Let Us Eat Cake!
On winning, friendship and the mad ones
I wondered as I decided on a topic to write about this week if this post might seem rather frivolous. Thankfully I often have this bell hooks quote in my head when I write and it allows me to feel free, "No black woman writer in this culture can write 'too much.' Indeed, no woman writer can write 'too much' … No woman has ever written enough". And I've wanted to write about friendship for a while on this platform. I often write about it on social media, but it's cloaked in form. An Instagram post or tweet hides a lot of meaning. It’s at once permanent and ephemeral and easy to ignore.
If you've read my newsletter before, you'll know I've written a lot about relationships. Relationships turned toxic, sometimes. Important relationships, the ones that shape us. We've all had them. Audre Lorde certainly did.
“I had known the pain, and survived it. It only remained for me to give it voice, to share it for use, that the pain not be wasted.”
–Audre Lorde
I recently came across the work of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who was prolific in the 1950s. In his book 'The Two Regimes of Madness’, he wrote about his friend and fellow philosopher, Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst, activist and writer.
'It was not long after 1968 in France. We didn't know each other but a mutual friend wanted us to meet. And yet, on the surface, we didn't seem to have much in common. Felix has always possessed multiple dimensions: he participates in many different activities, both Psychiatric and political; he does a lot of group work. He is in an "intersection" of groups, like a star. Or perhaps I should compare him to the sea: he always seerns to be in motion, sparkling with light. He can junp from one activity to another. He doesn't sleep much, hc travels, he never stops. He never ceases.He has extraordinary speeds. I am more like a hill: I don't move much, I can’t manage two projects at once, I obsess over my ideas, and the few movements I do have are internal. I like to write alone, and I don't like to talk much, except during my seminars, when talking serves another purpose. Together, Felix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.'
A beautiful tribute to his friend and what sounds like a wholly intoxicating relationship. He SAW him and in my mind by memorialising their friendship in writing Deleuze was honouring him. The honour of really thinking about him, analysing him with an eye to more understanding of them BOTH as people. He also spoke about Focault. In a 1988 lecture he said,
'Foucault was someone who was very mysterious for me. Perhaps we met each other too late in life. Foucault, was a great regret for me, he was the rare case of a man who entered a room, and it changed, it changed the atmosphere. Foucault is not simply a person… Besides, none of us is simply a person. It was really as if he were a special gust of air, and things changed…It really was atmospheric, there was a kind of an emanation, there was a Foucault emanation like someone who has a glow.'
I have two modes when it come to writing about other people. Sometimes if I write about a person, what can follow or even precurse is I stop seeing them as a person. In fact I told Owen Jones, who has appeared in many of my articles over the years, even in the Telegraph, that I don’t see him as a person. He is an example. A useful one.
I could have been nicer about it but really that conversation had gone on far too long. I did follow up with this though: