Asad Haider passed away on December 4, 2025. As of writing, it is the end of January. It has been difficult for me to write about Asad’s passing. It is difficult for several reasons, but one reason is the depth by which his passing has struck me. Asad and I were friends certainly, but Asad had older, dearer friends. And our friendship was marked by the slight awkwardness that lingers between teacher and student. Asad, in his characteristically humble and disarming way, would have dismissed this, not as false but as irrelevant.

It has been difficult for me write about Asad’s passing for another reason: because the effect it had on me does not seem to be equivalent to our friendship. There is a self-indulgent guilt complex here, feeling bad about feeling bad to ensure one continues to feel bad. Yet there is a reality to it. Old friends and family can and should pour out tributes, but I did not know Asad when he was in grad school. I did not organise with Asad or grow up with him or sit on any editorial collective with him. I took a class with him, sent him dozens of emails, read some books with him, interviewed him, and once or twice or thrice drank a million beers with him.

What has become apparent from the tributes that have emerged since he passed is that he had remarkable influence on contemporary leftists and thinkers. Those who knew him only virtually, via emails and Zoom, those who only knew his name or reached out with an email; and those who only knew him via his writings—we all seem to be experiencing one form of grief or another. One of the striking things about Asad was his sheer generosity. I had a lengthy email correspondence with him, he would read articles and pitches, suggest edits, point me in useful directions. In return I had very little editorial advice to offer him.

This was not pure altruism; Asad and I shared an interest in the works of Lazarus, the thinker who preoccupied him so much in the final years of his life. Yet I was the measly graduate student, who did not bare any fruit in pursuing a PhD. It sometimes felt absurd we were friends at all: I knew little about the history of organizing and radical politics in the US; my Marx was patchy, my Althusser even more patchy. Even though it seemed like Asad had known everything forever, he seemed to be able to recall his own days of ignorance and treated others with an extraordinary amount of grace.

This did not mean he minced words. If he was feeling nice, he would calmly suggest an avenue of investigation for you. If he was agitated, he would urge one upon you. Attending a talk at Columbia University by Etienne Balibar on Reading Capital I asked Asad afterwards what he had thought of the introductory speaker, one whose name I’ll leave out of this remembrance. Asad exploded: “that man was complete charlatan. Nothing he said about Reading Capital was true.”

What, I think, allowed Asad and I to become friends was that we shared an idea that we needed to think through radical politics more deeply. That we needed to turn to the much-maligned heterodox figures of Marxism: Althusser, Badiou, Lazarus. In 2020, amidst the pandemic, I joined a reading group Asad had started precisely to seriously study these figures. That reading group never got to Lazarus, but we read about a decade’s worth of Althusser, and then about a decade’s worth of Badiou’s writing.

What was it that made Lazarus appealing to Asad’s work? He had always remained clear eyed about the toll of organizing and was fond of invoking the endless process of radical meetings, where everyone gets a turn to speak through the most convoluted systems of proceduralism imaginable. Furthermore, Asad’s work on racial politics and the Black Panther Party in the US had led him to a renewed interest in the difficulties of emancipatory politics. In an earlier edition of Mistaken Identity, before they removed Trump from the subtitle, there is no mention of Lazarus. Yet you can hear the later formulations there, in embryonic form, in these writings. In his discussion of Black nationalism and Amiri Baraka’s political journey—which amazingly, impossibly, begins with a discussion of Rachel Dolezal and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain—he notes that the “almost paradoxical result of [Black] nationalism’s political victories was the incorporation of its parallel institutions into a more multi-coloured mainstream.” In this sentence there is a hint, however slight, that success and failure may not be the most pertinent categories to understanding the history of radical politics.

It would be easy in thinking through the collapse of Black nationalism or the agony of DSA meetings to revert to an account of insufficient Marxist discipline and theory. Our mistakes are errors in practice or errors in analysing the conjuncture. The descent into proceduralism of various activist groups is part of a failure to produce the correct kind of organization. Such solutions have been offered time and time again, after anything perceived as a failure. Ernest Mandel, writing after May 68, saw the failures of the student movement to induce a truly communist France as the surest sign that political action without a party is impossible. Never mind, then, that the French Communist Party were precisely the ones that bargained with De Gaulle to restore order to the streets.

Asad was after a different explanation of the history of radical movements and the corresponding intellectual output. He was, and this is part of the generosity that defined his personality, willing to concede that often these movements did win. Communist states were established, Black nationalism did shift racial politics in the United States in a more positive direction, and May 68 did nearly bring France to a halt. If the criteria for success is final and total victory, then all our movements will be, by necessity, a failure until they succeed. And this will make our history impossible to live and to enact.

There was a further problem. To be a radical is to attempt to see things from the viewpoint of emancipation. Liberals have rights, conservatives have law and order, but the left has emancipation. And if emancipation is to mean anything, it must be self-emancipation. It is a truism that if one is to think emancipation one must necessarily invoke domination. In this framework the first step to emancipatory politics is to think differently, to decide to do something about the situation. If that first step is to be properly part of an emancipatory politics that it must be one generated by the intellect and thought of people to imagine otherwise, to obtain a prescriptive relationship with reality. In other words, for there to be emancipatory politics, it must be the case that people think.

This phrase, “people think”, belongs to Lazarus. It is fundamental to his thought. To defend this proposition without lapsing into elitist discourse, without returning to the paradox of emancipation, requires a complex intellectual apparatus which Lazarus erects in his Anthropology of the Name. For Lazarus politics is singular, sequential, and rare. People think is a proposition that must be understood properly in interiority, subjectively and away from the functions of the state. Emancipatory politics proceeds in what he calls modes that come to lapse leaving behind the emancipatory potential of a particular moment of people’s thought.

Lazarus is difficult, and one thing Asad did for us was attempt to bring his concepts and ideas into our discourse. His essays like On Depoliticization and Socialists Think are attempts to use Lazarus without descending into the arcana of his theoretical apparatus. Yet it is clear Asad had been working with this problematic for a long time. As his discussion of Black Nationalism and Baraka continues in Mistaken Identity:

Nationalism did, at one time, appear as a potentially revolutionary ideology. The construction of new parallel institutions mobilized a general antagonism against a social structure based on the systematic exclusion of black people. The possibility of overcoming the marginalization of the black working class provided an objective, albeit tenuous, basis for the unity between the intellectual leadership and the grassroots base. But the mainstream incorporation of the parallel institutions, marked by the electoral success of the black elite, demonstrated the capacity of the capitalist state to absorb the nationalist challenge.

There is a lot of language here Asad would have most likely abandoned, including the final lines about capitalist absorption of the nationalist challenge. Yet the tenor of the above quote, in which a movement is successful but for a time, is the animating impulse of Lazarus’ work. Here Asad is attuned to something close to Lazarus’ logic of emancipation and lapsing modes. This is an attempt to reorient his own work, yes, but it is also an attempt to reorient his fellow radicals, to get past debates about old politics and go in search of new modes of politics.

In his eulogy for Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida talks at length about their intellectual friendship. It is strange text to read, for Deleuze and Derrida seem to share little else but the letter ‘D’ and the epithet ‘post structuralist’. Yet in this eulogy Derrida confesses how much he learnt from Deleuze. He learnt from reading Deleuze, from talking to Deleuze, from being with Deleuze. And after Derrida accounts for all he has gained from Deleuze and the nature of their relationship he tells us that now he will “wander all alone in this long conversation we were supposed to have together.” Asad Haider was the greatest and most generous communist of his generation. In his passing we have all felt, regardless of distance, this sense that we will suddenly have to wander all alone. This explains, in part, the collective shock. We have lost a fellow traveler and a guiding light. We still live in an era where we are confronting the closure of the party-form, radical politics at the state level and indeed many other experiments in doing something about the situation. We are still in search of new modes of politics. This confrontation and this search we must now do with what Asad has bequeathed to us, for he can no longer wander alongside us. We would, however, do his memory an injustice to deny ourselves our own capacity for invention and thought.

This disadvantages those whose work appears in this desolate December; these writings are condemned to oblivion. December: the month of silence, of holy nights.

Personally, this irks me. This year I had 7 pieces come out (pretty good for a guy with a full-time job) and 5 of them came out in November and December (I had a heroic run wherein these 5 pieces were all published in the space of four weeks).

It also causes problems for the workhorse magazines and publications, which don’t seem to take time off. This year saw the rise of Ross Barkan and Lou Bahet’s The Metropolitan Review, which seems to be able to publish something almost every day. That’s dedication – and where do all these writers come from? – but I don’t think any of their December pieces will make an end-of-year list this year or next. Except for mine, of course, because I am about to tell you about all the things I published this year, including my essay for The Metropolitan Review, which came out on December 11th.

What awaits below, however, is not just a self-indulgent list of my publications. Below you will also find my favourite reads of the year, including both books and articles, and perhaps a reflection or two on 2025. Sure, it was the first year of the second Trump presidency (three more years), but more importantly my first full year of gainful employment. I’m amazed I had time to read or write at all…

Shit I Wrote:

1. The Twice Examined Life – On Paul Valery (Exit Only)

After am absurdly productive 2024, wherein I wrote 12 essays in 12 months, this year things began at a halt. I didn’t get anything off until April, when I managed a brief review of Paul Valery’s Monsieur Teste, his only work of fiction, an odd little book about a philosopher everyone loves and praises but remains ill at ease. This was a good chance to use substack’s image insertion feature to not quote poems but present them. In discussions of poets like Mallarme actually seeing the poem really aids the analysis.

Monsieur Teste invokes the tension between philosophy and poetry, the old question of how the artist relates to the truth. Depends on who you ask, but make sure you ask someone who knows the history of poetry, or you will get an awfully annoying answer. For Valery there is no easy distinction; man carries both truth and poetry in his heart.

2. Mediation without History – On Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy (Hobbyhorse)

Several months passed. Then in August, I published an essay on Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy over at the Hobbyhorse. Yes, the book had been out for a while, and yes, I did think it was funny to publish an essay on a book called immediacy so late, but also I found Kornbluh’s analysis to be deeply misguided. You can read the piece in full yourself, but my basic position is this: American scholars love doing a little bit where they’re like “the French have abandoned Marx and it is up to us, Americans (?!?!) to restore Marxism to its true and mostly Hegelian roots.” Somehow our science of history, our historical materialism, is losing that historic edge. Look at the process a little more and you’ll see several historic reasons that inspire the shift in analysis and the emergence of post-Marxism in Europe. But history has never been Americans strong suit, eh?

The Hobbyhorse

Mediation Without History

I’m a little late to the party. It’s been well over a year since Anna Kornbluh’s book Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism was released. Perhaps this is what she wants after all, it must have been a disorienting experience for an author of a book called ‘immediacy’ to receive so much instant praise. As Kornbluh would be the first to admit, a …

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a year ago · 32 likes · 4 comments · Duncan Stuart

3. Marxism as Egalitarian Ethos (Negation Magazine)

Over at Negation Magazine, I wrote 10,000 words about Marxism, Everyday Resistance and the Rarity of Politics Thesis. All capitalized because they are all big name IDEAS. It’s long but I think it is good and you should read it. Of course I do, I wrote it. Again, in short: from Marxism one derives both the idea of everyday politics and resistance (via Henri Lefebvre) and also something called the rarity of politics thesis. You can find this idea somewhat in Lenin and even CLR James, but it appears strongly in French Marxism via Badiou, Ranciere and Lazarus. All it states is that politics, politics that effects some major change, is rare. These ideas make opposite claims – in everyday life politics occurs all the time; in the rarity of politics thesis it almost never occurs! Are the views reconcilable, how do they relate to the same tradition, what are we to make of this gap? And what does it tell us about people’s capacity?

4. The Death of John Ashberry (The Exacting Clam)

Once I had a dream. I dreamt of John Ashberry. Awaking in a cold sweat I rushed to my laptop and wrote down this dream in a lush and vibrant prose poem. Half a decade later, it still having been the only remotely good poem I ever wrote, I sent it to the Dada issue of the Exacting Clam. They obliged and published my insanity. Image below so you can read it and enjoy it.

5. The Pits of Inspiration (A Common Well Journal)

I love my friend Hank. And my friend Hank has restarted his old journal, A Common Well (not to be confused with Commonweal, the left wing Christian magazine). As part of the revamped and reamped journal, Hank is publishing little missives on the website, writers on writing. I contributed to the first round of these. In my short piece I argue that inspiration is not the act of creating something – the house of fiction, if you want – but is more like searching in a pit for a half remembered idea. In 1500 words I somehow invoke God, Henry James, Gerald Murnane, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Andrey Platonov. I removed, from earlier drafts, mentions of Giorgio Agamben and Thomas Aquinas.

6. On the 50^th Anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s Death (Exit Only)

On December 4^th, 1975 Hannah Arendt died. On December 4^th, 2025 it marked 50 years of Arendt being dead. I took the chance to revisit some of the dumber aspects of the “Is it fascism yet” debate that emerged during Trump’s first term. Samuel Moyn and Corey Robyn had I think this silly idea that there is this thing called fascism with certain characteristics, and you hold up what is happening and ask if it matches the criteria. This all sounds rational, and they benefited from the aesthetics of reasonableness. However, this kind of missed the point of all those people invoking Arendt back in 2016. See the whole point of Arendt’s analysis of fascism is that something unforeseen emerged, and that politics requires a certain vigilance in age where oue old modes of thinking and moralizing have been disrupted. The price of this vigilance and this awareness of the new as fundamental to politics is a certain degree of what might appear to be hysteria. I felt a missed opportunity here to invoked Junger’s lovely novel On the Marble Cliffs, which I wrote about in 2023, a book about being sealed in your ivory tower and waiting until it is too late to act because you are a reasonable man of science and weigh all the evidence equally.

7. The Miraculous and Miserable City (Metropolitan Review)

This year marked 100 years of one of my favourite novels: John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. I took the chance to write about it for the Metropolitan Review, and used this chance to also write about the intertwined history of urbanism and literary modernism. I chart the evolution of these two not through writers like Charles Baudelaire or Charles Dickens (a history that is as true as it is well trodden) but across the evolving work of three poets whose work is neglected these days: James Thomson, Emile Verhaeren and Mario de Andrade. Their work charts an evolving literary sensibility that tries to increasingly capture modern urban life. Along the way I discuss Robert Walser, Thomas Mann and James Joyce, all before finally getting to John Dos Passos’ masterpiece. I’m happy with this one, but unfortunately it lacks a certain juice: I didn’t pull anywhere near the hundreds or sometimes thousands of likes the Metropolitan Review sometimes gets on their articles. Never mind quantity versus quality, sometimes quantity transforms into quality. Or vice versa. Should have written about the male loneliness epidemic instead. Anyway, give it a read; it has been described as “good overall.”

The Metropolitan Review

The Miraculous and Miserable City

At the turn of the 20th century, the city became a source of concern, something to study, something to ponder. On the back of the Industrial Revolution and the concurrent disappearance of older, more rural forms of life, millions of people in what is called “The West” began to move to urban centers. W…

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9 months ago · 59 likes · 17 comments · Duncan Stuart and The Metropolitan Review

Shit I Read:

Whole Ass Books I Read:

I have made reading books my whole personality. I care about nothing else. I don’t listen to music. I don’t know what a Pokemon or an Elden Lord is. When I talk to other people I look at my feet. I can’t name any sports teams. Luckily I am really good at this fundamental skill everyone use to learn in elementary school.

I read like 36 books this year (not bad for a guy with a full-time job) but some of them were like really long. Some people read no books in a year. Some people read 200. Those people are lying to you. Anyway, here are my six favourites, because six makes a nice graphic.

1. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann

I read the magnificent magisterial The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann mainly amongst my group of mates. I.e. I was in a reading group. I was the last to finish the book, early this year (we began November 2024). It really is fantastic, although I do admit you have to get into it. This is not a quick Sunday afternoon read. The book has its own temporality, as does life in the sanatorium where our hero, Hans Castrop, goes to visit and ends up staying. A beautiful allegory for European life pre WWI, a stunning meditation on the concept of wellness and living, and a lovely book about family (yes I’m being serious). I have never read a book so long (700 pages!) where I felt the length was so justified, every page and digression worth it. Banger. Must Read. 10/10. Five Michelin Stars.

2. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Doblin

This one has been on my reading list ever since, in my first year of university, I pulled a copy of Kathleen L. Komar’s Chaos and Pattern: Multilinear Novels by Dos Passos, Doblin, Faulkner and Koeppen off the library shelves and read it instead of doing my physics homework. That monograph analysed Manhattan Transfer, Berlin Alexanderplatz, As I Lay Dying and Pigeons on the Grass. That was over a decade ago, and I only have the Koeppen (Pigeons on the Grass) left to read. Anyway, point is I’ve being meaning to read this one for a long, long time. It is stupendous. Yes, it’s confusing, yes it’s chaotic, yes it’s upsetting. It is a wonderful novel about the world’s biggest moron who you can’t help but feel bad for (yes yes he is a violent misogynist, have you guys ever read a book called Lolita?). A masterpiece of humanist, socialist (yes!) and modernist writing, black and grey and bleak and hilarious.

One time, whilst in a bar, I spotted a lonely hipster reading this book. I asked him how it was going, he said “I’m not sure it’s for me.” I encouraged him to keep going, and if you pick this up and struggle I offer you the same advice: more courage!

Also this year I read one (1) Alfred Doblin short story called The Sailboat Ride and it was the best thing I’ve ever read.

3. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

I have owned my copy of The Sound and the Fury for a decade. In a good example of the wisdom of the principle ot never get rid of a book, when I finally did read it I loved it. A stunning masterpiece, deeply modernist, deeply experimental and deeply humane. Indeed I would go so far as to say for Faulkner the humanism and the experimental modernism are inseparable; all thought can be rendered. People say Faulkner is about evil, but Faulkner is about alterity. I also read As I Lay Dying around the same time but The Sound and the Fury is without a doubt the superior novel.

4. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

He might be the best. Coetzee, I mean. Disgrace is so good. From the beginning there is just an all encompassing atmosphere of disaster. Everything, even that scene, unfolds in slow motion. Lurid David Lurie is such a great depiction of an educated middle-class shithead, and the intractability of his whole situation(s) is made so palpable. The final scene, where he ascends the hill and looks over the countryside is a really wonderful moment. In a sense nothing happens, but here Coetzee releases all the tension that the whole book has held. He places us, the readers, back on the shelf, just as we will do with his book when we close it. Also contains, as always, my absolute favourite Coetzee motif: old people having uncomfortable sex.

5. Magnetic Point – Ryszard Krynicki

Magnetic Point is a collection of poems from across the oeuvre of polish poet Ryszard Krynicki. I came across it when my friend Bailey left his Paris Review tote bag behind at a party. I started reading the books in his bag, which included Magnetic Point. I did return his bag to him, and got myself a copy of Magnetic Point, which I love. Krynicki’s poetry is a difficult but compelling, and reminds me a little of Paul Celan. While the holocaust hangs over Krynicki’s work – he was born in a Nazi labour camp in Austria in 1943 – it is the oppression of communist Poland that provides the friction that gives his work its impetus. In “The World Still Exists” he speaks of proceeding along the “street’s ultraleftist side”. He is a poet I have been looking for, and one whom only by chance did I find.

6. The Family of Pascual Duarte - Camilo Jose Cela

Picture this: Albert Camus’ The Stranger but it didn’t suck shit. The Stranger is alright, but I always felt, even has a rosy cheeked fifteen year old, that our amoral indifferent Meursault kind of does give a shit. Not so for Pascual Duarte, a complete and utter bastard. Pascual is our narrator and oppose to Meursault’s feigned indifference bordering on confusion (ah no the sun was bright now I killed a man) Pascual is direct, intentional and indifferent. Meursault cowers in the corner and this already suggests a conscious. Pascual can’t wait to kill those motherfuckers who put their hands on his sister. Only he is allowed to do that. Cela’s prose style, at least in the translation I read, is superb and the book is short and shocking. As far I as can tell Cela was somewhat of bastard himself, so no surprise he wrote such a good one.

Whole Ass Articles I Read:

The first article I read this year that I really loved was Aziz Rana’s Constitutional Collapse in The New Left Review. It’s a really wonderful essay, and make clear that all this talk of constitutional crisis has a long history. There were always weaknesses in the system, but we had to get here. This question – how did we get here? – Rana explicitly asks. The Cold War helped bring disparate elements of the American political spectrum together and kept more extreme racist positions out of play. Yes you wanted to be an anti-communist American capitalist, but you didn’t want to be a right wing nut job. If you had unsavoury views about non-whites in America, these had to be tampered by the constitution; ‘they’ were at least entitled to their civil liberties. The end of the cold war allowed those fringe position to come back in:

Yet once the USSR was gone, we therefore witnessed the gradual emergence of a reactionary right willing to defect systematically from the existing economic and racial compact. Strategically, the right became focused on using the instruments of minority rule in the existing constitutional order to project power, regardless of whether it represented a popular majority.

The Cleveland Review of Books this year had published plenty of bangers and had several great issue launches. They had two essays that really stood out to me. The first, by Cobi Powell, was his review of the new Thomas Pynchon book, Shadow Ticket. Powell was even handed about a Pynchon book on which the consensus seems to be that it is just alright. Though expecting Pynchon the elder to reach the heights of Gravity’s Rainbow or V. is perhaps to expect too much. However, Powell has the best analysis of the politics of the book I’ve seen so far, making his piece well worth the read.

The second stunner CRB published this year must be Peter Huhne’s essay on Henry James. Looking at the new Peter Brooks book on James as well as NYRB classics’ publication of his essays, Huhne makes good on an incisive insight. The prefaces and forwards James wrote to his own novels are their own little masterpieces of writing, where James lays out his most profound ideas (the term ‘house of fiction’ comes from the start of A Portrait of a Lady!), and yet our most serious collection of James’ writings on literature contains none of these? Assembled by a deep and serious scholar of James these essay were not, protests Peter! The style is wonderful, the point deep and profound. The best writing does not always appear in the obvious places. Give frontmatter a chance!

Joseph Albernaz, if he was from Boston, would be described by his friends as ‘wicked smart’. He’s not from Boston, however. In fact I have no idea where he’s from. He teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia and has a cool book on romanticism called Common Measures. He wrote a pretty damning review of the latest Charles Taylor book not that long ago. But this year his essay on poet Sean Bonney, time and revolution appeared at Alienocene, which is a journal started by people who definitely take too many psychedelics. Albernaz uses Bonney’s poetry as jumping off point to explored how time, the history of the calendar, revolution and death all fit together and fall apart. Albernaz’s essay bears the strange title “Notes on Cleft Calendrics”, but it is well worth your time (ha).

There was a lot of bullshit this year. My favourite piece of bullshit this year was when Sam Kriss just straight made up a guy called Lord Humungus, a figure of terrifying strength and brutality that rides across England searching for fuel for his war bikes. He appears in a genuinely serious piece about the absurdity of the UK’s declaration that the group Palestinian Action is a terrorist organisation and the limits of the law, whose excellent points are not diminished by the entirely fictional story of Lord Humungus.

Australian scholar Gregory Marks loves Hegel. I can’t really hold that against him, although I hold it against almost everyone else. That’s because Marks is great writer and a deeply insightful young intellectual. His essay on Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work and the tale of Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight is a really wonderful piece of writing. The essay, entitled “The Law of Shame” pulls out the threads of comedy and humiliation that lie within Arthurian legend. Not so much against Rose but in supplement to her, Marks offers the tale of Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight, a story the ends not so much with Sir Gaiwan’s tragic defeat but his humorous humiliation. Rose’s analysis of Arthurian legend is meant to emphasize the tragedy of law and right: when Guenevere and Lancelot’s infidelity is discovered Sir Arthur can either forgive them and fail as a king, or follow the law which calls for their execution and fail them as friends. Rose cautions us: whatever the king does, he must be sad. Yet for Marks Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight tells us a different story about what binds us together, pulled from the very same mythos:

Seeing his shame, the other knights laugh, not in mockery but in recognition of their own folly. Every one of them is bound by duties the source of which they do not know and with ends they cannot realise. The virtue that emerges in this broken middle between knowing the good and recognising that we err is humility, the human passion of which is shame. Whereas the tragic hero is perfected in death and the realisation of their fate, Gawain is perfected in life and the recognition of his shame, by which this erring “I” confesses and is absolved in the “I that is We and the We that is I” of the self-conscious collective. In memory of this lesson, the knights take the green sash as their emblem; a reminder against the follies of reason’s perfect laws and of their common humiliation.

Mathis Fuelling’s essay in Negation Magazine on Kohei Saito and degrowth communism was really excellent. In the end Fuelling makes a really simple but important point: so much of degrowth communism and ecological Marxism more broadly has us shifting through notebooks and the one hundred and fifteenth volume of the Gesamtausagbe to find the one place Marx made a remark about the soil. Of course, Marx is sensitive to ecological concerns, but this tendency towards Marxology as redemption tires Fuelling as much, it appears, as it tires me.

I wrote a missive this year for A Common Well Journal, but so did its editor Hank K. Jost. He’s not inclined towards the essay, Hank is 100% a fiction guy. Yet this essay, but how much he hates writing essays is rather spectacular, and ends with a 1,000 word sentence.

Amia Srinivasan just published, like it really just came out, an essay on psychoanalysis over at the LRB. She looks carefully at the intersection between psychoanalysis and politics. Psychoanalysis, historically, emerges as a turn away from politics: Freud’s project begins in earnest only once reactionary forces come back into power in Vienna. Srinivasan’s breadth of references is impressive, and she takes as her starting point the obvious genocide in Gaza as well as the appearance of Parapraxis magazine, the leading edge of psychoanalytic prose. Indeed she opens with a quote from Jake Romm from one his 2024 essay in Parapraxis, Elements of Antisemitism. Romm wrote another favourite essay of mine this year. His essay Against the Wound (LARB) charts a short but poignant excursion through atrocity, art history and the meaning of death. Both Srinivasan and Romm have Gaza in mind as the impetus of their writing. Yet both pieces represent a decisive shift in writing about Gaza. I have been reading less about these events, partly due to my own choices, partly due to the algorithm. Yet I cannot help but feel that we are also settling into the world where this has happened. Previous essays has a sense of urgency, a mood dominant by shock. Both Srinivasan and Romm are more reflective, though Romm’s anger is palable as always. Both are asking ‘what now, what next’, whether they realise it or not. It is not surprising that both end thier pieces looking forward. Srinivasan closes her essay by suggesting a somewhat forced link between organising and the talking cure, closing with a sense of here’s how we can get from psychoanalysis back to politics. Romm ends his essay with a strange scene where he finds himself in a museum during a school trip, ducking and weaving between hordes for children, potent symbols of the future, indifferent to the art as he returns to gaze at Luca Giordano’s Saint Michael, the painting he has spent the last 3,000 or so words telling us about. There is no rallying cry or powerful closing remarks from Romm, just simple dissipation. A vision of the future, however ambiguous, as the year draws to a close.

This last unfinished work by Arendt helped promulgated an industry of interpreters around her and her work. She was already public intellectual while she was alive, most well known for her analysis of fascism and totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was a natural fit for the era of Cold War politics, although she had her distance from the worst offenders in this milieu. The great mystery of her incomplete final work kept her reputation going in the years after her death.

Then, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected, and a new impetus was given to her work. Copies of The Origins of Totalitarianism flew off bookstore shelves, a new edition was rushed to the press and the pages of Americas finest publications swelled and cracked with think pieces on the relevance of Arendt. The late Richard J. Bernstein – a friend and scholar of Arendt – published a book on Arendt whose title captures this moment: Why Read Arendt Now?

This inspired a bit of ire on amongst some left-wing intellectuals. Corey Robin and Samuel Moyn were perhaps two of the most well-known ones; they both insisted that Arendt’s analysis of fascism did not apply to Trump in 2016. Indeed, after Biden was elected in 2021, Robin, smugly, wrote the following:

Strongman Trump was supposed to rule in one of two ways: either he would gather the force of white voters to impose his will on the G.O.P. and, from there, the American state, or he would use the rhetorical power of his office, the brutality of his words, to transform American political culture. Behind each fear lay a vision of democratic power that we only wish were true.

Trump term one was, in the end, limited by the limitations of the presidency itself. All these concerns were mere fantasy, projection and hysteria. What was consistent amongst those who held to Robin and Moyn’s line was an insistence about applying labels, that the terms we use match all characteristics. Fascism defines a certain kind of politics, and so one must met certain criteria to meet this definition. To decide if something is fascist, I simply pull up my chart of “fascist characteristics” and compare it to what I see happening. No match? Then no fascism.

This sort of logic was really taken to its apex by Rebecca Panovka in 2021 Harpers essay entitled ‘Men in Dark Times’. Panovka’s essay argues, rather intelligently, that even by Arendt’s own standards the Trump presidency would never qualify as fascist. She cites Arendt herself who in the third preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism warned against those crying totalitarianism and fascism prematurely, especially those who hurled the accusation at Lyndon Johnson’s administration in the 1960s.

For Panvoka what drew people to Arendt was her analysis of fascist lying and rhetoric. So Panvoka turns to Arendt’s analysis of lying, as it appears in her essays “Truth and Politics” and “Lying in Politics” to show that Arendt did not consider lying in of itself unusual in politics, and that Trump failed to rise to a state where his lies went so unchallenged that the distinction between fact and fiction ceased to matter, that the facticity of the world became erased.

Panvoka is right to focus on this aspect of Arendt, but in doing so slips into a mode of reasoning that Arendt herself was wary of it. This mode of reasoning we can term philosophical. The arguments of Moyn and Robin also fall into this category. For Arendt there is a division between philosophy and politics, which she summarizes in Truth and Politics as follows:

[H]istorically the conflict between truth and politics arose out of two diametrically opposed ways of life – the life of the philosopher, as interpreted first by Parmenides and then by Plato, and the way of life of the citizen. To the citizens’ ever-changing opinions about human affairs, which themselves were in a state of constant flux, the philosopher opposed the truth about those things which in their very nature were everlasting and from which, therefore, principles could be derived to stabilize human affairs. Hence the opposite to truth was mere opinion, which was equated with illusion, and it was this degrading of opinion that gave the conflict its political poignancy; for opinion, and not truth, belongs among the indispensable prerequisites of all power.

You see the philosopher cares about definitions; he cares about what things are. Against this is the life of politics, which attached as it is to doxa, to human opinion, fluctuates, shifts, alters. The altering world of politics produces a different kind of thinking, a different approach and stance towards the world than that of the philosopher. The philosopher, who retreats from the world with his definitions, is the opposite of the citizen (metaphorically speaking), who steps into a world defined by others. This distinction might explain why Arendt always refused to call herself a philosopher, and opted for the term political theorist instead.

Being in the world is being with others. This insight, quasi-phenomenological as it is, is not that remarkable of an idea. For Arendt though the fact that humans are defined by plurality – the fact that no one else is like anyone else – is, as she writes in The Human Condition, “the condition of all political life.” What insight Arendt does provide is that this being with others necessarily entails politics. It is because humans are distinct from each other that they need speech and action to make themselves understood. Yet the possibility that they could be understood at all implies, for Arendt, a fundamental equality. Human beings are united by both by the fact they are not alike and by the fact they can, ultimately, communicate.

For Arendt action and speech, i.e. politics, take place in the public realm. This, one of her more controversial ideas, necessities a liberal distinction between private and public. The needs of humankind could not, it appears for Arendt, be a cause of politics. There is no communication, no self-disclosure in announcing one’s hunger. When necessity is made into a politics, Arendt considers this a conceptual confusion which she denounces as the social. This distinction lead Arendt astray several times, but it comes with an interesting correlate. While the distinction between private and public is rigid in Arendt, the public sphere is not itself a fixed thing. It can in fact be brought into being by action and speech itself. We can come to constitute a public, the public sphere can be made.

That the ability to create the public sphere from scratch is possible at all poses some complex philosophical questions. It also means Arendt is fundamentally concerned with the new. Human plurality is fundamentally linked to what Arendt calls natality, the capacity for new beginnings. This is linked, just like plurality, to the fact of human birth. A public can be constituted in an act small – Seyla Benhabib, in an article on Arendt, offers the example of dissidents meeting in a living room – or an act large, such as the American or French revolution. This concern with the new is a classic concern that emerges with modernity, in avant garde arts movements, but it is also born out of the politics of the twentieth century.

This, of course, returns us to the recent debates on fascism. When Arendt set out to write The Origins of Totalitarianism see was attempting to understand something new that had emerged in the 20^th century. It appeared as a crystallization of various already existent trends, such as imperialism, antisemitism and nationalism. Yet it was its own thing and needed to be thought as such. The appearance of the new is the critical idea in Arendt’s apparatus and it requires us to stop and think. In the prologue to The Human Condition Arendt writes that “we must think what we are doing”, a classic Arendtian injunction. In order to think something we must attempt to understand it.

For Arendt, understanding means something specific. It does not mean comprehend, nor does it mean to have total knowledge about something. In science, for Arendt, we do not understand things. Perhaps we comprehend them, or master them, but understanding is an open ended process. In her 1954 essay ‘Understanding and Politics’ she writes that understanding is an “unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to the reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.” In this essay Arendt explains that for her, totalitarianism has exploded our “categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment.” We can call Hitler evil, certainly, but this somehow understates the problem. Understanding, with its open-ended character, is the process by which we come to grapple with the emergence of this new phenomenon.

Understanding, as opposed to knowledge or comprehension, matches not the tight definitions of the philosopher or the rigorous method of the scientist, but the fluctuating opinions and attitudes of the citizen, of the political subject. It is in politics, in the public sphere, that we encounter the new and must decide how we will react and act. An open-ended cognitive process of understanding, that is willing to abandon old categories, is necessary in this domain, especially after the horrors of the twentieth century. This is her famous invocation to think “without a banister”, to manage in world where old categories no longer suffice. It places the emphasis on understanding, on the open-ended dynamic thought process of the political subject.

Let us backtrack for a second. There is an interesting moment in Panovka’s essay. Having cited Arendt’s firm belief that the US press had kept the lies surrounding the Vietnam war in check and that this indicated a society which, whatever its problems, should not be called fascist. Panvoka goes on to cite Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s assistant. Speaking on the George W. Bush era and the Iraq War Kohn sees “a slide from a lot of lying for political expediency into domination by an ideology and the kind of worship of logical consistency that brings that ideology to the public.” That is he sees the emergence of conditions that move to US closer to fascism. Panvoka wants to use this point to underscore the history of lying in US politics and point to the fact it may have been worse before Trump’s first term.

If we look into that Kohn quote more deeply, we can notice a different reading emerge. The quote is taken from a 2006 dialogue between Jerome Kohn and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, entitled “Truth, Lies and Politics: A Conversation.” Panovka misattributes the quote; they are not Kohn’s words, but Young-Bruehl’s. And Young-Bruehl goes on to say the following:

I think that such a slide began during the Vietnam War, and Arendt was noting it in the justly famous essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” as she pointed to the domination of the Johnson administration not by a full-blown ideology, but by what she calls images - and specifically the image of America as the mightiest nation on the earth, an image which that administration was determined to preserve at the price of the world’s factuality. When the New York Times put the Pentagon Papers before its readers, it very successfully interrupted that very slide from lying into domination by ideology.

What Young-Bruehl is getting at here is the contingency of politics; that things change and cannot be taken for granted. It is the intervention of the press the stops the political lies of the Johnson administration from transforming into totalitarian lies.

Shortly after the beginning of the second Trump term, when ICE began abducting people off the street, Moyn tweeted out something along the lines of ‘its fascism now’. The obvious response to his critics was to respond with some paraphrase of John Maynard Keynes’ “when the facts change I change my mind, what do you do sir?” Yet it is not so simple: those who were so hyperbolic the first time were aware that these facts could change, and were hoping to get ahead of it.

A similiar principle was at play with recent discussions of when the apply the term genocide to what we shall call recent events. Early on many objected on definitional grounds. Yet those who were quick to call it were not thinking about definitions, they were thinking about what was emerging in the situation, its potential and its future. And they were acting to prevent an event from matching that definition, seeking to intervene in the world. The application of definitions has a certain Owl of Minerva quality; one only matches the qualities to the substance by candelight.

For those like Robin or Moyn, successful academics with an academic approach to this issue, thought has a certain rigidity. Those who do not show such serious conceptualization are lacking in rigor. Those lacking in rigor cannot be taken seriously. They are correct in a certain sense: the price for understanding as Arendt means it may require a certain hysteria. We cannot face up to the new with the concepts and comportment of the old world. It, unfortunately, means that the scholastic aesthetic of much debate over politics in the periodicals of the American elite will miss the point over and over again. The stance of the philosopher, of he who reasons by definitions and syllogism is the stance of the one who comes after. For those of us amongst the fray, a different logical is in operation, one that may not be best served in the medium of the op-ed. Arendt’s enduring contribution is to reckon with the fact of political rationality, that it does not conform to the shape of traditional rationality, and makes different demands on our faculties and our sense of truth and responsibility. That we must rethink our categories without giving up on thinking tout court. That’s quite a task for someone who always refused to call themselves a philosopher.

In the Gorgias, then, we should not be surprised to find that examined life is not so worth living either. In a pivotal discussion Socrates and his interlocutors suggest that being a philosopher might incur a certain amount of angst and suffering. Only a truly noble soul who would abandon all pleasure would become a philosopher suggests Socrates. The irony is intentional, your laughter here should be bitter. Indeed this irony is also present in The Republic, when the demands on the silver and gold class who should govern the city become increasingly excessive; just what, exactly, are the conditions of the just city?

Given this, perhaps it is better to be a poet? Afterall the opposition between the poet and the philosopher is a Platonic one and remains with us in our crass opposition between intellect and intuition, form and feeling. The poet, Socrates eagerly tells his interlocuter Glaucon, works at three removes from the truth and does not exercise any skilled practice. We do not go to Homer for medical advice, and he has not navigated his way to victory in any great battles. Witness then the erection of the division between the idea and the poem: “all poets downward from Homer have no grasp of truth.”

Paul Valéry, one of history’s great poets, belongs to a lineage of poets for whom the gap between the idea and the poem was to be collapsed. Yet it does not take long for Valéry to find the life of the poet tedious: in 1892, he gazes upon a storm of terrific malevolence and gives up on poetry. What does he turn to instead? Philosophy, of sorts. In lieu of his poetic efforts he begins to work on new character, one of a certain Cartesian excellence, who will embody the finest intellectual spirit of not only his age but all ages. Hence the creation of Monsieur Teste, Mr. Head if you want, though, as Ryan Ruby is keen to point out in his introduction to the new NYRB edition of Monsieur Teste, the French is slightly more subtle, with connections and connotations to both the words testify and testicle. A windbag and ballbag both, Valéry’s literary and philosophical creation is Frankenstein in fragments and letters. Yet how far did Valéry really travel from his own poetry to the world of ideas? His belated return to poetry suggests that the world of ideas ultimately offered Valéry little comfort. Yet his poetry itself was already worthy of the cerebral heights of Monsieur Teste. The life of the poet and the life of the philosopher have collapsed in the poem of the idea, which heralds a new idea of poetry itself.

Valéry’s poems, before he stopped writing them, reflected a certain abstractness, one codified and associated with Stephan Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. A Symbolist, Mallarmé’s poems were both finely tuned and associative, deeply abstract but not in the goal of achieving any immediate meaning. They were heavy on image – including the image formed on the page by the poem itself – and less interested in the pure evocation of feeling. More precisely: the sought to evoke the feelings associated with the lofty highs of abstraction, the pleasure of the furrowed brow. This reaches its apotheosis in Mallarmé’s most famous poem, ‘the throw of the dice will never abolish chance.’ It is better to show you a snippet of it then to explain it:

What are these lines written out? “The Abyss/Whitened/Glassy/Furious/Beneath a declivity/compacted desperately/ on a wing/ it own/in advance fallen back from a failure to take flight.” What meaning presents itself to us here, what classic form bounds these words? The emphasis on shape, on geometry, feels as inseparable from the poem as the words, and indeed is one of the main aesthetics features of ‘the throw of the dice’. One feels here Mallarmé mocking Plato: poems are all appearance, alright!

The throw of the dice is Mallarmé pushing the boundary to the extreme. But in a poem less formally (by which I mean visually) inventive – such as Hérodiade - the idea still reigns supreme:

Abolished, and her frightful wing in the tears
Of the basin, abolished, that mirrors forth our fears,
The naked golds lashing the crimson space,
An Aurora—heraldic plumage—has chosen to embrace
Our cinerary tower of sacrifice,
Heavy tomb that a songbird has fled, lone caprice

You can certainly analyse this poem on the grounds of its imagery, but what will strike a reader immediately, even in translation, is the emphasis on rhythm and sound above sense making. This is poetry for poetry’s sake, a whole half a century before Getrude Stein’s infamous “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

Valéry’s poems followed in Mallarmé’s footsteps. Indeed, his notebooks record his idea that poetry is more about its “program” than any given subject. Poetry is not about things, it does things. Read those lines of Hérodiade again and tell me what exactly is being portrayed and why. What exactly does it mean to “mirror forth our fears.” I am not suggesting such questions cannot be answered; however I am suggesting that it is not obvious. What is obvious is the poetic and rhythmic value of “forth our fears”, which is both alliterative and assonant.

The point is not that symbolist poems resist interpretation, that they could not possibly be understood. It is rather than these are poems that have turned sharply and decisively from being about things to being about poetry. The hermeticism is self-referential. Rimbaud, who also belongs to this moment in poetry famously declares “method, we affirm you!”, a decisive declaration of intent.

Valéry did not always reach for the formal experimentalism of Mallarmé, but he maintained a certain poetic density and committed himself rigorously to form and technique. This perhaps seen in Valéry’s tendency to maintain a single image throughout his poems, developing formal variations on single theme. The length of his poem ‘Young Fate’ sits in direct opposition to the dominant image of the poem. For the poem has a speaker and concept well defined: a young man, overcome with emotions he cannot quell. And from this Valéry spins pages and pages of carefully formulated poetry. As with Mallarmé, the point is made best by seeing the poem’s shape before one reads it. The following occurs on the third page of this twenty-page poem.

This is not a poem that is meant to (only) convey its image, this is a poem that is meant to see for how far and how long one can spin out an image, while adjusting rhythms and structures and symbols. The idea of poetry, its form, comes before its functions. Although ‘The Young Fate’ is a poem Valéry published in 1917 after his hiatus from poetry and the written word, this approach is there, embryonically, in early poems like Narcissus Speaks and The Spinner, which begin this process of weaving a single malleable topic through the techniques of poetry. The function of poetry is to make poetry, not to convey (emotions, images, thoughts, take your pick).

The new idea of the poem as the poetry of ideas soon exhausts a young Valéry. If ideas are what counts, why not tackle them head on? Better, perhaps, to be a poet? Not so. In 1892 while in Genoa, Italy – the same place where Gustave Flaubert is inspired in 1845 to write the first aborted version of The Temptation of St. Anthony – Paul Valéry decided to abandoned poetry. The cause of this is commonly understood to be a particularly intense thunderstorm that result in belief that poem was not the proper vehicle for the idea. Valéry would not return to poetry till 1912. In the meantime, he focused on his notebooks and other writings, including his creation of the strange Monsieur Teste. I have already suggested above that this leads itself to a reading wherein Valéry chooses the life of the mind over the life of the poet. A short online biography and introduction of Valéry goes so far as to suggest that “the fictional character of Edouard Teste…[was]…a paragon of intellectual austerity and self-absorption, an “ideal” thinker, and therefore a role model for Valéry himself.” Indeed, when Valéry gave up poetry he dedicated himself to his notebook, to his Monsieur Teste, and to pseudo-scholarly works on dreams and Da Vinci. In other words, he turned from poetics to speculation.

At first it seems as if Monsieur Teste is to be envied. He is not only wise and smart, but his wife and friends and fans and even the state all think so well of him. We are treated to a letter address to Monsieur Teste which, as we read, begins to seem tedious in its praise. His wife’s – Madam Teste, of course – reflections on him strike one as less loving and more infatuated. The state assembled report which closes the volume takes the tone of bureaucratic objectivity, a while pronouncing Monsieur Teste a genius, finds him troubled and lonesome.

Monsieur Teste, it slowly turns out, is no celebration of the life of the mind and the philosopher. Rather it is an account of the pain and the blockages of the idea. For example, consider this passage:

Until quite late in life, Monsieur Teste was not at all aware of the singularity of his mind. He thought everyone else was like him. But he thought he was dimmer and more stupid than most. This observation led me to note his weaknesses, sometimes his accomplishments. He noted that he was quite often smarter than the smartest and duller than the dullest – a very grave observation that can lead to a policy of abuse and unevenly distributed concessions.

Certainly, Valéry is describing an enviable genius here, but he is also describing a man who is cursed, whose own intellect prevents him from being fully human. In a piece imaginatively called “The End of Monsieur Teste”, Valéry terminates his creation with all the bitterness that has been boiling under the surface:

Syllogisms impaired by agony, thousands of joyful images bathed in pain, fear mingled with lovely moments from the past. What a temptation, though, death is. An unimaginable thing, which gets into the mind as desire and horror by turn. End of intellect. Funeral march of thought.

Better perhaps to be a philosopher than a poet? Not so. Monsieur Teste, exhausted, more than just a mere mind (“impaired by agony”, “bathed in pain”), imagines the end of all thought. And there is some sense of relief here. Perhaps the life of the mind has been too much. It is hard to read all of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste’s fragments and imagine a man for whom life has been a pleasure.

After 1912, when Valéry returned to writing, he seems to have accepted that his distinction between poetry and the philosopher is limited. Things are a little more complicated. In his 1939 talk “Poetry and Abstract Thought”, the philosopher and the poet are reunified: “If the logician could never be other than a logician, he would not, and could not be, a logician; and if the poet were never anything but a poet without the slightest hope of being able to reason abstractly, he would leave no poetic traces behind him.”

While the statement seems obvious (although it may not have been obvious for Plato and Socrates and dear Glaucon), it signifies for Valéry a distance travelled. The triumph of the post-1912 poems, including Young Fate cited above, take this reunification seriously. The poem and the idea in conjunction, not disjunction. Something else, too, has shifted. From the sour ending of Monsieur Teste Valéry’s poetry will now, on occasion, express a different outlook. This perhaps seen best in the closing stanza to Valéry’s most famous poem, the 1920 Graveyard by the Sea:

The wind is rising!..We must try to Live!
The immense air opens and shuts my book,
A wave dare burst in powder over the rocks.
Pages, whirl away in a dazzling riot!
And break, waves, rejoicing, break that quiet
Roof where foraging sails dipped their beaks!

End of intellect. With which, however, the procession of thought begins.

2024 was the year of the slop. AI generated nonsense across every single idea that can also live in your phone: instagram, twitter, spotify, facebook, tik tok.

So here’s grist for the slop mill: my list of all the shit I wrote this year, the best books I read this year, and some of my favorite articles from the year. Eat your heart out, ChatGPT.

Shit I Wrote:

This year I wrote 12 pieces. That’s 1 a month. A great majority were published here, on substack, although not always on my substack.

1. In a year marked by the horror of the return of genocide as a feature of global politics, I started out in January by writing about one of the great post-Holocaust writers: Aleksander Tisma. Tisma’s Novi Sad triology is one of the most incredible and bleakest things I have ever read, a triptych on the way guilt works and moves throughout society. If you haven’t read these books I really recommend you do. The will annihilate you. And despite all of Tisma’s grimness, I argue there is indeed some principle of hope at work in his novels.

2. At the end of January, I finally finished Ulysses. I wrote about it for the . Despite the book’s difficulty, there is a certain equality and communism to it. In its subject matter, of course, but in its prose as well.

   The Hobbyhorse

   So, I Finally Read Ulysses

   A book is more than the pages bound between its cover. Like all objects, they have afterlives. One can experience them quoted in snippets, read aloud, posted online, scribbled on walls, at readings or in the pleasure of conversation. Reading—if we are to leave it ill-defined—is a surprisingly diffuse activity. The classics especially are objects held in…

   Read more

   3 years ago · 9 likes · Duncan Stuart

3. In February there was an awful lot of discourse about Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Tutt published his book “How to Read like a Parasite,” exposing the truth of a deeply fascist Nietzsche completely incompatible with the left that had been exposed before him by Dominic Losurdo, and before him by Richard Wolin AND before him by one George Lukacs. This was starting to all feel kind of tedious, so I wrote about why leftists might find Nietzsche compelling, without devolving into Deleuzianism.

4. In March, I wrote about Gerald Murnane’s Inland. The book was released in the US by And Other Stories Press. Inland is a singular novel, vexing and strange, equal parts letter, monologue and reverie. Murnane’s mind is a strange place, but I spent much of the review pushing back against the idea that he is as weird and idiosyncratic as people think. You can read it here: https://www.ronslate.com/on-inland-a-novel-by-gerald-murnane/

5. In April I wrote about Andrey Platonov’s epic masterpiece Chevengur. A 600 page love letter to peasants, the revolution, the commune, and utopia, it was without a doubt one of the best books I read this year. And its heavy allusions to Don Quixote could not but help remind me of another figure who believed it takes a little bit of madness to make the world better: the Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno.

6. In May, I wrote about one of my literary heroes, Elias Canetti. This year, New Directions published his book, “The Book Against Death”, a collection of aphorisms and reflections on death and literature. Canetti said he “accepted no death”, and found, in the realm of writing, the tools to resist oblivion. It is a sentimental sentiment, but one I agree with dearily, as my closing remarks in this piece indicate. https://themillions.com/2024/05/elias-canetti-words-against-death.html

7. In June, I published the first of my three ‘summer essays’ at The Hobbyhorse. The first was on Franz Kafka and our relentless drive to publish all his notes, letters, diaries, office emails (not really a joke) and maybe soon his tax returns (hopefully a joke)? I term these objects “Hypographs". I object to this desire for the archive immensely and make my case in this piece.

   The Hobbyhorse

   Kafka's Hypographs

   If there is any writer marked by the posthumous, it is Kafka. In his lifetime just a handful of his works were published. There were two book length collections: Meditations and A Country Doctor. A Hunger Artist was published just after Kafka’s death. In addition to that he published a handful of his short stories in his lifetime—“The Stoker”, “The Meta…

   Read more

   2 years ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Duncan Stuart

8. In July my second summer piece for the Hobbyhorse dropped: Saint Bovary. In it I discussed Gustave Flaubert’s magisterial Madam Bovary and the limits of understanding Flaubert as a realist. Indeed he was much more of a mystic, believing in the divine powers of art. How and why, then, did he write such a grim and ‘realistic’ novel? Perhaps the answer has something to do with the limits of realism itself.

   The Hobbyhorse

   Saint Bovary

   “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” So writes Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet. This line appears so frequently in any writing about Flaubert that is has become a litany. Gather in front of the altar of literature and read from the divine letters of our dear Gustave: “AN AUTHOR IN…

   Read more

   2 years ago · 11 likes · Duncan Stuart

9. You might think that in August my final summer piece with the Hobbyhorse came out. No. Instead I wrote another piece at the substack, exploring Michel Foucault’s approach to inquiry, his theory (or lack thereof) of the state, and his vision of radical politics. The inspiration for this piece stems from a lecture he gave in Toyko in 1978, where he outline his theory of the relationship between political philosophy and the state.

10. Things returned to normal in September, with the final installment of my summer essay series for the Hobbyhorse. There I wrote about Yukio Mishima and the empty core of his sometimes stunning novels. What exactly is going on with his world view? Why did he go out so spectularly, and what are we to make of his aesthetic principles? It all revolves around attempting to answer a simple question: Did Mishima Die Happy?
    

    The Hobbyhorse

    Did Mishima Die Happy?

    “Did he really think it through?” – Henry Miller, Reflections on the Death of Mishima…

    Read more

    2 years ago · 27 likes · 5 comments · Duncan Stuart

11. In October, my review of Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel was published by the flawless folks over at The Cleveland Review of Books. These heros, veritable legends, were so good to let me go long - over 4,000 words - on yes Tawada but also the intricacies of Paul Celan. You can read it here: https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/yokotawada-paulcelanandthetranstibetanangel

12. In November I ate a big bird. I also had a short and weird text published over at . This piece was a 500 word essay where every word had to contain the letter ‘e’, a reverse lipogram. I wrote on Emerence and Ennemonde, two figures of European peasant life in European literature. Lots of ‘E’s in that sentence you see. https://minorliteratures.com/2024/11/26/emerence-et-ennemonde-depicting-european-peasant-life-duncan-stuart/

Shit I Read (Books edition):

I read 45 books this year. Some people read 100, some people read like 6. My six favorite (6 because it makes a nice graphic) were:

1) Chevengur - Andrey Platonov
- A wonderful, surreal book, replete with some of the strangest and yet most compelling characters in literature. A touch of Pilynak, a touch of Cervantes, a touch of revolution.

2) Kafka’s Other Trial - Elias Canetti
- One of the best books on Kafka, and one of the only books that takes seriously the issue of us plundering his letters constantly, as I wrote about in my essay on Kafka. Canetti shows how Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer became part of his work, especially his novel The Trial. But he reverse it the usual claims in Kafka scholarship: it is not the letters that help us understand the novel, but the novel that helps understand the letters.

3) Charles Bovary, a Country Doctor - Jean Amery
- A stunning little book, that attempts to redeem literature’s greatest cuckold. It is Amery’s insight to say that after the holocaust, perhaps we should reevaluate our disdain for Dr. Bovary.

4) Flaubert and Madame Bovary - Francis Steegmuller
- A wonderful biography of Flaubert’s life up to and including the writing of Madame Bovary. Part of its excellence is the middle section, which solely comprises letters of Flaubert, his mother and his friend Max Du Camp during a trip to “the Orient” (North Africa and the Levant).

5) Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
- What is there to say? Whitman’s heroic, exuberant poetry takes seriously the idea of an exhortation to all beings and all modes of life. One of the most successful attempts in literature, nay ever, to think everything and be everything.

6) The Practice of Everyday Life - Michel de Certeau
- You might think de Certeau is a silly French postmodernist. Actually he is a philosopher in the purest sense, keen to know everything there is to know about thought. His work restores the intellectuality and power of the ordinary through an incredibly learned and detailed study of language, life and philosophy. Plus he is a stunningly good writer.

Or, if you prefer pictures:

Nice. Please ignore the stretched pixels.

Shit I Read (Essays, Articles, and Propaganda):

I read a lot of essays and articles and so on in the course of the year, and there were a few (actually quite a few) that really stood out to me. Of course, in talking about cultural criticism published this year, one must start with the topic front and center of our discourse: the genocide in Gaza. It didn’t come out this year, but Raz Segal’s essay “A Textbook Case of Genocide” written a mere week after the events of October 7th, 2023, has been vindicated by events and the recent Amnesty International Report, declaring Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. I think it was there for all who know the history of Israeli miltary activity to see this outcome. Those who joined on the streets to protest what was happening in Gaza knew this too. Those who dismissed activists and writers and unwaveringly supported Israel are now party to the crime against humanity.

So two of the best articles I read this year concerned this. The first was Pankaj Mishra’s “The Shoah after Gaza.” This piece is Mishra attempting to think through the double moral conjuncture of The Shoah and the genocide in Gaza. The Shoah produces both the immediate conditions for the state of Israel and is also the cover for Israel’s doctrine of absolute force. In a painstaking analysis of some of the great post-Shoah writers - Primo Levi, Jean Amery - Mishra finds that the call to conscience in these writers can and does apply to our present moment.

The second piece was Erik Baker’s “Burnt Offerings” in n+1. n+1, like Jewish Currents, was consistently on the right side of the issue, publishing careful, detailed analyses of the situation in Gaza. Baker’s piece draws together the history of incendiary weapons with the protest tactic of self-immolation. Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire to protest the genocide in Gaza, is but one part of this dual history. Baker is clear-sighted about all of this, and writes in one striking passage the following:

the purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.

The other articles I read and loved this year were much less grim. Yet some of them were not so far from this topic. In Helen Rouner’s “Dust to Dust” - published in Commonweal Magazine - she relates the power of Auden’s poetry to the long shadow atrocity casts on human life.

Likewise, a post at a substack called , on Jean-Paul Sartre’s magisterial biography of Jean Genet, offers a picture of writing as a way out of despair, of freedom being the only way we can account for the totality of the person. The world produces atrocities, and writing can act somewhat against this. Although the sentiment is glib and will not bring back the dead, writing is not a pure act of futility. Something like this emerges in Sartre’s treatment of Genet, and Five (as we will call him) is right to highlight it.

Although it’s not mentioned by Five, lurking in the background here too is the fact of Genet’s book on Palestine, Prisoner of Love, as well as Sartre’s own interest and defense of anti-colonial movements.

Five’s Substack

"The history of his liberation": Wherefore Existential Biography?

Sartre began Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr as an introduction to Jean Genet’s collected works. But as he reread Genet’s books, spoke with the man for days at a time, and consumed quantities of stimulants that would kill the average horse, the book grew from a brief essay into a 625-page monument. Though it has been displaced as the definitive critical s…

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2 years ago · 29 likes · 4 comments · Five Good Hours

In addition to this, there were several reviews I thought were really good. Two by Alina Stefanescu really stood out. The first was her magesterial review of Robert Glück’s “About Ed” in the Cleveland Review of Books. That was in Feburary. Then, in October, Stefanescu wrote another fantastic piece on Annie Ernaux’s “The Use of Photography” for the LARB. One thing I appreciate in both these works is the careful and rather delicate discussion of desire. There is, I think, a certain tedious hedonism to our age, but desire is not a reed to be grasped and pulled out from the river, but an eel that slips back into basin after your first lunge.

I loved Ryan Ruby’s review of Rachel Kushner’s new book Creation Lake. In particular it offers a nice example of how to write about politics, the novel and the politics of the novel, all brought together in this antepenultimate paragraph:

We have just seen, in the case of Creation Lake, how Kushner’s choice of narrative perspective and character have the effect of disaggregating a collective into its component individuals and reducing political convictions to personal interests. We should add that these are political outcomes baked in to the literary form of their representation, not into reality itself. The charge that Sadie levels at Lucien and that Bruno levels at Pascal—that their respective attachments to ’60s- and ’70s-era figures like Godard and Debord are forms of nostalgia and romanticism—could also be leveled at Creation Lake, which reads like a literary-fiction adaptation of the aforementioned Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose Debord-influenced crime thrillers about female assassins, anarchist collectives, undercover cops, and political demonstrators were written half a century ago, in the early years of the neoliberal counterrevolution. In other words, Creation Lake may describe a period of political restorationism, but is itself an instance of aesthetic restorationism. As such, it not only formally mirrors the political impasses of its own time, it reproduces them. It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it is no less difficult, it seems, to imagine a new form for the novel. Perhaps these two difficulties are not unrelated.

In The Baffler, Bailey Trela wrote a wonderful review of Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable. More than anything else this was just a simply wonderful piece of writing from Trela, who brings his winding threads and dynamic prose to a really superb denounment:

A face, a pupil, a motionless point—I’m tempted to add another nodal image to this list: a nut. Nuts crop up everywhere in The Unforgivable, spotting the loam of Campo’s prose like so much windfall. It’s no coincidence that her sole autobiographical essay, a roseate evocation of childhood that cloaks her experiences in the rhythms and motifs of fairy tales, is titled “The Golden Nut.” In at least one sense, the nut is a symbol, for Campo, of secrecy—perfectly sealed, perfectly whole, like the sayings of the Desert Fathers, which “were almost always very hard, uncrackable nuts, to be carried around for life and crushed between the teeth, as in fairy tales, in the moment of gravest danger.” Inside there is flesh, folded and crimped—life’s originary point, the mystery of sense.

In the Sydney Review of Books, I really enjoyed Louis Klee’s review of “Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullis”. This book, by Justin Clemens and Thomas H. Ford is a investigation of one of Australia’s first judges Barron Field. Field sets out to write romantic poetry about Australia in Australia and in turn tied the history of Australian poetics to the displacement and slaughter of its indigenious population:

There is no need for captivity and civilising, Field’s poem implies. This is because he has assumed – in an early and oblique version of what would later become one of the most iniquitous lies of Australian colonisation – that First Nations people will die out ‘in the eye of Nature’, which is to say, ‘inevitably’. Australia, for Field, was not conquered, but taken under the fiction that it was uninhabited, and in the poem this fiction sits alongside another, kindred fiction: that settlers are not responsible for the ‘decay or extermination’ of First Nations because that will happen ‘in the eye of Nature’, as a matter of course.

That Field chose to deliver the genocidal meaning of terra nullius before the new governor of the colony in a reworked fragment of Romantic verse casts a painful shadow over Australian poetry.

Finally, I want to highlight J. Arthur Boyle’s superb essay from the start of the year, “The Artist’s Self-Interest: On Capitalist Fiction” published in The Cleveland Review of Books. A review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Boyle moves through the difficulties of fiction, publishing and capitalism in heated prose that expands and contracts, that pulses and writhes as it forms an impassioned sermon against the vissicitudes of congelmerate publishing. Our literary lives, our artistic lives, could be better and Boyle’s blood grows hot as he relays Sinykin’s account of what stands between us and a better, more creative world. Published all the way back in January, it was a wonderful essay that heralded what was, in fact, a really superb year for criticism and fiction. So let us end with Boyle’s final words, an ode to art and writing and all things good and beautiful, against the tryanny of value:

Art is the best language humanity has for understanding where, and what, humanity is. That is why art is beautiful to us—it creates and affirms the many meanings we have for ourselves. Capital, as a societally organizing force, does not have a way to value this function, because the value exists outside of utility. Because capital cannot assign a value, it treats this function as irrelevant, thereby rendering it irrelevant. In this case, no one could claim to love art and simultaneously tolerate the dominance of capital, as they inherently contradict each other. And if you don’t love art, how could I be particularly interested in yours?

See you next year, suckers.

All three of these problematics are part of the bigger problem that haunts Foucault’s work: discontinuity versus continuity. In The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault had attempted to give an account of intellectual history that  was fundamentally discontinuous. This attempt centered on the notion of epistemes, which appear in The Order of Things and are codified (and watered down!) in The Archaeology of Knowledge. For Foucault, an episteme is the dominant organizing knowledge system of an era. Crucially, it will be discontinuous with another one; the transformations cannot be understood as a dialectical movement from one to the other. In a more Hegelian picture, the errors of a previous system would be the seeds for a movement to a new epistemological picture – the errors would be sublated – but for Foucault, the errors are left behind. Any overlap between epistemes is either irrelevant or coincidental. Thus, each episteme is singular.

By 1971, Foucault’s had begun to move back towards continuity. He announces this move in his essay “The Order of Discourse.” This is precipitated by a rather harsh exchange that followed the appearance of The Order of Things. In 1968, a group known as The Circle of Epistemology penned several questions for Foucault. In their response to Foucault’s answers, they rightly pointed out that Foucault’s conceptualization of discontinuities presupposed a continuous framework. They asked, in short, for his general theory of singularities. He proposed the rules of formation. In a response The Circle pointed that these rules of formation had a certain transcendental flavor. Foucault never responded back. The problem Foucault faced was this: how to think singularity without abandoning the notion of singularity. Foucault leaves this question behind as he steps into his genealogical phase.

It is unclear what happens to singularity and archaeology in Foucault’s work in the 1970s. He freely admits that genealogy and archaeology belong together as part of a system that emphasises continuity and discontinuity. Yet, by the time of Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault is talking about developing a “history of the present”, and seems to be engaging in an enterprise akin to critical theory, with all the normative baggage of such an approach. This is in stark contrast to the closing of The Order of Things, where Foucault rules out commenting on the present age. 

Foucault’s insistence that he never abandoned archaeology is a little hard to take seriously, given how dominant the genealogical method became in his later work. These lectures from 1978, however, suggest that the problem of singularity still troubles Foucault. This is evident immediately. He begins by telling his audience that he wanted to discuss the problem of prisons with them but has realised that the problem of prisons in Japan is not the problem of prisons in Europe. This is no deep philosophical position yet, but it sets the tone for Foucault’s discussion. He will later refer to the prison reform movement and draw attention to the fact that nations with relatively humane prisons and cruel prisons have prison reform movements alike.

We will return to how this issue of singularity is present in Foucault’s lecture, but first let us get a sense of the terrain. Foucault moves from the specificity of prisons to the general thrust of his lecture. Given that he feels remarks on European prisons will not apply to the Japanese context, he shifts to a more general topic. Why does the question of power concern him so? Obviously, there is the immediate question that lurks for any serious political thinker of the 20^th century: the twin horrors of fascism and Stalinism (Foucault, notably, does not say totalitarianism). These are two extreme forms of state power.

Foucault here makes a comment that would bring great joy to figures like Daniel Zamora and Gary Becker. He states that the problem of the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the problem of the economy, of production and distribution. And now we have entered an era where the dominant question is one of power and its distribution. This might be good fodder for those who see in Foucault an arch-neoliberal (it is true, as they say, that the left loves an apostate, real or imagined). Yet he curiously undermines his schematic in the very next paragraph. There he says the philosopher has always been the one to limit power: “one of the principal roles of the philosopher in the West has been to set a limit, to set a limit to the excess of power, to this over production of power every time and in all cases when it risks becoming a threat.” This function takes three forms: 1) the philosopher as lawgiver (Plato, Solon), 2) the philosopher as counsel (Plato when he goes to Dionysius of Syracuse, and one assumes Machiavelli, although Foucault does not mention him), 3) the philosopher as independent, above it all, the one who laughs at power (The Cynics). In these ancient examples – Solon, Plato, The Cynics – Foucault is keen to point out that the Platonic City is never achieved. Even Aristotle, mentor and advisor to Alexander the Great, does not enact an Aristotelian city (or indeed, empire). Ancient western philosophy has never achieved the kind of political success of Confucianism (according to Foucault), where philosophy and state practice became fundamentally intertwined.

This fact, however, underwent a substantial shift in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The emergence of political systems heavily influenced by philosophers began to emerge. The first example is the French Revolution, which takes its cues from Rousseau. Then there is the Prussian State inspired by Hegel, the Soviet State inspired by Marx, and, as Foucault shamefully admits, something of Nietzsche and Wagner in the “Hitlerian” state. They are “philosophy-States” defined as “philosophies that are at the same time States, and States that think, reflect, organize themselves, and define their fundamental choices by proceeding from philosophical propositions, from inside philosophical systems, as the philosophical truth of history.”  

There is a bitter irony to these States, however. Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx are all philosophers of liberty, and yet “[t]hese philosophies of liberty gave rise each time to forms of power – be it in the form of terror, in the form of bureaucracy, or in the form of bureaucratic terror – that were the very opposite of the regime of liberty, the very opposite of liberty become history.”

Foucault has been here tightening a knot. This nexus of power, philosophy, and the State presents a question. What now of philosophy? One approach is to ask about the entanglement of philosophy and power. This would be to return to the question of the philosopher as anti-despot, as he (so often a he) that says “stop there, you!”, and ask if this is not itself a form of power, one that “lays down the law of the law.” One can say that philosophy should not concern itself with power, that it concerns itself with truth or being. Or philosophy can play a role in regard to counter power, if and only if, it no longer “consists of affirming, in the face of power, the law of philosophy itself; on the condition that philosophy cease to think of itself as prophecy; on the condition that philosophy cease to think of itself as either pedagogy or legislation.” Philosophy can still analyse, elucidate, and make visible the sites and struggles around power, but only if it “cease to raise the question of power in terms of good and bad, but in terms of existence.”

The next part of Foucault’s argument will bring us back to several critical questions. But first, let us try to understand the depth of these remarks. If we are interested in the minutia of Foucault scholarship, then we have here a nice, clear statement about his committee to a non-normative project. In articulating this, however, he is undoing the suture between philosophy and politics. A non-normative enterprise is one that can be used to inform concrete action, but not one that demands to do so. There can be no Foucauldian philosophy-State. This means that the second option he articulates -of a philosophy that steps away from politics – is actually also the third position. This is exactly the kind of space into which an analysis like Badiou’s emerges.

This, however, does not mean there is nothing to say about power or politics. Indeed, Foucault’s analysis suggests that this is the only condition under which we might be able to say something concrete and compelling about power and politics. How does he get there? He starts by drawing an analogy to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. There, he says the question of language is approached not from preconceived ontological notions of language, but from the question of how language is put into use. Likewise, Foucault conceives of “a philosophy that would have as its task analyzing what takes place on a quotidian level in relations of power.”

When Foucault looks at this quotidian level – which he defines as the struggles against prisons, schools, hospitals, the asylum and so on, of the institutional structures of everyday modern life - he finds something strange. The concern of legislation has disappeared. For example, those activities concerned about conditions in prison no longer demand specific conditions be met: “What one says is: no more prison at all.” This is a moment, Foucault says, when one is refusing to play the game, to engage with the premise of sound political action, and to participate in the philosophy-State.

What might we call this position—a refusal to play the game, a demand for better conditions through the articulation of an entirely different state of affairs? I think Foucault is close here to an idea that appears in the work of Lazarus. Lazarus articulates what he calls politics at a distance from the state. For Lazarus this is a rather particular concept, one that articulates a novel mode of political engagement without a specific object. This curious formulation is not entirely in line with what Foucault is getting at here but shares several important similarities.

Politics at a distance from the state means for Lazarus a politics conceived in interiority. This means subjectively: it develops itself by itself. This is a difficult idea, and it is worth thinking through an example Lazarus provides. This example is noteworthy because it has a certain quotidian element that matches Foucault’s own description of his interest and his project.

Lazarus focuses on an example from a factory dispute in the 1980s. In the general political climate of France at that time, there had been a move to distinguish immigrants and workers, exemplified during the Talbot-Poissy strike in January 1984, when a distinction was made that the strike was “the work of individual immigrants ‘unfamiliar with the realities of France.’” This distinction thus sought to delegitimize these strikers; they were not workers with legitimate grievances but immigrants causing issues.

Now, from the perspective of a traditional philosophical position, we would first be interested in establishing certain things. We might ask if immigrants are entitled to the same protections as workers, or  if we can properly distinguish between immigrants and workers. Alternatively, we might invoke ideas of liberty, justice or fairness. These approaches would be for Lazarus objectal, and not in the space of the subjective that interests him. For Foucault they would be normative and too akin to approaching issues along the lines of philosophy and the Philosophy-State.  

The above is also why Foucault’s position cannot simply be described as anarchism. At least not as the term is commonly used. The importance of his comments on philosophy and the state indicates a certain method of inquiry that does not begin with the normative. Traditional anarchism sets out certain normative principles that justify it as a form of political organization. And this approach has been the standard in the history of political philosophy. Foucault, with his indication of interrogating the quotidian level, is indicating a different method of inquiry. One that attempts to begin in the muck of it. Of course, there are certain theoretical presuppositions. This is also why Foucault sets out the disappearance of economy and production as central concerns, he is telling us from where his inquiry is starting. One might argue that he posits power as another abstract principle. This is true, but he does so only in the manner of a hypothesis. The crucial move is to then go into the details, to ask how power works from the ground up. What will we find when we look at things this way?

We should note here a suggestive analogy with Marx, that is relevant to both Foucault and Lazarus. Marx’s infamous delving into the “hidden abode of production” in Capital Vol. I leads us where? It leads us to the working man and the working day, to the employment relationship, the labour process, and the everyday of economic production. Here we discover a great Marxian idea: that money turns into capital via the trick of undervaluing labour. Exploitation is baked into wealth creation; the success of the capitalist must necessarily come at the expense of the labourer. This is a grand conclusion with major implications, but it starts from a simple, quotidian examination.

We should be careful here, for there is a sense in which economics is always about the everyday. What unites Marx with Foucault here is moving past a certain level of abstraction and grandeur into minutia and the immediate. It is an attempt to find where things get off the ground and to ask what is happening at this level. Marx asks this question from the perspective of exploitation, Foucault and Lazarus ask this question from the perspective of self-determination. Perhaps these are not the same method of inquiry, one can certainly feel the distance between their conclusions, but they are a similar method of inquiry.

Let us now return to Lazarus and his example of the factory workers. We have seen how their dispute becomes not a dispute about the abstract or sociological characteristics of workers versus immigrants but a political dispute over the term “worker”. A dispute that transforms it into what Lazarus calls a “problematic word”.  The immigrants on strike insisted they were workers, and in doing so, they exercised a certain subjective self-determination. This is one example of politics at a distance from the state, a politics where “[d]eciding as to the existence of the word – thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectiviating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness of those who pronounce it” becomes crucial.

What can help us draw in the similarities between Lazarus and Foucault here is to also understand a certain element of novelty. For Lazarus has grander examples than workers in the factory. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and Maoism are also examples of politics at a distance from the state. Not because they never concern themselves with the state at all, but because they announce a new possibility of politics and organizing. These moments all collapse out of their radical subjectivist moment into a more traditional politics – what Lazarus calls politics in the space of the state -but before that they represent a commitment to novelty and transformation. And this commitment is there in Foucault’s example of the prison abolitionist, who does not see as the object of their critique any particular line of legislation or enacting of a certain concept of prisons but the very system of prisons itself.  

In Foucault’s formulation, there is a loss of the restraining legislation of the philosopher, the one who lays down the law of the law. Foucault’s method leads him, through the everyday, into the halls of a radical and inventive politics that becomes the concern of Lazarus and Badiou. This loss of interest in the power of the transformative effects of legislature appears in a quote from Lazarus at the end of his essay “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?”:

We reiterate, it necessitates a new approach to politics, and demands, from the very beginning, no longer centering or focusing politics on the State, and beyond that, on the statist form of power. A new politics will be at a distance from the State. The failure of socialism is not simply the failure of its program—the disappearance of classes and the wasting away of the State—it is the failure of a general centering of politics on the State. The objectival vision of politics is also, today and in France, that there is no politics except that of the State apparatus and from the interior of its logics such as they formulate themselves: i.e., to do politics is to enter into parliamentarianism…. A materialist rupture demands that we create, against parliamentarianism, a non-parliamentary politics.

A non-parliamentary politics and a politics focused on abolition instead of legislation cleave awfully close, as far as I can tell.

Foucault does not quite get back to the question of singularity that is bubbling underneath the surface of his lecture. It is a question Lazarus takes up in detail, however. In articulating a politics at a distance from the state, singularity becomes a crucial watchword. As Lazarus explains:

Because it is also a politics which thinks itself, without the aid of other doctrines: philosophy, history, economics, sociology, etc.  The thesis here is that the subjective can not lead to anything but the subjective—the subjective thinks itself according to the subjective.  Thus, it is a question of a theory of the singularity of politics. The abandonment of supports or referents exterior to politics, or borrowings from other disciplines, defines the statement politics is a thought. Thinking itself, it is a thought. The element of the subjective is an essential part of the machinery—one could call a politics in interiority a politics in subjectivity.

So, the trepidation with which Foucault opens his essay, his wavering about drawing a comparison between prison abolition in Europe and in Japan, reflects some sense already of this notion of singularity lurking where his reflections lead. It is not quite the same thing, but some sense of a certain incommensurability in various political movements is present. And in this sense too, perhaps Foucault is right that he never really gave up on the archaeological method.

Gorky’s remark about Platonov’s characters is not unfair. Platonov leaves no room for doubt that his characters are foolish. They are extraordinary in a pejorative sense – it would be better if they were ordinary. Since Chevengur was censored  we might be tempted to assume it is samizdat. Yet Chevengur’s “eccentrics and half-wits” – let’s just call them fools – build a kind of Communism. They listen to each other, solve their problems together, help each other see reason. And then, through someone else’s idiocy, they are exterminated.

The fools of Chevengur are the core of the novel’s utopian and radical dimensions. Chevengur’s main characters, Sasha Dvanov and Stepan Kopionkin, are reflections of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Here Don Quixote’s meagre steed, Racinate, appears as a powerful cart horse named, amusingly, “Strength of the Proletariat.” Kopionkin even has his Dulcinea. It is none other than Rosa Luxemburg. Although she is no longer alive, it is her memory that drives Kopionkin and guides his actions. He keeps a photo of her in his cap.

Kopionkin often speaks in ridiculous Soviet phrases, he is hasty and quick to violence. When a forester invites Kopionkin and Dvanov in for dinner he makes the mistake of referring to them as bosses:  “‘Kulak cretin!’ replied Kopionkin, with quick rage. ‘Our power isn’t terror, it’s the meditativeness of the masses.’” The forester corrects himself and we are told that “[t]he Revolution had convinced Kopionkin once and for all of the submissiveness of every enemy.” Such absurd sentences abound in Chevengur, especially when describing Kopionkin.

Ostensibly, the novel is about Dvanov and Kopionkin’s search across Russia for communism. The Civil War and the New Economic Policy (NEP) had rendered communism obscure and scattered traitors and counter revolutionaries amongst the populace. They will eventually but separately arrive at Chevengur, far inland on the steppe. Chevengur functions as a kind of Mecca and every fool they meet along thier journey ends up there. Chevengur is a strange society, but its a utopian one. When Dvanov finally arrives he walks down the street, “not yet understanding anything but seeing that life was good in Chevengur.”

Chevengur is unlike anything else in Russian or Soviet literature. The period in which it  was written, as the revolution gives way to Stalinism, is also a time in which language is torn asunder. Marxism, as one of the last comprehensive Weltanschauung (worldviews) built its own extensive terminology and ideas. Russian revolutionaries sought to adhere to this lexicon, and by the time of Stalin this lexicon had become inflexible, being reduced to less than language. In Chevengur Platonov’s relationship to this language is still open. He parodies it and produces ridiculous effects with it, but his characters are still capable of thought.

In The Foundation Pit, which Platonov writes after the first collectivization (1928-1930) the characters not only talk in phrases torn from Soviet propaganda, but the narrative itself is written in this manner. This is apparent from the very first sentence of the text, where we are told that Voschev has turned 30 in his “private life” and that he has been dismissed from his factory job “on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.” At one memorable point one-character calls another a “class superfluidity” as if this is supposed to be some great insult. Everyone in The Foundation Pit -with some fleeting exceptions – is an idiot. And there is something sinister about an idiot.

The archetypal literary fool is Don Quixote. Yet what we should make of Don Quixote is far from obvious. We know him idiomatically, when we are told to not tilt at windmills, a warning about misdirected efforts. Don Quixote’s foolishness, however, is more than quotidian; it has world historical implications. He is a figure that signals a transition, sitting on the edge of new incomprehensible era. This makes him tragic as well. For György Lukács, Don Quixote is the surest sign that the era of the epic has ended, and the era of transcendental homelessness has begun. Don Quixote is a fool because he does not understand his fate, because he persists in a world that is no more. World history has passed him by. 

It is not just Lukács who makes of Don Quixote a herald. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, sees Don Quixote as heralding a different transition. This time it is our departure from the Renaissance world and the rules of knowledge that govern it. Don Quixote is, for Foucault, “the negative of the Renaissance world.” Don Quixote’s errors are often ones of resemblance. This object looks like another object. The Windmills are imposing, like giants. A washbasin shares the shape of the infamous Helmet of Manbrino, etc. ,etc. For Foucault this makes a mockery of the role resemblance played in the Renaissance and signals a move closer to our own current paradigm: only a fool would think that because two things resemble each other they are connected. 

Platonov’s Don Quixotes signal another transition. Yes, Don Quixotes, plural. Platonov takes literature’s greatest fool and multiples him. It will take more than an single individual to build communism, after all. Dvanov and Kopionkin are travelling through the wilderness when they come across a set of human footprints leading to a building. They inspect the building and tell the man inside to come out. He at first refuses, but eventually emerges. He is covered head to toe in armor and wears the red army star upon his helmet. A communist knight, our comrade Pashintsev. He has been living alone, believing the revolution to have been let down since 1919. He tells Dvanov and Kopionkin that he “lives without the least leadership – and the result is excellent.” He works to preserve the memory of the revolution in his abandoned compound and wards of officials with threats of grenades and various explosive. Yet he defused them all long ago and sleeps peacefully every night next to his impotent defenses.

Don Quixote reappears sixty pages later in the guise of Cherpurny, the Chevengurian. When Dvanov meets him, Cherpurny tells him that he is “From Communism…heard of such a place?” Leaving town and returning to Chevengur, Cherpuny is stopped. He has not paid for his night in the inn. Yet he has no money, because money is not needed in Chevengur.

He had no money and could not possibly have had any money. Chevengur had no budget, to the joy of the provincial authorities, who assumed that life in the town was proceeding on a sound, self-supporting foundation. In reality, however, the citizens of Chevengur had long ago decided that a happy life was preferable to any kind of labor, construction, and mutual accounting that required the sacrifice of man’s comradely body, which lives only once. Chepurny was unable to pay for his lodging. “Take what you want,” he said. “I’m a naked Communist.”

Don Quixote, too, refused to pay for a night’s lodging. For who has ever heard of knight paying to stay in an inn? There are now three Don Quixotes in Platonov’s story. One seeks to defend communism from its enemies (Kopionkin), one lives without leadership (Pashintev), one lives in a town that has supposedly achieved communism (Cherpurny). There is much in Don Quixote to suggest that Cervantes wants his hero to be a figure of mockery, out of time and overzealous. Yet these are not the only readings of Quixote possible. Quixote’s insistence, his removal from the immediate concerns of the world, gives him a sort of strength of character. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno suggests that Quixote’s foolishness is also bravery, and models a conviction that is essential. I have written about this before, but I will quote Unamuno again:

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by facing ridicule with serenity.

The term fool is seen as interchangeable with the term idiot. Both will make poor choices. One classic distinction, however, is that a fool is capable of great vision, occasionally seeing further or deeper than the general populace. The association of foolishness with madness links it to this prophetic capacity. Idiot, on the other hand, has no such connotation. There are no idiots who have suddenly seen things clearly, except of those who are becoming-unidiotic. A fool sees what is not, but that also means they see what may be. An idiot does not see at all. The idler is a fool, the inflexible bureaucrat an idiot. The naive romantic is a fool, the man who cannot see his marriage fall apart is an idiot. 

Chevengur is a novel of fools, and the turn of its plot, its tragic descent begins with an idiot. The Foundation Pit is a novel of idiots, and its one hero is a fool. In a crucial moment in The Foundation Pit, Voschez punches a kulak and in this moment is described as “without thought.” Meanwhile, the citizens of Chevengur are often thinking, and often forcing each other to think. When Kopionkin and Dvanov first take their leave of Pashintev he watches his “fellow-thinkers pass out of sight.” In chapter 39 it appears as if Chevengur’s peace is at risk of falling apart. Dvanov, Kopionkin, Cherpurny and others discuss what communism is and how they are to procced. They consider each other’s view points and devise a plan of action. They may be fools, but they are not without thought and are far from impotent.

November, 1928. The Soviet Central Committee, now controlled almost totally by Stalin, approves plans for 20% of the U.S.S.R’s farmland to be collectivized by 1933. It represents a crass, bloody and somewhat successful solution to a problem that has been plaguing the USSR since at least 1921. The Soviet Union struggled to get sufficient productivity from peasants in the 1920s. Poor weather conditions and the ravages of the civil war led to starvation. Platonov suggests Chevengur takes place around this time (1921/22). Characters talk of Lenin as if he lives and breathes, and Dvanov is kicked out of the home of his foster family because they cannot afford to feed him. 

The economic crisis following the civil war required backtracking from the communists. Crass histories, written after the ascendancy of the Cold Warrior™, suggest Lenin and his comrades were dogmatists. Yet Lenin and the General Committee also spent much time debating how to proceed and agreeing they would need to change plans and policy to prevent disaster. The return of markets and currency began to slowly ease their problems. Lenin argued that the if the choices were delaying communism or using force to make the peasant acquiesce, then it was better to delay. Better to take the slow road to communism than speed towards destruction.

It is easy to read this change as a mea culpa. Sorry lads, communism is impossible. This change, the infamous NEP, might be touted as a sure sign of the impracticality of communism. Many thought Russia was ill suited to communism. This was a country mostly of peasants, and communism was suppose to be about the workers.

From a certain perspective this is all true. It was foolish to seize government and abolish money, to introduce soviets and mass democracy, and to expect a successful revolution in such a backward country. Wasn’t it the case that there would need to be a democratic transition to socialism? Yet in 1917, when Lenin thought revolutionary take over was possible, he leapt at the chance; “History will never forgive us if we miss this opportunity.” On what grounds could the revolution succeed? Lenin, however, also knew that there needed to be one revolution to inspire others, and that someone must take the plunge. In this he was right.

After the fall of Soviet Russia and the eclipse of the communist horizon, we now tell a story of the follies of revolution. Soviet history is a straight line that leads from the storming of the Winter Palace to the gulag. Lost here are the oscillations of revolutionary history. We talk of the victims of communism, but many of those were themselves communists. As Enzo Traverso points out in Left-Wing Melancholia, “the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles and their defeats.” Cold War(ior) historians offer a simple lineage: Lenin paves the way for Stalin and Stalin institutes the Gulag. In this history there is no sign of the communists who helped carry Lenin to power, very little on the varieties of communist (but plenty on their vulgarities), no picture of the disunified and fracture nature of Soviet society immediately after the revolution and no picture of the great contradiction at the heart of Lenin’s enterprise. Lenin wanted to smash the state by going through the state. In the end the attempt to preserve the revolution and fight against the Whites required strengthening the state. If it is true that Lenin paves the way for Stalin, it is true only insofar as he left, at the time of his death, a strong bureaucratic state and not a feeble one. As the 1920s drew on, the foolish hopes of the revolutionaries were being transformed into the inflexible idiocy of bureaucracy. 

October 1927. Leon Trotsky, hero of the revolution, general of the Red Army, delivers a speech to the Central Committee. Others, described vividly by Victor Serge as men who “had no suspicion that they were really no more than restless ghosts of future suicides and firing-squad victims”, booed Trotsky’s speech. Platonov began work on Chevengur in the summer of 1927. As Platonov writes his novel the last vestiges of revolution fidelity are being eroded and Stalin’s rule is being cemented. Still, it is too soon for the despair to set in. The idiocy of the Stalinist period has not yet been fully realized and enabled. All Platonov’s zealous revolutionaries say and do ridiculous things. Yet they are redeemed. It is only towards the end of the novel that a truly sinister character appears: Simon Serbinov. Serbinov is no fool. Rather, he is an idiot.

Serbinov comes across the town of Chevengur. Serbinov is to make a report on land usage and cultivation. He arrives in Chevengur and although he finds it bewildering the town folk are kind to him. Stopping Cherpurny he asks why the citizen’s residents labor so uselessly. Cherpurny gives an answer that is perfect: “But we’re not working for use. We’re working for one another.” There is of course irony here, working for one another might entail better cultivation practices and more efficient industry. But it is Cherpurny, the provincial fool and idle dreamer who gives a more communist answer than Serbinov can imagine. Cherpurny then says to Serbinov “it seems you’re not a party member”. The joke is not on Cherpurny but Serbinov who is “unable to understand what stood before his vision.” Ultimately Serbinov will write a critical report of Chevengur. Shortly afterwards the town is attacked, and its residents die defending it. The Chevengurians believe they are being attacked by the White Army, but it has been strongly implied throughout the novel that the civil war is over. More plausible is that the government has arrived to wipe out an idea of communism that cannot conform to party bureaucracy. It is Cherpurny who is the a fool when he tells Serbinov “don’t worry – you’ll get used to thing here, you wont come to harm.” A reassurance a child might give. It is Serbinov and his army that are idiots when they reach out, like a malicious teenager, to crush the bug before them.

June 1926. Vladmir Nabokov gives a talk to the Aykhenvald-Tatarinov literary circle in Berlin. He has been living in Berlin for under a year. The talk is titled, rather wonderfully, “A Few Words on the Wretchedness of Soviet Fiction and an Attempt to Determine Its Cause.” Nabokov has read a novel so bad it has caused him to swear off Soviet literature for an entire year! This novel is Feodor Gladkov’s Cement. Cement is a classic of proletarian fiction, the story of Gleb who returns from the front unable to make sense of the new Soviet world. He cannot accept that his wife is his equal, he follows up on old grudges, but he will put everything aside to make sure that work can continue, the Whites can be fought off, and the local factory reopened. Gleb speaks in what Nabokov calls a “idiotic and pretentious tone”, his speech full of strange propagandistic locutions. The horrors of Soviet literature are contagion for Nabokov: even Pilnyak succumbs to this “bombastic verbiage.” With a few other examples Nabokov concludes that the Russian Revolution cannot produce any good literature, for good literature cannot be based on class analysis. It has as its subject Man.

There are many ways in which Chevengur mirrors Cement. Yet Platonov’s story is infinitely weirder and infinitely more ambiguous. And it is ambiguous because it takes in the fullness of its characters. They disagree often about what to do yet maintain a strange commitment to comradeliness. I once had a professor recommend Cement to me. He said it was a wonderful novel where people come together, work together and get things done. There was in fact a utopia dimension of this novel, a belief in common people working together. Platonov, if anything, is more utopian and more communist. The Chevengurians are weird, but they are weird in different ways. The crushing homogeneity of The Foundation Pit – all men saying the same things and working towards the same goal - is replaced by a dynamic hamlet of foolish revolutionaries. But although they are fools, they listen to each other and work for each other. Chevengur works because of its tragic dimension, this much is true. A good optimistic novel is a rare thing indeed. And it also works because it is about Man, as Nabokov says all good novels must be. But it is about Man in the plural.

Platonov transcends Gladkov’s brutish novel. With Platonov’s awareness of the limits and horror of Soviet life perhaps it is more useful to compare him to Victor Serge, whose novels chart the tragedy of the revolution. Yet Serge’s works are all novels of defeat. Serge’s Conquered City, written in 1931 and 1932, focuses entirely on the Red Terror, with the not so subtle suggestion that it paved the way for Stalin. Serge’s protagonists are corrupted by the power they wield. Platonov, writing four years before Serge, shows protagonists who are doomed by the power they don’t wield. Serge, turning from revolutionary zeal to despair, has his novels fit a more classic format. I mean this literally; in Richard Greenman’s introduction he says Conquered City is easily compared to Sophocles’ Oedipus the Tyrant. The structure of classical tragedy is a fate that cannot be escape. No matter what, Oedipus must follow the path he is on. And in Conquered City the unleashing of the terror sets the revolutionaries on a path that will culminate in Stalinism. In Chevengur, however, Platonov betrays his revolutionary idealism by imposing disaster from without. It is Serbinov who brings ruin upon the town, a town that however ridiculously it was run, could address its problems. It is in The Foundation Pit that Platonov returns to a traditional tragic structure. There is nothing that will stop the excavation of the pit, the men are guided blindly, as if by fate, into the chilling close of the novel where they lay Nastya, the child of communism, in her grave. 

Chevengur achieves something incredible. Serge returns to art of the novel by turning away from communist optimism. Gladkov’s optimism is ridiculous and uncritical, inhuman almost. We often ask, could there be any good Soviet literature? What does a communist novel look like? I think this is a difficult question, precisely for the reasons Nabokov identifies. Contenders include pseudo-unamists like James Joyce (if you are unconvinced he was more than a stylistic radical, see here) and Boris Pilynak’s Naked Year, which throws out all the old rules of literature just as the old rules of capitalism have been thrown out by the revolution. We should add Platonov’s Chevengur to this list. This is a novel where man and men, in all their foolishness, live together, at least for a while. Don Quixote’s greatest achievement, Miguel de Unamuno reminds us, was his conviction, strong enough to turn everyone else into a fool as well.  This may well be the only antidote to sheer idiocy. 

Modernity is a great topic because its start date can always be pushed backed. So we find echoes of Gramsci’s sentiment – although I admit the key is different – when Nietzsche declared that God is Dead. In The Gay Science he does so at least three separate times (§108, §125, §343) and each time insists it will take us a long long time to come to understand this statement and its meaning. In §108 he suggests it will take “thousands of years” to truly overcome God, in §343 he suggests that “the event [of God’s Death] itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.” The emphasis on “arrived” is Nietzsche’s.

This will not be the first or last time Nietzsche’s thought echoes that of Marxist thinkers. For they grapple with fundamentally the same problem: of newness, modernity, transvaluation and the liveability of a life. It is true that Nietzsche is anti-egalitarian, that he has nothing kind to say about socialism and that his later writings are obsessed with willpower and strength. Yet it also true that Nietzsche is elusive, self-undermining and ironic. You go to Nietzsche scholarship? Bring your whip!

The publication of Daniel Tutt’s How to Read like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche joins a chorus of recently published works that wish to drive an insurmountable wedge between Nietzsche and Marxism. There is the recent republication of Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Domenic Losurdo’s The Aristocratic Rebel, both door stoppers. Tutt’s book is anorexic by comparison, a mere 326 pages. I am not that interested in discussing these books or reviewing them: others have taken on this task. If you want to be brought up to speed on the left case against Nietzsche without reading 1,000 pages, there are several Jacobin articles on this exact topic.

A more interesting question might be what is of value in Nietzsche? What are the ethics of reading presupposed by the left-wing critics of him? I follow Alain Badiou in thinking that Nietzsche must be left behind, but we will see what exactly I take this to mean in what follows.

Let us begin with something I find compelling about Nietzsche. In his less cynical and more joyous moments Nietzsche is grappling with a question of what kind of person can confront the era before us. He is interested in the new and in becoming. In the same aphorism of The Gay Science where Nietzsche says we are not yet able to understand the death of God he also writes:

We philosophers and free spirits feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we received the tidings that the old god is dead; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation. At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again, the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been yet such an open sea.

God is dead and a new era approaches. This era must be confronted by certain figures, but the problematic here is that of newness. It is a point underscored in how Nietzsche writes about his own audience. Nietzsche frequently claims that his audience exists only in the future, and this reaches absurd heights in the forward to The Antichrist where he declares “this book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet….Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” In a real sense Nietzsche can be said to be bringing fort his audience with his works, for clearing the way to readers of Nietzsche. The question that follows from this is to what end?

Nietzsche sees himself as intervening in a stagnant, sick culture. The health metaphor in Nietzsche is constant but one must remember it is a metaphor: health is not a state of return but a state of overcoming. One does not return to normal health but overcomes their sickness into superior health. Thus, reading Nietzsche as simply a reactionary will not do. Something else must be afoot in his work and he is not, as Joshua Dunigan said, “your father’s reactionary”. 

The focus on the new is not just something that appears in Nietzsche’s late work. The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche first major work, is not just a study of ancient Greek tragedy but also an intervention in German culture, which Nietzsche see as having lost its way. Thus, towards the end of that book he declares:

Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical home when it can still understand so plainly the voices of the birds that tell of that home. Someday it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness following a tremendous sleep: then it will lay dragons, destroy vicious dwarfs, wake Brunnhilde – and even Wotan’s spear will not be able to stop its course!

It wasn’t until Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” that Nietzsche made clear his future looking approach. The essay was written as a respond to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’s “Future Philology!” which accused Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy of being embarrassingly unhistorical.  In his essay Nietzsche makes clear that there must be space for a history of creation and culture, and that a historian who seeks merely to gather the truest facts – a form of history he calls antiquarian – risks never allowing us to have a critical relationship to history, in which we use it selectively to forge the new. In this sense antiquarian history is capable of producing cultural stagnation. We can depart from Nietzsche’s lexicon and examples here: a society which is 100% tradition and obedience to tradition would simply not be any kind of functioning society at all. In fact it is not even possible to imagine such a society. And here’s another example that is critical to Nietzsche’s approach here: we cannot know every fact about what has happened in the past, we cannot have everything in front of us. If the criterion of critique and advancement is total mastery of the past we will never finish the project of knowing about the past. This means that we cannot, culturally speaking, move forward. For Nietzsche the past must enable the new, as he makes clear: “When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.”

This instance on the new does not make Nietzsche left wing. It does, however, make him sympathetic to left wing ideas that are also invested in this question. How do we create a new political order, how to we escape from the tyranny of the old? From where does the new emerge and what forces are capable of unleashing it? Communism is a struggle for a new world. And the new can be many things, and the new can be something worse, but as moderns we are already amidst the new. Another Marxist echo in the problematic; “all that is solid melts into air.”

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The old is dying and the new cannot be born is as much a Gramscian diagnosis as it is a Nietzschean one. Yet what of other Nietzschean concepts? One that the right is particularly enamored with – apart from, as always, the concept of the Übermensch – is ressentiment. Yet even this term, born out of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, a text the lends itself well to right wing readings, is not so easy to place politically.

Let us start with a slightly old but interesting piece. In an opinion piece with the antipodean newspaper The Australian, conservative academic Mark Bauerlin pulled out an overused analysis of the left:

They suffer from this condition that Nietzsche brilliantly identified as ressentiment, the French term for resentment. Not ‘I resent this or that’. Ressentiment is a general attitude towards the world. They resent great things. Greatness makes them feel their own mediocrity. They don’t believe in heroes because heroes remind them of their inferiority. People with ressentiment want to tear down heroes and statues. They look at a hero like Thomas Jefferson and say: ‘He’s a slave owner.’ But if you don’t suffer from ressentiment, you look at Jefferson and say: ‘Don’t you understand, Jefferson grows up in a slave society, his family-owned slaves, his plantation depends on slaves, his material wellbeing depends upon slaves, everything conditions him to be a full-on supporter of slavery.’

The argument seems simple enough. It is that the left hate what is great: the monuments of western civilisation, the heroes of old and those able and capable of making hard practical decisions beyond good and evil (i.e. world leaders). Yet this reading, or application, of Nietzsche is a deeply unfaithful one. A conservative idea of ressentiment can be easily flipped on its head.

Let me offer quick anecdote to show how Nietzsche can quickly be flipped from pro-conservative to anti-conservative. Between 2017 and 2020 I taught a course on deception and political theory. One of the weeks focuses on Nietzsche and his account of truth. During that week I would ask students if they thought Donald Trump was an Übermenschlich figure. In Nietzsche the Übermensch is a figure of self-determination, overcoming and life affirmation. Against Christian meekness and otherworldliness, the Übermensch is of this world and wholly his own.

This question was supposed to use a contemporary example to get them thinking about the material. I like the question because so much of Trump seems like it might conform to Nietzsche’s ideas of Übermensch or the will to power; a strongman figure, cutting against the grain. But some students pipe up, and cautiously suggest that this analysis is hard to square with the fact his values are so clearly the current dominate values about wealthy, money and success; he holds the very Untermenschlich status of being a capitalist in a capitalist society. What kind of free spiritedness is this? Nietzsche’s concepts do not stick for long with those who are mostly satisfied with this world, or who wish to go backwards.

In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche seems to be inveighing against an ongoing situation where what he calls “slave morality” is overcoming “master morality”:

the slaves’ revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values – a ressentiment experienced by those who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to obtain their satisfaction in imaginary acts of vengeance. While all aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ ab initio to what is ‘outside itself’, ‘different from itself’ and ‘not itself’; and this ‘no’ is its creative act.

This is the first major passage in which ressentiment appears in The Genealogy of Morals. Read it carefully and questions about a contemporary conservative deployment of the term abound. Perhaps contemporary left wing ressentiment appears in saying no to tradition and to our past? Yet surely such a tradition would be the de facto starting point? Is there not a gap between saying no to what is different from itself and the affirmation of one’s own demands? Could the latter not actually describe transfigurative politics? It is again difficult here to square all this with a view of Nietzsche as simply reactionary.

What is missing in the conservative reading is an understanding of Nietzsche’s relationship to creativity and freedom. What freedom is it to inherit your values directly from the ruling classes and their ideology? What free spiritedness lies in adherence and admiration for bygone eras and ancient monuments? To enjoy aesthetic products – statues, churches, books, philosophers – because you were told to, rather than because you wish to?  The free spirit is the one who possesses the will to power and the will to power is often read as nothing more than the will to truth, but this will is a creative force, a willingness to render something new, to create without adherence to the old order.

There is another way to craft this distinction, and it is simple. A weird logic is at work amongst the conservative intellectuals who claim that the victimhood is the defining feature of the left (which left, whose left? The communist left? The liberal left? More on this in a bit). Yet it is often they who take up the position of the victim. The world is changing, and they hate this. They resent it. They say no to it. They hate those who exercise power over them, often in ingenious ways, all whilst holding all the cards, cards they possess through nothing more than sheer luck and good inheritance.

What is beginning to emerge here is a crucial inversion. It is in fact conservatives who often suffer from ressentiment, unable to handle a world of dissent and dissensus. Those in power rage from positions of comfort, those whose world is slipping react violently, nihilistically to their surroundings. This is the vision of ressentiment coming from the right that Pankaj Mishra identifies so brilliantly in his The Age of Anger:

Donald Trump led an upsurge of white nationalists enraged at being duped by globalized liberals. A similar loathing of London technocrats and cosmopolitans led to Brexit. Hindu nationalists, who tend to belong to lower middle classes with education and some experience of mobility, aim at “pseudo-secularist” English-speaking Indians, accusing them of disdain for Hinduism and vernacular traditions.

Now it may seem that there is indeed a left that barters in ressentiment and guilt. They impose moral and Christian values.  This is true, but often this left is an equally staid left (not always of course) and crucially a liberal left content with the current order. This is a left Wendy Brown analysed as early as 1995, in her States of Injury. For Brown, Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment can be applied precisely to a left that doesn’t go far enough. Brown’s concern is that to leave political questions of emancipation in the space of legal and moral questions is to replace the political logic of transformation with the legal logic of punishment and revenge: “in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project [of legal-liberal redress] seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.” A left that seeks the total revaluation of our current order, including its juridical and carceral system, would go beyond this state of affairs and into the open seas of the abyss which Nietzsche so praised.

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The difficulties of the term ressentiment led us to another question: how should we read Nietzsche? Nietzsche is a difficult writer, a self-undermining ironist. In Ecce Homo he has this to say about ressentiment: “Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment over ressentiment- who knows the extent to which I ultimately owe thanks to my protracted sickness for this too! The problem is not exactly simple: one has to have experienced it from a state of strength and a state of weakness.” This is a classic Nietzsche move, in which strength and weakness appear to together, in which being reduced helps one overcome. This kind of ambiguity is fundamental to Nietzsche and appears multiple times in his work. He veers from harsh dictates to kind words. He shames Christianity but tells us that he bears no ill will against its followers.

And Nietzsche, like many of the greatest German writers, is deeply funny. In the bombastic section of Ecce Homo entitled “Why I am so Clever” Nietzsche answers the question with anything but a comment about his mental acumen. An accident that he never obsessed himself with religion, that he has the right instincts (i.e. he was built different) and a long passage on food and consumption are what he offers us as the source of his genius. And then he tells us that “it was only sickness that brought me to reason.” This is all very funny, but also quite serious. What if intelligence is mostly accidental? What if it is related to one’s pitfalls? What if it is necessary to be unwell to think well? These points are not directly argued for, but presented, to trouble us, to compel us to revalue our values.  

The attempts to prove Nietzsche as reactionary betray a twisted ethics of reading and strange belief in the power of ideas. The great racist ideologues and intellectual criminals of our time (and of past times) are very direct! Nietzsche’s elusiveness comes from his distance from such things. He is before the great terrors of the age, but he is always driving a wedge between any stable interpretation of him. He cannot quite be brought under the hallmark of reactionary or conservative thought. His ideas always go a little further. To place him alongside Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre is a grave error. Yet he bears no love from progressive movements, for equality and in this he is unequivocal. Yet can we believe that if we enjoy reading Nietzsche, if we find him compelling or insightful, we must take the worst of him too? He is only a systematic thinker to the extent he has a singular mission, but part of this mission is to frequently dissolve himself.

When it comes to the question of if we should read Nietzsche, of where he belongs, we mistake his artistry for philosophy. The question should we read Nietzsche is not the question should we read Carl Schmitt or Alfred Speers. It is the question should we read Ernst Jünger or Louis-Ferdinand Celine or Yukio Mishma.  It is the question of if we are reading a violent and cruel Machiavelli, a racist Kant or Hegel, a Nazi Heidegger, a Christian Pascal or a distant Montaigne. There are figures who remain worthwhile despite their dubious commitments. Figures who have much to tell us even, or precisely, when we find them loathsome.

Nietzsche himself shows us a world whose fracturing gives us permission to pick and choose and craft our own way forward. It is unclear what salience infinite interpretive battles will have. Perhaps Nietzsche is like Hegel, waiting for us just as we believe we have gotten away from him. In Badiou’s essay, “Who is Nietzsche?” he claims that Nietzsche “is someone that one must at once discover, find, and lose.” For Badiou this insight clings to his own conceptions of philosophy and anti-philosophy.  But there is another meaning there, lurking. We must learn to lose Nietzsche because his problems are our problems, his modernity our modernity. A new world beyond the cruel elements of this one awaits, but it must be forged through an act of will. We are Nietzsche’s future readers, the ones who awaited him. But it is also our duty to be his last readers. And Nietzsche knew this too, writing in Ecce Homo that “one repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” After the interregnum we will be able to read Nietzsche easily, peacefully. Nietzsche tells us, before Ecce Homo truly begins, that “only when you have all denied me will I return to you…” One hopes such a day draws near.

Each of the novels explores a particular level of guilt. The first, The Book of Blam, describes one Miroslav Blam, who is impossibly innocent. He has survived World War II without dobbing in his neighbours, betraying his people, or even killing a Nazi. He has been spared persecution because although he is ethnically Jewish, he has converted, quite circumstantially, to Christianity. In the second and best volume, The Use of Man, Tišma explores varying levels of guilt across several characters. These are characters who are victims of the war, but who have betrayed or abandoned others in the mess of conflict. Finally, in Kapo, Tišma singles out a source of guilt that is truly exceptional. You might think that the figure here would be a Nazi officer. Tišma’s insight and cruelty runs deeper than this.  Instead, he chooses a Kapo, a Jewish concentration camp guard, a figure of betrayal and self-loathing This is the source of his bleakness: suffering does not equate with righteousness, the just will not be vindicated. 

Guilt, then, is the watch word for these novels. And what they track is not just the horror of the camps. All the books occur, mostly, after the holocaust. Compare this with Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, whose books are so often located within the camps. Tišma wants to track the effects of these horrors, of how a life is shattered and decomposed after the war. In this sense the horrors of the holocaust cannot be surmounted, to go on living would be to not going on living at all.

There is much in Tišma to recommend this reading. Vera Kroner, the protagonist (if there is one) of The Use of Man survives untold abuse in a concentration camp. She survives only because she is selected to become part of a haram, raped and abuse by the camp’s commanding officer. She lives on later, in a state of almost constant dissociation. She returns home and enters her house with the feeling she was “entering yet another cemetery.” She strikes up relationships with men, but they are all meaningless. She is empty. There is almost a moment of redemption when Sredoje Lazukić, –the “anti-hero” of the book and Vera’s childhood friend – returns to Novi Sad and Vera takes up with him, and for awhile they almost happy.

Tišma cannot be read in the same vein as writers like Wiesel. Innocent cannot be afforded to anyone, even the war’s heroes. For Tišma the rot is in all of humanity, his books plunge us into the murky moral and psychological depths of these years. This is the central reason his books are described as bleak. Take, for example,  Sredoje. He should, in theory, be a war hero. He was a member of the partisans and shot a prominent Nazi officer. However, Sredoje’s story begins with his trip from Novi Sad to Belgrade. There in occupied Belgrade and hiding from the horrors of the war he becomes a police officer – i.e. a Nazi collaborator - and uses his power to coerce prostitutes into sleeping with him. Tišma does not want his readers to miss the accusation here, and Sredoje is described at one point as a “rapist.”

Sredoje joins the partisans almost by chance, not principle. Friendly with the Nazis in Belgrade, he is taken by his commanding officer to a cabin. There the commanding officer tries to become intimate with Sredoje. Panicking, he shots the officer and must flee. In the wilderness he stumbles across the partisans, only joining the resistance when he can no longer take refugee with his conquerors.  The man of action is the man without principles.

Sredoje’s role is in part to complicated postwar understandings of guilt. Here is a man, committer of ordinary, horrible crimes, a traitor, but also someone who shots fascists and helps liberate Yugoslavia. Much ink has been split on the sudden emergence of resistors after the war. Everyone, it turns out, wasn’t really for the Nazis. Picking at the scabs of guilt, searching for the ultimate victim is unproductive in the extreme, as Hannah Arendt was keen to point in her 1945 essay Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility: “Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.” More important than who is guilty, Arendt argues, is the question of how such situations emerge. In staging the vicissitudes of guilt Tišma is making this category more ambivalent, making the depiction of the holocaust more complicated. For this to work one must be brought into the deep psychological life of those who commit acts of extermination, cowardice, and foolishness alike.

Literature is perverse. To portray evil well is to portray an evil that is complex, compelling, and human. Vladmir Nabokov and J.M. Coetzee are two masters of such perverse literature. Reading Lolita is horrifying, horrifying because you are compelled. Coetzee takes a more metafictional approach to this issue in Elizabeth Costello. In one scene, the titular protagonist discusses the ethical limits of writing. She is repulsed by a book, Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. This book tells the story of Hitler and the July plot, Claus Stauffenberg’s infamous attempt to assassinate Hitler. Costello objects to the depiction of the execution of the plotters, presented in detail: “in representing the workings of evil, the writer may unwittingly make evil seems attractive and thereby do more harm than good.” As Jacqueline Rose points out in her essay “The Body of Evil”, this argument of Elizabeth Costello the character is undermined by Elizabeth Costello the book, which itself describes horrific scenes of animal slaughter, sexual violence and the holocaust.  Any book concerned with atrocity is a double-edged sword, necessary to imagine the worst, but erasing our innocence and potentially corrupting us.  A compelling portrait of the awful brings us closer to the awful. What shocks us about Tišma is that he takes this principle to its limit.

There is, however, a crucial question in the background. This question concerns the very crafting of the text itself. To begin such explorations already entails a well-drawn moral line. Underpinning the muddy picture of morality and its vicissitudes such authors present is a clear sense of moral clarity. Evil is a problem precisely because we can tell right from wrong; the problem then becomes why do we not exercise this clarity more often.

Yet Tišma’s novels also appear to wage war on principles themselves. We have seen this in the trajectory of Sredoje. It is important to note that what makes Tišma bleak is not just the depiction of horrible things – plenty of writers are bleak, depict bleak things – but his relentless undermining of principles. The Book of Blam, for example, relentlessly undermines the possibility of innocence. To be innocent after the Shoah is untenable.

The Book of Blam might be taken as a word against passive resistance, a suggestion that Tišma is straight forwardly pro-partisan. Yet the character of Sredoje already explodes this myth. So too does Gerhard Kroner, Vera Kroner’s brother. He joins the resistance, but this cannot be separated from his desire to kill. The return of Sep Lenhart to Novi Sad, who has been fighting for the Nazis in Russia, offers Gerhard the chance to assassinate a war criminal. But Gerhard’s desire to kill his enemy is also, in part, driven by his envy of Sep’s bloodlust. Everyone is compromised.

Robert Kroner the father of Vera and Gerhard, is trying to keep his head down. In arguments with Gerhard he insists that he is just a civilian. Kroner is a well-educated, enlightened figure. He speaks of Sigmund Freud, of Goethe, Schiller, reads Arthur Schnitzler and Lion Feuchtwanger. Yet all his education offers him nothing, he is incapable of action. He might not be able to fight – not everyone can join the resistance – but is also unwilling to flee. Just as his son Gerhard urges him to fight, Vera urges him to flee. She is shocked to discover he knows which countries his family might have the best chance to succeed in, but refuses to truly consider the idea, revealing that “what lay behind the appearance of reasoned argument [was] the dispiritedness of old age.”

Then there is Milinko Božić. In the beginning of the novel Vera and Milinko are lovers. Bookish and noble, spirited and confident, Milinko is the character with the most heroic qualities. Tišma is somewhat mocking of him, describing him as having “become convinced that diligence and honesty made one worthy of everything.” He joins the partisans enthusiastically, not reluctantly like Sredoje. His fate for his heroism is to die. His limbs are rendered from him by a mine, and he is put down by hospital staff.

There is one objection to all the unrelenting misery in Tišma’s Novi Sad trilogy. This is that in the act of writing the book himself he is offering some kind of restitution. It is true that this is a performative contradiction if and only if it is correct to say that Tišma is a pessimist who truly believes his own disparaging of the bookish figures of Robert and Milinko. Yet in Tišma there is a belief in something like justice, in the value of all these things. This becomes clear in Kapo, which ends on a small but significant act of mercy and literary justice.

Kapo is the final volume in the Novi Sad trilogy and was sold to me as “the bleakest volume of them all.” It is the inverse of The Book of Blam. Blam is totally innocent, but the protagonist of Kapo, Lamian, has betrayed his own people. He has gone from persecuted to persecutor. Kapo is his story, and we spend a lot of time in Lamian’s mind. With are there with his guilt, his memories, his reminiscences. He tries to kill himself multiple times, but mostly he fantasizes about it. He is another survivor, one who did anything to survive. And he is a self-hating Jew, whose inner psyche has been corrupted by antisemitism.

The plot of Kapo is not gruesome, but perverse. Tišma knows this. When Lamian was a Kapo, he used his powers to coerce female inmates to sleep with him. The whole spectacle is not one of pure force; it would almost be better if it was. He tells these girls, naked and crying: “if you want to eat, you have to come here and sit with me on the bench and kiss me. For every kiss you get a bite of bread and butter with ham on it, and a sip of warm milk. Want some?” This coy, clownish behaviour makes him, in a single moment, both pathetic and sinister. A heightening effect mere brutality cannot emulate.

Lamian focuses in on one particular girl from his days as a Kapo: Helena Lifka. He discovers one day, reading the paper long after the war, that Lifka is alive. He wants to see her. He has been living in his head for decades and cannot forgive himself. Only another can forgive him. The perversity of the plotline is that we know such an encounter would be horrific for Lifka. And we know that Lamian cannot be forgiven, not really. His seeking forgiveness is evidence that he is not worthy of it.

The novels then oscillates between the darkest possible will they won’t they plotline – it is well known romance sheered of mutual interest is criminal – and Lamian’s memories of his own antisemitism, betrayal and self-abuse. This is bleak, indeed. Our interest in seeing if Lamian will achieve his goal pulls the reader through Lamian’s reminisces of the Balkans right before World War II, of increasingly extreme antisemitism; street thugs and bullies evolve into murders while we wait to see how Lamian’s perverse plot unfolds.

Lamian goes to Zagreb, where he believes Lifka lives. He equivocates. Makes passes at the house. Again, this is romance from the abyss; who amongst hasn’t agonised over a call to a crush or a lover, spent too long on the perfect message, got cold feet the first, even the second time? Lamian summons his courage, rings the doorbell. Helena Lifka does not answer. Bewilderment ensues. The woman at the door patiently explains that Helena has recently died. Lamian refuses to believe her at first.  The host is Julia Milćec, Helena’s cousin. She informs Lamian that Helena died of cancer, that “she suffered terribly.” Julia has survived the war in ignorance, Lamian’s announcement that he was a Kapo is wasted on her. The confession has failed and Lamian finds himself weak, unable to stand. Julia offers him to stay awhile as she heads out to do some shopping.  He wishes to sit in the chair forever, to shield himself from the outside world, “only here was he safe, hidden, even if only for a short time, until the next moment, just as he had been safe in the toolshed at Auschwitz.” The book ends with a great nothing, an anticlimax. Lamian is the same, and he has not found his redemption. The final moments of the book do not give up all the perversity and bleakness that has lead us to this point.

There is, however, a justice to this closing scene. The fact that Helena Lifka has died means she passes without enduring a final torment. It is a small mercy, and although Tišma makes it clear that Helena has not survived unscathed – how could she have – this small mercy makes all the difference. It would have been infinitely more cruel to these characters to stage this confrontation and infinitely more cruel to us readers to end such a novel with an impossible and undeserved redemption.

There is, throughout Tišma’s novels, an instability to his pessimism. Robert from the Use of Man believes in the arc of justice. He dies at the start of the war. Yet he is right, the Nazis will be defeated, the camps liberated. As any theorist of moral progress will tell you, moments of regression are not enough to displace progress in general. Or consider Milinko. His moral certitude leads to a horrific death. Yet there can be no end to the war without the sacrifices of those like Milinko.

The very ground upon which Tišma’s novels take place is one in which things can and do get better, in which justice and goodness are possible. Just as, in Nabokov or Coetzee the moral confusion in their characters and novels is dependent itself on a moral clarity – of the author, of the audience – or at the very least a hope of obtaining one, so too Tišma’s unrelenting bleakness betrays a principle, a faith in justice. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Tišma would have written these novels at all if this were not the case. For they go out in the world to tell us of guilt and catastrophe, and in doing so they guard against its return. That a levee breaks does not mean one should not build them. Principles might not be enough to save you, but they might just be enough to save us.

At midday I set out to meet my friends. The route from my host’s place to the Vijećnica passes by one of Sarajevo’s many cemeteries. They are a constant feature of the Sarajevan cityscape and indeed Bosnia more generally. I had arrived in Sarajevo two days prior, travelling from Split. The bus winded its way through the Bosnian countryside, circling Sarajevo before arriving some nine hours after our initial departure. As we crossed the border and entered Bosnia proper we came to our first stop, Livno. Above Livno rises a steep and imposing hill, whose face is littered with the white tombstones characteristic of Muslim graveyards. It was the first man made monument I saw in Bosnia.

The cemetery, the graveyard, the necropolis. Call it what you will but it has become an unfortunate symbol of Bosnia. Documentaries about the Bosnian War open with panning shots of cemeteries. Perversely survivors of the conflict are interviewed amongst tombstones. In Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergović novel Kin, scenes of cemeteries and graveyards abound. When I wrote about the book in 2021 I emphasized this; in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah McEachern’s review opened with the same observation.

Those who know anything about the history of the region perhaps realize the logistical error I had made. For the 11th of July is the memorial of the Srebrenica massacre. Srebrenica is a small town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Bosnian War (1992-1995) Srebrenica was declared a UN safe haven. In July 1995 it was overrun by the VRS, the Army of Republika Srpska. The VRS massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslims over the course of July. The VRS maintained variously that these were combatants or that it was just revenge for Bosnians killing Serbsin the towns surrounding Srebrenica. In 2013, the Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic apologized for the “crime of Srebrenica”, but refused to call it a genocide.

From the Vijećnica, the city hall of Sarajevo, the names of all 8,000 victims are read out from A to Z. There is no shade around the city hall. As I stood in the square across from it, waiting for my friends, there was nothing but the heat and the names of the dead to whittle away the time with.

I do not speak Serbo-Croat-Bosnian, nor is it a language whose details I can pick out easily. But as I waited and this chant of remembrance washed over me, a nausea rose in me as I heard an unmistakable repetition. It was a last name on repeat, the last and only memorial to an entire family tree extinguished.

When we think of who will remember us after we pass, we think of our family. If we have any hope for immortality, for being more than our mere bodies, it lies in the fact our loved ones will carry our names into the future, for at least sometime after our passing.

Some might call this romantic, and mean by this criticism. But in times of immense catastrophe such romanticism has its value. Jergović stages his expansive novel Kin around narratives of his family. This act of remembrance allows him to stage the complex and bloody history of the Balkans in all its complicated tragedy. Family members who resist or join the Nazis, who survive (miraculously) and die (predictably) in bloody conflicts and quotidian acts of revenge. Yet there is an kind of cruel irony at the heart of Kin, one I was unaware of when I first wrote about it. Jergović is in some sense lucky to be able to write a family history at all. Those last names, read out for what felt like an eternity in Sarajevo on July 11th, underscore this fact.

These days we in the West feel we have a certain degree of moral clarity about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars. It is clear to us that the Serbians committed, aided and abetted genocide. These countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia are just far away enough, just east enough that we assume a certain irrelevancy; I would never get swept into such horrible thoughts and deeds. And I would never engage in the cruel whataboutism of a genocidal power.

There are those who hold that Serbia and Serbians did not commit genocide. Nobel Prize winning writer Peter Handke is one. One of the features of the conflict that comes up in interviews with those who lived through it, is a sense that the other side too committed atrocity. This is not actually to be denied. The Bosnian army did kill Serbian civilians during the Bosnian war.

Despite this, we would be incredulous of any history of the Bosnian War that began by foregrounding Bosnian war crimes. Not because they didn’t happen, but because they do not capture the dynamics of the situation, of the imbalance of powers, and of the sheer destruction inflicted on the Bosnian people. An attempt to write events in such a fashion would not suggest balance and moral clarity but moral confusion.

As the number of Palestinians killed by the IDF exceeds 9,000 in just under a month, a new grime fact has emerged. Entire families have been wiped from the civil registry. On October 15th this was estimated at 47 families, by October 28th the Palestine News and Information Agency had reported 825 families wiped out. Antiwar protesters have been quick to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, resigned for his role. In his resignation letter he claimed the UN was failing to prevent genocide in Gaza. On October 13th, six days after hostilities began following Hamas’ attack on Israel, Raz Segal penned an essay entitled “A Textbook Case of Genocide” in Jewish Currents. Segal argued that Israel’s actions and the rhetoric of its leaders all met the definition of genocide. Some have disagreed with the invocation of genocide. Dov Waxman wrote a letter to Jewish Currents arguing that:

while Israel’s relentless and devastating aerial bombing of Gaza is certainly killing many Palestinian civilians, it does not seem to be aimed at simply killing as many Palestinians as possible; if that were the case, the casualties would undoubtedly be even higher, given the military force at Israel’s disposal.

The perversity of this argument aside - if Israel wanted to commit genocide it really would - ignores three crucial factors. Firstly, it is historically the case that genocide is covered by the fog of war. Conflict allows for plausible deniability. I mentioned it before but will restate it here: after Srebrenica, there were claims by the Republika Srpska (specifically the Government Bureau for Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)) that while there was some indiscriminate killing, nothing was organized, that it was mostly targeting combatants and so on. Without intent, there can be no genocide. But we also have to take stock of the fact that, as Saree Makdisi argued in n+1 we are witnessing the evolution of such acts, traditionally conducted with small arms:

But in no instance that I know of has ethnic cleansing been accomplished through the use of massive ordnance and heavy bombardment with ultra-modern weapons systems, including the one-ton bombs (and even heavier bunker-buster munitions) used by Israelis flying the latest American jets. Such matters are normally conducted in person, with rifles or at the point of the bayonet. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was carried out almost entirely with small arms, for instance; the Palestinian civilians massacred at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and other sites to inspire others into terrified flight were shot with pistols, rifles, or machine-guns at close range, not struck by thousand-pound bombs dropped from F-35s flying at 10,000 feet or higher.

What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples—the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites, and of course the Philistines.

Makdisi sticks to less objectionable term ethnic cleansing, a term Waxman also uses in his letter. What I am building to here, however, is an important point about those who use the term genocide in their rhetoric, protests and objections to the conflict. Are they risking “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning” as Waxman objects? Perhaps. A legal case, a case that might come before the international court might not meet the UN’s definition of genocide. But protestors are not lawyers, and politics is not the court room. The events in Gaza this October are events in situ, and the shape they are taking points towards the extreme end of human atrocity. (addendum: The Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights at the United Nations published a press release warning of genocide. The OHCHR will tend to be more cautious on this front, but we can take this as vindication of slogans

I am not the first to point out the comparison with Bosnian War. As the numbers converge, as similar horrors begin to emerge, the shape of what is happening slowly comes into view. Those on the street are trying to get ahead of this; if the use of the term genocide is hyperbole it is the fear of those calling for a ceasefire that it soon won’t be. Politics is often about grasping the situation in situ, about fighting for the future.

Must we wait until the Gaza strip is laid to waste and its population annihilated or displaced before we are able to assess the situation clearly? History looks backwards, one will never have its clarity in the current moment. To argue over definitions of genocide as family trees are felled is to miss the point, to have descended into a vacuous pedantry. We know where this is going, we have, unfortunately, been here before.

The question of what is to be done is sidelined, in our pathetic excuse of a public sphere, by moral pedantry. Despite the 7,028 (as of writing) Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes, there is still an active and self-sustaining process of whataboutism, of inchoate associations between Palestinian liberation and terrorism, invocations of the right to self defense (as if Israel were a man accosted on the street), geopolitical analyst hand wringing about the balance of powers, and free speech warriors silent and smug as people are fired and ostracized for daring to oppose genocide.

Let us start then, where I have refused to start, with the Hamas attack of October 7th. The details are well rehearsed but what matters here is that Hamas killed Israeli civilians, often horrifically. It now became necessary to condemn Hamas before speaking of Israel, even as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, referred to Palestinians as animals and spoke of exterminating them all. As bombs from one of the world’s most advanced militaries rained down indiscriminately on one of the world’s most impoverished populations, pieces began running in the mainstream press about the horrors of the Hamas attacks along with think pieces on how the left has failed a test of decency.

What are we to make of all this? In many ways none of this is new. In his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said addresses the question of Palestinian terrorism:

Yet I suppose that to many of my readers the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of “terrorism”, and it is partly because of this invidious association that I do not spend much time on terrorism in this book. To have done so would have been to argue defensively, either by saying that such as it has been our “terrorism” is justified, or by taking the position that there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism as such….As a Palestinian, I resent and deplore the ways in which the whole grisly matter is stripped of all its resonances and its often morally confusing details, and compressed simply, comfortably, inevitably under the rubric “Palestinian terror.” Yet as someone who has been touched by the issue in all sorts of ways, I must also say that I have been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations , the bombing of schools and hotels; horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims, and horrified at the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things. Since I do not pretend to write as a detached observer, I have believed that rather than trying to deal frontally with the terror itself, I would do better if I attempted to convey to my readers some sense of the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came. And if in the end the story does not - as it cannot - mitigate the tragedies of waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality of a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question of Palestine.

Within our current discourse the above might read as an apology for atrocity. It is, however, an attempt at moral clarity. To understand this, we must first acknowledge our poor historical memory. This memory is, I think, willfully poor. It is in Israel’s interest to keep things that way. This is exemplified by Israel banning UN workers and officials from traveling to Israel after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Said’s comments from forty years ago and Guterres’ from this week are attempts to see the structural nature of the situation, to highlight cause and effect. You are against killing? You want peace? Then you must understand the situation ,regardless of if you condemn or condone it. The IDF has shot and bombed civilians in Gaza for decades, prevents most of the population from leaving and subjects them the full militarized force of the law without granting them access to their rights.

The demand to condemn Hamas forcefully and upfront is not, actually, a demand for moral clarity. It is demand that you begin your argument on the defensive and that you begin the chain of cause and effect at a certain point. It is a demand that you understand moral reasoning as an account sheet that must come out balanced, as if harms were as abstract and interchangeable as money.

Moral clarity resists this insidious will to abstraction. It is the ability to grasp the situation, the structures of cause and effect that lead towards any particular outcome, a sense of who has power and who does not and sense of who is capable of annihilating and who will be annihilated. This, to a certain extent, historicizes and formalizes morality. Morality is not a principle applied to all cases then, it is a gathering of the situation, a form of analysis. This requires, paradoxically, individualizing morality (tailoring it to specific situations) as a way to escape individualistic morality.

Moral pedantry erases the situation. It is ahistorical. It is not a form of analysis, but the application of a rule. Free speech absolutism is one example. It does not matter what was said to whom and how and in what way; speech must be defended. The rule must apply no matter what. This is the view of the jurist and the bureaucrat, the two dominant figures of the age. So too the right to self defense, which means more and more the right to never feel any threat whatsoever. A man in your drive way or yelling at you on the subway; self defense against a threat without any question of what constitutes a threat or how such a threat may have emerged in the first place. A right to self defense that ignores the psychosocial history of a nation and its citizens. Elimination as a right, as right itself.

So, the rule is that countries have a right to self-defense. The rule is that killing civilians is bad. These are unobjectionable in and of themselves. But applied as attempts to understand the events in Gaza since October 7th, they begin to flounder, they produce moral confusions. Suddenly one is suggesting that is right to drop 6,000 bombs in six days on a civilian population, that anything can be done. Because the rule must be applied. But the application of the rule is a process, and the process has its own logic. Moral clarity sees this process, knows its unfolding and asks what might bring it to a close. Justice follows moral clarity in this sense, defined, messianically, as interruption. Perhaps not so otherworld as I have suggested, for there is one interruption within reach of global leaders and their respective citizens: calling for and brokering an immediate ceasefire.

“Birth was the death of him.” – Samuel Beckett

No relationship is perfect. It is impossible for there to be a perfect relationship because love is disjunctive. The disjunction is not between the lovers but between their love and reality. Reality demands our death. Love demands infinity, and we can never live up to this demand.

Perhaps this sounds romantic. Fine. Love is also grotesque. We have, by and large, overcome the state of nature. Nasty, brutish, short? Pleasant, boring, long. The remaining source of our suffering: love. They fuck you up your mom and your dad, they don’t mean to but they do. Follow Phillip Larkin to the end, beyond his being verse, and you’ll find another conclusion: don’t love. And making love? Equally grotesque. The inner sanctum of our hearts, where disgust becomes fetish.

Between these two truisms, one romantic, the other cynical, lies the entirety of Rosalind Belben’s forgotten and beautiful novel The Limit, recently republished in the NYRB classics series.

The Limit is the novel of Anna (dying, dead) and Ilario( Italian, alive). They are married. The prose – strange, asyndeton, syntax garbled – jumps between at least three viewpoints: Anna, Ilario, and an omnipresent narrator. Beginning from Anna’s deathbed we jump backwards and forwards. Anna and Ilario’s relationship is displayed in all its critical moments, as well as snippets of Ilario’s life after her passing. The narrative is polyphonic and non-linear. The chapters repeat titles with increased numbering, centered around definitions from the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary. They are: Transmigration (“the passage of a soul at death into another body”, chapters 1, 15 and 19), Rapture (“the carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence”, chapters 2, 4, 9 and 17), Grief  (“a cause or occasion of keen distress or sorrow”, chapters 3, 8 and 13), Sea Change (“a change brought about by the sea”, chapters 5, 12, and 14), Childhood (“the state of time of being a child”, chapters 6, 11 and 16) and Future (“time that is to be or come here after”, chapters 7, 10 and 18).

 The text, we can say, is difficult. Here’s a passage, chosen at random:

I was eleven when. I was eleven when he: set out for a walk , to the other side of the woods , at two precisely in the afternoon. And in this wood of ours wild anemones still grow. He passed brimble bushes, primroses, beneath sweet chestnuts he prodded the soft peat with his cane. Or was it a stout walking stick. He strode through gorse, bracken, heather. Ling heather. At a time, simply at a time, the moment never to be established, he arrived. The river was at full spring flood: that we know full well. Full, everything: replete, satiated.

Belben’s prose is difficult in all her works. In The Limit, however, we might suppose a justification. Anna is dying, Ilario watches her, comes to care for her at the hospital. In this moment where consciousness lapses, where one goes from materiality to memory, a dense prose littered with shifting perspective is justified. Many books about death, or at moments of depicting death, utilize difficult prose. I will refrain from citing Paul Bowles as I am wont to do – “reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” etc, etc. – but the examples are plethora.

The Limit is not a novel about death. It bills itself as one, certainly. It is about love. And to be a novel about love and not romance, it must also be a novel about all the most grotesque moments of love. Watching your partner die might, for example, be one of these grotesque moments.

Another grotesque moment of love? Your parents; “protect me from my mother. Make my father beloved come alive.” This chapter, the first Childhood chapter, pushes along two separate points. One, Anna’s horrible mother. Two, her beloved dog, killing a cat. Perhaps these are not scenes of love. Anna declares: “I hate my mother. As I have not hated any human being then or now, or shall hate as much again.” The betrayal of a cruel mother, the betrayal of the family pet reverting to its animal instincts. The difficulties are the same. In the second Childhood chapter we learn that the father beloved has squandered the family fortune before drowning in a river. His death is either suicide, snake bite or both. This too is betrayal. But betrayal is born of trust, the deepest ones born of love. In its presence or absence its horrors are the same.

Describing love as grotesque? Justifiable. But love making? Surely puritan. Wavering, Ilario and Anna struggle to make love on their honeymoon. She is “forty, a virgin, and too narrow.” The attempts produce distress: “Anna glued her face to the sheet. Mentally she separated me from my cock.” Not just Anna, however:

And then, when she’d grown accustomed to the sight of naked me, she ogled my body. Convulsed in raucous laughter. A crescendo of embarrassment. I felt menaced by so many conflicting emotions. Sheer anger made me sweat: although the weather outside continued cold, racked upon the bed our skins stuck together, issuing crude sucking noises. Yes, the sweat was mine: your skin, I remember, remained dry. Unattractive.

Eventually they copulate; “the degree of his regret seemed out of all proportion to the event.” Do not take these difficulties for distaste or distance, however. The next chapter Belben will tell us of, not show us, their love, describing Illario as sitting “besides a person whom he loves – very much”. This is to assuage our doubts. What the novel shows us, ultimately, is the depth of their love, the depth of love in general.

All the grotesquery of Ilario and Anna’s consummation comes to signal affection. In the first Future chapter, Ilario is on a ship. He has a met a woman. They get (it) on. She reminds him of Anna. They fuck too. But it is destined, which means mechanical: “a love making later could only be the outcome of tortured intense discussion.” Ilario is haunted by images of Anna, yet their intercourse is perfect: “Slowly, quietly, gently. The passenger peers at such a brown man, physically perfect, many years older than herself, with whom she is copulating, with great pleasure.” Emotionless and frictionless and in completed contrast to the last scene of love making. The difficulty of Anna and Illario’s first encounter enters it full force in this contrast. What’s perfection without emotion?

Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work takes as its watch word the difficulty of not just love but life. The book’s epigraph, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”, is taken from the sayings of the Eastern Orthodox Russian monk Staretz Silouan. Silouan was apparently told this phrase in a dialogue he had with none other than Jesus Christ himself. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” sets the tone for Rose’s recounting of a life of difficulties. We might object: Rose’s sufferings were not extreme, nothing beyond the experiences of a middle-class life. This only underlies the point. To love and live will be to suffer, to put one’s mind in hell. A difficult childhood – dyslexia and divorce – lead onto other moments of difficulty for Rose. She falls for a priest, an impossible situation. This leads Rose to clear-eyed reflections; “love-making is never simple pleasure.” Indeed, there is another word for such activity. Or: “To spend the whole night with someone is agapē: it is ethical.” But the ethical is no easy thing to achieve, not a state of rest but of striving.

Structurally, Love’s Work is the opposite of The Limit. This is pure chance, there is no evidence Rose read Belben. However, The Limit is a book ostensibly about death that is really about love. Love’s work is the opposite. A book ostensibly about love that is really about death. For the unsuspecting reader – one that skips the blurb and Michael Wood’s introduction and has perhaps also been living under a rock – will find Rose reveal her cancer diagnosis halfway through the book. She is somewhat coy about this, knows that this is in some sense a cheap literary trick. Yet it heightens the thematic tensions of the book and Rose’s dictum, “keep your mind in hell, and despair not” now gains a certain solidity. Death is something else that must be confronted, and confronting it is just as impossible as love. The circle is complete.

Rose’s worldview comes together in her critique of new age spirituality. Such nonsense erases the grotesquery of love and of life. The advice to be exceptional, to love all, the see yourself as some cosmic intertwined being and to simply not worry about it are all acts which will destroy you. There are no happy hippies. As Rose argues: “It burdens the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries.” That would be no life at all, however. Furthermore, it would make love in impossible:

exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of revelation and reticence…it denies there is no lover without power; that we are at the mercy of others and that we have others in our mercy. Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon.

The difficulty of love turns out to be the difficulty of dying.

Love is grotesque. That is what makes it love. Towards the end of The Limit Illario is watching over his ill wife. He notices she has soiled herself. He shrinks from the situation at first, but there is no nurse around. He cleans his wife himself. He does not relish this task – “A trifle pale, my gills.” – but he does it nonetheless. Up against the vulgarities of the body you must decide what is stronger, your devotion or your disgust. Love affirms itself in this overcoming, to be loved is to the subject to this feat. Later you will need to be forgiven for your trepidation, and they will need forgiveness for their weakness. Rose: “to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever.”

Rose’s cancer spreads from her ovaries to her bowels. She requires a colostomy and a colostomy bag. “I want to talk about shit.” Rose knows this will make her readers squeamish. She plies us with details: “deep brown, burnished shit is extruded from the bright, proud infoliation in a steady paste-like stream in front of you.” This is neither erotic nor shocking. It simply is. Rose overcomes her disgust, invites us to as well, as a mode of continuing on, of continuing to live and of continuing to love.

I said earlier that Belben’s novel is beautiful. It is beautiful because of its difficult prose, and it is difficult because it fashions us a love we can recognise. There is love and there is tragedy. But in between, nestled inside of love itself is difficulty. Distance, disgust, and death.  This is the power, the mercy and the violence Rose sees as inseparable from love. And it is a true and human picture of love and life. In going through the moments of such intensity, in staging her novel as a series of moments of distance, disgust and death, Belben portrays a truer and more detailed picture of love in under one hundred pages than many authors achieve in several hundred. The difficulty of style turns out to be the difficulty of life which is the difficulty of love. Life and love are there then, conjoined and made intelligible under another sign: that of death. Love’s work, for Rose, is that she is bound to get love all wrong without ever giving up on it. Death’s work is to bring this process to a close. At the limit love’s work becomes intelligible in all its glory.

How strange then to say that Jünger’s time has come. In 2017 the first complete English translation of his 1932 essay The Worker: Dominion and Form came out and 2019 saw the publication of his journals from the second World War, A German Officer in Occupied Paris, which received wide coverage in the press. The New York Review of Books classics imprint has recently issued a new translation by Tess Lewis of On the Marble Cliffs and, somewhat closer to my antipodean home, an edited collection by Index Journal entitled Ernst Jünger: Philosophy Under Occupation appeared in 2021. The impetus for this revival is obvious. The recent publications and translations of his work date from after 2016, and in Jessi Jezewska Stevens introduction to On the Marble Cliffs she draws the obvious analogy; “the murmurs from the wings of 2022 tell us the democracy hasn’t been this weak since the Weimar years.”  In their introduction to Philosophy Under Occupation, editors Justin Clemens and Nicholas Hausdorf write of Jünger that he was “a witness to the rise of total mobilization, global war, and unprecedented technologies of mass extermination. Given that these remain our inheritances today – if now banalized and integrated into the highly-managed biopolitical fabric of everyday life in a neoliberal world at the limits of ecological viability – it also presents a kind of model of compromised survival under unprecedented conditions.” The cycles of history are getting shorter.

Before the renewed interest in discourses of fascism however, Jünger spoke to us of a world of technological nightmares, an impossible climate for the human soul. This concern is at the heart of The Glass Bees. Giles Fielke, in his contribution to Philosophy Under Occupation points out that tiny glass machines of Giamaco Zapparoni, the titular glass bees, mirror a push toward an entomic dystopia of swarms of delivery drones and the ecological language of networks and mass behaviors. In our age we are not only seen to be connected in the way a great hive or ants’ nest is, but we are also insect like in our behaviors, predictable, instinctual and irritable. Fielke’s imagination is set off by the reports of Amazon hoping to build a drone fulfillment center, whose uncanny resemblance to a beehive force his entomic analogy. Somehow here too Jünger is ahead of us, already knowing of our fates. No surprise then that Jünger liked to describe himself as a human seismograph, registering the underlying tectonic shifts that prefigured the tremors of the age.

The republication of On The Marble Cliffs offers us a chance to reconsider this romantic picture of Jünger. The book is, as a work of literature, utterly mesmerizing. Jünger is an excellent stylist, and his books often combine an intoxicating combination of frictionless prose and narrative foreshadowing. It is only after turning the final page of the book that one realizes how little happens in its slim 100 pages, so lost are we in Jünger’s pyrotechnics. The story is easily summarized. Two brothers – one of whom is the narrator - live in a monastic refuge high on the marble cliffs where they collect and categorize plant species. Their world is lush, and Jünger gives much focus to descriptions of the environment, to painting his idyll. The brother’s refuge high upon the cliffs allows the descriptions of the lay of the land - of the great lake, the Marina, and the grassy meadows of the Campagna beyond which lies the imposing and sinister forest - to have an organic nature; there is no clash between the narrator and what is narrated. This bird’s eye view, this sense of being above it all both physically and mentally is the first clue to what On the Marble Cliffs truly tells us about Jünger, who reveals in his parable the limits of detachment.

Tranquility is what the first several chapters set to establish, a tranquility that Jünger will slowly and horrifyingly unwind in the novel’s second half. This latter half follows the decline of this peaceful world into destruction and chaos. In the forest lies the Head Forester and his army of Mauretanians who will eventually destroy this idyllic world. The brothers, after a brief but all too late attempt at joining the fray, will retreat across the Marina as their former home and its surrounding landscape is torched.

The book was seen as an attack on the Nazi regime upon its release in 1939. It is hard to dispute this. Jünger was able to avoid the displeasure of the party due to the personal intervention of Adolf Hitler, but it is well known that Jünger despised National Socialism. They Nazis possessed the right sense of Prussian militarism, but their obsessed with technology concerned Jünger, and he steadfastly rejected attempts by the Nazis to propagandize him in anyway, including instructing the Völkischer Beobachter – the Nazi daily paper – to not publish any of his writing and walking out of a speech given by Joseph Goebbels.  For him they possessed “no metaphysics” and ceded too much ground to the liberal bourgeois order. His diaries from the second world war find him at odds with much of the Nazi party leadership, and although he was not involved, he was sympathetic to the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.

Jünger was, however, no progressive. “I hate democracy as I do the plague” he wrote in 1922. His treatise The Worker begins with his distain for liberal bourgeois democracy, suggesting instead a militaristic model in which freedom and obedience coincide in “the structure of an army and not the social contract.” He belongs to a class of European intellectuals best described as possessing an aristocratic spirit, readers of Nietzsche whose idyll was a naturalistic morality, – Darwin’s categorical imperative, not Kant’s -  ironic distance and the untrammeled wanderings of the free soul.

Jünger’s Storm of Steel is filled with this kind of ridiculous battle hardened nobility of the spirit that stems from this strange moment in European history. In the chapter entitled “The Double Battle of Cambrai” Jünger recounts his reaction to the news of a fallen comrade, Teppe, with pathos:

The news floored me. A friend of mine with noble qualities, with whom I had shared joy, sorrow and danger for my years now and who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny piece of lead! I could not grasp the fact; unfortunately, it was all too true.

This is almost immediately followed by:

Of all the stimulating moments in a war, there is none to compare with the encounter of two storm troop commanders in the narrow clay walls of a line. There is no going back, and no pity. And so everyone knows who has seen one or other of them in their kingdom, the aristocrat of the trench, with hard, determined visage, brave to the point of folly, leaping agilely forward and back, with keen bloodthirsty eyes, men who answered the demands of the hour, and whose names go down in no chronicle.

There is much talk of the nobility of his opponent, of the bravery of his opponents, but nonetheless Jünger takes pride in killing them, and kill them he must. The only time his enemies appear in any human light is when they almost kill him. The distance between this and Wilfred Owen, say, is unbridgeable.

Jünger’s fascination for us, I contend, is not that of the predictive seismograph, but that of the relic. He represents a form of life that has collapsed; the aristocratic spirit from which he draws is now gone. The mud of the Somme from which Jünger the surveyor and war hero grew was sowed by the very forces that unraveled the old world from which Jünger drew so much. This unravelling is there in the very evolution of warfare that the First World War represented. Much of Storm of Steel features Jünger waiting for bombardments to pass, never seeing his enemy. There are a handful of intense close battles. Jünger is at the dawn of massive technological overhaul in warfare, where the distance between enemy combatants has grown ever further. It was Walter Benjamin who keenly pointed this out, in his essay ‘Theories of German Fascism’ - a review of War and Warrior, a collection of essays about the First World War edited by Jünger – where he writes:

These authors nowhere observe that the new warfare of technology and material [Materialschlacht] which appears to some of them as the highest revelation of existence, dispenses with all the wretched emblems of heroism that here and there have survived the World War. Gas warfare, in which the contributors to this book show conspicuously little interest, promises to give the war of the future a face which permanently displaces soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character and war will assume the countenance of record setting.

A drone cannot win glory, and it does not experience honor. The values that produce such an object began, too, in the trenches of the Somme. These are the mud and blood soaked fields which inspired Paul Valéry to quip in 1919 that “the world, which calls by the name of ‘progress’ it tendency toward a fatal precision, marches on from Talyorization to Taylorization.” Despite Benjamin’s comments, Jünger seemed at times aware of this, yet always recoiled from fully accepting this. A passage from War as Inner Experience highlights this:

The battle of the machines is so colossal that man almost completely disappears before it. Often already, caught in the force fields of the modern battlefield, it seemed to me strange and scarcely believable that I was witnessing world-historical events. Combat took on the form of a gigantic, lifeless mechanism and swept an icy, impersonal wave across the ground. It was like the cratered landscape of a dead star, lifeless and radiating heat. And yet: behind all this is man. Only he gives the machines their direction and meaning. It is he that spits from their mouths bullets, explosives and poison. He that elevates himself in them like birds of prey above the enemy. He that sits in their stomach as they stalk the battlefield spewing fire. It is he, the most dangerous, bloodthirsty, and purposeful being that the Earth has to carry.

Man, or a certain man of a certain caliber, stands over and above machines. Note here this is no dialectical relationship, no uses and abuses of technology. There is simply the unconquerable will of noble souls over machines. Such a heroic vision, however, is belied by the facts of Jünger’s post war years.

To return to Sterling’s term “anachronistic”, what may have precisely let Jünger see so far was his distance from his present reality. The detachment of the man out of time. In his war diaries there is a famous passage wherein he watches bombs drop on Paris with a bemused indifference:

Air-raid sirens, planes overhead. From the roof of the Raphael, I watched two enormous detonation clouds billow upward in the region of Saint-Germain while the high-altitude formations cleared off. They were targeting the river bridges. The method and sequence of the tactics aimed atour supply lines imply a subtle mind. When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theater—pure power affirmed and magnified by suffering.

The passage is controversial for all the reasons Jünger is controversial: the aestheticization of war, the conflating of destruction and beauty, the strange detachment in the face of horror. It is also controversial because there was no air raid at sunset on that day. Jünger could have been confused about the date, or he could be blurring the line between fact and fiction. Yet, as Marilyn Stendera notes in her excellent essay on Jünger and time in Philosophy Under Occupation, it also belongs to the temporality of the witness: “the alternative temporal imaginary of the witness that the journals construct can also be characterized by a tension between fact and fiction, between a claim to historical objectivity – to temporal authority – and the absolute refusal thereof.” Yet if Stendera is right to identify Jünger’s strange temporalities – at least in his war journals – as that of the witness, then his infamous detachment is naturally a part of that, as she further explains: “perhaps the very attempt to remain untouched must ultimately render this kind of witness complicit – sometimes resisting, sometimes serving, mostly surviving, but never escaping the totalizing temporalities that it navigates.” There is an implicit impotence here, a great irony for Jünger the man of action.

Stendera ends her essay with a Jean Cocteau quote which, to the best of my knowledge, has appeared in almost every recent essay on Jünger: “some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” The logic of this witticism plays out on its own terms, but it is more suggestive than first appears. The hand is the instrument of touch. For most it is through this appendage that they affect the world. The suggestion that Jünger has no hands is not just a bon mot. It implies an incorporeality, an ineffectualness. Jünger may see this world and prophesize about it but he is not of this world, he cannot affect it. Left behind his fate becomes that of the ghost, a relic of the past that cannot move on, a sprite left to remind us of past transgressions.

After WWII, Jünger remained a popular writer but drew more and more into the life of the private individual. His was an inward emmigration, captured well by his late description of himself as an “loyal but unenthusiastic citizen” of postwar Germany. His 1977 novel Eumeswil introduces the figure of the Anarch, one who lives in a world they despise. This figure may be seen perhaps as one of romantic resistance, a man who knows he cannot act against the world but that he can resist the world’s encroachment into his soul. Jünger elaborates on this concept in contradistinction to the anarchist:

the anarchist is a man with plans, for example to kill the tsar or something to that effect, while this is less so with the anarch. The anarch is more established within himself, and the condition of the anarch is in reality the condition which every man carries within himself. [...] An anarch can for example work calmly in an office, but when he leaves in the evening, he plays quite another role. And aware of his own superiority, he is able to take a complaisant view of the political system currently in power. 

This figure is described in romantic terms by Jünger, but it is hard to see the difference here between the Anarch and the good liberal citizen Immanuel Kant describes in What is Enlightenment? Kant infamously argues that one may exercise total freedom in their public use of reason – what they say and write to various publics - but their private reason, perhaps best thought of as vocational reason, can be narrowly restricted. All of which is summed up the dictum “argue all you want but obey.” This model seems to march the Anarch perfectly, who even goes so far as to not argue at all and simply obey.

Hausdorf, in his essay in Philosophy Under Occupation, seeks to waylay such an interpretation of Jünger. He writes:

It [the Anarch] marks an attempt of non-communication or, better yet, of a separation of communicative strategies between outward social promiscuity and inner reserve. The latter doubles as a military code of honour, renouncement and asceticism. The state form suggested by the Anarch is thus also the reign of the well-behaved, innocuous, disciplined and educated – but potentially dangerous and free…the Anarch thus contrasts drastically with bourgeois individualism which is interested in the principle of safety and the maximization of lifespan.

It is worth noting the idea of the passive and whimpering bourgeois liberal – an image Jünger himself presents in The Worker – is at odds with the historical origins of liberalism, which concerns the question of when it is right to rebel and the very conditions of obedience. This is the animating principle in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and it is there too in Thomas Hobbes, who concedes at the very least that one can defend themselves from the Levithan, and quite possibly that it is just to resist a Levithan who cannot keep the peace. There is more room for dangerous militant individuals in liberal doctrine than in Jünger’s militarism. It is lost on Hausdorf that a sentence like “Venator [the protagonist of Eumeswil] can ponder tyrannicide while choosing not to act on it” describes the truth of just about every subject living under tyranny, and if we replace tyrannicide with the simple assassination of a head of state, it now covers literally every political subject.

On the Marble Cliffs’ message belonged to a world of aristocratic action, the tragedy of the story one about the great cost of retreating from the world. From the bird’s eye view and knowing distance – it is important to note that On the Marble Cliffs is told in the past tense, it is a retelling - the principle of action which dominates Storm of Steel slowly fades away. The inner turn that culminates in the Anarch begins here and there could be no clearer sign of capitulation than this turn inwards. The singularity of heroism becomes the egoism of the isolationist. Yet there can be no other fate for a man so detached from the world, a man who despite his perspicacity consistently failed to grasp the whole and to understand the dilemmas of his time.

I only know of one France. That of the Revolution. That of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Too bad for the Gothic cathedral. - Aimé Césaire, 1941

I will not be surprising anyone by saying that C.L.R. James was a historian. To be a historian though is to have an idea of not only what it is to study history, but a theory of what history is: how it works, what drives it, its causal nature. Yet the work of history does not proceed top down, from theory to raw data. On occasion the record fights back, one history hints at another. In James’ seminal The Black Jacobins two concepts of history are at play. One he is explicit about. He believes that men make history, but they do not choose their conditions. This idea, a paraphrase from Karl Marx’s The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is something we will return to at the close of this piece. James’ text navigates the space between men, history and conditions. Yet, in doing so James also point towards another conception of history, one that problematizes the very notion of historical conditions and with it its implicit teleology. For his focus on the men who make history – both ordinary and great – is undermined by his vision of teleological history.

That is the ground I intend to cover, but let us go back to the start of the text. I mean this about as literally as possible, let us examine the title of the book as it appears on the cover. “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution” is the book’s full title. It presents us with the triangulation of three aspects of James’ study: the masses, the great man who led them and the context, or conditions of their actions, which is in this case located with the proper name of San Domingo. We might thus expect The Black Jacobins to balance these aspects. The preface to the first edition, however, tells us that “the individual leadership responsible for this unique achievement [the only successful slave revolt in history] was almost the work of a single man – Toussaint L’Ouverture.” This indicates a sympathy for what is often referred to as the ‘Great Men’ theory of history, the idea that powerful and singular individuals wield immense influence on the course of history. James proceeds carefully from here, noting that “Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth.” One might expect this shift to indicate that James believes there is a dynamic between the masses and the great men of history and that his intention is to balance both. This is not how the text proceeds, however. Instead James claims:

Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.

James drops the question of the conflict between the masses and the great men who lead them, replacing it with the an argument about the conditions history imposes on action. What this does is replace a discussion of dynamics between these two factors and how they might undermine and reinforce each other with an appeal to force outside this dynamic, in this case the force of history itself. This is to say nothing more than that what happened must have happened. Again, we will return to this end point in the closing remarks. This conflict between masses, great men, and history appears clearly in two chapters drawn from the start and end of the book: Chapter 1, ‘The Property’ and Chapter 12 ‘The Bourgeoisie Prepare to Restore Slavery’.

In the first chapter James begins normally enough. Here is the history of the popular historian: facts, figures and a nice touch of testimony from some impossibly named noblemen. Yet as this is a history of both slaves and slavery, James’ provides a sketch of the lives of the slaves of Santo Domingo, who remain, no matter what cruelty they face, “quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.” The topic of slave intelligence occupies several pages. The slaves display wooden stupidity in the face of their masters, but when gathered away from the eyes of their masters display “remarkable liveliness of intellect and vivacity of spirit.” Here already in James, is everything you need to get you to another James: James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, in which the ordinary intelligence of slaves, servants and peasants is emphasized, often exactly in this way James’ describes: idiots in front of their masters, intelligent amongst themselves.

This intelligence was not invisible to westerners. James cites De Wimpffen as well as Hilliard d’Auberteuil whom wrote “no species of men has more intelligence” and subsequently had his book banned. Further to this intelligence was resistance, mostly unorganized but widespread. Poisonings were extremely common as was marronage – the term for running away from a plantation and thus slavery -   and in the 1750s a rebellion attempt, led by the one handed escaped slave Mackandal, nearly succeeded in poisoning the colonial masters of San Domingo. The goal of this uprising was not just death and destruction but emancipation. It failed when Mackandal was betrayed.

Why does James discuss the intelligence of the slaves of San Domingo? Why the need for the account of their purposeful ignorance, which undermines the colonists’ accounts of slave stupidity? Why discuss resistance and the failed rebellion of Mackandal? Earlier in the book James points out that “one does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom.” The intelligence of the slaves, the strategies of resistance and dissimulation are the raw materials of human character required for the emergence of figure like Toussaint. Recall Toussaint’s quote above, that he is but a trunk from the tree of liberty from which another will grow. This produces another question, the question of the necessity of these events. History, afterwards, has unfolded as it has and we establish the clear links from one moment to another and its failures and its successes both appear as destined. For history in the making things are not so clear. Walter Benjamin, in his essay the Storyteller writes:

’A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heimann once, ‘is at every point of his life a man who dies at the at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more dubious than this sentence- but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man – so says the truth that was meant here – who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.

This passage highlights the move from contingency to necessity after the fact of an event. James understands necessity as inbuilt, which is to say his conception of history, especially when he appeals to historical conditions is teleological and mistakes remembrance for ontological fact.  

The failure of Mackandal for James is not a contingency, because the Haitian Revolution required the breakdown of the balance of powers between “the proprietors of San Domingo, The French bourgeoisie and the British bourgeoisie.” Here James glosses over the question of conditions – something Mackandal indicates, that emancipation and organization are within the grasps of the slave of San Domingo, for the question of condition. There is one thing that must break from revolution to be possible. Yet in describing this James has revealed a counter history and the fertile grounds for change, in doing history from below he is undermining his metahistorical beliefs about historical conditions and necessity.

All this is to say that to make the point that conditions matter James must tell a story of a failed uprising, to highlight the interaction between Toussaint and the masses he must stress the intelligence of the masses, in doing so a question begins to emerge of what, exactly, a historical condition is, how determined it is and what place there is for contingency in such a history? This is to say the very reconstruction of historical necessity and conditions begs the questions of historical contingency.

These questions reoccur in the chapter 12. This chapter is, in part, about Napoleon Bonaparte’s plans to invade Haiti (formerly San Domingo) and restore slavery after the revolution. More so it is about how Toussaint, whilst fully aware of Bonaparte’s plans, sawed off “the branch upon which he sat.” How so? Tension had arisen because many blacks, although no longer slaves, still worked for whites. Moise, the commandant of the North Province, became the figurehead of this objection. Moise was Toussaint’s nephew, and when an insurrection broke out in the north, it was to cries of “Long Live Moise!” Moise was arrested and shot. Afterwards Toussaint introduced a series of laws “surpassing in severity anything he had yet decreed.” While breaking the morale of the black masses he sought to reassure the whites. Toussaint, with an invasion heading for his shores, was unable to maintain cohesion in Haiti. In a word Toussaint had lost the trust of the masses, and without them he was no great man. Once again this is a place in the text where James, confronted with the dynamic between the masses and great men and a question of decisions and making history shifts to a discussion of historical conditions. This time the argument is negative. James writes:

What should Toussaint have done? A hundred and fifty years of history and the scientific study of revolution begun by Marx and Engels, and amplified by Lenin and Trotsky, justify us in pointing to an alternative course.

This alternative course is one where instead of mistrusting the masses, Toussaint explains the role of the whites in the new society of Haiti, incorporates them but limits their role. For Lenin it was a problem of proletarian and bourgeoisie, but the problematic, of incorporating the remnants of the old oppressive regime, was the same and Lenin succeeded. As James writes:

Lenin kept the party and the masses thoroughly aware of every step, and explained carefully the exact position of the bourgeois servants of the Worker’s State, Toussaint explained nothing, and allowed the masses to think that their old enemies were being favoured at their expense. In allowing himself to be looked upon as taking the side of the whites against the blacks, Toussaint committed the unpardonable crime in the eyes of a community where the whites stood for so much evil.

Why turn to Lenin to discuss the idea that without the masses, Toussaint is nothing? James will later go on to say that Toussaint’s fateful choice, to shoot Moise and betray the masses, could not have been otherwise:

Toussaint’s error sprang from the very qualities that made him what he was. It is easy to see today, as his generals saw after he was dead, where he had erred. It does not mean that they or any of us would have done better in his place. If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further. Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.

Here we are confronted with both the claim that the answers to Toussaint’s problem emerge after 150 years of revolutionary study, and that Toussaint could not have done otherwise. Once again James’ question of the relationship between the masses and great men and the choices they make becomes a question of historical conditions and inevitability.

In the 18^th Brumaire Marx famously says: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” James is fond of this line and alludes to it often. James appears to take it to mean that revolution proceeds under conditions, that the time must be ripe, that men can seize opportunity but not create it. I’m not so sure this is what Marx means. The rest of Marx’s quote continues:

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language…In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

Marx is here not making a claim to historical necessity, but rather pointing out that in the struggle for the new – a new order, a new situation, a new way of being – the language of the old must be adopted. The conditions are the available discursive resources, the images and terms used to articulate the new. The very struggle to articulate and make this, however, is not in this passage limited by the historical conditions. The dynamic between the masses and Toussaint, the great man, is not something James dwells on, he resolves it every time through appeal to historical conditions. That this dynamic, this source of tension might generate both success and failure, that history might be a question of decisions – decisions under condition perhaps, but decisions nonetheless – is a question James resolutely avoids. Historical conditions, the telos of revolutionary history, comes to stand in for a difficult question of how this dynamic plays out, how we go from the intelligence of the slaves of San Domingo to the revolution. This a question of two concepts of history both at play in this text, a self-generating history from below, and the historically determined dynamic of impersonal forces, the confident belief in the self-destruction of the bourgeoisie. The difficulty in managing these two approaches is the task James confronted, and it is the task we must also confront in thinking, that is to say philosophizing, about history. We must ask what a philosophy of history that takes seriously the ordinary intelligence of all requires, what a history of always possible progress means for our standard ideas of progress, and what a revolutionary history means for how we understand the paths not travelled.

The weather is disheartening in the extreme but it’s ideal conditions for what I’m going to see: Wu Tsang’s The Whale. An adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale that is mostly silent except for the score and a narration provided by the ‘sub-sub-librarian’. The score, written by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee, is being performed live by the Sydney Chamber Orchestra. In the first thirty minutes of the film the storm breaks, and we’re as soaked as the sailors on the screen. To call Tsang an accomplished film maker seems like an understatement: they’re clearly hot shit. Yet The Whale falters as an adaptation of Moby-Dick; less retelling and more mere repetition; it stays on the surface, and fails to, in its recounting, understand Moby-Dick. Yet on what grounds could I justify this thesis. You see, I haven’t even read Moby Dick. What insights have I to offer?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on not reading James Joyce. Actually, I wrote two. In the first one another great novel of horrifying length and immense cultural status that mine eyes had neglected was briefly mentioned: Melville’s Moby Dick. Except again, I’m not really sure how true this is. For I have encountered this text in many forms, and many of its pivotal scenes are etched upon my mind.

This time I’m not here to ask what it means to encounter a text. My latest encounter with Moby-Dick has perplexed me a great deal. One purpose given to the importance of reading canonical works and reading them cover to cover is that it will develop one’s understanding. This is unobjectionable: if one doesn’t have all the pieces in front of them, one cannot complete the puzzle. Yet, as we will see, things are rarely so simple. I assume that Wu Tsang and scriptwriter Sophia Al-Maria have read Moby-Dick cover to cover. But perhaps here, in the film’s failings, we can glimpse how hard fought for is understanding.

First, however, a little history and a little narrative. See I put off reading Moby-Dick for so long because in many ways I had already read it. When I was about 6 or 7, which I agree is a little too old for this, my father read to me from an abridged and illustrated edition of Moby-Dick. We had just moved to New York and I guess he thought it would be good for me intellectually or somethin’. Scenes from that reading are etched into my mind, in part because of the illustrations, and in part because I probably demanded certain scenes be re-read. The scene where Queequeg enters the room Ishmael is staying in and the description of Queequeg as some sort of deeply intimidating figure, a fear of the other I had yet to see narrated so; the scene where Tashego falls into the whale carcass, an event so visceral and horrifying to my little 6-and-a-half year old mind I don’t think I’d forget it illustrated or not; the all consuming whirlpool that emerges in the books final scenes, an image of total destruction hitherto unknown to me. A few years later, 9 or 10, too old to be reading an abridged anything, I read the book myself. For years I was convinced that I had read Moby Dick cover to cover. It was only much later, while helping my parents move, I came across the book, its white cover and red lettering emitting the warmth of familiarity, and realized to my horror that I had only ever read the abridged edition.

Around half a decade later, I was living in Washington D.C. My teenage years were ones in which my literary interests waned and my interests in music and science grew. The aesthetic connection between music and science is held together by the vast genre known as metal. They both focus on technicality, knowledge, arrangement. The care of the theoretician is all present here. Yet metal is also the breeding ground for harsh noises, unusual recording techniques, attempts to push music to its extreme. Here then is the irreverence of the experimentalist. And so too metal shares with science the meeting point between technician and experimentalist: the leveraging of technique in the search of novelty. In those days music was all new to me, an infinite valley of previously unheard sounds and musical ideas, a wilderness to be discovered. Every week in those years I heard something I hadn’t heard before. I will never hear Fugazi for the first time again, but oh how I wish I could. Amongst this cacophony of novelty was Mastodon, whose 2004 album Leviathan I took a particular shine to. Leviathan is an entire album about Moby-Dick. I played the record on repeat: I listened to it on my iPod constantly, listened to it while studying (so much the worse for my grades), vainly tried to learn the songs on guitar (they’re fairly hard) and in the process learnt phrases, words and moments of plots from Moby-Dick, some less than faithfully transliterated. For example, “snap your oars” becomes the much more metal “crack your oars”, “hearts alive”, a phrase in the first lowering chapter appears as the name of the final track depicting the end of the Pequod. To this day ‘Hearts Alive’, the fourteen-minute closing track, remains a favorite of mine, a song with all the centrifugal force of a whirpool. I’d be remiss here not to also mention Ahab, the German band who exclusively write songs about novels of the sea (including two albums just on Moby-Dick) and who are widely credited with inventing the absurdly named genre “Nautical Doom Metal”.

A decade later after that I was back in New York. It was Jan 2021, and NYC was desolate. The Covid Pandemic meant there was fuck all to do. It would have been a great time to read Moby-Dick, but alas my copy was back in Australia. So instead, I went around to my brother’s place (he was living around the corner) and we watched the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick, directed by John Hurston and with a screenplay by Ray Bradbury. It stares Gregory Peck as Ahab and Richard Basehart as Ishmael (with a short but stunning appearance by Orson Welles as Father Mapple). As you can imagine for a movie made in 1956 the technical production leaves much to be desired. The infamous white whale, Moby-Dick himself, moves like a large piece of polystyrene, but the performances save the film. Peck’s Ahab is incredible (but distracting insofar as he looks uncannily like Abraham Lincoln). Old films were less worried about their audiences turning them off – a problem video, DVD and then streaming have introduced – and as such they tend to be slower. Hurston’s Moby-Dick makes great use of this, giving us Ishmael’s opening monologue and allowing the film to truly build a slow inescapable descent into the whirlpool of Ahab’s madness. The literal whirlpool in the final scene, however, does look a bit shite.

Sometime shortly after, or before, this I went to see my friend B. give a paper at an academic conference in New York. The conference was on animality – philosophers are still trying to figure out our relationship to animals and nature, in the way that only the idiocy of the intellect can produce – and B. had an old essay on Moby-Dick he had transformed into a suitable paper. The paper is heavy with quotations from the book, and given the conference was on zoom, it was possible to read along with B.’s presentation. B.’s paper was a real masterpiece of close reading: pointing out that in the background of Melville’s democratic and homoerotic poetics is animal violence; it is this violence which brings men together, which forms the basis of their being-in-common. One quote from Moby-Dick was central to B.’s presentation, from the ‘most celebrated’ Squeeze of the Hand chapter:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long, I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this advocation beget….let us all squeeze ourselves into each other.

Here the crew are squeezing whale spermaceti back into fluid after it has congealed. What a passage, I thought. It’s buoyancy and poetic charm is enough to make one at least consider reading the unabridged version of Moby-Dick.

This brings us to my final and most recent encounter with Moby-Dick. Tsang’s film adaptation irked me because it seemed to not understand Moby-Dick. The film opens with an introduction to our narrator, who reads from a mixture of quotations from Moby-Dick and C.L.R. James’ book length study of Melvilles masterpiece, Marines, Renegades and Castaways. The narrator is played by Fred Moten, and they are located in what looks like the deep hull of ship – one review suggested it was the a whale’s belly - surrounded by tomes, presented as some mixture of queer sailor and voodoo priestess. We are promptly told that Tsang’s The Whale seeks to displace a tale of revenge with the story of the communal bond of the sailors; the bond of the crew against the perilous bloody mindedness of Ahab and his first mates.

Here the problems begin. After our introduction by our narrator the first scene commences. We start at chapter four: Counterpane. Readers of Moby-Dick (not I) can preempt the dimension that will unfold from here. Earlier I cited a passage from Moby-Dick I first heard at my friend B.’s talk. One known fact about Moby Dick is that is extremely homoerotic. Counterpane is the chapter after Ishmael meets Queegqueg, who is forced to share a bed with him because the inn is full. Ishmael’s fear of Queegqueg gives way to a rather intimate friendship (let’s say). Counterpane opens thus: “Upon waking next morning around daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.”  So Tsang’s retelling begins here but transforms strong suggestion into explicitness: Ishmael and Queegqueg are clearly presented as lovers in the opening scenes of The Whale.

Queering Moby-Dick is not objectionable, it is unnecessary. Perhaps Tsang is doing a service, making queerness the explicit theme of the story, reversing the polarities. A revenge tale with a queer side is now a queer tale with a revenge side. Except Tsang doesn’t achieve this. Tsang, who was born in Massachusetts, suffers from a great North American hermeneutic miasma. This is the belief that everything must be explicit. The miasma is paradoxical because the great theme in American scholarship is the alternative, the underside, the untold, the unsaid. Yet these two tracks run parallel to each other: a society in which the terms ‘words of affirmation’ and ‘ghosting’ circulate with similar velocities in popular consciousness.

Tsang’s Queequeg is not Melville’s hulking figure. Repeatedly throughout The Whale the rough and tough sailors are transformed into softer specimens of masculinity. Not so much a queering of Moby-Dick as a twinkification. This might all be part and parcel of Tsang’s goal to tell the underside of Moby Dick, to tell a softer story. This is the heart of the problem, for at the same time Tsang still tells the irreducible, unescapable and hypermasculine story of Moby-Dick, a story of revenge and obsession. The story and its presentation become, all of a sudden, at odds with each other. Such tensions can be productive, but tension is not inherently productive. Duress can bind, but it can also shatter. Throughout The Whale things fall apart more often than they cohere.

Tsang’s film has its moments – I am, as always, being both belligerent and hyperbolic – but there is much that either fails to land or becomes cringeworthy. Here’s one moment that works: an early scene, all sailors upon the deck, moving on the ship’s deck which arranged is a little too much like a theatre stage. This moment has a sense of exaggeration and falsity to it which gives it a quality of musical theatre to it. It helps reinforce the idea that there is a different, more queer and more joyous, story that Tsang wants to tell. And indeed the more off script Tsang goes, the more Tsang wants to exploit the medium of cinema in retelling a novel, the more promise The Whale shows.

More common, however, are the moments of tedium. The sea turns red in the film’s climatic moments, in order to represent the blood of the whale but instead the ocean looks more like cranberry juice. The only horror being invoked here is the horror of the kidney stone. The infamous scene of a crew member falling into a whale’s headless corpse occurs not on the side of the ship but in the try works in Tsang’s retelling. The try works are a kind of in-ship factory, designed for processing the products of slaughtered whales. Melville describes the try works as factory like and so Tsang sets the scene as a literal factory, with an automatic conveyor belt and blast furnaces in the background. This kind of literalness is nauseating. Earlier, before Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, Queequeg says something akin to “Not you and I, but us.” Tedious teenage romanticism. Then occurs the scene where the prophet warns them of their fate. Here’s another moment of tedium. In silent movies movements are exaggerated. With no audio something has to grab attention. Looking at mouth silently gaping for too long between intertitles produces an artifice that counteracts absorption. The prophet’s lines are long, and the camera fixates on a mouth moving for what soon feels like an eternity. Not unsettling but disengaging. These moments, and the whole film suffering from what can only be described as the aesthetics of the video installation, get in the way of moments of genuine promise.

One moment in particular is enough to make one blanche. Have just shown the scene in which Ahab reveals to his crew that Pequod’s actual purpose is to hunt Moby-Dick, he brushes off the objections of First Mate Starbuck and declares that the plan is to hunt Moby-Dick. Here our narrator interjects with: “The Plan? Shit, the Nazis had a plan.” The analogy is jarring in its absurdity. What follows from this is a quote extracted from C.L.R. James’ study of Moby Dick. Here’s the James quote in full:

Their primary aim is not war. It is not dictatorship. It is the Plan. In pursuit of what they call planning the economy, they have depopulated Russia of tens of millions of workers, peasants and officials, so that it seems as if some pestilence sweeps periodically across the country. In pursuit of their plan, they have placed and intend to keep millions in concentration camps. Their purpose is to plan. And they will carry out their plan or, like the Nazis, bury themselves and Europe in the ruins. But even this by itself would not cause the international crisis. What causes it is the fact that in every type of country, the most highly developed and the most backward, have arisen tens of thousands of educated men, organizers, administrators, intellectuals, labour leaders, nationalist leaders, who are ready to do in their own country exactly what the Communists are doing in Russia and look to Russia as their fatherland. This is the problem. The most futile of innumerable futile debates is the quarrel between Democrats and Republicans as to whose policy was responsible for the fact that China has gone Communist. Neither of them could have done one single thing to stop it. The madness spreads irresistibly.

In the context of James’ first chapter however, the claim isn’t nearly as absurd. For James is setting up a strong claim: the Melville’s world is the dawn of the same world which produced the dual horrors of Nazism and Stalinism. He sets up the claim with care. Just as tension is not productive in lieu of being tension, juxtaposition is not inherently meaningful. Bringing James’ broader socio-political reflections into the mix at this precise point does not form the beautiful intelligibility of a hitherto unknown constellation but the white noise of a broken receiver.

The film makes an interpretive error early on, declaring that we will not be focusing on the story of Ahab’s vengeance. Moby-Dick is not so much about vengeance as it is about obsession. Vengeance here appears as merely one aspect of obsession. The obsession is what unites the multitude of the book’s aspects. Ahab’s obsession and Ishamel’s obsession with the crew, with his desire to go out to sea. Ahab’s obsession and the crew’s obsession. Ahab’s obsession in ,as James’ points out, contradistinction to obsession with wealth that drives Starbuck and society write large. It is about obsession, and how obsession can drive one to self-destruction. Tsang has her own obsessions and they run The Whale aground. What The Whale fails to do is get beyond the surface of Moby-Dick; it is in this way that it fails to understand.

While understanding might come from a deep and, to borrow a term, completionist engagement, such engagement does not guarantee understanding. In Raymond Geuss’ essay “Teaching Nietzsche” he outlines a plan of reading Nietzsche that follows a completionist model as the guide to understanding. He tells us:

My advice to beginning students of Nietzsche is: if you want to understand what Nietzsche is really concerned with, what forms the essential background against which his work should be studied, do not read Kant (or Hegel), but study the real history of what was happening in the 19th century in Central Europe and spend the three or four years you will need to learn Greek sufficiently to follow what is going on in an ancient text. Then start reading Homer, Hesiod, the Presocratics, early elegiac and iambic poetry, tragedy and comedy, Herodotus and Thucydides, and especially Plato as systematically as you can…If, after reading Theognis, Plato, and Sophocles, you still have time, read Schopenhauer and Wagner. If, then, you still have time on your hands, it will not hurt then to read Kant and Hegel, although I would wager that by that time you will find nothing in them to help you further in understanding Nietzsche.

Such a move is common: if you really want to understand someone you better read all their predecessors too. And it is true that such a move will aid in understanding. But so too can one dapple and dip in the murky waters of intellectual history and have something insightful to say. I haven’t taught Nietzsche as long as Geuss has, but when I have, insight abounds from those who have just come to him. Geuss is being deliberately provocative and perhaps a little ironic, but his model is an underlying assumption of much intellectual life. Yet this model of study renders teaching – study’s counterpart activity – impossible. Jacques Rancière, in his text The Ignorant Schoolmaster, points out the infinite regress at play such discourses. For let us take Geuss seriously here. If this is what it takes to understand Nietzsche what hope do students have? Perhaps they can reach for a tome by someone who has undergone the Geuss immersion. But then on what grounds could they make sense of it, given all the work necessary for understanding. The secondary literature can only be properly assessed by someone who has done all the reading, and so we need another text and another master. This is also, partly, the problem of Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; at some point my understanding has to be self-generated or its not really understanding at all. Rancière’s solution, incidentally, is to move from question of intellect to question of will, but we can stay in the realm of the intellect here and make sense of the perplexities of understanding. For, just as one could read all there is and still not have understanding, one does not need all the pieces in front of them in order to gain insight. Nothing promises understanding but nor does anything prevent insight.

Theodor Adorno, in his “The Essay as Form” tells us something insightful. The essay as form is held in ill-repute by academics, for it starts wherever and ends wherever and it is against the academic requirements of originality and rigour. It also allows us to bring quickly into view the whole. In its lack of careful, slow, methodical argumentation so common of the monograph, the essay unfolds a complexity and a whole. As Adorno writes:

The essay as form will be a good guide for the person who is beginning to study philosophy, and before whose eyes the idea of philosophy somehow stands. He will hardly begin by reading the easiest writers, whose common sense will skim the surface where depth is called for; he will rather go for the allegedly difficult writers, who shed light on what is simple and illuminate it as a "stance of the mind toward objectivity." The naiveté of the student, to whom the difficult and formidable seems good enough, is wiser than the adult pedantry that admonishes thought with a threatening finger to understand the simple before risking that complexity which alone entices it. Such a postponement of knowledge only prevents knowledge. In opposition to the cliche of the "understandable," the notion of truth as a network of causes and effects, the essay insists that a matter be considered, from the very first, in its whole complexity; it counteracts that hardened primitiveness that always allies itself with reason's current form.

Notice here, however, that for this model to work, one may proceed piecemeal; understanding comes via understanding, knowledge via knowledge, insight via insight. There is no preparation necessary other than literacy. Since insight is always possible, insight can also be generated from the partial. And just as the whole does not guarantee understanding, the partial does not prevent insight. In this we might have the basis for the great democratic equality, formal and immanent, of which Melville was so fond. Or so I’ve been told.

Enter: Sylvain Lazarus. In recent years a handful of terminally online sickos – myself included -have begun reading Lazarus. This, naturally, might lead to the following questions: who the fuck is Sylvain Lazarus? and why should I read him? Aren’t we all a bit tired of French guys with theoretical systems? Well, if you want an answer to these questions you should read on. In the tradition of one of the greatest philosophy posts of all time – ‘Who the Fuck is Jacques Rancière?’ – I proudly present ‘Who the Fuck is Sylvain Lazarus?’ First as tragedy, then as farce.

Lazarus is a French political theorist, anthropologist and sociologist. Except he hates all of those disciplines and thinks they’re full of little shits. He’s also a pal of the first guy to ever experience an event – Alain Badiou – and they founded L’Organisation Politique (literally ‘the political organization’) in 1985.

For Lazarus politics is really about the fact that people think. He asks what is the “thought of politics” and how you can “think politics.” It turns out if you want to think politics properly you need to disentangle it from other disciplines: economics, history and especially sociology. Political science, you see, is the gathering of different methodological tools from disciplines obsessed with externalities and applying them to the one domain in which people free themselves from externalities. In order to see that politics is about people’s thought Lazarus erects a complex yet fascinating system. I’ve boiled it down to its three spiciest and most important components below.

1.     The Two Statements

Right at the heart of Lazarus’ work are what is fearsomely called ‘the two statements’. Here they are:

1)     People Think

2)     Thought is a relation of the real

We have already heard and will hear plenty about (1). Much of Lazarus’ work returns to this phrase. But what about (2)? What’s going on with this ‘of’ (there’s a real philosophy question if ever there was one). First, we need to know that Lazarus hates all these social science dweebs and their objective total science of the social. Durkheim? More like dick slime. Levi-Strauss? More like fuckin-grouse. You get the idea. So Lazarus wants the thought of politics to stand on its own, outside a discourse grasping for the objective in social and political relations. That’s the motivation.

You see social science discourse doesn’t think people think. It rarely says people don’t think, but rather it claims that science, and only science, thinks. While we tend to think in terms of causation and conditions – the kind of scientistic discourse Lazarus opposes – such thinking also makes it hard to articulate our own agency or the agency of those who make history. Everyone’s a social scientist until it comes time to explain their own thoughts and actions and then it turns out they’re the fucking only unconditioned object in the entire fucking universe. The problem with social science is that it cannot be the case that only science thinks, hence: people think.

But what does ‘thought is a relation of the real’ mean?  Here’s a typical Lazarus explanation:

“the relation of the real is the relation in which the real is not a relation of the object. If the real is necessary to the existence of thought it is not in the sense of the real being the object of thought or of claiming that thought can only be of the real. The relation of thought and of the real proposed here is different in that the real to which I refer erupts into thought as the which will be at stake and in question, for thought to think.” – Anthropology of the Name

What the actual fuck. Here’s the idiot’s (that’s us!) guide: there is a subjectivist thought in which the thought on its own terms is what matters most, this thought is part of the world, partakes in the world, without belong to the domain of objective study. It is a relation of the real – partakes in the world - but not a relation to the world.

All this is baffling in the extreme, but let’s hear this madman out: thinking in such terms allows us to see what was valuable in past endeavors of human emancipation. Some successful movements for human emancipation eventually regressed or gave way to horrors. Some stabilized into a set of liberal norms that hide other oppressions. Lazarus’ strange thought asks us to not locate such moments in a history of progress or failure, but to try and understand emancipatory moments on their own terms. Sometimes they simply have given all they have to give. This frees us from both telos and cynicism. To understand this more we need to turn to Lazarus’ account of what he calls ‘modes of politics’.

2.     Politics is Sequential and Rare

Lazarus doesn’t deny that history, society, and economics determine aspects of political life. It’s just that he’s only interested in the kind of politics that escapes those factors. He’s interested in what he calls politics in interiority, which he sometimes calls politics ‘at a distance from the state’, compared to politics in exteriority, or politics ‘in the space of the state’. Politics in exteriority is the shit we tend to think of when we use the word ‘politics’ normally: ‘T.V. makes you dumb’; ‘it’s the economy, stupid’; ‘why do people vote against their own interests’; ‘why should people who don’t understand tax law get to vote’; ‘why do men mistake their servitude for their salvation’; ‘the proletariat as the holders of no place in capitalism are the only ones who can change it’; ‘don’t you know that Robert Axelrod’s 1984 book Evolution of Cooperation shows that a tit for tat game theoretical model is a stable state solution and thus the basis for civil and political society and attempts to theorize politics outside of this model are nothing more than navel gazing and have no place at my CIA funded research center!’.  It’s everything that happens between the student union and the parliament floor, by way of the Political Science and Economics departments of the world.

Lazarus doesn’t care about this mode of politics. It is much discussed by everyone else, and everyone else is a fucking nerd. What’s important is that this view does not cover the entirety of politics. Lazarus cares about politics in interiority (I already told you that, remember?), which we can analyze by its “mode.”  Allow him to elaborate:

“I propose the category of mode of politics, maintaining that non-statist politics, that is, non-historicist politics, is uncommon, sequential, and identified by what I call its mode: a mode of politics is the relation of a politics to its thought, the bringing to light of its specific categories that permit an identification of the subjective on its own basis. Politics does not have to be conceived by way of a hypothetical object, the content of which is the state and power. A political sequence in interiority creates its categories, its theorists, its sites.” – Lenin and the Party

For Lazarus each mode of politics in interiority is singular. Rather than a grand tradition of revolutionary thought the stretches from the French Revolution to today, Lazarus will instead argue that the concept of revolution is a unique feature of the mode of politics associated with the French revolution. Lazarus identifies several modes of politics: the French revolution, Bolshevik party politics, the CCP at war. Each mode is unique, identifies a unique thought and exhausts itself. The mode closes and its categories can no longer mark politics in interiority.

By now every 24 year-old with a Dragonball Z avatar has the same furious objection: what about the Russian revolution? That was certainly a revolution, but Lazarus is looking for what marks it out as unique and singular, and as “politics in interiority.” That’s not the category of revolution – if that’s all it was there wouldn’t be anything new about the Russian Revolution. What was new was its introduction of the party as revolutionary. So Lazarus says that there was a specifically Bolshevik mode of politics running from 1902 – the year Lenin published What is to Be Done? – to 1917, the year the Bolsheviks seize power. This politics is not one where revolution is unique but one where the party as revolutionary is unique. Which consequently means that simply returning to the party might be a way for, let’s say, socialists to gain some power in America, but it’s not some kind of general solution for radical, emancipatory politics – in fact, “general solutions” and “politics in interiority” don’t get along too well at all.

At this point either you or every 24-year-old with a Dragonball Z avatar (or both) is grimacing at his screen and shouting, “if the modes are subjectivist and singular, why are we fucking talking about them?” Although a mode becomes exhausted, it can still be investigated, and its resources used both for theoretical investigations and future politics. This is what Lazarus calls “the method of saturation”. Like some kind of revolutionary Gordon Ramsay, it’s all about how you handle the produce:

“I term the ‘method of saturation’ the examination from within a body of work or a thought of the lapsing of one of its founding categories. It is a matter of interrogating the work from the standpoint of the lapsing of the category and of re-identifying it in this new conjuncture.” – Anthropology of the Name

You might think Lazarus only cares about the grand moments of politics, that his modes privilege extraordinary situations of rupture or newness. You might object that his people doing the thinking are figures like Lenin and Mao – hardly the masses or even the people. Good point, you fucking got ‘im.

Except not really. For Lazarus politics in interiority is also about what he calls “problematic words.” What does this mean? Let’s look at another example: factory workers in France in the 1980s.

See, in 1980s France there was this big dispute because a lot of workers were now immigrants, and when they wanted rights, or some control of their lives on the factory floor, some fuckers (including the Socialist Party fuckers who got elected) said “oh but not you’re not really workers with the rights and importance of workers you are immigrants” and then they would say “no we are workers you stupid snail eating fucks.” At this point you might be asking yourself, “what the hell is a worker anyway”? Well, that’s when the word worker became a “problematic word”, a word whose meaning is disputed by the forces of the state on the one hand, and people’s thought on the other. Lazarus puts it a little more eloquently when he writes:

“deciding as to the existence of the word – thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectivating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness as those who pronounce it – is exactly what I mean by people think” – Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?

So not just the grand shit, but also some more of the, as the French say, quotidian shit too (pretty sure that means “everyday life” in French or some shit).

3.     Time Does Not Exist

Badiou - the guy we were all supposed to stop reading in 2015 - says that Lazarus’ theory of time is notoriously difficult. Well Monsieur Badiou, the way I see it the theory is actually pretty fucking simple: time does not exist. Lazarus, in expounding his theory of politics calls for the abolition of time. Here’s the short version of the argument: politics is about the emergence of people’s thought, the fact that they think. For it to be politics in interiority it can’t be beholden to anything outside of itself, include temporality. We always say “well of course this happened during that revolution because people didn’t have this concept yet/the conditions hadn’t matured”, This puts thought under a condition of temporality. But also, clearly politics in interiority is about the possible, the new: new subjectivities, new thoughts, etc. The man himself says as much:

“the category “possible” is the category through which thought constitutes itself. For a situation to be understood by its possibles is a reversal compared to historicist or scientific thought, for which it is the precise investigation of what is, in terms of determinism, cause or law, that makes it possible to respond to the question of what could be.” – Worker’s Anthropology and Factory Inquiry

Now we’re getting into the long version of the argument, so strap the fuck in. See Lazarus realizes it’s hard to square possibility and temporality without reverting to ‘progressive’ history – i.e. something like Hegel’s little story about the development of freedom in The Philosophy of History (you know, the book that says Africans don’t have history or thought) – which would put the possible always in the future.

At this point we need to make a little detour. Lazarus develops his hatred of time via a discussion of historian Marc Bloch. Everybody loves Marc Bloch. And for good reason. Bloch was a historian committed to seeing his subjects as persons with, well, subjectivity. He was also a French Resistance fighter to boot, and was executed in 1944 by the Nazis, his last book The Historians Craft incomplete at the time of his death. Rare these days for people to be both martyrs and historians.  

The Historians Craft is simply put, fucking fantastic. But it has this problem. At a crucial moment Bloch is discussing his theory of time. He has the obvious, unobjectionable sentence:

“only the future has contingency. The past is something already given which leaves no room for possibility” – The Historians Craft

This sentence is a real fucking doozy, however. It actually links the past and the present and suggests both are without contingency – it’s Augustine’s old conundrum, so you know it must be important – as the past and the present can’t be clearly distinguished in Bloch. So no contingency in the present. But by definition the future is always to come, to arrive. Its moment never arrives and thus the possible is, in fact, the impossible. We could take a Derridan route here and just wallow in the difficulty of concepts, but Lazarus has a different approach: abolish time. Lazarus moves from a temporal analysis to a spatial one, going to “sites” rather than temporal events in the past.

All of this is bonkers, and if you’re a phenomenologist you’re probably having your lifeworld rocked right now. If you’re a physicist, you probably think time doesn’t exist anyway. Any astute reader (that’s you) might be wondering about these modes and their sequences from earlier. Doesn’t this all imply temporality? Lazarus objects:

“Sequences are the lapses of time in which a mode is at work. That is to say, it is the lapse of time in which a specific invention of a politics takes place. Or, better yet, in which what emerges is the absolutely singular and unprecedented presence of something which has never before been and which will never again occur, take place. This is what I have called a historic mode in interiority, a term which allows us to conceptualize and describe a mode in terms of sequencing (revolutionary mode, Bolshevik mode, etc.) and to trace out their boundaries and limits” [translation modified] – Subjective Singularities

This is a little confusing, I have two speculative guesses as to what this means: 1) the dates in the modes mark the absence of time not its continuation 2) you can order something without implying a temporal aspect.

But look, I don’t really know. All this shit is, to be blunt, pretty fucking wild. What it helps capture, however, is the vicissitudes of politics, especially self-emancipation. A long as fuck time ago, Immanuel Kant asked what enlightenment was and decided that it was when one becomes free of their self-incurred immaturity. But for it to work you had to inch yourself out of this immaturity, if anyone did it for you it wouldn’t count. Shit. So somehow there has to be a moment or possibility of freedom in every state of unfreedom, a moment of development from all stasis. Precisely what politics in exteriority denies. And although it’s true that we are often slaves to conditions and patterns outside our control, there are also moments where everything changes and these moments are not well explained by the models of determination and continuity. It also, as discussed in section uno, allows us to see emancipatory politics as neither a history of everything becoming liberalism nor total failure, at the expense of the concept of history itself.

So great. Here’s the problem: this account means that to properly account for politics there’s a point where theory stops and actions begins. Sounding a little familiar? Yeah, that’s right, it’s in Karl Marx too, and it’s what connects Lazarus to a radical tradition. But furthermore, it’s not some vulgar division between action and thought. The claim, after all, is that people think. Every mode of politics for Lazarus has its theoreticians - for example Saint-Just or Lenin –  so the objection really is to the idea that thought from outside could be a guide to action. No philosophical system or economic determinants will be able to guide or predict action in such a moment. Lazarus’s account of politics is fascinating, but it will never be truly absorbed by academia because it ends the academy’s deep belief that problems are rectified in journals and op-eds. Reading Lenin with the comrades is still, however, cool as fuck.

Further Reading:

i)                The Big Man Himself

Lazarus has eight or so things translated into English. You should learn French (not that I have). A new publication called Fracture Magazine is working tirelessly to amend this dearth of translations and general work on Lazarus. In the meantime, here are his seven or maybe eight works – one book, four essays and one anonymous essay almost certainly penned by him:

1.    The Dialectical Mode (2005) – article, anonymous but most likely Lazarus

2. Lenin and the Party (2007) – chapter in edited collection, good on modes

3. A France for All (2015)— newspaper article written with Badiou and Michel in 1997, defending the sans-papiers.

4. Anthropology of the Name (2015) – book, dense and best read with friends

5.    Can Politics be Thought in Interiority? (2016) – article, start here

6.    Worker’s Anthropology and Factory Inquiry (2019) – article, also good place to start

7.    Subjective Singularities (2022) – article, weird translation

8. May 68: Politics and History (2026) - article, published at Fracture Magazine

9. Timelines: The Two Arcs (2026) - article, published at Fracture Magazine

ii)              Other Cunts

1.     Who has written about Lazarus? Well for starters me, obviously. Apart from the above screed you can read me on Lazarus’ idea of problematic words here and on his theory of temporality here and here. Over at Negation Magazine, I have tried to think through applying Lazarus to ecopolitics here, which I was interviewed about here. I also wrote a piece for them trying to connect everyday politics to the rarity of politics thesis, an essay that culminates in a lengthy discussion of Lazarus. I have a conference paper on his theory of singularity and his relationship to Foucault here and some more stuff on Foucault and Lazarus here. A nicer version of the above screed, focusing on Lazarus’ two statements appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas blog here. I wrote Lazarus’ influence on Asad Haider (cowritten with Cam West) for Fracture Magazine here. AND FINALLY you can access an entire five week seminar I taught on Anthropology of the Name at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy here.

2.     Asad Haider -RIP - has written about Lazarus a plenty. You can read ‘Socialists Think’ here and ‘Emancipation and Exhaustion’ here and his essay on the Chinese cultural revolution here. I interviewed Asad in 2021 and we spoke a lot about Lazarus. You can read that here. Negation Magazine - who are publishing a lot of work on Lazarus - interviewed Asad as well. You can read and listen to that here. Also his afterword to the 2021 edition of Mistaken Identity was republished at Fracture Magazine. There in he goes into plenty of detail about his engagement with Lazarus, read it here.

3.     Fuckin Alain Badiou has of course written about Lazarus. The essay on Lazarus in Metapolitics slaps, as well the essay ‘philosophy and politics’ in Conditions.  His interview with Peter Hallward at the end of Ethics also has a few moments that really clarify Lazarus.

4.     Michael Neocosmos wrote this huge ass book Thinking Freedom in Africa. It fucking shreds. The first chapters have a lot on Lazarus. He also wrote an entire essay about him here.

5.     Neocosmos’ late mate Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba -RIP King – has also written on Lazarus extensively. Africa in search of a new mode of politics is a banger essay and shows how far the Lazarusian model can go in thinking the possibilities of people’s thought and global politics.

6.     My mate Bryan Doniger wrote an essay on Lazarus, and unlike my stupid bullshit he actually published it in a peer reviewed publication.

7.     “Taylor B”, infamous diagram lover, wrote about Lazarus and the concept of the party in Cosmonaut, where he had testy exchange with Donald Parkinson. All worth reading: here, here and here.

8.     Daniel Tutt has been on this shit for a while. An early blogpost of his can be found here. He also hosted a big symposium on Lazarus which you can watch here.

9.     Gabriel Tupinambá has this whole organization which takes questions of political organization and thought seriously. He does not always reference Lazarus, but Lazarus’ concepts are being used, as seen in this paper here.

10.  Knox Peden – author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology and all-round legend – has a paper on Badiou’s concept of history. Yet in explicating Badiou he discusses Lazarus at great length and explains many of his concepts in detail. It is well worth a read.

11. Cam W. - Editor at Negation Magazine - writes a little bit about Lazarus in his essay “The Premise of Organization”. The essay nicely sets up some of the problems in Marxist theory that Lazarus directly addresses.

12. There appears to be a Serbian contingent of Lazarus devotees. I found this article “Kosovo is the Heart of Serbia’s Power”, which I promise is not as jingoistic as it sounds. It is written by Branka Ćurčić and appears to use Lazarus’ idea of politics at a distance from the state to argue against ethnonationalism.

13. Chloe Cannon wrote a piece for Negation Magazine (who else?) on teleology, Marxism and of course, Lazarus, entitled “Politics at the End of History”. She was interviewed about it here. Cannon also has a piece for Negation Magazine entitled “The Correct Ideas Club” which applies some of Lazarus’ ideas to Leninism and offers a good detail of exposition on Lazarus’ idea of saturation.

14. I stumbled across a masters thesis by one Patrick McKenna on “Foucault’s Late Theory: Politics and Thought”. McKenna offers a novel and powerful reading of the late Foucault as explicitly taking on questions concerning politics, singularity and subjectivity in contrast to those who see his late period as his ‘neoliberal era.’ In articulating this view of Foucault McKenna spends much time on Lazarus, and offers several good formulations of his thought. I also appear in this, though much like Lazarus I am but a mere foil for the greatness of Foucault. It’s still a great paper, however.

15. Salar Mohandesi’s Red Internationalism obstensibly charts the history of anti-imperialism in the sixties and how it lead to the emergence of the global human rights movement by the late 70s. Yet in what is otherwise a work of global and political history Mohandesi is adopting, throughout, a Lazarusian framework. He takes the idea of modes, sequences, exhaustion and saturation seriously and uses them to organise his work. It is also an excellent read, his style is fluid without compromising intellecutal rigour.

Christina Tudor-Sideri’s debut novel, Disembodied occupies this non-zone. It would be easy to say that Disembodied is a serious debut that shows promise but has some rough edges. Better luck with the sophomore novel, Christina!

That would be a rough judgement, but such is the life of the writer. Such a judgement, however, may be too hasty. Disembodied occupies this non-zone only by nominal means. The judgement is true against the yardstick of novelistic expectations. I am, however, not so sure that Disembodied is best thought of as a novel, with all the descriptive and dialogical baggage that term carriers. It is certainly a work of fiction. Yet there is a consistent breaking of convention – yes rules were made to be broken and so on but bear with me here - that is more than just experimentation. Tudor-Sideri the novelist and her subject matter are at odds. In many ways this is the dramatic axis of her fiction.

Disembodied is the final breath of its protagonist, a surge of meditations and recollections before total blackness. The book’s universe is really self contained in this sense, turning the final page terminates our narrator in the same instant. A nice meshing of content and form (or even materiality). Our nameless narrator will in this lengthy final breath have her thoughts drift from disquisitions on Nietzsche’s eternal return to remembrances of lover and then on to final attempts at making sense of one’s life. These are always interesting, occasionally profound, and at times sentimental.

Tudor-Sideri’s consistent disregard for novelistic convention is immediately apparent. Consider the opening line of Disembodied: “I died on the twelfth of September, at the height of happiness.” In many ways this is a classic opening sentence: happiness and died sit in such a horrific juxtaposition, and then the odd specificity of twelfth of September all grab one’s attention. To start’s one story with “I died” is, however, the negative image of ending a story with “I awoke”. Both are to be avoided as they undermine a certain gravitas of storytelling. Yet how else to begin such a story? In terms of scene setting this is as efficient as it gets. We have date, event and the only character who really matters compressed in just over ten words.

It is one long paragraph from this sentence to the book’s final word. The single paragraph, comprising some 135 pages, represents the final breath of our narrator. To make one’s novel uniparagraphic is another conventional rule broken, one demanded by the subject matter at hand: the single paragraph and the single breath are the same. Such a technique can be used to great effect. Tudor-Sideri uses this technique well; the first forty or so pages of Disembodied are utterly compelling. Draw in by the patent absurdity of the premise, one is soon carried along by the text as it twists and turns across its disparate subject matter. The lack of any paragraph breaks is used to force the reader into disquisitions and digressions with urgency, a kind of literary equivalent to flooding the brain with oxygen.

All this does not not a novel make. Plenty of novels are uniparagraphic. Plenty of novels have strange conceits or mediocre opening lines. Consider Thomas Bernard’s Old Masters. Over the course of a single 300-page paragraph what is revealed is not just an old man’s annoyance with Heidegger (and many others) but the story of Reger, and – despite the subtitle of the book – a rather intense tragedy concerning the death of his wife. Reger’s life story is retold by Atzbacher. This introduces another and a double, a “di”, another aspect of storytelling that by itself does not a novel make, but helps reline Bernard’s experimentation back within the genre of the novel.

What begins to really throw into doubt the genre status of Disembodied is how it approaches recollection. Plenty of novels ‘recollect’, retelling a life in retrospect. Indeed one could say this was foundational moment in the modern novel. Yet there is something off in the recollection that is found in Disembodied. This is in part due to the nature of the book; the memories being recounted slip into vagueness and indeterminacy as our narrator decomposes. Of course, there are recollections in a technical sense – with our narrator already or almost dead there is nothing but recollection – but the images are imprecise, impressionistic, fleeting. A scene is defined briefly, by a green armchair before something else moves the text along. The following is typical:

Odessa, 1917: a memory, a fragile inscription upon the pages of an ever more fragile book, a timely labyrinth to lose oneself in. Morning itself now touches the windows of the house, and in doing so, it shatters this synthesis of hunger and angst which I had been using for warmth. I leave nothing behind me except for rainwater. Rainwater upon the objects inside the house, rainwater here, in the garden, rainwater all the way to the village, that is where my dog now sleeps, perhaps in the arms of a child, perhaps at the feet of an old woman who reads to him at night. Rainwater in the jam jar, rainwater under my fingernails. Rainwater that falls from the sky, incessantly, like needles piercing the skin of the living, needles I no longer feel but still know of. Rainwater that floods the bed and fills the heart. Rainwater in the image of the creator.

Odessa 1917? What of it? The lack of description, the preference for abstraction – “hunger and angst I had been using for warmth” – build the thinnest of imageries in passages like the above. Then repetition forces a motif – here it is rainwater – to dominate. There is a thinness to these recollections which is intentional, but pushes Disembodied further and further away from the novel.

At one point our narrator says that we die again, or truly, when the last person to remember us dies:

you will breathe the final breath, not the breath from the moment of death, but the final breath that one takes when there is no one left to remember us. For that is when we die, when through the dark, forgetfulness stretches out its limbs and grabs you, right when the last of those who knew you have disappeared into the transient warmth of their final hour.

There are different ways then to die. As our narrator recollects and gathers up the past a story unfolds in which these slices of death emerge. She compares death and the orgasm: “for death loves life so ardently that it gives itself to it through means of all that is beautiful and through the language of the body that feels and throbs and aches and orgasms.” This would normally be trite except it introduces an idea of death and life as being intertwined. Not in the normal sense in which our finitude determines what kind of beings we are – if we were immortal would we really be alive? – but the sense in which death is present in all life. The link is fleshed out in a more concrete way, as death, pleasure and bondage are brought together: “it was perhaps the same pleasure that I took from lingering on the bottom of the pool, the same pleasure I later found in asphyxiation and in ropes and bounds. The same pleasure I take now from death, by lingering on the verges of life for far too long.”

At one point is made clear that our narrator is unwell, there is great pain cause by something, according to a doctor’s diagnosis, in her blood. Right before we learn of our narrator’s diagnosis of their mysterious disease –perhaps some kind of blood curse – we are told that “I remember how to do a double-column tie instead, how to join a wrist to a thigh or an ankle to a chair.” In the context of pain and disease and death, we are given this rather intimate confession:

Impermanent pain of any kind, if I am honest, though never self-inflicted, was what provided me with the greatest of comforts—it was my pear with every lunch, my cigarette with every bath—and the perfect backdrop for it was, of course, the sexual act: transient pain followed either by comforting hours or hours in which one slept without dreaming, without nightmares, without fears and, most of all, without the pain that invited all of them in the first place. I went as far as to consider it a gesture of kindness toward myself: to get down on my knees and receive pain under the control of something other than my diseased body. 

The analogy of pain and death with bondage and submission is deeper than the tired connection between death and the orgasm. Those who, in the context of sexual intimacy, like to make suffer and to suffer alike may be familiar with the term ‘subspace’ a kind of mindset the submissive partner enters into, a state of passivity and pseudo-dissociation. Of course, much like death, I have only be told about such things. For my part I am far too interested in cruelty to have experienced such states.

What the recollections of Disembodied do is not paint a vivid picture of a life now lost. Rather they articulate a series of deaths, of relations to death. The idea Tudor-Sideri defends is that we can and do think death. Yet because it is also a cessation we will only ever approach the limit. Yet it lingers, in transient fragments, in pain, pleasure, submission and existence.

In Jacques Derrida’s seminar on the animal, The Animal That Therefore I am he offers a succinct definition of his term limitrophy. This is a mixing of and a confusion at the limit. He writes:

Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.

For Derrida this term allows him to investigate where the human and the animal overlap and diverge without sliding into an implication that there is, in fact, no division between the animal and human life.

This is what Tudor-Sideri does in Disembodied. It charts, in retrospect, a series of approaches to the limit of death. That it takes place against this limit is only natural. The philosophising that opens this book speaks to this problematic. As if one’s last thought would be of the a priori or Nietzsche’s eternal return. Rather this is a settling of accounts. The question at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason after all, can be phrased as “how is experience possible” but Tudor-Sideri is not interested in normal experience, but experience at the limit.

In this way Disembodied is really a work of philosophy rather than a novel. Perhaps you wish to call it a novel of ideas. Or an essayistic novel. Or a novel-essay. This might be compelling in a pedantic sense, as terms to designate the intersection of the treatise and the fictive. Yet even this is not so straightforward. Though not always present in such tomes, dialogue is a consistent enough feature of the novel of ideas that Sianna Ngai asks if it is not simply a subgenre of drama, echoing Martin Puchner who aligns it with dramatic Platonism. As for the essay side of this distinction, it shall suffice to note that Györg Lukács, in Soul and Form, associated the essay with life.  All this reaching for distinctions, however, ignores the problematic of Disembodied itself, that what it seeks to depict unknots our standard storytelling procedure.

In another way it would just simply be ludicrous to call Disembodied a work of philosophy or even essayistic. This confusion is, I think, the point. In my review of Tudor-Sideri’s first book, Under The Sign of the Labyrinth I point out that the book, a mixture of the essay, memory, and philosophy takes the form it does as integral to the point Tudor-Sideri wishes to make about the body, trauma and thought. In this sense, form and content converge. Likewise, Disembodied cannot, by the very nature of the moment it seeks to depict, maintain the elements that would make it either a novel or an essay. Or indeed some kind of combination of the two. The problem simply is that what is at stake is experience at a limit none come back from. In this manner to treat this topic in an uniparagraphical monologic fiction – or if you prefer, a monograph - is to take seriously the demands of the subject, a subject as demanding as it is universal.

Death not only comes for us all but long before it claims us, we encounter it. When was the first time you saw something die, saw your father pummel a fly or crush a cockroach? When was the first time, looking at an old dusty family photo you asked about a face you did not recognize, and learnt there was such a thing as being ‘no longer with us’, ‘in a better place’ or somewhere upstate. How embedded in our cultural mind’s eye is the image of the family pet that passes or has to be put down, the importance we attach to such a moment, supposing it will make our children wiser and more mature?

As we go about our lives, we see death approaching. We have near death experiences, watch loved ones grow weak and sick, witness the irrepressible march of time. It is there in our receding hairlines and tired eyes, in the increasing slowness with which we approach the world. Before we ourselves die, we must carry the names of the dead within us. Those who die young have not really lived. Not because of a lack of experience – though this may be true – but because they encountered their own death before any others.

The ultimate non-experience is thus part of our experience. The horizon of our finitude is the infinitude of the abyss, the great nothingness that awaits us.

For literature however, these experiences are difficult to convey. Experience comes to us in language. So death and madness (the decay of language and thought into nonsense), being render silent (for example, by being transmogrified into a bug) are the same problem for literature. How to write the non-linguistic, how to write the liminal, the ineffable, and incommunicable. 

This issue is at the heart of Beyond, a short story collection by Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), a Uruguayan writer. This collection of Quiroga’s stories, translated by Elisa Taber, all address madness or death. In this way Quiroga follows the lead of his most obvious influence Edgar Allen Poe.

Quiroga, at the time of death in 1937 was considered to be a writer of “comparative obscurity”, whose works were, nonetheless “true glories of American literature.” Quiroga now enjoys relative posthumous fame. His Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales, 1918) is on the curriculum in Argentina’s primary schools. He is said to have influenced Gabriel Marìa Márquez and Julio Cortázar. I asked a dear friend, from the Dominican Republic, if she was familiar with Quiroga: “of course, we studied him in high school.” It would be a mistake to say that Quiroga is unknown in the English-speaking world, but that his short story collections appear in English under either the auspices of university presses or incredibly cheap, order to print paperbacks (presumably using expired copyrights), reveals a contemporary author our collective monolinguism has once again left by the wayside. An unfortunate error.

It is worth making a biographical remark about Quiroga. For his tales - of loss, despair, madness and death - come from a life marked by tragedy. His father died shortly after his birth in a hunting accident. His stepfather, afflicted by illness, killed himself. A seventeen-year-old Horatio was the first upon the scene. In 1902 he accidentally shot and killed his best friend. The jungle of Misiones looms large in Quiroga’s life and his stories. His first wife killed herself because he insisted on living there.

In 1935 Quiroga fell sick. Suffering from prostate cancer, his second wife abandoned him in Misiones. It is under these conditions that many of the stories in Beyond were written. He eventually travelled to Buenos Aires for treatment, where he learned his condition was incurable and inoperable. He took cyanide, ending his life and his suffering.

George D. Schade’s introduction to Quiroga’s The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1976, trans.Margaret Sayers Peden) ends the summary of his life there. But in the days leading up to Quiroga’s suicide a strange series of events took place. Quiroga, in the hospital and terminally ill, hears of a man suffering from elephantiasis who is forced to stay in the hospital’s basement. Quiroga demands the man, Vicente Batistessa, be brought up. They share a room and become friends. It is Batistessa who administers the cyanide, a final act of friendship to his new long suffering friend.

This story is hard to confirm – it appears on Wikipedia, unsourced – but it is plausible. For there are two Quirogas. Quiroga is not merely a recounter of horrid tales whose life reflect his art. For there is also Quiroga the humanist, the lover of life. It is this element that makes his stories more than mere tales of horror.         

Quiroga’s prose is best described as efficient; his mastery lies in his story telling – with the notable exception of him describing a divan as “wide as a coffin”, an image the resonates through his story ‘Vampire’ – yet this is intentional. In his ‘Manual of the Perfect Short Story Writer’ he espouses a lean, direct and unadorned vision of literature. The sparseness of his prose has a dual effect. It brings into focus the object of the story, as if we were just as obsessed as his protagonists, and it dims the surrounds, giving his environments a darkness and claustrophobia.

Quiroga’s frequent discussions of madness, however, force literary experimentation to the fore. In ‘The Express Train Conductor’, a train conductor, dismissed from a medical exam that morning as being perfectly sane, loses it. The story, narrated by said conductor, builds from an just slightly unhinged narration to a maximum gauge intensity. In the moments before madness descends, the conductor decides that the train, going at the maximum speed it safely can, is not going fast enough. He admonishes the boilerman:

               “My friend!” I scream, “And our courage? Didn’t the boss recommend nerve? The train is running like a cockroach.”
               “Cockroach?” He responds, “We are at the limit…two pounds over. This carbon is not like the one we had last month.”
               “We have to run, my friend! And your nerve? I found mine.”
               “What?” murmured the man.

The boilerman will fail to shovel enough coal, amidst the talk of nerves – the boilerman becomes the “timorous one” – it is the conductor who loses it. Seeing the boilerman immobile, not shoveling, he lashes out: “‘Wretch! You’ve abandoned your post!’ I roar, launching myself from the sandpit.” After this incident, a sudden shift of register: “Spectacular Tranquillity. In the field, at last, outside the railway routine.” Ironic, as is the talk of nerves, insofar as one must assume the train, with the boilerman now incapacitated, is hurtling along at some ungodly speed.

The conductor snaps out of, has the train diverted, slams on the breaks. And in the story’s final moments the position of the narrator shifts:

               But what descended from the train afterwards, whose grinded breaks had stopped it by the detour bumper; what was pulled from the locomotive, meowing horribly and writhing like a beast, was but a rag for the rest of his days in the asylum. The psychiatrists believe that saving the train – and the 125 lives it carried- evidenced professional automatism, not very rare, and that those with this kind of illness tend to recover their judgment.
               We believe that the sense of duty, profoundly rooted in the nature of man, is capable of containing for three hours the tide of madness that is drowning him. But one does not recover from such mental heroism.

Is this the voice of our conductor? Throughout Beyond the narration comes from a strange place. In ‘Vampire’ a man with a nervous disposition (“the sound of a gunshot would finish me off”) calmly retells the story that led to his condition. In ‘The Son’ a father’s son disappears into the jungle of Misiones. He is late returning. The father searches to him, finds him, is reunited. But:

Smiles, hallucinating happiness. Since that father walks alone. He has found nobody and his arm rests on a void. Because behind him, at the foot of a pole and with legs raised, tangled in the barbed wire, his well-loved son lies under the sun, dead since ten that morning.

In carrying us beyond, Quiroga must be somewhere beyond the beyond.

There is one story, near the end of the collection that hints to where these stories may be coming from, that points to this beyond the beyond. The experiences of Quiroga’s story collection are liminal: madness and death. But there is a third, worldly, element that is also there. It is not horrifying, and it is only present in some of the stories. You may know it by its common name: love.

Quiroga announces his thematic early on. The book’s first and titular story is a story of two lovers. A girl’s parents have forbidden her from seeing her love. Her lover and her agree to die by suicide together. They awake as ghosts, in the room in which they have died. And for awhile they live and love, as best they can in their spectral form. And when their loves fades they pass from the liminal, the in between, to the beyond.

Quiroga solidifies this theme in a late story, ‘His Absence.’ This is the only redemptive story in the book, and one of great imagination and power. The story’s protagonist, Julio Roldán Berger, suffers a nervous episode as marriage with his girlfriend, Nora, looms. He comes to six years later, on a mountainside. He has not been comatose, however. He has been absent. He has lived life for six years, and it is a marvellous life he has lived. He has written a groundbreaking work of philosophy, The Open Sky, which has been herald as a work of genius not seen since Kant. He is engaged to a girl called Nora. Yet it is a different Nora, more beautiful and enchanting than the old one.

Berger is now forced to live a lie. He is not the author of The Open Sky. He is not the man who Nora fell in love with. After living with Nora for a few months he is forced to confess. This could be a moment of horror, but Quiroga turns into a moment of redemption:

               I add, “Losing the author of The Open Sky won’t weigh on you?”
               “Who?” asked Nora with feigned perplexity. “I don’t know that gentleman. I only know…”
               And what her lips don’t utter, her eyes and mouth do in the form of an anxious and oppressed secret.
               And as if this truly sever testimony did not suffice, Nora gets up and takes The Open Sky from the shelf, returns to sit on my knees, and with her arm around my neck, she tears the pages from the book, one by one, and throws them into the fire, which we watch burn in wonderment.
               “Now” she says, bringing her free arm to join the one that intoxicates me, “that gentleman is dead…”

It is a strange moment. Indeed, it is one of madness. The man you married has told you he does not recall the years of your relationship, that he is not the man you meet and fell in love with. He has only been truly himself the last few months. And to lean into, not away from, this terrible secret is to behave as if one were possessed. In this moment madness and love cannot be so easily distinguished. Quiroga’s great insight, in these stories, is to see that death is only death because we love, that we die twice because those we love and who love us carry us in their memories, and all this is a form of madness. The beyond Quiroga narrates from is in fact a within. It was, after all, a friend who helped Quiroga pass into the beyond.

This may sound like an immense sentimentalism. But Quiroga is not bleary-eyed about this topic. The stories of madness, death and despair are unsentimental and horrifying.  The opposite of sentimentalism is a pure cynicism, as unrealistic as its counterpart. We can be redeemed in small ways. Yet the same facet of human life that can save us may also drive us into the beyond, the great abyss which in its incomprehensibility gives our lives their definition and meaning. 

This republication , however, not only brings a classic back into print, it also allows us to reexamine the question of what literature can and cannot do in the face of collective trauma. The novel follows the retreat of a French cavalryman after a disastrous offensive in May 1940. The novel’s sentence structure belies this simple summary. It is this fact that has lead to a large body of misguided academic criticism of the novel missing what Simon is doing and must be doing in The Flanders Road.

Let us begin, however, by discussing psychoanalysis. In Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920, he remarks upon the reoccurring dreams of survivors of the Great War. They dream, over and over, of their most horrific moments on the battlefield. Yet is only when they dream that these images haunt them, their waking life is free from traumatic memories.

There are certain scenes in human life that we struggle to articulate. These scenes are often, but not always, traumatic. It is assumed that silence follows trauma, that we repress and cannot speak, or remember but do not speak, of the traumatic. Freud’s soldiers live their waking lives free from repetition, yet when they pass from consciousness into unconsciousness, they re-enter that abyss they have sealed off and of which, outside of the clinic, they do not speak.

The point of psychoanalysis is to make trauma speak. It believes that trauma is communicable but that the mind struggles to communicate it. This is a point forgotten by us culturally. We have become obsessed with the ineffable, the incommensurable, the incommunicable. As the twentieth century unfolded in Europe as a series of massive traumas, both collective and individual, a fascination with the limits of language and representation emerged in philosophy, in literature and in art.  This is a classic story, that everything between 1914 and 1945 pushed us, culturally, to the realization of the failure of language. Particularly after World War II, and the revelation of the Shoah, a new skepticism around communicability emerged.

This skepticism, as I have noted, emerged most strongly in three fields: philosophy, academic literary criticism and literature/art. Or so the story goes. Literature, however, resists such skepticism. Despite the great theme of the failure of language clearly emerging in postwar literature, we should not confuse difficulty with impossibility. This confusion is at the heart of the legacy of Simon’s novel The Flanders Road and indeed all of Simon’s work, and the key to clarity lies in the book’s purposeful appropriation of psychoanalytic themes.

Those discourses that are associated with postmodernism are the fertile soil on which this skepticism bases itself. The (partial) critique of reason in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the investigations of alterity and difference in Jacques Derrida, the radical notion of the other in the work of Emmanuel Levinas all emerge in response to the horror and trauma of this moment in European cultural history. Levinas in particular pushes a radical line in this vein: the radical other is unthinkable. As A.J. Bartlett writes of Levinas’ Other: “That the Other is absolutely other however means that the impossibility of the relation to it is also absolute. In other words, the impossible cannot be thought, it cannot itself be an ontological or philosophical question; nothing can come to supplement – to use a psychoanalytic term - this impossibility because it cannot be conceived.”

More so than any of the thinkers above it is Jean-Francois Lyotard who takes the specific trauma of the Shoah and analyses it by saying it cannot by analyzed. It is this problematic that inspires his work on the “differend”, which identifies the incomprehensible in any given linguistic dispute, and it reaches his apex in his poorly titled book Heidegger and the jews, where he writes of art and the Shoah that “What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it.” Lyotard takes this idea from Elie Wiesel, who once wrote that “to tell the story [of the Shoah] is to distort and diminish…a mystery [that should] be protected from the process of demystification.” Postwar, post Shoah literature moves around the subject, bears witness, says only that it cannot say.

We have then moved from the difficulty of speaking of horror (psychoanalysis) to the impossibility of speaking of horror (a theology, as we will see). Once this intellectual shift has occurred a new style of literary criticism emerges. No surprise then that Lyotard’s will characterize Simon’s work as: “the search for undetermined linkages among elements of phrases and among different families of phrases’, exemplary of a ‘general narrative condition in which not only the form of narrative but more important the “unphrased”, the “unnarrated”, or the “unpresentable” are the stakes of the search.” A narration of theunnarratable, a presentation of what cannot be presented, a phrasing of what must remain ‘unphrased.’ As meaningless as it is paradoxical.

The Flanders Road is a strange novel. Or, perhaps, it was. The first sentence runs the length of the first page. Punctuation is abandoned. Scenes fold into each other and repeat endlessly. Ostensibly The Flanders Road is the tale of Georges, who is part of a French Calvary unit who charges against a Panzer Division. In the ensuing loss and defeat, Georges makes his way across a countryside whose layout he does not know, and across his memories that wash in in from both future and past, altering the time and place of any given moment. Dialogue interrupts recollection and recollection interrupts dialogue.

This abuse of narrative flow looks something like this:

…I saw her by the light of the hall bulb but not her face: her hair, her back, silhouetted, black, then the door closed I heard her quick steps fading diminishing then nothing else and after a moment I felt the dawn’s coolness, pulling the sheet up over me, thinking that the autumn wasn’t far off now, thinking of that first day three months ago when I had been at her house and had put my hand on her arm, thinking that ager all she might have been right and that wasn’t her way, that is, with her or rather through her, that I will reach (but how can you tell?) perhaps it was as futile, as senseless as unreal as to make hen tracks on sheets of paper and to look for reality in words perhaps they were both right, he who said that I was inventing embroidering on nothing and yet you saw the same things in the papers too, so that you would have to believe that in between the shops with yellow imitation-wood fronts and the black signs and the cafes, or between midnight and six in the morning, or between two bolts of cloth, they sometimes found time enough and space enough to be concerned with such things – but how can you tell? How can you tell? I would have had to be the man hidden behind the hedge too, watching him advance calmly towards his death down that road, parading as Blum had said, insolent, idiotic, vainglorious and empty, or maybe not even having any idea of making his horse trot not even hearing the men screaming at him not to go on…

Georges’ memories move seamlessly from a lover leaving him on a cool summer morning to memories of the war. We can certainly see once again themes of trauma here and in a psychoanalytic formula: wandering association that returns to sites of pain, of an involuntariness that Simon’s breathless sentences and abrupt shifts in scenery invoke, of a constant repetition.

In making sense of this abuse of language critics look for a justifying gesture. Simon must explain his experimentalism. Early on in the novel the retreat from the Panzer division is describes as such: “in full retreat or rather rout or rather disaster in the middle of this collapse of everything as if not an army but the world itself the whole world and not only its physical reality but even in the representation the mind can make of it”.

Lynn Higgins interprets this sentence to be a remark uniting both the collapse of the French Army with the collapse of language and representation: “Collapsing along with belief in the objectivity of history and the possibility of heroism, then, are the traditional means to formulate the loss. Furthermore, history itself is seen as the cause of the collapse of representation.”

Likewise, Maria Minich Brewer thinks that incommensurability is the defining feature of not just a work like The Flanders Road but Simon’s oeuvre. The incommensurable here is, for Minich Brewer, related to shock and encounter. She writes:

In Simon’s work from L’Herbe onwards, an aesthetic of the incommensurable and shock emerges in the encounter between incongruous, anachronistic and even anamorphic realities. Simon has written about experiences of intense affect, exhaustion, hunger and fear, where there occurs a sense of being enclosed (Louise’s sensation of being in a diving-bell in L’Herbe) or radically separated from the outside.

The whole point of incommensurability is to invoke a strangeness, an extra element beyond cognition or representation. Minich Brewer makes the stakes of her terminology clear when she analyses a passage from Simon’s L’Acacia:

The description of a civilian train passing the convoy emphasizes the violent impact of two worlds crossing: the mobilized and the non-mobilized, that is, the present and another present which for the young soldiers has hurtled into an inaccessible past. Looking out of the window, the narrator corporal notices first a family armed with gas masks, then a traveler, a version of his former ‘travelling’ self. In a mute but telling gesture which deepens the corporal’s sense of irremediable abandonment, the man holds up a newspaper with the headline ‘MOBILISATION GENERALE’. The shock effect of the encounter enters consciousness directly, traumatically, without any form of defense… Refusing conventional representations of war, Simon’s writing stages the dynamics of phrase universes and spaces, bearing witness to their encounters and ways of traversing one another. In the scene described, no common idiom translates the meaning of general mobilization for both parties. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ have no common ground or ‘we’, except the space where incommensurables collide and in which their lack of common measure is registered as trauma in the unconscious

The question here is to what extent Simon does and can believe that he is interested in unrepresentability, the incommensurable, the unnarratable, in short the impossibility of literature after trauma?

The psychoanalytic themes, of timelessness and repetition suggest otherwise. So does the fact of Simon’s writing. Unlike Wiesel who explicitly states his commitment to an impossible task, Simon makes no such claim. Can the difficulties of the book but just that, difficulties? Must we always reach for impossibilities?  

Part of the problem here is a failure to separate out the macrolevel structure (plot, structure) of the novel from the microlevel structure (sentences, specific claims or things said). That the novel’s plot and structure are clear enough. Simon himself says the novel is structured like a clover: three sections and each leads back to the center. Georges and his compatriots cycle back around to the same dead horse as they beat a hasty retreat in each of the novels three sections.  

The plot, too, can be easily summarized: the protagonist, Georges, is part of an ill fated French Calvary unit. The Captain, de Reixach, of this unit is some distant relative of his. He is shot off his horse by a sniper, the Calvary unit is routed, and George is wandering around the French countryside with Iglésia – a jockey and assistant to the captain – Blum and occasionally someone perplexingly named Wack. At times Georges wonders if De Reixach was not in some sense committing suicide with the charge. Jerry Carlson notes that the most obvious analogy for the plot is one of a detective novel: why would De Reixach lead such a foolish charge?

The simplicity of this plot is obscured by the microlevel structure of sentences, paragraphs and the transitions between scenes. This present tense scene consistently melds into a series of scenes from the past and future, as we have seen above. Georges’ past, the times he has meet  Iglésia before ( Iglésia has an affair with the Captain’s wife) flow in and out of present tense scenes as do future scenes of Georges as a prisoner of war, of Georges after the war in the room of a lover. The flow of the scenes disrupts the sense of time; it is only fair to say the retreat in France is the present tense scene because it is the one that takes up the most time in the novel and thus appears as its central local. The novel, like the unconscious, is timeless.

What then is also the difficulty of the microlevel structure of the novel in service of, if not some impossibility? Let us return to Freud’s soldiers, and to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis does not say that trauma cannot be spoken. It says that without restitution, without first attempting to speak of what one struggles to speak, we are forced into strange behaviours and repetitions. Yet it can be spoken, eventually. The initial impossibility gives way to a mere difficulty. Although Freud would probe the limits of analysis in his late essay Analysis Terminable and Interminable, what isn’t ruled out is the possibility of improvement. At the end of his essay Freud defines the task of psychoanalysis as such:

Our object will be not to rub off all the corners of the human psyche so as to produce 'normality' according to schedule nor yet to demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall never again feel the stirrings of passions in himself or become involved in any mental conflict. The business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functioning of the ego; when this has been done, analysis has accomplished its task.

Analysis Terminable and Interminable is one of Freud’s final essays and is sometimes read as a moment of doubt as he looks back on his life’s work. Yet even here the possibility of psychoanalysis remains, despite the complications and difficulties, certain.

Let us return to Levinas. Bartlett, having explained Levinas’ strong conception of the other, now tells us this:

The key thing here is this notion that there exists – and already it is un-Levinasian to say ‘there exists’ in this manner – what cannot be thought. In Levinas, who is far from being an idiot, this impossibility has a rigorous framework – even if its irrefutability would lie in the real of God; which is to say, in his ineffability as purely Other. So, the approach to the other always has this religious dimension whose point really, is to reserve something from thought – to save God from the philosophers… Which is why Levinas is a theologian.

For Bartlett this is contra philosophy which holds that we can come to know all we cannot. What is at stake here is the seriousness and rigor which we need to bring to claims of the impossible. A novel that seeks to convolute language, to present trauma through an abuse of story telling, is not about the impossibility of our categories or of our experience. A novel modelled off the categories of psychoanalysis is not about the impossible. To confuse the difficult with the impossible gives criticism a gravitas, but it risks undermining the possibility of literature itself. Approaching literature with all the gloomy seriousness of a liturgy turns literary criticism into a theology.

The gap between Simon and his interpreters is then simply the gap between the philosopher – or rather those who believe in working through and coming to know - and the theologian. Simon presents the difficulty of trauma. The narration is convoluted, the sentences and scenes flow into each other, ignoring temporal dimensions. And yet we read it and see in it a cultural moment we have all come to know. Just as the cure, or improvement, is the background condition for psychoanalysis, so too is possibility and commensurability the possibility of the novel itself. Simon knew this, it is a shame his interpreters do not.

This fact has complicated what one should make of Dimes Square and how to write about and review it. Dimes Square is a play about the literary scene in New York City by a member of that very same scene. Yet, like the mirror off which the characters snort endless lines (financed by exactly what, one must wonder), the distance between the object and its reflection is perilously close.

Dimes Square takes place over several nights in a singular location: the loft of writer Stefan (Max Macdonald). At Stefan’s loft a variety of artistic and media types gather. Relations are tense between all these characters, and the tensions remains high over the course of the play. The play opens with Iris (Anges Enkhtamir)) and Nate (Jordan Lester), a couple who can barely talk to each other. Iris is unbearable. She does not even qualify as a narcissistic artist, just a quotidian self-obsessive who happens to write bloody awful poetry. She punctuates conversation with insecure and tedious lines, at one point she blurts into conversation “I need to lose ten pounds, don’t I?” Nate, a cancelled rockstar, is similarly emotionally incompetent, struggling to address his failing relationship with anything but too late dedications of love. Before they are interrupted, Iris tells him “I am looking for someone else.” She says this not to Nate, but to a bookshelf across the room.

Mike Crumplar, co-host of the podcast Jouissance Vampires and shitposter extraordinary, confused indictment with recognition in his screed against the play. Gasda, in attempting to portray a scene, brings in a set of references familiar to many viewers of the play (especially in the early runs). The play’s cast find themselves drinking fernet and going to Clando (Clandestinos, a bar in the actual Dimes Square, and one you might find Gasda and his actors at), they (we?) are name dropping Joshua Cohen and Sloane Crosby, the former of whom has seen this play at least twice (to the best of my knowledge). The critic Christian Lorentzen plays the bombastic Dave, but really he just plays a somehow more vulgar version of himself. Martin Amis’ daughter Fernanda Amis plays Olivia, a character whose parents are successful writers. Indeed, the version of Dimes Square I saw took place in the home of a well-known novelist, an upgrade from the previous location which was merely the home of one of Gasda’s acquaintances.

This kind of incestuous, self-referential approach leads Crumplar to accuse the play of being insular, by literary scenesters for literary scenesters. Yet, the fact that Gasda knows his subject does not mean he is incapable of being critical of it. Gasda is not merely interested in witty caricatures of his own social life, and to see the play as such is to miss what makes it compelling. Gasda has described the play as comedy, and it is. Yet he has also described the play as deeply pessimistic about the literary scene. What is interesting (and ultimately disappointing) about the play is that it does not quite bridge the gap between comedic and pessimistic. If, as a satire, it is attempting to hold a mirror to its audience, the mirror is a cracked one and the image distorted.

Unlike Crumplar, I take Gasda to mean what he says about his own artwork. And while there are self-indulgent aspects of his play, it is not some baffling and reactionary monument to the underground literary scene. The references to fernet and Clando and Cohen and Catholicism are not the essence of the play. They are mere window dressing. The play is about flawed social climbers and the tragedy of the literary scene. It is comedic because Gasda caricatures his young artistic types. It is tragic because all these characters are stuck in their shittiness. All of the characters are aware that things are unpleasant, that each of the other characters is deeply flawed. Yet nearly all of them remain, feeling a little too close to fame to be willing to walk away. Instead, they lean into the hostility of the situation.

Consider, for example, the female characters. They are all relegated to secondary status by their male counterparts. Their work is of lesser importance, less interest than the work of the boisterous men, the true artists. Faced with this, however, they simply find ways of leading the men on and staying in their peripheral vision. Gasda’s female characters in Dimes Square have been criticized for a certain shallowness, but it is entirely plausible that they appear as shallow because the male characters are not interested in what they have to say when it comes to their art. Rosie (Cassidy Grady) for example, is a visual artist, and when she asks the room to come to her opening, she gets an entirely non-committal “I’ll be there”, but not any interest in what, exactly, she makes and why. Rosie follows up these indifferent promises with “not just because I’m cute, but because I’m talented, ok?” to which she gets a even more indifferent response: “of course.” One could simply walk away from this maltreatment, if one didn’t want to make it big in New York City.

Gasda, however, doesn’t quite pull off a sense of pessimism or tragedy. And this is itself a little tragic, as it is clear that is within Gasda’s powers as a writer to deliver on such a promise.

In the second half of the play, which features Gasda display his full talent as a playwright with seamless dialogue and a real sense of human character, we are introduced to two older writers. The two older writers - Dave and Chris, played by Lorentzen and Bob Laine respectively – explode onto the stage in the opening of the second act and steal the show. Dave’s character especially possesses a room filling bombast. He is verbose, vociferous and vicious. His lines are side splitting, and a fair part of that is due to Lorentzen’s delivery. What steals the show, however, is the pairing of Dave and Chris. It is not their comedy but their humanity that makes them great characters. Geoffrey Mak, in their review of Dimes Square (which is, by far, one of the better reviews of Gasda’s play) for Spike Magazine writes that “For social satire to deliver meaningful critique, it needs a tragic element, which might be figured by a Lear or Don Corleone type, even if in a comic mode. With Dave, a missed opportunity, we don’t get any such moments.” I disagree. Mak has missed seeing Dave and Chris as a pair. Dave and Chris, as the older seen-it-all writers are also tragic as opposed to merely insufferable.

How has Gasda poured more humanity into his middle-aged foils than his painstaking caricatures?  It is possible that their age gives Gasda plausibility to slip into the dialogue a throw away line about a dead friend, to make a recent divorce (as opposed to merely a break-up or relationship troubles) and its fallout part of Chris’ character, a character defined by loneliness. At one point Chris says that loneliness is like “a demon that crawls into your asshole and carves out a private hell, you try to shit him out but he clings to your bowls, howling.” It is funny, but it comes from a real place of suffering, is charged with pathos. It is not the mere loneliness of the existential kind: it is something deeper. His divorce is not the image of a shitty relationship coming to an end, but the disintegration of a marriage and the struggle to return, alone, to a world now alien. Compare Chris with Terry (Christian Stevenson) the up-and-coming young filmmaker whose lengthy hugs and forceful come ons dissolve into pathetic impotence. Chris, on the other hand is tragic, pathetic but comprehensible. Chris shows the audience what they are frightened of. Here, briefly, the mirror remains uncracked.

What is stolen in the second act is the coherence of the first. The young artistic types who dominate the first act and appear again in the play’s closing scene are too hateable. Dave and Chris are loathsome, but they are understandable. This is the key to what makes them tragic. Each of the other characters represents a sort of obvious fragment of an artistic personality you might encounter, at a party in the loft or a dorm at art school. Some of them are hanger-ons, hoping to get successful by association – such as Rosie or Ashley (Helena Dryer). The central conflict is between Stefan (whose loft the whole play takes place in) and Terry. Stefan is successful – his novel getting turned into a Netflix show – but he is unliked by his peers and there is a sense he’s only doing it for the fame and the social accolades (sex included). Terry is a filmmaker who is puritanical in his obsession to make good art. He quotes Augustine, he doesn’t fuck, and his art is guided by a concept of aesthetics. Stefan and Terry form a dichotomous pair: Stefan is a seducer, Terry really really needs to get fucking laid. Stefan is an unserious artist. Terry is over invested in his art. Stefan fucks the girl Terry has a crush on, succeeding (sexually) where he has failed. What they have in common is that they are unlikeable and that they are caricatures. The only character who appears in possession of a serious moral consciousness and even – apart from Dave and Chris – serious depth, is Bora (Eunji Lim), Terry’s cinematographer. Terry is in love with her. In the first act, Bora fucks Stefan on the roof. Scandalous. But she reacts with regret, is annoyed by Stefan’s attempts to soothe her anger with more seduction and is aware she has made and is making a mistake. It is the play’s first real human moment. There is no Bora in the second act; Dimes Square’s central dramatic axis cannot sustain her.

Dimes Square is a play about the impossibility of escape. Dave and Chris are cracked mirrors held up to the younger artistic types they hang around with. At the end of the play there is no proper denouement; which gives the audience the sense that everything will go on like this forever, sexual and emotional tensions boiling under the surface until death consumes them all or the lights go up. No one quite has the wherewithal, too entranced by the possibility of fame, to leave the situation. Except Bora. She is literally too well formed a character to participate further in not the literary scene as such, but Gasda’s portrayal of it.

What is exciting about Dimes Square is also what is frustrating about it. Gasda, in a handful of moments, displays the skill and experience of a master playwright. Yet these moments are really only a handful. If it is truly Gasda’s goal to portray the pessimism of the literary scene, he would do well to locate the true source of that pessimism, an exercise which requires robust, multi-dimensional characters. The failures of character picked out from the back of a crowded apartment gesture towards (but do not fully convey) a deep sense of impossible conflict and human tragedy, of those obsessed with greatness enough to become mad, and of those who, committed too long to a certain lifestyle, become stuck. One cannot object that the one-dimensionality is the point, because Gasda can make the same points more compellingly with more robust characters and does so at infrequent moments in this very same play. The great problem of the playwright is the transformation of interiority into exteriority. It is a task Gasda can succeed at it, but not one at which he always does. Gasda’s only way out would be to turn the play’s most famous line – that “we are living through the dumbest time in human history”, which bookends the play – into a motto about the possibility of art and the play itself. Then the point would be that the human condition has deteriorated to such an extent art is impossible and Dimes Square is itself indicitive of this,that they are no longer any human characters to portray at all. A strong position. If Gasda believes this, however, he has another problem. For if that is truly his view he should and would simply walk away, and disappear from the second act of his own career.

Gasda’s pen is deft, but the hand that wields it has yet to find its proper grip. One hopes he has time to develop to the full height of his powers before his newfound success hurtles him into the very lifestyle and personality he so clearly despises.