“What is difficult,” writes Vivian Blaxell in Worthy of the Event, is “the possibility that the greatest beauty of all beauties may be the beauty of everything fucking off in one way or another.”

As I write this, Vivian has fucked off to the heart of an Empire to promote her book. In Naarm, I am beginning to worry about my own fucking off. I have completed my thirty-third year, which my partner calls “the Jesus year”. Crucified by my own neuroticism, I am now entering what we might call “the Buddha year” and feeling like a nasturtium blooming for it. Everything is beginning and ending all at once. The time has come, as Kim Kardashian might say, to “let go and let god”. This does not imply the relinquishing of struggle, but rather, to roll with the wave as it slams the body against the shore.

Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event has a great deal to do with my present modus operandi. The text is written as a seven-part essay with citations indicated in Prestige Elite and left for the reader to decipher with a loose bibliography at the back. Here, where I have cited Vivian, I have done so in Courier New to emulate her style (mimesis is something she looks upon fondly). This impressive and affirming book suggests that the logical misstep of the contemporary subject (that is, you and I, dear reader) lies in the failure to grasp the only truth, which is that there is only truth. Disbelief does not rid the universe of its multiplicitous realities, or of our unstoppable states of being and becoming. Blaxell cites the Dhammapada 278:

All created things perish. Those who know and see this become passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity. The Buddha is dispassionate about beauty. He is dispassionate about change. No love of fate for him, these things just are. What could be more beautiful than that?

This citation is from section “IV: the disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature”, first published as an Overland essay. Here, the disappeared in question makes a number of lovely Wertheresque remarks like, “things disappearing is beautiful and difficult. You have to say yes to it all.” The beauty of things disappearing and thus changing is a central theme of Worthy of the Event.

Following a.k.a. Victor Mature and applying the theory, I’ve been leaning in and ambiently saying Yes. All this yea-saying has landed me here, writing in a rhinestoned Paul Frank velour tracksuit, inspired by Azealia Banks, who conjures this cultural aesthetic: “Kylie Jenner 2015 revival for all the too old girls that FINALLY got approved for nose jobs and lip implants on care-credit.” For me, this is the precise feeling of turning thirty-three and becoming alarmed at the apparent twenty-year cycle of cultural nostalgia. I think Azealia Banks has been saying No to herself. At 33, she is about to enter her own Buddha year. People are going to keep on getting nose jobs and lip implants and care-credit. I will be over here, in my terrible tracksuit, reading Vivian Blaxell and saying Yes.

The essays in Worthy of the Event begin with a literal treatment of disappointment in section ‘I. the disappointments’, also published in Overland in 2021. Blaxell has lived many lives. She is a former teenage sex worker, history and politics professor, trans pioneer, mental health nurse, and currently a bestselling essayist. She does not fuck around with negation. The author has been saying yes to it all for much of her life.

The disappointments begins with a disappointing confession: Blaxell’s vagina disappoints her. To be dis-appointed: to be removed from office, to miss a rendezvous. The essay cuts to a story about a second-wave ex-lover who calls her own vagina she. Blaxell writes, “I want to say to Fairy, Is your vagina ever a he?” In quick succession, the author recollects Dr. Ron Barr “on camera in 1983” discussing the “disappointing” results of reassignment surgery. Here we are also introduced to Norma Mapagu, who tells the author to stop watching the old video: ““There are better things to be disappointed about than vagina. Some people are disappointed with God, of all things. Why don’t you try that?” To all of this, Vivian Blaxell says Yes.

Whether you’re a fervent nihilist or a Victorian Socialist, Worthy of the Event will strike you as the work of a lifetime. Comprised of seven loosely autobiographical essays published in international journals over the last few years, the book is structured around the sublime event of life, which is becoming. The author has consulted widely, encountering notably throughout: Norma Mapagu, Leibniz, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Blaxell’s mother, Hegel’s mouse, Miyazawa Kenji, McKenzie Wark, Paul Virilio, Spinoza’s God (or Nature), Kant, Māui, and of course, Buddha. Or, an excellent council to investigate the question of death. And investigate she does: “II: mouse eats communion wafer” concerns the god-awful task of being and becoming. Section ‘III. nuclear cats’, first published in Meanjin, questions deeply the human / animal binary. The fourth and fifth essays concern disappearances and endings, and from there, we are rocketed out into section ‘VI: stardust’. The final movement of the essay is section ‘VII: the practice’, where Blaxell, against Mapagu’s advice, concerns herself with shit. There is no topic this woman cannot encounter. She flinches neither in the face of faeces nor death. These essays say Yes to it all.

*

Does Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event take things beyond the ambient Yes? The answer, reader, is of course, Yes. It would be an insult to call this extraordinary essay a work of autofiction or philosophy. Instead, the Event is an Event unto itself. In presenting the anecdotal with the academic, the mythological with the mundane, Blaxell’s work walks the Spinozist talk, which flattens the cultural hierarchy of the essay. This makes the Event a deeply interesting piece of writing. Few of the people in Blaxell’s essay match neat stereotypes, but perhaps her caricatures just feel real. In global North cultures, imitation is frowned upon in theory, but in practice is another story–just ask Pablo Picasso or Witi Ihimaera.

In the twenty-first century of the global North, the practice of mimicry has been tied up in the human / animal binary since John Locke and John Stuart Mill spread the inconsistent liberal gospel of self-ownership. But as Blaxell shows, during the Southern European Renaissance only a couple of centuries prior, emulation was a high art and even an honour. Then came Adam Smith, then the Industrial Revolution, and the west embraced Capitalism. The Romantics followed claiming to be original geniuses, and their imperial branding remains stamped on the present century with the legacy of intellectual property–though we might note that the data input required by large auto-predict models is quickly modifying this view amongst wealthy cyberlibertarians.

Nevertheless, in section “VII: the practice,” Blaxell makes an unabashed argument for emulation:

Doing how others have done before me is how I learn to do myself; it creates me; it fills me with skill and power. BamBam can say what he likes about copy. BamBam wants me to feel like a cheap copy of myself, but I am not a copy of anything. I am a perfect-perfectly-beautiful-evenin- my-flaws emulation of a perfect and perfectly beautiful way of being.

BamBam is a man with severe cognitive dissonance. In practice, he wants to fuck her, but his theory does not hold up. BamBam, says Blaxell, has a problem with his relation to her, the issue being what he “knows and feels when he lets [her] body into his story.” He simultaneously knows she is trans, and does not want to know. BamBam is in denial about his desire, and so, in sensing her rejection, mocks the author for being an “unoriginal imitation of a woman.” This is, of course, very funny to anyone who understands the concept of social construction. As Judith Butler famously argues, gender is performative. Gender is created through behaviour and so is always becoming. Everybody is constantly performing gender, and often for the benefit of men, as Simone de Beauvoir might add. I am reminded of an old flatmate from Toowoomba who, upon seeing a selfie my brother had taken, questioned whether he was gay. I suggested that my brother seemed quite comfortable with his sexuality and my flatmate immediately had to go downstairs and get stuck into his punching bag.

Here I am, inserting my own anecdotes, where I have been trained to attempt instead the illusion of academic objectivity. Blaxell has challenged my existing ideas of cultural hierarchy.

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in Can the Subaltern Speak?, intellectuals (specifically, Foucault and Deleuze) have a vested interest in speaking for the subaltern as part of their routine maintenance work on the ivory tower. Our positions as public thinkers hinge upon the conditions of exclusion. Of course, we have seen this at Spivak’s own university with the expulsion of Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.

I am not trying to claim that Blaxell has subaltern status (if she did, I couldn’t write this review) but rather pointing out the radical implications of the treatment of texts as equivalent in Worthy of the Event. The author here does not speak generically of “Maoists” as Foucault and Deleuze do in the object of Spivak’s critique, but instead relies heavily on her own specific and direct experiences of love, sex, rebirth and rebirth, which are vast. She has lived many lives across many grammars, and it shows.

Blaxell’s treatment of the rain on the kahikatea tree in Aotearoa is presented in equivalence with the 1959 film Ukigusa, with the disappointing places of Japan, and with McKenzie Wark’s social media presence. Blaxell defends her apparent globalism: “I went to woman because there was no other place to go. I went to Japan because there were so many other places to which I had already been.” While it might be easy to go in on Blaxell for some kind of Orientalism, this charge in itself implies a Eurocentric hierarchy, and one which makes less sense when you consider the Spinozist metaphysics underpinning this seven-parter. This is because, as my friend Leah says, you can plug any imaginary into the Spinoza operating system, and it is this medium which Blaxell’s attitude towards the world rests sufficiently upon.

Baruch Spinoza was a philosopher and mathematician living in Amsterdam in the 1600s, which some call the Dutch Golden Age. Unlike many Enlightenment philosophers, Spinoza was gainfully employed as a tradie, grinding lenses. In his spare time, he wound up the rabbinic authorities of the Portuguese Jewish community to the point where his ideas saw him excommunicated (read: cancelled), twice. Spinoza’s views on God were radical at the time, and they may remain so. In thinking about what there is, he writes that God or Nature is a “substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” In other words, there is God or Nature and only God or Nature. If you had to make an exhaustive map of everything that exists, it would be the world itself (ie, God or Nature) with all of us in it, stretched out in front of us forever and ever, infinitely becoming and becoming without hierarchy or end. By surrendering the desire to negate and accepting the truth of this infinite becoming, we might each come to see the events and experiences of our lives as part of a much greater, much more multiplicitous sublime.

*

Not every book you read engages with experience as directly as Worthy of the Event. Blaxell has expediently demonstrated that theory is not and should not be removed from Reality. To do this, the essay flits across several histories in both degree and kind. Blaxell is a brilliant synthesiser of these terrific questions of being and becoming, though right at the start of section “II: mouse eats communion wafer,” she declares that she is “not a philosopher” and does not “understand the difference between being and becoming.” Perhaps this is because she is still in the process of becoming, like you or me, or Spinoza’s God or Nature, or Hegel’s mouse, who steals a special wafer.

According to G.W.F. Hegel: if a mouse eats Jesus Christ-become-wafer or wafer-become-Jesus Christ, then God exists in the mouse, exists even in the shit of the mouse… the mouse goes on unchanged by its becoming but the inner being of the pilfering mouse becomes transformed, divine. Baruch Spinoza might have thought Hegel’s mouse, inside and out, and everything else in the universe, inside and out, all God modes inside and out, since God is a universal substance with a zillion ways of being, infinite articulations, uncountable and unknowable …

Blaxell has done her homework. The mouse who eats the communion wafer is there, in the third volume of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, written two centuries after Spinoza’s Ethics. In Worthy of the Event, we might take this as an argument against essentialism in all forms.

In a section on scholastic philosophy, Hegel (a good Lutheran Protestant) argues that God is both three-fold and indivisible. “For as the just behold Christ in heaven, so must Christ be an object on earth which may likewise be beheld.”[1] He goes on to use the mouse analogy to show the difference between the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages and the contemporary Lutheran faith to which he belongs. Hegel is pointing out that while the backwards Catholics of Old may have worshipped the poo of the mouse, the advanced Teutons with their printing presses (which emulated Chinese technology) knew that the bread and wine was not literally Jesus’s body. For Hegel, Luther maintains what he sees as the “perfect contradiction” of the human both being and not-being God at the same time. Subjectively speaking, for Hegel, there is still some Jesus in the bread and wine.

As Blaxell argues, it’s not that complicated. She extends the Hegelian thought experiment to show that Spinoza’s argument imbibes Hegel’s like a wafer. Spinoza’s God or Nature already contains Hegel’s mouse over a century before Hegel’s mouse’s great-grandmother even exists. While Hegel has done something to his mouse (smells like negation), Spinoza’s Ethics are not built on a No, but a Yes. The Hegelians are calling this Spinoza’s monism. In monist theories, there is no divine separation between object and subject, or between the world and God. According to George Di Giovanni, writing in the 2010 introduction to Hegel’s The Science of Logic, this is unacceptable. In his view, Spinoza’s monistic ontology reduces

all the things of nature to mere surface-like events, the truth of which would consist… in their disappearing, in their nothingness – precisely what Hegel refused to do by insisting on the objectivity of the modal categories.

The Hegelians do not want to disappear into nothingness. They do not want to go the way of the dinosaurs and the mice. These errant knights of the great order of philosophy hold tight to their Gods in defense of Hierarchy and Categories like there is some sort of real separation between them.

*

Vivian Blaxell’s yea-saying relies heavily on Nietzsche, who “says yes to the beauty of constant change as a part of the formula for greatness in a human being… [he wishes] to be only a yes-sayer to everything including suffering and disaster.” In Worthy of the Event, we thus find an extended defense of what Nietzsche might have meant by the transvaluation of all values. Blaxell’s philosophy, rooted in Spinoza’s Ethics, demonstrates thoroughly the Zarathustra aphorism: “all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; [which] are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.” We might critique this as a fairly light-handed approach to suffering, which of course the Buddha teaches is rooted in our desires and attachments to the world. But rather than arguing that we should just suck it up and get over it, Blaxell (“not a philosopher”) is claiming, pace Nietzsche, hat if becoming is the “real term of human life rather than a subordinate clause of being,” then “all that discomfort and horror and loathing about people becoming what you think they are not supposed to be is just a fight against life itself.” In other words, the essentialism of saying no to life prohibits the natural process of being and becoming which continues to unfold as God or Nature ourselves.

But the problem of evil must not be glossed over so freely. For me, two thinkers missing from the intellectual map of Worthy of the Event are the Martinique psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, and the French philosopher and mother of western feminism Simone de Beauvoir. Fanon famously begins Black Skin, White Masks by proposing, like a.k.a. Victor Mature, that “Man is a yes … doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.” The colonial world order is based on the exclusion and subjugation of the colonised by the coloniser, and these categories have been enacted by the social construction of race. Here, the exception creates the rule. If I am white it is because Fanon is black.

The essentialism of the racial binary functions to deny the truth of our being and becoming. The invention of race, as the late Australian academic Patrick Wolfe taught, was designed to reconcile “the great [Enlightenment] taxonomies of natural science with the political rhetoric of the rights of man.”[2] It is not a coincidence that the western concept of liberty comes to prominence at the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Up until Fanon’s time in the mid-twentieth century, the freedom of becoming was predicated on its antinomy, that is, the unfreedom of being enslaved. For Fanon:

There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence… I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

The idea of social construction is thus one of the greatest critical tools of the twentieth century. There is no spoon, no blue pill, and no red or black pill either, but thinking makes them so. Fanon took up this key tenet of existentialism to demonstrate that we are free not only to say “yes to life” and no to “the butchery” of freedom (what he sees as “most human in man”) but that we are also free to participate wholeheartedly in this endless process of being and becoming.

Simone de Beauvoir also famously took up the concept of social construction to argue against this historical “man” of Fanon, Hegel and Nietzsche in The Second Sex. For Beauvoir, woman

discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness.

For Fanon, the unfreedom of the black subject is premised upon the freedom of the white subject. For Beauvoir, woman’s subjugation is predicated upon the essentialism of man. Both thinkers thus fight against the implicit essentialisms of liberal Enlightenment discourse, which western universal freedoms and unfreedoms have also rested so ironically upon.

Worthy of the Event builds on these critical traditions using the medium of the essay with a refreshing lens. To be sure, Vivian Blaxell does not underweigh the gravities of colonialism, race or gender as they have been socially constructed. After citing Aimé Césaire in “V: indifferent to prayer”, she confesses that she doesn’t feel like a white settler in so-called Australia, just as she didn’t “feel like a haole all those years in Honolulu,” and “didn’t get the message about my having and how my having entailed others not having.” She suspects this is related to “the not-having-ness of transsexual woman existence in most places where [her] privileges are as contingent as [her] beauties,” or perhaps because colonialism has not happened to her as a disaster.

These tensions are not resolved in the work, because colonialism has not ended, just as the not-having-ness of transsexual woman existence has not ended. We can be confident, however, that these negative social constructions will soon transform, given that the only constant is change. The global outcry against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, or Tesla stocks plunging, or the inevitable global success of this book by a beautiful transsexual woman, might reassure us.

Worthy of the Event ends, as it should, in both transcendence and not-transcendence, not with the death of the author but with the death of her ninety-three-year old mother. The final chapter, “VII: the practice” largely concerns itself with shit, which is the ultimate ending, where the body is recycled back into fertiliser for more becoming. Throughout the Event, Blaxell’s mother seems to have lived a prim and proper life, which the author herself has lived to defy. ““Oh, dear, oh dear, where’s the lavatory, I’m going, it’s coming now, I’m pooing. Oh, stop it.”” There is beauty in this final movement. “Ridendo dicere severum,” writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: through what is laughable, say what is sombre.

Like the shit of Hegel’s mouse, the shit of the author’s mother is holy. Perhaps Blaxell is here attempting to emulate Dodie Bellamy, who, with recourse to bodily emissions in Barf Manifesto, demolishes “the essay’s usual forward propulsion of the narrative arc, that fantasy of progress, resolution.” This holy shit signifies beautifully the outcome of the essay, which is both transcendence and not-transcendence, or perhaps being and becoming. The Event ends with a line from the Miyazawa Kenji poem Haru to shura, which Blaxell has translated as “Body, scatter to the dust of the sky.”

[1] GWF Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, ed ES and Simson Haldane, MA, vol 3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1896)

[2] Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016).

Image: a detail from the cover of the book
 

This is the fourth in a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.