Frank Farrell

Farrell, Frank B. "The Waste Land" and the Hellenic-Homoerotic Cultural Tradition., 2010. Abstractwastelandhellenic.pdf
Two references help us to understand some deep patterns at work in Eliot’s poem. Hegel in his Philosophy of History makes detailed reference to the Phoenician Sailor, also a character in the poem. And Frazer’s Golden Bough speaks of a certain ambiguity in Rome’s victory over Carthage: Rome had imported the statue of the West Asian goddess Cybele in order to help with this victory. The two references suggest that the poem is asking about both an individual and a cultural process of separation-individuation. There is an analogy between the efforts of the (male) self to break free from earlier maternal attachments and to establish an autonomous individuality and, on the other side, the efforts of European culture (Greek, Roman, and Christian) to break free from earlier attachments to West Asian religious worship. Eliot’s poem suggests that both achievements are fragile and may be deceptive failures, so that gender identity, and also the cultural identity of the Christian West, are in question. That particular analogy is at the basis of the Hellenic-homoerotic constellation of ideas and attitudes, and Eliot can be usefully studied in terms of that constellation, especially the poem’s gender ambiguities, whatever may have been his actual sexual practices. The poem also demonstrates unusally well the engineering described in Chapter 4, where different mental modules converge on the same object, and there are also surprising affinities with ideas in Nietzsche.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 1: The idea of the Aesthetic and the Uses of Nietzsche Since 1970., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche1.pdf
Nietzsche is a strong advocate and analyst of Hellenism and the aesthetic. Deconstructive styles of thought and programs in cultural studies have been radically disenchanting and iconoclastic regarding the aesthetic and regarding Hellenic ideas of form and the beautiful. Yet Nietzsche has also been made a hero of deconstruction and cultural studies, through a distorting selection of material from his work. What is needed, if we wish to understand the possibilities today of aesthetic experience in literature, is a more thorough and careful reading of Nietzsche. Certain influential readings of Nietzsche by Derrida, de Man, and others must be rejected. One area of helpful focus is Hegel’s differentiation of the religion of the beautiful and the religion of the sublime. Work in the humanities since 1970 has tended to favor textual or postmodern versions of the religion of the sublime. That tendency has made an appreciation of the aesthetic, and an appreciation of much of Nietzsche, far more difficult.
Farrell, Frank B. Recent Gay Fiction and Aestheticism., 2010. Abstractrecentgayfiction.pdf
I examine recent gay-themed novels by Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Toibin, Andre Aciman, Jamie O’Neill, and Andrew O’Hagan, and ask what these novels tell us about a possible future for homosexual aestheticism and literature, in the face of academic and social changes that would appear to devalue it through the framework of recent theoretical outlooks.
Farrell, Frank B. Zadie Smith on Joseph O'Neill's Netherland., 2010. Abstractzadiesmithreview.pdf
Zadie Smith, in comparing O'Neill's Netherland to a particular experimental novel, suggests that O'Neill aims for aesthetic experiences that are old-fashioned and ought to be more rigorously questioned. I argue against her claim, through considering, and being skeptical about, the treatment of aesthetic experience in recent theory-oriented developments in the humanities and in postmodernism.
Farrell, Frank B. C1 Returning to Nietzsche: Eros, Hellenism, and the Aesthetic., 2010. Abstract
Much use has been made of Nietzsche in the humanities of the last four decades, but academic critics have filtered out what is most interesting and useful in his work if we wish to understand the aesthetic experience of literature. I examine his work, and that of others, in order to get a clearer sense, for the study of literature today, of the relations among Hellenism, eros, and aesthetic experience. Ten chapters follow, each with a chapter abstract, and by clicking on, you can read here a full-text version of each chapter.
Farrell, Frank B. Returning to Nietzsche: Eros, Hellenism, and the Aesthetic. Chapter Ten: Is There Any Future for Homosexual Aestheticism?., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche10.pdf
Recent social changes strongly worth endorsing, such as gender equality, a favoring of egalitarian relationships, and a devaluing of a strong male bonding aimed at cultural tasks, have very much weakened the social conditions under which the Hellenic-homoerotic model might have a place, and have brought out elements in it that we find unethical. Yet does this mean we should leave it behind entirely? It may be that even with an overall disenchantment regarding certain mechanisms of that model, a radical iconoclasm regarding some of its practices and attitudes may not be the appropriate response. Useful experiences may still be provided by these practices and attitudes, given the biological design of humans. And some elements of the Hellenic-homoerotic constellation may be relatively portable, that is, transferrable to others who may not share its particular history. We remain selves for whom self-formation and individuation still matter, who engage, at complex levels, in processes of attachment, separation, and reinvestment, and who care about having a style of selfhood that is not merely a passive site where cultural vocabularies imprint themselves. This question of portability will be examined through a study of short fiction by Alice Munro. Five gay-themed novels (by Alan Hollinghurst, Andrew O’Hagan, Andre Aciman, Colm Toibin, and Jamie O’Neill) will demonstrate that aesthetic experience and beauty still matter for writers today. It may appear that the discipline known as queer studies should replace the Hellenic-homoerotic model, but that would be an unwise move. There remains a place, though an altered one, for homosexual aestheticism.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 9: Hellenic and Hebraic., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche9.pdf
One way of describing work in the humanities since 1970 is to say that, in one of the typical pendulum swings of the Western tradition, Hebraic elements of that tradition are emphasized and Hellenic ones devalued. I am very uneasy with that description, as the distinction in question has sometimes been used in the service of anti-Semitism. But there is a more narrowly focused investigation that does bring out some useful patterns of thought. The nineteenth-century Jewish philosophers Solomon Formstecher and Samuel Hirsch reacted to Hegel’s devaluing of the Jewish religion in his early theological writings. They argued that Hegel’s working through the steps of the religion of nature, and through the Hellenic religion of the beautiful, was necessary only for pagans who did not yet have the disenchanted understanding of religion as moral. Derrida also considers and undercuts, in his Glas and “The Ends of Man,” Hegel’s writings on Christianity and Judaism, and Walter Benjamin develops some of the same themes, while Emmanuel Levinas uses the Hellenic-Hebraic contrast to argue for a morality of radical otherness. We can explore, through this history, why some of Derrida’s intellectual preferences might be what they are, and why the recent engagement with Nietzsche may underplay his genuine Hellenism.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 8: After Nietzsche: Wittgenstein's Direction and the Direction of Fascism., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche8.pdf
The personal lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein have important similarities. Both emphasized the need to engage in philosophy at an especially intense level; the requirement of an aloneness that was often extremely painful; and the importance of not taking on the role of an actor for others, as one determined by the cultural responses received. On the other hand, Wittgenstein, in his notebooks, shows elements of a Kierkegaardian religion of the sublime, as opposed to Nietzsche’s religion of the beautiful. Yet in his later philosophy of language and mind, Wittgenstein does precisely the opposite of the recent theorists of the sublime, with their rhetorical inflation and their suggestion that any difficulty in handling reference, meaning, and truth means that we are left with something ineffable and undecidable, so that all our everyday practices are radically ungrounded. Wittgenstein shows, instead, that these ordinary practices have, in themselves, the stability they need to carry meaning successfully. Even without a privileged metaphysical grounding, our practices are multiply anchored to what surrounds them and they successfully incarnate the meanings we need to convey. A very different direction in the twentieth century is that of fascism. What is of interest here is that there are some real affinities between the Hellenic-homoerotic model and some fascist ideas and attitudes. A look at certain German thinkers (the poet Stefan George, the Cosmic Circle of Munich, and a number of “masculinist” homsexuals) shows that these affinities are genuine but ambiguous, and that someone in the Hellenic-homoerotic tradition might well go in a very different political direction.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 7: Nietzsche and the Postmodern., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche7.pdf
Nietzsche has often been recruited as a support for work in the humanities since 1970. But he serves very poorly as such a support. When one looks at his assessments of writers, musicians, and cultures, and at the criteria he offers for these assessments, his values have very little in common with those of recent academics. For a radical thinker, he endorses surprisingly many elements and themes of classicism: wholeness, form, beauty, “finish”, and the confident expression of capacities that have come to ripeness after a long period of discipline and training. In contrast, recent work in the humanities is very much under the sway of secular versions of the religion of the sublime. One favors a vague pointing to an ineffable difference. One celebrates a stark otherness that defeats any leftover traces of a metaphysics of identity or presence. One delights in what appears as radically undecidable, aporetic, and paradoxical. In fact, these efforts of rhetorical inflation are the sign of a decadent academic culture, just as Nietzsche found the romantic and Wagnerian sublime to be a sign of cultural decadence in the nineteenth century. The Hellenic-homoerotic constellation has little affinity for the various versions of the sublime (theological, Protestant, romantic, Kierkegaardian, textual, linguistic, postmodern). Nietzsche allows us to see that the idea of beauty and the aesthetic is not a matter of prettifying cultural conflict, but goes to the core of a grave and difficult project of self-formation.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 6: From Greek Tragedy to Modernism., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche6.pdf
To understand the detailed workings of the machinery of the Hellenic-homoerotic model, one should examine them in key works of literature. One thus will try to show how a certain anxious fragility regarding separation from earlier attachments and investments, and regarding the possibility of a self-maintaining style of selfhood, is displayed in the themes of these works and is also shown in the idea of what writing or art can be. The texts employed are: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s The Bacchae, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Melville’s Billy Budd, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Three stories by Henry James are also examined: “The Pupil”, “The Turn of the Screw”, and “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’”.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 5: Eliot's The Waste Land., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche5.pdf
Two references help us to understand some deep patterns at work in Eliot’s poem. Hegel in his Philosophy of History makes detailed reference to the Phoenician Sailor, also a character in the poem. And Frazer’s Golden Bough speaks of a certain ambiguity in Rome’s victory over Carthage: Rome had imported the statue of the West Asian goddess Cybele in order to help with this victory. The two references suggest that the poem is asking about both an individual and a cultural process of separation-individuation. There is an analogy between the efforts of the (male) self to break free from earlier maternal attachments and to establish an autonomous individuality and, on the other side, the efforts of European culture (Greek, Roman, and Christian) to break free from earlier attachments to West Asian religious worship. Eliot’s poem suggests that both achievements are fragile and may be deceptive failures, so that gender identity, and also the cultural identity of the Christian West, are in question. That particular analogy is at the basis of the Hellenic-homoerotic constellation of ideas and attitudes, and Eliot can be usefully studied in terms of that constellation, especially the poem’s gender ambiguities, whatever may have been his actual sexual practices. The poem also demonstrates unusally well the engineering described in Chapter 4, where different mental modules converge on the same object, and there are also surprising affinities with ideas in Nietzsche.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 4: How Does the Psychological-Cultural Engineering Work?., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche4.pdf
Certain kinds of self-to-other investments and identifications, as these develop in a process of individual self-formation, have a special capacity to be transformed into investments in a field of high-level cultural objects. Cognitive science provides a parliamentary model of mind according to which several initially unrelated mental modules, each with a specific and narrow focus, may form a coalition that converges upon a single object in the environment, yielding a rich and multi-leveled engagement with that object, in this case an eroticized one. Melville, in his Billy Budd, and Hegel, in his analysis of an oscillation between self-to-other and self-to-self relations, show important elements of this machinery. The outcome is that there is both a psychological need for, and a sophisticated peparation for, an investment in aesthetic objects through which one’s fundamental relation with the world is enacted and negotiated.
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 3: Zarathustra and the Aesthetics of Sublimation., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche3.pdf
In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche asks about, and in some ways enacts, certain relations among the achievement of beautiful form, the transfiguring of a natural instinctive life into a more elevated, more powerful expression, and the kind of individual psychology, with an often intense loneliness, that will be needed for this accomplishment. He thus works within what Hegel called the Hellenic religion of the beautiful. The promise is that erotic sublimation will lead not to a weakening of instinctive powers but to an exhilarating lightness of movement, a higher cresting of nature, in the realm of thinking and art, and to a genuine individuation not available to others. Is Nietzsche persuasive in making this promise?
Farrell, Frank B. Chapter 2: Nietzsche and the Eros of Self-Formation., 2010. Abstractreturnnietzsche2.pdf
Nietzsche insisted, more than other thinkers, on linking high-level philosophical and aesthetic activity to matters of individual psychology, self-formation, and sexuality. It is useful to examine his own work from that point of view, especially since his idea of the aesthetic and the beautiful seems to depend so much on an individual’s process of self-formation, of separating from earlier, perhaps threatening attachments and achieving a well-formed and self-sustaining pattern of activity. Much that is central to Nietzsche’s work can be made evident if he is seen as continuing a constellation of ideas and attitudes that might be labeled Hellenic-homoerotic. One can show how productive it is to view him this way without engaging in empty speculation about what his sexual practices might or might not have been. We also need to face the issue of how generally applicable Nietzsche’s idea of the aesthetic might be, given the parochialism of its origin.
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