Opinions, art, debate
A colleague went to a black-tie event in St Louis where a valet service was provided. The dinner was nice but the vehicle left the reception without its catalytic converter. St Louis is like that.
The reason why I’m sharing though is that I diagnosed the problem as cat converter theft before the mechanic did. It just so happened that this crime is featured prominently in a novel I recently read and it was fresh on my mind.
I found a book that explores the depths of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, and I’m dead to the world, my friends, because it’s so interesting.
Arendt is the only female philosopher who is actually a philosopher, meaning, she didn’t write solely about being female. Heidegger was her teacher, and pretty much everybody else’s because his is the most influential 20th-century thought. Byung-Chul Han, for example, is a Heideggerian.
Heidegger initially supported the Nazi party because he thought that Jewish thought was too intellectualizing and globalistic. Then, the Nazis accused his ideas of being too Jewish, intellectualizing, and globalistic. None of this prevented Arendt from resuming their relationship after the war, which is fascinating in and of itself.
My interest in Heidegger began back in Ukraine when I skipped a whole semester of philosophy classes and decided to mollify the professor by explaining, in simple words, the work of some particularly complex philosopher. Nobody is more complicated than Heidegger, and the professor was duly stunned.
Shocking. Never happened to anybody else ever. Getting fired is a completely new invention. At least, there’s a news program to inform us that losing one’s job is unpleasant. We’d never find out otherwise.
I apologize in advance for giving a pedestrian, boring answer but true scholars are people who publish the kind of research that makes an impact in their field. They introduce new concepts, find new directions of research, and define the conversation in some way.
Back in 2015, I came up with the name “literature of crisis” and explained that the crisis it described wasn’t going to end. It was, I said, a much, much larger phenomenon than the Great Recession.
Just recently, I finished reading a book that’s being prepared for publication where the author discusses my “pioneering, groundbreaking study” and argues that instead of “literature of crisis” we should say “crisis literature.” Which to me is “potato-potahto” but whatever. Ten years later, everybody agrees I was right and literature of crisis still very much exists.
My other big idea was that women grow down instead of growing up and it’s directly connected with women’s liberation.
And now I’m working on my biggest one yet with the new book that’s 55% done. I’m really excited about that one.
Articles and books come out debating my ideas. People send me their articles and say I inspired them. I’ve got a small crowd of scholars reading Bauman and Byung-Chul Han because I like them. All this is how I know I’m a scholar.
It’s all about results. If you can create ideas that are relevant and get other people thinking and creating, you are a scholar. If you can’t, then no matter how much you want to be one, and how much you identify as, and how much you feel like one, it’s all haloymes, which is how Soviet Jews referred to empty fantasies.
As somebody with a better sense of how more than myself said, the pedagogy of the oppressed has turned into the pedagogy of the depressed. Here’s a selection of books that will be foisted on 8-graders by their school:
We can complain ad infinitum about kids not reading but who’d want to read this twaddle? These books have no aesthetic value. There’s no interesting story. All they contain is vapid pseudo-psychological moralizing.
This is the US junkie recently arrested in Russia:
Will he also be traded for an arms dealer (like Biden did) or a crypto billionaire (like Trump did)? Isn’t it easier finally to ban these addled commies from traveling to Russia and serve as bait for blackmailing the US? Why are we constantly on the hook for these clearly abnormal people?
In case people didn’t see it in the comments, my university decided to eliminate most of its Humanities programs and fire tenured faculty. I will talk about the political reasons behind this later. Today, though, I want to use this situation to illustrate how I’m experiencing the exact same conflict between neoliberal mentality and nostalgia for stability that I wrote about earlier.
I like my house, my street, my church, my little town. I’ve lived here for 15,5 years, and that’s long for me. We have a vast shortage of foreign language teachers in the region, so I could easily find a job at a nice private Christian school. I looked, there are tons of offers. I’d probably even make more money. But I wouldn’t be a scholar. I would spend my days doing something I don’t like or value for money. Is that worth the stability, the familiar house, the friendships, the congregation? I very very sincerely don’t know.
On the other hand, I can go on the academic job market. That means newness, feeling so much younger, invigorated, inspired to read and write more. An adventure, new achievements. But it also means losing the friends, the places I’ve grown to love, and embracing the upheaval.
I don’t want anybody to think that I discuss the neoliberal subjectivity as some sort of an outsider who stands above it all. Nobody is above it. “But me, I’m different, I’m not like anybody else” is the most primitive of all neoliberal copes. This is why I’m sharing this story to show that in some way or another we all are pulled in these opposite directions.
Elon Musk is much more interesting than other mega rich dudes in that he symbolizes where we all are right now. He’s a mirror we are looking in with fascination because the conflict he enacts for us daily mimics ours.
On the one hand, we are mesmerized by the possibilities of the fluid lifestyle. It liberates creativity, frees us from every shackle, makes us feel powerful, flatters our sense of importance, and offers the rush of accomplishment. Fluidity wouldn’t be so powerful if it weren’t so darn enjoyable. We all feel its pull. I’m following a writer who wants to live a carless trad lifestyle in rural New York, and every word he writes is neoliberal, aka fluid, aka post-national, aka whatever you want to call it.
But at the same time, we all feel that something that matters to us a lot is being traded for the fluid freedom of ceaseless productivity and idolized choice. There’s no audience to observe our feats of lonesome striving because everybody is busy performing their own. There’s no “us” at all. It’s lonely, and there’s so much anxiety that even the richest man in the world can’t get through the day without being medicated to the gills. We are all on something by Musk’s age of 53, and probably earlier. We are all chronically ailing.
And we all feel nostalgia for the now irrelevant idea of rights. We pine for politics in the sense of an expression of the life of the polis. There is no polis and there are no citizens in any sense that matters. We have convinced ourselves that wanting anything other than complete freedom is a betrayal of the ever-important self but the desire for something bigger than the compulsion to keep choosing is there, nagging and begging for attention.
We look at Musk’s clumsy reenactment of the role of a statesman and a family man, and it’s both cringe in its parody-like shamelessness and endearing in its naive cluelessness. Choice is a jealous deity and won’t tolerate any other gods on its pedestal. We all want to be the agents but not the objects of choice. But that’s impossible. We don’t want to accept anything given, anything we haven’t chosen but we also want to be accepted as given, as unchosen, as endowed with rights just because we exist. In this, we are all Elon Musk, and he fascinates us because we recognize ourselves in him.
I unfollowed immediately. Why be a conservative if petty whorishness of this kind is to be lionized? Making everybody privy to her Valentine’s freakout over being discarded like a used Kleenex is vulgar and we should all be better than this.
As I say in the book I’m writing, neoliberalism is a moral catastrophe. Even saying the word “morality” makes one sound fuddy-duddy and stupid. And children are the first casualties.
What is it with eggs? People are posting videos of shoppers dragging out huge stacks of egg cartons. My Twitter comments are filled with references to eggs. What’s happening? Are there supposed to be egg shortages? There are none where I live, and prices have improved. Is there a meme I missed?
I feel like a teenager who broke her leg and missed a huge round of school drama.
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