There’s nothing Deeper than Skin

The Sale of Damien Hirst’s now famous diamond encrusted skull — the work is entitled, “For the Love of God” – has got me thinking again (which is a very good thing; between the jetlag and the German language course, I haven’t been very productive of late). It’s not that I’m somehow overwhelmed by the exorbitant price that this work garnered at auction ($100 million USD, which is, according to the folks at Bad at Sports, less [update: my fingers were faster than my mind here; "For the Love of God" sold for more than the worth of its materials.  Sorry for the confusion] than the value of the diamonds — and more than any living artist’s work has ever sold for), or even that it would have been completely at home in the props department of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Nor is it the fact that William Conger produced a conceptually similar, if much less decadent piece a little while ago for a charity event (Conger’s Skull is adorned with pennies that have been bent to fit its contours; I couldn’t find any images of it online).

Rather, what piques my interest is based on a philosophically inspired understanding of the conceptual history that Hirst’s works draw upon. For it seems to present an interesting conjuncture: on the one hand, and like most ‘anatomical art,’ one can’t help but experience a morbid interest, an intellectual quickening which might turn Kant’s sublime inside out, since it is not some savage ‘nature without’ that threatens and horrifies us, while simultaneously and singularly presenting to a self-reflective audience the potential and power of the human mind, but the hidden ‘nature within’ — the human body itself. The Spinozistic claim, “No one yet knows what the body can do,” in other words, is transformed by anatomically inspired art into the sublime of the integral, natural –and teleological — force of the human organism, which lies wrapped up in its own skin. If one were to follow this line of interpretation, Hirst’s redressing of a skull in diamonds covers the sublime with nothing more than charm. It offers, as it were, a parergon for it, which, by imperfectly insulating us from the terrifying ground of material existence, enframes it all the better. It forces us to tarry with what lies underneath. Indeed, the pearly white teeth, which serve both as a focal point — counter-balanced, no less by the large diamond set on the forehead — for our gaze, and as a grim reminder of the dead life that serves as the origin for this work.

On the other hand, any presentation of a human skull cannot but call to mind Hegel’s discussion of Spirit’s becoming the bone. That is, the endeavor to present the potential of an individual in terms of the material and causal characteristics of her body, (so Hegel’s argument goes in the “phrenology” section of the Phenomenology), i.e., to externalize the logic that makes thought and action intelligible by treating it as a property or effect of a merely natural, causally determined object, or else to read off of an object the operant logic of social behaviour, fundamentally misunderstands the formative, historical, and above all else, intersubjective determination of human agency. The logic of experience, understanding and agency, does not begin, in other words, from the inside and move out. Rather it is always already something social, something external, which must first be appropriated, internalized, and then ex-pressed. For Hegel, then, what lies under is precisely what enfolds or enframes us. But it is only in its expression, in its determinate articulation by a self-possessed individual, that this logic becomes thematic, and hence open for consideration. We move, as it were, through the object to the antecedent intersubjective conditions that constitute it, and finally to the our self-certain operation with them. What ought to hold our attention, along a Hegelian reading, are the diamonds themselves and how their being inset upon a skull expresses, or otherwise problematizes our communally held intuitions concerning the value and dignity of the human body. The diamonds, not the skull itself, express the values, powers, and potential of being human.

More precisely, and now to bring out the agon between the Kantian and Hegelian readings, whereas the immanentization of the Kantian sublime — and not merely the powers involved in our contemplation of it — through the contemplation of the body’s anatomical structure, insists on an indifference to its ontic frame, Hegel views the cold calipers of phrenology and the enlightened habit of public dissection, as exactly what is immanent in — as well as what immanentizes — our aesthetic contemplation of the human form. the conventions that make these exercises or reason possible, that make them meaningful, and that, finally, express what lies under. For Kant, one can have no attachment to the body being viewed. For Hegel, the possibility of this aesthetic distance, this disinterested interest, is a product of our social situation.

All this said, then, and to return to Hirst’s skull (just before closing this post), what fascinates me is this work balances between, or provides a fulcrum for, the Kantian, a-contextual reactions (which perhaps has its contemporary analogue in nothing less than kitsch), and the historically-effected Hegelian reaction to the re-deployment and transformation of Tradition to which “For the love of God” belongs. Consider, for those who aren’t familiar with it, the details of Hirst’s skull, as described in an ABC News article, here (NB the image of “For the Love of God” is taken from the same source),

is a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and covered by 8,601 pave-set diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. The single large diamond in the middle of the forehead is reportedly worth $4.2 million alone. Hirst financed the project himself, and estimates it cost between 10 and 15 million.

Unlike Hamlet’s Yorick, whom he knew so well, we are here faced with a cast of an anonymous skull. We are faced, in other words, with an insurmountable distance, which seems to privilege a Kantian Reading — save, of course, for the abstract, and almost misplaced realization that the cast is still a cast of some anonymous skull. and without being able to form anything that might even initially constitute an immediate relationship with the object, how are we to engage in a Hegelian critique of the Kantian position?