About Raph Shirley

I have been creating strange material for the internet for over twenty years. A kind of failed artist yet I refuse to stop.

The gesamtkomodiewerke stations

A schizo-erotic reading.

In The Schreber Case (1911) Freud makes this astonishing claim that there is a ‘genetic’ link between Judge Daniel Schreber’s desire to be a woman penetrated by a man and his schizophrenic delusions of being Christ crucified. If there is such a perverse sexual content to the crucifixion then let us analyse it from the perspective of radical atheist theology. What psychological functions might it serve? How is this collective dream structured? In this version of the stations of the cross I will pontificate on the meaning of each stage leading up to Easter Sunday. We begin with the wrongful accusation. From Kafka to Lynch the idea of being wrongfully accused is a central element of anxiety. The concept of anxiety will therefore be central to my reading.

“Can Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that even he can’t eat it?” – Homer Simpson.

I can do that of course so surely Jesus can. The crucifixion is the key element of Christian contradiction. The paradox is the question of whether power entails the power to be powerless. This is the classic atheist reading. That we needed a story to signify the death of God and the transition to a post religious world. Engels paraphrases Hegel in the Anti-Dühring (1877) and says that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Christ taking up the cross can then be read as taking on the inevitability of death and nothingness. The walk to the crucifixion will be a carnival and a pandemonium. It is not a suicide but the wilful recognition of the necessary conditions of life. A materialist account of accepting limits freely.

A pratfall! Pure humiliation and there will be more! It is a supreme arrogance to look at our own failures and humiliations and call them divine. Is that the basic story of the crucifixion? By humiliating God we exalt ourselves. We are capable of killing Christ! Nietzsche calls us the ‘bungled and the botched’. We are an animal gone wrong. An unplanned pregnancy caused by a broken condom. The evolution of consciousness was a catastrophic error on the part of the world. I do think that we are such a disfigured animal that we would exactly misrecognise a pure soul and kill it through arrogant misunderstanding. Mentally disfigured by language. A positive reading of this is that being fucked up is what constitutes the subject and that that is what is divine in us and inaccessible to animals. They cannot be fucked up through pure self reflection. They cannot go mad. We can simultaneously brag and brag humility with Christianity. Thomas Jefferson said that pride was the hardest sin to overcome because if he considered himself without pride then he would take pride in not having pride. But if we are the people that kicked a man when he was down are we then ashamed? Can we have no pride and no shame simultaneously? To err is human. To fail is divine.

The standard atheist account of the nativity might be that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier or had a teenage love affair. Joseph then agreed to marry her and not have sex until after the birth to provide legitimacy. Joseph as cuckold always struck me as an interesting character and his absence from the defining event of Western culture could be because uncertainty over our paternity is a constitutive element of the self. This to me is implied in the superstition free Gospel in Brief (1892) synopsis written by Tolstoy. The vulgar Freudian reading of the virgin birth fantasy is that it is traumatic to discover that your mother had sex with your father. This appears as a primal betrayal. This is actually a reading of all infidelity that it is a regression to the infantile separation anxiety. Women can orgasm during childbirth as a direct result of the terrible pain. This sets up a truly crass reading of the virgin birth fantasy that Christ gave Mary her first orgasm and he therefore is free from the existential guilt of jealousy of the father. Might this be the most important aspect of the Christian fantasy. This is a neatly dialectical referent to the crucifixion as a depiction of being anally penetrated that we see in the Little Hans case (1909). This fits with the stations as a model of a life and the cuckold fantasy as concerned with the primal scene. In the contemporary world around two percent of children are incorrect regarding their father. One can only imagine greater ambiguities in the time of Christ due to the lack of the capitalist disciplinary apparatus. Meeting the mother is both to be seen humiliated by your creator and to face the anxiety of unknown paternity. The steady march to death intensifies.

This moment is comical to me. Imagine seeing the pathetic site of a political prisoner carrying his own execution device. Feeling a moment of pity Simon tries to help him and all he can think to do is help him carry the weapon itself. There is a dramatic irony to the comedy and the total failure of all except Christ to understand the significance of the injustice. We the audience are aware of the end of the story and so see how Simon is oblivious. The scene puts the viewer in a God like position because we know the end and know how Simon will later learn the significance of his act.

“Critique is the condition for a possibility” – Chris Cutrone’s summary of the Kantian project of critique.

“All critique starts with the critique of religion” – Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx (1843).

We should not compare Christianity to modern science but to modern culture. It is not in conflict with contemporary evolutionary biology but with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Should ideology critique move on from the crucifixion then and concentrate on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)? My argument is that the two must come together. The Crucifixion has not been conclusively critiqued such that the possibility to fully bury it and construct a new culture exists. Christianity retains the possibility for an immanent critique. The carnivalesque comedy of the procession to the cross is a further aspect of the total condensation of the plot. The condensation of the comic and the tragic. It continues to yield to critique. Each new set of economic and cultural conditions has a new reading. It is the thoughts of the ages condensed into a short walk. A metaphor for life and death.

The widow gets sentimental! Like Simon of Cyrene helping to carry the cross wiping his face is a pathetic act of help. Farcical. The man is about to be killed. A slight wiping of sweat and blood is a minor aid. Nevertheless, it contains a kernel of grace to go against the baying crowds. That some felt sympathy may even heighten the guilt at taking part in the killing. There are no excuses. In the heat of anxious terror grace is still possible. Surely the widow knows a little sadness. The festival of depravity is amusing but you might still have a momentary lapse into sentimentality.

Repetition is a key aspect of the humorous. They say if you see one secretary crying it is tragic but if you see a second it is funny. Falling down is the perfect example of the superiority theory of the comic. It adds to the carnival nature of the stations. We can imagine the bulk of the public drinking and laughing and enjoying the spectacle. To be laughed it is also a central component of humiliation. Don’t we imagine that we are being laughed at in our lowest moments? In each moment we can identify with either the crowd or the victim. The schizophrenic intensity is building.

Engels called woman the original proletarian. Within the patriarchal marriage the man was the bourgeoisie and the woman the working class. Here we therefore see the basic inversion at work in Christianity of honouring the powerless. This is Nietzsche’s central critique of Christianity in its undermining of power being driven by ressentiment. The pathetic are heralded and the strong are brought down. The lambs shall eat the meat of eagles. That is what makes the religion interesting as a technology for population control. It symbolically resolves the resentment of the weak through its honouring of them. This is most perfectly achieved in the Magnificat. A poor woman and nobody is chosen as the spring of all power. The failed, the ill, and the insane can call the world upside down while the powerful can claim modesty and maintain position. But arguably there is a radical element at play. For that reason I see Christianity as a central ideological battleground. The previous move of atheism to retreat off the territory may have been a tactical error. What did Jesus talk to the women about? Abortion access, miscarriages, and the menopause? Pay differences, misogyny, and maternity leave? In all seriousness, yes!

In the prodromal stages of schizophrenia one warning sign is an intense interest in the occult or religious ideas. Adorno calls an the occult a regression of consciousness. A regression is a return to an earlier stage. To a more fundamental stage. We are all constructed on these irrational foundations. The third fall as a high point in humiliation is for me therefore the apex of the schizophrenic disorientation. In Sabina Spielrein’s account of a case of schizophrenia a woman’s distress at her husband raping her and his sex with other women is unified with her misery at her miscarriage into an incoherent totality of religious fervour and aesthetic theory. The stations of the cross structure the descent into insanity. Sexual humiliation and its religious opposites clash in a disturbed mind which is the universal foundation of sanity. The passage of the cross in reversed time is a return journey to the birth of consciousness.

If the first repetition is comic what is the second? This to me is an aggressive assault on the audience. Daring us to laugh at a pathetic man brought down with our fingers pointed. Still laughing? The carnage is ramping up. The schizophrenic breakdown is peaking. Can the mind survive this radical primal humiliation tracing back to the earliest moments of infantile indignation? The mind is growing incoherent.

The pinnacle of the humiliation. Here we see raw human flesh. I would probably have taken part in the mocking and the cruelty. Is there a sexual sadism? Yes. I have heard it said that there is always a libidinal element to ritual violence and surely here we see the height of human baseness. Do we take a sadistic pleasure and identify with his tormenters? That might be the real genius of the story. We can enjoy his suffering from the perspective of our violence and we can enjoy the innocence of his wrongful accusation from a masochistic position. Christianity puts us in a position of power over God. As Hinduism claims to venerate the cow but then leads a cow around in a ceremony and dresses it up as if to mock it it is an inversion of modesty. We call ourselves Gods with religion. We claim our language lifts us above the animals and nature and we have both the power and the cruelty to humiliate even the highest. We can bring all down to the level of shit!

To enjoy Christianity you need a taste for blood! You must be able to imagine weilding the hammer. And to enjoy it! You must stare at the phallic symbol of a nail in flesh directly. You must show no mercy!

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” – Pascal.

I can think of worse physical torture. It is not the most painful thing I can imagine. Burning by fire always strikes me as the most frightening violence. Instead it is almost banal in its humiliation. The agony that will follow was surely terrifying but still no one present knows what is to come. Jesus himself is not even aware that there will be no help from any God. The true weight of an atheist world is dawning on him. There is no hope. The nightmare is here. This is what makes Christianity the anti-religion par excellence. A warning against the religious fervour which helped us take part in the religious festival of the crucifixion.

It is typical to mask the genitals. Perhaps for prudeness or perhaps to create a radical ambiguity over the sex of the beast!

“Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.” Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille (1987)

For the mother to watch the death of the son is the ultimate incest. They say that you cannot look directly at the sun or death. The atheist reading of the crucifixion concerns the impossibility of full atheism. Only a God could be fully atheist because only a God could look straight into the pit of death. Christ’s discovery of atheism on the cross was his genius. A weaker mind would have fallen into religious certainty or sentimental platitudes. Christ faced his own abandonment and the meaningless of his life. He realised that the prophecies of a new prophet to end all prophets were ironic and all he was was a pathetic political apostate being executed by the state to be forgotten. Therein lies the irony of the whole project of atheist Christianity. The real material Christ cannot have seen the full nothingness of existence but he discovered the ideal. Like an asymptote of how much truth a human mind could conceivably take before schizophrenic disintegration. In a previous Easter I drew the seven words on the cross. If the stations are a metaphor for a life then the seven words are the stages of death. If the crucifixion is the highest image of death then so to it is the height of eroticism. The orgasm ideal.

The last seven words on the cross:

1. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
2. Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
3. Woman, behold thy son! and Behold thy mother!
4. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
5. I thirst.
6. It is finished.
7. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.

“How shall we comfort ourselves we murderers of all murderers” – Nietzsche, from The Gay Science (1882) God is Dead section.

Nietzsche was of course referring to modern science, the lack of need for religion in an industrial economy, and the disenchantment of the world later theorised by Max Weber. We can also read the Crucifixion as our murdering of God and creating the atheist world view. We the Christ killers! We shall reign over the Earth for two thousand years!

We will inevitably end with a consideration of the Hegelian concept of sublation, aufhebung, or perhaps colloquially overcoming. There will be no image of the resurrection which is a purely mental sublation event. The best example of sublation I think is relativity theory where some basic facts were finally sublated in to a coherent whole which disolved contradictions. The mind can produce and destroy the ontological proof by thinking alone. The resurrection for me then is the sublation of the notion of a physically existing God. Instead by our killing of a pathetic man simply because he was a genius creates the conditions for a moral sublation. The good news is that God has been killed. We killed him and so become aware of our status as God slayers. We, the “murderers of murderers”. We walk in to a terrifying new epoch of freedom and responsibility.

The gesamtkomödiewerke reading method

This is a psychoanalytic method for tarot reading. It is based on a small number of hard assumptions:

1. Randomly drawn cards do not predict the future in any meaningful sense.
2. A free and superstitious reading of cards can give some insight into psychoanalytic principles of both parties in a reading with two people.

The technique draws on the most fundamental aspects of psychoanalysis. The analysand is to sit comfortably facing away from the analyst. The basic aim is to produce a dream narrative. Three cards should be drawn and revealed from past to future and structured like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. One should think of the process as trying to produce a ten minute short film by David Lynch. After the film has been produced free discussion is permitted to analyse the story using a literary theory approach. Some further points may help:

  • Cards should be read literally. Two swords are two swords. If these were drawn first the story should begin with two swords.
  • A discussion between the two can ensue. Why are there two swords? Where are they? This should not be analysed psychoanalytically until after the story has finished. IT should instead be discussed as a conspiracy between the two. The analysand will be the central character in the dream. The analyst may enter into the dream or not as they wish.
  • How can the first card develop a mystery which might begin to be solved? A basic possibility is the scene of a crime. Another possibility could be a scene the analysand happens upon. A mystery is the basic premise but a detective and a crime is not necessary.
  • The third card should add some finality to the story but leave open some uncertainty to allow further analysis and interpretation after the session.
  • There is nothing superstitious about enjoying a story about supernatural occurrences. Two swords can transform into two cups for instance.
  • The story can take the form of the dream. A good ambiguity can be produced by starting the story with awaking during the night. Try to foster uncertainty regarding the reality of the situation.
  • The two readers should be trying to produce a joint dream. Only after the story which should not be more than ten minutes can we begin to think of meaning.
  • The reading should be relatively fast. If it takes you too long to think of a story you have made a mistake. Spontaneity is key to finding interesting connections.

The gesamtkomödiewerke manifesto

  1. This is a manifesto of failure.
  2. It will succeed if it fails and fail if it succeeds.
  3. In declaring its aims and its aims at completeness it fails necessarily.
  4. The complete work of art is a contradiction. The complete joke doubly so.
  5. It is masculine.
  6. It is defined by masculine failure. A failure to be masculine and therefore successfully masculine.
  7. The negative generates the positive but the positive cannot generate the negative.
  8. Has there not been a great terror cast upon the earth? Do we not tremble in the shadow of a complete irony? And yet it yearns for an impossible completeness.
  9. To break the limit of the infinite in a finite language.
  10. To produce the contradiction in the reader without proof.
  11. To refuse suicide because it is too positive. To remain in the infinite abyss of the negative. To reject the pure unity of death.
  12. Let us continue to fail or die. To continue to live after success is a sin.
  13. Neither the first manifesto nor the last. Merely another failure for the pile.
  14. This is an aging movement. It does not concern the young who do not know the gentle catastrophes of life.
  15. The practitioners must be freed from the tyranny of sexual rank by age, injury, or failure.
  16. It is a metaphysics of sex. It is the contradiction of the erection. The inflation that occurs in the genitals of all humankind as a protocontradiction. A protocontradiction that defines the negative masculinity.
  17. Hypermetadoubledialectics.
  18. It is at odds.
  19. At odds with the world and therefore itself.
  20. It is an incomplete nontotality.
  21. It is a comedy of anxiety.
  22. It is a schizophrenic disjunction of text units.
  23. The I moves around and through it as any word.
  24. The we is the failure of the cogito.
  25. The I is complex and not simple.
  26. The becoming is a failure to be.
  27. It is not finished. We are not born after it was finished. It has not begun.

Tarot reading 26

The Two of Swords

Rider Waite copy.

The Six of Cups

Rider Waite copy.

The Eight of Wands

Rider Waite copy.

The reading

Slay me at this beach. I shall take my own head and not watch! But lovely memories of a kind child overwhelm me with tears. Let me follow the sticks and my destiny. Now is not my time.

Tarot reading 25

The Tower

The attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

The Two of Pentacles

Rider Waite copy.

The Four of Swords

Rider Waite copy

The reading

Nightmare strikes the west. All certainties are turned upside down. History has begun again. So bring the farce. Bring the infinite binary. Then let me die on my sword. What three are against me?

Tarot reading 23

The Seven of Swords

Cut this snake into eight pieces!

Strength

The French Revolution brought down the most mighty.

The Five of Wands

My hand! My hand!

The reading

A snake is in my dreams. I must wake up. A vision of a naked woman. My hand is cursed!

Tarot reading 22

The Page of Pentacles

A sweet young boy with a coin in his pocket.

The Three of Swords

Sorrow is the beginning of wisdom – Alastair Crowley.

The Five of Cups

Misery follows sadness

The reading

The boy is not ready for tragedy. Sorrow stalks its prey like a leopard. Crawling in the undergrowth. When it has you there is no escape.

Tarot reading 21

The Eight of Cups

A woman kills herself by jumping off a building and falling on a car. An iconic photograph. Rest in peace Evelyn McHale.

The Queen of Cups

Ophelia dead by drowing suicide.

The Chariot

The top of the Brandenberg gate depicts the bringing of peace into Berlin

The reading

A woman is dead. A second is dead. Both suicides. War is coming to Europe and the whole world quakes.

Tarot reading 20

The Three of Cups

Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters. Lear’s three daughters. A tragic grouping.

The King of Cups

King Henry the Eigth

The Moon

Historically associated with howling wolves and the sexuality of the lobster.

The reading

Why do the three sisters quarrel? The father and patriarch has caused it through avoiding it. Dark sexual forces shall bring tragedy this night.

Tarot reading 19

The Knight of Pentacles

No explanation needed.

The Knight of Swords

I liked them to face each other since they were drawn as a pair.

The Star

Rider Waite plus milk emerging from the nipples.

The reading

A fight! How can one take a coin to a sword fight? He will be killed surely. He holds up the coin and as the swordsman approaches merely says ‘buy me this life’. He is cut down viciously. The dead body looks up at the sky as it takes a last breath. A single star burns into his eye.

Tarot reading 18

Judgement

Very similar to Rider Waite. Great design.

The Sun

Teletubbies

The Seven of Pentacles

Reference to the devil’s smiley face.

The reading

Guilt reeks. Lying in bed after a night of debauchery. The sun shines through the window. Checking my wallet I find just seven coins. I had two hundred last night.

Tarot reading 17

1. The Eight of Pentacles

    A man labours over the coins. Each coin represents one coin time.

    2. The Ace of Swords

    The Sword decapitates the king and takes his crown.

    3. The World.

    When we look upon the world rationally it looks rationally back.

    The reading

    A man is hard at work making horseshoes. There are eight. Can we assume they are for two horses? A masked assassin bursts in and cuts off his head. His cloth cap falls to the floor and reveals a golden coin. The assassin takes the coin but doesn’t realise that it will bring him great misery.

    Tarot reading 8

    1.The Hermit

    He has gold but lives in a world of golden senses.

    2. The Six of Pentacles

    Bill Gates.

    3. The Four of Pentacles

    Jeff Bezos.

    The reading

    The poor wise hermit searching with his lamp. Searching for an honest man in daylight like Diogenes before him. He is not looking for an honest man but a rich man. The excel spreadsheet and the shopping basket full and resplendent with wealth and beauty. I won’t be so trite as to say these are worth nothing. The masters of capital have made fountains of gold.

    Tarot reading 16

    Fifteen blackbirds sitting on a telephone line.

    The Ace of Cups

    Keeping it simple.

    The Lovers

    I knew I would do something pornographic but decided to keep it relatively traditional with a ‘reverse cowgirl’ position taken from a French erotic illustrator.

    The Emperor

    Lacan’s graph of desire overlaid on US president Donald Trump.

    The reading

    An overflowing of emotion wells within me. Where is my lover? What cruelty that we are separated. And in this lustful anxiety a dark master has taken the reigns and put them upon us.

    Tarot reading 15

    Money is the order of the day. A fortnight of deals!

    The Queen of Pentacles

    I had wanted to include Queen Elizabeth II and pentacles seemed a good choice as I wanted to put her on a fifty p coin. Unfortunately i drew her too big so that idea went down the drain.

    The Ace of Pentacles

    The Rider Waite has a hand so I drew my own hand with a coin in it.

    The Ten of Pentacles

    Elon Miusk occurred to me and only later did I realise it was probably because the roman numeral X looks like logo for X.

    The reading.

    Coin rules us all. Queens and thieves both. Take this coin and do what thou wilt!

    Tarot reading 14

    A dangerous number. An unholy number

    The Four of Wands

    Simplicity and balance. A happy marriage.

    The Page of Swords

    Another beautiful boy! Strong but nimble. Running! Jumping! Loving!

    The Four of Cups

    Meditating on the three a fourth appears!

    The reading

    In the ideal life we begin with balance. A leaving ceremony. The boy sets off sword in hand. Finally he finds no adventure so sits under a tree and ponders his past, his present, and his future. In pondering these three a fourth is suggested. A fourth tense?

    Tarot reading 13

    Thee times four. These three are ruled by the master of hell! They must serve him.

    The Page of Wands

    A mere boy full of hope. Simply drawn with a magic hat.

    The Six of Swords

    Taking a boat across a sea to three volcanoes. This boat is not built for seafaring. Will the swords make it.

    The Devil

    The biggest card!? I decided to free draw without reference and use the classic design of a naked man and woman chained to him. I think this is an interesting opposite to love as the divine. Do we taste both heaven and hell in sex?

    The reading

    Hail a beautiful boy has been born. AS he grows he takes his stick with pride and ventures to the woods. Discovering a stream? A pond! A lake! A sea! An ocean! Out of his depth and now a man he spies a beautiful woman. Love blossoms but a great danger is afoot in in this ecstasy.

    Tarot reading 12

    The twin towers. Not the end of history but the beginning!

    Justice

    I had long ago decided to use the Metallica And Justice for All cover for this.

    The Magician

    The Magician is a great and major arcana. My first thought was a popular magician but I couldn’t think of any apart from Paul Daniels who doesn’t interest me. I decided to just free draw and for some reason Pamela Anderson came to mind. I original drew her with a large erect penis but it looked a little odd so I painted over it in gold.

    The Nine of Pentacles

    The Rider Waite is a pretty woman in a gown. Diana’s wedding came to mind so I used her and put the pentacles in her train.

    The reading

    Guilt rules your dreams. The sword of justice comes for you. But you are saved by wakefulness. The magician offers you a deal. Your wedding day and nine million dollars. But you must also be made immortal. Why tricks are hidden in this offer?