The Politics of Dancing

The Long Shadow of Friedrich Nietzche  ‘Nietzsche has been re-appropriated by just about everyone: ‘existentialists, phenomenologists, and then increasingly, during the 1960s and 1970s . . . critical theorists, post-structuralists and deconstructionists’. Not to mention anarchists, libertarians, hippies, yippies, radical psychiatrists, religious cultists... .’* In individual’s insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, epochs it is the norm.’ Friedrich Nietzsche. I first came across Nietzsche when I was 16, in the former of an essay by AJP Taylor. [1] In this he made the rather trite and lazy observation that Nietzsche’s ideas logically led to his going mad. That this was certainly untrue, Nietzsche suffered from a degenerative brain disease of the kind that had killed his father, was not allowed to get in the way of a neat narrative. Still, my appetite was whetted. Nietzsche is the great liberator amongst philosophers, and though his last work was complet...

For the first time ever I have had doubts about the wisdom of stopping Brexit. This is not because I have suddenly been converted to a Brexiteer, quite the opposite, for I believe Brexit will be a disaster, far worse than some imagine. No, the reason being is precisely that I am a passionate European, and fiercely believe in the EU project. So these thoughts clarified only after reading a Der Spiegel editorial , which pointed out how damaging a divided and fractious UK would be inside the EU. NOT A GROWN-UP COUNTRY Suppose Remain win, even by a sizable majority, we would still be lumbered with Farage, and the whole neo-fascist Vote Leave movement, now crying foul. The mischief this crowd could cause within the EU after a failed Leave attempt can only be imagined. Whatever else these last few years have shown is that we are a country not grown up enough to be a member of a complex multi-national project like the EU. We need to go away and either grow up enough to re-engage se...

On New Year’s Eve, in his last diary entry for 1917, Wilfred Owen speaks of midnight as being the ‘intolerable instant of the change.’ It resonated with me when I first read it, over forty years ago, and it resonates with me even more today. Of course,  the ‘new’ in 'new year' is confection. In a reversal of the fairy story narrative, the pumpkin doesn’t suddenly become a gold carriage at midnight. Nature is oblivious to this man-made moment,- the change from 31/12 to 1/1. Yet we seem to need this sense of a new start, of fresh beginnings, resolutions to change behaviour, even the dream of wiping the slate clean. Sadly New Years Day is just another day in our life, yet we impress New Year's day with a significance that, given the usual grey light of morning, it finds impossible to bare. So what made the change intolerable to Owen? I think it was a sense of this fraud, that, of course, nothing will change at all. Still we pretend that the we have broken with yesterda...