Robot Sex, Roombas — and Alan Rickman

Originally posted on de Gruyter ‘Conversations’ but needing updates owing to fairly fatal, reading wise, and very literal: deadlinks … nobody likes deadlinks…

Babette Babich | 17.08.2017. Updated 14 February 2024

Robot lovers, given current technology, are not particularly good at being robots, much less at being Alan Rickman. Now the reference to Alan Rickman makes little sense here. Still that’s how the original post began. Rickman matters and the reference will be plainer a bit later. (Various editorial interventions wishing sentences to be more compact made them compact, but, as often happens, less perspicuous.)

This essay raises, quite as the title suggests, the notion of ‘Robot Sex.’ The good news is — and in 2017 the promise of AI was already patent, though it tended to count as virtual in those days — that in order to thematize cyborgs or robots we do not actually require anything so ontic as real robot tech or cyborg tech in order to write about and think about and theorize robots for the sake of arguing robot ethics — a booming cottage industry, now a tad eclipsed by AI ethics — or indeed for talking about robot sex.

Thus the January 2024 issue of Cosmopolitan is still asking, just to quote their title headline, about “Sex Robots.” In fact, they’ve been waiting, so they cut to the chase: “how do sex robots work and can you buy a sex robot?” Now the Cosmo article on sex robots does not feature some android version of Alan Rickman or Jude Law as he once was or Henry Cavill (still) or some other suitable Hollywood idea(l) but and much rather, and in the tried and true Cosmo fashion, by showing a lady on all fours (this is true to the current state of the robot art, being largely a matter of mobile robot dogs) with a fantasy body, airbrushed perfect, and ideal to the dream: no pesky introspection, and, transparent, no waist at all.

(There is dissonance to the extent that Cosmo is a mag read, with a certain dedication, if for the most part, by heterosexually inclined ladies.)

To be fair the ladies’ journal is simply evolving, as it were, the aesthetics of the gynoid represented in the 2014 film Ex machina, a cautionary tale for the gentlemen, here carried to a certain extreme. In addition, most AI depictions of robots, both male and female, and one assumes, soon a trans model (not yet items extant for order), tend to minimize the waist.

Robots, the very idea, seem to inspire philosophers, just to quote the perfectly analytic Alva Noë, at least if we take this at the level of his title, “Deconstructing the Philosophies of ‘RoboCop’,” to take a walk on the continental side.

In any case, and I will leave it to others to deconstruct the deconstruction, the waist ideal, size too, is already a feature for Robocop, exemplifying the ‘new bad future.’

Robot lovers, should we get them, will be transhumanist, posthumanist events, in 2017 Steve Fuller named this humanity 2.0.

In truth, then as now, robot lovers were as they remain, virtual, app style. So sex robots for order are comparable in nearly all respects, apart from a certain canned dialogue potential, to fairly low tech sex dolls (no refunds, no returns). 

Virtual things, like AI, for example, are things we don’t have but wish we did. And so, because we can’t really do anything else with them, we think about them, write about them, argue about them, devise possible ethics for them, talk about how good or terrible it might be if people came to prefer them over human lovers or build careers (cue young academics getting tenure by writing books and talking about them).

Captivated by the idea of a robot lover, one can set one’s heart on acquisition.This can involve, for those who think this is just around the bend, setting up savings accounts, hoping to be able to buy one someday: available sex dolls (best to call them that rather than ‘robots’ just given that they cannot walk), despite their aesthetic limitations, are quite costly.

Hitches seem par for the course when it comes to future tech. Thus we still don’t have jet packs in any usable form that does not involve crash helmets, ditto: the flying cars that were a staple of so much science fiction, much less the robot Maria in the city of tomorrow depicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis circa 1927. But, optimists till the end, cryogenics still offers us the chance to freeze our decapitated heads for the time when replacement bodies exist and we can be thawed out, because that will be a number one priority for people in the future (perhaps the earth will be depopulated by then) and reanimated to enjoy the robot lover of our dreams which will surely have been developed in the interim.

Descartes and the Sex Toy

Robot lovers or mechanical automata have been around for a while. So too the more garden-variety kind of masturbatory accessory or sex toy, as certain ancient artifacts fall into this category.

In 1649, almost four centuries ago, the same René Descartes, who made an argument about the trouble we would have in distinguishing an automaton from a human being a central component in his philosophy, had himself, so the story goes, constructed a female automaton, very tiny, his robot could not walk either, so it was the size of a child.

When he was compelled to travel to Sweden to teach philosophy to the Queen, he took his sex daughter with him for companionship at sea and, one supposes, in Sweden too — but superstitious (or jealous) sailors threw it overboard and that ended that.

Rene Descartes, after Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The mechanical Francine would be debated. To this day, some biographers deny she ever existed, which points to our current inability to even imagine the sophistication of clockwork automata (and the passion for the same in the 17th century) but such devices go back to antiquity, even before Socrates and I write about life-size Greek bronzes (including illustrations).

Recently, the efforts of a number of historians of art and science like Horst Bredekamp have helped advance our imaginative capacity in this regard. But accounts of automata are even older, and mechanically possible, as the mysterious Antikythera mechanism demonstrates.

No one less than Plato tells the tale of Socrates’ ancestor Daedalus, skilled enough to build automata designed to return to their maker (permitting Daedalus to sell the same machine again and again) and necessitating chains to secure them for customers who wished not to have to buy them twice.

Cue the Rickman Function

“In addition to making love, a robot lover could also do useful things. Like cooking and cleaning, changing lightbulbs and such.”

Today’s robot sex-dolls, like Descartes’ personal automaton, are sex-dolls for men. Indeed, even the anatomically male versions are sex-dolls for men too.

Yet, at least in theory, a woman might be well delighted to have a robot lover, and one is almost tempted to imagine that a robot lover might even be, potentially, perfectly programmable, a perfect lover, especially for women.

A robot could do all the good things one might hope a lover might do, the kind of things real live lovers can find onerous (at such matters are mentioned from time to time in disputes). So, in addition to making love — this being the point of a robot lover after all, in just the way that one wished, when one wished and as long and as often as one wished, surely good things, a robot lover would also be useful : opening jars, or getting stuff from the higher shelves down to the counter and then, even more importantly: putting it all back again. This could extend, making one’s robot love a perfect partner, to cooking and cleaning, changing lightbulbs and such, all in addition to companionship. All sans dispute.

Indeed, one might even imagine (this being virtual exercise) a robot lover with a Walter Raleigh function as we might call it, casting a cloak as a bridge across rainy puddles or, better still, a robot with an Alan Rickman-as-Colonel Brandon function, capable of carrying one physically (and very romantically) over puddles or up steep hillsides in inclement weather (or sunnier weather, as one wishes). Or a robot to help with carrying parcels and purses and rucksacks.

Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility 1995

Thus just as I mentioned AI ethics, there are plans to devise robots that might be helpful in related ways, if not up to the standard of a Rickman or even a Robocop, but perhaps this is a matter of personal taste (though the lady falling here seems herself to be a sex doll, rescued by a more up-to-date active version of the kind we still don’t have).

Robot lovers for women, at the very least, will need, and the Rickman version would excel at this, deep conversational features, ideal as it would be to have someone to talk to who would want to talk, being interested in the topic of conversation one might suggest and capable of following topic changes without annoyance.

Perhaps all we need to do is creatively revamp existing AI programs that pretend to be therapists, mix them up erotically and affectionately with a touch of male Siri. And then, again and again, there would be the sex. Perfect! And for women, that could go on for days so designers will need to work on battery life.

“Again and again, there would be the sex that could go on for days so decent battery life is a must.”

The language of teledildonics seems to suggest all this. But not so. Dildonics, the awkward name for the industry dedicated to designing and manufacturing sex robots, is not, despite the name, dedicated to manufacturing vibrators or mechanical dildos, perhaps on the model of mechanical broncos but just, and mostly, to robots for guys.

In the case of lady robot lovers, these are silicone sex dolls, not unlike the cheaper, blow-up doll versions.

Immovable Robots

Still no robots, and there are none on the drawing board, currently offer functionality at the level of moving on their own. One has to drag them about, which is why today’s sex robots are small, which reduces mass, improving portability.

To this extent, today’s robot lovers are capable of even less than the 17th century automata of which Descartes speaks – these were capable of walking – although, on the plus side, it does seem, at least if one judges from video advertisements of these robots, that there might be some vibrating bits, with a heat function, like shoulder massage devices one can buy online.

To this extent, sex robots, such as we happen to have them, are robots in name only. They do not walk on their own and what motions they are programmed to have are limited as is their capacity for conversation.

Still robot lovers are available and you can buy them. For men, that is – and for women too should they want to buy a doll designed for men, as the manufacturers do not discriminate and are happy to ship them to anyone who can pay. All in production, on sale at increasing costs, up to $50,000, depending on cosmetic features.

“Sex robots are robots in name only: they do not walk on their own and what motions they are programmed to have are very limited.”

Elsewhere I pointed out that a lot of care is involved with maintaining these particular sex toys – which can seem a tad anti-climactic.

To date there is no Rickman function. None of the robot lovers is advertised as having the ability to walk or cast a cape across a puddle to protect one’s footwear or as having the capacity to carry one – even for short distances – up a hill, with or without rain, let alone as being capable of conversing about poetry or the meaning of life – or which dress looks best, among the things women like to talk about with lovers.

But this immobility means is why I began by saying that robot lovers are not particularly good at being robots as not being able to move is a major fail for a robot.

To this extent, it is also unclear how good they might be as lovers (I bracket customers with a necrophiliac fetish for making love with a non-moving, or minimally moving, partner that one must lug about, as one would have to lug about a corpse).

Aren’t we already Cyborgs? Cell-Phone at the ready?

But, say the enthusiasts, we are “already cyborgs,” quoting the theorists as they do.

We are already ‘transhuman’ and from this perspective, of course, we can do all the necessary moving ourselves, as we must to have robot lovers. And part of being transhuman-already, this is the point of Facebook and selfie-culture, social media technology gives the impression that we are more accomplished than we are and thus that we are more than (merely) human.

Apart from social media, don’t we all already do this anyway? For what do we have our hairdressers and our makeup or fancy dress for special occasions? This is the transhumanist imperative such that for job applications, we choose a certain photo but for an internet dating perhaps another. At the same time, one of the biggest complaints with online dating – the kind of dating that involves dating people you have not met, blinder than blind – concerns the misleading impressions that can result as some candidates game their chances by using a “good” photo of themselves from a few years back, which becomes a problem when years turn into decades. And some use photos that aren’t even their own.

Very ChatGPT: we want to look our best.

From Robots to Roombas

To date, updated now to 2024, we do not have walking, talking robot lovers. But we do have mobile domestic robots, and we have had them for a while. Consider the Roomba: a spherical self-propelled vacuum cleaner (clearly designed by a man, as rooms, hence the name Roomba, typically have square corners, where dust gathers and where the round Roomba cannot go).

Part of the point of insisting we are cyborgs is that we have an imaginary idea of imaginary robot lovers. This is how internet porn works (it’s imaginary, as Slavoj Žižek points out) and people (Lacan noticed this before Žižek) pay for this imaginary ideal.

In Japan, where Anime means that robot allure has a well-established, albeit still virtual, presence in the comic book imaginary realm, there are apps that permit Japanese business men to book holidays for themselves and their pretend (or ‘virtual’) girlfriends, including holiday meals and lodging.

Hollywood too has already been there with the film Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, as a Siri style voice.  And if Star Wars gave us a rolling trash can, not unlike the Roomba in motile capacity, R2-D2, and the golden C-3P0, Star Trek – at least the next generation and Star Trek Voyager – improved on Dr. Smith’s Lost in Space robot nemesis who merely rolled and waved his arms, with fully human-like figures like Data and Seven of Nine.

C3PO and R2D2, robots. Image by Giordon Tarpley via Flickr (CC-BY 2.0)

Thus it hardly seems that we need actual robot technology in order to have robot lovers if an app will do. After all, the beauty of a robot lover, real (if we can work out the tech bits) or imaginary, app style, is that robot lovers are not actual lovers. The reason we can suppose that we are dealing with perfection is because we are not dealing with another human being but only with our own imaginary desire(s).

In Ex Machina, as I mentioned this above, uncannily, the robot with a developed artificial intelligence, virtually human, seems to have its own all-too-real plans for itself, plans not including, shocker, the human male lover. And if this was not the subtext of Bladerunner, which after all did not vary the Pinocchio story, it was the point of The Matrix.

“But, grammar still matters, we do have killing machines: that’s the definition of a drone.”

We do not have beta models of machines capable of making love – these are, please pay attention to the grammar, not the same as machines one might be able to make love to. After all, one can make love, Portnoy did, to a raw piece of liver or to a statues as the ancient Greeks excelled at that. Indeed, they were so good at it they turned the practice into a religion. Still, grammar matters, and we do have exactly mobile, killing machines: that’s the definition of a drone.

Drones are a little too real. The theme is robot love, not robot death and the ideal of robot love corresponds to its one-sided malleability and its non-reciprocity, which is it is to send a text.

Will we get ideal robot lovers?

Texting has its own culture, and gives us companionship on demand, when we want it, just the way we like it. Alas, like Twitter trolls, there is a nearly inevitable sexism here. Hence what it means to be attractive to others includes body-optimization, even if you don’t ‘see’ anything but a text.

The ideal ‘friend’ in texting (like the ideal voice for a GPS program) is an ideal girl-friend: young, friendly, nothing complex, bubbly personality, no troublesome depths.

If the biotech enhancement does not (let us always say: as yet) exist beyond the cosmetic, all of our debates depend on our conviction that the technology for full-body replacement is right around the corner.

Will we get ideal robot lovers for ideal erotic encounters with options for opening jars, poetic conversations (and the Rickman, uphill carrying function?) Or will we simply find ourselves conforming to someone else’s ideal to please a date we have yet to meet, or else to maintain a human lover with other friends on the line?

Maybe there’s an autofill app, that would be ChatGPT, to keep our on-line lovers captivated until the mobile versions, android style robot lovers can be ordered on Amazon.

Reiner Schürmann’s and Heidegger’s ‘Unknown God’


MATTHEW KRUGER-ROSS
July 7, 2023 at 10:10 pm

Dear Friends & Members of the Heidegger Circle:

We are pleased to announce our upcoming summer seasonal gathering with the theme of Reiner Schürmann on Martin Heidegger.

The gathering will be on Wednesday, July 19 from 12:00-1:30PM EST on Zoom.

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/9052560171?pwd=cXQ3UWo2YkE2dnJsU1o5cHFWdnUyZz09

Our invited speakers are Babette Babich, Ph.D. at Fordham University, who will speak on “Schürmann, Heidegger, and the ‘Unknown God’” and Ian Alexander Moore, Ph.D. at Loyola Marymount, who will speak on “Heidegger, the First True Anarchist”. We will begin with brief presentations from our invited speakers before opening up for group discussion.

We hope to see you there!

Dionysus in Music: On the ‘God of Sex and Drums and Rock and Roll’

— In memoriam: Michael Lee Aday: 1947-2022 —

If one could think the Dionysian in music, what would that be like? What would that sound like? Better still: who would that be?

Nietzsche tells us in a book, starting with the very first section through to the end of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.

He tells us that the Dionysian — via Schiller, who wrote the words, but also via Schiller’s theory of ancient tragedy — is Beethoven. The Beethoven of the symphonies, not his string quartets and not the Beethoven of The Creatures of Prometheus. Yet the little vignette Nietzsche pays for out of pocket, commissioning Prometheus unbound, liberated from his manacles with his tormenting vulture shattered and broken on the rocks, can make us wonder.

In fact, Nietzsche quotes Goethe’s creative verses on Prometheus, the titan who steals the human-forming thunder of Genesis, not least because Homer gets there first, with Prometheus forming humanity out of clay.

Nietzsche starts as musically verbatim as possible, quoting The Ninth Symphony, the choral ode, all to go on to play with the spur, the thorn, the edge of dissonance.

Elsewhere, in The Hallelujah Effect, I revisit Adrienne Rich’s reflection on the protracted endurance of dissonance, The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message, like a rapist, so the cultural musicologists said. Her poem makes her point plain, had that been her purpose (it was not, not quite), his would be another name to add to a list of the cancelled.  There are already so many names on the list, all of them, arguably, with reason.

And the connection, the same, we find in Nietzsche’s extended praise for Archilochus, the self-avowed rapist of antiquity, difficult to comprehend no matter how much care scholars care to give it, not that they usually do. In the book they wrote, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Silk and Stern can make neither head nor tails of Archilochus: it is Nietzsche who has to be wrong. Classicists continue to make the same claim for their own reasons but still it got under their skins — ‘Nothing to do With Dionysus’ even when they were writing about neither Nietzsche nor Archilochus.

But the Dionysian in music: could it be Hallelujah? Hard to argue, no matter how it’s sung and no matter who sings it, k.d lang or Bob Dylan.

Here is the question of sex appeal and preference in music is less for the song sung than for the one who looks the part: this, Nietzsche tells us, is the Apollinian. In the case of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, that’s not Cohen himself but Jeff Buckley — after all these years.

Similarly there’s gotta be a looker for rock and roll.

In search of a modern Prometheus, a modern Beethoven, candidates of choice will be all about public taste, popular, that is: vulgar eros.  The Dionysus of choice is not via Nietzsche’s Dionysus book, even if these days, waiting for an update, we are ready for relevance. We still need a text, a record or an album cover, a video frozen in time.

Riders on the Storm. Cue the Doors, they covered Dionysus.

Jim Morrison looks the part. College educated, smart as fuck: and he had the decency, not too, too unlike Mozart, to die young.

Nietzsche scholars along with students of 19th Century Music in Comp Lit, cast their vote before they read anything at all about the Dionysian, sparing them the Archilochus problem. Archilochus, the name is already a syllabic choker: who was he?  Didn’t he talk too much about himself, lyric poet, I poet, and was he not, on his own account, a literal rapist, ‘howling from the climacteric,’ as Rich wrote of Beethoven? No metaphors for Archilochus, so he insists, writing his lyric to tell us, with rhythm too, so we believe it? One cannot quote Archilochus without shuddering, awful man, nasty man, vile, technically impotent as he smoothly informs us, praecox, or it would have been worse. Like the current narrative about vaccine injuries: how it could be worse is unclear. Archilochus tells us that because of his song, three at one blow, the daughters along with their father, Lycambes, hung themselves rather than bear the shame of his word.

As for me, I still hold a torch for Morrison. Beauty’s beauty.

Morrison is not the god of sex and drugs, didn’t Steinman write drums? that’s rhythm, and rock and roll? It wasn’t Sid Vicious, nomen est omen, or various Ramones, but it was, odd and dissonant, Meat Loaf, of all things, and he didn’t write the songs. 

Jim Steinman (1947-2021), who died last April and never stopped being an Amherst undergrad, wrote the songs. That’s the point when it comes to Dionysus. The lyric is no personal confession, you learn nothing about the man when you hear the song sung: it’s a drama the singer inhabits, just as Nietzsche tells us that in any Greek tragedy there is only one actor on stage, however many actors are on stage, including the chorus, everyone, everybody, even the audience.

Dionysus.

Meat Loaf is as unlikely as Archilochus, basically oafish, offensive and harmless and harmful, lustful and sweaty and messy, way messy. Uncanny vocal register, between male and female.

Like the god of wine.

Meat Loaf, a jock from Dallas, Texas who played football in high school and college, would have brushed that off. Should have been, so he tells us: Roger Daltrey, who, along with the young Brian May, looked the part.  Taller too.

And at the same time, Meat Loaf easily, off-hand, as it goes without saying, claimed the crown for himself: sex-god.

One should think about that because the song sung, the way he sang it, made Steinman’s song work — and otherwise not — I would do anything for love,* resurrecting their top selling album in a line: I’d run right into hell and back.

*Official video

Now Steinman wrote opera — Wagner never dies — and said so. And part of what Steinman wrote and Meat Loaf sang is myth, in this case, the myth of Orpheus.

There is a power in doubling metonymy: Orpheus, the original myth of the myth, who did and did not — and this is the way of all love songs — retrieve his beloved from hell. After finding the way to Eurydice, Gluck also tells us this in his opera, and almost bringing her back, before Orpheus yielded to the one ‘no’ he needed to remember, to keep as sacred vow, a pact he would not break, that’s a fact, until he broke it: I won’t do that, as he had assured himself and Hades, part of his pitch. 

But you never don’t do the thing, the one thing, you must not do. Afterwards, if you don’t die, you live a broken life as Orpheus was thereafter broken until the Thracian women found him and gave his body in pieces — the original corps morcelé, after the Dionysian original, baby Zagreus — to the river. Milton catches that, as When, by the rout that made the hideous roar, / His gory visage down the stream was sent, / Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore…

I Would Do Anything for Love includes the mysticism of love, caught between the parallel reference to difficulties in life, some days it don’t come easy, and the frustrations of eros, some days it don’t come hard, seemingly a simple variation into clever, moving inside the genius of everyday words, easy turned to hard, and then the erotic point in any case, now a love paean because that’s the song it is: some days it don’t come at all / and these are the days that never end. The song swings in different versions between neutral reference to life and time and personification, so that an unnamed woman might, from night to night, be breathing fire or carved in ice.

But how does one get inside a lyric that sings tantra to the world: no mysticism, just earnest admission, an admission that happens to be the height of love, of eros, mystic union, paradise by any light?

This is not about prowess, this is admitting the impossible to replicate wonder of connection, love, that most love songs, most memories simply pass over: But — and one needs the conjoined connector for this — I’ll never do it better than I do it with you, there is a pause, a breath, so long, so long. In various videos singing this, sometimes, Meat Loaf’s eyes are closed, but the audio alone makes it clear.

When the operatic vision turns, as opera must, to a duet, there is the small town vision of the woman’s voice, like Archilochus’ lyric, opera is misogyny or it is nothing, and she asks, in the touchingly simple faith of women, the Gretchens as Nietzsche teased, if her suitor can or cannot bring this or that to a proposed tryst, Can you get me out of this godforsaken town, turns into pure relief, is that all you want: Oh I can do that. As the song goes, it turns out that women already know the tune, cannier in such exchanges than they seem, asking the world and already guessing, Cassandra like, the apocalypse: we all fall down and we all turn to dust. The lyrics are malleable, does she sing we’ll all fall? ashes, ashes, we all fall down: dust to dust?

We will.

Meat Loaf died in Nashville on the 20th of January 2022. The year matters because of the state of the world given over to the terror of the very idea of a possible death from just one thing, one virus, as if that were or could ever be the only way to die. Thus, as he died he was mocked for having the misfortune to die at all, heaven forbid, bless his soul, after speaking out on the wrong side of mandates and restrictions. Of the many things he happened to have died from, he was rebuked for testing positive for — because that’s all it takes — before ‘immediately,’ dying from Covid.

In truth at 74, the aging rock star, old man as he was, was some fraction of two years older than the average age to which an average man might live, these days. Certainly, to think as actuaries do: he was twenty years older than his parents had been when they died.

Like an elderly lady who cannot stop dying her hair jet, jet black — or wearing high heels — ‘underlying conditions’ are a life-time coming. Meat Loaf who eagerly told every interviewer who, just as visibly, did not care to listen, had cancer after cancer, crippling back troubles (someone should encourage people to steer clear of the surgery that does nothing for them, crippling the victims and the doctors who recommend it should quit, but there’s money in it and sick people can’t complain). His was a chronicled decline. In 2000, Meat Loaf’s life story was a made-for-TV documentary, with someone else playing the part, singing his songs for copyright reasons but not less because he was too old to play himself, already, twenty-two years ago.

Rock stars, sex-gods, do not have a long half-life.

For many years, this man could not walk unassisted, suffered illnesses of various kinds, stress of various kinds, two or three strokes, and the other things that come with getting older.  Age is a thief and, when it is not sudden, death is cut by cut: loss after loss after loss, until at the very end, sick with desire, as Yeats teaches, a tattered coat upon a stick, as Shakespeare taught him to say, sans everything.

To settle these many depredations as injuries bring one to one’s final downward journey, to reduce all that to just one thing is prevarication.  And this new disease, Covid? As was made perfectly clear from the beginning of the pandemic and the new world order: any illness, any possible way that one might die, to remember another of Cohen’s songs, who by fire, who by water, or, indeed as this would hold for sex-god rock stars, who in these realms of love, any and all of these ways can be ascribed to Covid, as for two years now, they do do that.

This old man, who had been old to himself — and everyone else: it is never a secret — since his fifties, dying on camera as stars do, on social media, for the past few years, who pulled himself together to give interviews to interviewers looking for a headline and not for the details he gave them as old people will, just to say this again,  tell you details until you turn away, a man who kept trying, and who would in death, on the day itself, be mocked by the cruelty of the crowd he lived for, denounced now not for his looks, as part of what age steals is that: he lost the fat, only to be condemned on the same social platforms that drove the pandemic in the same way from the start.

As for the passing of Marvin Lee Aday, as he was born, Michael as he preferred, and Meat Loaf? That was Archilochus, lyric poet, soldier for hire, as Nietzsche tells us his fate could only be tragic: warlike votary of the muses, who was hunted savagely throughout life.

As Meat Loaf lived, he died: transparent while insisting on his own depth, taking insult bitterly and abandoned to angers, mildly savage, curiously gentle, bemused by theatre and seeking his public to the end.

Retrieving Agamben’s Questions

There is tremendous disquiet all around — enough for a lifetime and a half, lived and unlived.  But in this time of crisis, scholars otherwise keen to pick through Heidegger’s Nazi enabling complicity, attuned to what he said or wrote — or failed to say or failed to write — find themselves repeating currently standard government edicts.

We declare that we need more restrictions on personal freedom, not liberty. Longer isolation, not community. In these times of what can only be described as mass hysteria, Giorgio Agamben undertook to public demurral.  

Here I take my point of departure from his original essay posted in Italian, on the 26th of February 2020, L’invenzione di un’epidemia, translated into French, German, etc, and then available to be read in English translation online with a number of other posts by other scholars arraigned beneath an excerpt on the plague from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in an issue/post of The European Journal of Psychoanalysis under the title of “The Invention of an Epidemic.” Agamben’s subsequent clarifying reflections, Chiarimenti, published on March 17 (in English as “Clarifications”) detail responses to criticism of his comments on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Agamben had unpacked (‘The Invention of an Epidemic’) and had then unpacked his unpacking (‘Clarifications’), a careful hermeneut, a thinker of the first order, using official data, official reports, official argumentation a question: given the projected severity of the epidemic, were the measures proposed justified?  Agamben’s reflections, as he clarified them in his Chiarimenti, observed:

“The dead — our dead — do not have a right to a funeral and it is not clear what will happen to the bodies of our loved ones. Our neighbor has been cancelled and it is curious that churches remain silent on the subject. What do human relationships become in a country that habituates itself to live in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society that has no value other than survival?”

Giorgio Agamben

Things only got worse: the predictions, the responses, the hysteria.

Articles swiftly appeared by scholars emboldened to take him down. The technical term for the practice is ‘scientific mobbing.’ It can be helpful to think about the concept of “academic mobbing,” as explored in discussion by Noah Carl published online in The Economist’s Open Future initiative.

For a discussion of mobbing from the perspective of continental philosophy of science, see my preprint: “Whose Art, Whose Beauty.”

In Agamben’s case, the mobbing was served up as Agamben wrote contra the standard line: challenging the official position. Those who attacked him rarely cared to note that Agamben had only pointed to inconsistencies in the measures consequent to the official position. 

No small part of the problem is the idealization of an ideal science imagined as the direct substitute for the word of God. One may not raise a question as epidemiologist, virologist, biochemist, medical doctor, public health expert; one may only repeat the official story. And if one mentions air pollution, including chem trails and their particulate wake, much less bioweapons, certainly not 5G, and so on, one is subject to the same assault, more summary to be sure.

I shared a series of links on Facebook to illustrate some of the challenges of etiology in general and virus infection in particular, including public health, environmental preconditions for aerial/aerosol transmission, masks, etc. Most recently Facebook flagged an April 16, 2020 YouTube announcement by the Nobel prize winning scientist, Luc Montagnier (who discovered the HIV virus) and who pointed out, not solely citing his own work but the work of others as well, that the new “coronavirus SARS-CoV-2” virus had the unmistakable markers of laboratory production not natural mutation, as ‘fact’ checked, verified as ‘false’ news.

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Perhaps one may someday argue that in Agamben’s case the range of attacks worked to ‘elevate the tone,’ as Derrida might have intimated, three hours into a lecture, just where such lectures — any lectures at all, the very idea of public space as such, the concept of being together with others — are quickly acquiring the romantic status of the ‘olden days’ in memory and subject today, even if mentioned, to sanction whether by moralizing passersby, neighbors, or police, often with grievous consequences, in ‘real life.’

In any case, on Easter Monday, the 13th of April, Agamben posted in the same locus, Quodlibet, his Domanda.  Again translated by Adam Kotsko, this was posted two days later as Giorgio Agamben: A Question.

Social media works by posting and reposting — ‘Facebook Poker’ as I speak of this in The Hallelujah Effect  —  and among others, when I shared Agamben’s posts on Facebook I was horrified by the angry response of so-named (this is a Facebook rubric) “friends.” Still, I shared other things: videos by virologists, epidemiologists, general medical practioners, and made observations of my own on other topics, gingerly.

Perturbed by the force of critical reaction, I nonetheless again posted Agamben’s Easter Monday post, unpacking it for anyone who might care to follow the thread just because (the carceral term is significant) “lockdown” gives us all the time in the world to read and not less because “lockdown” robs us of focus at the same time.

I started by noting the most difficult part, the part one can read first of all as if it might have been the point of it all: the closing paragraph:

“I know that someone will hasten to respond that we are dealing with a condition that is limited in time, after which everything will return to how it was. It is truly strange that we could repeat this other than in bad faith, since the same authorities that proclaimed the emergency never stop reminding us that when the emergency has been overcome, we will have to continue to observe the same directives and that “social distancing,” as it has been called with a significant euphemism, will be society’s new organizing principle. And, in every case, what we have accepted submitting to, in good or bad faith, cannot be cancelled.”

Giorgio Agamben

To understand this as terminus a quo requires a return to the point of departure.

Thus we can repeat Agamben’s questions, there are three, one by one.  The first is crucial:

“1. The first point, perhaps the most serious, concerns the bodies of dead persons. How could we have accepted, solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify, that persons who are dear to us and human beings in general should not only die alone, but — something that had never happened before in history, from Antigone to today — that their cadavers should be burned without a funeral [che i loro cadaveri fossero bruciati senza un funerale]?”

Giorgio Agamben

Here the issue although directed to the prohibition against visiting the sick and the dying, was critical and classic, concerning the bodies of dead persons.  What do we owe the dead? 

Throughout, Agamben’s point is that we are not living under fascism: despite the language of ‘burning’ this is no Holocaust nor are we living under a Nazi regime, and, although much of the language encountered on social media is that of war, we are not at war. Much rather, as Agamben writes in his “Clarifications,” “We live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called ‘reasons of security’ and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.” To this extent it is unsurprising  

“that for the virus one speaks of war. The emergency measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. But a war with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most absurd of wars. It is, in reality, a civil war. The enemy is not outside, it is within us.”

Giorgio Agamben

The war motif recurs in “Question,” outlined as part of the second question Agamben lists:

“We then accepted without too many problems, solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify, limiting, to an extent that had never happened before in the history of the country, not even during the Second World War (the curfew during the war was limited to certain hours), our freedom of movement. We consequently accepted, solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify, de facto suspending our relationships of friendship and love, because our proximity had become a possible source of contagion.”

Giorgio Agamben

Note the repetition: Agamben writes with the care of a poet, repeating, for a total of three times, the register of contingent chance, of possibility and the precision of imprecision despite the absence of certainty: “solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify [emphasis added].” 

The mantra is key.

What is suspended on the basis of this “risk” that is “not possible” to assess with certainty (the failures of past projections, as the UK journalist Rob Lyons has reported, show the limitations of disease forecasting), is friendship and love, nearness, proximity, excluded utterly to avoid contagion.  Freedom of movement is relinquished, affection foresworn and thus, and immediately, we harden ourselves to our loneliness and to that of others.

The third point took Agamben to recall a crucial issue concerning what is at stake in the current treatment of Covid-19 victims, which involves a separation from anything but bare life: most of those who are placed on those ventilators in such high demand, at such high prices, as standard mainstream medical media will inform us, die very much owing to iatrogenic injury: ventilators destroy lung function and even patients who recover suffer lasting lung damage as a result, that is, should they survive the violence of the ventilator intervention. 

Thus Ivan Illich wrote of ‘Guarding the Eye in the Age of the Show’ in part against the corruption of our sensibilities via propaganda — Illich did not call Jacques Ellul ‘Master Jacques’ for nothing — but also in terms of “ethical iconology,” contra the sham of life offered by modern medicine which Illich described in his Medical Nemesis, as the ‘expropriation’ of health and life and death (see for discussion in the context of technologized medicine here, video here), described by Agamben as the “greatest of abstractions” in a seemingly surreal but precise expression:

“I know very well that this abstraction was actualized in modern science through apparatuses of reanimation, which can maintain a body in a state of pure vegetative life. But if this condition is extended beyond the spatial and temporal confines that are proper to it, as we are today seeking to do, and it becomes a sort of principle of social behavior, we fall into contradictions from which there is no way out.”

Giorgio Agambem

After these three points, Agamben goes on to indict both the church and the law, fit for a political theology, and not less, so I have argued, via the philosophy of science, just in order to raise the question of science as a question quite as Nietzsche says and not less as Heidegger says, echoing Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal, when Heidegger, speaking of modern science and modern technology, reminds us that

“Science is the new religion.”

Martin Heidegger
(See further, my discussion here, p. 220).

Agamben writes

“…The Church above all, which, in making itself the handmaid of science, which has now become the true religion of our time, has radically repudiated its most essential principles. The Church, under a Pope who calls himself Francis, has forgotten that Francis embraced lepers. It has forgotten that one of the works of mercy is that of visiting the sick. It has forgotten that the martyrs teach that we must be prepared to sacrifice our life rather than our faith and that renouncing our neighbor means renouncing faith.”

Giorgio Agamben

On Facebook, when I posted this, Shannon Thomas objected, pointing out that: “Francis of Assisi embraced lepers knowing he was not a carrier — he put his own life at risk. Pope Francis asks we keep distance knowing we may be carriers ourselves, and that embracing puts the one embraced in danger.”  The observation is a fair one; the problem with this risk-aversive reflection is not only that it misses the point Agamben had sought to make with respect to intimacy and love but  that it presupposes the dogma of the carrier, an invisible dogma as the carrier in question is held to contaminate asymptomatically.

The possibilities of suspicion are infinite.

As I argue in “Calling Science Pseudoscience,” at issue is the question of disease and the question of science as such where I engage a range of thinkers and scientists, including Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Duesberg, Richard Lewontin, Martin Heidegger, and Bruno Latour (and Alexander Nehamas). Cf., as a video What is a Disease?

The current agent of contagion is an invisible enemy, and because invisible, because statistics as reported along with testing and confirmation are and will be matters of state decree, a permanent threat, grounds for the very permanent state of exception that had exercised Agamben’s worry.

This is theory, not fact and ruling that uncertain science is certain enough to justify changing the law of every land does not make the science any more scientific if it also does not abrogate the law.

This is Agamben’s worry in his recent post:

“in this case, every limit has been surpassed, and one has the impression that the words of the prime minister and of the head of civil defense, as was said of those of the Führer, immediately have the force of law. And we do not see how, going beyond the temporal limits of validity of the emergency decrees, the limitations of freedom could, as is foretold, be maintained. With what juridical apparatuses? With a permanent state of exception?”

Giorgio Agamben

We should worry. But we are, as noted at the outset, agreed in advance, complicit in advance. And as Simone de Beauvoir observed, to the ongoing irritation of feminists of every generation and wave, we are often very well-pleased with ‘the deal,’ party to ‘the deal,’ complicit in ‘the deal,’ this complicity ensures compliance.

Camus’s The Plague is on everyone’s lips, but relevant as well is Camus’ short essay on The Myth of Sisyphus. Key to Camus’ existentialist absurdism is a certain preoccupation with death, and we remember that the theme is omnipresent for the ancient Greeks who had, as many cultures do, a death cult.

We are named for death, thanatoi, mortals. For the Hellenes, our being bound to die as we are, our nature as creatures of a day is key to everything, learning how to live is learning how to die and, of course, of course, we typically learn neither.  This failure is anticipated by those who conceived it: like other ancient cultures, the ancient Greeks espoused a recycling theory of the soul. We’ll get another chance they supposed, less ideally to be sure, reborn as swine or worse yet as an insect, Kafka would have been delighted, and again work our way up to finally (maybe) getting the point, after some multiple thousand-year cycle of birth and rebirth.

Only the Judaeo-Christian tradition models its souls on non-recyclable, one-off, one-way bottles. That the last is the tradition of modern science is no accident.

To return to Sisyphus, Camus tells us that he had a way with death, and once — shades of Severus Snape’s opening word-promise to teach his students “to put a stopper in death” — managed to put the god of death in chains (I illustrate this in a recent video lecture on Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus) a catastrophe such that Mars/Ares, god of war, had to be dispatched, so Camus tells us, to appease the god of the underworld, Pluto/Hades, understandably aggrieved to find his kingdom empty.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Cavalier as he was toward death, the mortal Sisyphus, as he lay dying, instructed his wife to dispense with the rites of the dead and to cast his body into the public square.  Which end of life directive she duly followed. When, upon thus finding himself in the underworld, absent the rites due the dead, Camus reports that Sisyphus was “annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love.” And good persuader as Sisyphus was, he was able to talk the god of the Underworld into allowing him to return to the Overworld, the world above, the world of the living, ostensibly to reprimand his wife (Pluto/Hades who had his own problems with his own wife was predictably receptive to such an incentive). But immediately, once Sisyphus was returned to the land of the living he lost any thought of revenge and simply lived, refusing, as long as ever he could, to return.

Eventually Mercury/Hermes, the collector of souls, would be sent to drag Sisyphus back down to the Underworld, where his “rock was waiting for him.” 

If we pay attention to the freedom, the simple liberty of movement, taken from us, we begin to understand the reason the last line of The Myth of Sisyphus urges: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” 

Indeed, of all the souls of the dead, dwelling on the plains of asphodel in the underworld, only Sisyphus is allowed to climb mountains: his rock being a major burden — Camus calls him “the proletarian of the gods” — but also the reason he is ‘compelled’ to ascend again and again from the underworld toward the world above, the ‘overworld,’ the world of the living, of which he was so fond.

To repeat Agamben’s most important because uncanny reflection on what Nietzsche called “first and last things,” again:

“[h]ow could we have accepted, solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify, that persons who are dear to us and human beings in general should not only die alone, but — something that had never happened before in history, from Antigone to today — that their cadavers should be burned without a funeral?”

Giorgio Agamben

Our humanity begins, so certain paleoanthropologists tell us, with burial rites: we are human not because we are wise, but because, and we share this with our hominid relative, h. neanderthalensis, we bury our dead, with care, what Heidegger named ‘Fürsorge,’ that is, with the kind of ritual of which, paleontologists tell us, traces remain over millennia. 

Antigone tells us that she is bound to the law [νόμῳ is the word she uses], so she tells Creon, brother of her mother, father of her betrothed, the same Creon who needs her to secure his own claim to lawful rule.  The brothers who slew one another fought so bitterly that, Sophocles says, they were unrecognizable in death and so, because “it was not possible to specify” which brother had been loyal to Thebes and which sought to take it by force, a body was chosen to be singled out as Polyneices [Πολυνείκης, famously noted etymologically as meaning ‘manifold strife,’ Empedocles uses the same term for a cosmic cycle of enmity] in order that the cadaver be denied the funeral rites every mortal required for passage to the afterlife. To save her brother from an eternity unmourned, Antigone defied the edict of Creon’s law, at the cost of her life.  Love compelled Haemon, Creon’s son to defy his ban, and he, after failing his lunge against his father, turned his own sword on himself.

Love-Death.  

Those who argue that the two, Creon and Antigone are both right, both following the law as they see it, each by their own lights, are mistaken, although I have found myself in class repeating this conventional interpretation of Sophocles. For everyone knows that Creon follows the law of opportunism: this is what he says in vulgar precision to his son, as he tells him he must forsake Antigone, even as Creon needs to enforce his decree to ensure his regency as law.  Antigone follows not only a higher command but the essential command. 

Thanatoi as we are, children of a day, mortals, we need those who will mourn us and still more urgently we need to do the same in our turn.

There are those who claim, justifiably so, that the best poem in the English language is a poem of mourning. This is John Milton’s Lycidas.  

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We must always build the lofty rhyme, we need poetry and art, as we also need, so Sophocles tells us, as Aeschylus tells us in yet more dreadful fashion, rituals for the dead.

What we allow to be done in our names, what we are doing, what we have already allowed to be done, is wrong.

18 April 2020, Winchester, Hampshire, UK