Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.

I bet that last paragraph sounded like the diatribe of a seasoned smoker, irritated that he’s having more and more trouble getting his fix. Wrong. I haven’t smoked (tobacco) in years, after a fortunate incident in which I had half a Marlboro and puked violently for about twenty minutes, giving me an entrenched hostility to the scent and flavour of this acrid smoke. So, I hate smoking just as much as the vitriolic anti-smoking crowd. It’s smelly and idiotic: everyone who’s not in denial about their addiction knows this. It’s supposedly twice as addictive as heroin, and certainly only a fraction as interesting. Smoking cigarettes alone does not a Kurt Cobain produce. And the pitiful arguments that smokers use to rationalize their addiction are the worst. “It keeps me thin.” Yeah, well, so does eating less and exercising. “It relieves stress.” Yeah, well, so does pot and beer, not to mention simply not being an uptight idiot. Moreover, it seems that finding time for another smoke is the principal cause of stress among smokers. Smoking is really the perfect addiction for our capitalist society. Not only is it a hilariously expensive habit, it’s impossible to figure out why people acquire the habit in the first place. Smokers start smoking because they want to be cool (or, in my case, because that nicotine headrush in the early years is a great addition to being stoned and drunk out of your mind). But eventually all coolness and pleasant headrushing fades, and you’re just straight-up addicted to something for no good reason. Smoking a cigarette is indeed incredibly satisfying for a smoker, simply because it relieves them of the desire to smoke a cigarette for a little while. In this, it’s just like any number of other consumer goods, producing a desire which it then temporarily satisfies. At least when you’re a habitual drinker or pot smoker, you still get a little buzzed while you’re slowly killing yourself. So once again, we can see that cigarette smoking is a perfect fit for the capitalist lifestyle: its psychotropic effects are so mild that you can be incredibly addicted and still functional and productive. It’s not the kind of addiction that makes you miss work, it’s the kind that you can bring with you to work.

Anti-capitalist musings aside, it should be clear that I don’t think there’s any rational argument for cigarette smoking. It’s something that you start doing and continue doing for profoundly irrational reasons, reasons which lie in the addictive processes of the unconscious. Conversely, there are rational arguments for banning smoking in certain places, particularly in places where people might be exposed to carcinogenic smoke against their will. This is doubly so when one thinks about the rights of employees: customers can always choose a different location if they don’t like the smoking, but employees who might like to save their lungs don’t generally have that privilege. There is no rational argument for why smokers should be allowed to foist their preferred means of amortized suicide upon an unwilling group of people, whether it’s founded in a business logic or a libertarian one. (And never mind the multiplicity of equally carcinogenic industrial pollutants already in the air: there’s still no need to make a bad situation worse.) Even the strictest libertarian ought to recognize that their rights end where my nose begins. So I think it’s great that society has taken up a more enlightened stance on smoking in these contexts, and abandoned the old paternalistic attitude (a pater who smoked, obviously) which demanded that non-smoking customers and employees simply suffer in silence. Likewise, I would also say that I recognize the need for a punitive tax rate on tobacco products, not only to discourage potential new smokers, but to recoup some health care costs (especially in a country with socialized medicine – but I’ll come back to this health-care question shortly).
Where the anti-smoking crowd and myself diverge is when this enlightened attitude toward smoking law turns into a new paternalism, the same paternalism which has always been deployed to justify prohibition. Weak-kneed anti-smoking lobbyists won’t usually claim that the practice ought to be completely illegal, instead falling back on an increasingly complex system of restrictions and quasi-prohibitions with the intention of making it more and more difficult not only to become a smoker, but to remain one. Economic disincentives and other market-based measures are one thing; to think of every smoker converted to a non-smoker as some sort of victory for humanity is another thing entirely. I got my very hostile attitude toward the concept of smoking from my father. Nevertheless, said father, a good liberal to the end, can be incredibly irritating once he gets on to the topic of smokers and their vanishing rights. Like most anti-smokers, he seems to positively revel in trashing the concept of smoking, in his deep ressentiment that other people continue getting away with what he believes himself morally compelled not to do. Vigorous campaigners for anti-smoking regulations, like most dogmatic liberals, are always wallowing in this kind of ressentiment, and attempting to entrench their own moral principles in law. Like I said, some anti-smoking laws are reasonable. But such resentful and dogmatic liberals always seem to think that if a little bit of legislation is a good thing, then a lot of legislation will be a great thing. (Not incidentally, we might observe that this will never be a credible belief, and it will always give ammunition to conservatives, whether principled or otherwise.) The drive to institute an effective prohibition on all smoking is based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the function of anti-smoking legislation. Justifiable anti-smoking laws are the ones which prevent non-smokers from being unwillingly or unwittingly exposed to carcinogenic smoke. Paternalistic anti-smoking laws are the ones which seek to prevent smokers themselves from enjoying their vice, even when they aren’t harming anybody but themselves. These sorts of paternalistic laws can only have outright prohibition as their ultimate aim, which is not only unjustifiable from the perspective of individual liberties, but profoundly ineffectual as a disciplinary method.

Paternalism is always ultimately based on economic necessity. Daddy wants you, more than anything, to be productive. As long as smokers seem just as productive (or more so) than non-smokers, smoking will remain a non-issue. (Likewise, if overpopulation ever becomes a serious drain on the economy, you can bet that the institutionalization of ‘healthfulness’ will fall by the wayside). As the Cancer Society reminds us, “For each pack of cigarettes sold in 1999, $3.45 was spent on medical care caused by smoking, and $3.73 lost in productivity, for a total cost to society of $7.18 per pack.” Apart from the incredibly spurious nature of these sorts of ’statistics,’ we can clearly see their paternalistic appeal: smokers need to be stopped from smoking, not just for their own health, but for the greater good. This has, of course, been the argument deployed by all authoritarian regimes in order to justify the unjustifiable, abrogating individual rights for the perceived good of the collective. I’m not going to scapegoat the Russians, Italians or Germans in this respect: every government that enforces a prohibition on an act which harms only the individual actor (or nobody at all) is in this sense authoritarian and paternalistic. And thanks to Harry Anslinger’s remarkably successful (albeit poorly-named) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, this list includes approximately every nation-state currently in existence.
Here, a good-ole-fashioned libertarian would be ready to end his or her discourse on smoking: smokers, like all individuals, have liberties, and they oughtn’t be hindered from enjoying them unless they are themselves hindering someone else from enjoying theirs. This seems like a pretty solid moral foundation for legislation, and in most respects it is. But I’m no ole-fashion libertarian, and I’m not really happy just appealing to the liberties of smokers as a value in and of themselves. After all, they’re stupid enough to continue being smokers, so I don’t see why we really ought to respect their liberties all that much. This is more or less the implicit claim of paternalistic legislation, after all: those unfit to govern themselves must be governed by law. So I’d like to take up this paternal claim on its own terms, and demonstrate its essential absurdity. Essentially, what’s at least a bit ‘radical’ about my take on smoking law is that I wholly agree that smokers aren’t really fit to govern themselves, and for this precise reason they ought to be allowed to continue doing so. Smoking, far from being a practice which needs to be prohibited for the greater good, in fact contributes to this ‘greater good,’ however it may be defined.
Let’s start this section with a little thought experiment that’ll hopefully get your hackles up again. (What are hackles, anyway?) In your head, I want you to rank-order the following four hypothetical individuals in terms of how much they deserve to die. If you’re uncomfortable with this formulation, then just rank them in order of how upset you would be to hear they’ve died:

1) A 25-year, pack-a-day smoker.

2) A morbidly obese individual who simply overeats.

3) A morbidly obese individual with a hereditary thyroid condition.

4) A healthy baby in Central Africa.

I’ll give you a second.

All done?

I’m willing to bet that, once you got over your initial distaste at the premises of this thought-experiment, 95% of all you hypothetical readers didn’t change the order, and not just because you’re very suggestible.

Why? Because there’s a huge difference between the first two hypothetical individuals and the second two. The first two are individuals who, whether or not they know it, have made life choices which are almost certainly going to entail a shorter lifespan. The second two are individuals who, through no fault of their own, are likely going to have a shorter lifespan. In setting up your ordering, you’ve relied on an implicit ethical principle: people who die because of choices they’ve made are more deserving of their death than people who die because of an accident of birth.

What does the death of a pack-a-day smoker have to do with the life of a baby in Ethiopia? Simply put: Everything.

Everyone knows it, but nobody is willing to come right out and say it: the human race is multiplying out of control. Malthus recognized this as far back as the eighteenth century, while in our own century Paul Ehrlich derived some rather silly predictions from this underlying principle. What does ‘out of control’ really mean in this context? (NB, for those of a very philosophical bent, my thoughts on these issues are strongly influenced by the late Garrett Hardin and his always-irreverent take on ethics) It simply means what it says: populations of animals are generally controlled by a variety of natural factors, including food supply, predation, and climactic catastrophe. We human animals, however, have placed ourselves not simply ‘atop’ but outside the natural food chain by constructing our own artificial food chains (wheat-truck-mouth/hay-cow-mouth/etc.), while our technologies have made us incredibly resilient in the face of natural catastrophes. This not only allows our population to grow and grow, uncoupled from any natural control factors; this growing population and its increasingly complex techno-society are in themselves an apparently inexhaustible resource for solving future population problems (as outlined by Julian Simon). And so, as humanity continues to push the carrying capacity of its planet to the maximum, it also continues to find new ways of expanding this global capacity.

It seems to me that the debate between Simon and Ehrlich over whether and when humanity will one day run up against some fixed carrying capacity and simply collapse, is not only a bit overblown, but profoundly misses the point, especially in terms of what we might call ‘population ethics.’ If we look at the various means by which capitalist society has been able to expand the global carrying capacity of the human race, one thing should be clear: from a local perspective, these mechanisms are often profoundly unequal (and therefore unjust). Farmers in America get subsidized to grow corn nobody wants to buy, while on the other side of the world, millions starve to death. The fastest-growing problem in the developed world is obesity, while the developing world is still stuck on the same old problem of malnutrition. If this doesn’t strike you as the most evil irony of the contemporary world, then you are not only lacking a sense of irony, but a moral sense.

What the hell does this have to do with smoking, and the thought experiment above?

It’s simple. All the noble efforts to feed the starving masses of the world can only go so far. The only sustainable solution to the problem of overpopulation is simply population control. We need to overcome our selfish instinct to be fruitful and multiply as much as Nature will allow, because we don’t live in Nature anymore: we live in an accelerating industrial culture that has latched onto an unsustainable spiral of growth. The particular time is irrelevant: we need to solve this problem of growth for ourselves, or Nature will reassert her power and solve it for us. Not only do we need to rethink our lust for growth, but we need to rethink the incredibly unequal distribution of this growth: individuals born in developing countries are more likely to die simply by the accident of their birth.

And so, paternalistic legislation against smoking is not only an affront to liberty and a colossal waste of time, but grotesquely misguided to the point of becoming immoral. Why the hell should we fight to save the lives of individuals who are ready to pay for a chance to throw theirs away, when millions of individuals starve to death every year, even as they desperately fight to survive? Even the economic arguments ‘for the greater good’ are a bit silly. In a study with wonderfully contrarian conclusions, the Danish Institute of Health concluded that the lifetime “health-related costs of smoking are balanced by smaller expenditure due to shorter life expectancy.” When you think about it, smoking is in fact a wonderfully democratic system of population control. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, less and less people (in developed countries) die each day, but just as many people get born. This progressive elimination of natural selection from human existence can only exacerbate the problems of overpopulation and their concomitant inequalities.
Population control is the only solution to overpopulation, but it’s an extremely problematic one in almost any form. After all, everybody wants to live, and they at least want their families to live (beyond that, it seems, many people don’t really care that much). So how does the ‘controller’ of population decide who gets to live and who is allowed to die? Essentially this is the problem of deciding who deserves to live, and who deserves to die: this is a problem suitable for a god, not a man. The solutions proposed by ‘eugenics’ are so profoundly repugnant that they barely deserve a mention. Controlling the birth rate through legislation is another option, but there remains the ethical problem of what to do with babies in excess of the limit. Garrett Hardin’s solution – ‘don’t help the poor!’ – is equally problematic, insofar as it assumes that those who are born into poverty have less right to life than those born into wealth. The moral quandaries of population control by legislative fiat have led most liberals to cast the idea aside, to proclaim that all life is sacred and that we have a sacred right to protect life: in this respect they’re not far from ‘right-to-lifers.’

But liberals still support abortion rights, for good reason, and for the same good reason as they ought to allow smokers to keep on smoking. Abortion and smoking are passive, ‘democratic’ modes of population control, modes of control which in fact reintroduce some semblance of natural selection into the sphere of human existence. People who choose an unhealthy life get sick and die; embryos whose mothers don’t want them and so won’t raise them well, simply don’t get born. (The net effect of this second fact seems to be, on the whole, positive.) These notions might be repugnant to the liberal mind. If so, fuck the liberal mind. I think liberals should learn to stand up for principles, even when it means they have to tolerate a few repugnant conclusions and cast aside their paternalistic impulses. Save paternalism for the familial sphere, where it belongs: if you’ve got a child who smokes, you can and should go right ahead and pressure them in whatever fashion you’d like to stop doing so. But in the legal sphere, we need to bow to a higher principle of liberty, whereby others are free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t directly affect us. This doesn’t even demand that we liberals give up the desire for a better world, or the hope to improve humanity. Quite the contrary: I should say that if smokers are dumb enough to continue smoking, while fully aware of the consequences, then their deaths ought to be continually improving humanity’s aggregate intelligence. If they’re wealthy and irrational enough to sustain a smoking habit, then their share of the earth’s carrying capacity should go to somebody more deserving, like the starving Ethiopian from the thought experiment above. Maybe as we start to think about smoking in this context, we’ll even start to reconsider the disproportionate investments that are made in lung cancer research, and start to think about simpler (and less profitable) things, like malaria and malnutrition.
So, as non-smokers, let’s forget the pipe dream of a non-smoking society and say to smokers: light up! Be proud of the sacrifice you’re making for the greater good!

Just don’t blow that shit in my face.

So here’s the absurd statement: Not only were Hitler and the Nazis onto some important ideas, they were ‘geniuses’ of a sort when it came to the Jewish ‘Idea.’ This is not only absurd, but patently offensive to anyone with a reactionary mind. But this sort of reactionary mindset is eminently counterproductive. If we want to actually investigate evil, to understand the structural logic behind its genesis, then we can’t conduct our investigations from the perspective of the goodly thinker, the beautiful soul. Instead, we have to think about the conditions which determine the evil Idea, within its own absurd frame of reference. This is perhaps an ethnography of evil, minus the participant aspect: we have to obtain an emic understanding of what it’s like inside the evil mind, before we can begin to translate it into etic terms, understandable by those of us who are, if not ‘good,’ at least morally unobjectionable.

First: Why do I say that the Nazis were ‘geniuses?’ We are all familiar with the concept of the evil genius, but this sort of notion could be made a bit clearer by thinking about genius in relation to the Deleuzian plane of immanence. Reason is a process which takes place in the plane of representation, actualized in expression and formalized in a language (this would include formal languages, such as logic or mathematics). Reason, as I began to consider in a very preliminary way in last night’s post, is a delimitation and structuration of a differential plane of immanence within the body and brain of the subject, which for convenience we shall refer to as ‘the mind.’ Reason is the law of the mind, a set of social conventions which determines what expressions of that differential plane are acceptable in the context of serious rational inquiry. Genius, on the other hand, is quite different from reason. Genius is the process by which conscious thought directly accesses the mind’s plane of immanence and determines hidden connections between and within things, the genetic logic of a given existing thing; this virtual logic is always covered over in the actual, and inexpressible according to the conventions of representational reason. This is perhaps clearest in the case of the savant: they access the immanent plane of mathematics directly, and can perform feats of computation which seem impossible to those of us shackled by reason. Yet they generally remain unable to understand this process in a rational way, and are barred from the world of ‘real’ mathematics by their inability to ’show their work.’ This is the genius of the idiot, the genius which exceeds all possibility for rational determination. Rational geniuses, by contrast, try to make sense of the connections revealed by their genius in a reasoned way, to ensure that the connections they ’see’ with their genius are not merely figments of their poetic imagination, or worse, of their bad intentions. The most successful rational geniuses ultimately generate a paradigm shift of rationality: the laws of reason are remade in such a way that these hidden connections can now be grasped in the actual. This should make the opposing position of the evil genius clear: they recognize hidden connections, differential Ideas covered over in the process of actualization, but instead of interpreting these connections through the lens of reason (however difficult this process may be), they jump to conclusions. These conclusions are almost invariably not rational ones, but ones shaped in bad faith by their own prejudices and unconscious drives.

This discussion, interesting in itself, should help to illuminate the genius of Hitler, and the process by which it became an evil genius. Deleuze says that all Ideas are problematic. Hitler was therefore absolutely correct that the Jewish Idea ‘poses a problem;’ the problem posed by Hitler is how exactly he determined the Jewish problem in such a way that it led to a barbaric and unquestionably evil solution. The problem of the Jewish Idea is simple: why be a Jew? This formulation of course leaves a great deal unsaid, and so we ought to formulate it in a proper rational way as follows: why is it that the Jewish people have remained a Jewish people in the Diaspora, instead of assimilating? The genius of Hitler was that he recognized the problematic character of the Idea which structures the Jewish race as diasporic; the evil of Hitler is that the problem was formulated according to a logic in which the Jewish difference was necessarily subordinate to the unitary historical identity of the Germanic people.

This is not evil in itself, but evil in that it is absurd. The Jewish Idea not only pre-exists the Germanic one, but is eminently superior in terms of the depth of its historical ‘identity.’ While the Germanic race is a fictional pastiche of differential Ideas, both genetic and social, the Jewish race is perhaps the archetype of racial identity. Indeed, the Jewish problem can be more accurately formulated in these terms: why does the Jewish race seem so different? The answer lies precisely in its identity: Western (that is, European) culture is constructed in terms of various fluid identities which barely conceal an underlying play of difference. ‘We’ have progressed from intermingling tribes, to aristocratic families, to ‘peoples’ of the Germanic, Italian, Iberian, etc. type, onto this silly fiction of the nation-state, none of which are truly ’self-identical’ concepts, and yet we constantly proclaim the unity of these identities in a sort of reaction-formation on a grand scale. The Jewish people, constructed through centuries of subjugation by these fluid, territorialized identities, emphasizes its own difference from these constructed identities as a means of preserving its own internal cohesion. The result is an enduring ‘culture,’ a group identity far stronger than that to be found within these European pseudo-identities; thus it only makes sense that in the most intensive moments of the process of European identity-construction, Europeans have always sought to exclude or subordinate the Jewish identity.
Thus we are led past the Jewish ‘problem’ to its equally problematic cases of solution. Why be Jewish?
It should be noted that the Jewish Idea is no less problematic from within than from without, and indeed only takes the form ‘Why be Jewish’ from within. The various schisms within contemporary Judaism make it clear that different factions of Jews have very different solutions to the problem of Jewish identity. The first solution is the orthodox one: Be Jewish because of the will of YHWH, be Jewish because you are part of a Chosen People. This is an extremely strong solution, so long as people remain within their theological mindset; indeed, this solution, and the strict separation it has long entailed, is in part designed to keep the race within that mindset. Yet as intercultural barriers have broken down and more Jews have been secularized through European dissemination, this solution has become less persuasive. Thus we come to the solution of the less-orthodox and non-observant Jew: Be Jewish because you are, be Jewish because you are born into this identity and its entire history stands behind you. Thus a religion becomes an ethnicity. I don’t think of myself as a non-observant Catholic, but a non-Catholic, yet non-observant Jews tend to continue their self-identification as such. This is because Catholicism is a European pseudo-identity, an inferior simulacrum of the Jewish Idea, while Judaism in every form still understands the essence of identity-formation. I am not implying here that either mode of identity is superior – I enjoy the fluidity of my Europeanesque pseudo-identity – but simply pointing out the different cultural attitudes towards the concept of identity, and identity of the concept. The third solution that jumps out, perhaps simply because it is the most radical, and the only one acceptable from a Eurocentric perspective: stop being Jewish. This is assimilation, the radical negation of a given identity in favour of a self-made one. Of course, the (mass and individual) conversion of Jews to Catholicism has a number of interesting implications w/r/t the (forced or willing) trading of a ‘real’ (or at least more fixed and concrete) identity for a pseudo-identity; for now, I’ll move on.

The question implied by the Jewish problem from outside is a bit more contentious: What to do with the Jews? This has been the problem for any political entity which contains Jews within its territory; really this is the same problem posed by any political identity in its process of construction when it comes up against a pre-existing political identity. Barring assimilation, the process which the Jewish identity has been ‘designed’ to resist, there is one obvious answer: expel them. This was the ’solution’ to the original Jewish problem which made it an international one: if the insecure political identities of Babylonia and the Romans had not expelled the race from their respective territories, then the Diaspora would never have occurred, and the Jewish people would have remained a territorial assemblage. Instead, they became a territorial assemblage separated from its territory; rather than finding a new territory, as many European tribes in similar positions did, they dispersed around the known world, and developed new forms of deterritorialized identity which were nevertheless founded upon the historical territory and its loss. (We might note that the infrastructure of those very empires perhaps facilitated the distribution the Jewish population across a vast territorial expanse, while the resilience of the people and their textual culture served to perpetuate its now-distributed identity.) This process of expulsion merely served – in the eyes of nascent European cultures – to spread the ‘problem’ around; recognition of this factor is another element of Hitler’s evil genius. (I say European specifically because historical evidence makes it clear that most Arabic, Turkish and other empire-formations were in general less hostile to the Jewish identity.) Thus we arrive at Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem: not simply to expel the race from a territory, but from existence. For the Nazis, the Jewish problem and the deconstructive threat it posed to a nascent Germanic identity took precedence over all conventions of morality: the nation above all, this national fiction before the reality of human life. This is the structural logic of anti-Semitism: the persistence of the distinctly Jewish form of identity within the European implies that for the European form to succeed, the Jewish must be eliminated.

The self-evident (at least to anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite) immorality and absurdity of this logic leads to the real final solution to this ‘external’ formulation of the Jewish problem: learn from the problem, without trying to ’solve’ it. Following Levinas, we might propose that genius without evil demands openness to the Other; not necessarily the infinite Other of God, but all those forms of otherness which trouble ideal, ‘totalitarian’ concepts of nation.  In terms of an ‘instrumental’ justification of such openness (rather than a properly ‘ethical’ one), we need not refer simply to the fact that Judaism is one of the richest sources of historical material, or that its past can calerly shed light on the processes of cultural identity-formation in general. Both of these observations are essential in themselves. In a more immediate and concrete way, however,  we must stress the fact that Jewish culture, with its progressive movements of deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, is of central importance to any debate with regard to this supposed ‘postmodern crisis’ of the nation-state. As supranational corporations and subnational multiplicities began to supplant traditional political organization, the question of cultural identity and its relationship to politics, capital, and territory has become absolutely essential. We must question not only the apparent novelty of these territorial displacements, but also the fundamental premises of cultural identity, along with that totalizing impulse of political ‘unity’ which still persists. Until ‘we Europeans’ open ourselves fully to the value of the Jewish identity and its history in this light, the Jewish ‘problem’ will remain dominated by the pseudo-question of whether one ought to be anti- or pro-Semitic, along with all those absurd and often violent ’solutions’ which stem from such a question.

So, it’s been a considerable amount of time since I’ve posted much of anything on here. And I have a serious need of getting back into the discipline of thinking in text according to my own ideas, and I’ve also been having this really weird thought in my head since last night. I’m poring over the Critique of Pure Reason this morning, and this little germ of an idea keeps building upon itself in the ol’ think-box, so in a useful concatenation of mental state and external necessity, I’m going to walk said idea through a little bit of digital exegesis. In the interest of starting things off in a fun and provocative way, here is the most reactionary form of this ‘thesis’ that’s in my head: wrestling is sublimated homosexual rape. My goals with this exegesis are to uncover some of the interesting subconscious detritus which underpins wrestling and its curious subculture, but also to engage in a little bit of critical thinking with regard to rape and homosocial desire.

Here we go!

Because I do love to get into thorny issues, let’s start this discussion off with a little deconstruction of rape. For the sake of political correctness, I would just like to point out that no part of this upcoming paragraph (in spite of whatever knee-jerk readings may emerge in the intersection between reader and text) in any way delegitimizes the pain or trauma of the rape experience, but rather, this is merely an attempt to problematize the conventional ‘rational’ understanding of rape. I argue that, just as writing is not an inessential supplement added onto speech, rape is not an inessential and subordinate sexual practice, but in fact lies at the heart of the sex act. This is immediately evident when we witness the courtship patterns of animals. These are certainly not ‘courtship’ in the conventionalized human sense, but in fact bear a far stronger phenomenological resemblance to pursuit, forced submission, and rape. ‘Desire’ in the human sense cannot figure into animal sexuality. Thus, ‘rape,’ on its bare definition as sexual encounter in the absence of mutual consent, comes before this rational construct of desire that we call ‘consensual sex.’ With sex, animals are simply expressing an evolutionary ‘desire’ which is in our terms more along the lines of a biological imperative. Desire, in its highly rationalized and coded human form, is simply appended to the sex drive ‘itself.’ The ego-structure of the rational subject requires self-presence, and so we demand a rationalized (as opposed to forcible) mode of consent when it comes to our procreative instincts: rape is suppressed by the symbolic order, but endlessly resurges from the reptilian depths of the mind in both concrete (ie. actual rape) and sublimated forms.

Last night, as I was engaging in this wonderful and beautiful unity of rational subjects we call ‘consensual sex,’ I allowed my consciousness to engage in a little bit of drifting for tantra’s sake, and I was struck by the odd similarities between the play of leverage between bodies in the sex act, and the forcible contest of leverage that is wrestling. Setting aside for now the rather hilarious implications of this weighty realization in the context of the moment (let’s just say that these sorts of deconstructive tangents are far less useful for tantric purposes than, say, trying to remember the names of all 50 US states); this is a pretty significant connection. Given that wrestling developed as the exclusive province of nude, well-oiled male bodies in Ancient Greece, with all its well-known institutionalized perversions, it is certainly no stretch to draw the conclusion expressed at the beginning of this short piece. Wrestling, like all pseudosexual acts, is a game of submission: whereas consensual sex requires mutual, rationalized consent (itself sublimated into, and produced by, various human courtship rituals), rape is a strategy of forcible submission that culminates in a sex act. While consensualized sex is a play of leverage between agreeing subjects, wrestling enacts a play of leverage between aggressive bodies, which culminates in a conspicuously absent homosexual sex act.

This relates directly to Eve Sedgwick’s work on ‘homosocial desire,’ as when she asks of Reagan and Jesse Helms, “Doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-loving-men’ and ‘men-promoting-the-interests-of-men’ have the same intuitive force that it has for women?” Likewise, I ask: doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-raping-men’ and ‘men-forcing-men-into-submission’ have a self-evident intuitive force? Wrestlers play at homosexual sex by enacting a hidden desire. But while heterosexual rape enacts a subconscious desire for the dominance of a ‘male presence’ over a female body conceived (incorrectly, as it barely merits mentioning) as an opposite ‘absence,’ the sport of wrestling sublimates that same drive into a desire for a contest of equals, a play between two male presences which has become so highly coded and socialized that the implied sex act is no longer required.

This, of course, leads on to some extremely significant questions with regard to this concept of a battle between ‘presences’ as it relates to homosexuality in general, as well as the libidinal force which wrestling spectators often exhibit and how it may relate to a latent homosexuality which may underpin even the most conventionally ‘heterosexual’ social practices. For the time being, however, I will break with this particular bit of playful analysis and get back to my dear Immanuel.