criminal - he was, after all, captured, convicted, and executed by the Roman authorities, and that would have been the end of his revolt in morals if it had not been for a far more astute and politically capable figure: we refer of course to the apostle Paul. For Paul it was who latched on to 229

the fact that it is not the life and practice of Jesus that really matters; martyrdom but his and death. Unable to make little if any political capital out of the former, via an ingenious interpretation and exploitation of the latter Paul finds a way to "sum up everything down-trodden, everything in secret revolt, the entire heritage of anarchist agitation in the Empire into a tremendous power." 29 Nowhere is this hidden power-spirit political revenge within Christianity and the lusting for more in evidence that in the final book of the Bible: the Revelation of St. John of Patmos. And nowhere is this work better analysed than in Lawrence's study: Apocalypse. I.ii. Lawrence as Apocalypsist. "Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." 30 "Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul de sac. "31 "I agree with you, in a sense, I am with the Anti-Christ ... "32 These three brief extracts from Lawrence's letters tell us a good deal about his relationship to Christianity; a relationship which, like Nietzsche's, is marked by an increasing hostility over the years. His analysis of Christianity is in so many important respects identical to Nietzsche's own that we needn't here spend time tracing its development. Rather, we can concentrate our attention on what Lawrence has to say in his final work, Apocalypse: a text in which "Lawrence takes up Nietzsche's initiative by taking John of Patmos as his target, and no longer St. Paul. Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty." 33 230

The essential argument of Lawrence's Apocalypse is that it is only in Revelation that we can hear the unmodulated voice of "popular religion as distinct from thoughtful religion.v+' It is a voice that informs the Christianity not of Jesus, but of Paul and John the Divine. If the former opens the way for the possibility of a noble "Christianity of tenderness", this is closed down by the "Christianity of self'-glorification'<> on behalf of the 'meek' and 'humble', as developed by the latter saints, who, as Deleuze says, succeed in grafting onto Christ "a monstrous ego".36 The almost Stoical teachings of Jesus, meant for the individual, are substituted by a base philosophy aimed at the masses ("Platonism for the people", as Nietzsche calls it37): "And we must confess, it is hideous. Self-righteousness, self-conceit, self-importance, and secret envy underlie it all. "38 One of the central lies upon which this Christianity constructed, is the lie of personal immortality. of the 'middling masses' is This, along with the deceit of equality of all souls in the sight of God, serves only to flatter those "little bigots and three-quarter madmen<? who imagine themselves to be the great measure and meaning of all things and whom Paul knew needed to be seduced if a victory over Rome and Roman values was to be achieved. Via these and other such lies, Christianity "persuaded over to its side everything ill-constituted, minded, under-privileged, all the dross and refuse of mankind". 40 Nietzsche both and Lawrence deny and loathe the thought rebellious- of personal immortality. In The Will To Power (166), for example, Nietzsche writes: "nothing was further from him r Jesus 1 than the stupid nonsense of ... an eternal personal survival. What he fights against is exaggerated inflation of the 'person"'. 41 It is fear, of course, as well as egoism, which sits behind this willingness to believe in the immortal I. Lawrence writes in The Escaped Cock: "It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men go mad ... For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness" (EC, p. 574). But the Church plays on 231

and manipulates this fear; the symbol of God on the Cross explicitly promises divine immortality to all those who accept Christ as their saviour: "Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the Cross is divine ... We all hang on the Cross, consequently, we are divine"42; this is the absurd logic of the Crucified. The Cross becomes not only the symbol of "the murdered Phallus" (FLC, p.lS7), but also the symbol of the glorified ego. The enemy is not so much Jesus nailed to the Cross, as all those who would keep him there and find their own triumph and eternal self-preservation in the symbol of the martyred God. The last book of the Bible is their book; a book of lies and resscntiment, full of the "vast anti- will of the masses"43 (or the 'will to nothingness' as Nietzsche calls it). And yet: "When we come to read it critically and seriously, we realise that the Apocalypse reveals a profoundly important Christian doctrine ... perhaps the most effectual doctrine in the Bible. That is, it has had a greater effect on second rate people throughout the Christian ages, than any other book of the Bible. "44 And this is because, argues Lawrence, if on the one hand it contains a will to the destruction of "all mastery, all lordship and all human splendour+>. so too does it reveal a "strange will to a strange kind of power". 46 This may be a wholly negative and negating power - the reactive power of the mass and of bullying authority - but it is important we acknowledge it, for it is a will to power and it is the dominant will within modern society, both religiously and politically. Power: this remains the great problem that always returns to us. To understand the puzzle of Revelation we must begin to understand the power-urge therein. For Lawrence, with this strange and disturbing expressed book "there crept into the New Testament the grand Christian enemy, the Power-spirit. "47 And this was as inevitable as the kiss from Judas: "Why? Becaue the nature of man demands it, and will always demand it. "48 Why? Because the nature of man is will to power 232

and not will to impotence. But, unfortunately, Revelation is a frustrated and perverted the will to power 'sanctified' within thing; a negative will composed of predominantly reactive forces. John of Patmos does not know how or what it is to affirm; he can only negate. His is a slave's conception of power; i.e., not the power of creation, but only of judgement and damnation; the power that belongs not to the living, but to the dead. Deleuze is not wrong to describe Revelation as a "book of zombies. "49 And yet, even when it is power at its most ugly and reactive, still one is glad in some manner to see some notion of power (other than the so-called 'power of love') raise its head at last in the Bible. For as Lawrence says, the nature of man demands such; that is, the collective nature of man. For perhaps, alone, a man can be a Christian, when he is but: "When he is with other men, instantly distinctions occur, and levels are formed. . .. As soon as two or three men come together ... then power comes into being". so If Lawrence is pleased to see the return of what is repressed throughout the rest of the Bible, namely, power, he is even happier to see a reactivation of a pagan element; if massively distorted by and buried under Jewish and Christian strata. The Apocalypse of St. John is, in its wanting to judge and punish, in its call for destruction of the natural world, and in its almost limitless lust for revenge, essentially Jewish, and as Deleuze points out "it is not difficult to demonstrate the Jewish sources of the Apocalypse at every point". 51 But what interests Lawrence is the resurfacing from time to time of pre- and non-Judaic elements. Paul chooses to suppress pagan sources as far as possible; to disconnect Christianity from its religious background, and he exercises great skill and enthusiasm in doing so. But John reactivates and redirects pagan symbols and myths for his own end, and this excites Lawrence who, "with all his horror of the Apocalypse", nevertheless pushes on with his study of the work "experiencing 233 an obscure

sympathy, even a kind of admiration for this book". 52 But let there be no confusion here: although the Apocalypse of St. John does contain some hint of the true and positive power-spirit via its reactivated paganism, the use to which John puts this - namely, the destruction not just of Rome, but of the entire cosmos - is horrible and repellent, resounding as it does with "the dangerous snarl of the frustrated, frustrated in man, vengeful. "53 John does not simply want to seize power-spirit suppressed collective the power of the Roman Empire for himself, but to destroy self, the such power and replace it with a wholly negative form of power (a sort of anti-power) both anti-social and almost anti-human: that is a final power belonging to the last men; i.e., the community of saints and saved brethren. As Nietzsche notes; "in Rome, the Jew was looked upon as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind" .54 Not surprisingly, therefore, for John of Patmos'Y, Lawrence "soon recovers all his distrust and horror contemptuous of the will to revenge and self-glorification and the will to forever have the final word. But the question we must ask is: Is Christ himself blameless? constructing That is, can we simply accuse Paul and John of between them a faith based upon the promise (threat) of a new Jerusalem that violently distorts the Gospel of Love as taught by Jesus, or does Christ himself bear a degree of responsibility for the emergence and eventual victory of the Crucified? Perhaps his ideal and bodiless love was bound to issue in John's hatred just as it inevitably invited betrayal? Ultimately, Lawrence is brought to this conclusion. Thus for all his attempts to save Jesus and distinguish the bringer of glad tidings from the emaciated figure on the Cross, acknowledges that the real problem begins with Christ's Lawrence love itself; i.e., that which we have already seen to have been deathly and full of compulsion. It is this alone which permits a wholly negative religion to be built upon a noble and positive message of tenderness. Ultimately, writes Lawrence, Jesus and John are "two sides of the same medal. "56 234

Above all, Jesus is profoundly and disastrously mistaken insistence on love and in his perverse inner-absorption. in his one-sided He succeeds in giving an impossible ideal for the ideal individual, but, by refusing to think of real men as social beings and in effectively abandoning any concern with power and politics (thereby surrendering such to the State and those individuals like John up against the reality of the State), he was, argues Lawrence, hugely naive and irresponsible: "Jesus saw the individual only, and considered only the individual. He left it to John of Patmos ... to formulate the Christian vision of the Christian State. John did it in Apocalypse. It entails the destruction of the whole world, and the reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory." 57 The Apocalypse shows us the Crucified in relation to Rome, the world, and the cosmos: "It shows him in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all. "58 It is the other side of Chist's love, and it means suicide and murder en masse. Arguably, it is towards this time of fatal nihilism and world-destruction that we move today. This is why Mara Kalnins is right to say in her 1995 introduction to Lawrence's study that the latter remains far from simply being "an esoteric enquiry into an obscure book of the Bible, with which few people nowadays are familiar".59 It is, like John's Revelation itself, a vitally important "book to conjure with. "60 It is also, despite its apocalyptic theme, a joyful message of hope for the future; "one last glad tiding", as Deleuze says."! For it expresses Lawrence's belief that man can, if he so wishes, find a way to come back into touch and reestablish the living connections which he has spent the last 2,500 years denying or attempting to break. Lawrence's final work challenges us to "institute, maximum of connections'<- and to revalue values. 235 find, or recover a But whilst we need to

proliferate all manner of relations, we must, warns Lawrence, also break those false bonds; particularly those which tie us to capital: "According to Lawrence's critique, money, like love, must be reproached not for being a flow, but for being a false connection that mints subjects and objects'v-' and in this way keeps us separated off from the world around us. To conclude, then, we may say that Lawrence's Apocalypse is a passionate call for man to rediscover an essentially cosmic-religious (God-free) way of living. Rejecting the promise of "petty little personal salvation, petty morality'P", he expresses his "immense yearning to be ... back in the far-off world before man became 'afraid'. We want to be freed from our tight little automatic 'universe', go back to the great living cosmos of the 'unenlightened' not being sentimental or reactionary to pagansl'<> Lawrence is here; for he is not naively advocating a creeping back into old shells; the old certainties, beliefs, forms, and connections are broken, or of little or no use to us. Lawrence is acutely aware of the fact that: "We can never recover an aid vision, once it hs been supplanted. "66 But what we can attempt to do is "discover memories of old, far-off, in part at least, a new vision in harmony with the far-off experience that lie within us. "67 This is surely, precisely what Nietzsche attempts within his Dionysian philosophy. What he and Lawrence tell us is that whilst God may be dead, we are not - and neither is the cosmos, even if we have fallen out of touch with the latter and into sterile and automatic egoism. By coming out of responsive connection with the sun and stars (as well as other cosmic bodies), we have made an essentially tragic excursion into the void of pure abstraction. on the vital correspondence argues: between ourselves Lawrence insists and the heavens; in fact, he "We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is the vast living body, of which we are still parts. "68 And this, he claims, is literally true, as men knew in the past (and will do again). If to the modern mind this sounds like mystical nonsense, "that is merely because we are fools."69 Our task today, then, is to 236

develop new forms of consciousness and new feelings, and to not only 'get back' our bodies, but to get back into relation with the cosmos: "and it can't be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken 2000 years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them generations to life?"?" The revaluation of all values is a project of and one of the key words remains the word of the unborn day: Resurrection. Part II: Remarks on Lawrence's The Escaped Cock in Relation to Death, Sex, and the Resurrection into Touch. We saw last chapter Tommy Dukes call for two things: firstly, a democracy of touch; secondly, the resurrection of the body. Only, it was argued, once the latter has been achieved will we be able to set about the building of the former. So it is that the resurrection of the body remains our central concern here. But which body? Whose body? Last chapter we formulated an answer to the first of these questions in terms of the phallic body (or what Deleuze and Guattari term, after Artaud, the body without organs); organism, or ideal corpse-body. contrasting this with the metaphysical We then related the building of such a body to the becomings within active desire of Constance Chatterley and her lover, Oliver Mellors. Here, however, resurrection, it will be in relation to the man who died and his his becoming, in relation to the Priestess of Isis. The Escaped Cock is Lawrence's revaluation of the death and rebirth of Jesus.' He provides a brief summary of the first part of the tale himself in a letter: "I wrote a story of the resurrection; where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more - so cuts out - and as he heals up, he begins to find out what an astonishing place the phenomenal world 237

IS, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven - and thanks his lucky stars that he needn't have a 'mission' any more. "2 It is in the second part of the tale, however, where Lawrence attempts something far more daring and philosophically profound; namely, the transformation via desire and sexual contact with a pagan priestess of the newly risen man who died into a potent and affirmative man of flesh, as well as the man-god assemblage Osiris (Dionysus); i.e., an altogether different form to the Christ-figure been. The man who died gets identity/subjectivity back his body via a surrender he had of his old and by losing the face of Christ. In other words, not only does the man who died come down off the Cross and surrender Thorns, so too does he rise into anonymity and forgetfulness the Crown of (these belonging to innocence) . Lawrence is enabled and encouraged to attempt such a bold and overt revaluation of Christian teaching by his reading of Nietzsche, of pre-Socratic a wide range of works on religious mythology. For via the above, Lawrence had available to him "an older tradition of resurrection Christianity's bitterness against the earth philosophy, and symbolism which had none of and fear of the flesh. Christ is subsumed in the larger tradition of torn and regenerated fertility gods." 3 The lesson which Lawrence hopes to teach via his attempt to put the man who died back into religious context and offer a glimpse of an older, pre-Christian, 'phallic' religion, is simple: each man must be willing to die and then resurrect into a new life having been dipped in oblivion. Unfortunately, difficult to accept today as it has always been. 238 this remains as

Accepted or not by the majority, post-Nietzschean thinkers. it is a lesson reflected in the work of other Thus, for example, when Lawrence says in verse: "Sing the song of death, 0 sing it! / for without the song of death, the song of life / becomes pointless and silly'l", we cannot help but be reminded of Heidegger's insistence in Being and Time on the importance of Dasein facing up to its own mortality. George Steiner conveniently sums this point up: "Dasein can come to grasp its own wholeness and meaningfulness ... only when it faces its 'no-longer-being-there' (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein) .... Dasein ... has access to the meaning of being because, and only because, that being is finite. Authentic being is, therefore, a being-to wards-death, a Scin-zum-tode ".5 We first approach and gain an experience of death via the death of others and via the death of our gods. However, no matter how profound our understanding of the death of others is, each one of us must ultimately experience our own death: Each one of us must, as Lawrence would say, prepare his or her own 'ship of death'." To quote from Steiner's reading of Heidegger once more: "an authentic death has to be striven for. A true being-towards-the-end is one which labours consciously towards fulfilment and refuses inertia; it is one which seeks an ontological grasp of its own finitude rather than taking refuge in the banal conventionality of general biological extinction. "7 Central of course to this taking upon oneself an authentic death in which the nearness of nothingness is acknowledged and one concedes the need to be made nothing, is the notion of Angst. Angst is a facing up to the fact that one's being rests upon non-being and the waters of oblivion. And it is vital: "those who would rob us of this anxiety - be they priests, quacks - by transforming physicians, mystics or rationalist it into either fear or genteel indifference, alienate us 239

from life itself. Or, more exactly, they insulate us from a fundamental source of freedom. "8 For freedom, ultimately, is the freedom to die many deaths in one's own way and to rise anew, transformed like the phoenix, from out of death back into life and the greater health. Essentially, this analysis of death found in both Lawrence and Heidegger, is a pessimistic and tragic one; but it is not romantic, nor "all too typical of Teutonic death-obsessions dismiss and portentious fatality. "9 Those critics and commentators who it as such are often the same ones who miss its full philosophical significance; i.e., without finitude there can be no freedom or active life. As Steiner correctly points out, this conclusion means we have arrived "at the antipodes to Plato." 10 The problem is, as we have said, most men even when seemingly full of the courage for death, lack the desire to resurrect once more into the flesh; i.e., they lack the greater courage for life (and thus fail the existential test of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence: see BI.i.). Thus, thinking back to Sir Clifford Chatterley, we find a man prepared to make the descent for king and country into a man-made hell (i.e., the trenches of the Great War) and therein undergo a death experience, but lacking the affirmative will to then make the ascent into a new post-decadent (and overhuman) life; to achieve the resurrection of the body and an "immortality of the flesh" (FLC, p.66). In fact, such a resurrection and such an immortality holds no interest to those such as Clifford Chatterley: what they lust after is something else entirely; "the private and egoistic resurrection of sprit, into the ideal eternity" (JTLJ, p.70). It is this personal salvation they value; not the vision of life and death imagined by Tommy Dukes wherein men rise up again "'with new flesh on their spirits, and new feelings in the flesh, and a new fire to erect the phallus" (ibid.). But it is this 240

latter 'immortality' which is achieved by both Dionysus and the man who died, who by dying 'authentically' amid the flames of a fire-death, are able to rise into the unborn day. Clifford, like all the decadent-idealists related to him from Plato down, wants merely to explore the death that is within him; just as he toys with his sex in order to experience the thrill of disintegrative sensation and arrive at a new piece of knowledge. Not for one moment does he want to let go of his precious ego or his assertive (but non-affirmative) will. If he wants to know of death, so too does he wish to secure himself forever in an ideal self. Thus the immortality of the flesh desired by Dukes means nothing to Clifford. Such immortality is, as he rightly points out in objection, to him, "merely temporal" (ibid.), and thus, worthless and meaningless. For Clifford cannot conceive of valuing, loving, and affirming the temporal nature of existence; cannot begin to appreciate the very timeliness of time and its passing, or that: "Even eternity is in rhythms" (JTLJ, p.70). Ultimately, Clifford belongs to one of the damned; i.e., he is one of those unhappy souls "that cannot die and become silent / but must ever struggle on to assert themselves.") I Unhappy because: "No man unless he has died, and / learned to be alone / will ever come into touch." 12 Unhappy because he cannot bring himself to love fate, but is one of those eaten up with having to care about what will become of him "and who dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all" . 13 Here then, described in snippets of Lawrencean verse, is Clifford Chatterley: the nihilist obsessed with preserving his own vacuous ego and emotional emptiness. Death, the thing he wishes to know of but avoid, is the only cure for him and men like him; men, indeed, like Jesus who are entirely closed off and selfabsorbed, concerned only with their own inner-sensations and entirely out of touch with the world external to themselves. Men with bodies over which nothing 241

can pass, desire cannot flow. When Christ cries out upon his Cross: 'Father, why hast thou abandoned understanding understand me?' one does not doubt his pain and confusion; for nothing of why he has been brought to the Cross, nor does he why he must die upon it. Doesn't understand, that is, that no one, not even God, "can put back a human life into connection with the living cosmos / once the connection has been broken / and the person has become fatally selfcentred. "14 Death alone in such circumstances which results in disintegration, but also transfiguration and not a goal, or consummation). negative representation restricts can serve; death not only as that (i.e., death as a process Let us be clear on this point, if there is a of death ("death conceived as a judgement which denies, and condemns"), so too is there a positive experience of death ("death experienced as transportation, a flight, becorningvj->: a heat-death and a fire-death. a dissolution and passage, This is such a vital point, that we are obliged to discuss it further. true The first negative image of death - death as a terminal fact which comes at the end of life is of little interest to us here, even though it is and remains the predominant image of death "formed from the restricted point of view of the ego" 16, and accepted by most people to be death per se. What we are keen to develop here is the latter; i.e., the death that Nietzsche in his Dionysian philosophy, Lawrence in his last poems and late fictional and prose work, and Deleuze in his philosophy of difference, are all interested in: a death which is, as Keith Ansell-Pearson recognizes: "exemplified in, but not restricted to, the death of the gods" 17 and which takes place endlessly in a wide variety of ways. Similarly, when gods are reborn they interpretations rise in many different ways possible of any resurrection. and there is a multiplicity of Deleuze, whilst recognizing that there are many forces capable of seizing hold of Christ's story, insists that "we are still waiting for the forces or the power which will carry this death to its highest point and make it into something more than an apparent and abstract death." 18 242

But one would argue that in The Escaped Cock Lawrence supplies such forces or power; that he gives us here an interpretation affirmative sense, but in the profound not only in an active and sense that Nietzsche means by the term; i.e., not merely a development of uninterrupted symbol with which, according to Deleuze, the dialectic invariably confuses interpretation. Lawrence's interpretation is arguably not only philosophically more developed than Paul's, but it is also truer both to the spirit of the Gospels and to the great pagan tradition out of which Christianity in part grew. Were his story of the man who died to be accepted and taught, it could possibly serve not only as an important foundation for a wider revaluation of values, but also, ironically, as a means by which the Church could itself achieve a resurrection the Church of the Crucified prefers distorting and new becoming. However, as it is to go on either funking or deliberately the story of Jesus, preventing us from knowing him as we may still perhaps one day know him; i.e., as a bringer of glad tidings and a "wonderful initiator into death for rebirth". 19 Essentially, then, all three of the above (Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Deleuze) are each in their own way attempting to enter an element of difference into death, thereby engineering a revaluation of the latter by breaking up its homogeneity and unity. If Deleuze is most commonly associated with this project, he is anticipated nevertheless by both Nietzsche and Lawrence; the former demanding that we rethink our relation to the dead world of matter, understanding our own 'return to the inanimate' as a reconcilation with what is actual and a chance to perfect ourselves once more. Death, then, signals change or transformation; the end of life, but its true womb. finished', as Jesus thought, rather: it is not the opposite of life, or Consummatum est does not mean 'all is "It means: the step is taken."20 That is, the step into death, but not the final step; for there is still another step - in fact, a 243

whole series of other steps - to be taken beyond the tomb and back into the flesh and new life. But not all men can take this step. Some, like Clifford Chatterley, are crippled in one way or another. Some like to remain on the Cross from which they can look down upon life and curse it: the Crucified. Some like to remain in the tomb, swathed and shrouded in bandages like an Egyptian mummy; they lack the strength or the desire to roll away the rock from the mouth of the cave, and besides, it's comfortable in the tomb, and safe. These latter are the last men that Nietzsche so despises. Between them - the crippled, the Crucified, and the cowardly - they constitute the vast majority of men today: herd humanity. What hope is there, one might ask, for a resurrection of the body when it is negated by the dead weight of a whole legion of zombies and kept nailed to a cross, or wrapped in a tomb? Seemingly little. And yet some, like Connie, maintain faith in the possibility: "'The human body is only just coming to real life''', she gaily informs Clifford: "'With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body'" (LCL, pp.234-5). What Lawrence attempts in The Escaped Cock is to show that she is right: and if Jesus is the one who finished the body off with his fatal sayings and teachings, as Connie claims, then he has to be the one to bring it back to life. The really rather terrible story of Christ remains for us modern Europeans central to our selfunderstanding. the Cross, The Christian era ends not merely with Jesus hanging limply on but with the prolonged crucified in one way or another: half-death of all men: we have all been "No doubt the death was necessary. It is the long, slow death of society which parallels the quick death of Jesus and the other dying gods", writes Lawrence, who continues with the warning: "It is death none the less, and will end in the annihilation of the human race ... unless there is a change, a resurrection, and a return to the cosmos. "21 244

Tommy Dukes understands this; he is painfully aware of how the men of his generation (including himself), having survived the death of God and the Great War, are "struggling for the life that should be theirs" (JTLJ, p.68). A life they are denied, trapped organisms: still as they are within the old ideals, conventions, "Their bodies were the old tormented and bodies which had died, but which had not yet come to life again. The spirit was struggling into new life, a resurrection. But the body was not yet filled with new blood and fire" (JTLJ, pp.68-9). In Christian terms, Lawrence is arguing that now is the period betwen Good Friday and Easter Sunday; i.e., the time in the tomb, suspended between life and death. Nietzsche calls this the time of 'incomplete nihilism'; a strange, dim, grey era of uncertainty and confusion. The great and very real danger is that men will fail to find the resources to take them beyond this stage and over themselves, as every caterpillar must if she is to leave the chrysalis as a creature transformed and reborn: "perhaps they would never ascend really into life. They would remain the shadowy, almost incorporeal beings of the era between the rolling open of the tomb, and the ascending into the firmament of a new body" (ibid., p. 69). But, on the other hand, perhaps it will be the case that the man who died will show a few men the way forward, via his leap into the tide of new life and the unresolved wonder thereof: the future is uncertain. What is for sure, is that we have experienced death in the negative sense for too long; and for too long have we allowed ourselves to be bullied into accepting that only once we had enveloped "the world in a vast unison of death"ZZ could there be achieved the goal of 'universal salvation'. Now we begin to realize that it is impossible to all die the same death once and for all, because death is a multiple phenomenon and each man must be allowed and encouraged to die many times in many different ways if ever he is to live. 245

Of course, this is not to say that we can simply move from one understanding death to another overnight. Death in its reactive representation understood of must first be fully by those few who can "go through the final pain" of such knowledge and accept the "bitter necessity to understand these initiators pass clear and transform the death that has been" .23 When death into something gay and joyous (a veritable festival of death), then, finally, perhaps we may all leave the old idea of death behind. Dionysus is one such Lord of Death; and so too the man who died. We may conclude our thoughts on death by saying that it is not that one is necessarily reborn from one's time in the tomb a 'better' person, but one usually emerges a different person; often a more profound type as Nietzsche says, or, with reference to the case of Jesus, more mature. And this is so even when the sign of one's new profundity is a new-found delight in things of the surface; the sign of one's maturity is a certain playfulness. One becomes, in a word, more 'Greek', as Nietzche understands man who died resurrects awareness the latter: Christ is crucified as a Jew, but the as a Hellenic type.24 Thus we witness him coming into of the 'phenomenal' world and learning how to affirm life "at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance". 2S For the first time, the man who died learns how to see the world with eyes full of wonder, like the child, for '''there is more child in the man than in the youth, and less melancholy: he has a better understanding of life and death. "'26 An understanding based upon a notion of difference and an affirmation of such: "Strange is the phenomenal world And life bubbles so variously. Why should I ever have wanted it to bubble all alike?" (EC, p.572). If the man who died discovers wonder, so too does he find courage: the courage which is needed "to survive and flourish in the face of life, which by definition bears with it an enormous quantum of pain" 27, as well as joy. Courage also to come into touch; sexually with a woman and socially with his fellow men. We 246

shall discuss the latter connection immediately In part III. iii of this chapter, but let me state my view that those who argue that in The Escaped Cock Lawrence is only concerned with "personal regeneration" 28, and not attempting to offer an important cultural critique, or serious socio-historical are profoundly mistaken. As we have argued throughout political concerns, like Nietzsche's, reinterpretation, this thesis, Lawrence's are not merely an eccentric and insignificant "branch of his ideas about religion" .29 They are, on the contrary, central to his work and remain of relevance to many of the present debates within political and cultural theory. Having reiterated this, let us now examine the erotic aspect of the man who died and his resurrection. In the First Lady Chatterley, Connie asks Clifford: "'Do you think it was right for Jesus to say to woman: 'Go, and sin no more'? After all, he was only a man! ... Not a woman himself!'" (FLC, p.l33). Clifford is amused, but irritated by the question. Connie continues: "'Supposing the woman had said: 'Come thou, and sin with me!' Wouldn't it have been better, do you think?'" (ibid.). Clifford replies that Jesus wouldn't have gone - and probably he is right. But the man who died does go unto woman; does give in to the temptations of the flesh and surrender himself up to desire at last. And his going unto woman is the ultimate and most crucial stage of his resurrection as a man uncrucified; the means by which he overcomes his fear, his pain, the last traces of his old self and loses the "sour smell of entropic decay" 30, i.e., the stink of death and the tomb. By gomg unto woman, the man who died learns that there are many ways of entering into holy communion; many ways of serving and showing one's love for God, without having to be nailed to a cross. He realizes that the only 'sin' lies not in knowledge of sex, or the active engagement in carnal pleasures, but in "turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies+.U And he realizes that sexual abstinence is a form of greed and vanity; a withholding of that which 247

should be shared. One must give and take of the self, whilst not giving oneself away or holding oneself back entirely (see EC, p.565 where the man who died tries to make this clear to Mary Magdalene). Like Connie Chatterley, the man who died also discovers his nakedness. Although stripped of clothes when put on the Cross, he was never really naked - merely exposed. For without having a body, only a face, naked he could not be. The woman of Isis helps him attain a living body replete with its own forces, its own beauty, and its own nakedness; a body without organs and without any facial overcoding. She gives him physical and sexual significance, awakening in him "an awareness of physical touch (touch of bodies, hands, moist lips)". 32 His wounds are sealed, and yet he is fully opened for the first time to the flow of desire; i.e., opened to all those strange forces external to himself, thereby allowing various intensities to pass across his body. Between the arms and legs of the woman of Isis he loses his old interiority, and in combination with her he forms a "circuit of intensities between male and female energy'T' calls the 'phallic body'). (what Lawrence It is at this point that the lovers "lose themselves in sweet, shared slime"34 and achieve a state of bliss; a form of joy that is immanent to desire and related to the jouissance of the greater day, not the plaisir of the common day, as understood by the slave and promised by the prostitute, whose pleasure is always "suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt." 35 The priestess of Isis washes away the nausea and the tiredness of the man who died, not with tears, but with the secretions of her vagina; he is bathed and oiled by the woman, so that by the end of the tale he has rid himself, as we have said, of the odour of death and the ghostly anaemic look of Christ; the 'pale Galilean' is finally conquered. The skin of the man who died takes on a little colour, as well as the smell of the woman's scent, which, we are told, is like the "essence of 248

roses" (EC, p.600); i.e., the beautiful perfume of love and life. Ultimately, the man who died rises into virile manhood and sovereignty; lordship. into his He has not escaped death, so much as left behind him the fear and anguish of death, as well as that which is most often coupled to these things, namely, the ressentiment directed towards a life which is mortal and lived within time. By giving us a Jesus who does not ascend unto Heaven in a cloud - and who does not want to ascend thus; a Jesus who rises in the flesh and acknowledges his Father as the Flesh (and not the Spirit or Logos), Lawrence gives us an important and radical new vision of Christ and of ourselves. The question remains: can we accept this vision of the man who died and of ourselves as risen lord? We have shown ourselves capable of accepting Christ on the Cross, Christ in the Tomb, Christ ascending to Heaven with a puff of smoke, Christ as a "unity of love and reactive life". 36 But Christ risen in the flesh and in touch with the physical world, Christ who promises us not salvation, but "the unknown joy, the unknown happiness" and communion with the "unknown God" 39, this Christ we still seem wary of and even hostile to. However, let us not conclude on a sour note. For while we may be certain that the reign of the negative has not yet moved towards completion, still in The Escaped Cock Lawrence gives us hope for the future: "Tomorrow is another day" (EC, p.600). Part III: Political and Ethical Considerations. UI.i. The Man Who Died and the Eternal Recurrence. "If the eternal return speaks of death and rebirth ... what kind of death belongs to the eternal return? A heat-death or a fire-death?" 1 Whilst the answer to this question is undoubtedly both, here we will be stressing the latter as we examine the death and resurrection of the man who died in relation to Nietzsche's great 249

teaching of recurrence. eternal return former; This is not to deny, however, that for most men the seems to threaten only the crushing return and certainty of the it would hardly function as a cultivating idea or existential test if this were not the case, and this is clearly a vital aspect of Nietzsche's thought- experiment . But there are other men, if lesser in number, who find the courage to pass the test of the eternal recurrence and uncover its secret, thereby finding themselves initiated into a different faith. For these men, wise in the way of the circle, the phoenix always rises in gleaming new feathers and the eternal return of death "does not mean that one undergoes the same death again and again", for the death belonging to the eternal return "is a plural one assuming multiple disguises". 2 Likewise, one is not born and reborn into an identical life again and again; the same (das Gleich) is not a fixed essence and does not refer to a content in and of itself; "but rather must be taken to refer to the act of returning irevenir; itself."3 We leave the tomb as the man who died leaves it: transformed and in the process all the while of becoming-other. As Klossowski argues, the eternal return is, in a sense, Nietzsche's version of the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis)." as much as this doctrine does allow for the construction In of a conception of identity, it is one that is "compatible with embodied experience and historicity ... constructed and reconstructed ... by means of engaging with the world." 5 Essentially then, the eternal return forms a Dionysian ethic of repetition and the difference engendered philosophy of becoming, related formulations post-moral by it. It is the culminating incorporating but profoundly of living dangerously and as such anti-Christian thought of Nietzsche's developing his earlier and loving fate. It is, of course, a ethic par excellence in as much as it rejects judgement in favour of an affirmation of innocence and 'dead certainty' 250 in favour

of chance. Appropriately, (see this ethic is introduced into Nietzsche's text by a demon The Gay Science, IV.341; a passage which remains central to an understanding of the eternal recurrence). It is a teaching which is also well illustrated in theory and practice in Lawrence's The Escaped Cock. For if the man who died is portrayed as one who learns how to embrace a woman, so too is he shown as one who manages to think the thought of recurrence and ultimately to "crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation resurrects and seal. "6 And this because the man who died into a way of living that makes such a thought not only bearable, but beautiful. But this does not come easily; at first, just after awakening from his death-sleep, he is still very much full of pain and nausea; "the sickness of unspeakable disillusion" (EC, p.SS7). In an important passage, Lawrence writes: "He could move if he wanted: he knew that. But he had no want. Who would want to come back from the dead? A deep, deep nausea stirred premonition consciousness. of movement. He resented in him, at the the fact of ... the moving back into He had not wished it. He had wanted to stay outside, in the place where even memory is stone dead. But now something had returned him ... and in the return he lay overcome with a sense of nausea" (EC, p.SS6 - my emphasis added). Clearly the demon has crept after the man who died, crept into his tomb and into his 'loneliest loneliness', and whispered to him the thought of recurrence. And this thought almost crushes him with nausea and it seems at first as if the man who died will fail the test of the eternal return, for he doesn't want to be returned to a world which put him to death and caused him so much suffering. "To be back! To be back again, after all that!" (EC, p.SS7), he thinks to himself, and he is shocked to discover that after all the horror 251 he has experienced, the

night to which he returns is still the same night, and the day the same day; i.e., that his personal death has not signalled the end of the world. The latter returns: "the same as ever ... thronging with greenness, a nightingale winsomely, wistfully, coaxingly calling ... the natural world of morning and evening, for ever undying" (EC, pp.S57-8). But it is the song of the nightingale which awakens within him a new feeling beneath his nausea; "a resolution of which he was not even aware" (EC, p.S58). A determination to live and to affirm the thought of the eternal return. Gradually, the man who died realizes that blessed is the soul that listens to the voice of its demon; for it becomes, as the Greeks knew, eudaimon, or joyful. And so he leaves his tomb and, a little later, encounters the escaped cock; another bird full of active life. Like the singing of the nightingale, the crowing of the cock awakens in the man who died the courage to accept the return of his own life and to "see as beautiful what is necessary in things" _7 That is, to see as beautiful the will to power in things and thus acknowledge overcoming (of struggle). life as a process And, importantly, of becoming and as something lived and experienced within time; it is crucial, if one is to embrace the teaching of recurrence 'divine idea', that one overcome any lingering resentment as a towards time and its passing. For what is willed by the lover of fate is "not the literal contents of the moment but the very momentariness of the moment: that is, time's desire and time's perishing. "8 This does not mean offering a weary and hopeless resignation to the fact of one's own mortality and a positing of death as the final reality or truth of being; rather, it means finding the courage to offer a positive affirmation so that at the end of one's own life one will be able to say: '''Was that life? Well then! Once more!"? Such courage, Zarathustra teaches us, destroys the negative ideal of death and transforms the latter into a line of flight. Of course, like the man who died, has to struggle even Zarathustra, 252 hard to

overcome his own initial nausea at the thought of recurrence; to become the singer of the intoxicated song and one who knows that paradise is here and now, thereby becoming one with time and the event, affirming life as an economy of the whole. Prior to his collapse and subsequent convalescence, Zarathustra was unable to do this; unable, for example, to accept that even the little man recurs eternally. The man who died likewise has trouble overcoming his disgust for the fact that the slave of the lesser day must also be returned. Even when accepting the food and shelter offered him by the peasant and his wife, he can't help seeing them as "limited, meagre in life, without any splendour of gesture" (EC, p.S60). But he is able at least to accept that "they were what they were, slow inevitable parts of the natural world" (ibid.) and that it was not his mission, nor anyone else's duty, to 'save' them. However, his acceptance of the existence and eternal return of the slave-class and those poor in life, also convinces the man who died of the absolute necessity of rule and the need to abandon all ideal illusions concerning the 'equality of souls'. If there is not mastery, he now realizes, and an acceptance on behalf of the noble and strong in life of their obligation to rule, then the slave will assume authority and lead the world toward finally, the abyss of anarcho-nihilism: ever-greater tyranny and, "It was the life of the little day, the life of little people. And the man who died said to himself: Unless we encompass it in the greater day, and set the little life in the circle of the greater life, all is disaster" (ibid., p.S89). Whilst we shall follow this point up in more detail in part III.iii., let me stress here that to overlook this political aspect of the theory of eternal return is to miss an essential import of the teaching as Nietzsche conceives of it. All things, all forces, all men - great and small, active and reactive, sovereign and slave return. This is not to say we should 253 think of the eternal recurrence as

Zarathustra's animals mistakenly think of it; i.e., as a cycle of the identical being endlessly repeated like an ever-turning wheel of existence. For, as we have seen, there is undoubtedly an element of selection and cultivation within the theory and, ultimately, what returns those readings is difference. in which negative However, we should equally be wary of wills and/or reactive eliminated and only that which actively affirms is returned. forces are entirely To put it simply, the slave cannot be interpreted out of history any more than he can be crushed out of existence (the last man doesn't fail the test of the eternal return, for he fails to acknowledge any such test; the whispering of demons means nothing to him), or lifted up to heaven via the salvation procedures of Christ. He belongs to the earth and must be accepted as belonging thus and accommodated (ruled) accordingly. If this is an unpleasant truth, nevertheless it is one that the man who died accepts; just as he accepts the joy of living in the moment and of looking upon life without any ill-will. He knows that in saying yes to this joy, so too does he say yes to everything, including all woe and unpleasantness, for, as Zarathustra says: "'All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love'" .10 The eternal return does not just promise happiness, then, and there are harsh implications of this Dionysian creed, which is why one has to become hard in order to accept it and not simply free of ressentiment. pain and all that is problematic Christianity in our existence, As a tragic affirmation of it stands in contrast which seeks to escape from such things and thereby to a negate this world, this life, as it is. No doubt Nietzsche was in part attracted to the idea of eternal recurrence because it closes the gates on any hopes of an escape from reality "by denying the very possibility of transcending the past for an existence outside of history, whether projected into an afterlife, into a utopian future, or even into an image of what might have been, had the past been different." II There can be no doubt that those who remam trapped 254 within the tomb of

incomplete nihilism and regard the flesh as lacking in value due to its transience, will shudder at the thought of the eternal return and be quick to dismiss it as a form of lunacy. We have already seen Clifford Chatterley reject the 'immortality of the flesh' put forward by Dukes, precisely on the grounds that, in the face of death, the body doesn't matter: "'Admitting the obvious fact of dust to dust'" (lTLl, p. 71), as the former puts it. Clifford only understands heat and not fire; "the death 'of' being and the being 'of' death'<? and has no inkling of how to transform "the undifferentiated differentiated fire-death black-nothingness of the death drive Iinto J the of the eternal return." 13 Instead he longs for a spiritual immortality as "the ultimate consolation of an alienated existence" .14 Dukes does have an idea of how to stop death masquerading operating as a force of repression as a biological fact from and does oppose the preachers reclaiming eternity for this fair earth. He declares: "'ultimately, of death by to me there is one body: the body of men and animals and the earth! And if this body is capable of newness, then that is my resurrection'" (lTLl, p.71). In other words, Dukes wants to see the continuous rebirth of life on earth; "not as mere repetition but as willed and wanted re-creation." Death, then, to reiterate, 15 has no 'isness'; no ontological stability, or unity. And time too is something that flows; there is no chronological fixity and whilst the present moment may give the impression that it can be pin-pointed, it is always a process and a passing away. Lawrence writes: "Life, the ever-present, knows no finality ... the perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never m any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. "16 And herein lies the loveliness of man and all things, beauty resting on the fact that being is becoming; i.e., that being is manifest in the nowness of every moment and is not fixed eternally. If we can accept this, then we can think the thought of eternal recurrence. But alas, as we have said, most men do not want to stop believing "in being as something 255 distinct from and opposed to

becoming" or to start believing "in the being of becoming itself." 17 For most men, the experience of duration and continuity proves that there is stability and fixity. For most men, beauty does not lie within time, but external to it; the immortal flowers of heaven never-fading which so horrify Lawrence, are precisely what they long for and the transcendent loveliness of the actual rose means nothing to them, seeing here as they do only death and decay. Before his death and subsequent resurrection, the man who died belonged to this majority of men; he too thought he could ignore and slander the world of things and their becoming (their transient and transcendent loveliness). But after he rises back into the flesh, he realizes that there is nothing more than what exists in the moment and is able to share Lawrence's own desire: "Don't give me the infinite or the eternal ... Give me ... the incandescence and coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. "18 It is this alone which matters - for it is this alone which 'is'. It is the source, the issue, the creative quick of time itself; that from out of which, into which, and through which the future and past both stream. Whilst for most men the mystery present remains undiscovered and unrecognized, and the beauty of the pure the man who died realizes that the memory of his past life lived and the promise of an ideal life to come, mean nothing in comparison to the blossoming reality of the moment. For what are the past and the future at last other than crystallized abstractions from the present, as Lawrence argues, both of which take us away from the immediate life of the present. The Escaped Cock is rich in passages that suggest this new way of thinking. In fact, arguably, the whole tale is one of the moment and its celebration as fire and life; the latter seeming now to the man who died as more compulsive than the destiny of death: "The doom of death was a shadow to the raging destiny of life, 256

the determined surge of life" (BC, p.S63). Sadly, it is this shadow which is cast by the Cross of the Crucified, which still falls over the modern world. We have all lived for so long within the shade that even some of the healthiest possessed by the same spirit of revenge which "animates the desire are of the despisers of the body and the preachers of death" .19 Deliverance from this spirit is Zarathustra's greatest wish for mankind and his teaching of the eternal return is directed towards liberating the will from its negative conception of time "which posits a seriality of past, present, our consciousness and future events"20 and which has crippled cruelly, making us feel powerless before time's passing and thus desirous of revenge. Lawrence argues that in contrast to the above model of time, we should reactivate a pagan conception of time as moving in cycles which "allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. "21 Our present straightline, time-consciousness which leads us wearily along an eternal is another cross for us to bear, and thus belongs to what Nietzsche calls the spirit of gravity. When a man finds the thought of the eternal return to be the 'greatest weight' (das grosste Schwergewicht), rather than a liberating experience that allows him to take flight, then we can assume he is possessed by the spirit of gravity. Like Zarathustra, he must seek the exorcism of such a spirit and learn to put down those things that genuinely bend his back and make of him no more than a pack-animal. It is not life that is a burden, but the death-forces and the duties imposed upon him by a moral-rational subjectivity; these and a bad conscience are what genuinely weigh him down. III. ii. The Man Who Died as Overman and Uberchrist. Who could embrace and affirm the teaching of the eternal return? Only perhaps a man who, in some sense, was more than human or beyond the human: an 257

overman.I? Only one who had passed clear of death and reactivity and resurrected into a new life free of all bad spirits. Zarathustra is one such and the man who died is another. But if the teaching of the eternal return demands the emergence of an overman, there can be no doubt that, paradoxically, must first in order to become transhuman one become more and not less of a man (or woman); i.e., one must discover one's wholeness or integrity, as symbolized by the rebirth of Osiris- Dionysus. Critics who insist that the overman is not simply a progression level of humanity existing presently, the highest of any type or are not wrong. The overman is not merely of all possible higher men, one agrees with Deleuze here: "The overman and the higher man differ in nature, both in the instances which produce them and in the goals that they attain. "23 Thus the overman is not the realization or determination of human essence. However, one would also wish to challenge, or at least carefully interrogate, the view that "the overman seems to correspond to the possibility of an ecstatic break away from humanity". 24 For the man who died certainly contrary, does not make or seek any such transcendent he makes a 'counter-ecstatic' his ideal identity - his 'Christhood' break; on the return to the mortal flesh and overcomes - by recovering the virile integrity of his physical manhood. For Lawrence, the key to living an active and ethical life lies "in remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are. "25 To surpass himself, man does not become more ideal (more hu-man), but less so; more animal, complete with guts and genitals and all those things which the idealists hope to see shrivel away. One would argue that this is what Nietzsche also wishes to see. Indeed, for Nietzsche, it will mark a genuinely positive achievement when man learns how to 258

become whole again, rather than an ideal assemblage of human-like qualities, or a mere simulacrum: "Painted with fifty-blotches on face and limbs"26 and written over with countless empty signs. It is thus vital that the man who died realize that he is more than a mere salvation-machine, or Christ-figure, as his disciples and followers (,Christians') would have him be. His first priority is to recover his manhood and his mortality and overcome his past as ideal-divinity and God upon the Cross. More than wishing simply to become- Ubermenscb. the man who died sets out on a process of becoming-Oberchrist (and, indeed, anti-Christ). Again and again he insists that his triumph is that he is not dead, has not been swept up to heaven, but has been reborn into the flesh upon the earth as man-alive. His 'mission' now is to heal and to become whole. The first thing that the man who died does as part of this process is to renounce his universal concern with the souls of all men, in order that he may concretely care for his own soul; "'now I can go about my own business, into my own single life'" (EC, p.564). He recognizes that the desire he had to bring about the salvation of all men whilst disregarding his own physical well-being and needs, was itself a sign of decadence, just as Zarathustra a transfiguration accepts that "his own desire for of humanity into an overhumanity reflects his own sickness and morbid, dissatisfied condition. "27 As we have seen, Zarathustra and the man who died both learn to overcome their nausea at the reality of man and accept him for what he is. Both also learn that their own task is to take care of and create themselves. This does not involve or lead to the kind of self-obsession suffered from before his death; that Jesus the self is not conceived as something to discover, dwell upon, confess, liberate, or preserve - but create and continually work upon. This ancient Greek conception, reactivated by Nietzsche and Lawrence, is not only different to the Christian idea or ethic of the self, but, according to Foucault, "diametrically opposed. "28 259

The man who died, having adopted this Greek ethic of the self, begins also to take an active concern with his appearance: "Therefore he cut his hair and his beard ... And he bought himself shoes, and the right mantle" (EC, p.571). But more than simply wanting to dress sharply, the man who died wants to physically heal and become strong; to rise in touch with the flesh he himself denied and lent to torture (the Crucifixion) and metaphysical cannibalism (the Eucharist). At the climax of the tale, the priestess of Isis helps him achieve this: "What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life" (ibid., p.593). She takes the death out of him and all the old fear and ressentiment, "gradually warmth began to take the place of cold terror, so that and he felt: I am going to be flushed warm again, I am going to be whole! I shall be warm like the morning - I shall be a man" (ibid., p.595). And, indeed, finally: "he felt the blaze of his manhood and power rise up in his loins, magnificent" (ibid., p.596). This the phallic erection - is the symbol of his wholeness and recovered life. To reiterate: as Christ the Redeemer, Jesus was something less than a man, not more; a kind of castrato. His becoming- Uberchrist sets free the non-personal and inhuman forces and flows of life and liberates him as a sexual being of the kind problematized within the Judea-Christian tradition. "'I am risen!'" (EC, p.596) becomes the cry of triumph of not only the man who died, but of all those who have been reborn into the new flesh and rediscovered the body's potencies, whilst accepting its limits. This feeling of power, of power's inrush and increase, results in great joy for the man who died; a joy great enough to enable him to affirm the eternal recurrence unconditionally. As man-alive and risen lord, he feels himself so well disposed toward life and so full of blazing indomitable power, that he is able to say yes to life in its totality and to desire nothing more than the eternal resurrection of the flesh. Confident and joyous, the man who died shines out like a star and provides 260

a new practice. Like his brother Zarathustra, he abandons any thoughts of preaching or teaching, having realized that whilst one profits from hearing the song of the nightingale, one profits from a philosopher "only insofar as he can be an example ... But this example must be supplied by his outward life". 29 This takes both Zarathustra and the man who died some time to learn; but that they do learn it is an important part of their respective (but in many ways parallel becomings). As Daniel Conway writes: "Zarathustra's exemplification of Ubermenschlichkeit thus transfers the onus of authority from his discourse to his practices in the world. Here Nietzsche's insight echoes that of Plato and Aristotle; to be a virtuous exemplar is to promote the virtue of others. "30 It is not that Zarathustra or the man who died say to those who look to them 'do as I do', or 'model your life on mine'; for neither ultimately wishes for followers of zombie-like disciples. On the contrary, they wish for living companions and friends who are masters over themselves in their own right and own fashion. The greatest and final lesson that Zarathustra 'lose me and find yourselves'. and the man who died wish to teach is 31 Having spoken so far of the becoming- Uberchrist of the man who died in terms of a new practice of self, let us now examine the above from a slightly more 'clinical' perspective; for what enables the man who died to get back his body and affirm a new ethic is the fact that he attains the 'greater health' that Nietzsche writes of. When naked before the priestess, the man who died is revealed as painfully thin and frail, still very much full of death. And yet, miraculously, he heals (or, rather, is healed by the touch of the woman) and comes into a new kind of well-being; "an irresistable and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. "32 261

In other words, the new health of the man who died is not the good health of the bourgeois who desires above all else to preserve himself. Such dreary and functional good health is merely a limitation and a blockage placed upon the lifeforces imprisoned within man. Better death, says Deleuze , than the health we have been given and are continually told by the 'health authorities' we should look after. Like a great artist or true philosopher, has seen and heard with bloodshot the man who died "returns from what he eyes and pierced eardrums'T' and with an emaciated body full of nausea and full of holes. And yet still he returns with a deeper vitality and a greater health than with which he began his journey. Zarathustra says he has seen the greatest and smallest of men naked and that they were revealed as "still all-too-similar to one another" we are forced to wonder whether Zarathustra Yet would recognize a body full of the greater health if he were to see one; for Zarathustra nakedness badly (as we saw last chapter). in their nakedness.H understands the body and its One certainly doubts that he would have been able to see in the man who died what the woman of Isis sees in him and his body: "a true Priestess, she saw the other kind of beauty in it, the sheer stillness of the deeper life" (EC,. p.582). In fact, Zarathustra makes several remarks which reveal his poor understanding of the nakedness of the overman. For example, he thinks that it is within "the burning sun of wisdom in which the overman joyfully bathes his nakednesst''V But this, as Lawrence shows and as the man who died learns, is not the case. Initially worried that the priestess will not be able to prove equal to the death within him because she lacks his understanding and knowledge of death, the man who died realizes as he bathes his nakedness in her sacred oils and the secretions of her vagina, that it doesn't require wisdom or knowledge, but the touch of 262

tenderness and the warmth of desire: "It doesn't need understanding. It needs newness" (EC, p.595). The woman is not a philosopher recognize; in any sense such as Zarathustra she acts and has her beauty from another would consciousness awareness' as Lawrence calls it in his Lady Chatterley writings). ('cunt The man who died can only watch in awe as she performs her sacred mysteries which remain beyond him and his understanding: "How sensitive and softly alive she is! How alive she is, with a life so different from mine!" (EC, p.592). Zarathustra has never looked upon a woman thus; nor received from such a healing touch of passion and desire. Knowing not of woman, nor sexual fulfilment, Zarathustra remains a far more limited and far less interesting character than the man who died. Until he finds the woman with whom he can 'mingle his body' and overcomes the greed of his virginity, he will not make the move from knowingin-apartness to creating in touch. The man who died, we may say in conclusion, learns three things: to love, to laugh, and to dance. As Christ, Zarathustra he did not love sufficiently; otherwise, says "he would not have been so angry that he was not loved"36 and he would not have demanded such an ideal and uncompromising hardness, as with madness, with fearful outbursts The man who died acknowledges love "with against those who denied it". 37 this and accepts the folly of attempting to "embrace multitudes" whilst having "never truly embraced even one" (EC, p.565). But learning how to love in a new manner overcoming; this self-serious is only one stage of his self- man has also to learn how to laugh and to dance. The man who died achieves the latter by refusing the burden of the Cross and living in happy defiance of the spirit of gravity. And this shepherd of souls achieves the former by biting of the head of the black snake as depicted by 263

Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Of the Vision and the Riddle. By biting off and spitting out the head of this serpent of bad conscience, the shepherd stands: "No longer shepherd, no longer human - a transformed yet on earth had any man laughed being ... laughing! Never as he laughed!" 38 At what does this Uberschetcr and Obermensch laugh? At all things; but perhaps most of all at his own former seriousness and bleating moral righteousness. Having learned how to laugh, the man who died now feels deep shame that he once preached that blessed are they that weep and mourn; cursed are they that laugh. Becoming a man who is able to laugh, enables the man who died to leave all solemnity and will to vengeance to the authorities Jewish priests of Church and State; i.e., to and Roman judges who exist only to condemn life, love, and laughter. But by becoming-gay and insouciant the man who died doesn't cease to be any the less an opponent to these authorities; seriousness they despise his light-heartedness and, in fact, if they disliked his still more. For as Nietzsche notes, what really enrages the slave at last is "half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith"39 and the importance of law and order. Thus it is, for example, that we observe the hostile reaction of his former disciples when the man who died meets them along the open road, disguised, and teases them with both his questions of them and his answers to their questions of him. The man who died knows now that "a dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief" (EC, p.S73) who knows not how to laugh. If the man who died understandably wishes to have little contact with those uncompromising men and women who cannot laugh, he realizes also that he wants to avoid those who have heavy feet as well as hard hearts; i.e., those who cannot dance and who mistakenly believe "that to affirm means to bear, to assume, to endure an ordeal, or to take on a burden", rather than to "set free that which lives. "40 Lawrence illustrates this by showing us the man who died assist in the 264

escaped cock's quest for freedom and fulfilment: '''I must toss this bird into the seethe of phenomena, for he must ride his wave'" (EC, p.572), i.e., the bird must find his roost to rule so that his singularity takes on splendour "polished by the lure" of the hens he takes to his body (ibid., p.574). This is vital: love, laughter, dance and play all demand community; our singularity only shines out and has meanmg within a community of touch or some kind of vital social and cultural context. Self-stylization otherness. and self-overcoming takes place within a wide world of This, finally, is the greatest realization of the man who died; that he rises and must rise as a man implicated within a network of power and politics. III. iii. The Man Who Died as Risen Lord. "Rise as the Lord. No longer the man of Sorrows. The Crucified uncrucified. The Crown of Thorns removed, and the tongues of fire round the brows. "41 We have seen that the man who died overcomes his nausea at having to accept the fact that the slave of the lesser day returns eternally; seen also that he realizes that this necessitates the need for rule. And so the question of power and politics returns to us once more. Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy (III. IS) that true aristocrats belong to a solitary species of man and thus instinctively dislike organization(s) and feel ill at ease in groups, irritated at having to deal with the affairs of the lesser day. They are "accustomed to living on mountains - to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics"42 beneath them. But, just as they must overcome their nausea at the thought of the slave's eternal return, irritation and discomfort. rule over others Zarathustra so too must they overcome this For in order to be masters they have to learn how to and not merely over themselves. Eventually, such men as and the man who died have to descend from their mountain tops 265

(climb down Pisgah). if ever they wish to enter into the 'promised land' (i.e .. a fulfilled life on earth) and not merely glimpse it from afar. Further. realize that they will not be allowed the false security they have to of a mountain top indefinitely. that the last men will not rest until all mountain dwellers and other solitaries have been exterminated: "The good have to crucify him he who devises his own virtue! That is the truth!"43 Of course. in exterminating the creators, last men ensure that the future itself is sacrificed (to themselves). the This is precisely what the man who died means when he argues that unless the lesser day is set within the context of the greater day and ruled over by the men of the latter, all ends in disaster. If he himself is to avoid being murdered once more (and innumerable times more) at the hands of the majority, then he has to accept the responsibility of power and the obligation of rule. In order to guarantee both his own life and the 'whole human future'. the man who died realizes he must accept his duty to rise not only as man-alive, but as a power-lord. In The Escaped Cock. the hint is given that the man who died is transformed via his contact with the priestess into more than a man who will simply make a good lover, or husband and father; i.e., will also become a solar-aristocrat or man of divine fire and affirmative will: "A new sun was coming up in him ... 'Now I am not myself - I am something new ... It, (EC, p. 595). This IS developed by Lawrence in an essay which effectively forms an outline for a third part to the tale of the man who died, entitled The Risen Lord. In this work, the man who died acknowledges his intention to engage with the world and resist those forces which would block the flow of solar energy and negate all warmth of heart. That is, those forces which Lawrence identifies as belonging to 'Mammon' (his term for the Crucified). Lawrence writes that if Jesus rose as a man on earth then his greatest test would be to find a way in which to continue the struggle against "the mechanical anti-life convention of Jewish priests, Roman despotism, and universal money-lust", as well as his own "self-absorption. 266 self-consciousness, self-

importance" . 44 Crucially, the latter struggle against egoism relates closely to the former. For the man who died realizes that if he is to be successful in the fight against the conventional powers that be, he must learn to form relations with others. Nietzsche says: "It is not possible to be a philosopher completely for oneself. For as a human being a person is related to other human beings, and if he is a philosopher, he must be a philosopher in this relationship. "45 But this is true also for the non-philosopher; true for all men in whatever capacity they act. No one can ever really lead an entirely isolated 'inner life' or ask in good faith of another 'what have I to do with thee?' Acknowledging the bond between himself and all other men and women, the man who died rises to form a wide variety of relationships political - some based on love, others based on - sexual, social, and enmity (but all formed within desire and sealed by Dionysian passion). The man who died rises not only to discover family life, but also the world of work, for example. In The Risen Lord Lawrence suggests that if he remembered his first life then probably he would assume once again not his role as a preacher, but as a carpenter "with joy, among the shavings. "46 But in The Escaped Cock, as we have seen, the man who died decides to become a healer-physician, realizing as he does that he can only achieve his own healing via a 'revolutionary' resurrection does not take place in isolation. healing of mankind; that his It is not that life itself is a sickness (as decadents like Socrates and those who posit death as a 'cure' would have it); but human life has been made sick by the forms of subjectivity and civilization man has devised for himself. As cultural physician, the man who died is also a 'schizoanalyst' - and who knows better than he of breakdowns, and becomings? therapeutic, But the nature of the schizoanalytic project breakthroughs is not merely or strictly clinical: it is also formative of a new type of critique. As 267

Mark Seem writes: politics becomes "Once possible, we forget about where singularity our egos a non-neurotic and collectivity type are no longer of at odds with each other't+": what we have called in this work a politics of desire. This form politics expressions of desire and of 'molecular' allows for new collective seeks to destroy "the oedipalized by a totalitarian system collective sensibility". As we said earlier, and neuroticized of moral shelter forces who have today Rather, There can be no doubt, the struggle. Declaring to flee from the authorities to continue remark in a letter granted and tactically however, themselves theirs, one is reminded is a fight, in all those who have attempted sovereign individuals), the fight against 'pigs', (i.e., a mixture himself to protect the man who died pledges and beauty from all forms the 'rose to a period of Lawrence's own of relative silence "1 shall go into the world of retreat. I rise up, and I've got to keep it up. "51 to rise up and live as lords convention of instinct politically and put him to death once more, from public life due to illness: want to. My business to at the end of the tale, when about who would capture Arguably, In pledging that would end in more astute, again, to kick it and stub my toe. It is no good my thinking second nature authority: that the man who died intends when asked of his plans following withdrawal and feel I don't of a on by the pigs. "50 That is to say, this his intention to pit his wits against and enforced forging this time it would be the fight of "a freed man fighting time the man who died will be strategically carryon via "the be the fight of self-sacrifice the rose of life from being trampled less naive. norms, formed this means that the man who died as risen lord must continue "But this time it would no longer "49 rational dependencies" 48 his fight with the reactive crucifixion. and individual and slave morality (i.e., has become and need). of life' from to defend intelligence, of grossness 268 and vulgarity. being trampled sensitivity, In other on by the love, laughter, words, he is

declaring his intent to defend culture from the forces of civilization (the latter being a euphemism for mechanical barbarism). Above all, as risen lord the man who died wants to take the power and the riches of the world out of the hands of the mediocre and the greedy. In his first life Jesus "thought that purity and poverty were one. It was a fatal mistake. "52 Now he knows that the riches and powers of the world must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the base and resentful. Power and wealth do not corrupt the pure in spirit ("it would thus not seem to be a necessity for a Caesar to become bad"53); but the impure in spirit and the impotent use these things corruptly. The man who died as risen lord is determined that the earth shall not belong to the slaves of the lesser day, that it shall, rather, be governed by those who have had the courage to die out from their old lives and resurrect into the new flesh. Such men have not, after all, "died and risen again for nothing." It must be stressed, 54 however, that the above do not lust for riches and worldly power in order to disguise their own poverty of spirit, or their own weakness. Both Nietzsche and Lawrence are keen to make this point clear. The former writes that true aristocrats are not merely ambitious slaves eager to expand their own egoism and authority, but those who "want power merely because it would otherwise fall into other hands upon whom they do not want to be dependent. "55 And the latter has the risen lord tell Mammon that riches and power and glory ultimately mean very little to him as a man who, having died, has lost his selfimportance: "'That's why I am going to take them all from you Mammon, because I care nothing for them. I am going to destroy all your values, Mammon: all your money-values and conceit values. I am going to destroy them all. "'56 In daring to destroy the old values, the man who died as risen lord marks himself out as a true creator; his joy comes from the thought of destroying whatever mutilates or prevents the flow of life and contact with life. 269

In some ways, the risen lord is the Jesus hinted at on occasion Testament, but never fully developed: Jesus the power-lord In the New who comes bearing arms with which to smite his enemies. Certainly the man who died as risen lord is not the gentle shepherd and saviour who preaches love and forgiveness and thinks he can abandon any concern with power and politics (the sword). This was the fatal error made by Jesus in his first life and one made much of by Lawrence in Apocalypse, where he argues that whilst "Jesus gave the ideal for the Christian individual .. . rhe] . " deliberately Nation. "57 This, Lawrence claims, avoided giving an ideal for the State or was naive and irresponsible; for Jesus effectively left it to others to give such and thereby to fashion and operate such. Thus, in away, Jesus handed us all into the power of the systematizers and the bullies: "Jesus made it inevitable, when he said that money belonged to Caesar. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no man. Money also means power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual enemy". 58 Christ's error here resulted in the universal crucifixion of man; not just his own death. For his refusal to accept the responsibility of power and provide rule, gave the opportunity to the base and mediocre to fashion a religion in his name founded upon self-glorification of the weak and the undermining and persecution of the strong and healthy (i.e., it allowed the slave revolt in morals). Incredibly, some readers of Lawrence and Nietzsche still fail to grasp this point and its significance. Michel Haar, for example, insists that the future 'masters of the earth' called for and imagined by Nietzsche "will possess neither political power, nor wealth, nor any effective governing force". 59 Hopefully, the folly and dangerously utopian nature of this remark is now self-evident. The 'voiceless voice' who whispers into the ear of Zarathustra during the 'stillest hour' is right to tell him that it is unpardonable to have power and then to refuse to rule.6o It is not enough merely to perform miracles, one must also be able to command great things. Ultimately, Jesus not only let down Judas, but he betrayed us all by 270

leaving himself at the mercy of slaves and opening the way for the 'reign of saints'. But the man who died accepts the 'horizontal division of mankind' as the "eternal division between the base and the beautiful'<! and he affirms the necessity of cultivating a pathos of distance between them and of establishing the rule of the few over the ego-bound masses, or 'robot-hoardes'. To conclude, I would like to refer to the series of points that Lawrence closes Apocalypse with. Deleuze notes that these points, crucial to an understanding Lawrence's late political thinking, form "a kind of rnamfesto'<! them to the Litany of Exhortations of and he relates found in Fantasia. And, certainly, they do essentially argue something similar to that found in the above; namely, leave off ideal-loving in the abstract and start to form real connections. But this is not what they say in full, and Deleuze is careful not to mention the nature of the connections Lawrence productive of aristocratic own quasi-anarchic advocates: active power-relations formed political relations (i.e., relations contrary political project, within and to Deleuze's but very much in line with Nietzsche's philosophy and Lawrence's own earlier work: see chapters II and III). With his dying breath, Lawrence seeks to defend and to affirm a political creed that many of his commentators remain keen to overlook, or pretend he abandoned decisively post- Plumed Serpent. But although Lawrence does flood his late work with a greater level of radical desire and does begin to evolve a different political vocabulary of favoured terms, still he insists on the vital importance of political and social power relations. It remains his belief that the most fundamental truth is that: "No man is pure individual ... men live and move and think and feel collectively ... It has always been so, and will always be so. "63 For Lawrence, then, man is a unit of worldly power. And as such he is a collective being who "has his fulfilment in the gratification of his power-sense. 271 "64

Therefore, as point six of Lawrence's 'manifesto' in Apocalypse concludes: "To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long-run being in a power relationship, fatal. "65 Either the collective self has its or it is doomed to live a reactive life "trying to destroy power, and destroy itself. "66 As risen lord, the man who died is ready to accept the validity of this argument; ready to acknowledge his own duty to provide in himself the living embodiment of power: the hero or leader whom Judas sought in vain. To become an aristocrat display great tenderness; means more than being able to one must also be able to give expression to the "sense of divinity informing humanity" (i.e., become one who can "interfuse the earthly and the spiritual for the enrichment of the community")."? The risen lord is a power-lord, or solar aristocrat; a king-god who transmits vividness and the actual potency of the cosmos. To a greater or lesser degree, it is the need of all men to feel themselves such in their own way: "The primal need, the old-Adamic need in a man's soul is to be, in his own sphere and as far as he can attain it, master, lord, and a splendid one. "68 But this can only be achieved via submission within a hierarchy of arranged power and by giving reverence and allegiance to the power-soul in other men; by conceding that fulfiment is something that can only be achieved collectively. Part IV: Closing Remarks. IV.i. Nietzsche and Lawrence as Posthumous Thinkers. "The philosopher", says Deleuze, "is someone who believes he has returned from the dead".! Someone, that is to say, who believes he must live in the world as a risen lord; that this is the necessary pre-condition for living a full and vital life of wonder and connection. Nietzsche calls such types 'posthumous' 272 individuals and

includes himself amongst their number; "it is only after death that we shall enter our life and become alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!"? There can be no doubt that Lawrence too is another posthumous thinker. And perhaps it is the case that our hope today lies precisely with such people; i.e., with those who give us in their writings and their lives a new understanding of life and death and provide and philosophers also what fewer than a handful of poets have ever given us - a completely new vision of what man is and may yet become. Works such as Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Lawrence's Escaped Cock which have been central to our study in this chapter, becoming-other to that which we are and that which is produced, The express a perpetuated, and insisted upon as the ideal form by the dominant socius of this today. They allow us to glimpse, if only briefly and somewhat hazily, the "deeper blue of that greater day"3 which is the unborn day that lies beyond the ruins. Nietzsche's aphorisms and Lawrence's poems, at their best, tear open the grey skies of the present and form openings to the outside which is also the future, obliging and encouraging us as readers to "plunge into chaos, before returning as if from the land of the dead. "4 IV.ii. Towards a Final Conclusion. I have attempted here in this chapter to offer an understanding of Nietzsche as he would have us understand him; in terms of Dionysus versus the Crucified, which is to say as one who has 'unmasked' Christian morality. which sets him apart from the rest of rnankind.f It is this, he claims, It certainly sets him apart from Lawrence, who has a somewhat different (though clearly related) project; namely, to put Jesus back in touch with the wider religious context emerged from which he and to "put God and the Bible back into the enormous setting. "6 273 historical

For Lawrence and Nietzsche, the Judea-Christian detached monotheism has been disastrous, pluralism and interconnectedness certainly the case that: insistence upon an absolute and and they wish to reactivate the of the earlier pagan religions. Of course, it is "A paganism haunted by Christianity is something inevitably different from a paganism that has never known it. "7 Nietzsche and Lawrence would readily admit this (just as they would concede that a post-moral ethic beyond good and evil, is something other than a pre-moral good and evil). Zarathustra ethic before and the man who died attempt to show us possible ways forward; there can be no going back. And yet we might ask is the becoming-Osiris of the latter really an advance or in any way more significant than Ramon's becoming-QuetzaIcoatl, Plumed Serpent or Cipiano's becoming-Huitzilpotchli (see chapter 1II)? One would argue that it is: For one thing, it is achieved via a process of phallic tenderness political murder. in The and an experience of desire; not The man who died fucks himself into a new life and thus his becoming resembles more closely the becoming of Oliver Mellors, than Ramon or Cipriano. The latter, for example, attempts to achieve divine status and breach the limits of his humanity by stabbing prisoners. himself been a political prisoner executed by the authorities, The man who died, however, having and himself been judged, condemned, and has had more than enough of such cruelty and state- stupidity. This is an important point: Quetzalcoatl drinks human blood; Dionysus is a god of the grape. Whereas Jesus too once advocated the drinking of his blood and the eating of his flesh, this is now explicitly repudiated as a teaching by the man who died. There is in The Escaped Cock a counter-transubstantiation into wine to parallel the counter-transcendence of blood back back into the flesh of the body. The man who died no longer says drink blood like one of the undead, or feast like a zombie on corpses; but, rather, sip the wine of Dionysus and let it make you merry and gay so that you will want to dance and sing, not lust for revenge and 274

for death. Whilst Lawrence retains notions of active power and radical aristocratism post- Plumed Serpent, he does move significantly beyond the politics of evil and cruelty as discussed in chapters II and III of this thesis. Lawrence ultimately condemns the literature pornographic of transgression as being both romantic mixture of the sentimental and the sensational. Serpent and other writings from his 'American period' murderous and decadent; a If in The Plumed he plays out his own fantasies, he eventually comes to question those writers and thinkers who remain trapped at the level of crime and disintegration. In a letter to Aldous Huxley he asks: "if you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape, in their various degrees ... however are we going to live ... it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia, inertia, inertia and final atrophy of feelings. "8 Such negative limit expenences within moral-rational may help us 'escape' from our 'imprisonment' consciousness, but if they fail to help us get beyond the sensation produced by the experiences themselves then they are not very effective escapes (mere masturbatory fantasies); we remain ego-bound. follow a line of flight that will transport us from In wishing to bad conscience to new innocence, we do not wish to end in a black hole of inertia and the atrophy of all feeling (i.e., nihilism). In seeking to become hard, we do not wish to become brutal and insensate. Lawrence, more than any other novelist of the last century, helps us to move beyond good and evil without succumbing to the above dangers. Of course, even his work takes place within the perspective of nihilism and is thus far from free of reactive forces; but he, like Nietzsche before him, comes closest to stuttering the first terms of a genuine revaluation of all values. 275

Outside the Gate: A Conclusion. In this thesis I have made a critical and clinical examination of Nietzsche's project of revaluation as 'mediated' via the work of D.H. Lawrence and in relation to other bodies of post-Nietzschean thought. Primarily, I have been interested in the political and ethical aspects of this project, as well as its cultural and social implications; that is to say, I have been keen to argue Nietzsche and Lawrence at a public level, countering the reduction of their work's significance to a wholly private individual level (i.e., an essentially abstract and apolitical level). I have suggested that whilst it may be difficult and at times disturbing to modern sensibilities to imagine a culture dominated by active forces and noble values, or a model of the self 'beyond good and evil', this should not constitute an argument against attempting to do so. By placing Nietzsche's project within the fictional enviroment provided by Lawrence's novels, I have hoped to stress that it achieves its main success as a provocative thought-experiment, best played by those readers and critics prepared to live dangerously and do their thinking outside the gate (i.e., outside of the usual 'elementary' thought, moral-rational conventions); searching for a vocabulary of words with which to build a nest of flames in which old models of self, and society can be destroyed, and new models created. I will say more on this idea at the close of this conclusion, indicating an important implicit concern of this thesis (the theme of language). Firstly, however, I wish to formally bring together in a clearly summarized manner a number of the main conclusions that have emerged during the course of the preceding study. The following were reached in the context of and are relative to the individual chapters and I have roughly arranged them here according to this structural division of the thesis and not on the basis of merit or validity. 276

Fuller accounts of the points summarized can often be found In the closing sections of the chapters they are drawn from. Our primary conclusion must be - contrary to our own initial expectations and prejudices - that nihilism, far from being the great danger and problematic of modern European culture to be solved at all costs, or the very limit of thought and experience to be moved beyond via a transcendent leap, is actually something to be affirmed. For nihilism, as indicated by all the talk of crisis that surrounds it, is a crucial opportunity moment of transition; a phenomenon which to revalue values and effect an overcoming of ourselves. merely mark the collapse of all values and the disintegration who understand our essential history. the It does not of agency. Those it in exclusively negative terms have only partly understood Modern man, as Nietzsche shows, is born of 'original' constitutes provides it. nihilism; its unfolding And, in all likelihood, we may conclude, postmodern man (the transhuman human being) will be born of modern European nihilism; the latter marking the end of one history and the beginning of a future narrative and new revealing. In one form or another, nihilism is coextensive with our being and becoming and provides both the tomb and womb of man and overman. Even the decadence which is asociated with it (as cause and symptom) is necessary to us; vital for growth and the flourishing of culture. If strength and health are needed to preserve life, then sickness and corruption (deviation) advances it. Thus nihilism is an ambiguous state of affairs; one that ultimately demands and requires perfecting. Secondly, and following on directly from the above point, those things which nihilism has most clearly and successfully manifested itself via - humanity, science and technology, capitalism - cannot simply be abolished. Nor can the above or their effects be reversed or undone; only overcome. And if there is an inherently negative will expressed in the above and a predominantly reactive accumulation of 277

forces; if they do form limits upon thought and experience and in some base manner cripple us by inhibiting our becoming, then so too from out of the above do some of our best hopes escape. Ultimately, they are not things to be opposed, so much as forms to be reconfigured, be redirected. processes to be accelerated, and forces to What needs to be done is to decodify and deterritorialize the self still further (man must be overcome, not 'saved'); science must become gay and technology questioned (not rejected in favour of a simple-minded and technophobic 'New Ageism'); capitalism must be taken to its absolute limit, which, as shown in chapter I, is a schizophrenic limit, and there transformed (not countered by socialist idealism or hindered by state regulations and a series of internal axiomatics). consummated Nihilism, to reiterate the above (not left incomplete and imperfect). conclusion, must be Besides, as Nietzsche rightly points out; 'no one is free to be a crab'. Thus nihilism cannot be side-stepped, or reversed. But whilst we should resist the temptation to reactively deny it, so too should we avoid falling into the trap of passive resignation a la the last man. The four R's: reform, must all be met and revolution, reaction, and resignation countered by a fifth: rejection. Affirmation alone is the key to the sixth and final R-term: revaluation. And the revaluation, becoming-minoritarian, we may conclude, will involve in an important or becoming-woman of politics, of the sense the subject, of knowledge forms, and of culture. Nietzsche refers to this process both positively and with approval as the giving of style, or the making gay of the above; and negatively in terms of decadence (although as noted above this is often only a nasty word for something which provides tomorrow's health). It is a process characterized by a return to, or, more precisely, a resurrection something without organs) and a transfiguration of the body (as of the Word back into the Flesh. Such thinking, which has been at the heart of this thesis, has often best been developed within contemporary feminist theory and we can conclude that whilst 278

the project of revaluation is not explicitly presented by Nietzsche as a 'feminist' one per se (any more than the problem of the subject is openly portrayed crisis of adult-white-male-heterosexual male authority in particular), as a it can legitimately be read as such and there are clearly aspects of Lawrence's and Deleuze's work, as well as Nietzsche's own, which encourage and open the way for such a reading. In fact, this has been one way in which the writings of the above have had an important public role to play; i.e., by providing minority groups with the opportunity to develop a new style of nomadic thought evolve a counter-discourse and that is appropriate to the voicing of their concerns. If Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean philosophy allows for the development of a radical politics as suggested above, then so too does it encourage the forming of a closely related new ethos and aesthetic; art providing a new practice of self as well as a counter-nihilistic force par excellence at the level of culture and society. 'Style' is a central term in the Nietzschean vocabulary. And yet because style involves above all else strict discipline and the formation of a singular taste, few will ever attain it. However, it remains crucial, Nietzsche argues, that every man and woman have some notion of style, if they are to achieve satisfaction (i.e., a feeling of pride in their strength and fulfilment as creatures able to command and obey themselves). Those individuals lacking in satisfaction will succumb to the poison of ressentiment and cast an evil eye on those others who do know joy and do possess a degree of style. These are the 'slaves' who make up the herd majority of mankind that Nietzsche speaks of; those unable to create laws of their own by which to live and who therefore subscribe to and seek to impose a universal morality; those who, unable to give birth to a culture and become a people, erect a civilization and form themselves into a state. Lacking the character and the strength to shape the chaos of themselves, they suppress and deny the latter by an act of will; shutting out all but the small handful of base forces they can organize a purely personal identity 279 upon. One of the crucial tasks of

revaluation is, we may conclude, the liberating of daimonic and impersonal selves from the subjectivities and ego-bound selves we have been given and become all too familiar with. How man achieves this self-overcoming is vital. But, let us recall, it has been an important finding that this too is a fundamentally social and cultural task; it is not and cannot be something achieved in isolation. The care, creation, and enhancement of the self (as well as its overcoming) is a politics as well as an ethics, because our being is always a being with and for others and our becoming always a becoming-other. Having mentioned the process by which the overman is produced, I would like to offer a few additional remarks in conclusion with specific reference to this important notion. In chapter II, I examined how as the move was made from the love-mode of moral idealism to the power-mode of libidinal materialism, the human subject (and political agent) is dramatically reconceived and reconfigured at both the level of forces and form; the ideal concept of the human being displaced by possibilities suggested by the greater reality of man as a being of will to power: inhuman and overhuman possibilities. Nietzsche and Lawrence both stress the immoral and non-rational forces nature of man and demonstrate of the Old Adam could come together with external how the daimonic forces - social, political, economic, and technological forces for example - to produce a new type of subject. But whilst their anti-humanism is not simply a reactive misanthropy; is far-reaching and thorough-going, it anymore than their wishing to make of man more than a logical machine is a flight into an absurd and romantic irrationalism. If, on the one hand, both authors do at times appear to invite misinterpretation on such points as these, so, on the other hand, do they demand and deserve the most careful and intelligent of readings. The key question is: can man in his present form acquire a new sensibility (i.e., a new way of thinking and feeling); or must his present human status be abolished? 280

Nietzsche. rightly I would conclude, argues that man must be overcome. However, he remains at pains to emphasize that even in his present form man, for all his slave attributes (free-will, memory, accountability etc.), remains a creature worthy of hope and full of tremendous potential and is not simply to be aborted. Man himself must form the bridge to the future; dormant forces within man. The overcoming of man is essentially overcoming and will proceed via a deepening and furthering well as a connection or, more precisely, a self- of what man is, as with new forces external to him. The becoming -Ubermensch does not involve transcendence and is not achieved via ecstasy. Of course, this is not to imply that Nietzsche is merely seeking a new turning for man based upon a development of the moral-rational subject. If he is not advocating an ideal leap over man, nevertheless he does wish in some manner to punctuate historical and evolutionary equilibrium and continuity via the development of a radical trans- human future. The overman may not be the absolute other that some critics have, mistakenly, suggested; but 'he' is certainly more than the superhuman. Ultimately, this question of the overman is central to the project of revaluation because Nietzsche and Lawrence are interested becomings and transmutations, a 'revolutionary' in how, via a number of strange they can make the present order explode. If this is project, it is so on a primarily molecular level and in a manner most significantly developed by Deleuze and Foucault. Molar political revolution is something that Lawrence expressly rejects in two separate novels as vieux jeu. For the latter promises nothing more than a continuous repetition of the same; i.e.. more men of slave-like and human, all too human status and their grouping into herd formations. interesting Nietzsche and Lawrence are undoubtedly at their most and most important when, realizing this, they begin to imagine and promote the possibility of a new kind of politics. But if the revaluation involves the forming of a radical new style of politics, then 281

it has to be admitted that Nietzsche and Lawrence did not get very far in developing such themselves; others. Further, they merely hinted at it and opened the way for there are elements in the writings of both which seem at odds with the radicalism of their work. In part due to his theory of culture - arborescent rather than rhizomatic - Nietzsche, for example, finds himself obliged to affirm a socio-political conservative tradition model that is strikingly similar within philosophy that reaches back to Plato and his Republic. When Lawrence attempts to reterritorialize at times to a his thinking upon such lines in The Plumed Serpent (see chapter III), the result is a disturbing and quasi- fascistic fantasy in which the underlying sensibility doesn't fit into the political form given it. This novel serves best, it can perhaps be concluded, as an instructive failure. However, if there are reactionary and authoritarian elements in Nietzsche's and Lawrence's political writings (and clearly they were neither liberals nor democrats in the usual sense of this term), it is important to be able to conclude that it is in no way valid or meaningful to describe their work as 'fascist'. On the contrary, with its emphasis on cracks, ruptures, fact a whole 'gargoyle aesthetic' disjunctions, difference, and becoming (in and radically active notion of power), feasible to argue that their work is inherently anti-fascist. of Nietzsche and Lawrence is sometimes it is If the political thinking limited and sometimes regrettably distorted by the semi-rigid forms they attempt to impose rather awkwardly onto their more fluid philosophy of power, never does either of the above betray Geist to Reich or to any party-political MachtpoJitik. Whatever else they were, neither Nietzsche or Lawrence was a state-idolater and both were, in fact, prescient in recognizing and warning against the danger of the totalitarian modern state. Being artists, both were instinctively aware that there is no Absolute and that wholeness and completion, or purity (be it of races or genres) can only rest upon illusion and the exclusion of a vast field of otherness. 282 A field which they wished to

explore and conduct their thought-experiments contingent, and discordant within, bringing out the temporal, elements within all certainties (to find value in that which the fascist mind fears most). By abandoning fantasies of violent transgression and takeover we are perhaps all rescued from the black hole of fascism and the dangerously utopian longing for a New Jerusalem. As indicated, a grand revolutionary response to nihilism at the molar political level is simply inappropriate and demands to be decisively rejected; by such means. It is important the revaluation is hindered rather than furthered to be able to conclude, as Lawrence concludes, that the desire for bloody revolution and all sorts of horror and atrocity is both romantic and reactionary; a form of love-idealism on the recoil. Just as the challenge to rationalism does not mean the promotion of a mindless irrationalism, immoralism and affirmation as said above, nor does an active of nihilism require or justify inhumanity. The thrill of the negative limit-experience the masturbatory a brutal and base and of crime, belongs to variety that leaves one just as ego-bound afterwards as before, never really transforming the subject, despite the intensity of sensation. If the new innocence that Nietzsche and Lawrence seek lies 'beyond good and evil', it does not lie beyond good and bad: the immoralist is not unethical; becoming hard does not mean becoming insensate and falling into a state of emotional atrophy in which all finer feeling is denied (it means become honest and acknowledge the tragic nature of existence, affirming its eternal return); live dangerously does not mean abandoning all self-discipline and restraint, or refusing to exercise any degree of caution (it means, rather, avoid positing as far as possible any fixed ideals and beware of turning processes into goals). The key, then, to revaluation and self-overcoming revenge; spirits is in the exorcising of the twin spirits of gravity which weigh us down with ascetic self-seriousness righteousness and poison the blood with ressentiment. 283 and and self-

But if transgression it is nevertheless is rejected as a strategy and theoretical terrorism abandoned, important to note in conclusion that, for Nietzsche, it remains vital that the great man or sovereign individual be allowed the opportunity show that he can, ultimately, after having demonstrated to an ability to both suffer and inflict cruelty, resist the desire to do so and thereby affect his own selfovercoming (become 'good' in the noble and generous sense). As we heard Zarathustra declare: '''I desire beauty from no one as much as I desire it from you, you man of power: may your goodness be your ultimate self-ovecoming. I believe you are capable of any evil; therefore I desire of you the good. '" I To be able to show compassion - even a revalued form of pity - is undoubtedly important test of greatness and central to Nietzsche's project. an In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence gives Ram6n and Cipriano the chance to undertake this test. Whether or not they pass it by holding out the 'green leaf of Malintzi' (see chapter III once more). is debatable; and Lawrence soon after the end of this novel is ready to confess his loss of faith in the great man or hero. It may be, sadly, that in the present circumstances, even the greatest of men would fail to achieve the goodness desired by Zarathustra; and that we therefore need the 'quarantine' arrangements of democracy and the old morality for a long time yet. However, one needs to be careful in drawing too many conclusions of this kind from Lawrence's publically confessed loss of faith in the hero. For if it signals a move away in his late writings from inflated political posturing militancy associated with it, towards and the ascetic a new politics of phallic tenderness touch, it is vital to note that this represents and a change of tactics and approach - and not a change of goal or core philosophical beliefs; the revaluation of values is still the great desideratum. Certainly Lawrence is not beating a retreat to the old ideals of liberal humanism. as some critics seem overly keen to suggest. Thus if the Lady Chatterley writings and those related to them allow for an opening up and critical reexamination of his own thinking in the power trilogy of novels, 284

Lawrence does not effect a complete break with the above. Rather, he seeks to make his position clearly distinct from those who would vulgarize and brutalize his thinking reconsiders with their own inherent baseness and fascism. If Lawrence his own philosophy of power, he does so, we can conclude, because he stays committed to it. And he moves away from an inappropriate modernist ambition metaphysical terms in which power is invariably (as something politics of conceived in negative lacking but lusted after; something and to be possessed and worked from the will in order to outlaw, prohibit, oppress etc.), in order to safeguard continuity his positive and subtle coherence notion of power. in Lawrence's There is thus a greater work (as, indeed, there is in Nietzsche's), than is sometimes recognized. In rejecting grand politics and great events, Lawrence does not, however, withdraw into the private or the petty; i.e., make the solipsistic retreat into the politics of the soul as advocated by those such as Rorty (see the Introduction part II). The micro-politics of desire which became the concern of this thesis in chapters IV and V, remains very much a concern with the forces and flows that underlie, form, reform. pass through, over, and around the individual and society. A schizoanalysis is always a political analysis; the soul is never a private affair. And yet this is not to suggest that Nietzsche and Lawrence naively confuse the personal with the political due to a false equation between the organization of the soul with that of the state, thereby making invalid and illegitimate judgements to do with the latter on the basis of their insights into the former. Rather, Nietzsche and Lawrence by later radically anticipate the conclusion reached theorists that there is no longer a clear public/private dichotomy or distinction to be made. The modern state has entered the soul in a previously unheard of and unimaginable manner. Thus, as Marcuse rightly claims: "The traditional border lines between psychology and political and social philosophy ... have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era. "2 It is because Nietzsche and 285

Lawrence grasped this - not because they held on to classical models of thinking that understood society as man writ large - that they successfully flitted back and forth from remarks on the body and consciousness, to remarks on society and culture, shattering the traditional language games of political and social science in the process. If there are many different aspects to the project of revaluation, the erotic element is by no means the least important among them; particularly when linked to ethico-aesthetic and socio-political thinking. A theory of sexuality - and, in a much wider and more profound Nietzsche's project. sense, desire - is vital to an understanding This is not surprising of when one recalls that his central problematic, nihilism, is conceived of as a physical crisis of feelings, as well as one of values and beliefs, and that he identifies his own philosophy as 'Dionysian' in nature. For Lawrence too sex is central; understanding it as he does as our deepest form of awareness, and basing his thinking on touch and tenderness on this understanding. These two terms - touch and tenderness - we can conclude, are as crucial to the project of revaluation as Lawrence conceives of it, as they are to his politics of desire. The former, for Lawrence, means coming back into connection with one another, with other creatures, the physical universe. and with inanimate things of Nietzsche calls this desire for touch an 'urge to living unison'; but what he does not mean by this is a desire to negate difference or close distances (which is of course how nihilism operates, reducing all things to an essential sameness and valuelessness). Desire is that which brings into relation, joining together at least two terms, two flows, two forces; but without collapsing them into One Identity as within the ideal-love tradition that longs for merger. Nietzsche and Lawrence differ from Deleuze and Guattari on the political implications of desire, however, as we indicated in chapter IV. Whilst the latter seem to believe that all relations and structures 286 of servitude and hierarchy can

and have to be compromised and dissolved by desire, the former (maintaining the 'aristocratic' element of their own earlier thinking), argue that these are in fact the very things formed by desire and which we should value (and socially inscribe). Thus a libidinal culture of touch is not without distinctions and whilst, admittedly, desire may not recognize accentuates power differentials. class differentials based on money, A democracy of touch therefore, it whilst on the one hand enabling men to meet 'naked and light' along the Open Road, would, on the other hand, allow power differentials to become manifestly self-evident and for souls to be ranked accordingly, based on the degree of power they were. Of course, the way in which an individual styles the degree of power he is will also playa part in determining his rank within such a democracy, and, it should be stressed, power becoming-other; is a dynamic flow between individuals who are constantly it is not a fixed essence that determines being once and for all. Thus the above order is mobile and susceptible to continual change; one's rank indefinite. We need, in conclusion, to offer a few further remarks on Lawrence's notion of a democracy of touch. It is, apparently, a libidinal arrangement within desire that is 'fucked' into being via the creative exchange between man and woman conceived of not simply as distinct 'sexes', in the manner common to thought based upon molar identities, but as two flows of energy vibrating at a different speed or pitch; or two streams of differently charged blood. It is certainly not something that can be established by non-molecular air of the party-political between lovers. revolution; the raised fist punching the militant have been replaced by the holding of hands Lawrence does not promote or even accept the possibility of liberation from social relations into an ideal individualism, nor the equally ideal notions of solidarity proposed by those such as Rorty. On the contrary, he seeks an escape from such liberal fantasy and an end to isolation via the establishment of physical relations on the basis of active power and affirmative desire. 287

But is Lawrence's notion of a democracy of touch compatible with Nietzschean philosophy? I conclude that it is; in fact, very much so - particularly with the mid-period works beginning with Human, All Too Human. When one reads these works, one understands how even the use of the word 'democracy' by Lawrence is not so peculiar. For whilst, admittedly, he, like Nietzsche, is an enemy of democracy as it is presently understood (by slave moralists), ultimately Lawrence, like Nietzsche, wants to see the overcoming democracy (resting on fear, weakness, of such a reactive conception of and envy), and the building of a 'true' democracy of exuberance and strength which will "create and guarantee as much independence as possible; employment'l.:' independence of opinion, of mode of life and of This, for Nietzsche quoted here, is the democracy of the future and what Lawrence calls the democracy of touch. As an arrangement of a people still to come, it involves rather and political more than just socio-economic change (important as these things undoubtedly are). It will demand great cultural transformation in addition, and, beyond this, a reckoning with the great saviours and teachers of the past; i.e., those grand idealists such as Plato and Christ. Or, as Nietzsche summarizes this reckoning: Dionysus versus the Crucified! This brings us back to a claim we made in the Introduction and which we sought to demonstrate in the main text; namely, that Nietzsche and Lawrence are, in a sense, great religious writers, as much (if not more) than they are political thinkers: I would like to re-affirm this view here in conclusion. Although they are not mystics, or theologians, they understand the need to substantiate mystery and that the revaluation is an inherently anti-Christian struggle first and foremost; an attempt to overthrow moral idealism via a reactivated paganism. If they attempt to express their philosophical and religious insights in socio-political terms, so too do they frequently 'Dionysian' poetry work in reverse in which to express and attempt to find the those values they find impossible to contain within conventional language games. Lawrence achieves this perhaps most 288

beautifully in The Escaped Cock, his final major work of fiction which formed the focus of chapter V, having arguably failed to do so in The Plumed Serpent. Nietzsche does it with mixed success in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; a book which, if not quite mankind's greatest gift, remains nevertheless one of the most valuable works of revaluation. Dionysus versus the Crucified is rightly given by Nietzsche as the formula to understand him and his project. But his thinking is post-Christian anti-Christian (in the same way that it is post- and not merely anti-modern). Lawrence rightly recognizes that only a resurrected anti-Christ as much as And Jesus can play the role of to perfection (better even than Dionysus), and he suggests that via a revaluation of Christ's story it can be made to actively serve and enhance the life of the present. There are, finally, just a few additional points that deserve to be emphasized in conclusion. Perhaps above all it should be said that Nietzsche's concern is with the question of culture and the cultural production of greatness; can legitimately be read as a sustained call for cultural the revaluation renaissance. The philosopher, Nietzsche informs us, in his guise as cultural physician, can diagnose the condition of culture, can help preserve it, or can assist in its destruction, thereby providing the space and the conditions for a new culture. But he cannot himself create this new culture; not unless, that is, he becomes an artist himself. For only as an artist is the philosopher able to create new models and practices, invent new ways of thinking and speaking, and, ultimately, revalue Combined, these new models and practices allow for a different values. ethos to be developed and a different revealing for man; one that makes possible a Dionysian celebration of life lived on earth, in the flesh, and in time; life as something mortal and yet valuable and worthy of affirmation precisely because of this. 289

In returning us to the flesh and to time, Nietzsche and Lawrence essentially return us to the real; the revaluation marks a counter-transcendence away from the Ideal and the imaginary and asserts that human and cultural greatness is not achieved via a denial of the thingness of things, nor an attempt to transcend the earth, the body, or the temporal conditions of existence, but by affirming the above and forming a multiplicity of direct connections with the real. Immanence, not transcendence, revaluation. is one of the central words belonging to the vocabulary of Man, as Lawrence puts it, must learn how to climb down Pisgah, which means, as Heidegger puts it, "climbing back down into the nearness of the nearest. "4 This descent may well be arduous and perhaps even more dangerous than the ascent into abstraction, but if man is to come into fulfilment and blossoming as man-alive (and not dead-man-in-life), attempt a passage into the sacred there is no alternative but to moment which is here and now. As we concluded earlier, it is perhaps our poets and artists like Nietzsche and Lawrence themselves who are best able to guide us towards this fourth dimensional realm of the Greater Day; having retained their sense of wonder, of reverence, and of gratitude. The question is whether we will accept the gifts they offer and dare to follow the pathways beyond good and evil which they reveal; pathways planted with purple delights and, as Nietzsche says, with good sentences. The revaluation of all values is a complex and multifaceted process that will not and cannot be achieved overnight: it will involve change culturally, socially, politically, and onto logically . The politics of style, of evil, of cruelty, and of desire which we have introduced here as possible responses to modern European nihilism, mayor may not offer clues as to how these changes can be made. The crucial point to conclude is that Nietzsche's philosophical investigations cannot be divorced from his public and social thinking. If, as indicated, there are serious concerns with the above, it is our task to wrestle with these - not funk them. And if Nietzsche and Lawrence do not achieve a revaluation of all values between 290

them, they succeed nevertheless in constructing a powerful reckoning with slave morality and in exposing the vocabulary of the above as something full of hate and ressentiment; something destructive to man's well being and which infects not just his soul, but his political and social forms. Nietzsche and Lawrence succeed also in offering us the first stammered terms of a counter-vocabulary innocence and becoming for which we should be grateful; a vocabulary of of 'elementary' words which will enable us to tear up the foundations of our souls, reawakening feeble and dormant forces within us and liberating us from the old ideal words of moral-rationalism. Undoubtedly, there will still be many who wish to remain captives and servants of received conceptual linguistic conventions; souls enchanted by the spell and promise of metaphysical language, enthralled by good grammar and comfortable persons will never create new ways of thinking, experiencing, schemes and moral- with cliche. But these never enjoy new ways of never discover new worlds to inhabit. There remains no smooth road into the future; we still have many obstacles to go round or scramble over if we want to live. But surely, no matter how many skies have fallen, we do want to live and live with a certain nobility. For whilst God is dead, we are not and, as Lawrence concludes, this should be cause for rejoicing. 291

Notes and References. Note that I give the full details of each title only on the first reference and after that simply the author, title of work, date of publication, and page number. Outside the Gate: An Introduction. 1. Jurgen Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Polity Press, 1994), p.167. 2. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), 960, p.504. 3. Foucault; 'The Ethics of the Care For Self as a Practice in Freedom', Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, (vol. I. of The Essential in; Works ), ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et el, (Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1997), p.293. 4. Keith Ansell-Pearson; 'Introduction' Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.ix. Note that Ansell-Pearson is not here promoting such a view; on the contrary, he offers his own criticism and rejection of such thinking. 5. Richard Rorty; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.120. 6. Ibid., p.83. 7. Ibid., p.99. 8. Keith Ansell-Pearson; An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.171. 9. Leslie Paul Thiele; Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, (Princeton University Press, 1990), p.223. 10. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Future of the Novel', 10; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.1S4. 292

11. Nietzsche; 'The Struggle Truth, ed. & trans. Between Daniel in; Philosophy and Science and Wisdom', Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), p.134. Nietzsche, (Fontana 12. J.P. Stern; Of course, between Nietzsche philosophy is not, Press, in attempting and literature, Sarah Kofman reminds it is because it has always 1990), p.146. doing us: "If Nietzsche to dissolve something existed; genre previously can venture and already the distinction unimaginable; as a new kind of philosophy ... such a philosophy is possible because it had already been alive for the pre-Socratics." See Sarah Kofman; ed. D.B. Allison, 'Metaphor, Symbol, (The MIT Press, m; The New Nietzsche, Metamorphosis', 1992), p.209. in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University 13. D.H. Lawrence; 'Books', Press, 1988), p.198. 14. Ibid. 15. Herbert Marcuse; Nomadic Subjects, (Columbia University 16. Rosi Braidotti; 17. Deleuze; Press, Eros and Civilization, (Penguin Press, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh 1970), p.133. Press, 1994), p.4. Tomlinson, (The Athlone 1992), p.llO. 18. Deleuze and Guattari: (University of Minnesota As we have seen, Rorty Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Press, 1997), p. 18. also develops he says is produced and sustained Deleuze and Guattari who derive Kafka, Lawrence, Miller, above in human, all too human a notion within of 'solidarity' works Fitzgerald, terms, based Lawrence and Nietzsche: 1987), p.231. 293 However, unlike a reading of to define the of novelists such as dread of cruelty. 20. Press, which of such from on a reading Nomadic Subjects, (1994), p.4. University in his work, et ai, Rorty manages Kerouac 19. Rosi Braidotti; Milton; of literature. their understanding Dickens and Orwell, and upon his overriding Colin Dana Polan, A Study in Influence, (Aberdeen

Earlier in the above (p.122) Milton writes: "The novel can help us live because it is capable of modifying as well as reflecting our feelings, and since these feelings are expressions revaluation of our fundamental values, by so doing it can bring about the of values which Lawrence and Nietzsche regarded as an urgent necessity. " 21. Jurgen Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (1994), p.2IO. 22. Ibid. 23. Martin Heidegger; 'The Origin of the Work of Art', m; Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, (Routledge, 1994), p.197. 24. Jonathan Culler, quoted (disapprovingly) by Habermas m; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (1994), pp .192- 3. 25. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (Penguin Books, 1983), p.1S. 26. Henry Miller; The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, ed. Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen, (John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1985), p.51. 27. Colin Milton; Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, (1987), p.l. See also Robert E. Montgomery on the relation between Nietzsche and Lawrence in; The Visionary D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 28. Colin Milton, ibid., (1987), p.19. 29. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.l. 30. Deleuze; 'Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse', in; Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, (The Athlone Press, 1987), p.119. 31. Foucault; 'Prison Talk', in; Power-Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et aI, (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp.S3-4. Chapter I: Among the Ruins: Nihilism, Culture, and the Politics of Style. Part I: Opening Remarks on the Death of God and the Emergence of Modern European Nihilism in Relation to Lawrence's The Rainbowand 294 Women in Love.

1. Albert Camus; The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower, (Penguin Books, 1971), p.59. 2. Maurice Blanchot; 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992). p.121. 3. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p. 280. 4. Ibid. 5. Debra B. Bergoffen; 'Nietzsche's Madman', in; Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb, (SUNY Press, 1990), p.64. 6. The transhuman throughout aspect of Nietzsche's project is crucial and will be stressed this thesis. Lawrence also frequently speculates on the overcoming of man, in both his fiction and non-fiction, as an anthropocentric and virulently opposes what he identifies egoism and ideal-humanism at the heart of modern culture. See, for example, pp.126-8 and pp.478-9 of Women in Love, (1995). 7. Mark Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (The MIT Press, 1991), p.88. 8. D.H. Lawrence; 'Study of Thomas Hardy' in; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1995), p.29. 9. Ibid. 10. Jurgen Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (1994), p.212. 11. See Nietzsche writing in Daybreak (1.14) for example, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.13-14. 12. Mark Kinkead-Weekes; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Women in Love, ed. David Farmer et ai, (Penguin Books, 1995), pp.xiii-xiv. 13. Ibid., p.xvi. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p.xxi. 16. Deleuze; 'Nomad Thought', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.147. 17. Mark Kinkead-Weekes; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's p.xviii. 295 Women In Love, (1995),

18. Anne Fernihough; Kinkead-Weekes, 'Introduction' to Lawrence's The Rainbow, ed. by Mark (Penguin Books, 1995), p.xxix. 19. We will make more of this distinction between culture and civilization later in the text. And see also footnote 28 to Part II below. 20. Nietzsche; 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', m; Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.74. 21. Ibid. 22. In her 'Introduction' to The Rainbow, Fernihough writes that it is "impossible to overlook the fact" that in the above Lawrence "chooses to make a woman into a Nietzschean figure of sorts" (1995), p.xviii. 23. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), 1.24, p.98. 24. Ibid., 1.23, p.98. 25. Anne Fernihough; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's The Rainbow, (1995), p.xxix. 26. Mark Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.41. Part II: Aspects of Nihilism as a Molar and Molecular Phenomenon. 1. Marshall Berman; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, (Verso, 1990), p.1II. 2. Ibid. 3. It is because this is the case, that their work needs to be supplemented with writings from those authors, like Marx and Weber, who have taken the time and trouble to study the economic field more closely. On occasion, Nietzsche and Lawrence do expose themselves to the charge that their critiques are no more worthwhile than the most lamentable and romantic of anti-capitalist texts. I shall comment on this later in the thesis. 4. Nietzsche; 'The Greek State', in; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), p.184. 5. Marx & Engels; The Communist Manifesto, (Penguin Books, 1985), p.82. 6. Nietzsche; 'Schopenhauer as Educator' in; Untimely Meditations, (1992) p.16S. 296

7. Ibid., p.164. 8. Nietzsche; Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (1989), 111.175, p.106. 9. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974),1.40, 10. Nietzsche; p.l83. The Greek State', It is important p.l07. in; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), to note how Nietzsche's concern for the well being of culture leads him into a rejection of both capitalist economics and the 'liberaloptimistic world view'; i.e., how his social and political views are closely related to his thoughts on the former. 11. Ibid., p.184. 12. Deleuze and Guattari: What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp.l07-8. 13. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), 1.10, p.40. 14. D.H. Lawrence; 'Refelections on the Death of a Porcupine', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.363. 15. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et el. (The Athlone Press, 1994), p.239. 16. See for example Lawrence writing in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', m; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), pp.38-9. 17. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man' 43, p.106. 18. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), pp.239-40. From a viewpoint, that is, of their own theory and practice developed in the above work and in A Thousand Plateaus (The Athlone Press, 1996); their twovolumed study of capitalism and schizophrenia. What Deleuze and Guattari argue, essentially, is that: "capitalism, through its processes of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nevertheless continues to act as capitalism's limit" (Anti-Oedipus, p.34). For capitalism, therefore, 297 it is always

a question of "binding the schizophrenic charges axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary and energies into a world potential of decoded flows with their interior limits. ... Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death" t ibid., p.246). 19. Ibid., p.33. 20. Ibid., p.34. 21. Nietzsche; 'Schopenhauer as Educator', m; Untimely Meditations. (1992), p.165. 22. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), p.178. 23. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.240. 24. Ibid., p.35. 25. Maurice Blanchot; 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.122. 26. See Nietzsche writing m On the Genealogy of Morality (1994), essay Ill, section 25. He argues here that it is art, and not science, which is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal, because it has a good conscience towards lying and an entirely different relation from science to matter and the physical world. It is art which allows man the possibility of a different revealing; a point developed in Part III of this chapter. 27. Nietzsche; 'The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom', m; Philosophy and Truth (1993), 199, p.141. 28. Nietzsche almost always relates science and material progress and not to culture; to civilization two terms between which he maintains a fairly strict and consistent distinction throughout his work (see for example his remark in note 121 of The Will To Power ). Mark Warren writes of this "uniquely German opposition" of the concepts kultur and Zivilization: "The distinction had an established polemical twist by Nietzsche's time. While civilization was seen to be materially progressive ... German's often emphasized that culture was ... a spiritual quality possessed by individuals and peoples, something growing from 298

within their conditions of existence and defining their uruque identities." See Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.26. 29. See Chapter II where the distinction between reactive force and active power is analyzed in detail. 30. See Women in Love, (1995), chapter IX, pp.llO-13. This powerful and disturbing scene tells us much about the character of Gerald Crich. 31. George Steiner; Heidegger (Fontana Press, 1989), p.33. 32. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.333. The original German reads: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wschst / Das Rettende auch. 33. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), p.134. 34. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.330. 35. D.H. Lawrence; 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', m; Studies in Classic American Literature, (Penguin Books, 1986), p.134. 36. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.341. The problem is, as Heidegger notes in 'The End of Philosophy and the Task For Thinking': "The need to ask about modern technology is presumably dying out to the same extent that technology more decisively characterizes and directs the appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it." See Basic Writings, (1994), p.434. 37. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology' (ibid.), p.333. This is an important passage, yet troubling also: Talk of man's 'essence' seems to imply that there can be found some fixed human nature; talk of a more 'original revealing' prior to technology would appear, as Keith Ansell-Pearson "to underestimate massively the extent of technology's animal and the nature and extent of its investment points out; invention of the human in mankind." See Ansell- Pearson writing in Viroid Life, (1997); p .153. 38. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology', in; Basic Writings, (1994), 299

p.320. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. For more on subjection and enslavement to the machine. see Deleuze and Guattari in; A Thousand Plateaus: 13: 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture. To summarize very briefly their view. the following quotation from p.454 is helpful: "There is enslavement when human beings themselves are constituent parts of a machine ... But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object". 42. Maurice Blanchot; 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', m; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.213. 43. Mark Kinkead-Weekes; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Women in Love, (1995), p.xxiii. 44. George Steiner; Heidegger. (1989). p. 36. 45. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.274. 46. Ibid., p.281. 47. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Viroid Life, (1997), p.2. 48. Heidegger; 'The Question Concerning Technology'. in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.337. 49. Ibid., p.338. 50. Ibid., p.339. 51. Ibid., p.340. 52. Heidegger; 'The End of Philosophy and the Task For Thinking', ibid., p.437. 53. According to Nietzsche: "Every individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life ... If he represents value is in fact extraordinary ... If he represents the ascending line his the descending development ... then he can be accorded little value". See 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 33, in Twilight of the Idols. (1990). pp. 95-6. 300

However, elsewhere in his writings, means this straightforward; to be of greater advancement Nietzsche recognizes that things are by no that, in fact, it is degenerate natures who often prove value and significance wherever spiritual progress and the of the species is to be effected (see Human, All Too Human, 1.5.224, for example). Lawrence, particularly in Women in Love, is also far from certain what value to accord the role of decadence in the the total economy "paradoxes about corruption are dramatized at every level ... affirming but also calling into question (often simultaneously) growth, of life. And thus purity and degradation". the dichotomies See Colin Clarke; of decadence and The River of Dissolution: D.H. Lawrence and English Romanticism, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp.xixii. 54. See for example note 328 and the series following on decadence in The Will To Power, (1968). Despite what Nietzsche says here, many commentators seem to confuse corruption still as symptomatic of nihilism, rather than as cause of the latter. 55. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993), 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' (1), p.4. 56. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.276. 57. For an interesting discussion of this key Lawrencean idea see Linda Ruth Williams; Sex in the Head, (Harvester study D.H. Lawrence, (Northcote Wheat sheaf, 1993), as well as her short House, 1997), particularly pp.29-30 and the section entitled 'Hermione's Mirrors' on pp.99-103. 58. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.2?? 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., pp.293-4. 301

62. Ibid. 63. D.H. Lawrence; 'Pornography and Obscenity', in; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961), p.68. 64. Ibid., pp.68-9. For another version of this 'two flows' theory, see Georges Bataille's second volume of The Accused Share: The History of Eroticism, trans. Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1993), particularly part 3.1: 'Sexuality and Dejecta'. Whilst there is a natural association between the sexual and excretory functions, Bataille concedes the point that the two worlds are radically distinct. 65. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (Fontana Press, 1985), p.130. 66. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Reality of Peace', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), pp.34-5. 67. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (1985), p.130. 68. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.277. 69. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.130. 70. As Keith Sagar writes: "Gudrun's nostalgie de la boue is a desire to reverse the normal processes of human development, individual, towards integrity, happiness', and to break herself down with many spasms of extreme sensation, towards man's first responsible slime. The obscene both in the species and the consciousness is what she thrills and to." 'productive See D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art, (Penguin Books, 1985), p.165. It is vital to note that whilst both Nietzsche and Lawrence do suggest decadence may help both individual and cultural growth, so too can it mark a potentially fatal devolution as in Gudrun's case. 71. See Women In Love (1995) where this distinction is developed by Lawrence. 72. Philip Wheelwright notes that for Heraclitus; "soul has its natural place somewhere between water and fire, and contains within itself the possibilities of self-transformation in either direction ... Since soul is a dynamical something, 302

always tending by a sort of inner urgency is, it may (if it be wise and excellent) and more fiery, to become other struggle upwards or (if it yield to degeneration) than what it was and to become drier, it may slip downwards brighter, to become more sodden and moist." Quoted by R.E. The Montgomery; University Press, 1994), p.155. discussed at some length in this work. Visionary The relation D.H. between and the flow of this river. is reluctant and conditional (Cambridge Heraclitus and Lawrence is reservation the process of 73. Note that Birkin does not decide to affirm without decadence Lawrence. As Michael Bell points out; "his acquiescence as well as inducing an element of conscious despair." See D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.130. 74. Nietzsche as a new sea: '''In truth, a polluted Behold, proposes river. the figure of the overman One must be a sea, to receive a polluted I teach you the overman: Prologue', river and not be defiled. he is this sea, in him your great contempt go under. '" See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. 1969), 'Zarathustra's R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin p.30, dangerous revolves around contains the gruesome with exhaustion exhausted can Books, 3, p.42. 75. In note 48 of The Will To Power, (1968), misunderstanding', man is which essentially and the concern that "history have always been mistaken for the fullest Nietzsche warns of the 'most a confusion to do fact that the - and the fullest for the most harmful. " 76. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 77. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 112, p.69. 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 43, p.106. 78. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', Other Essays, (1988), greatest that: expression p.294. See the end of The Rainbow (1995) for Lawrence's of this hope (voiced via Ursula). "By the time he came triumph in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and of 'civilization' ... to write as much It is true to note, however, Women in Love, Lawrence more 303 likely than the renewal saw .,. the of 'culture'

foreseen by Ursula in the earlier novel." See Colin Lawrence Milton; and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, (1987), p.169. 79. See Keith Ansell-Pearson's essay; 'Toward the Comedy in; The of Existence' Fate of the New Nietzsche, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill, Press, argues "In learning 1993). Following Nietzsche, Ansell-Pearson to become postmodern human beings, regarding condition our present of the tragedy beings', but only more 'profound' of human existence, and who recognise we do not become the comic 'better human Seeker, ones" (p.276). in; Assorted Articles, (Martin 'Child of the English Genealogists', in; Nietzsche, Lawrence; London, 1930), p.96. and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton, 82. Keith Ansell-Pearson; how of cries of crisis! 'The State of Funk', 80. D.H. 81. Paul Redding; who greet the earnestness with comic laughter, nature that: (Avebury (Routledge, Feminism, 1993), p.220. Viroid Life, (1997), p.161. Part III: Aesthetics and Ideology. 1. Nietzsche; 'Schopenhauer as Educator', m; Untimely Meditations, (1992), p.148. 2. Ibid. 3. According cultural to Howard revolution, The Birth of Tragedy is "an analysis of a failed one in which art and philosophy which might have founded the Early Nietzsche', 4. Deleuze; Caygill, a volkskultur:" failed to achieve See 'Philosophy and Cultural in; The Fate of the New Nietzsche, (1993), the alliance Reform in p.112. Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.139. s. Ibid., p.138. See Nietzsche's openmg remark numerous other passages displeasure at the idea of culture's to the first throughout of his his writings becoming-German. 304 Untimely Meditations in which and he expresses See too Ansell-Pearson's his

essay' Geist contra Reich' in; The Fate of the New Nietzsche (1993), in which he argues that Nietzsche never betrays the former to the latter, nor confuses the two, and thus any characterization of his thinking as being continuous with the cultural and political aesthetic of fascism can be swiftly refuted (as it is in the text here). 6. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'What the Germans Lack', 4, pp.72-3. 7. See Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the New Idol', p.75. 8. Deleuze and Guattari; What Is Philosophy?, (1996), p. l71. 9. As indicated above in note 78 to Part II, Lawrence appears to abandon this notion of an 'immanent utopia' by the time he comes to write Women In Love. 10. Deleuze; 'Nomad Thought', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.143. 11. D.H. Lawrence; 'Preface' to Chariot of the Sun, by Harry Crosby, (a.k.a. 'Chaos In Poetry'), in; Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald, (William Heinemann, London, 1961), p.255. Deleuze and Guattari make extensive use of this essay in their What Is Philosophy? (1996); see in particular 'Conclusion: From Chaos to Brain'. 12. Nietzsche; 'The Philosopher', 13. Keith Ansell-Pearson; in; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 36, p.ll. Viroid Life, (1997), p.178. 14. Daniel Breazeale; 'Introduction' to Nietzsche's Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.xxiii. Nietzsche's insistence on culture as a 'natural' formation that assumes an 'organic' unity, is problematic become "complacently for some readers dismissed in an age in which such notions have as outworn, reactionary, and irresponsibly obfuscating", as Anne Fernihough puts it (see her D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Clarendon Press, 1993), p.l7). Nietzsche and Lawrence repeatedly arguably do conservative so in a manner And yet, the fact remains that both use organic metaphors different to that found in their work, and within mainstream thought; i.e., they use such metaphors and concepts in a radically counter-idealistic manner that attempts to retrieve 305 the physical and inaugurate

culture in the body. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, 'nature' does not imply that which is, has always been, and should always remain as is (they have no reified ideal of Being); rather, it suggests a world of constant becoming (growth, decay, mutation). 15. Nietzsche; 'David Strauss, The Confessor and Writer', m; Untimely Meditations, (1992), p.5. 16. Ibid., p.6. 17. Ibid., p.8. 18. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), IV.318, p.158. Later, in Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'Maxims and Arrows', 26, p.35, Nietzsche will write: "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." 19. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.111. 20. Ibid. 21. Daniel Breazeale, 'Introduction' to Nietzsche's Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.XXIV. 22. Mark Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.66. See footnote 5 above. 23. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.219. 24. See Chapter IV where we follow up and expand upon the notion of a robot or slave democracy in contrast to a 'true' democracy of 'touch'. 25. In section V.356, p.304. of The Gay Science (1974). Nietzsche writes; "what will not be built anymore henceforth. and cannot be built anymore is - a society in the old sense of that word; to build that. everything is lacking. above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society, this is a truth for which the time has come." 26. Philip Goodchild; DeJeuze and Guattari: An Introduction 306 to the Politics of

Desire, (SAGE Publications, 1996), p.196. 27. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.149. 28. Nietzsche; 'Schopenhauer as Educator', in; Untimely Meditations, (1992), p.163. 29. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (1980), p.149. 30. Ibid. See too Lawrence writing In 'The Spirit of Place' which forms a preface to his Studies in Classic American Literature (1986). He says, for example: "Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing, community, fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealizable, purpose" (p.12). active in The problem with this is that such communities are prone to becoming fixed and fatal, and, in the worst case, the desire for such leads to an abject reterritorialization along nationalistic and racist lines (as in Nazi Germany). If we are to lay claim to such a homeland and avoid the dangers, then it is vital to appreciate that it lies ahead of us in a future time - not behind us in the past - and will have to be invented and invoked by us. As Deleuze and Guattari say: "Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation." See; What Is Philosophy? (1996), p. 108. As they also note, it is not populist writers but the most aristocratic (such as Nietzsche and Lawrence) who allow us to envision and lay claim to this future. 31. Nietzsche; 'The Philosopher', in; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 30, p.9. Some critics have been keen to point to Nietzsche's so-called 'positivism' mid-period writings as evidence of "a reaction against his earlier romanticism, and in particular rehabilitator." (1990), of his p.126. his naivete with respect to the potential of art as a cultural - L.P. Thiele; Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, But whilst it is the case that in his later work Nietzsche reconfigures his notion of art and pours scorn on his own 'artists-metaphysic' displayed in The Birth of Tragedy, art always remained 307 for as him of vital

importance. Thus, as Thiele goes on to concede in the above cited work: "Even at the high point of [his] reaction, however, Nietzsche did not deny the necessity of art. He simply accentuated his suspicions of it." That is, he came increasingly to see that art too can (and very often does) serve in the interests of the ascetic ideal, as will be shown in the main text here. 32. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 853 (II), p.452. 33. Daniel Breazeale; 'Introduction' to Nietzsche's Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.XXXIX. 34. Ibid. 35. Heidegger; Nietzsche, (vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art), trans. D.F. Krell, (Routledge, 1979), p.70. 36. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), section 7, p.40. 37. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 9, p.82. 38. Ibid. 39. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 1Il.25., p.121. 40. Nietzsche; 'Philosophy in Hard Times', in; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 36, p.102. 41.Michel Haar; 'Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992). p.27. 42. Deleuze and Guattari; What Is Philosophy?, (1996), pp.202-3. 43. Keith Sagar; D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art, (1985), p.179. 44. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.370. 45. D.H. Lawrence; 'An Introduction to His Paintings', m; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.38. 46. In Twilight of the Idols, (1990) Nietzsche argues: "Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man ... he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence" (p.89). Echoing this, Lawrence writes; "where life is, there is essential beauty. Genuine beauty, which fills the soul, is an indication of life, and 308

genuine ugliness which blasts the soul, is an indication to Bestwood', in; Phoenix II, ed. F. Warren (Wiliam Heinemann, London, of morbidity." Roberts and Aesthetics and Ideology, (1993), p.3. 48. 'Introduction Lawrence; Harry T. Moore, 1968), p.265. 47. Anne Fernihough; D.H. See 'Return to His Paintings', A Propos of Lady m; Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.36. Cf. this and other remarks in the above essay with Heidegger's musings in 'The Origin made by Lawrence of the Work - will allow things place and a sanctuary 49. Deleuze and Athlone Press, 50. to come forth In Poetry' essay, here by Ursula, contrast playful the naivete of the of we moderns. Lawrence; Lawrence declaring to the 'new innocence' providing Brian a dwelling Massumi, writes positively (The of the kind of it to be the new spirit which Nietzsche seeks. ancients the with of art and life Both writers acutely often self-conscious See the above essay in Phoenix ( 1961 ). 'Introduction to His Lover and Other Essays, (1961), Chatterley's being, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. and belonging D.H. into radiant 1996), p.187. naivete displayed 51. Both for them. Guattari; In his 'Chaos sophistication (1994). art work - even of the most radical or revolutionary men argue that the authentic nature in; Basic Writings, of Art', Paintings', in; A Propos of Lady and never p.38. 52. Ibid., p.50. 53. Herbert Marcuse; For utopia Freud, possibility, Eros and Civilization, (1970), p.123. was always a transcendent as it was for Marcuse notion an imminent and, indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, who also believed in a 'people yet to come' who would "constitute daily life according aesthetic Deleuze and Guattari: An paradigm", Introduction possibilities defend to as Philip Goodchild the Politics to the no-man's the present order of Desire, says in his (1996), land of a transcendent make those interested 309 p.195. utopia, in developing By relegating those to an real who would such possibilities

appear unrealistic and unreasonable. 54. D.H.Lawrence; 'An Introduction to His Paintings' m; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), pp.50-51. 55. See Heidegger's 'Origin of the Work of Art' in Basic Writings, (1994). p.333. where, controversially, he argues that to 'save' means a good deal more than merely to "seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin in order to secure it in its former continuance." essence, in order Rather: to bring '''To save' is to fetch something the essence for the first home into its time into its proper appearing." This idea is developed here in Chapter Ill. 56. D.H. Lawrence; 'An Introduction to His Paintings', m; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961). p.59. 57. The notion of a 'body without developed philosophically organs', first by Deleuze and Guattari. suggested by Artaud and is central to a politics of desire; see Chapters IV and V of this work. 58. D.H. Lawrence; 'An Introduction to His Paintings'. m; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.39. 59. J.-F. Lyotard; The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Manchester University Press, 1991), p.xxxiv. 60. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), p.39. 61. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'Maxims and Arrows', 44, p.37. 62. Daniel W. Smith; 'Introduction' to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical. trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p.lii. Chapter II: Beyond The Ruins: Love, Power, and the Politics of Evil. Part I: Opening Remarks on How the Disease of Love Infects Modernity and Its Politics in Relation to Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo. 1. Steven Vine; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's 310 Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins,

(Penguin Books, 1995), p.xix. 2. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.344. 3. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.139. 4. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (1985), p.lOt. 5. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 1.629, p.199. 6. Ibid. 7. Nietzsche; 'The Greek State', in; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), p.180. 8. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Old and New Law Tables', 27, p.230. 9. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.118. 10. Freud; Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, Strachey, (The Hogarth Press / Institute of Psycho-Analysis, ed. James 1969), p.80. 11. Ibid., p.48. In Aaron's Rod (1995), Aaron says he would rather have the world hate him and break his legs than love him; see pp.263-4. 12. Freud; Civilization and Its Discontents, (1969), p.80. 13. Michel Haar; 'Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', m; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.19. 14. Freud; Civilization and Its Discontents (1969), p.49. 15. Lawrence; 'Love', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.7. 16. Herbert Marcuse; Eros and Civilization, (1970), p.56. 17. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (Penguin Books, 1983), p.80. 18. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), p.166. 19. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Penguin Books, 1995), p.72. 20. Mark Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.43. 21. Ibid., p.214. 22. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), 18, p.87. 311

23. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (Duckworth & Co, 1957), p.86. Part II: Power: The Philosophy, Politics, and Problem Of. 1. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.lS1. 2. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.164. Interestingly, Brian Massumi in his 'Foreword' to Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus (1996) whilst also making a distinction between power and force, suggests that the former is something negative and oppressive, latter is 'liberating'. A whilst the He writes: "Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from the outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls" (p.xiii). If this is also Deleuze and Guattari's view, it is not Nietzsche's or Lawrence's. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, the building of walls is not objectionable per se, even if they both take pleasure in seeking out cracks. 3. Foucault; The History of Sexuality, (Vol. I.), trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1990), p.85. 4. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.Sl , 5. Foucault; The History ofSexuaJity, 6. Foucault; 'Truth and Power', Vol. I., (1990), p.86. in; Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et aI, (Harvester Wheatsheaf, ed. by Colin Gordon, 1980), p.119. 7. Ibid. Again, it is interesting and important to note that whilst Foucault never became 'enamoured of power', he arrived at a far more positive understanding of it in his late work, than the one expressed in his 'Preface' to Deleuze and Guattari's Oedipus (1994); an understanding Anti- more in line with Nietzsche's own. Deleuze and Guattari, even after having attempted to scourge the notion of power from negativity, still continue to regard schizoanalysis as a struggle against power- formations and power-effects. 8. D.H. Lawrence; 'Blessed Are The Powerful', m; Reflections on the Death of a 312

Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.326. 9. Ibid., p.327. 10. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 1067, p.SSO. 11. D.H. Lawrence; 'Him With His Tail In His Mouth', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.31O. 12. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 2. p.125. 13. Camus is thus mistaken to suggest as he does in The Rebel ( 1971) that the only place in which we have seen Nietzsche's will to power as the driving force is in the fictional world of unlimited desire and domination imagined by Sade. The libertine as Sade pictures him is far removed from the Nietzschean free spirit. 14. Nick Land; The Thirst For Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p.59. 15. Ibid. 16. William Blake; 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', m; The Works of William Blake, (Wordsworth Editions, 1994). p.179. 17. Ibid. 18. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968),304, The translation p.170. of the French is given by Kaufmann m the above as: "Pure, without admixture, crude, fresh, with all its force, with all its pungency." 19. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 38, p.103. Nietzsche calls this his 'first principle' of life as will to power. 20. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), 'Preface to the English Edition', p.Xl. 21. D.H. Lawrence; 'Him With His Tail In His Mouth', m; Reflections 011 the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.31l. 22. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.123. 23. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in; The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976), 'The Convalescent', 2, p.330. 24. Foucault; quoted by James Miller m; 313 The Passion of Michel Foucault,

(Flamingo, 1994), p.199. 25. Mark Seem; 'Introduction' to Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.xx. 26 D.H. Lawrence; 'Blessed Are The Powerful', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.324. 27. Ibid., p.327. 28. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), IV.262, p.146. 29. Foucault; The History of Sexuality, Vol. I., (1990), p.48. 30. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.l73. 31. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), 111.189, p.IIO. 32. Steven Vine; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, (1995), p.xxiv. 33. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.145. 34. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Self-Overcoming', p.l37. 35. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), V.188., p.llI. 36. Ibid., p.112. It is important to note how Nietzsche here ties not only self-respect, and a being-for others. but even existence to being as a being-with We should also perhaps note that Nietzsche goes on to say that what he here identifies as 'nature's imperative' is neither a categorical imperative cl la Kant, nor one directed towards the individual, so much as towards "peopes, races, ages, classes, and above all to the entire animal 'man', to mankind." 37. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), 1.60., p.37. 38. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), V. 199., p. 120. 39. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.70. 40. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968). 859, p.458. 41. J .A. Bernstein; Nietzsche'S Moral Philosophy, (Associated University Presses, 1987), p.lOl. Later in the above work, however, Bernstein 314 does go very wrong with his

reading of Nietzsche; arguing, for example, that the latter is opposed to a social order "that permits or encourages all and sundry to develop their talents to the utmost" (p.1OS). That this is incorrect can be seen from a careful reading of section 57 of The Anti-Christ (1990); Nietzsche wants one and all to develop and display their talents, only he does not accord all men equality of potential and thus concludes that some men, being mediocre, will find their happiness and fulfilment as 'cogs'. I will comment on this point later in the main text. 42. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), IX.257., p.192. 43. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.ll. Nietzsche also does what Lawrence is doing here; i.e .. , dismissing freedom in the conventional sense, only then to declare himself the defender of freedom in a 'truer', more 'authentic' sense. 44. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), IX.259., p.194. 45. Nietzsche; 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', Preface to; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), p.4. 46. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Old and New Law-Tables', 11, p.220. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 12, p.220. 49. Ibid., 11, p.220. 50. D.H. Lawrence; 'Democracy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.72. 51. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.l09. 52. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990). 57, p.187. 53. Ibid. 54. Anne Fernihough; D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (1993), p.23. 55. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990),57, 315 p.187.

56. D.H. Lawrence; Movements in European History, ed. James T. Boulton, (Oxford University Press, 1974), p.321. 57. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.103. 58. D.H. Lawrence; 'Aristocracy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.376. 59. Nietzsche; Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. R.J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1988), 'Why I am a Destiny', I., p.127. 60. Leslie Paul Thiele; Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, (1990), p.l77, footnote 6. 61. Mara Kalnins; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Apocalypse, (1995), p.23. 62. Alan D. Scrift: Nietzsche's French Legacy, (Routledge, 1995), p.113. 63. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), II.112., p.67. 64. Keith Ansell-Pearson; 'Geist contra Reich ' m; The Fate of the New Nietzsche, (1993), pp.79-80. 65. Georges Bataille; On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p.176. 66. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), V.377., p.339. 67. Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche and Lawrence differ from Deleuze and Guattari, who seem to regard the giving of allegiance to the heroic and submission within an order of rank as a perversion of desire per se and the fundamental problem of political philosophy to be addressed. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that desire can be perverted (by all forms of idealism for example) and made to turn back against itself, I would argue that the will to reverence cannot be accounted for by reference purely to Oedipal factors and understood thus as an entirely negative phenomenon. 68. J .A. Bernstein; Nietzsche's Moral Philosophy, (1987), p.112. 69. As a matter of fact, Bernstein is aware of this, though keen to discredit the idea by suggesting that the overcoming of bad conscience in commanders 316 would

lead to the giving of good conscience to bullies and to hatred. Even if this were the case, still his claim that Nietzsche ignores the problem of how to ensure the best will want to rule is revealed as wilfully false. 70. Keith Ansell-Pearson: Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, (1991), p.223. 71. Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought. (1991), p.I13. 72. Ibid., p.246. 73. Ibid., p.209. See footnote 14 above to Chapter I. Part III. however. in which the idea of the organic as a conservative notion per se is challenged. 74. See Keith Ansell-Pearson: An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, (1994), p.41. Note also that this argument concerning the noble lie and the natural law IS followed up here in Chapter III. 75. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Viroid Life, (1997), pp.28-9. 76. Ibid., p.106. Ansell-Pearson continues: "It is curious that Nietzsche himself does not appear to recognize the predicament he is in. In Twilight of the Idols, for example, he is astute in recognizing crucial 'social' elements and historical determinations Darwinian 'biological' theory. How is it possible. therefore, that his theory of 'will-to-power' within for Nietzsche to claim is exclusively and solely a principle of so-called 'natural life'? With what legitimacy can he read off from the text of nature a social and political philosophy, as he claims he does? In neglecting to attend to these crucial questions Nietzsche has forgotten developed of David Strauss the earlier trenchant critique he in which he argued that any natural philosopher who sought to assert anything regarding scientist or the ethical and intellectual value of so-called laws of nature was guilty of an 'extreme anthropomorphism' that oversteps the 'bounds of the permitted"'. Part III: Beyond the Molar Level of Politics. 317

1. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 765, p.401. 2. Steven Vine; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, (1995), p.xxvi. 3. No doubt objections will be raised in some quarters to Lawrence's use of 'theological' language - and to my suggesting that a notion of the Holy Ghost relates to Nietzsche's critical philosophy of power. But as will become clear. Lawrence's language is justified and is, in fact, a necessary strategy; one later adopted by Heidegger. For Lawrence, to speak in terms of the Holy Ghost and the dark gods, is a convenient way of stressing the non-human and inhuman aspects of life as will to power. When one reads a passage such as the one following: "The Holy Ghost ... is many gods. Many gods come and go, some say one thing and some say another, and we have to obey the god of the innermost hour. It is the multiplicity of gods within us make up the Holy Ghost", interprets one this as meaning: The will to power ... is many forces. Many forces come in and out of ascendency, some are active and some reactive, and we have to obey the dominant arrangement of forces. It is the multiplicity of forces within us make up the will to power. Passage quoted from Lawrence's essay on E.A. Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature, (Penguin Books, 1986), p.87. 4. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love Was Once a Little Boy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.344. 5. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 390, p.210. 6. Nietzsche; On The Genealogy of Morality, (1994), I.12., p.27. 7. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.65. It is interesting to note that Lawrence is writing here in his last work; i.e., well after his power trilogy of novels has been completed and he has, according to the myth perpetuated by some critics, abandoned his concern with power, leadership, politics etc. 8. Ibid. 9. Michel Haar; 'Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', m; The New Nietzsche, 318

(1992), p.25. 10. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), IX.260., pp.194-5. In The Will To Power (1968), 259, p.149, Nietzsche makes the same point this way; "a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. " 11. D.H. Lawrence; Movements in European History, (1971), p.312. 12. D.H. Lawrence; 'Aristocracy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.369. 13. Ibid., p.370. 14. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.64. 15. Ibid., p.166. 16. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Viroid Life, (1997), p.19. 17. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.131. 18. Ibid. 19. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), III.206., p.126. Of course Nietzsche knows that most men cannot - and do not want to - leave their jobs, their families, and their old selves behind cl la Aaron Sisson; accepting that most men are slaves, he says that for the majority fulfilment lies in service. Nowhere in his work does Nietzsche advocate universal emancipation; but he does hope to see preserved a few exceptional individuals who do are destined for independence and command. 20. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.277. 21. Ibid., p.95. 22. See Chapter IV Part III.ii. where the Lawrencean concept of the Open Road (borrowed from Whitman) is discussed at length. 23. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), 111.206., p.127. 24. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.319. 25. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), V.377., p.338. 26. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Land of Culture', p.144. 319

27. Macdonald Daly; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Kangaroo, (1997), p.xxv. 28. Deleuze; 'Nomad Thought', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.142. 29. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'What the Germans Lack', 4, p.73. 30. Peter Singer; Hegel, (Oxford University Press, 1983), p.36. 31. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), IV.283., p.228. 32. James Miller; The Passion of Michel Foucault, (1994), p.48. 33. Ibid., p.49. 34. Ibid. 35. Alan D. Schrift; Nietzsche's French Legacy, (1995), p.35 36. Note that Somers is somewhat misleading here in this self-comparison with Nietzsche. He refers of course to the section entitled 'Of Great Events' in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra says that our 'greatest events' are; "'not our noisiest but our stillest hours. The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly'" (1969, pp.153-4). As will be clear from the above, Zarathustra is not saying that he doesn't believe in great events - as Somers implies - only redefining what constitute such. In fact, Zarathustra is saying what we saw Harriett saying earlier; that great events are changes in feeling, which take many centuries to develop and take effect. 37. Albert Camus; The Rebel, (Penguin Books, 1971), p.215. 38. Compare this with Nietzsche's confession in Ecce Homo, (1988), p.126: "I am not a man - I am dynamite!" And yet readers may also recall Nietzsche's earlier declaration from The Gay Science (1974), 111.218., p.2IO: "I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all." This arguably provides evidence of how Nietzsche's position changes and becomes harder, more violent, over the years (more desperate? more vulgar?). 39. Macdonald Daly; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Kangaroo, (1997) pp.xxvii-viii. 40. As Bataille notes: "Life's movement can only be merged with the limited movements of political formations in clearly 320 defined conditions, in other

conditions, it goes far beyond them". See 'Nietzsche and the Fascists' in; Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.193. 41. Macdonald Daly; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Kangaroo, (1997), p.xxviii. 42. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.116. 43. Macdonald Daly; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Kangaroo. (1997), p.xvi. 44. Ibid. 45. Wittgenstein; Trectetus-Logico-Philosopbicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness, (Routledge, 1999),6.5.22. 46. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.114. 47. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.157. 48. Quoted by John D. Caputo; 'Heidegger and Theology', in; The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignan, University (Cambridge Press, 1993), p.270. 49. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), p.135. 50. David Farrell Krell; 'Introduction' to Heidegger's 'The Question Concerning Technology' in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.31O. 51. John D. Caputo; 'Heidegger and Theology', in; The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, (1993), p. 283. 52. Hubert L. Dreyfus; 'Heidegger and the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics', in; The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, (1993), p.31O. 53. Ibid., pp.312-13. 54. Ibid. p.313. 55. Keith Ansell-Pearson: Viroid Life, (1997), p.165. 56. Ibid.,p.161. 57. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), 23, p.IIO. 58. Jurgen Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1994), p.220. 59. Ibid., p.87. 60. Ibid., p.221. 321

Chapter III: Only a Dark God Can Save Us Now: Quetzalcoatl and the Politics of Cruelty. Part I: Sulphurous Lawrence's Politico- Theological Speculations: The Plumed Serpent and the Re-Introduction Opening Remarks on of the Gods Back Into History. 1. Richard Books, Aldington; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent. (Penguin 1982), p.7. Lawrence, (1985), p.60. 2. Frank Kermode; 3. William E. Connolly; 'Preface', Political Theory and Modernity, (Basil Blackwell, 1988). p.ix. 4. Ibid., p.6. 5. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (I992), p.196. 6. Ibid., p.20S. 7. J urgen Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (1994), 8. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), 9. Nietzsche; ThusSpokeZarathustra, Rilke, 10. Rainer Maria Heidegger's 'Building translation given reads: quoted Dwelling 1.23., p.53. (1969), by David Thinking' p. 339. 'Of Manly Prudence', Farrell Krell in his 'Introduction' in; Basic Writings, (1994), "Now it is time that gods emerge p.16S. p.344. / from things to The by which we dwell." 11. Nietzsche; 'Philosophy m Hard Times', m; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.103. 12. L.D. Clark and Virginia Crosswhite Hyde; Plumed Serpent, ed. L.O. Clark and Virginia 'Introduction' Croswhite Hyde, to Lawrence's (Penguin The Books, 1995), p.xvi. 13. Ibid., p.xvii. 14. Kate refuses to accept the estimation 322 of Ramon and his men of Quetzacoatl

offered by the hotel manager, however, for "she had seen Ramon Carrasco and Cipriano. And they were men. They wanted something beyond. She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting" (PS, p.103). This though is surely one of the great dangers of nihilism: one searches desperately for something anything - to hold onto; extreme political solutions offering themselves all too readily. Suddenly, even the most dangerous political invalids and religious fanatics find themselves taken seriously - as Nietzsche warned against. 15. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), III.61., p.86. 16. Nietzsche; Twilight of the Idols, (1990), 'The 'Improvers' of Mankind', p.69. 17. William E. Connolly; Political Theory and Modernity, (1988), p.66. 18. Henry Miller; The World of Lawrence, (1985), p.227. Capitalized emphasis given in the original. 19. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.108. 20. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (1980), 'Fragment I', p.155. 21. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 1.1.20., pp.22-3. 22. William E. Connolly; Political Theory and Modernity, (1988), p.66. 23. Michael Bell; D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, (1992), p.186. 24. Albert Camus; The Rebel, (1971), p.266. 25. Leslie Paul Thiele; Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, (1990), p.146. 26. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 11.23., p.69. 27. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 1035, p.533. 28. Ibid., 1037, p.534. 29. Heidegger; 'Letter on Humanism', in; Basic Writings (1994), p.252. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 323

32. D.H. Lawrence; 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', Ill; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.361. 33. David Farrell Krell; 'Introduction' to Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism', Ill; Basic Writings, (1994), 215. 34. Heidegger; 'Letter on Humanism', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.254. One of the main dangers of such a descent is a fall into a gross (and ideal) materialism. However, that a descent has to be made is something that Lawrence is equally adamant upon; see for example his essay 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in; Selected Essays, (Penguin Books, 1981), which includes the little verse: "They climbed the steep ascent of Heaven / Through peril, toil, and pain; / 0 God, to us may grace be given / To scramble down again" (p.51). 35. Quoted by Heidegger in his 'Letter on Humanism', Ill; Basic Writings (1994), p.257. 36. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), p.ll5. 37. Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), 23, p.112. 38. Ramon goes on to say: '''I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, And the Tree Igdrisil'" lung, (PS, p.248): According to writing in an essay entitled 'Wotan' (1936), this is precisely what does come to pass In Nazi Germany. He says: "We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic. political, and psychological factors. meaning, all-tao-human responsibility But if we may forget reasonableness, for contemporary ... our well may burden God or the gods with the events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. that the unfathomable for a moment In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion character explain more of National Socialism than all the reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt each of the factors depths of Wotan's explains an important part of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more." See; C.G. lung; Essays on Contemporary Events, (Ark Paperbacks, 1988). p.15. 324

Essentially, I think Jung is correct. the Norse equivalent of Dionysus; 39. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, It is interesting to also recall that Wotan is a god of storm, frenzy, and excess. (1990), p.136. 40. Ibid., pp.136-7. 41. Foucault quoted by James Miller in; The Passion of Michel Foucault, (1994), p.309. 42. Ibid. If Jung is right in the above footnote (38), then Foucault is mistaken here; choosing as he does to ignore the phenomemon of National Socialism as an instance of 'political spirituality' that pre-dates the Iranian Revolution. 43. James Miller; ibid., p.312. Part II: The Politics of Cruelty. 1. Georges Bataille; 'Sovereignty', vol. III of The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1993), pp.220-21. 2. D.H. Lawrence; Letter of June 6th, 1929, quoted by Mara Kalnins in her 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (1980), p.35. 3. T.S. Eliot quoted by John Carey in; The Intellectuals and the Masses, (Faber and Faber, 1992), p.85. 4. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 881, p.470. 5. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 11.1.220, p.265. 6. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), 1.18., p.16. 7. Ibid., 1.45., p.3l. 8. D.H. Lawrence; 'Morality and the Novel', m; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), p.173. 9. See Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, (Tavistock Publications, 1987) and Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Penguin Books, 1991). 325

10. D.H. Lawrence; 'Dana's 'Two Years Before the Mast", m; Studies in Classic American Literature, (1986), p. 126. 11. William Blake; 'Proverbs of Hell', see; 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', m; The Works of William Blake, (1994), p.181. 12. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 1.8.477., p.176. 13. In his 'Study of Thomas Hardy' Lawrence writes that the predilection d'artiste is always for the aristocrat, and that this taste is rooted in "every imaginative being", because; "the aristocrat alone has occupied a position where he could afford to be, to be himself. to create himself, to live as himself. That is his eternal fascination." See; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), p. 46. 14. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Reality of Peace', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.43. 15. Ibid., p.44. 16. Ibid. 17. Henry Miller; The World of Lawrence, (1985), p.150. 18. See D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.180. 19. Nick Land; The Thirst For Annihilation, (1992), p.56. 20. D.H. Lawrence; 'Self Sacrifice', in; The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books. 1977). p.678. 21. D.H. Lawrence; 'Shedding of Blood', in; The Complete Poems, (1977), pp.678-9. See also the related poems in this series: 'The Old Idea of Sacrifice' and 'Self-Sacrifice' (II), ibid., pp.679-80. 22. If this is so, then Bataille was not as mistaken as is often suggested when he attempted to establish a secret society (The Acephale Group) founded upon an act of ritual human sacrifice; a group whose aim was to promote total revolution along Nietzschean lines. 23. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), [V.325., p.255. 24. Machiavelli argues that the murder of political opponents is justified on the grounds that it can, by avoiding the dangerous disorder and unrest likely to be 326

caused by these persons for everyone in the future, be said to be 'compassionate'. See The Prince, trans. George Bull, (Penguin Books, 1981), p.95. 25. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), V.370., p.328. 26. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Three Metamorphoses', p.55. 27. Ibid., 'Of the Sublime Men', p.141. Part III: The Flight Back Into Paradise: Further Remarks on the New Innocence. 1. D.H. Lawrence; 'Paradise Re-entered', m; The Complete Poems, (1977), pp.242-3. 2. James Strachey; 'Introduction' to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, (1969), p.x. 3. Freud; ibid., p.71. 4. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), V.429., p.184. 5. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.180. 6. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 11.24., p.70. 7. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Novel and the Feelings', in; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), p.204. 8. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994),11.24., p.70. 9. Nietzsche; Ecce Homo, (1988), p.96. 10. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.183. 11. Henry Miller; The World of Lawrence, (1985), p.217. 12. Quoted by Keith Cushman in his 'Notes' to Lawrence's 'The Old Adam', in; Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, (Penguin Books, 1996), p.203. The line is from The Book of Common Prayer, as used in the Church of England's baptism service. As Cushman interestingly points out, the term 'Old Adam' is also slang for the penis; revealing that what is hated and feared by the Church is the 327

phallic self (i.e., man as a physical and sexual being). 13. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Novel and the Feelings', in; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), p.204. 14. D.H. Lawrence; 'St. Mawr', m; The Complete Short Novels, ed. Keith Sagar and Melissa Partridge, (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 320. 15. Ibid. 16. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), IV.337., p.268. 17. Ibid. 18. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Reality of Peace', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.35. Part IV: Closing Remarks. l. D.H. Lawrence; Letter of March 13th, 1928, in; The Letters of D.H. Lawrencene, ed. Aldous Huxley, (William Heinemann Ltd., 1932), p. 711 . 2. D.H Lawrence; 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.l07. 3. Keith Ansell-Pearson; An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker. (1994), p.78. 4. W.H. Auden quoted by Rick Rylance, see 'Lawrence's Politics', in; Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown, (Open University Press, 1990), p.169. 5. Rick Rylance; ibid., p.170. 6. See Mark Warren; Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), who raises this as a criticism of Nietzsche's approach. But see also my remarks in Chapter IV re; the need to molecularize political thinking in an age in which traditional category distinctions have broken down. 7. Mark Warren; ibid., p.195. 8. D.H. Lawrence; 'The State of Funk', m; Assorted London, 1930), p.98. 328 Articles, (Martin Seeker,

9. Daniel Conway; 'Nietzsche's Doppelganger: Affirmation and Resentment in Ecce Homo', in; The Fate of the New Nietzsche, (1993), p. 70. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. See for example Lawrence's Complete Poems, (1977), p.SI7. poem entitled 'A Sane Revolution', in; The See too the related poem 'Revolutions as Such' (ibid., p.517), in which Lawrence claims that only political 'robots' desire bloody revolution today. 13. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), I.7.438., p.161. 14. Ibid. The translation IS given by Hollingdale as: 'When the mob joins in and adds its voice, all is lost.' 15. D.H. Lawrence; 'Study of Thomas Hardy', m; Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, (1985), pp.38-9. 16. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.112. 17. D. H. Lawrence; 'The Crown', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.169. 18. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 1.8.463., p.169. 19. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), V.S34., p.2ll. 20. Nietzsche; Ibid., p.211-12. 21. Albert Camus; The Rebel, (1971), p.69. 22. Wilhelm Reich; The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, (Pelican Books, 1983), p.16. 23. L.D. Clark and Virginia Crosswhite Hyde; 'Introduction' Plumed Serpent, (1995), p.xxv. 24. Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus, p.257. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p.260. 329 to Lawrence's The

27. lbid., p.277. 28. Ibid. 29. Huxley's Brave New World, is of course the utopia dreamed of by the last man; a world where science and technology have triumphed completely and all men are happy, content, and cared for. Huxley himself at the time of writing this novel (1931) is far from opposed to such a vision; in fact he comes close to accepting and promoting the triumph of rational-idealism. he begin to move away from this way of thinking. Only after 1945 does See the Flamingo edition (1994), which contains a useful Introduction by David Bradshaw. 30. Albert Camus; The Rebel, (1971), p.269. 31. Heidegger; 'Letter on Humanism', in; Basic Writings, (1994). pp.249-51. 32. Heidegger; 'Building Dwelling Thinking', in; Basic Writings, (1994). p.352. 33. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), P.150. Chapter IV: Tenderness: The Philosophy of Becoming and the Politics of Desire. Part I: Theoretical and General Opening Remarks. 1. Lawrence in fact completed three versions of the novel he had originally thought of calling Tenderness: the first two versions have been published as The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane. It seemed appropriate a study concerned with multiple becomings to refer cross-textually to to all three versions when convenient and useful to do so, and although the final version Lady Chatterey's Lover - remains the central point of reference. I do not wish to claim for it any privileged or definitive status over and above the earlier versions. 2. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.149. 3. Georges Bataille; Literature and Evil, (Marion Boyers Ltd .. 1985), p.229. 4. Foucault quoted by James Miller in; The Passion of Michel Foucault, (1994). p.244. 330

5. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), 'Preface to the Second Edition', 2, p.35. 6. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Afterworldsmen', 7. Georges Bataille; 'Eroticism', p.6l. Vol. II of The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, (Zone Books, 1993), p.103. 8. The term 'pollyanalytics' is one that Lawrence imagines a 'respected might use to describe his 'pseudo-philosophy'. See the 'Foreword' critic' to Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.1S. 9. D. H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p. 17. 10. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (1985), p.22. 11. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1984), p.292. 12. Anne Fernihough; D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (1993), p.63. 13. Ibid., p.64. 14. Herbert Marcuse; Eros and Civilization, 'Preface to the First Edition', p.2l. 15. Ibid. 16. Philip Goodchild; Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, (1996), p. 75. 17. Thomas McCarthy; 'Introduction' to Habermas; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (1994), pp.viii-ix. 18. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 808, pp.426-7. 19. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love Was Once a Little Boy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.339. 20. D.H. Lawrence; 'Dana's 'Two Years Before the Mast", In; Studies in Classic American Literature, (1986), p.124. 21. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Old and New Law Tables', 8, p.218. 22. Nick Land; The Thirst For Annihilation, (1992), p.131. 23. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.183. 24. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1883), p.17. 25. Ibid., p.l09. 331

26. Ibid., p.W8. 27. Ibid., p.l09. 28. Ibid., p.llO. 29. Ibid., pp. 110-11 . 30. Ibid., p.187. 31. Ibid., p.W9. 32. D.H. Lawrence; 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in; Assorted Articles, (1930), p.143. 33. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.362. 34. D.H. Lawrence; 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, in; A Selection From Phoenix, ed. A.A. Inglis, (Penguin Books, 1979), p.472. 35. Philip Goodchild; Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, (1996), p.196. 36. Nietzsche; Ecce Homo, (1988), p.66. 37. D.H. Lawrence; 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.12l. 38. Ibid., p.122. 39. See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Despisers of the Body', pp.61-3. 40. Note what Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, (1993), 18., arguing that the man of deeds (i.e., the Old Adam) has now become so incredible to the theoretical and impotent modern man, that he regards the former as a monster of unreason, in need of castrating and/or confinement. 41. Nietzsche; Daybreak, (1989), 1.39., p.27. 42. D.H. Lawrence; 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in; Assorted Articles, (1930), p.141. 43. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love Was Once a Little Boy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.346. 44. Deleuze and Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus, (1996), p.149. 45. Ibid., p.150. 332

46. Ibid., p.159. 47. Ibid., p.160. 48. Ibid., p.161. 49. Rosi Braidotti; Nomadic Subjects, (Columbia University Press, 1994), p.III. 50. Deleuze and Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus, (1996), p.237. 51. Ibid., p.244. 52. Ibid., p.252. 53. Ibid., p.253. 54. Ibid., p.262. 55. Ibid., p.293. 56. Ibid., p.279. 57. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.9. 58. Ibid. 59. D.H. Lawrence; 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.359. 60.Ibid.,p.361. Part II: Schizoanalysis: Of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and Becomings. 1. Although Lawrence strips Connie bare, seemingly like one of the old, lustful philosophic voyeurs who insist on seeing everything and knowing the 'truth' woman (and hence the 'secret of life'), he nevertheless allows Connie to retain her modesty (and mystery), of is Nietzschean in that he and, further. to regain her innocence, by freeing her of bad conscience and ignorance concerning her body and its sexuality. And unlike the above. Lawrence doesn't stare in horror at her exposed genitalia and see merely a wound; as if woman were no more than a castrated male. Rather, he posits her with beauty and meaning of her own and values her sexual difference in a manner which anticipates 333 the work of Luce

Irigaray, coming close to forming a 'gynaecological' ontology of 'cunt' (see for example the exchange between Mellors and Connie on p.178 of LCL). This is not to say that Lawrence wishes to simply reduce woman to her sexual organs; he accepts that she is a cultural and social entity as well as a physical being. But by emphasizing her sexual being and sexual difference, Lawrence hopes to change the way that culturally and socially she is thought of and constructed. wants woman to be accepted as a real creature; stereotype Above all, he and not degraded into an ideal of purity, or a foul obscenity (woman as virgin, woman as whore). Traditional male representations of woman are countered by Lawrence in LCL as well as in essays such as 'Give Her a Pattern' (see Selected Essays, 1981, pp.1923). 2. Michael Squires; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Penguin Books, 1994), p. xxx. 3. Ibid. 4. The centrality of heterosexual coition within Lawrence's thinking is one that has attracted much critical attention. He remains fairly adamant throughout writings that: "Sex without the consummating (Fantasia of the Unconscious, heterosexual nature his act of coition is never quite sex" 1983, p.17); and so too does he insist on the of this act: "Because the source of all living is In the interchange and the meeting and mingling of ... man-life and woman-life ... manbeing and 'Introduction' woman-being" to Lawrence's (from a letter quoted by Bruce Steele Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, in his 1985, pp.xxvi-vii). For Lawrence, those who would decouple sex from coition are mistakenly turning it into an entirely head-bound form of masturbation. affair of sensation and knowledge; essentially a In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1983) he writes p.129 that the thought to such persons "of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know mentally ... is insatiable. Anything, 334 so that the sensation and

experience shall come through the upper channels. This the secret of our IS introversion and our perversion today." For Lawrence, the vital thing in heterosexual different creatures; otherness, coition the meeting of two IS it is this, the flash of interchange between forms of polarized which causes a transformation in both parties newness. In what Lawrence regards as 'counterfeit' loss or transformation of self; rather and gives rise to sexual activity, there is no there is "merely a greedy, blind self- seeking" ('Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness', in; A Selection From Phoenix, 1979, p.471). Again, it is arguable as I suggest in footnote 1 above, that Lawrence is close in his thinking here to the feminist philosopher of sexual difference Luce Irigaray (closer for sure than he is to Deleuze and Guattari, for example, on this matter). Like Irigaray, Lawrence posits a crucial difference between the sexes and is certainly not a "theoretician of the male homosexual and ... lesbian experience" (Rosi Braidotti; Nomadic Subjects, 1994, p.132). Not that Lawrence condemns homosexual contacts outright (and certainly does not do so from a moral perspective); and there are plenty of episodes of physical tenderness between same sex individuals in his work; from the naked wrestling of Gerald and Birkin in Women In Love, to the homo-erotic occult bondage practiced by Ramon and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent, to give but two examples. argues, homosexual intercourse is less harmful Even, Lawrence than masturbation, which he always interprets negatively. 5. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.116. 6. Ibid. 7. For Lawrence, in line with other bodies of radical thought, distinction between sex and procreation; there is a vital the former is not simply a means in the service of the latter. In his 'Study of Thomas Hardy' (see Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, 1985), Lawrence writes, pp.52-3: "Am I here to deposit a security, a continuance of life in the flesh? Or is that only a minor function in 335

me? Is it not merely a preservative measure, procreation. It is the same for me as for any man or woman. That she bear children is not a woman's significance. But that she may bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate: that she drive on to the edge of the unknown, and beyond. She may leave children behind, for security. It is arranged so .... But the act, called the sexual act, is not for depositing seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown." 8. Deleuze and Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus, (1996), p.188. 9. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love Was Once a Little Boy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.345. 10. Kate Millet claims in Sexual Politics (Virago, 1977) that Lawrence is guilty of transforming masculinity into a mystical religion founded upon celebration of the penis. But Millet fails to appreciate what Lawrence is attempting Chatterley trilogy and related works: in The Lady for one thing, when he writes of the phallus, he is not simply referring to the penis, which, as he says himself, is "a mere member of the physiological body" (iTL), p.238); i.e., a vulgar organ. The phallus, as Lawrence understands it, "in the old sense" (ibid.); i.e., the sacred- symbolic sense that the Greeks knew of and which Nietzsche acknowledges in his Dionysisan philosophy, great consciousness" "has roots, (ibid.) the deepest roots of all, in the soul and the and belongs to man and woman both (as a bridge between them); not simply the male agent. The phallus is understood by Lawrence as a cosmic symbol of desire and relatedness; thus the fear of, or contempt for, the phallus, betrays the great modern horror of the physical and of being in touch. Lawrence writes: "This is the root fear of all mankind. Hence the frenzied efforts of mankind to despise the phallus, to nullify it" (ibid., p.239); via an attempt to conflate and confuse it with the penis which more often than not belongs as just another mechanical organ to the well organ-ized body and thereby at the disposal and use of the mind and sensation seeking ego. 11. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Three Evil Things', 2., p.20B. 336

12. Herbert Marcuse; Eros and Civilization, (1977), p.138. 13. D.H. Lawrence; 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover " m; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.91. 14. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.96. 15. Michael Squires; 'Introduction' Lawrence's to Lady Chatterley's Lover, ( 1994), p. xvi. 16. Keith Sagar; D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art, (1985), p.294. 17. Nietzsche; 'Philosophy in Hard Times', in; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 39, p.l04. 18. D.H. Lawrence; 'Autobiographical Sketch', m; Assorted Articles. (1930), p.153. 19. Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.254. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p.255. 22. D.H. Lawrence; Fantasia of the Unconscious, (1983), p.108. 23. Ibid. 24. D.H. Lawrence; 'Nobody Loves Me', in; Selected Essays, (1981), p.36. 25. Colin Milton; Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, (1987), p.109. As Milton rightly points out, this vision is now desired, but not promised. 26. Thomas Mann quoted by George Steiner in; Heidegger, (1989), p.154. 27. Heidegger; 'Building Dwelling Thinking', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.362. 28. Andre Breton quoted by Herbert Marcuse in; Eros and Civilization, (1977), p.124. 29. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.243. Part III: PostanaIysis: Towards a Democracy of Touch. 1. It would perhaps have been better if Dukes had of used the word 'cultured', bearing in mind the distinction drawn in Chapter I between the forces of culture 337

and civilization. 2. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (1985), p.116. 3. D.H. Lawrence; 'Robot Democracy' in; The Complete Poems, (1977), p.648. 4. D.H. Lawrence; 'Real Democracy', ibid. 5. D.H. Lawrence; 'Future Relationships', ibid., p.611. See also the related poems in this series: Future Religion (p.611), Future States (p.611), and Future War (p.612). 6. D.H. Lawrence; 'Democracy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), pp.82-3. 7. D.H. Lawrence; 'Whitman', in; Studies in Classic American Literature, (1986), p.183. See also Whitman's poem 'The Song of the Open Road', m; Selected Poems, (Dover Publications Inc., 1991), pp.30-39. 8. D.H. Lawrence; 'Whitman', ibid., p.l81. 9. Ibid., p.183. 10. Ibid., p.182. 11. Ibid., p.186. 12. Ibid. 13. Maurice Blanchot quoted by Deleuze and Guattari in; Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.341. 14. David Farrell Krell; 'Introduction' to Heidegger's Basic Writings, (1994), p.34. 15. Deleuze; 'Nomad Thought', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.149. 16. Heidegger; 'Buiding Dwelling Thinking', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.349. 17. D.H. Lawrence; 'Love Was Once a Little Boy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.343. 18. Heidegger; 'Building Dwelling Thinking', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.351. 19. D.H. Lawrence; 'Future States', in; The Complete Poems, (1977), p.611. 20. Nietzsche; 'The Greek State', in; On the Genealogy of Morality, 338 (1994),

p.l83. 21. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 11.2.284., p.380. 22. Ibid., 11.2.289, p.383. 23. Ibid., 11.2.293, p.384. 24. Ibid. 25. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Virture that Makes Small', I., p.187. 26. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 11.2.293, p.384. 27. D.H. Lawrence; 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover ',In; A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (1961), p.120. Chapter V: The Escaped Cock: Revaluation and Resurrection. Part I: Versus the Crucified. 1. Nietzsche; 'Philosophy in Hard Times', In; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 38, p.103. 2. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 62, pp. 196-7. 3. Daniel Breazeale; Footnote 7, to Nietzsche's 'Philosophy in Hard Times', In; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.103. 4. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), IV.307., p.246. 5. Ibid., V.377., p.340. 6. R.J. Hollingdale; 'Introduction' to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), p.28. This is a contentious claim by Hollingdale to say the least, based as it is upon a rather dubious psychoanalytic interpretation repressed'. Contrary essentially unaware of "the provenance involving the to Hollingdale's belief that in Zarathustra 'return of the Nietzsche was of the grand and grandiose" (ibid.) conceptions which he elaborates, I would suggest that Nietzsche was acutely aware 339

of what he was doing (here, as elsewhere) and that in many respects one of the flaws of Zarathustra is the overly self-conscious attempt to do what Lawrence achieves with much greater skill and subtlety in The Escaped Cock (i.e., offer a reinterpretation and revaluation of Christian teachings and myths). 7. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Voluntary Death', pp.98-9. 8. We recall that Jesus was only in his early-mid thirties when nailed to the Cross. The man who died reminds Madeleine upon his resurrection relatively a young Nevertheless man with over that he is still half his life still to live (EC, p.564). he has left behind him in the tomb his immaturity and, to Mary's bitter disappointment, the "enthusiasm and the burning purity" (ibid., p.566) of rapt youth. 9. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', m; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.37. 10. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), 3.62., p.88. 11. Ibid., p.89. 12. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 111.21., p.113. 13. For more on this apsect of the tale (i.e., the becoming-Aesculapius man who died) see Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen; of the 'Saviour and Cock: Allusion and Icon in Lawrence's The Man Who Died', in; The Journal of Modern Literature,S., (1976), pp.279-96. 14. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 11.18., p.64. 15. Ibid. 16. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 42., p.164. 17. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', m; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p. 37. 18. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 29., p.151. 19. Ibid., 15., p.135. 20. Ibid., 30., p.152. 21. Ibid., 34., p.156. 340

22. Ibid., 32., p.154. 23. Michael Tanner; 'Introduction' to Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, (1990), p.22. 24. Ibid. 25. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 51., p.I77. 26. Ibid., 62., p.196. 27. Ibid., 27., p.150. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 58., p.191. 30. D.H. Lawrence; The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, (1932), p.628. 31. Ibid., p.640. 32. D.H. Lawrence; Letter of June 6th, 1929, quoted by Mara Kalnins in her 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, (1980), p.35. 33. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', 10; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p. 37. Deleuze goes on to say, p.44: "St. Paul is the ultimate manager, while John of Patmos is a laborer, enterprise the terrible laborer of the last hour. The director of the must prohibit, censure, and select, whereas the laborer must hammer, extend, compress, and forge a material ... This is why in the Nietzsche-Lawrence alliance, it would be wrong to think that the difference between their targets - St. Paul for one, John of Patmos for the other - is merely anecdotal or secondary. It marks a radical difference between the two books I The Anti-Christ and Apocalypse]. Lawrence knows Nietzsche's arrow well, but in turn shoots it m a completely different direction". This is why charges of 'pure plagiarism' sometimes made against Lawrence, are mistaken; critics who suggest such suffer from a form of myopia which prevents them from seeing the radical differences between the two books and the two authors, as indicated by Deleuze above. 34. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.63. 341

35. Ibid., pp.64-5. 36. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', In; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.40. 37. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), 'Preface', p.32. 38. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.144. Compare what Lawrence says here with what he writes earlier in 'The Crown': "One God, One Way, One Glory, one exclusive salvation. And this One God is indeed God, this one way the way, but it is the way of egoism, and the One God is the reflection, inevitably, of the worshipper's ego." See; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.292. 39. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 43., p.166. 40. Ibid. 41. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 166., pl00. 42. Nietzsche; The Anti-Christ, (1990), 51., p.179. 43. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.69. 44. Ibid., p.66. 45. Ibid., p.70. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p.67. 48. Ibid. Lawrence expands on this point on p.69 of the above, writing: "Judas had to betray Jesus to the powers that be, because of the denial and subterfuge inherent in Jesus's teaching. Jesus took up the position of the pure individual, even with his disciples. He did not reaJJy mix with them, or even really work or act with them. He was alone all the time. He puzzled them utterly, and in some part of them, he let them down. He refused to be their physical power-lord. The power- homage in a man like Judas felt itself betrayed! So it betrayed back again: with a kiss. And in the same way, Revelation had to be included in the New Testament, to give the death-kiss to the Gospels." 342

This important passage is followed up In relation to the question of power and po Iitics in Part III. iii. of this chapter. 49. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', In; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.37. 50. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.68. 51. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', m; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.42. This forms a convenient opportunity to comment, briefly, on Nietzsche's thinking on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Essentially, for Nietzsche, Jesus the Redeemer represents a great seduction to the Jewish political project of revenge (i.e., the slave revolt in morals), and he is happy to allow the formula Dionysus versus the Crucified to also be read as Rome versus Judea. In the Genealogy Nietzsche argues that the Jews are a "priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, possessing an unparalleled genius for popular morality" (1994, 1.16., p.35) and he is adamant that Christian love grew out of Jewish hatred not as its denial, but "as its crown, as the triumphant crown" (1994, 1.8., p.19). However, Nietzsche concedes that Greek moral philosophy "had already done everything to prepare the way for and to make palatable" to the Romans moral fanaticism of the kind subscribed to by the Jews, describing Plato as a "great viaduct of corruption". See The Will To Power, (1968), 202., p.118. If Nietzsche's comments in the Genealogy, The Anti-Christ, unfortunately lend themselves to anti-Semitism, and elsewhere, do it should be remembered that Nietzsche himself abhorred the latter and made his opposition to such explicit in both his private correspondence and published work. For an interesting study relating to this matter see the essay by Yirmiyahu Yovel entitled 'Nietzsche, The Jews, and Ressentiment " in; Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Richard Schact, (University of California Press, 1994), pp.214-36. 52. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', m; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.43. 343

53. D.H. Lawrence; ApocaJypse, (1995), p.73. 54. Nietzsche; On the Genealogy of Morality, (1994), 1.16., p.34. See also chapter III of Lawrence's Movements in European History, (1971) which discusses the relation between Jews, early Christians, and Romans. Essentially Lawrence echoes Nietzsche's view, arguing that the Romans regarded the former as anti-social in their intolerance and monotheism; and criminally insane in their lusting for the destruction of the world. 55. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', m; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.44. 56. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.144. 57. Ibid.,p.146. 58. Ibid., p.148. 59. Mara Kalnins; 'Introduction' to the above, p.27. Deleuze offers take on the contemporary an interesting Revelation (and Lawrence's reading of it). He writes: Apocalypse lies not in its predicted catastrophes, glorification, the institution of glory relevance of John's "The modernity but in its programmed in the New Jerusalem, of the self- the demented installation of an ultimate judiciary and moral power." Deleuze is inviting us to see the comparison with the New World Order that is promised us by today's military-industrial-media corporations. Whatever the validity of so-doing, certainly it is the case that Western culture is founded upon the histories and religious mythologies of ancient Greeks, Roman, Jews, and Christians and thus "any analysis or critique of modern culture will be superficial unless it succeeds in tracing back the roots of our present crisis all the way back to certain features in the very foundations of our culture." See; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', in; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.46, and see Daniel Breazeale; 'Introduction' Philosophy and Truth, (1993), p.xli. 60. D.H. Lawrence; ApocaJypse, (1995), p.146. 344 to Nietzsche's

61. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patrnos', Ill; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.37. 62. Ibid., p.52. 63. Ibid. See Chapter I for remarks on capital in relation to culture and subjectivity. 64. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.75. 65. Ibid., p.76. 66. D.H. Lawrence; 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in; Apocalypse, (1995), p.54. 67. Ibid. 68. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.77. 69. Ibid. Mara Kalnins writes in her 'Introduction' to the above, p.27: "The discoveries of mathematics and physics in the second half of this century would also appear to bear out Lawrence's recognition that humanity is itself a part of the dance of energies, the interconnected web, which is the cosmos." 70. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.78. Part II: Remarks on Lawrence's The Escaped Cock in Relation to Death, Sex, and the Resurrection into Touch. 1. Obviously and undeniably the man who died is Jesus of Nazareth, interestingly, his name is never used in the tale and I will here, for the most part, follow Lawrence's practice and refer to the protagonist but, of The Escaped Cock as the man who died. The question of identity is, to some extent, made irrelevant in as far as the story concerns someone who has left behind in the tomb all that he was and is now in the process of a pure becoming, beyond his earlier self. 2. D.H. Lawrence; letter quoted by David Ellis in; Dying Game 1922-1930, vol. III of The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, (Cambridge University Press, 345

1998), p.356. I agree with what Ellis says of this letter; that whilst it does form an "accurate precis of the action of the story ... its tone hardly suggests how triumphantly Lawrence avoids bad taste in the handling of such delicate material, the power with which he is able to evoke a 'biblical' atmosphere, and how movingly Lawrence describes the pain and disillusionment of the Jesus figure." (Ibid.) 3. Keith Sagar; D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art, (1985), p.302. 4. D.H. Lawrence; 'Song of Death', in; The Complete Poems, (1977), p.723. 5. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), p.99. 6. See Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death' in; The Complete Poems, (1977), pp.716-20. 7. George Steiner; Heidegger, (1989), p.l02. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p.103. 10. Ibid. 11. D.H. Lawrence; 'Unhappy Souls', in; The Complete Poems, (1977), p.612. 12. D.H. Lawrence; 'Initiation Degrees', ibid. 13. D.H. Lawrence; 'People Who Care', ibid., p.613. 14. D.H. Lawrence; 'Fatality', 15. Keith Ansell-Pearson; ibid., p.617. Viroid Life, (1997), p.57. 16. Ibid., p.63. 17. Ibid. 18. Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.156. 19. D.H. Lawrence; 'Reality of Peace', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.42. 20. D.H. Lawrence; 'Resurrection', in; Phoenix, (1961), p.739. 21. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.79. 22. D.H. Lawrence; 'Reality of Peace', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.32. 346

23. Ibid., p.34. 24. Whilst I acknowledge that anti-Semitic texts frequently attempt to Hellenize or 'Aryanize' Christ, I would hope and trust that it will be clear that it is not my intention to here further, or in any way lend support to, this tradition. In this work, as in Nietzsche's, terms such as 'Jew', 'Greek', 'Roman', 'German', should be understood to designate cultural-philosophical styles, or qualities; not racial identities fixed in terms of metaphysical being, or biology. 25. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), 'Preface', 4., p.38. 26. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zsrethustre. (1969), 'Of Voluntary Death', p.99. 27. David B. Allison; 'Nietzsche's Identity', in; The Fate of the New Nietzsche, (1993), p.28. 28. Frank Kermode; Lawrence, (1985), p.138. 29. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.240. 30. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Viroid Life, (1997), p.83. 31. Georges Bataille; On Nietzsche, (1992), p.75. 32. Ibid., p.78. 33. Deleuze and Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus, (1996), p.157. 34. Georges Bataille; On Nietzsche, (1992), p.98. 35. Deleuze and Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus, (1996), p.155. 36. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.154. 37. Ibid., p.173. Part III: Political and Ethical Considerations. 1. Keith Ansell-Pearson: Viroid Life (1997), p.57. 2. Ibid., p.65. 3. Ibid. 4. See Pierre Klossowski; 'Nietzsche's Experience of the Eternal Return', in; The New Nietzsche, (1992), pp.l07-20. 347

Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.200. 5. Mark Warren; Of course, consist as Warren also says: in characterless passage "Fundamental of time, but rather of familarity that we experience 6. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), IV.341., 7. Ibid., IV.276., to historicity as recurrence in a series of recurring points of the 'same thing'. p.274. p.223. Viroid Life, (1997), p.173. 8. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 9. Nietzsche; is that it does not 'Of the Vision and the Riddle', 1, his in p.178. 10. Ibid., 'The Intoxicated Lawrence follows Song', Nietzsche 9, p.332. closely here In 'Reality of Peace' essay Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988); arguing we can but will one moment transform everything of joy to return (including ourselves). we can find one spark of happiness moment then we affirm life in its totality He writes; to the new life the of our being" (p.33). Nietzsche and Political Thought, (1991), p.197. 11. Mark Warren; Warren goes on to say, p.197: "The thought escape from historical being into [transcendental] identities ... The only possibility absolute and "if, in our heart of hearts, ... then we are converted we accept this spark as the treasure that if affirmation of history ... asserts another the the utter world eternal and impossibility another of for experiencing eternity return an existential becomes imperative: it places the individual face to face with all the sufferings experience - nothing more and nothing set of is the and limits of less." Viroid Life, (1997), p.80. 12. Keith Ansell-Pearson; 13. Ibid., p. 81. 14. Herbert Marcuse; Eras and Civilization, (1970), p.l05. Marcuse writes in full: alienated existence, relegation to a transcendental has "Eternity, long since been into an made the ultimate instrument consolation of repression world - unreal reward for real suffering." 348 of an by its

15. Ibid. 16. D.H. Lawrence; 'Poetry of the Present', m; The Complete Poems. (1977). p.182. 17. Deleuze; Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.48. 18. D.H. Lawrence; 'Poetry of the Present', in; The Complete Poems, (1977). p.183. The above essay at this and other Heidegger's points, 'Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?', has a remarkable similarity in; The New Nietzsche, to (1992), pp.64-79. 19. Keith Ansell-Pearson: Viroid Life, (1997), p.70. 20. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, (1991), p.175. 21. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.97. 22. It is not uncommon for commentators on Nietzsche's philosophy to make the connection between the eternal return and the overman. arguing that only the latter could fully will and affirm the former commentators unconditionally. However. other have identified what they claim to be an incompatibility between these two key notions, and attempted to demonstrate that they in fact contradict one another. This problem is addressed by Ansell-Pearson in his work on Nietzsche; see for example pp.185-6 of his Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, (1991). 23. Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy, (1992), p.168. 24. Michel Haar; 'Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', m; The New Nietzsche. (1992), p.24. 25. D.H. Lawrence; 'Education of the People', m; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (1988), p.161. 26. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Land of Culture', p.142. 27. Keith Ansell-Pearson; An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker. (1994), p.120. 28. Foucault; 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', In; Rabinow, (Penguin Books, 1991). p.362. 349 The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul

Foucault suggests that between pagan and Christian ethics the opposition is not so much between license and austerity, but between conceptions of the self and different forms of austerity. 29. Nietzsche; 'Schopenhauer as Educator', in; Untimely Meditations, (1992), pp.136-7. 30. Daniel Conway; 'Nietzsche contra Nietzsche', in; Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb, (SUNY Press, 1990). p.l09. This providing of an exemplar is fundamental to Greek ethics concerned with the care and creation of the self. What is most striking about the above, according to Foucault's reading, is that it is an ethic concerned very much with daily conduct and social behaviour; and not with questions of religious metaphysics. Further, ethics were not related to or enforced by any institutional system. Lawrence also notices this and in Apocalypse writes with approval of a non-moral. non- oppressive ethic which is chosen by the individual and involves nothing more than simple good manners and an aesthetics of existence. It is precisely such an ethic that the man who died seeks for himself. 31. See Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Bestowing Virtue', 3, p.103. Earlier in 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 9, Zarathustra declares: "'A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves ... Zarathustra harvesters, what has he to do with herds and herdsmen and and fellow-rejoicers: seeks fellow-creators, fellow- corpses!'" (ibid., pp.51-2). In a similar fashion, Lawrence insists in his 'Risen Lord' essay: "If Jesus rose as a full man, in the flesh. he rose to have friends ... whom he could hold sometimes to his breast, in strong affection '" how much more wonderful, this, than having disciples!" See Phoenix /I, (1968), p.575. 32. Deleuze; 'Literature and Life', in; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.3. 350

33. Ibid. 34. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Priests', p. 117. 35. Ibid., 'Of Manly Prudence', p.166. 36. Ibid., 'Of the Higher Men', 16., p.304. 37. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), 'What Is Noble?', 269., p.208. Nietzsche concludes by saying that the story of Jesus is ultimately the story "of a poor soul unsated and insatiable in love who had to invent hell so as to send there those who did not want to love him". 38. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Vision and the Riddle', 2., p.180. 39. Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil, (1990), 3.45., p.75. 40. Deleuze; 'The Mystery of Ariadne', in; Essays Critical and Clinical. (1998), p.lOO. 41. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix 11. (1968), p.737. 42. Nietzsche; 'Foreword' to The Anti-Christ, 43. Nietzsche; (1990), p.124. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of Old and New Law Tables', 26., p.229. 44. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix 11, (1968), p.575. 45. Nietzsche; 'Philosophy in Hard Times', in; Philosophy and Truth, (1993), 48., p.l08. 46. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix 1/, (1968), p.575. 47. Mark Seem; 'Introduction' to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, (1994), p.XXI. 48. Ibid., pp.xxii-iii. 49. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix 11,(1968), p.575. 50. Ibid. 51. D.H. Lawrence; letter quoted by Keith Sagar; D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art. (1985), p.307. 52. D.H. Lawrence; 'Aristocracy', in; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and 351

Other Essays, (1988), p. 367. 53. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968), 1026., p.531. 54. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix II, (1968), p.576. 55. Nietzsche; The Will To Power, (1968),721., p.384. 56. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Risen Lord', in; Phoenix II, (1968), p.576. 57. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.145. 58. Ibid., p.146. 59. Michel Haar; 'Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', m; The New Nietzsche, (1992), p.26. 60. See Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'The Stillest Hour', p.168. 61. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Cross', in; The Complete Poems, (1977). p.637. See also the related poems: 'What Is A Man To Do?' t ibid., pp.631-2) and 'The Gulf' (ibid., p.635). 62. Deleuze; 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', In; Essays Critical and Clinical, (1998), p.51. 63. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.146. 64. Ibid., p.147. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., p.69. 67. Mara Kalnins; 'Introduction' to Lawrence's Apocalypse, (1995), p.19. 68. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.7l. Part IV: Closing Remarks. 1. Deleuze; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta, (The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 209. 2. Nietzsche; The Gay Science, (1974), V.365., p.321. 3. D.H. Lawrence; 'The Flying Fish', in; St. Mawr and Other Stories, (1997), Appendix II, p.209. 352

4. Philip Goodchild; Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, (1996), p.187. 5. See Nietzsche; understood? Ecce Homo, (1988), p.131, where he writes: "Have 1 been What defines me, what sets me apart from all the rest of mankind, is that I have unmasked Christian morality." 6. D.H. Lawrence; Apocalypse, (1995), p.158. 7. Graham Hough; The Dark Sun, (1956), p.189. 8. D.H. Lawrence; letter quoted by Keith Sagar in; D.H. Lawrence: Life Into Art. (1985), p.325. Outside the Gate: A Conclusion. 1. Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1969), 'Of the Sublime Men', p.141. 2. Herbert Marcuse; Eros and Civilization, (1970), 'Preface to the First Edition'. p.21. 3. Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human, (1993), 11.2.293., p.384. 4. Heidegger; 'Letter on Humanism', in; Basic Writings, (1994), p.254. 353

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