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The title of this book may suggest something other than what is in it. The popular idea of flirtation is of a kind of frivolity and coquetry. No one, it may be said, takes flirtation seriously; nor, too, things like Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, which is the title of Adam Phillips’ previous book. There is a danger from the outset that Adam Phillips invites us to set him aside and not take him seriously — titles such as these can all too easily be passed by in favour of weightier more reverential tones.
It may well be, in the very spirit of paradox that he cherishes, that this is what he both wants and does not want. There is no doubt that at one level he commands substantial respect. This is a remarkably profound book, beautifully and precisely written and filled with sharp and telling insights. It is a work of scholarship; it is anything but light and flippant. And, yet, at another level, there is a question about how far he wants the book to rest safely on the shelves of established academia. In his last chapter, he writes of the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, whose terror was of being appropriated and exploited through being seen and known. There is perhaps here, too, a similar sensibility. Quite persistently, it seems, Adam Phillips eschews being taken ‘seriously’, for fear that this might cramp his mobility. The very originality that makes this book so distinctive depends no doubt on his keeping himself apart and indeed always on the move — and it is in this respect that we can possibly reach an understanding of the gist of this book and its title.
Flirtation is not a superficiality. It is far more generative than it seems — and it consists of a certain kind of movement, of mental agility, that keeps alive a spirit of ambiguity and unpredictability (the oldest sense of the word, ‘to flirt’, is ‘to jerk lightly away’). Flirtation, as Adam Phillips defines it, ‘is the calculated production of uncertainty’; it is ‘the opposite of compromise in its unwillin