What if everyone involved in the French revolution — not just the Third Estate, the defectors of the French Royal Army, the Sans-culottes, and the JacWhat if everyone involved in the French revolution — not just the Third Estate, the defectors of the French Royal Army, the Sans-culottes, and the Jacobins (including and especially Robespierre), but also the counterrevolutionary émigrés and royalists, and the coalitions that emerged to combat the Revolution — what if every single one of them had been pwned all along?
What if, far from being an indictation that God had abandoned France, the sheer molten plasticity of the Revolution, its resentment and foolishness incarnating itself in numerous constitutions, regimes, reactions, reactions to reactions, using and discarding ambitious politicians as so many masks, was nothing more than a divine purgative, a "great purification", to free the metal of France from its "sour and impure dross", so that it could be made more malleable in the hands of a future king?
Maistre does not formulate the above as a question. Every sentence in Considerations on France appears in the form of a declaration: the Revolution just is God punishing and purifying France; the victory of the Republic against royalist insurgents just is a Providential guarantee of the integrity of France as a nation, not a vindication of republican government. In fact, republican government simply does not exist. We'll come back to that one, but let's be clear: Maistre is not interested in argument, "sound reasoning", or even internal consistency: if any of these things are present, it is not integral; it is merely an effect. The grandiose mad fury of his reactionary conservatism has less in common with Catholicism as a religious practice than it does with the intimidating, inhuman beauty of Catholic architecture.
Nothing could possibly live inside Maistre's architectonic hatred, but even for a nonbeliever it's one hell of a tourist attraction.
*
Maistre does not believe in any such thing as common humanity. With vicious brio, he declares: "In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me."
This embodies the conservative insight that people do not float indeterminately and accidentally through societies that have no hold on them, but exist in and through their history, culture, and language. In Maistre's thought, this is charged with reactionary disgust at cultural and ethical criticism as an unjustifiable and seditious leap into abstraction. Liberal political and ethical theory insists on the impossibility of fixed natural hierarchy, the solubility of ethical disagreement, and the categorical universality of political and ethical laws, and so liberals tend to find empirical reality embarrassing. Forgetting the men they live amongst, they are always inclined to speak of "the natural rights of man". For Maistre, this language commits a category error: rights belong to really existing people, not just to "man", a thing that has never existed and never will.
You may have heard this one before: Every attempt to bring "man" into being leads into satanic inhumanity, tyranny, and — God forbid — atheism...
*
From Maistre's reactionary contempt for the great mass of humankind (which is not the same thing as humanity — human beings are a particular kind of animal requiring constant and harsh discipline; humanity is nothing more than a rationalist hallucination), the following claim emerges: "A large and free nation cannot exist under a republican government." Democracy in modernity is, strictly speaking, impossible. The liberal postulate is that man is a rational animal capable of self-legislation and, by extension, universally valid legislation within a state. Maistre finds this absurd. He doesn't offer a "rational" argument for this and he doesn't feel a need to: empirically speaking, the Revolution is a clear refutation of democratic principles.
"Representative democracy" is a contradiction in terms, and even if it were not, the tendency for representatives to find themselves snatched up by parties, and then for parties to be dominated by certain ambitious personalities, which themselves use the organs of state to intimidate and to crush dissent, demonstrates the futility of this idea of democracy in practice. What is funny is just how modular this critique is. Who still believes in the abstract and universal human being of liberal theory today?
But reading it from the pen of someone like Maistre, does that worry you?
*
"There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place... But let us not lose courage: there is no chastisement that does not purify; there is no disorder that ETERNAL LOVE does not turn against the principle of evil."
I share with Maistre his impatience for rationalist abstractions, and his delight in rubbing the obvious fact of human evil in the faces of reformers and optimists too wilful to see it. Everything else about him is entirely alien to me — and idiotic: his monarchism, his delight in mystical or absurd argumentation, his naive insistence on the intrinsic value of tradition. Not once did I agree with anything in this text that wasn't merely a mirror of myself. This is an otherwordly psychology; a different genus of mind. Don't mistake convergence for sympathy.
People describe Maistre as cold and dry; frankly I think the opposite. The hand that wrote these words was slick with sweat and flush with hatred. As an insight into the fascist mindset, Maistre is exemplary: his contempt is not dangerous; his hope is....more
Well, I wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks — as long as they have something interWell, I wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks — as long as they have something interesting (or at least well-written) to say. Hence my enjoyment of Schmitt, Nietzsche, Land, and so on. And I'd always heard Mishima was a truly excellent writer. Perhaps it was just the translation, but he wasn't quite my taste. Which is a shame. If you liked it or it is in someway personally important to you, that's cool, maybe we'll hit the weights in the sun together sometime, but I've gotta vent my spleen on this one. Get a load:
“For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death. In order to encounter the universe and still live, he must wear a mask—an oxygen mask.”
I just... can't take this seriously. Every time I glance back up the page at this quote I start sniggering. HE MUST WEAR A MASK..... AN OXYGEN MASK...... If this passage appeared in Cioran I think it wouldn't stand out too much, but like many of Cioran's aphorisms it would clearly be meant to make you chuckle. Mishima, however, is entirely humourless and he wants me to take him entirely seriously. And there just isn't anything here that I am capable of taking seriously. Topics fumbled with include:
- "The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence" - The appropriate response to twink death (stop going outside) - Where the "profoundest depths" of the imagination lie (death apparently) - How important it is to pursue intellectual and physical excellence
I don't know if it's Mishima's influence or just cosmic rightist convergence but I feel like I've heard the following sentiment a thousand times:
“The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero...”
Yes, liberal, indeed. You might think it was stupid and pointless for Mishima to do a terrorism, get laughed at by a bunch of soldiers, disembowel himself and then die painfully to a three-times-botched beheading, but have you considered I have already depicted you as the soy wojak?...more
About two years ago I got really ill and I thought to myself: "Oh fuck, I've fucked it haven't I? My youth has ended! AND I WASTED IT ALL ON PHILOSOPHAbout two years ago I got really ill and I thought to myself: "Oh fuck, I've fucked it haven't I? My youth has ended! AND I WASTED IT ALL ON PHILOSOPHY! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!11"
This precipitated a massive lifestyle change. I ditched cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food. I got a gym membership. I got into combat sports too, and promptly fucked my knees, back, and shoulders. I bulked too hard, had to diet, then resumed bulking. As a weak, sedentary nerd, I was bound to fuck the whole thing up in every way I possibly could, but somewhere along the line I stopped being injured and worn out all the time and instead I was simply healthy, resilient, strong. Turns out exercise is good for you — who knew?
Now let me tell you what happens when you start trying to get healthy. Capital, as the boundless drive for more, recognises something of itself in the budding athlete's drive for self-improvement, but with an important distinction: the human body, like all living things, is destined to age, decay, and die. Capital is not a living thing, but "dead labour", not given to limits, but continually pushing back its own limits in its never-ending expansion. Understandably, then, "be happy with your body" is bad business, and that's why from the day I started working out, the adverts I've been served have been desperate to give me Body Dysmorphic Disorder:
- CAN'T GET IT FULLY UP LATELY? EMBARRASSED THAT YOU AREN'T ABLE TO GET ENTIRELY, COMPLETELY ERECT WHEN YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN? HERE IS A VIDEO OF AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN LOOKING EXASPERATED. EVER WORRY THAT'S HOW AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN WOULD RESPOND TO YOUR NOT ENTIRELY ERECT PENIS?
- HELLO MALE IN THE 25-TO-34 AGE BRACKET. PERHAPS YOU HAVE NOTICED THERE ARE MORE HAIRS IN THE SHOWER LATELY. OH, YOU HAVEN'T? WELL. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO WORRY THAT THERE ARE. ANYWAY. IF YOU GO BALD YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO HAVE SEX WITH ATTRACTIVE WOMEN. DOES THAT CONCERN YOU? HERE IS A VIDEO OF A BALD MAN WHO IS SAD. DO YOU WANT TO BE LIKE HIM?
- HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING TIRED RECENTLY? YOU NEED TESTOSTERONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY. YOU NEED TO INJECT TESTOSTERONE INTO YOUR BODY. YOU NEED TO PAY US APPROXIMATELY ONE-TWELTH OF THE MEDIAN SALARY IN YOUR COUNTRY PER YEAR SO THAT YOU CAN BECOME DEPENDENT ON US FOR A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF EXOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE.
Yeah yeah, impersonal economic forces embodied in our information infrastructure want me to be suicidally depressed so that I'll give them my money. So what? That's nothing new. Sure, but it's interesting when you consider the premise of this book. I like this book, and I like Pope. He seems like a good egg. But when Pope wrote this in 2000, he believed that by getting men to open up about their experiences of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, "bigorexia", etc. that we'd be able to fight back against the pernicious influence that the media has over our body images. The Spinozist position: knowledge is power. If you know you can't get as big as Arnie without steroids, then you'll stop worrying that you're inadequate as a man if you're not as muscular as him, right?
Maybe. But if you look at the state of fitness-related Instagram accounts, or YouTube channels, or online forums dedicated to fitness, you will see almost nothing but negging, infighting, absurd body standards, blatant steroid users pretending to be "natty", open steroid users saying "natties" are wasting their time, constant whining about women (including incredulous rage about how "she dumped me for a guy who can't even bench press his own bodyweight"), people insisting that if you can't deadlift 180kg or more the first time you walk in the gym you are WEAK, LOW T, etc. The sheer rate of innovation in methods of inducing self-hatred in anyone who happens to stumble across this stuff is impressive. And these are people who on some level ought to know better. Never being satisfied with your physique, always feeling small, putting down anyone who is pleased with a relative improvement in themselves — that's just the culture. It makes the stuff Pope describes in this book seem pretty chill, by comparison.
The truth is, this book is outdated. I'm sure the advice he gives for the worst sufferers (get on SSRIs and see a therapist) would work, but in 2000 the assumption was that for most people, knowledge would be enough. These days, knowledge is abundant, but so is rationalisation and propaganda. For many gym-goers the body is no longer just a personal statement, but a moral and political one, too: leftists are weak, effeminate, soy-eating homosexuals who go to therapy and talk about their feelings all the time — you don't want to be that, do you? Pope at one point suggests that part of the explosive growth of the gym and supplements industries in his time had to do with the "threatened masculinity" men were experiencing in response to feminist successes in gaining economic and legal equality for women. I think that thesis is sadly correct. But Pope is a good liberal, and so he thinks that "political" problems in this sense are given to rational disintegration. But political problems are actually libidinal problems, and those run very, very deep indeed.
None of that is to say that anyone who goes to the gym is a fascist, obviously. Otherwise, that's worrying for me. But ultimately every problem and every trend Pope talks about in the book has been accelerated and radicalised by social media, by the growing perfection of advertising technology, by the centrifugal ideological forces driving us all into ever more intense political and libidinal corners. "Talk about your feelings" is no longer an adequate solution on a large-scale. It probably never was.
But enough about the large scale. I was doing some RDLs a few months ago, probably had something like 120kg on the bar, but I'm not sure. This absolutely massive guy comes up to me and asks if he can work in, and of course I say yes. To my amazement he proceeds to do bent over barbell rows, maybe 7 or 8 reps, and I tell him that it was very impressive, because it was.
"No," he said sadly. "I used to be a lot stronger. Before I got injured."...more
“My ills are reticulate; my woes are granular. The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .” — Fiona Apple, Left Alone
Introduction, or, You People Need“My ills are reticulate; my woes are granular. The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .” — Fiona Apple, Left Alone
Introduction, or, You People Need To Get A Grip
Let’s get this out the way: I don’t know Anna Marie Tendler and nor do you, not even if you do read her memoir. But from the very little I’ve learned about her from reading this, I quite like her. I don't think she'd like me, but that's okay. I don't tend to make my reviews about other reviews, but this is a special case. Even my rating (4 stars, when realistically it's more of a 3) is a concession to the reception I've seen the book receive both on GR and online more generally. I'm, quite simply, trying to skew the average. Reading some of these point-missing GR reviews written by vampiric ghouls desperate for juicy deets, I’m reminded of the old words: “I don’t watch heat; I got shooters that’ll watch it for me.” I’m happy to be that shooter, Ms. Tendler.
For years now, we have been seeing calls to “destigmatise mental illness”. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of that future, imagine long-winded and annoying memoirs stamping on a human face — forever. Like all possible futures, this isn't ideal, but what's worse is the seething reaction this memoir seems to solicit. For my part, I truly have no interest in “critiquing” Tendler for her faults and failings, and I’m not sure why anyone does. “But what about the loan-repayment-haircut thing with Theo! She's so ridiculous!” Okay? God forbid a woman do anything, including pen a memoir of middling quality in a time where universal literacy is primarily used for dunking on whatever fragment of the pop culture machine has been favoured by the algorithm “lately”. I’ve even seen one reviewer admit that the only reason they were interested in this book was that they were hoping Tendler would “drag” her ex-husband, but now that they’ve read it, they’re on her ex-husband’s side! HELLO? CRINGE DEPARTMENT?
You People Need To Get A Grip, Part II
To continue this rant a little longer, I think anyone with a spiteful, resentful spirit will have a great time shitting on this book. There is so much to hate Tendler for. I have a comically-large gameshow dartboard mounted on my living room wall, and each segment has a different accusation. My show assistant spins it and I throw my dart with impeccable precision. Its ballistic trajectory carries it squarely into the segment marked: “WHITE WOMEN BE LIKE”. The crowd goes wild. Watch this, dear reader: I make this shit look easy.
“Did you know?” I begin with a malice that will build into an orgasm before I’m through. “That in Chapter 7, Annamarie says that women with consumption were thought to be the epitome of beauty in the 19th Century? She points out that the beauty standard correlates with the symptoms of a deadly disease: ‘impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move.’ But what she neglects to mention is that the fetishism of a pale complexion mobilises classist and racist anxieties for its efficacy. After all, the 19th Century is the time of the Scramble for Africa, the emergence of scientific racism, the radicalisation of beauty standards by way of white supremacy. Of course it is awful that middle and upper class women should have felt such extreme pressure, but consider the working class and colonised women who were excluded to even make the standard possible! And yet she FAILS to mention that! Am I really meant to feel SORRY for women who willingly sold themselves to BAD MEN rather than GET A JOB?”
The crowd are on their feet, and I personally need a new pair of boxers.
If that bit seems unfair, read some of the one-star reviews of this memoir and come back to me. And if it still seems unfair after that, well, then it was just a joke, so calm down! Can’t you take a joke? Why are you acting so crazy right now?
There’s a serious point to be made here, though. Yes, Tendler is oblivious, privileged, WHITE, needs to touch grass, etc., but it is absolutely out of control to bring that kind of “criticism” to bear on a mental health memoir. Nobody made you pick up the memoir subtitled "a memoir" where a typographical flourish on the front cover squeezes the "M" and "E" in "Men" together in an affront to subtlety so explosive it could escape Earth's gravity. “Oh, this mentally ill person seems strange and annoying and lacks self-awareness!” On god? Were you expecting something else? This entire fucking genre started with Michel de Montaigne!
Why Would A Guy Who Mostly Reads Dead Racist German Philosophers Even Read A Book Like This, Anyway?
Fun fact: I don’t even know who John Mulaney is. Apparently he’s funny for a living? Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about The Divorce. I followed Tendler on Instagram a few years ago for like three reasons:
1. I like her photography, especially Dinner in March. Call me basic and tasteless if you want. I’m a Kantian; that ship sailed a long time ago. 2. I like her sincereposting. People should do it more. 3. I think she’s pretty and I like seeing photos of her every now and then.
Then she started posting about a memoir and I thought, “yeah, I’ll read that. That seems right up my alley.” Does that seem strange to you? Just because I’m Enneagram Type 5 and I rant at women about Spinoza on a first date? Well, it shouldn’t. I had Fiona Apple’s ‘The Idler Wheel’ memorised before you had even heard of her (which was after ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’, of course). I was on Tumblr before you. I am more smug than you, I am more pretentious than you, I have reached voids of self-awareness you can’t even imagine. I am capable of dwelling on slights that didn’t even happen — in fact I’m doing it RIGHT NOW. My Spotify playlists are legion, and they follow entire narrative and thematic arcs. All of my friends are lesbians — even the men! Now where’s my BRAT vinyl? Oh, yes, right here. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me. . . .”
About the Whole Misandry Thing
Maybe it’s just because many of my friends declare their hatred of men on a regular basis, but I wasn’t all that fussed whenever Tendler would express her antipathy for my gender. I don’t particularly like men either, not even the ones I want to have sex with, so she was quite relatable to me.
What you have to understand is that Tendler’s “patchy” relationship history is a symptom: of fear, of early childhood distress, of an inappropriate relationship with her emotionally abusive and unstable mother. Her pain and anxiety flows through the machinery of desire and patriarchy and enables couplings of sometimes devastating and sometimes merely disappointing consequences. It’s a shame we hear so little of what Tendler felt or said during her relationships with men, but I think I understand. A turbulent life with no stable familial foundation can feel like a montage, a series of images drawn with great intensity, but with an absence in the centre. On occasion, I imagine, Tendler was nothing other than this absence, this bristling negativity — negation of past heartbreaks, negation of elitist judgments, negation of childhood dependency on an explosive mother and an inept father, negation of pointless and unrewarding jobs, negation of negation itself, the will to reject all true criticism of parental failure, to refuse to sink into that despairing negativity that points the finger at a mother who meant well but fucked up anyway — my heart broke to hear about the birthday where Tendler was spanked merely because she didn't want her photo taken — and to block off that channel so that all this surplus rage could go the only other place it could go: towards the men in her life who were certainly not innocent either.
“There is a whole history before me and a life she thought she’d have—child-free, working in fashion, living in New York City. Instead, she ended up a stay-at-home mom who cooked dinner every night and carted her children to their activities. She never held that against me; instead she made her whole life about my brother and me.”
That last line is complete bullshit, but if you want to blame Tendler for believing that, you’re one sick puppy!
About the Whole Misandry Thing, Part II
Chapter 29's anti-psychiatric feminist rant had me nodding along as a son of Deleuze. A line from her psychiatric assessment courtesy of Dr Samuels reads: “CAUGHT IN A SADOMASOCHISTIC TRANSFERENCE-COUNTERTRANSFERENCE ENACTMENT”. Wow. Much science. Very insight. And Tendler is right to be sceptical of her male psychiatrist who writes a little too dismissively of her aversion to men. Tendler is right to point out how much easier it is for men to disregard the psychological consequences of patriarchy and instead return to the eternal image of the bad mother. Maybe that's even what I'm doing now, but while Tendler furiously rejects Dr Samuel's suggestion that her hatred of men is the product of a displaced rage towards her mother — and that matters far more than any opinion I could form — I do find it interesting that between Tendler’s description of her mother’s abusive behaviours, and Dr Samuel’s guess that Tendler is suppressing rage against maternal figures, there is mostly silence.
As I have said before, “Anna” is often not the name of a person in this memoir, but instead the name of an absence. Platitudes about how difficult life was for her mother aside, I’ve seen very little to indicate any sort of healthy coming-to-terms with her mother's behaviours at all. I don’t believe in sadomasochistic transference enactments because I’m not a hack, but even a hack can pick up on suppressed maternal resentments, and Tendler’s disavowal does not convince me, even if I absolutely agree that the men in her life have done plenty of damage themselves. I'm not angry with her that she doesn't see completely eye-to-eye with me, a random stranger (and a man too!) about the relevant facts of her life, and I admire her bravery in putting this information out there.
Anyway, enough is enough. I was told that after Rayman 2 I'd be cast as a tormented artist who falls for a girl with great, big... eyes. And here I am, still playing the sidekick in a low-budget flick. See ya in Rayman 4!...more
Imagine the inverse utopia: there’s a town where one little kid is just having a fucking awesome time. Bedtime? Whenever they want. Chicken nuggets? HImagine the inverse utopia: there’s a town where one little kid is just having a fucking awesome time. Bedtime? Whenever they want. Chicken nuggets? Hell yeah. School? It’s out for the summer — and summer never ends in this utopia!
Meanwhile, outside the kid’s awesome multi-story mansion, every other living human on Earth is being tortured 24/7. They wake up in cramped conditions, commute through polluted streets to ugly offices illuminated with artificial light, or descend into the depths of the earth to extract materials they will never own, or simply expire slowly in existences of meaningless alienation. For their “entertainment” they bicker pointlessly with one another, poison themselves in great moving crowds, or simply stare into a little box until their eyes redden and sleep takes them unannounced into an empty darkness. Even when death comes, the weight of karmic debt keeps these beings tethered to the earth, chasing them through myriad rebirths, eternally perhaps, save for a chance encounter with the conditions of a possible enlightenment and escape from the whole hellish cycle.
Great works of philosophical pessimism can be broadly divided into two camps: the diabolically funny (think Cioran) or the hyperbolically dark (LigottGreat works of philosophical pessimism can be broadly divided into two camps: the diabolically funny (think Cioran) or the hyperbolically dark (Ligotti, Zapffe). These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but one drive tends to rule a pessimist: spleen in the face of a raw deal, or laughter in defiance of an unwanted existence. This is what gives the genre its therapeutic appeal to me: either way, one can let off some steam when being alive is not alright.
This isn't a great work, or even a pessimistic work, and I suppose it never claims to be one. I just jumped at the title "Notes on Suicide" and bought it without really reading more than a couple pages past the introduction. But this also isn't a bad work, just shallow. Focus isn't sustained for long enough on any topic to make an impression, which is a shame, because Critchley is a good writer, and one gets the impression that we're only getting a small excerpt of thoughts he must have been ruminating on for a while as he wrote from his seclusion by the North Sea.
The book ends with the exhortation (paraphrased): "Don't kill yourself. Love deeply instead!" and this point is made mainly by way of reference to Virginia Woolf. (Details regarding Woolf's demise are noted but quickly brushed over.) I won't lie to you, dear reader, I wasn't going to kill myself even if the book told me to. The author himself rather sheepishly noted in his later preface that he felt he'd rushed the ending but I simply think it was unnecessary. These are "Notes on Suicide", not "Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself", and I'd have much rather hear him expand on the various forms of suicidal consciousness as revealed by the notes that are left behind....more
Came for the portrait of life in a guerilla band, stayed for the cool molotov shotgun diagram.
- - -
A treatise on the importance of discipline and moraCame for the portrait of life in a guerilla band, stayed for the cool molotov shotgun diagram.
- - -
A treatise on the importance of discipline and moral rigour (to the point of asceticism) in establishing a relationship of trust and security between the guerilla band and the rural population on which they depend (and whom they aspire to liberate). This is the sine qua non of guerilla warfare and that makes this work primarily a book of practical ethics, down to its (briefly outlined) dictums around romantic relationships, paying one’s debts, economy in the use of resources (ammunition, energy, people), etc. Combat is glorious but not ecstatic, and violence is regarded with highly tempered enthusiasm: terrorism is proscribed, the enemy is to be treated with humanity (often allowed to escape after a lecture), and the wealthier classes are to be given “bonds of hope”, not merely expropriated. In short, this is a cool-headed and somewhat boring read, which made me enjoy it all the more.
Might elaborate later but that’s about all I have to say for now....more
Written in 1996, we begin with the partition of Europe's old empires into new nation-states after the First World War and chase the dialectic of ethniWritten in 1996, we begin with the partition of Europe's old empires into new nation-states after the First World War and chase the dialectic of ethnic conflict through the rest of the 20th century. The essays on Yugoslavia, Ireland, Ukraine, and the Middle East (or rather the territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire) gripped me most thoroughly, though it's worth reading the essay on Hungary for some eyebrow-raising comments from that essay's author that I can only assume were meant to spark some ethnic conflict of their own.
In brief, the principle of self-determination for all nationalities was not - of course - pursued with terminal rigour. Europe's borders were to be redrawn along ethnic lines, yes, but not at the expense of the interests of the victors, nor in any way that would mean a triumph of the vanquished, nor was the logic of nationalism to be allowed to splinter Europe along every conceivable national claim (that, of course, would and will come later...). The process of national self-determination would not only be arrested by the realities of the international system, but (of course) the Second World War would also counteract the centrifugal forces disintegrating the existing empires and nation-states. In the absence of countervailing forces, the tendency is towards national divorce. The authors of this text expected the trend to continue, if not accelerate, with the collapse of Communism. History since 1996 has undeniably borne this out, though the disintegrative tendency that deterritorializes must compete with the imperial tendency that reterritorializes, as in the contemporary war in Ukraine. That the principle of self-determination has ambiguous validity can be noted through comparison with the far less spectacular suppression of the secession attempt in Catalonia circa 2017.
As a framework for understanding the long history of much of these proceedings, this book is highly stimulating, and easy to recommend....more
I wouldn't normally finish this sort of book. I've read a lot of critical theory, and I have a good nose for bullshit with un petit air français. HoweI wouldn't normally finish this sort of book. I've read a lot of critical theory, and I have a good nose for bullshit with un petit air français. However, a friend of mine recently recommended me a video that intrigued me. The premise, briefly, is that anti-fatness and anti-blackness are the same thing: "If you are anti-black you are also anti-fat, and if you are anti-fat you are also anti-black." This is a striking claim, and the video fails to support it. Wondering if perhaps going to the sources would be more enlightening, I decided to go to the source of the above quote - Da'Shaun Harrison - and read their text on the subject.
As an exercise in the art of highly-targeted rhetoric (this will only work on a particular strain of leftist and repel just about anyone else) it is impressive. As an argument from premises to conclusions, it is embarrassing. Rightists tend to accuse critical theorists of deliberate obfuscation but I don't think this is correct. I believe Harrison is arguing, more or less, in good faith, it's just that when your intellectual diet consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians*, you run a high risk of allowing "if", "perhaps", "always already" and other genre phrases to do all the arguing for you without even noticing.
Take, for example, the absurd statement:
"...for the Black to exist so too must the fat. If we agree that this is the case, then what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black."
I actually don't agree that if we agree that "for the Black to exist so too must the fat" we must therefore agree that " what also makes the Black "criminal" is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black". And Harrison must not think this is entirely self-evident either, because they quickly give the example of "the Two-Ton Contest". The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s. (Harrison claims it was played as recently as the 2000s but I've seen no evidence to support this.*) They played the game by tallying up the weights of defendants when they pled guilty or were found guilty, and the first prosecutor to total two-tons (or 4000 pounds) won. This is, obviously, obscenely cruel and dehumanising, but Harrison mentions it to further cement the idea that fat Black people specifically are under further threat because of their fatness. The irony here is that the direct quote Harrison takes from Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court contradicts this:
Defendants potentially “deserving” of longer sentences received short ones. Conversely, other defendants received harsher sentences not on the basis of their crime or the evidence against them, but according to their weight.
I'd contend the most we can say based on this quote is that innocent fat Black people will have been incentivised to accept "generous" plea deals that were pushed on them only because of their weight and because of this disgusting "game", which is terrible, but what's left out of this account is that non-fat Black people weren't getting a free pass, and when it came to actual sentencing will have been treated far harsher. Here's a direct quote from Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, Van Cleve's own source for discussion of the Two-Ton Contest:
From what he’d heard, “a lot of fat guys [defendants] were getting great deals,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s say a prosecutor’s got a guy who’s 350 pounds. Where the guy normally would have gotten ten years, the prosecutor might offer him a year”—to get a quick and certain conviction. “Skinny guys wouldn’t get offered anything,” Locallo says.
Harrison's theoretical "style" operates through implication, through selective citation and through the inadvertent (I'm sure) use of silence on matters that contradict. Harrison doesn't even think to address this counterpoint either because they aren't aware of it (this wouldn't surprise me) or because they don't think anyone is likely to point this out.
I've spent a while dissecting a claim that takes up about a page in the book, by the way. There's a rhetorical technique called the Gish Gallop: it works by overwhelming your interlocutor with an excessive number of arguments regardless of how good those arguments are (or indeed how relevant they are to the discussion). In its original form the Gallop is essentially used to run down the timer on a formal debate and leave a number of arguments "unanswered" before the end. Obviously you have all the time you want to read a book, but bookish critical theory types are prone to doing this in their texts because it demonstrates their scholarly chops and because they can exploit the tendency most of us have to say "lots of examples therefore true". Checking any one claim can take literally hours, and they come thick and fast. For a few more declarations that are prima facie absurd or require justification that never comes, see also:
"What does it look like to talk about health not as something the Black fat body has been removed from but rather as something created precisely for fat Black people, or the Black fat, to never have access to?"
(A depressing thought!)
"As such, people who are Black, fat, disabled, and/or trans more generally do not have access to Beauty."
(Where Beauty with a capital B refers to the possession of "Desire Capital", which grants one "access, power, and resources." If you cannot think of a single Black/fat/disabled/trans person with "possession" of this sort of "capital" you have been living under a very secluded rock.)
"Health is a framework in which no Black person can ever fit."
(I'm less certain that the sun will rise tomorrow than Harrison is that NO BLACK PERSON CAN EVER BE HEALTHY.)
Sucker punches and curveballs like this fly off the page line after line. There's an acidic nihilism on display here that obviously stems from the traumatic experience of having grown up fat, Black, poor, etc. in the United States. This is an experience I can't relate to, and I'm weary of conducting this review in a stigmatising way (merely disagreeing with the premises of this book is sufficient to be anti-fat and anti-black by Harrison's standards but that's not the standard I'm trying to meet). There needs to be room for discussion of how the way we speak about fatness does harm to fat people, without ceding to claims such as "anyone who still has a vested interest in intentional weight loss... is making the active decision to invest in systemic anti-fatness, anti-Blackness, ableism, misogyny/-noir, and capitalism". I think it's worth being open-minded to the historical "origins" of the way we talk and think about fatness, and certainly if there is a racial inflection to this (within or outside of the US) that's worth investigating too.
But that's not being successfully argued here. This shit just sucks.
-- NOTES:
1) "consists almost entirely of Derrideans and Foucauldians": To be fair, #NotAllDerrideans #NotAllFoucauldians but for every Judith Butler (who is not themselves immune to bullshitting) there are thousands of dreadful imitators.
2) "The Two-Ton Contest was a courtroom "game" prosecutors in Cook County, Illnois played in the 1970s and 1980s." Harrison claims this happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It's not clear where they get this date from. The book they cite, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court, gives the time period as "the 1980s and 1990s", and if you check the book cited in that book, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse, the source who describes the game says it was no longer played when he joined the trial courts as an attorney in 1978, and that he heard about it from "veteran prosecutors". Even assuming he's lying, that still doesn't date the practice to the 1990s, let alone the 2000s....more
BAP’s primary intellectual reference is, as he proudly wears on his sleeve, Nietzsche; though I found myself occasionally thinking “this is a bit likeBAP’s primary intellectual reference is, as he proudly wears on his sleeve, Nietzsche; though I found myself occasionally thinking “this is a bit like Heidegger if he was even more racist and an eighth as clever.” I’m not going to bother criticising this text on the basis that it is racist, misogynistic, etc., since these elements of the text are so immediate and unconcealed that its target audience would take this as a compliment. This book isn’t written to persuade an ultra-leftist like me, and it didn’t. We understand each other well enough, then, and I can criticise only where I think it’s interesting to do so.
Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and avowed will-to-spontaneity concealed a surprising degree of rigour. This isn’t to say every part of his corpus displays a unity of thought, just that within a given one of Nietzsche’s polemics, it is difficult to pull out meaningful internal contradictions. The same cannot be said for imitators of his style, who seem to feel it gives them license to self-contradict and gesture vaguely to some idea of dialectical intrigue or artistic exuberance as an excuse. BAP exemplifies this. One example that amused me early on was the claim that the leftist metaphysics of the soul states that “matter can somehow be corruptly configured, and that we all have disembodied souls with male or female essences”—in other words, that transgender people can actually exist. Not long after, however, BAP claims “there are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians,” and later—more explicitly: “Saddam Hussein was like this: he was a transsexual in his soul.” Trans people are a recurring object of scorn in fascist thought because they represent a remainder that cannot be fully incorporated into the system: in so far as transgender identity can be deployed rhetorically to prop up misogynist binaries (the idea of a spiritual lesbian, of a trans Saddam Hussein) they are legitimate objects of discussion, but in the limit their refusal of supposedly natural laws of the body and their existence as malleable social and physical beings renders them as pure anathema to the fascist. Hence the incoherence, which goes all the way down.
This isn’t a trivial nitpick, either—rather a call to be aware of what is happening here, what is always happening here: to be effective, fascist literature must attempt to be artistically compelling because it cannot be intellectually compelling. It must tap into the primordial purpose of reason: to communicate in compelling language what is first grasped intuitively. (Only Kantians believe reason has any implicit relationship to transcendent truth.) This is also why BAP idolises the instinct, insists upon the intuitive (or demonic) spontaneity of genius, and disparages syllogistic reasoning. Much of this text is self-refuting at the level of reasoned argument, which BAP concludes means only that reason is faulty.
I don’t tend to disagree on that point at least. Reason is an instrument of social conformity and not a tool designed to promote the triumph of truth, except occasionally under conditions of great discipline (in scientific endeavour, in some corporate or governmental planning, etc.)—and even then, reason aims at a historically-contingent, utility-determined truth. But in typical fascist style, this premise is the excuse for BAP to just make shit up until his energy is spent. It would be exhausting to examine every lie in this work, and unnecessary. I’m no fan of Sartre, but his analysis of the antisemitic type remains true: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge… They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”
*
I first tried to read Bronze Age Mindset a few years ago and bounced off within the first few pages. It bored me; it still does. One unfortunate consequence of BAP’s constant callbacks to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Schopenhauer, et al. is that you’re never able to stop comparing him to them, and the comparison is not favourable. BAP’s writing is well-suited to the puffed-up dorks who dream of exalted positions within the new fascist vanguard: shallow, ahistorical, botched “might is right” sloganeering for edgelords. You can imagine what a government run by people like this looks like: not a revival of a “heroic” Bronze Age culture, but a sad continuation of the Leviathan state as it is, perhaps more protectionist, certainly more racist, but nonetheless corporatist, litigious, cramped—with war still won with drones and logistics, with wealth still secured by the abstract transmutation of commodities into money and back again. Capitalism exerts its irresistible force of gravity: BAP’s insistence that a “manly”, piratical age would put an end to the suffocation of industrial society is pure cope. You only need to look at the historical record.
Or you can do it, so to speak, “a priori”. Fascism takes the form of a diseased total state because what it seeks to do is impossible by its own sociology: organise a supposed undifferentiated mass of rabble (i.e. people who broadly just want to be left alone) under the will of an aristocratic band or dictator (i.e. pillagers with delusions of grandeur), instituting military discipline across the social field and securing this order through the use of myth. Perhaps the natural order of the world is slave societies with elites propped up by agricultural surplus (though much archaeological evidence suggests this is not the case); nonetheless, that is not the world we live in. Hence, also, the invocation of a “purgative function” in nature—what BAP calls “Nemesis”, and the rest of us call genocide. There is much fantasising about mass slaughter in this work, and certainly you won’t get anywhere near BAP’s ideal society without killing a lot of people. But since such a task requires mechanisation, mass industry—hence capital—and a fully alienated labour force, it hardly qualifies as “Bronze Age”, just capitalism for sociopaths.
*
In case it’s not clear, I think this book is bad. I think it’s delusional. Its posturing is tiresome, its politics are rancid. It is a shame, then, that this is no impediment to its power. In the end, a critical review of a text like this is pointless because arguments like BAPs operate at the level of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure: community, social context, day-to-day relationships and habits. On the other hand, there is very little organised resistance to fascism in liberal countries, where the assumption seems to be that changing demographics or the mere automatic march of moral reason will solve the problem for us. Perhaps it will, but I have my doubts....more
"I cry out to you, but you do not answer; I stand, and you just look at me. You have turned cruel against me; With your brute power you obstruct me. You l"I cry out to you, but you do not answer; I stand, and you just look at me. You have turned cruel against me; With your brute power you obstruct me. You lift me to be carried off by the wind, And you sweep me away in a tempest." — Job 30:20-22
"I'm announcing loudly: 'I don't know what's going wrong!' I've tried turning it off and then turning it back on!" — Cheekface, No Connection
It was on the way to meet a friend in the city that I was intercepted by a street evangelist. "Are you a believer?" he asked, and before my brain could tell my mouth to shut up, I answered: "No." As a policy I don't debate religion with free-roaming theists, so instead I resigned myself to responding vaguely for however long it took for him to decide he'd started me on a conversion journey. This world, he instructed me, could not have come about by chance. It is too beautiful, too functional, too remarkable to be an accident—gravity, he said, was fine-tuned to one in a billion (whatever that means). He handed me a leaflet for his church and, with one last warning that I would burn in Hell forever if I didn't let the Christian deity into my heart, he said a cheerful goodbye.
At times like that, I think of the Book of Job.
In case you're not familiar, Job is the story of a man "whole in heart and straight of path", a servant of God who (it seems) is uniquely sinless. In the prologue, the heavenly accuser, the Satan, gets permission from God to kill Job's children and destroy his estate as a test of faith. When Job responds to this with superhuman equanimity ("YHWH has given, and YHWH has taken. May the name of YHWH be blessed."), the Satan attacks him personally. Job is plagued with rotting skin and festering boils. His corrupted flesh marks him as an outcast: once a man who lived in honour and affection, Job becomes a social pariah, repellant even to his wife. "Can we accept the good from Elohim and not accept the bad?" says Job, but his patience will not last long. His friends visit him but cannot find anything comforting to say and, after a week of silence, Job throws down the gauntlet. He knows he is innocent, and he knows his suffering is an arbitrary attack from a capricious and amoral God. No less than a meeting with the deity will convince him otherwise. Job's friends try by various means to talk Job down, insisting that God only punishes the wicked, and that there must be some sin Job has committed to earn His ire. The reader knows this is not true, of course, and when God does appear, He neither tells Job about the Satan's test, nor does He offer a consoling explanation of divine justice. Instead He says, more or less, that the strong owe no explanations to the weak, and this whole world is His property to play with as He likes. In the typical reading, this is where Job "repents" (for what exactly?)* and God restores him to twice his previous glory—ten new children and a whole lot of cattle. Job receives this reward for speaking the "truth" about God, while Job’s friends narrowly escape punishment for lying about God’s nature. Bear that in mind; we'll return to it.
Typical Christian readings of this tale cast Job as a man of faith* and patience, or they argue he is correctly put in his place for demanding God explain His unprovoked attack on Job's life and honour. God's plan is unknowable, these readings say, and His boastful, contemptuous ranting at the close of the book demonstrates just how beyond our understanding He is. We can rest assured, however, that His designs are ultimately benevolent: the wicked will not prosper in the next life, and the just will repose in unending happiness with well-formed souls. In so far as this reading can be ascribed to the text, it can only be done by somebody who has never truly read Job. You see, Job's friends offer the "God is good" boilerplate and are consequently threatened with an unseemly fate. That’s rather funny, but this moment troubles me, and it has for a long time. If God valued only meek obedience, Job's honesty would earn him no quarter, let alone a reward. His friends, in the meantime, would not have their lives threatened, despite their mistaken grasp of God's motivations. On the other hand, Job's honesty seems to offend God—how many people does He feel the need to explain himself to? How many people who preach his benevolence does He feel the need to punish? If Job is so insignificant, why does God regard him with such pride in the prologue? I don't have answers here, only questions.
*
If Job is a theodicy, it is a remarkably honest one. "Theodicy" means justification, or vindication, of God. Theodicies address the so-called "problem" of evil, and seek to explain why a just God would set this globe spinning and populate it only to let its inhabitants suffer. A typically facile theodicy is the rationalism of Leibniz, who took as his starting point the view that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and infinitely good, so by definition this world must be the best of all possible worlds. This presupposes a human conception of "good" that is nowhere in Job, which instead presents a God who is not concerned with an abstract "good", but personal right, a mastery that will not recognize the moral claims of "dust and ashes"—human beings. In a certain sense, Job is really an anti-theodicy: God needs no vindication from us. To understand where God is coming from, you need only imagine what would happen if an ant submitted a letter of complaint to a construction company for destroying its nest. Morality does not meaningfully operate when such disparities of power, right, and interest are present. What theodicies would the non-human inhabitants of the natural world write? And how miserable would they make us to read?
This brings me back to the street evangelist. He, like many other (but by no means all) religious people, believes in a version of God whose contradictions amount to impossibility. This benevolent being manufactured a world so complicated that its very existence attests to His goodness. He will forgive any sin, pardon any transgression. But in His infinite moral wisdom, He sees no problem in subjecting his creations to infinite torment if they simply fail to believe in Him. This doesn't sound like a relationship of respect or care; it sounds like a relationship of despotic power. One that Job—because of, and not in spite of, his fundamental moral and intellectual decency—was happy to denounce to the face of the deity.
All relationships of despotic power have rationalisations, vindications, dogmatic defenses. But Job is ultimately rewarded for fighting* even as he correctly grasped the futility of his case. I wonder if there is some lesson that can be taken from this.
-- NOTES --
(1) A quick note on Job's "repentance"—Greenstein, the translator, renders Job's final lines as: "That is why I am fed up; I take pity on "dust and ashes!" (emphasis mine). After hearing God belittle him as an insignificant nothing from a species of dubious value and little interest, Job—far from repenting—expresses defiance. God is pitiless; Job knows this from hard experience. He will not be cowed into expressing a view of God that is at odds with His behaviour. It seems that this may be what earns Job his reward.
(2) Certainly it is interesting that Job does not abandon a belief in God. What he does is far more radical, denouncing God as being uninterested in human standards of justice, if not an actual sadist (see some of Job’s more impassioned rants about the injustice of being born).
(3) There's something troubling in this reading in that it’s the deity he challenges who rewards him. Hard to imagine an oil company rewarding you for [REDACTED], for example....more
““‘To sum up then,” she said, “love is the desire to have the good forever.’”” – Plato, Symposium
“Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul:““‘To sum up then,” she said, “love is the desire to have the good forever.’”” – Plato, Symposium
“Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish.” – D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod
If there is something the Platonic eye cannot petrify, a process it cannot transform into a monstrous reflection of crystalline “reason”, then I haven’t found it. Love, to Plato, is nothing more than the narcissistic flower of mortality: “Why is reproduction the object of love?” Diotima asks Socrates. “Because reproduction is the closest mortals can come to being permanently alive and immortal.” There are several bones to pick with this claim, but what vexed me most was the suggestion that value attends only to that which can participate in the eternal, and that this calculation is the motor of one of the most fundamental human drives. I prefer the formulation of Deleuze and Guattari: “We always make love with worlds. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to masses and large aggregates.”* The “object” of love is not the “Good”, the “Beautiful”, infinity, eternity, or any of the other lifeless Platonic phantasms. Love knows nothing of eternity. Only now, and now, and now. And the experience of love is not that of gazing into some abstract structure, one that just so happens to have articulated itself in this person or this text. In love, one is set in motion; one explores a world.
I’d argue the only person in this dialogue who represents a genuine experience of love is Alcibiades, who drunkenly crashes the party and finds Socrates there. Eschewing the demand to talk about love in the abstract, Alcibiades elects instead to discuss Socrates. In the speech that follows, Alcibiades reveals that he has an unrequited romantic and sexual attraction to Socrates, who is not at all interested in using this to “gratify” himself. Instead, he wishes to give Alcibiades moral instruction. For Plato, this section serves a political as well as a didactic function: Socrates was condemned to death (sort of*) for corrupting the youth of Athens. Plato, through Alcibiades, instead casts Socrates as a chaste and selfless teacher, someone whose moral influence on young men could only be positive. The speech is also an attempt to prove the truth of Socrates’ perspective on love. Socrates–who understands love essentially as reproductive and utilitarian–is composed and always sober. Alcibiades, meanwhile, is drunk, passionate. He embarasses himself in front of everybody. You are meant to admire Socrates and feel his example is worth following, but I felt that Alcibiades is the only remotely human person to feature in this story. This is appropriate, since ethical Platonism is fit only for machines. Nietzsche: “The most blinding light of day: reason at any price; life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, another kind of disease—and by no means a return to "virtue," to "health," and to happiness.”*
The other speeches and myths that feature in the Symposium exist, essentially, so that Socrates can dismiss them all as aesthetic lies. Love, to Plato, is not revealed by stories about divided humans searching for their other halves, or speculation about an unstoppable army composed entirely of lovers. Certainly the speech givers are sophists, and their idealised visions of love grate. The critical issue is the ignorance of transience: those lovers in that fantastical army may find their successes disappear when relationships fray; those humans who long to be reattached to their other halves may find the humans they later become long only for distance. To her credit, Diotima notes that a person is reborn many times over a supposedly single life: “Although he is called the same person, he never has the same constituents… This applies not only to the body but also to the mind.” But then what, exactly, participates in immortality in the act of reproduction? Plato’s immortal lover is a fleeting thing, a moment trying to become an eternity. This dialogue reeks of the fear of impermanence. “It reeks of the great death and the little ego.”*
Nevertheless, this text is sometimes beautiful, entertaining, funny, and brief enough to be worth reading to see whether any of Plato’s characters strike a chord with you. Still, love is better understood by participating in it than by imprisoning it in a fixed idea. Better to be Alcibiades than Socrates.
(2) Robin Wakefield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths. Wakefield argues that Socrates’ trial and execution was actually linked to his antidemocratic politics and his actions during the Peloponnesian War. “Corrupting the youth” seems to be a common, sufficiently vague accusation for the prosecution to use to secure Socrates’ condemnation–not, indeed, the actual reason this ancient Ben Shapiro was forced to drink hemlock.
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