This is the second essay I’ve written that bears the same title. I cannot remember the contents of the first, only that I submitted it sometime in the autumn of my first year at university, and it was on the topic of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was a work that I found thrilling for all of the adolescent reasons a young man usually does. I dread now to think what I actually wrote in that essay, or its exact argument – but it was perhaps some rudimentary speculations about the differences between the Machiavellian notion of virtù (which I favoured) and the constraints of traditional virtue (which I no doubt found tedious at the time). I recall receiving a high grade, likely the last of its kind for a few years, since not long after I completely lost interest in attending classes. The paper warranted a commendation from the lecturer who taught us the book, Domenico Zanré, who remarked that it was excellent when I went to pick it up from his office. He seemed to want to elaborate on the topic for my edification. To my regret, I didn’t take him up on the offer.

I recall him being a very warm, but rather quiet and reserved man; a Scottish-Italian scholar of the culture of the Florentine Cinquecento, hailing from the northern fishing town of Peterhead. A few years later, having forgotten about Machiavelli, I began to wonder in passing what had happened to Dr Zanré, who I no longer saw around the university. Reading a newspaper article recently confirmed what I vaguely ascertained from a cursory internet search back then; he had given up academia to study for the priesthood at the Pontifical Scots College in Rome, and was ordained at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, located on Huntley Street. I remember that the location sounded familiar to me at the time and gave me pause.1

I never had much cause to think about Machiavelli until many years later, after I discovered and came under the influence of the philosopher Louis Althusser. Born in 1918 to a pied-noir family in French Algeria, he was given the first name of a man his mother was supposed to marry, a man who had been killed on the Western Front. This man’s brother, Althusser’s father, felt duty-bound to offer himself as a replacement for the distraught fiancé. Inevitably perhaps, their marriage was respectful but entirely loveless. In his autobiography L’avenir dure longtemps (The Future Lasts a Long Time), he describes, in passing, one of the residual effects of this not altogether uncommon family upbringing:

I have said that I felt incapable of loving, that I could not respond to others and to the love they so generously showed me. This was true of women I knew and even of my male friends. It seems that my mother’s impersonal love, directed not towards me but through me to someone who was dead, made it impossible for me to exist in my own right or in relation to another person, especially if that person was a woman. I felt powerless or impotent in the full sense of the word; I was incapable of love…

As these rather tortured and candid admissions suggest, in addition to being one of the greatest philosophers of the 20^th Century, Althusser was a deeply troubled man. He spent almost the entirety of his late youth, which coincided with the Second World War, in a prisoner of war camp after the fall of France. After the war, he did little else than live and breathe academic philosophy; he resided in a small apartment within the École Normale Supérieure at the Rue d’Ulm for a large portion of his adult life, punctuated by regular mental breakdowns, hospitalisations, and various treatments for acute psychological distress. In 1980, in the grips of a manic dissociative episode, he strangled his wife while giving her a neck massage. He admitted culpability, but was declared mentally incompetent and (controversially at the time) avoided prison, but was institutionalised for only 3 years.

I’ve always found L’avenir dure longtemps remarkable, not only because of its macabre subject matter, but because it seems to confirm my long-held suspicion that autobiography and fiction ought to remain stubbornly distinct. What is purportedly offered by Althusser are the bare ‘facts’ of his life and circumstance, yet even in his febrile and broken state, he can scarcely resist the pull of fictionality. A more succinct account, and admission of culpability, of what transpired that fateful night is given at the beginning of the essay we will shortly examine:

I strangled my wife, the woman who was everything in the world to me and who loved me so much that, since living had become impossible, I no doubt rendered her this ‘service’: she did not defend herself against it, but died of it.

Althusser’s achievements in the realm of philosophy were significant, yet his legacy remains indeterminate. Some of the theoretical concepts which he introduced were so successful that many often forget their provenance, but we might usefully recall them across several interrelated topics and concepts: Structural Marxism, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Interpellation, Overdetermination, and finally (and most enigmatically) the Materialism of the Encounter. What unites all of these themes is the attempt at articulation of what is often referred to as the ‘epistemological break’ within Marxist thought. This theory proposed that the early ‘humanist’ works of Marx are distinctly at odds with the philosophical system proposed in Das Kapital, which Althusser insisted represented a fundamentally anti-humanist epistemology that only begins to cohere when history is considered as a process without an origin or telos (or aim). This doggedly anti-humanist and ‘scientific’ Marxist thought was considered by his opponents as overtly doctrinaire, and indeed he was one of the main intellectual figures who remained mostly loyal to the Parti Communiste Français. Some of his contemporaries, such as the English Marxist E.P. Thomson, openly excoriated Althusser as a Stalinist.

Unsurprisingly, Althusser was also at odds with many of the emergent radical left currents which culminated in the abortive May 68 revolution in France, where the first echoes of the identitarianism and radical subjectivity that define contemporary progressive politics found meaningful articulation. The perception of Althusser’s unyielding dogmatism is of course inaccurate, as Warren Montag proved in his landmark retrospective Althusser and his Contemporaries (2013). Making extensive use of the archive, Montag proved that Althusser’s philosophical project was a great deal more dynamic than many allow, and is best understood as a ‘perpetual war’ conducted against (and more often in dialogue with) the prominent intellectual figures of contemporary French philosophy. Nevertheless, the determination to pursue the cause of anti-humanism cannot be explained solely through a consistent philosophical commitment.

Althusser joined the Communist Party in 1948. However, as a young man entering the prisoner-of-war camp in 1939, he was, according to his biographer Yann Moulier-Boutang: ‘solidly on the right, a royalist, and fundamentalist Catholic.’ Months before Althusser murdered his wife, he remarked the following in an interview

I became communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church. I remained a Catholic, that is, an internationalist universalist. I thought that inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity. And then, there was the influence of my wife who had fought in the terrible resistance and who had taught me a lot, a lot. Everything has come to me through women, and this is the reason why I attribute a very important role, a predominant role, to the women’s movement. Women don’t know their capacity, the possibilities, their capability to do politics.

The second part of this admission might give us pause when we consider the influence he attributes to his wife, and that he would have a hand in her death - allegedly at her insistence - a few months after uttering these same words. A close friend and interlocutor, the theologian and Catholic priest Stanislas Breton, wrote some reflections on the many philosophical discussions he shared with Althusser over the years. Breton is completely without illusions in these reflections, first citing Martin Heidegger’s acknowledged debt to his own theological bildung in the development of his thinking, whilst making clear that the case of Althusser is not analogous:

Without his Catholic education in the youth movements, it is possible and probable that Althusser would never have attained the ‘path of thinking’, let us add: of Marxist thought. However, it remains the case that, as Heidegger notes, an origin is always measured by the hazards (aléas) of existence, which render it indefinitely problematic and handed over, at least in the case of human beings of a certain character, to future decisions. This applies to all of life, and to intellectual life in particular. However, I would be tempted to reverse the Heideggerian sentence in the following way: if it is true that the past is always future, then perhaps it is no less true that the future is constantly in the grip of the past.

On his release from the prisoner of war camp, where he had found common cause with many communists, Althusser first gravitated towards the growing left-wing catholic intellectual movement. Breton recalls a talk Althusser gave in 1970 to students at the philosophy faculty of L’Institut catholique de Paris, where he was open about his debt to the social teaching of the Church prior to the war. Breton recalls an important work, The Significance of Marxism (1937) by Henri Desroches and C. Jean, which he feels was as equally influential to Althusser as it was to himself. This was a work that

…suggested, still timidly, that Marxism could, in its way, not only serve the evangelical cause of the poor, but also enrich a theological understanding that was inadequate to the necessities of the present time.

This speculative insight serves Breton as sufficient cause; something which Althusser might perhaps have retained on a personal level, and it might also be argued, although taken outside of the canonical strictures of the faith, also served as the ultimate justification for the grand philosophical undertaking he was committed to, even if the project itself would (perhaps inevitably) bring the philosopher into contact with suppositions that would obviate the very essence of that original faith. Breton recognised this too:

Mysticism and negative theology are at one for him. Both suggest a radical critique of religious representations. They call into question the triumphalist theology of eminence that had enchanted him as an adolescent. Basically, if God exists, then he can only be the desert, the obscure night, the nothing through excess, more than the whole, and by the same token the refusal of an ontology having become theology, onto-theology as will be said later. I recall these moments of the Althusserian night as decisive stages on the path of the distance taken or to be taken. One understands that this negative theology could be turned into the provocative shadow of a certain social atheism of which Christians were once accused.

Completely aside from this speculation, however, was the position of the Church at the beginning of the Cold War. In 1949, Pope Pius XII issued an anathema that proscribed Catholics from associating with Communists. Earlier that year, Althusser published an article in the journal of one of the left-wing Catholic organisations targeted by this decree, Jeunesse de l’Eglise. According to Althusser, the Church maintains a ‘commitment to world-wide reaction, and is struggling alongside international capitalism against the forces of the working class and the advent of socialism.’ The future of the church, he continues, would depend on the courage of

Christians who …are developing an awareness of the necessity of struggling and joining the ranks of the world proletariat…The Church will give thanks to those who, through struggle and in struggle, are once again discovering that the Word was born among men and dwelt among them – and are already preparing a humane place for it amongst men.

The Pope’s intervention seems to have confirmed Althusser’s decision to relinquish his faith. As Gregory Elliot remarked: ‘Henceforth it was not equally to Roman Catholicism, but exclusively to Russian Communism, that he looked for salvation. “The Youth of the Church” having been repressed, “the youth of the world”…absorbed Althusser’s energies.’

Althusser’s late essay The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, written partially while institutionalised and published only posthumously, is considered by some to be the ravings of a madman, or more charitably, as a repudiation after the fact of everything which his philosophical system had heretofore attempted to explicate. To others, it departs according to a map set against those same theoretical coordinates that had been elucidated in his previous work, with the goal of pushing all previous suppositions to their very limit. In his speculative theory of Aleatory Materialism, Althusser posits a hidden, repressed and unacknowledged materialist current throughout the history of European philosophy, which resurfaces periodically and in an occluded form. This is a materialism

…opposed, as a wholly different mode of thought, to the various materialisms on record, including that widely ascribed to Marx, Engels and Lenin, which, like every other materialism in the rationalist tradition, is a materialism of necessity and teleology, that is to say, a transformed, disfigured form of idealism.

Epicurus is for Althusser the most instructive example of this hidden materialism, and is the first which is looked to:

Epicurus tells us that, before the formation of the world, an infinity of atoms were falling parallel to each other in the void. They still are. This implies both that, before the formation of the world, there was nothing, and also that all of the elements of the world existed from all eternity, before any world ever was. It also implies that, before the formation of the world, there was no Meaning, neither Cause nor End, nor Reason nor Unreason.

Here, ‘the non-anteriority of Meaning’ in Epicurus is given to be particularly audacious and ‘by virtue of which he stands opposed to both Plato and Aristotle.’ After a brief detour via Heidegger, the essay now takes an odd turn, seemingly away from philosophy, but towards our particular theme.

In the work of Niccolò Machiavelli, the aleatory encounter takes the form of an attempt at divining the future; of envisioning the possibility of Italian unification amidst inauspicious material conditions that are akin to those of Epicurus’s atoms falling parallel to one another within a void. What is required for something to ‘take hold’ is the ‘swerve’, such as the Lucretian clinamen that supervened within the Epicurean creation myth. In Machiavelli, this comes in the mythical form of the New Prince, a figure imbued with sufficient virtu to counteract the undulations and tribulations of fortuna, thereby creating the conditions necessary for Italian unification. Althusser notes that this is the result of a peculiarly aleatory mode of reasoning which purposefully leaves its most essential factors indeterminate:

History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about. Simply, one day new hands will have to be dealt out, and the dice thrown again on to the empty table. Thus it will have been noticed that this philosophy is, in sum, a philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void [fait le vide philosophique] in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous ‘philosophical problems’ (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any ‘object’ whatever […] in order to set out from nothing.

The essay, fragmentary and overdetermined, nonetheless is powerful, and in retrospect, rather haunting given the momentous and tragic circumstances of its composition. That Machiavelli is the central subject within this work is unsurprising, since the origins of this essay are to be found in a collection of unpublished writings and lectures Althusser gave on Machiavelli over many years. This interest was putatively philosophical but may be more accurately described as an obsession, one made more potent and seductive by a relative historical neglect which Althusser attributed to a misapprehension of Machiavelli as primarily a political thinker as opposed to a philosopher. The work of Machiavelli was for Althusser a mystery to be solved, even in spite of Bernadotte Croce’s judgement that the enigma of Machiavelli would ‘never be settled.’

For Althusser, Machiavelli’s omission of all the contemporary theological and philosophical traditions signals a deliberate moment of rupture, poised between the medieval world and the emergence of modernity. The ‘silence’ of Machiavelli condemns the contemporary moral and ethical discourses of his own time: both the court and radical humanists, the Christian theology of the church, in addition to the political philosophy of classical antiquity:

It is evident that Machiavelli considered himself the founder of a theory without any precedent, and that between the imaginary reigning representations of history and politics and his knowledge of the actual truth of the ‘thing’, there is an abyss, the emptiness of the distance taken, that cannot but startle.

What remains unsaid here, yet can nonetheless be inferred, is that Machiavelli - like Althusser himself - appears to be motivated by the call of historical necessity, that unification is a desirable and ideal outcome preferable to a less-than-desirable status quo of chaos and subjugation. Once more, there appears the remnant of this solitary sufficient cause, evident also in Althusser’s own rupture with his Catholic faith.2 Motivated by the Church’s temporal proscription of his particular interpretation of justice and liberation, it seems to resemble a formal repudiation of the faith through expediency, in pursuance of a more elevated and divine duty towards the poor and oppressed, which might thereby be served more efficaciously.

Yet for Stanislas Breton – who had a hand in the discussions around Machiavelli that led to this enigmatic philosophical essay - the emergence of this final form of the Althusserian philosophical system signalled a complete foreclosure of his Catholic upbringing and theological development, where the former sufficient cause threatens to become its opposite:

The new materialism sealed, if I can say it, the emergence of a point of apogee and impossible return. The literary device of a train without origin or destination, which one catches on the run, illustrated a final farewell to what he had loved and the meaning of what I hesitate to name his new law […] it was for him something like a retort of absolute disagreement with his former nostalgia for a reason to be, the new way that freed it from the principle of reason to grant it the suppleness and freedom of a reason more amenable to chance than indivisible necessities.

What then is this ‘new law’, and how does it oppose the former ‘reason to be’?Breton could not have been unaware of the fact that Althusser’s ‘philosophical void’, in almost a final act of defiance to his Catholic humanist past, seems to deliberately invoke what Jacques Maritain describes as the essential pre-condition of moral evil, the ‘nihilating will’, which posits the lacuna, nothingness and the void as first cause. No doubt there is in this gesture something of the previous defiance against the temporal authority of the faith in general, and what Althusser considered to be its humanistic illusions specifically. The invocation of Machiavellian virtù, coupled with the reputation for ‘wickedness’ lauded as an exemplary source of esoteric secular knowledge by Leo Strauss, was undoubtedly appealing to Althusser’s iconoclastic impulses. We might note in passing that classical virtue, in its Aristotelian sense, is to a large extent centred upon the very teleological framework that Althusser, via Machiavellian Virtù, dispenses with entirely, in favour of the attempt to master the chaotic and contingent forces of Fortuna.

In 1981, a Scottish philosopher long resident in the US, who had spent his formative years as a Marxist humanist, reviewed a retrospective work called Modern French Philosophy by Vincent Descombes for The London Review of Books. Alasdair Macintyre had left the Communist Party of Great Britain (as many did) in the 1950s, and in a trajectory that inverts that of Althusser, would convert to Roman Catholicism in the 1980s. He wrote the following:

Descombes, like many others, identifies key weaknesses in Althusser’s positions. What he does not emphasise adequately – and at this particular time it is what it is fitting to emphasise – is the profound gratitude that we all owe to Althusser for having brought French Marxism back into dialogue with the rest of French philosophy […] he de-Stalinised Marxism more thoroughly than any other Marxist did.

Why it might have been a ‘fitting time’ to acknowledge such gratitude was that Althusser had already been committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife – where he would start work on The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter. That same year, MacIntyre would publish his most notable work After Virtue (1981), where Machiavelli is attributed a certain role within his condemnatory diagnosis of the collapse of moral values after the Enlightenment:

Wherein does Machiavelli differ from the Enlightenment tradition? Above all in his concept of Fortuna. Machiavelli certainly believed as passionately as any thinker of the Enlightenment that our investigations should issue in generalizations which may furnish maxims for enlightened practice. But he also believed that no matter how good a stock of generalizations one amassed and no matter how well one reformulated them, the factor of Fortuna was ineliminable from human life […] What I want to emphasize is Machiavelli’s belief that, given the best possible stock of generalizations, we may on the day be defeated by an unpredicted and unpredictable counter-example—and yet still see no way to improve upon our generalizations and still have no reason to abandon them or even to reformulate them. We can by improvements in our knowledge limit the sovereignty of Fortuna, bitch-goddess of unpredictability; we cannot dethrone her.

There is here an unmistakable resonance with Althusser’s aleatory materialism, but if both of these readings of Machiavelli have some resemblance, or are in any way comparable, the lessons they yield would differ radically. One of the central claims of After Virtue centres upon the discrediting of Aristotelian teleology by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Since then

…moral philosophers have attempted to provide some alternative rational secular account of the nature and status of morality, but […] all these attempts, various and variously impressive as they have been, have in fact failed, a failure perceived most clearly by Nietzsche (After Virtue: 271)

For Macintyre, the diminution of teleology has resulted in the tragic moral void inculcated by Nietzsche; one that might only be redeemed through a return to the classical conception of Virtue. For Althusser, anti-teleology signifies the limitless potential of radical contingency, the exhilaration of the philosophical void. The former is a humanistic philosophy, but one that is, in the most benign possible sense, a philosophy of reaction; the latter, putatively radical, is nevertheless profoundly anti-humanistic. If we strip away the valences of this philosophical opposition, underpinned by a comparability of experience and temperament, it seems to become less an opposition of ideology, and appears to return us once more to the theological notion of sufficient cause. Is the notion of Telos as transcendent First Cause the sine qua non of human flourishing, or are we able to embrace within materiality, and its various encounters, the exhilarating and radical sufficiency of a contingent history without any specific purpose other than its potentiality for re-imagining the world entirely? The genius of Althusser is, I believe, found within this relentless pursuit of the outer limits; that the logical result of a materialistic conception of history that seeks emancipation and liberation for humanity might warrant an absolute efficiency of purpose, a technique that is not only outside the realms of humanistic thinking, but might not even require humans at all.

I am reminded of a passage from Joseph Conrad’s greatest novel, Nostromo (1904) spoken by the misanthropic Dr Monygham, a disillusioned idealist once tortured, broken down and made to betray himself, but who is now completely free from illusions yet still committed to some unnamed cause:

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.

I cannot be entirely sure why I have found myself drawn to a philosopher such as Althusser over these years, a man so deeply committed to the cause of humanity, but who was, by his own admission, incapable of properly loving other humans. Yet even those ‘incapable of love’ might attempt to imagine a world in which it is possible to live a decent life without it, and perhaps even to imagine that such a world might be utopian - since, having been deprived of the love they feel incapable of, they come to see themselves too as among the wretched of the earth, and to make that cause their own. There is something admirable, a spark of the divine even, in this ability to transpose the tragic circumstances of one’s life onto the cause of some collective liberation - even if it rarely leads to an efficacious form of revolutionary action. And yet, alongside this there is another tendency which is not entirely unrelated, where the ideal future some imagine for others is a curiously solitary one; one devoid of people, activity and human flourishing - where the dreams of liberation too easily mutate into the aberrant and nightmarish desire to be free from the burden of humanity itself. This is less a philosophical void, alive with possibility, than it is an abyss. I fear now, more than ever before, that we are edging closer towards it.

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This is a lightly edited version of the paper I gave on Monday as part of the ‘Future of Criticism’ conference organised by .

The original content of this paper has been modified, not only in light of the interesting discussions which we heard on Friday – but also with respect to recent exchanges occurring online between ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’. I won’t disguise the fact that the original intention of my paper was to elicit just such a confrontation, in the fervent belief that provocations of this type are always generative.

In the spirit of what I believe to be truly valuable in the present moment, namely its liberating and exhilarating amateurism, I will try to speak with a very heterodox audience in mind and thus forgo some of the ordinary conventions of the academic paper. The participants in this forum are sufficiently aware of the problems we face; I won’t linger in too fine detail on probable causes and effects.

As such, the tone of what I will now propose may at times more resemble a polemic than any modest proposal.

I’d like to start with a quote from by – who will be speaking later in the day:

“…..I think we need a better amateurism—after the romantic autodidact—that embraces disciplinary knowledge, deployed in an idiosyncratic fashion, and rejects pandering for likes, subs, and everything to do with the influencer economy.”

I too am in favour of an inspired amateurism that rejects condescension and low expectations, but equally rejects deference to credentials and the authority of institutions. Indeed, the most enlightening connections I have made online over the past couple of years have been with people who don’t care much about such things, and whose interests are more purely intellectual and artistic as a result.

It is self-evident that on platforms such as Substack, the dispensation of enlightened amateurism is by no means widespread, and if anything is a minority pursuit. I am no evangelist for platforms, or indeed a true believer in technology’s capacity to advance the cause of humanity. Much of what becomes popular on these platforms reflects the enormous condescension and infantilising tendencies of the publishing world towards the reading public, within the field of literary production, and in culture more broadly.

A literary marketplace where Young Adult fiction features prominently now seemingly champions a form of YA criticism. On the face of it, one might assume that the aim of getting the kids to read is an admirable and worthy goal…yet the kids in question happen to be fast approaching middle age. The influence of such work, which is not intended to educate the young and impressionable, is unequivocally pernicious, and its formal and aesthetic qualities are now readily discernible even within the purportedly elevated domain of literary fiction. The primary audience for YA criticism is not young people, of course, but infantilised adults who still feel some residual attachment towards books as fetish objects, which they are keen to display in social media posts, as piles to be read; books are treated as shibboleths of in-group inclusion, pleas for belonging, or markers of political reliability, etc. Nevertheless, there remains a palpable suspicion and aversion to difficulty and intellectual overexertion. Indeed, what has occurred in the past decade and a half is the wholesale legitimation and pandering to this infantilism across all elements of culture, to disastrous effects.

The reasons for the proliferation of these tendencies is partially explained by the emergence of the figure of The Influencer, who I have written about previously. The influencer is a symptom of a culture that has become synonymous with lifestyle. There are historical antecedents for this phenomenon, yet it is also in many ways quite novel. What seems undeniable is that there no longer exists a sharp distinction between artist and critic, performer and spectator, writer and reader, teacher and student, producer and consumer. People go to exhibitions so that they may themselves be artists, read books so that they may one day be authors, attend concerts so that they can eventually perform on stage. Such individual aspirations previously demanded the requisite talent, and the failure of these ambitions manifested in either quiet resentment or achievements upon what Jacques Lacan referred to as the “inverted ladder” of desire. It is a dynamic that once constituted an underlying truth of the symbiotic relationship between artist and audience. Its transformation in the present moment, however, has made the public forums of cultural exchange into vast workshops that also serve as group therapy sessions.

In this particular vein, I think the transition from journalist to novelist is far more common today than it ever has been previously. The role of the journalist and novelist, each previously fulfilling a worthy function in their own right, appears to have merged to form the uncertain figure of the ‘writer’, who is more the product of a specific ‘technique’ within the political economy of media and publishing than only the product of technological advances. To my mind, the intellectual impulses required by each function are inimical, and the distance between them irreducible. It has become commonplace to place blame for the aesthetic scourge of contemporary letters on a programmatic (and pragmatic) ‘MFA writing ’ mode, but the more universal expository writing style taught widely at the undergraduate level in American universities, and across the Anglosphere, bears equal responsibility.

There is no denying that this quasi-journalistic mode is popular, given that it places little demand upon both writer and reader. Its popularity might be explained by a contemporary obsession with self-making and personal branding, which, unsurprisingly, also seems to determine entry into elite institutions in the form of the personal essay (at present a massive and growing industry exists to create and tutor aspirants in this style). These institutions in turn supply us with an outsized number of our current Journalist/Novelists. Being charitable, we may allow that the journalist’s primary concern is a goal-oriented verisimilitude, but such an attitude is more often than not deficient in what Keats described as Negative Capability, which in my view is an essential quality of any worthwhile novelist or poet.

This goes some way in explaining the very specific middlebrow ‘culture’ of letters we are forced to endure, one that is produced by, and of primary interest to, a coterie of writers whose literary, artistic and critical impulses appear to be primarily journalistic. Though the books produced and discussed might have some resonance within the confines of this contracting ‘official’ critical culture of the Journalist/Novelist - one which functions on quid pro quo, intra-class loyalty, and politesse - it doesn’t appear to be overly concerned with literary or artistic qualities.

As we can see, there is indeed much within the present ‘Middling Morass’ that is worthy of sociological analysis. Much of what I have heard at this conference seems to at least attempt to answer these critical demands. Yet my proposal is somewhat different, and is informed by my own past missteps.

Last week, we heard from Simone Murray, who spoke about a popular novel which apparently isn’t YA fiction per se, but seems to bear some of its characteristics and textures. It is said to be a reworking of Nabokov’s Lolita. From what I can tell, it seems to take the popular misapprehension of Nabokov to its apogee.

I notice also that Tara Heffernan’s critique of the Ausnaissance, and the work of Felix McNamara which I edited and published, similarly takes a sociological perspective. It’s worth mentioning that my interest in Felix’s work is – in common with all works we publish through Hyperidean Press – concerned with its literary aspects above all else. Tara also wrote very interestingly about Nabokov’s hidden critique of artistic managerialism and instrumentalisation within Lolita. There is more than a grain of truth to her analysis. The prospect of Nabokov as the great American liberal moralist is, in my view, a tantalising delusion, which readers and critics continue to pursue, missing his hidden scorn both for American progressivism and moralism (which is, lest we forget, quite different from ‘morality’). Yet Nabokov would have found both the hackneyed misreading and re-working, and the more involved, considered and refined sociological reading, to be equally abhorrent.

I also attempted in doctoral research many years ago to untangle the ideological valences of a writer who unyieldingly claimed the status of Apoloteia, but who nonetheless betrays the hidden coordinates of a distinct ideological position. My feeling is that I was somewhat successful in this endeavour. Five years of research culminated in two months sifting through the archive at the Berg Collection at the NYPL, where I was granted permission by Nabokov’s estate to view and draw on some unpublished essays in Russian, etc., and reproduce fragments in my own translation. At the time, I felt that this was some sort of huge ‘gotcha’ moment - some grand unveiling of true motivations, a peek behind the magician’s curtain. Years after my monograph came out, however, I’ve come to realise that my own motivations were rather pointless.

What I admired about Nabokov’s work - and continue to admire - are its intangible aesthetic qualities, which are always able to stand on their own merits. At the time, however, I only wished to make these accord with my youthful revolutionary theories. But the artistic genius of Nabokov is manifestly of the perennial type, evident in his ability to deliberately invoke the varied interpretations that critics seek to inflict upon his work. This is an intentional achievement of his Art, and one that needs no further justification.

I don’t believe a ‘Future’ for criticism, or the humanities more broadly, whether in the institutions or outside of them, will be found by pandering to popular whims, or through feigning some quasi-sociological interest in mass-market or middlebrow phenomena as a means of professional survival.

I would much rather embrace the real thrill of amateurism, the ability to be inspired and unconstrained; to be unbound by professional and bureaucratic obligations. We ought to follow this impulse fully and celebrate the artful, and to vociferously express one’s contempt for artlessness in all of its forms.

To this end, we might embrace the original spirit of the Avant-Garde. That too was a spirit of inspired amateurism, one reconciled to limited efficacy in the present, in favour of some grander potential impact in a future that is yet to be determined.

I defer in this instance to one of the most prolific interlocutors on literary Substack, the anonymous sage – who generously offers us a bracing definition of the spiritual and artistic avant-garde that is, in my view, very much attuned to the needs of the present:

“An artist or writer, or community of artists or writers, who have a strong, affirmative vision of a radically different future, and who align their art with that vision, and who are willing to pay a personal and professional cost to promote that vision.”

Ultimately, the question we ought to ask ourselves here is, as critics or scholars – are we putting anything on the line to promote our particular vision? Contarini’s inspired formulation approaches that of Henri de Saint-Simon, who is thought to have first introduced the military term into the cultural sphere in his imagined 1824 dialogue between ‘The Artist, the Scientist and the Industrialist’

“It is we artists who will serve as your avant-guard; the power of the arts is indeed most immediate and the quickest. We possess arms of all kinds : when we want to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them upon marble or upon a canvas ; we popularize them through poetry and through song; we employ by turns the lyre and the flute, the ode and the song, the story and the novel; the dramatic stage is spread out before us, and it is there that we exert a galvanizing and triumphant influence. We address ourselves to man’s imagination and to his sentiments. We therefore ought always to exert the most lively and decisive action. And while today our role seems nonexistent or at least quite secondary, that is because the arts are missing what is essential to their energy and to their success, a shared impulse and a general idea.”

L’Artiste, le savant et l’industriel (1824)

We need not dwell too long on the significance of Saint-Simon, whose influence was vast and reverberated across the salons of Europe, inspiring many of the theoretical architects of modernity, not least among them Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Shortly after the publication of Saint-Simon’s tract – and his death a few months later – the novelist Henri Beyle would publish a slightly testy response. Beyle is more widely known to the world by his nom de plume Stendhal, and as the author of what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of the 19^th Century – The Red and the Black (1830) - the influence of which was in no way immediate, but, as its author fully predicted, long and slow to arrive at its full significance.

Stendhal, to some extent finding common cause with the notion of an artistic Avant-garde, nevertheless felt the need to excoriate Saint-Simon’s undue emphasis on the industrialists within his imaginary dialogue – who he considered to be the most parasitic, uninspired and least productive members of any given society. Stendhal was writing, I believe, in light of Byron’s death – and thus in support of a distinctly Romantic Weltanschauung: those who contribute most to the cause of humanity are those willing to stake all they possess towards a particular vision.

The writer would describe himself as a furious romantic of the modern form, which is to say a true manifestation of the spirit of the Avant-Garde…someone who does not dwell too much on an illusory past, takes full account of the present, and tries above all to predict the future, and the movement of history towards the eventual arrival of the many at a point where the ‘Blessed few’ already stand.

Where Saint-Simon’s artist, operating at the vanguard, seeks to popularise a doctrine for the masses on behalf of a new social order, Stendhal posits the need for rigorous novelty, originality and contemporaneity within art – whilst simultaneously rejecting its being subsumed towards merely programmatic and political ends.

In the preface to his treatise De l’Amour Stendhal wrote:

“Je n’écris que pour cent lecteurs”/ I write only for one hundred readers.

Many of his works were dedicated to this ‘Happy Few’, which he found to actually be rather unhappy with the present, yet spirited, lovable and passionate, neither given to hypocrisy nor to moralising, and least of all to despondency about what the future might hold. He feels that he knows only one or two of these readers, but is confident that many others like them exist, though perhaps few and far between.

This isn’t an elite of wealth, material comfort, class or pedigree; it is not one determined by credentials or positions, but it is emphatically one of sensibility. If there is to be a future for criticism - in the University, or most likely outside of it – the enlightened critic should aspire only to be to such a reader, who, after all, does not possess the world-weary spleen of the Professional, but the vigorous and adventurous heart of the Amateur.

5th October, 2026

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Below is a short extract from my essay on Joseph Conrad in the latest issue of . You can read the full essay here. Many thanks to editor for his invaluable input and guidance.

…

The son of a romantic poet and failed revolutionary, Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in 1857 to the Polish nobility in Russian occupied Ukraine. Known affectionately by his family as Konradek, he was named by his father in homage to the national poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (Mickiewicz was also the author of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz). His birth and childhood were thus imbued with a particular type of romantic idealism related to the cause of national liberation; its subsequent disavowal would be fateful and formative.

The future author’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was arrested in 1861 for subversive political activities and imprisoned for months in the Warsaw citadel before being sent with his young family into Russian exile. The harsh climate there led to the death of Apollo’s wife Ewa from tuberculosis in 1865, and perhaps led to his own untimely death four years later—leaving the young Konradek orphaned and in the care of his beloved maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, a practical and sensible man who admonished Conrad for the foolhardy youthful excesses that Tadeusz attributed to the hotheadedness of the boy’s paternal family. This early experience of tragedy perhaps inculcated in Conrad certain lessons that he would retain long after he had retired from life as a merchant seaman to take up writing. A sense of tragic failure, of the cruel punishments dealt by fate to the dreamer for the crime of wishing for a better and juster world, would inform the central paradox of Conrad’s oeuvre. Conrad belonged to a family fixated, with tortured and unyielding fidelity, on a cause that seemed destined to fail—and in this “lost cause” we find the link between the inheritance of nineteenth-century Romanticism (revolutionary, national, and aesthetic) and the ambivalence with which Conrad’s work itself registers the unwanted encroachment of technological, economic, and political modernity.

We here first require to make a distinction between two terms often used interchangeably, both of which possess a distinct function within the work of Conrad. The first is the generic literary mode of romance; the second, the ideology-cum-aesthetic of Romanticism. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye famously posited romance as a perennial narrative mode that assuages fundamental desires and is organized around the quest, including encounters with the fantastical, wish-fulfilment, and self-making. Fredric Jameson’s most ambitious chapter in The Political Unconscious (1981) was based on Frye’s conception of romance in relation to the work of Conrad. Jameson accepted the basic structural coordinates of Frye’s romance, but insisted upon their historicization. For Jameson, romance was not merely a recurrent trans-historical archetype, but one that emerges and re-emerges at certain historical impasses to perform a very specific but little understood function. Romance flourishes at those moments of crisis when an older social order is being displaced by a new one, but has yet to vanish completely—a symptom of an unresolved and uneasy co-existence between social forms.

In the case of Conrad, Jameson posited that the romance form offered a “strategy of containment”—the means by which an aristocratic temperament raised within the tempestuous climate of nineteenth-century Romanticism could confront the material conditions of contemporary imperialism, including the ways in which previous codes and modes of life were being made obsolete by monopoly capitalism. As such, romance allows contradiction to be registered and permits an aesthetic resolution that would otherwise be impossible to conceive. The sea in general, and the sailing ship specifically, was the principal locus of this strategy: a socially anomalous space, stratified with regards to labor, duty, and human solidarity; simultaneously abstract and definite in its aesthetic and metaphysical relation to nature. The world of sea and sail bears the trace of pre-capitalist virtues of honour, fidelity, and commitment to skill and craft—yet is also the capillary system by which the insatiable forces of imperial commerce function.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson generally accepted Ian Watt’s signal conceptual framework of “delayed decoding” as a deferral of cognitive recognition that lies behind the immediacy of perceptual fragmentation; a proto-modernist technique anticipating the febrile disorientations of high modernist prose. This technique is the primary reason why Conrad, Watt argued, ought to be considered a pivotal figure in the transition from realism to modernism. What was not fully explicated in this account, however, were the ways in which this “delayed decoding” appears to preserve at the level of formal expression the immediacy of experience integral to romance, and why it proved resistant to the casual explanation and rationalizing logic of the realist narrative form. It is in, and through, the narrative apparatus of romance that Conrad’s ideological aesthetic of Romanticism survives and is re-purposed to meet the demands of an emergent modernist taxonomy. Is the “lost cause,” then, Romanticism itself? Jameson’s reading in 1981 was expansive and persuasive, but what it elided were the remnants that remained unaccounted for by his account of the demystifying gesture of strategic containment and delayed decoding. If the narrative apparatus utilized by Conrad was effective in allowing for the preservation of the “lost cause” of Romanticism, then what made it distinct from mere false consciousness?

An early work, Youth (1898), bears the trace of the Romantic “lost cause” in its least disguised and untroubled form, where the basic premise of the narrative conveys the heroic futility of, yet also fidelity to, some as yet unnamed abstract and metaphysical principle. The Judea, an ancient barque overseen by a sixty-year-old captain who has been given his first command, is dispatched from London to Bangkok with a cargo of coal that catches fire mid-voyage and consumes the ship in the Indian Ocean. The ship eventually must be abandoned, and the crew escape in lifeboats to the nearest port. The tale is recounted twenty years later by Marlow, who had served on the ship as a second mate at the age of twenty:

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning. We were sitting round a mahogany table that reflected the bottle, the claret-glasses, and our faces as we leaned on our elbows. There was a director of companies, an accountant, a lawyer, Marlow, and myself. The director had been a Conway boy, the accountant had served four years at sea, the lawyer—a fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honour—had been chief officer in the P. & O. service in the good old days when mail-boats were square-rigged at least on two masts, and used to come down the China Sea before a fair monsoon with stun’sails set alow and aloft. We all began life in the merchant service.^[1]

The narrative framing is by no means incidental, and the representative bourgeois vocations are all united by their service to the sea, a mystical order through which one remains forever marked, and which has now begun to fade and transmute itself. The story being recounted concerns youth, but those gathered to hear it are no longer young; it thus belongs to a vanishing order, including in a technological sense: the erstwhile fraternity of the sail sitting around the mahogany table exists now because the world it remembers no longer exists. Meaning is constituted retrospectively, and only in the company of those capable of recognizing, without “knowing,” the cause that has been lost. The story’s constant refrain is the motto emblazoned upon the cursed ship’s figurehead: “‘Do or die.’” The motto is at once absurd and strangely apposite—free from any malicious trace of ironic intent, it captures the dogged determination of the aged Captain Beard to press forward despite each successive setback. It is recalled by Marlow as a means to imbue his first voyage as an officer with some redemptive meaning, suggesting as it does that the worth of any undertaking is not contingent upon its success. Indeed, the injunction to “do or die” applies most rigorously to an act that is doomed in advance, as most poignantly captured in Marlow’s reflections on youth, which acquire their pathos (and escape maudlin sentimentality) from their evocation of an essential transience:

O Youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret—as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her....^[2]

^[1] Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (William Blackwood and Sons, 1902), 3.

^[2] Conrad, Youth, 13–14.

I haven’t written anything other than through pre-existing obligations since the beginning of summer, and to tell the truth, I’ve had little desire to write anything at all. This whole summer, now thankfully almost passed, has been filled with various creative frustrations. It must be admitted that I don’t seem to function well in summer, and despite my best efforts, I am certain, by now, that I don’t particularly enjoy it very much at all. It makes me restless and disconsolate, for no apparent reason and to no obvious end. I haven’t lacked for experiences and material to write about, but I’ve lacked all motivation, not from any pleasant feeling of indolence and leisure…quite the opposite. I have put down some of these half-formed impressions gathered over the course of this most end-less of summers so that I might put them to one side going towards the autumn.

…

I read a couple of letters which T.S Eliot sent around 1921 when he was staying in Margate in the midst of composing The Waste Land, during a three month sicky he got from his banking job for ‘nervous’ problems. He wrote to Julian Huxley, eugenicist and brother of Aldous, enquiring about going to see Dr Roger Vittoz in Lausanne, who had also treated Joseph Conrad and William James. Shortly after, he writes to the poet Richard Aldington asking him if he might want to stay in his flat while he is away in Lausanne seeing Vittoz:

I am satisfied, since being here, that my ‘nerves’ are a very mild affair, due, not to overwork, but to an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction. Nothing wrong with my mind – which should account, mon cher, for the fact that you like my prose and dislike my verse.

Like many similar subtle distinctions, the term ‘abulia’ has perhaps fallen out of favour, or has been engulfed within an overly medicalised lexicon - but I believe it referred to a general lack of will, diminished motivation, or ability to find interest in doing things, which seems very familiar to me.

…

In late spring I attempted to preoccupy myself by building a fifteen-meter fence in our garden. I spent a great deal of time planning it out, testing out structures, acquiring materials and tools, etc. My friends offered to help, and one of them even brought round a pneumatic post driver that could theoretically hammer each two-and-a-half-meter wooden post into the ground in a matter of minutes. We began to realise, fairly soon, that this wouldn’t work: there appeared to be a significant number of large stones at a certain depth. Apparently the ground on which the house was built in the 1950s was once a riverbed. At this point my friends, quite understandably, became less enthusiastic. So I ended up having to dig the holes for the posts with a spade in the blazing sun over a couple of weekends, removing all of the massive stones by hand, setting the posts in concrete, cutting all of the horizontal beams to size and fixing them, and then finally attaching the fence panels. Although it often didn’t feel like it at the time, I thoroughly enjoyed every part of the process, in particular the sense of physical exhaustion, satisfaction and accomplishment that, in my experience, can only be derived from doing physical labour, not to mention the sense of pride one obtains when standing in front of a finished construction that is both robust and functional. Needless to say, it’s a feeling of accomplishment I rarely find in any other field of activity. However, my hope that the project would give me the requisite distance from my other ‘work’, to which I could somehow return invigorated, was far too optimistic.

…

We had a Hyperidean Press reading event in Berlin at the beginning of July to mark the publication of Felix McNamara’s Atrocities. I agreed to read an extract from my forthcoming novel IVOIRE, but for some reason, I also agreed to play some music composed for the occasion, inspired by a section in the novel featuring a recording of Congolese tribal music found in an archive by the protagonist – a noise musician – who decides to incorporate it into an ill-omened concert in Glasgow in 2014. Playing was a good idea in theory, and in execution seems to have gone down well, but I didn’t anticipate how difficult the process would be. The actual work of composition was completed frantically the weekend before I travelled to Berlin; a work comprised of found sounds, processed choral vocal elements, live drums, and guitar. Before I got to the composition stage, however, I managed to fill the three weeks before with various projects that were, in retrospect, used only to distract myself from the work of composition. I took apart and modified a guitar especially, planned and built a rotating magnetic strummer from a repurposed handheld fan, and experimented with re-wiring the circuits of a guitar pedal which (in the end) I didn’t end up using. This was an inordinate amount of effort for what was to be five minutes of playing in front of a casual audience, but these deferments were attempts to assuage a sense of dread I hadn’t felt in a long time. After all, this modest musical performance would be my first time playing ‘live’ since 2012. I do not experience a dread of public speaking at all, but during the reading – I was later told – it seems that the knowledge that I would have to pick up my guitar and play music made my hands begin to involuntarily shake while clutching the paper. I notice now, watching the video, also, a strange flickering of the lightbulb behind me at certain moments, likely some electrical fault…but uncanny nonetheless.

The event, held in Neukölln where I was also staying, went very well. I was pleased to see a few old friends and make several new ones. It seems somewhat trite to write again about my experience of the city, which I seem to visit at least once a year for one reason or another. The same social dynamics I observed last year still hold true. We might add another light-hearted observation that came from a walk through a flea market with Felix McNamara near the Admiralbrücke. It is exactly the type of city that results from rounding up all of the attendees of goth/punk/alternative clubs from mostly peripheral cities and provinces across the western world (from Brighton to Buenos Aires, as it were), placing them in proximity to each other and allowing those essentially objectless and unrefined ‘outsider’ impulses to mature into a quasi-adulthood that more resembles a suspended adolescence. The last stand of the universally misunderstood teenager. This is written entirely without malice, since along with most of those I have called friends, I attended such clubs and was once privy to those impulses. The idea that such a place exists is oddly comforting, for however much longer it may still last. Although I enjoy visiting there, I’m always glad to be able to leave.

…

I spent a few days on the Istrian coast in Croatia with my family, and for the first time we stayed at an all-inclusive hotel; an experience I wouldn’t like to repeat. The idea of convenience is always better in theory. I would like at some point to make a proper visit to the country, and I am very fond of people from the Balkans in general, but I must admit that I’ve never enjoyed the handful of times I’ve come to Croatia for summer holidays, despite its very obvious natural beauty and climate. It’s difficult to say why this might be the case, but I dislike overly touristic places in general, particularly when the tourism seems to have such narrow commercial parameters and seems to be so contrary to the local customs, or places where people primarily go for an agreeable climate.

…

I finally finished reading The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō. I began reading it around a year ago, and barrelled through to about halfway until my copy was stolen, along with my backpack, on a visit to London last autumn. By the time I got around to obtaining another copy, I was already reading other things, so progress slowed. But I managed to finish it this summer. It’s a historical narrative, based on real events and set in the 17^th Century. It focuses on a provincial Japanese nobleman attached to an ill-fated diplomatic mission that sails first across the Pacific to Nueva España, then across the Atlantic to Spain, and eventually to the Vatican to seek an audience with the Pope. The mission is led by an overly ambitious Franciscan missionary from Spain who has spent his life attempting unsuccessfully to convert the Japanese to Christianity, suffering torture, imprisonment, indifference and hostility along the way. He is, nonetheless, completely fixated by the idea that he might somehow be made Bishop of Japan. This worldly ambition animates him in a quest that he has convinced himself, and others, to be entirely divine in provenance, and his intense ambition is contrasted to the more subdued sense of honour, obligation and duty that drives the eponymous Samurai towards his own equally tragic end. It’s a subtle and understated work and – on reflection – I was glad to be able to read it slowly over the course of a year. A great deal of its episodes have stayed with me.

…

We spent a week in Glasgow visiting family. The city has changed a lot over a year, very much for the worse. It’s the only place I know which seems to have become exponentially more expensive and gentrified but appears far less polished, and looks objectively awful in many ways. It doesn’t seem to have much left to give. I’ve now been away for ten years. I recall there always being a downtrodden quality to Glasgow which was perhaps what made it so agreeable, since it was in stark contrast to its more essential and immediate warmth and conviviality. It seems a great deal more febrile now, more dysfunctional and inhospitable. But I took the wee man to visit the tall ship at the Riverside Museum, a three-masted barque called The Glenlee, which we both enjoyed immensely. I mentioned it to Paul Franz in a recent podcast for Hopkins University Press, where I discussed my article on Joseph Conrad. It was exactly the type of ship that Conrad would have sailed on; the type of ship which was his first as a merchant navy officer and then his first command as Master - experiences rendered in his fictional works Youth (1898) and The Shadow Line (1916), that I discuss at length in my essay. The wee man and I were captivated by the ship’s wooden interior, and he made me explain everything to him. Since then, he still regularly rearranges the cushions of the sofa into a ship, and talks about how he’s the captain. Unfortunately, I had to explain to him that he is – as of yet – still a second officer and has much to learn, and only if he’s lucky will he be able to succeed me to command. He was a little reluctant to accept this, at first, but was eventually reconciled with throwing cannonballs (cushions) off into the sea.

August, 2026.

There is a clip of the influencer Clavicular where a momentary hint of genuine emotion seems to break his carefully crafted nihilistic veneer. As with much else in our all-pervasive hyperreality, I’m unsure about the authenticity of what is occurring on-screen: a robotic AI voice reads out a message that has seemingly been sent into the chat by Clavicular’s father:

I’m very proud of you son. Although I don’t understand what it is you do, I’m glad you found your passion and are making it a career.

The young man is briefly affected, but quickly brushes it off. The sentiments expressed by the father are trite to the point of cliché, yet mirror similar things said by many fathers, myself included, to their sons every day. Originality is not, after all, an essential condition for sincerity. Furthermore, we need not speculate on the specific paternal relationship here to understand that it is likely fraught and somewhat complex, like the majority of such relations. Nevertheless, this fragment is noteworthy mostly because of the manifold ways in which it is mediated through technology. It is a video of a man filming himself, watched by countless others, responding to them, seemingly engaged in some form of discourse, but also to some extent communing in isolation with respondents that may as well be voices inside of his own head. Furthermore, the uncanny, disembodied voice, likely some text-to-speech function, imbues the scene with an absurdist quality that is at the same time quite perturbing; a parody of the Symbolic Father, one who fails to cast proper judgement, neither convincingly laudatory nor sufficiently condemnatory.

Jacques Lacan posited that the Father serves as the signifier that structures the limits of desire through prohibition and negation. The ‘No’ of the Father is an intervention that signals the child’s transition from the ‘Imaginary’ maternal-filial dyad into the Symbolic order, comprised of language, rules, laws, constraints, limits, morals, and a temporal lineage that goes simultaneously back in time and forward into the future. In addition, this imparts to the child their own relation to an external social order that approximates the familial structure. The near homophony in French between ‘No’ and ‘Name’, and the obvious religious connotations, motivated Lacan to designate this term Le Nom du Pere (The Name of the Father), which highlights its function as the Fundamental Signifier, the arbiter of the Law, in lieu of its Ultimate Guarantor.1 This, of course, describes a normative development. In contrast, any foreclosure of this mechanism, either partially or in full, Lacan speculated, is the basis of neurosis and psychosis. In the clip of Clavicular being ‘Father-mogged’ by AI, there is not a complete foreclosure of the Nom du Pére. The intervention of technology has mutated the commanding voice , rendering it inhuman, indeterminate, flattened its tone and affect, and thereby highlighting our universal condition as heteronomous subjects of technological domination.

I recall quite distinctly one episode from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s best novel The Idiot, which I read as an 18-year-old – and in retrospect I probably remember because it concerned a character who was roughly my age and possessed of the same adolescent worldview. A band of roguish nihilists arrive at the dacha where Prince Lev Myshkin is summering in an attempt to extort the kindly and hapless millionaire. Among them is a 17-year old terminally ill consumptive called Ippolit Terentyev, whom Myshkin invites to stay with him, and has only a few weeks left to live. On the Prince’s birthday, a rowdy gathering takes place with the nihilists in attendance, who take advantage of the free booze. Ippolit declares to all the guests that he will read a rambling essay he has composed with the grandiloquent title Après moi, le deluge, after which he dramatically attempts to shoot himself - but fails, since he has neglected to put the shooting pin into the pistol. In one particular part, he makes reference to the painting The Dead Christ (1522) by Hans Holbein the Younger, a depiction of the corpse of Jesus lying in the tomb, which Ippolit has seen hung at the home of his associate, the antagonist of the novel, the love-crazed murderer Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin:

In Rogozhin’s picture there is no trace of beauty; this is in the fullest sense the corpse of a man who had endured infinite agony before the crucifixion […] the face has not been spared in the least. It is simply nature, and the corpse of a man, whoever he might be, must really look like that after such suffering. […] if just such a corpse was seen by all His disciples […] by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, how could they believe that the martyr would rise again? The question instinctively arises: if death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime […] Looking at such a picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly […] in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being…

The invocation of this second encounter with Holbein’s painting should alert us to its significance within the narrative, since it was first glimpsed by Prince Myshkin himself when he visited Rogozhin in the first part of the novel. In Ippolit, we have then a seemingly minor character whose worldview is integral to the ideological underpinnings of the entire narrative, since his views appear to be diametrically opposed to those of the protagonist. Where Myshkin saw within Holbein’s painting the mystical essence of faith and belief and its ineffaceable presence in all aspects of the human spirit, for Ippolit it merely reconfirms the cruel indifference of nature, and the ultimate meaninglessness of the existence from which he is soon to depart.

The dying young man cannot conceive that such an image was exactly what Christ’s first disciples likely saw, and continued still to believe that life could triumph even over death. Yet the character of Ippolit is not, like in much of Dostoevsky, merely a grotesque straw-man for the didactic moralising of the author. Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaya, the author’s second wife, recounted in her memoirs that in 1867 her husband insisted on stopping at the Kunstmuseum Basel on their way to Geneva specifically to see the painting by Holbein:

The painting had a crushing impact on Fyodor Mikhailovich. He stood before it as if stunned. And I did not have the strength to look at it – it was too painful for me, particularly in my sickly [pregnant] state and I went to other rooms. When I came back after fifteen or twenty minutes, I found him still riveted to the same spot in front of the painting. His agitated face had a kind of dread in it, something I had noticed more than once during the first moments of an epileptic seizure.

Dostoevsky has endowed his protagonist, Prince Myshkin, with epilepsy - a divine illness that was thought to often afflict the yurodivy (holy fool) in the Russian Orthodox tradition. The author reportedly suffered his first epileptic episode after the death of his tyrannical and highly devout father. Many believed that the father was murdered, others that he died of a stroke or an embolism, but the mysterious circumstances that surrounded the death of the father (who, by most accounts, was a harsh disciplinarian) would find a variety of different expressions within the Dostoevskyan oeuvre.

Vladimir Nabokov, whose own father was murdered, had an almost visceral and psychologically curious dislike for Dostoevsky. He thought him a mediocre novelist who wrote one excellent work (The Double), and several others that contained some ‘excellent humour’ but with ‘wastelands of literary platitudes in between.’ In his famous lectures on Russian literature at Cornell, he identified epilepsy as one of the four categories of mental illness into which all of Dostoevsky’s characters fall, the others being senile dementia, hysteria, and psychopathy. Yet Nabokov’s distaste for all types of overt ideological proselytising, and his complete aversion to Freudian psychologising, inculcated in him an intellectual indifference and hostility to art that was not ‘artful’ within his very subjective and narrow perception, but might have significance beyond the aesthetic. Returning to Anna Grigorievna's description of their trip to see Holbein’s painting, she remarked that although ‘I admit that it is true to nature’, she could not ‘find it at all aesthetic, and in me it aroused only disgust and horror.’

In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky initially wished to convey the redeemed sinner, but thought it best that he embody the most perfect and faultless virtues of Christ, and to have such an innocent and virtuous man live in the fallen world of contemporary Russia. He was aided in this decision by the early death of the child that his wife was pregnant with when they first glimpsed Holbein’s Christ. He is reported to have remarked that viewing such a painting was enough to make one lose faith completely. The Idiot is Dostoevsky’s best novel, in my view, because it is perhaps the only work in which he subjects the contradictions of his own worldview to merciless scrutiny. Both Ippolit and Myshkin represent the bifurcated persona of their author, torn between the rebelliousness and radicalism of his youth for which he was cruelly punished, and the latterly fervent belief he held onto as a means of redemption in the face of the many tragedies that seemed to befall him; but also the profound self-disgust, self-hatred, resentment and hatred that drives his most famous works.

Ippolit asks: ‘Can’t I simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?’

In this question, there is something of relevance to the worldview of the Looksmaxxer, who seems to have answered in the negative. What is the solution to the relentless and merciless nature that will in time rot the human flesh of its own saviour - a crude nature that is both ‘merciless dumb beast’, and in terms more relevant to the hyperreality of the social media panopticon: a dull and insensible ‘machine of the most modern construction.’ The question asked by Ippolit is that of a child asking for reassurance. We do not yet possess a convincing answer, and have left those who pose the question to fill in the blanks. There follows, then, a reversion to crude determinism. In a world governed by spectacle and appearance, one ought to simply accept the spiritual vapidity of aesthetic Technique, to aspire towards ruthless optimisation of the superficial veneer, to attain salvation by becoming a technocrat of desire. The goal is unsympathetic and misguided, much like Ippolit’s last testament, which, even on the precipice of death, couldn’t jettison its youthful narcissism and delusions of megalomania. Nevertheless, we cannot help but feel sympathy for him.

It seems to be par for the course to say that the young ‘Looksmaxxer’ is a less-than-sympathetic character, which he no doubt is in several ways. Uncanny and grotesque in his sterile simulacrum of masculine beauty, holding fast to a pitiless logic tinged with certain misguided illusions, but utterly ruthless in the pursuit of his own semblance of perfection. But the middlebrow critique of his obvious faults is facile and unworthy of proper intellectual consideration. That he is at once ridiculous, banal and monstrous hardly needs to be mentioned. But the only proper attitude that one ought to have toward a wayward young man scarcely out of his teenage years, who has transfigured himself beyond recognition in the pursuit of hollow abstraction, who seemingly believes in nothing, ought to be pity.

We inhabit a culture which prefers to react instead of act, which is satisfied with fixating on the grotesque spectacle but is unconcerned with causation. After two decades of giving free reign to rapacious and unscrupulous Semio-corporations that have permanently altered the contours of our social order for profit, who have perhaps irrevocably poisoned and altered young and impressionable minds, we seem to have agreed that those same minds – belonging to entire swathes of society, some of whom are still scarcely more than children - are now worthy targets of abstract societal ressentiment and redress, are given to be inherently undeserving of pity, undeserving even of much thought unless it is to scold and browbeat them into submission. They have, by and large, been left to fend for themselves, to self-socialise; raised in communities of peers as hopelessly adrift as themselves, scattered all across the vast, anonymous hinterlands of the internet - generation after generation of lost boys that have become feral, forming their own cargo cults and hollow rites, and worshipping a peculiar set of demi-urges.

The most breathlessly reported aspect of Clavicular is his purported use of a hammer to smash his facial bones into compliance. The subtitle for Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, one of his last and most febrile works, is ‘How to Philosophise with a Hammer.’ Among many other things, it is the source of a certain maxim, part of which will sound familiar and somewhat cliché to modern ears: ‘Out of life’s School of War — what does not kill me makes me stronger.’ In the original German, Nietzsche uses the more colloquial expression umbringt as opposed to tötet. The former implies the action of an adversary, meaning to be ‘taken out’, ‘done in’, or when used reflexively (sich umbringen), is also a common expression for the suicidal act. To act, then, is pre-emptive - to ensure that one is not acted upon: to act to prevent one’s own death. It is an ‘act’ of desperation, as all such acts are. The sum of Nietzschean philosophy has been interpreted by both his most dutiful and slavish adherents, then and now, to be something greater than philosophy: an exhortation to act. Indeed, as Alain Badiou noted, we should take Nietzsche at his word when he declared philosophy to be the ‘greatest of all criminals’:

Nietzsche opposes, to the speculative nihilism of philosophy, the completely affirmative necessity of an act. The role that Nietzsche assigns himself is not that of adding a philosophy to other philosophies. Instead, his role is to announce and produce an act without precedent, an act that will in fact destroy philosophy.[1]

This fateful ‘act’ was conceived by a mind that was itself poisoned and diseased, and one that would in any case succumb to philosophy’s intolerable weight. Many who came in Nietzsche’s wake would attempt to apply his prophetic prescriptions without success, and the notion of a fundamental separation between action and contemplation remains intact up until the present.

But isn’t to smash oneself with a hammer also to ‘philosophise’ with a hammer? Is this the production of an act without precedent, and one that negates philosophy? Clearly not. The hysterical fascination with Clavicular is accompanied by the obvious arguments against his non-Philosophical act. This argument proceeds along a certain line: a man’s worth in terms of ‘Sexual Market Value’ is not determined by his looks alone. In the ‘real world’, the most important factor is charisma (a gift of grace), which is so abstract and mystical that it’s essentially impossible to teach or finesse. And yet the contemporary social realm is one of pure spectacle lived out online, where ‘real life’ and actuality are secondary to virtuality – where the ordinary rules of engagement, attraction and repellence don’t necessarily apply.

The truth is that even in the real world, exceptionally good-looking men do possess something approaching the effect that Looksmaxxers laud and mythologise, though true to the nature of such fanaticism, they appear to be blind to its second-order consequences, and have as a goal something which is ultimately not particularly desirable. I’ve had a few friends over the years who were strikingly handsome within a classical mode, and on the whole, it was pretty good to have them as wingmen when out and about: they seem to bring energy and opportunity wherever they were. There’s no better opener for a man than to be really good-looking. But what it often means for these men is that they become objects of desire instead of its agents – a state of affairs that is difficult to parse for most men. Women approach them unbidden, often not knowing what to do or say, awkwardly drawn into their orbit, doe-eyed, and rather confusedly making all of the gestures of nonchalant disinterest that women are want to do, but in a manner that is much more overt, obvious and deliberate as to completely negate the possibility of their indifference.

On the surface, it appears to be an easy and desirable role for a man to have (at least for those who hate working and have no stomach for rejection). Such a man, in most cases, has to expend minimal effort to interact with women, who find his physical charms disarming in the first instance. But from what I’ve observed, being an exceptionally good-looking man is a strange burden in and of itself, and one I assume to be quite different in quality from being a beautiful woman. Some men are lucky enough to also be charismatic and affable, but for those who are not, the experience of being very good-looking seemingly dulls one’s natural instincts and impulses; it makes one complacent and indolent, and paradoxically quite insecure in themselves and who they are. There appears to be an inherent passivity to masculine beauty that makes it difficult to reconcile with any avowedly essentialist or normative sexual dynamic. An exceptionally handsome man is pursued, stalked, hunted; he is preyed upon.

Indeed, this paradoxical dynamic wasn’t unfamiliar to Germaine Greer, whose strange and uncomfortable The Beautiful Boy (2003), argued that a feminist recapturing of the classical fixation with youthful male beauty and innocence, which she posits has been effaced by modern patriarchy, might actually hold the key to gender equality. Perhaps this was an unconscious attempt to foreclose the Nom du Pere by symbolically consummating the taboo of maternal-filial incest. The increasingly widespread phenomena of pornography that reflects some parodic version of this incest, the marked increase in female high-school teachers being accused of having sexual relations with their underage male pupils, or the more innocuous and benign increase in older women and younger men in relationships suggests that there has been a particular shift in the collective unconscious vis-à-vis the Oedipal taboo.

Yet is the Looksmaxxer wielding his hammer actually passive? Isn’t he, in fact, possessed of a monomaniacal and fanatical drive to self-making and optimisation that attests to a level of action completely opposed to passivity as such? One hundred years ago, there was an article in The Chicago Tribune entitled ‘Pink Powder Puffs’ which excoriated Rudolph Valentino, the most iconic mass phenomenon of Hollywood’s silent era, for ruining American Masculinity by being so good-looking as to be effeminate. Valentino, a skilled boxer who sparred with Jack Dempsey, challenged the anonymous writer to a bout in the ring. There was no direct response from the actual writer to his challenge, but the tough-talking sports columnist Frank O’Neil took it up. He was able to swing only once before being completely laid out flat by Valentino, who then ‘Gentleman-mogged’ him by making a show of helping him up off the floor. One hundred years later, the result appears to have been reversed – as in this video of Clavicular, where a random challenger takes the young Looksmaxxer out in a matter of seconds, humiliating him in the process.

Indeed, the world of 1926, suffering under the weight of an apocalyptic war not long ended, still seemed to be one where ‘action’ properly conceived could potentially ‘destroy’ philosophy; but in 2026, though the act remains, the possibility of its efficacy seems to have receded further into the realm of impossibility. The answer is to be found within our evolved, but in no real sense modified, relation to the technological.

[End of Part 1]

Henry de Montherlant was a once-celebrated early twentieth-century French novelist whose work has largely been forgotten; a writer who initially made his career through loosely autobiographical novels that drew upon his experiences of the First World War. Latterly, he became a prominent Nazi collaborator and fascist fellow traveller during the occupation of France, but was pardoned for his war activities, and much later died by his own hand in 1972. His most famous work was the tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles (The Girls, 1936-1939), which was once a bestseller in France, where it sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages. However, if Montherlant is remembered at all today, it is only because of the philosopher Simone De Beauvoir’s extended critique of his avowed anti-feminism and misogyny in The Second Sex (1949). Both Montherlant’s novel and Beauvoir’s critique are fascinating documents of the early twentieth century’s sex wars.’

Montherlant was born in Paris to an aristocratic family from Picardy, with origins in Catalonia. Much like his contemporary Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, he served in the First World War and was wounded, and achieved critical acclaim at a young age for literary efforts inspired by the war. Writing in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1923, Drieu La Rochelle offered effusive praise for Montherlant’s second novel Le Songe (The Dream, 1922). Drieu noted that the author ignores the forms of literature which were designated as ‘modern’ in ‘certain circles’ and thankfully seems to have no interest in the ‘uncertainty’ and ‘speculation’ common to modernist work by writers such as Jean Cocteau or André Breton:

He dissociates himself from modern love in order to study a primitive form of it: the common compartmentalisation by young man of sensuality and sentimentality, between the desire for the mistress and the dreams of fidelity and engagement. And finally, man’s contemplation of the struggle between the myths of sport and war. Montherlant has touched upon the treasures that make our lives beautiful. Two attributes which are in general painfully separate, are united within him: a prudent and penetrating meditation, and a form of ecstasy, where the epic and the lyrical frequently intermingle. From this marriage, supple and fine-tuned, is born a work which, among other things, does honour to our age.

This was a review written during the beginning of Drieu’s own disenchantment and break with his avant-garde Dada contemporaries, which is evidenced by the unqualified praise that he offers to a work which tellingly displays many of the same qualities praised by critics in his own war poetry collection Interrogation. Furthermore, The Dream, much like Drieu’s work, revels in the celebration of masculinity and virility.

The protagonist of Le Songe is a young man named Alban de Bricoule who volunteers for the war to prove his courage and to demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice himself. Before he departs for the front, he breaks up with Dominique, a promising young athlete he is apparently in love with. At the same time, he also breaks with Douce, his rather simple and vivacious mistress. What follows is a series of lyrical episodes and vignettes that contrast the feminine orders of desire and sensuality against the masculine orders of courage, honour, violence and brutality. Whilst Alban leaves for the front, Dominique becomes a nurse at the rear.

Far from relying upon the clichéd generic sentiments of contemporary romance, Montherlant demonstrates a distinctly ‘modern’ willingness to contemplate uncomfortable psychological territory. Alban has come to the war voluntarily, but Montherlant does not deflect from the perturbing psychological motivations that have brought him to the front. At one point, Alban’s hand is said to linger over his pistol, and he thinks himself akin to a catholic bridegroom on his wedding night, at liberty, with a woman finally in his arms:

The dead killed by those besides you […] must shatter your nerves but the most hideous dead body is not ugly when you yourself have killed it; just as a woman can weep without seeming ridiculous if she is weeping because of you.^[2]

Alban longs for ‘some provocation to commit legal murder’. Frequent associations between the libidinal and the morbid permeate this early work. Much emphasis is placed upon force, strength, physicality and action as the most efficacious means for men to attain some form of quasi-spiritual transcendence. (It’s well to note that Montherlant was avowedly an atheist, and like many in the generation of 1914, a proponent of Nietzsche). Yet in this early work, the conflict between the sexes is not yet overt. The female body in its athletic form can still be redeemed, and is proposed as an antidote to the corporeal and spiritual decay of modern society in the 1920s. At the beginning of the narrative, Dominique, who is a long-distance runner, contemplates herself and her fellow female athletes training in the stadium:

There was indeed something new here, something which was an advance: time-worn words, which here found all their youthfulness again. What had been lost, obliterated by the distortions of fashion, by the sexual fantasy of the male, by the error of artists in taking that fantasy for their ideal, by centuries of conventions born of ignorance and stupidity, was here restored by these young women: the pure feminine body as Nature first created it. The order imposed on their bodies had penetrated their whole lives.

We cannot fail to note here the emphasis on ‘nature’ alongside the ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ imposed upon the body, and how this might be reflected positively in other aspects of an individual's life. Though this was ostensibly a war novel, its underlying message seems to be aimed directly at the decadent excesses of French post-war society. The purity of these ‘half-naked maidens’ is contrasted against the ‘nauseating creatures’ and ‘miserable hags’ found in magazines like La Vie Parisienne, who are not ladies ‘but monsters born from some infamous contact, fit only to be stoned to death, as the hermaphrodites of old, for being an insult to nature.’ As we shall discover, these muted hints of Montherlant’s ‘disgust’ of femininity in its ordinary (undisciplined) form in this early work would find more explicit and deeper expression in Les Jeunes Filles. In Le Songe, this disgust is more muted; merely contraindicated by the depiction of the virginal Dominique, who is said to be so ‘pure’ that even ‘the handkerchief that wiped her face would remain immaculate’:

It seemed that nature had wanted to achieve in her a human masterpiece of the clear, firm style. She had never polished her nails, yet the light played on them; she never moistened her lips, yet her lips shone; the rims of her ears seemed to be varnished; the whites of her eyes were clear. Her hair had the faint glow of laurel leaves. She did not use perfume but her clothes, at night, were folded between sachets of lavender, and its scent lingered until noon. From noon till evening, the smell of her skin prevailed. Her skin had its own smell, like fruit and plants, like the wood of trees; and this smell was like a hand kneading Alban’s heart.

The feminine ideal here depicted is corporeally perfect, intact and ‘firm.’ Elsewhere in this brief early work, we are struck by the periodical invocations of Wagnerian imagery, alongside admiring allusions to the music itself. Taken together with the numerous references to classical mythology, one begins to see many points of confluence between Montherlant’s aesthetic of action and strength through athleticism and sport, and the comparable neoclassical aspects of Fascist Italy’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, and Nazi Germany’s Kraft durch Freude movements. Montherlant was himself an accomplished athlete who excelled in many different sports. Yet even within the narrative of Le Songe, the notion of physical perfection as an ameliorative to spiritual decadence is somewhat unstable. It is undermined constantly by a psychologically peculiar aversion to what is given to be the inconvenient ‘truth’ of feminine nature. Dominique’s character, despite her impressive physicality and virginal purity, is depicted as utterly capricious, wicked and corruptible; she shuns her duties as a nurse constantly to indulge her own petty amusements and pleasures:

Her high-handedness, her passion for favouritism, her inability to put up with what she disliked, the way she repudiated her strongest convictions according to circumstances, in all this she was giving vent to the harsh and extreme side of her nature. She became more than ever changeable, dependent on the moment, without any guiding aim. Had there been anyone there who loved her, she would have made them suffer dreadfully.

Referring to early novels such as Le Songe, the scholar Richard Golson wrote that in spite of the ‘obvious fascistic overtones of Montherlant’s early fiction’, its morbid exaltation of violence and death, its idealisation of virility and its implicit fear and hatred of women – ‘the works […] are devoid of any social or political context that would allow these predilections to assume overtly political or ideological dimensions.’ However, the aesthetic effects communicated in a work such as The Dream, and later in The Girls are in fact manifestly ideological. Indeed, the ways in which Montherlant sublimates certain psychological and philosophical raw materials into his distinctively lyrical style, bear the trace of what I have termed ‘Recidivist Masculinity’1, which is a noticeable facet of fascist modernism (and ‘transgressive’ literary forms more broadly). It underpins the conspicuously psychosexual elements of Montherlant’s work. I have argued elsewhere, and in particular in my forthcoming book from which some of this material has been culled – that the signal characteristic of historical fascism is the Ideological Aesthetic, and the principal reason for its frustratingly protean character (a fact conceded even by fascism’s philosophical progenitor Giovanni Gentile) is that it frequently comprised of an array of aesthetic phenomena used to constitute (and thus compensate for) an absent and elusive political centre. The fascist aesthetic and the fascist ideology are more often than not mutually constitutive and dialectically related.

The energies and impulses of femininity, the beauty and purity of its corporeal form against what is often portrayed as its irredeemable spiritual corruptibility, is a theme Montherlant would return to in his most famous work The Girls. Initially taking the form of an epistolary novel before expanding into more standard narrative forms, The Girls has enough perspectival variety and enough skilful prose to make it a compelling read. The narrative never veers too far from the central voice of its protagonist, a novelist named Pierre Costals. Because of his fame, youth, and good looks, Costals has many female admirers and mistresses. Unmarried and with no desire to wed, he engages in various affairs that are never fully elaborated in the initial part of the tetralogy, but are mentioned in the letters sent to him by his many adoring female fans. One of these women is called Andreé Hacquebaut, a provincial spinster who is desperately in love with Costals. She sends him letters which are initially ‘intellectual’, but after the flimsy pretence has been dispensed with, overtly demonstrative. Costals does not reciprocate her affection since he finds her to be physically unattractive, even though he purports to admire her intellectually. She speaks to him longingly of her desire to be in Paris and to leave her provincial village, where she feels that she is squandering her potential.

At one point, Costals arranges a secretarial job for Andreé in Paris, for which she is initially very grateful. However, she quits the job in frustration at her lowly duties before returning to the countryside. Many of the epistolary exchanges comprise Andreé’s relentless appeals and overtures to Costals, who in turn repeatedly rejects her when he deigns to reply at all. On one occasion, after she annoys him by committing a faux pas, Costals sets up a scenario wherein she is deliberately made to interrupt him with another woman whilst making love as a cruel means to punish her and amuse himself. The letters between Costals and Andreé provide the majority of the philosophical and psychological weight to the initial part of the tetralogy, and contain many provocative insights into the relations between the sexes, which at times make for uncomfortable reading.

As the narrative progresses, Costals enters into a relationship with a beautiful young socialite named Solange Dandillot. Their emerging affair, its various undulations, their engagement, and eventual break, take up much of the remaining three volumes of the tetralogy. The main philosophical proposition interrogated in The Girls concerns two divergent conceptions of love. On the one hand there is romantic love, which Costals thinks an invention of women and one that is inextricably bound up with the institution of marriage. He proposes that this conception is central to French bourgeois society, but fundamentally deleterious to men, and in particular to men of talent and creativity. Opposed to romantic love are carnal pleasure, affection, and desire, which provide generative forms of inspiration and vitality antithetical to conjugal love.

Andrée acts as a foil to Solange, whose name Costals confides in a letter to a friend, is composed of ‘Sol: ground, and ange: angel.’ But Solange is ‘not very intelligent, because she’s too pretty’, Costals declares, stating rather haughtily that he has never ‘found the two things together’:

Here is an angel who will not get away from me. […] And this is the answer to the divagations of the poor Andrée, who spends her time seeking God knows what God knows where. The Andrée story can be summed up in a single phrase […] if only she were pretty.

Costals at first seeks only to extract pleasure from Solange, which he does by seducing and deflowering her, yet he finds himself more and more trapped by what appear to be genuine feelings of affection, and by the matrimonial conventions towards which Solange appears to have an unyielding fealty. Solange is presented as the only type of woman acceptable to Costals; unremarkable in intelligence, compliant, lacking her own will, naturally drawn towards authority and conservatism, virginal and physically beautiful (angelic), but noticeably lacking the palpable sensuality which comes with autonomy and agency. But in the end, even this ideal woman repulses Costals, as he later observes in despair when her health declines due to a mysterious, seemingly psychosomatic illness apparently caused by his refusal to marry her. In order to cure her, he eventually acquiesces to marriage. However, he immediately regrets this decision and begins to notice her shortcomings, physical and personal, much more comprehensively than before. This has the effect of intensifying his repulsion:

Look at this one, clinging on to me, although she loves neither me, nor my work, nor making love. What has she done to adapt herself to me? […] She sullies me by condemning me to so-called gourmet’s food, which I don’t want and which I disapprove of, by dragging me to so-called luxury establishments, which I dislike and disapprove of, in fact thoroughly abominate. This tartishness […] Eating, always eating. Sprawled in armchairs for hours on end. She wants to turn me into a typical French capon, a pot-bellied bourgeois with his aperitif, his brandy, his cigar, his motor-car, his “good living”. Frigid herself, she wants to emasculate me, out of jealousy. Lacking vitality, she wants to devitalize me. Then there are the shops, the buying of useless objects, the cinema, the theatre, anything as long as its idiotic, for the only object is to stupefy me here as it is to emasculate me there.

Even this physically ‘ideal’ woman can only ‘emasculate’ and ‘devitalize’ Costals. To succumb to marriage with such a woman, indeed any woman, is akin to accepting the paunchy bourgeois decadence of French society he so abhors; something thoroughly opposed to his ideals of virility, strength and action. Most importantly, however, the de-masculinization which Solange threatens is above all equivalent to a threat of de-aestheticization. Marriage and ‘good living’ would deprive Costals of his sense of aesthetic aloofness and separateness, his cultural refinement, and above all, his artistic vitality.

We cannot here discount the pitiless insight of Camille Paglia, who tended to see in the struggle between the sexes a fundamental conception of aesthetic judgement itself; the eternal conflict between the female cthonian forces of chaotic nature against the male forces of ordered and rational culture; the Dionysian against the Apollonian:

Dionysus is the all-embracing totality of mother-cult. Nothing disgusts him, since he contains everything that is. Disgust is an Apollonian response, an aesthetic judgment. Disgust always indicates some misalignment toward or swerving away from the maternal. Huysmans speaks of “the humid horror” of woman’s unclean body […] nineteenth-century aestheticism, a vision of a glittering crystalline world, is a flight from the chthonian swamp into which nature-loving Wordsworth inadvertently led Romanticism. Aestheticism insists on the Apollonian line, separating objects from each other and from nature. Disgust is Apollonian fear at a melting borderline.

For Paglia, the Apollonian is not only an aestheticised ‘disgust’ but also ‘obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry’, and perhaps most significantly, ‘fascism.’ The notion of a transgressive 'Recidivist masculinity’ as ideological aesthetic (qua fascism), begins to cohere when considered in the mythological terms which Paglia conceives the Apolonian line of ‘aestheticism’, alongside its signal philosophical principle of l’art pour l’art. In the end, Costal’s escape from marriage is given to be an act of existential heroism. Keeping the masculine self inviolate, satisfying man’s primal physical needs by possessing women sexually without succumbing to their influence, is posited as the ultimate good. Yet in the final analysis, these conclusions appear hollow, bereft, and very far from convincing. We’re left with the nagging thought that Montherlant’s pitiless and overt misogyny seems a tad too extravagant, almost too theatrical, to be completely authentic.

In Chapter 11 of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which elaborates the myth of women with reference to various male writers, she writes that:

Montherlant belongs to the long tradition of males who have adopted as their own the proud Manichaeism of Pythagoras. Following Nietzsche, he holds that only epochs marked by weakness have exalted the Eternal Feminine and that the hero should rise in revolt against the Magna Mater. A specialist in heroism, he undertakes to dethrone her. Woman – she is night, disorder, immanence. […] According to him, it is the stupidity and the baseness of the men of today that have lent an air of positive worth to feminine deficiencies: we hear about women’s instinct, their intuition, their divination, when it is right to denounce their lack of logic, their obstinate ignorance, their inability to grasp reality […] their mystery is a snare and a delusion, their unfathomable treasures have the depth of nothingness; they have nothing to give man and can only do him injury.

The section as a whole is relentless in its critical excoriation, and Beauvoir lands many successful blows – but its underlying reliance upon an almost triumphalist bien-pensant moralism is far less convincing, since, for some reason, it holds back its most incisive critique. For Beauvoir, Montherlant was a coward in many respects, but most importantly, because he was a Nazi collaborator. Though Montherlant scorns the weakness of ‘shop girl morality’, she maintains that ‘Many a little shopgirl during the occupation earned a respect we do not accord to Montherlant.’ Furthermore, his feminine targets are deliberately chosen to never pose a real challenge; flimsy, inconsequential, provincial or (among the worst sins in Beauvoir’s eyes) petit-bourgeois. Montherlant seems preoccupied only with women over whom he can convince himself of his own superiority, but he rarely, if ever, sets himself in competition against other men.

This powerful, seemingly moral, indignation at work in Beauvoir’s analysis is so forceful that it seems to miss the fact that Les Jeunes Filles is to some extent intended as a darkly comic novel, written with noticeable irony, that sets itself on a collision course with marriage as one of the most sacred institutions in French bourgeois society. It’s well to note that Beauvoir admired the comparable iconoclastic qualities of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which she and Sartre would read aloud to one another, presumably between writing their great works and grooming a steady succession of high school students and troubled teenage runaways, whom they passed back and forth between each other’s beds.

As Beauvoir noted:

Montherlant has chosen a freedom without object; that is, he prefers an illusion of autonomy to an authentic freedom engaged in the world; it is this availability that he means to use against woman; she is heavy, she is a burden.

The desire for freedom from feminine influence for Montherlant was, in common with other Fascist writers and artists, undoubtedly rooted in a sense of inadequacy and precipitated by fear and shame. The implicit thrust of Beauvoir’s critique of Montherlant amounts to an accusation of phobia - that the author’s loathing of women is rooted in a pathological fear of them. For Beauvoir, ‘Montherlant has chosen ease; he claims to worship difficult values: but seeks to attain them easily […] Montherlant the lion avoided the feminine mosquito with terror: he is afraid to be tested by the real.’ Beauvoir further observes, reflecting the depiction of Dominique in Le Songe, the obvious tendency to deny the reality of women’s corporeal imperfection:

If a woman kills the flesh in her through the discipline of sports, she can still be esteemed; but an autonomous existence molded in a woman’s flesh is a repulsive scandal; feminine flesh is abhorrent the moment a consciousness inhabits it. What is suitable for a woman is to be purely flesh. (Second Sex: 260)

Beauvoir proposes that a fear of women and their potential to be something other than mere objects of sexual desire can best explain misogyny, a notion which has, in the intervening period, become something of a truism in mainstream feminist thought. Yet there is here a more subtle accusation, that such a fear is also motivated by some latent homosexual desire. Interestingly, Montherlant himself pre-empts this in the many exchanges between Costals and Andreé in Les Jeunes Filles, where it is implied that this accusation constitutes one of the many tactics employed by women in their rhetorical combat with men.

At one point in the first book, Andreé seeks to excuse her rejection by Costals by accusing him of being a homosexual. This accusation is subtly repeated in Beauvoir’s own critique at several points, his preference for ‘young boy’s hair’ over women’s. For Beauvoir, Montherlant defines femininity as a form of negation: ‘…like Aristotle and Saint Thomas, he believed it was defined negatively; woman was woman through a lack of virility; that is the destiny any female individual has to undergo without being able to modify it.’ With Montherlant, as with Drieu La Rochelle, we find ourselves confronted with an obsessive and pathological fixation with virility that masks a decidedly more libidinal fixation.

The coming to light of Montherlant’s private papers following his suicide in 1972, and the publication of Pierre Sipriot’s biography Montherlant sans masque (1982), revealed the true nature of his sexual proclivities, confirming that the writer was indeed engaged in many homosexual relationships to the extent that he essentially lived as a gay man in his private life. Beginning in his boarding school days when he was expelled for an affair with a fellow pupil at the age of sixteen, Montherlant maintained many intense liaisons and relationships with men throughout the course of his life. Moreover, Montherlant’s personal correspondence with the openly gay novelist Roger Peyrefitte evidenced, often in graphic detail, the writer’s lifelong obsession with encounters with adolescent boys, which he pursued in secret up until the end of his life. As Richard Golson remarked, during the 1930s Montherlant ‘prowled the streets and the movie houses of Paris in search of adolescent partners while scrupulously maintaining his public image as the French literary world’s most eligible bachelor.’ His need to engage in these types of encounters even during the Nazi occupation may have been the principal motivating factor in his choice to be a collaborator, which provided some degree of protection from the Gestapo.

In 1946, Montherlant was essentially fully exonerated for his wartime activities during the occupation by the post-war authorities. These activities included several contributions to the infamous fascist magazine Je suis partout before the war, numerous pro-German articles in collaborationist journals and newspapers during the occupation, and regular social contact and fraternisation with Nazi cultural figures and other overtly pro-fascist writers. For comparable intellectual crimes, the writer Robert Brasillach was executed in 1945. However, Montherlant was able, through skilful omission and selective inclusion, to give the impression that his wartime activities were far less compromising than they in fact were. His paltry sentence was a year-long ban on publication in France that took account of time already elapsed, and thus had no impact whatsoever on his career. Completely aside from Montherlant’s duplicitous efforts to minimise his association with the vanquished Vichy regime, there was his egregious attempt to claim a furtive support for the resistance during the occupation. When asked by the Vichy Ministry of Youth to compose twenty lines on the subject of heroism – Montherlant wrote that he is drawn only to the heroism of ‘the individual who through fidelity to his ideas, his beliefs, or his style of life, accepts, in France of 1941, to remain isolated; or that of the group which for the same reason, accepts its status as a minority’ Montherlant later claimed that his reference to a ‘minority’ was a cryptic reference to the heroic efforts of the resistance partisans. But this was likely a complete fabrication, as Golson maintained:

A more plausible interpretation of the passage is that the group in question consisted of Montherlant, Peyrefitte and their circle of adolescent homosexual lovers […] During the occupation, both Montherlant and Peyrefitte were arrested for homosexual activities, and their correspondence contains numerous references to their persecution at the hands of the Vichy authorities. It is this group, then, “isolated” in the France of 1941 but faithful nevertheless to a “style of life,” to which the passage on heroism most likely refers.

That Montherlant’s very public misogyny derived from a latent and repressed homosexuality seemed to be a given for Beauvoir, and was perhaps a significant factor in his oft-stated ‘disgust’ towards women, but she opts in the end to only offer cryptic and non-committal allusions. Indeed, she appears to practise a significant amount of restraint in not fully pursuing this particular line of critique. Montherlant merely ‘does not have sensuality’ regarding women and ‘dreams of more worthy embraces, between equals, where gentleness was born of vanquished strength.’ But the argument that Montherlant was sufficiently ashamed of his homosexuality to hide it from the public is somewhat peculiar in a cultural milieu familiar with the likes of André Gide and Jean Genet. Indeed, many of his early works dealt openly with the themes of homosexual love affairs, which, in stark contrast to the spiteful and vitriolic content of Les Jeunes Filles, count among Montherlant’s more delicate, lyrical and evocative works. Indeed, were it not for the inconvenient fact of his fascist collaboration and the four-part misogynistic novel he penned, and the airing of his indiscretions, it is not inconceivable that Montherlant might even have ascended to the ranks of canonical gay writers.

In attempting to explain the discrepancy over the public perception of Montherlant’s sexuality and its actuality, Renee Winegarten posited that it was ‘doubtless because he saw how knowledge of his paedophilia would undermine the image of himself and his high ideals that he had so sedulously constructed.’ Yet French society has long had a troublingly permissive attitude to that most unpardonable of sexual crimes. It’s well to note that many of the most prominent names in post-war French philosophy were still proudly signing their names to petitions to de-criminalise sexual relations between adults and children as late as 1977, written and organised by the writer Gabriel Matzeneff, a close friend of Montherlant, and a particularly egregious paedophile who wrote and published books about sex tourism in the Philippines with pre-pubescent boys, and enjoyed the favour and protection of the French literary establishment up until 2020. To this day, more new allegations surface of what Michel Foucault got up to on his frequent trips to Morocco, which seems to be an established rite of passage that he shared with predecessors such as Gide and Montherlant himself.

Indeed, the virile masculine image which Montherlant went to such great lengths to cultivate was completely at odds with reality. Montherlant was deemed medically unfit for service in 1914 due to an enlarged heart and a deformity in his thorax. Irrespective of these conditions, he was still eligible to volunteer but chose not to do so, and instead worked for two years in his uncle’s insurance firm. He was called up as an auxiliary in 1916 but served mostly in minor non-combat roles. He was, in fact, wounded in 1918, but behind his own lines during training exercises. None of these details prevented Montherlant from embellishing his pedigree as a warrior poet and nationalist writer inspired by the thought of Maurice Barrés.

In my previous essay on Montherlant’s direct contemporary, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, we were confronted with a very distinct masculine psychopathology – a resentment and hatred towards feminine (maternal) weakness that was to all intents and purposes a displaced self-hatred, one derived from the dual inflictions of paternal cruelty alongside a suffocating maternal overweening. In this context, Montherlant’s comparable adoration of force, his own fixation with virility and strength – not to mention his own profound disgust at feminised weakness, accompanied by a pathological desire to embellish the details of his life and character, also suggests a passive psychological state which Francois Mauriac wryly described as the ‘crime of female natures.’ Curiously, Beauvoir also seems well aware of these subtleties:

For Montherlant it is first of all the mother who is the great enemy […] Her crime is to wish to keep her son forever enclosed within the darkness of her body; she mutilates him so she can keep him all to herself and thus fill the sterile void in her being; she is the most deplorable of teachers; she clips the child’s wings, she holds him back, far from the summits to which he aspires; she makes him stupid and degrades him […] through the explicit reproaches Montherlant heaps upon the human mother it is clearly seen that what he detests in her, is the fact of his own birth.

However, the conclusion of Beauvoir’s analysis holds that Montherlant’s attitude towards women, even when rooted in what are clearly aberrant psycho-sexual motivations, is evidence only of an undifferentiated and normative ( heterosexual) misogyny. The most valuable insights made by Beauvoir with respect to Montherlant are thus deferred and deflected for reasons we can only speculate. We can, however, be certain that if she had given full expression to the more penetrating analysis at which she hints, it would no doubt complicate the thesis which she builds within this chapter, and in The Second Sex as a whole. According to this argument, the overbearing heterosexual, patriarchal structures of Western society have imposed upon the feminine subject a certain oppressive mythology which requires first to be identified, before it can be surmounted and counteracted. However, in a writer such as Montherlant, we are dealing less with the uncomplicated pathological thinking and hatred of a heterosexual male towards women and more with what, had he been writing today, might indeed be described as a ‘queer’ writer. Is this misogyny then the displaced and frustrated hatred of the repressed homosexual against the innocent objects of an unjust compulsory heterosexuality that has been unfairly imposed upon him? There is, indeed, no question that Les Jeunes Filles is a misogynistic work which revels in a pathological, spiteful, cruel and merciless disgust over femininity. But does it not then follow that this misogyny is itself ‘queer’?

If Montherlant embellished his achievements within the scale of normative masculine virtue and accomplishment, and if his desire towards dissimulation was, like Drieu La Rochelle, rooted in frustration over an essentially passive psychological weakness (‘the crime of female natures’), was the resultant misogyny not then, in a manner of speaking, «Entre nous les filles »? What would be the implications if we were to read Montherlant’s The Girls not as a work of virulent misogyny, but according to the more affirmative contemporary trends of scholarship, as a darkly humorous and ironic work of clandestine ‘queerness’?

These suggestions are only half-serious, but they do highlight a dichotomy and inconsistency within contemporary scholarship and culture towards ‘masculinity’ that is difficult to resolve, and as a result, has simply been brushed aside. Only when masculinity is ‘queer’ does it become permissible to discuss it openly and without qualification, to extrapolate on it, to attempt to understand its nuances in a variety of ways. Yet when it is overtly misogynistic and hateful, it is instinctively condemned only as a product of a normative, heterosexual and patriarchal structure worthy only of being condemned and dismantled. To designate phenomena as ‘queer’, or to deny or withdraw such a designation, seems then to serve an oddly disciplinary function. By using a writer such as Montherlant as one example of an essentially normative and heterosexual masculinity (and willingly going against her instincts to the contrary) Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational text of modern feminist thought has, to a certain extent, codified the inconsistent, somewhat obscurantist approach to masculinity that stubbornly persists.

Writing in the wake of Beauvoir in 1977, the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray coined the awkward term ‘hom(m)o-sexual economy’ which she proposed as a system of symbolic exchange. Within this system, the phallus serves as the principal form of exchange value in heterosexual relations, which are themselves rooted in a latent homosexual desire that requires to be disavowed. Within this formulation, male homosexuality is valuable and subversive for the goals of feminism in that it negates the symbolic use-value of the phallus by using it towards what Irigaray described as ‘un-productive’ ends (pleasure amongst men) as opposed to generative heterosexual sex – thereby disrupting the ‘hom(m)o-sexual economy.’ For Irigaray, all patriarchal ideological formations are centred around a libidinal economy that is exclusively between men, where women are merely observers when they are not simply ‘goods’ to be exchanged. This grand transaction of power serves as a cover for men’s true desires, which are invariably homosexual. Though such extravagant theories have, in the intervening period, come to be viewed as rather crass and unfashionable, the related idea that any serious intellectual consideration of ‘masculinity’ can only be enacted if it proceeds from a putatively ‘queer’ lens has become naturalised within scholarship. In this context, the scholarly field of ‘masculinities’ mostly functions as the arriére-garde of feminist studies, and the journal Men and Masculinities, by far the most prominent and prestigious of its kind, describes itself as:

a feminist journal pillaring masculinities scholarship that centers power and inequities and that takes an intersectional approach to the study of gender. Moving beyond a focus on cis men, it is a home for masculinities scholarship that contributes to social constructionist discussions and debates on identity, politics, and the organization of the global world.

To ask why ‘queer’ masculinity is the only permissible form of serious intellectual discourse available on the topic inevitably takes us into uncomfortable territory within contemporary cultural discourse, where there is inarguably a palpable crisis in masculinity, but one which is only addressed by media sensationalism concerning its most aberrant and extreme phenomena. Through think pieces which alternate between hand-wringing and mocking derision, we are informed by various journalists and cultural commentators of ‘incels’, ‘gooners’, ‘looksmaxxers’ – and this salacious material has come to replace any serious attempt within the academy, or indeed outside of it, to understand the nature of the present crisis, which is pointedly one of normative masculinity, or rather is notable absence and failure, and the collective aversion felt to inculcating any values that might be associated with it. This void has profitably been filled by a variety of fly-by-night mountebanks and opportunists; self-help gurus, bootcamp leaders, podcasters, internet guys, influencers, and aspiring cult leaders of various stripes, etc. Meanwhile, the anomic violence and chaos that have historically always accompanied such crises continue to proliferate and mutate in more disturbing ways, inexorably leading towards a saturation point, and perhaps some calamity that seems more and more inevitable.

In speaking of Mikhail Lermontov in a class on the Russian novel, a university lecturer once told me that a well-tested criterion to be considered ‘great’ is to have potential that remains unfulfilled due to some tragedy, and that it’s vanishingly rare for a twenty-something-year-old to have already fulfilled any sort of potential. In his view, Lermontov, killed in a duel like his hero Pushkin at 26 years old, was really nothing special, and it was only an accident of history that his work is considered ‘great’, with the implication being that the tragedy of his own life is that he’s continually forced to explain these basic facts to an endless parade of undergraduate malcontents. I realise only now that, since we were discussing a course essay I’d submitted, he was definitely making a not-so-subtle dig at my juvenile intellectual pretensions. Of course I was barely listening, likely hungover and on a comedown, and naturally thought he was talking bollocks. But that wasn’t a rare occurrence for me at 21 years old.

And yet, for more benevolent motivations, I found myself repeating similar advice to a young friend in his twenties who is currently quite depressed and feeling isolated, and having doubts about his achievements and direction in life. Against my usual refusal to give anyone advice unless professionally compelled to do so, I said something about how potential, being ephemeral, is completely meaningless and that ultimately the only thing that matters is how one might develop some quality of ‘vision’, which only comes from age and experience. I’m not sure if I believe this to be the case. Nevertheless, it was an odd experience to find oneself in a position to offer advice and feeling compelled to reach for comforting platitudes. Perhaps this is what passes for the ‘wisdom’ of ageing.

I was in London again recently for the Hyperidean Press reading event on the 21^st February and stayed for a few days, going to various events and meetings. When I was there in autumn last year, I had my backpack stolen at an opening. It didn’t have anything much of value aside from a paperback copy of Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai, and my cherished notebook from Japan in which I had written quite a few ideas for the new novel. The hosts of the event found the culprits on their CCTV and sent me screenshots to send to the Police, which I never really bothered with. I remember how ‘hip’ and nonchalant they looked at the party, and somehow wished them well. My return flight back to Zürich was delayed, which meant I missed the last train to rural Austria where I live, and was forced to spend a night in St. Gallen. Lately, I sometimes feel a sort of spiritual disturbance before leaving on a trip, something that compels me not to go, and I remember feeling it quite strongly that particular time last year. I used to be completely relaxed on flights, but since I became a father, I’ve started to become rattled, filled with dread and foreboding. I remember discussing this with my father-in-law, who, after a reckless youth of travelling and riding motorbikes, also developed a fear of flying after acquiring ‘something to lose.’

On this occasion, I had no such feeling, and everything went completely smoothly with travelling. Quite a few of my mates were also down from Scotland for various reasons, so there was a great deal of drinking and banter. A couple of them are getting married, which I’m always happy to hear. I arrived late, and we went straight down the pub located right next door to the hotel in Dalston where we were all staying. I went to bed at 2am, but it seems that the conditioning of being rudely awoken by a marauding two-year-old hooligan at 6am every day doesn’t leave you, so that is precisely when I woke up the next day; unable to get back to sleep, and forced to function for the rest of the day on four hours of sleep.

My mate Jamie, Creative Director of Hyperidean, and I decided that it would be a good idea to take the train down to the pub in Fitzrovia where the reading was held after being scandalised by the 40 quid peak surcharge for an Uber. After a lot of triumphal banter about being 40 quid up and how we’d invest our gains on the Polymarket on the outcome of the reading event, we suddenly realised that we were more than halfway to the wrong pub (also called The Ship, but in the East end), so we had to get out. Just on cue, it started to rain, and since lugging a heavy box of books is annoying enough when it’s dry, we ended up getting a taxi. It was 27 quid, and factoring in what we’d spent on the tube, we were still 4 quid up, if also slightly late to meet the others. Can’t argue with that. The reading went well. I’m somewhat hesitant to go into specific details, but it was a great evening and really felt like ‘something’, like an event, which is the best one can hope for these days when you leave the house. I read an extract from my new novel IVOIRE.

I’ve now visited London far more frequently in the last few years than I ever did in my twenties, despite visiting every summer with my family when I was growing up and staying with my auntie and cousin in the South-East London suburbs. I remember seeing her once in 2013 when I’d arrived back from staying in New York for a couple of months, and was deep in the midst of an addiction to prescription Xanax. When I arrived, I told my auntie, who was a retired nurse, that I needed a new prescription but didn’t have it with me since I lived in France. She very kindly drove me to her old hospital down the road, and the doctor kindly refilled the prescription for me. On the drive home, my auntie said very nicely and matter-of-factly that it seemed like I shouldn’t really be taking those drugs - that I probably didn’t need to be taking them, and that I would be much better off without them. I hadn’t told her what the medication was or what it was for, but I assured her that I was only taking something that a doctor had prescribed. She replied that it didn’t matter where it came from. I barely saw her again before she died during the COVID lockdowns. I was only able to watch the Buddhist funeral service via a video link late at night from our apartment in Tokyo.

As ever, the soft landing of the personal essay style and all of this banal diarization is used merely as a prelude to my more abstract impressions of the city and the various encounters I had, which will be maddeningly non-specific and hardly worthy of the pre-amble since they were mostly good-natured. There were many discussions, complaints, invectives and gossip about various intrigues and conflicts towards which I am, on the whole, quite indifferent. Most seem to involve perceptions of ideological antagonism, but in substance seem unrelated to the ‘political’ in any recognisable sense. Clearly, they are more expressive of a relentless and protean collective propensity towards self-categorisation among people who are quite similar in most respects, and thus ultimately in the service of individual positioning within an imagined (and entirely imaginary) hierarchy. What actually struck me most is that everyone seems burdened by a comparable nihilism, sometimes disguised but rarely successfully concealed. It comes out in various ways. It is this, above all, which makes me sceptical about the nature of various contemporary conflicts and intrigues. And yet it is, on the whole, a sympathetic nihilism since it gives the impression of being hard won, or rather…conceded. It is perhaps sympathetic because it is so inconsequential.

Oblivious to my lecturer’s subtle lack of belief in my capabilities, I opted to write my undergraduate dissertation on Dostoevsky’s The Demons. Temperamentally enamoured by the real-life nihilists who inspired Dostoevsky, I pored over Franco Venturi’s seminal study of the roots of the 19th-century Russian populism, in particular the figure of Sergei Nachaev, who served as the main inspiration for Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. What I was loath to admit, and perhaps didn’t quite understand at the time, was that that particular brand of Nihilism was to a certain extent an ironic designation used to describe a type of what became a completely unprecedented, hardened revolutionary zealotry inspired by ideas that were, in Dostoevsky’s view as an apostate for those same ideas, akin to demonic possession. The textures of those hardened sentiments are quite stark in Nechaev’s own text, The Revolutionary Catechism (1869), in which he states the Revolutionary’s duty to be

Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single-minded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.

The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality, romanticism, infatuation, and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, practiced at every moment of the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation. At all times, and in all places, the revolutionary must obey not his personal impulses, but only those which serve the cause of the revolution.

In contrast to that nihilism, which was anything but, is the more cosmic variety I seem to encounter frequently among others, and sometimes, even in myself. Everyone has started, rather nihilistically, to smoke again, which is really enjoyable for an occasional smoking tourist such as myself (only on away days). Every time I come back to the UK, I buy several packs of reasonably priced European cigarettes as if I’m on my way to prison, as a form of social currency, and enjoy being overly generous with them.

I went to visit my friend, the painter Anna Sebastian, in her beautiful studio - you can commission her to paint your dreams.

I went for a very long walk around central London, and I went inside Westminster Cathedral for the first time and lit a candle. It’s really quite beautiful.

At an Oxfam bookshop, I was able to find several excellent books, including First Principles of Television (1932) by Arthur Dinsdale, editor of the first Television magazine. I’m always fascinated by early works on technology, and this one is particularly interesting:

Direct communication by word of mouth, to be thoroughly effective, involves something more than mere employment of our vocal chords, and a language. It is not generally realised what a great part is played in oral communication by facial expression. Shut your eyes, speak to a man in darkness, and, unless you know him very well indeed, the intelligence conveyed by facial expressions will soon be missed. Consider the telephone. Apart from the physical imperfections of the instrument, it is surprising how often failure to truly grasp the distant speaker’s import is due to our inability to see him.

Dinsdale was convinced that Television, which he is at pains to emphasise means ‘seeing at a distance’, would be able to solve this fundamental communication problem. It occurred to me that I’ve lived my entire adult life attempting to parse the dissonance between virtuality and actuality with little success. When I moved into university student halls at 18 years old, I first got a broadband connection, made a Myspace page, and eventually started to come across people from the internet in real life. I can’t say that much has changed in the nature of these odd ‘real life’ encounters, which are always a more agreeable variation on the ‘catfishing’ trope. People always differ from their online persona in interesting and pleasant ways that are invariably more sympathetic, more fallible, and always more poignant. Needless to say, I always like the people I meet in person far more, but then again, it has always been in my nature to see the mildly tragic in everything. My estimation of London, in particular, seems to have changed from being brash, vulgar and cringe to now expressing a more noticeably apocalyptic, and thus tragic, quality to it, which is on the whole quite interesting. I’ll be back soon.

On a train somewhere in the Appenzell, February 2026

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“There is naught in the Three Worlds I have need to do, nor anything I have not gotten that I might get, yet I participate in action…Just as the ignorant, being attached to actions, act, even so should the Knower, being unattached, also act, with a view to the maintenance of order in the world.”

- The Bhagavad Gita, III. 22-25

For me, one of the finest works of sports writing is the Trinidadian journalist C.L.R James’s book about cricket: Beyond a Boundary (1963). It has a special significance for me since I was also born in one of those small, successful, cricketing nations - Sri Lanka - and my father also played the sport during his days at Law College. Much has been written about the book’s sociological import as a work of ‘post-colonial’ and cultural criticism. James, a Marxist scholar and intellectual, seems to suggest that it was cricket, by providing a contested space for expressing drives towards self-consciousness, independence and self- determination, that precipitated the breakup and transition from the British Empire into the Commonwealth, and the maintenance of generally friendly relations after independence, which, though frayed at times, could have quite easily been much worse. I have nothing much to add to this thesis, only that it has generally been proven quite prescient.

More interesting to my mind, however, is Beyond a Boundary’s actual theme, which is Cricket itself. At the beginning of the work, James details how his early love for the sport was sparked in him because their house in Port of Spain overlooked the local cricket ground. By standing on a chair in his back garden as a six-year-old boy, he was able to watch entire games unfold during languorous and muggy Caribbean days. James, the middle-class son of a schoolmaster, briefly recollects his impressions of his working-class neighbours. Of particular interest was the grown-up son, Matthew Bondman, who James describes in detail as a scowling, loud and aggressive ruffian:

But that is not why I remember Matthew. For neér-do-well, in fact vicious character, as he was, Matthew had one saving grace – Matthew could bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace and style. When he practised on an afternoon with the local club, people stayed to watch and walked away when he finished. It may have been a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg. But, whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a long, low “Ah” came from many a spectator, and my own little soul thrilled with recognition.

Indeed, disregarding its more overt sociological and political entanglements, few seem to credit Beyond a Boundary for what is its stated purpose - a serious philosophical consideration of a sport that proceeds primarily from its aesthetic qualities. For James, there is absolutely no question that Cricket is an art form:

We are accustomed in cricket to speak of beauty. The critics of art are contemptuous of the word. Let us leave it aside and speak of the style that is common to the manifold motions of the great players, or most of them. There are few picture galleries in the world which effectively reproduce a fraction of them […] These motions are not caught and permanently fixed for us to make repeated visits to them. They are repeated often enough to become a permanent possession of the spectator which he can renew at will.

As compelling as James’ insights are, they have much in common with the little that exists generally within scholarship, which appears mostly confined to the rather small and marginal discipline of the ‘philosophy of sports.’ In common with most work in that field, Beyond a Boundary is ultimately a consideration only of the sporting spectacle, of spectatorship. The modern scholar, intellectual, and man of letters is by nature and temperament a spectator, rarely an active participant, so this state of affairs is unsurprising. It is my own tentative contention, however, that if such philosophical considerations proceeded from the basis of the active role, then the aesthetic experience of sport would become entirely self-evident.

I recall the winter of 2013 being particularly difficult for various reasons, not least because I’d somehow managed to contract Mononucleosis at 27 years old, and was thus forced to spend a few months mostly in bed. I was living in Nice, in the South of France, and becoming ill coincided exactly with the end of a brief and intense affair with a girl, so I was feeling particularly isolated. My apartment was in the north-east of the city, and the window of my bedroom overlooked the courtyard of a jail from which one could observe the prisoners (hunched, miserable and ant-like) walking around during their brief window of exercise. For the past decade, I had drunk and smoked copiously, and regularly took a variety of uppers and downers. But during my illness, I had neither the desire nor the ability to do any of these things. In fact, I didn’t have the energy or the concentration to do anything except watch films. After some time, even the ability to focus on the complex nuances of cinema – or at the very least the type of cinema I favoured – also became too exhausting. With a few notable exceptions, I’ve never been much inclined to binge-watch TV shows. I think I first saw the film version of Friday Night Lights many years before, likely because the soundtrack was by Explosions in the Sky - a favourite band of my early twenties. I didn’t know of the existence of a TV series then, but I somehow discovered it and began watching it on a whim during my convalescence. At first, I was fairly confident that I wouldn’t stick it out since it appeared to lack the polish and gravitas of the original film, and the acting was much triter. I was proved very wrong, however, and whether due to illness or something else entirely, I ended up watching all five seasons in a very short space of time. In retrospect, I realise that the experience of watching this show facilitated something akin to an unlikely epiphany; a shift in my philosophical outlook and mode of life, away from an almost exclusive state of perpetual contemplation towards one equally concerned with ‘action.’

We can easily note the origins of a philosophical merging of physical and moral virtue from the Enlightenment onwards. Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essay on Physiognomy (1781) rekindled the classical ‘science’ of determining moral character exclusively from outward physical appearance; that the more virtuous a human being, the more physically beautiful they were. Lavater had many enthusiastic supporters, including Goethe, and his work was in dialogue with other contemporaries, such as Johannes Winckelmann, whose pictorial work on Greek Sculpture is likely the principal source of our persistent notion of the ideal human physique. For many Enlightenment thinkers, the aesthetic was still inextricably bound to its etymological origins in the Greek αἰσθητικός ­– a form of perception. What was beautiful could be readily observed. Through the intervening centuries, our idea of the inter-relation between beauty and virtue has been modified by the ebb and flow of culture and counter-culture, which mostly succeeded in enacting a reversal of those original – and at any rate imprecise and questionable - categories. In a similar vein, we have become too prone to self-categorisation in the contemporary moment. Many of us feel an increasing compulsion to declare our fundamental being in terms of a ‘type’ – or a brand, to be more precise. If one does, wears, eats, drinks or says something, it is given to indicate belonging to a certain group or type; as one thing as opposed to something else.

The arc of history is cyclical, seemingly composed of strenuous action and reaction – but we tend too often to see only the relentless cycling between philosophies, ideologies, beliefs and desires that appear only reconstituted, re-purposed, rejected, and perhaps forgotten – only to sometimes be renewed. Yet we rarely pay attention to the quality of the movement and action itself, its trajectory, its purpose; less a perfect circle, more often an upturned spiral.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, by all accounts a completely delinquent father to his own five children, who he sent to be raised in a foundling hospital, counselled in Émile (1762) that the ideal education of boys consists of ‘constant bodily exercise’:

To the extent the sensitive being becomes active, he acquires a discernment proportionate to his strengths; and it is only with a surplus of strength beyond what he needs to preserve himself that there develops in him the speculative faculty fit to employ this excess of strength for other uses. Do you, then, want to cultivate your pupil’s intelligence? Cultivate the strengths it ought to govern. Exercise his body continually; make him robust and healthy in order to make him wise and reasonable. Let him work, be active, run, yell, always be in motion. Let him be a man in his vigor, and soon he will be one in his reason.

Despite the source of this wisdom, and some of the dark paths such teachings would take, there still persists a line of thinking which sees the wisdom in itself, the exaltation of physicality and vitalism, as defective and deleterious, as nothing more than the sum of its few negative historical associations. It is, in my view, much greater than those – and of a manifestly transcendent value.

The TV show Friday Night Lights follows a high school American Football team in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, in a state and region where I believe the sport is generally accorded a quasi-religious centrality. Much of the sporting action is interspersed with the personal lives, tribulations (and tragedies) of the young players, and centres on their inspirational coach and Paterfamilias, Eric Taylor. It’s impossible for me now to recall the various narratives in their entirety since there were many (some more captivating than others), but there is one episode (“Mud Bowl”) which has stuck with me to this day. Towards the end of the first season, the team is still reeling from the injury and paralysis of their star quarterback, Jason Street, in the first game of the season, and he has been replaced by his diminutive and timid substitute, Matt Saracen.[1] Against the odds, they’ve managed to make a decent run towards the State Championship, but they’re forced to play a tough semi-final game on a make-shift field since their home-ground has been ruled out due to a toxic-waste spillage. During the highly contested game, a torrential downpour occurs, rendering the field almost unplayable.

Aside from the overtly dramatic symbolism of mud, rain, overwrought passion, and the usual rousing speeches and performances that eventually secure the Dillon Panthers a place at the State Championships, there is one particular moment I remember most. At halftime, the referees inform both coaches that they will have to abandon the tied game because of inclement weather. But on overhearing the discussion, the young players on both sides ardently plead that they be allowed to continue. At that moment, all of the accumulated intentions, impulses, goals and outcomes of the sporting spectacle are reduced to a single essence – the overwhelming desire to ‘play’ the game, which we cannot rightly separate from a ‘love’ for the game itself. No doubt as a result of being incapacitated by ill-health, I found in this sentimental depiction something immensely thrilling; something that caused me to reflect (and undoubtedly to romanticise) my own long stifled and repressed relation to the realms of sport, action and physicality. But these initial thoughts were, in a similar vein to Friedrich Nietzsche, still the speculative insights of a spiritual (and to some extent actual) invalid. It would be some time before I became properly initiated.

During the previous decade, I had spent a great deal of my ‘productive’ time immersed in books. I was living in France while writing my PhD dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov, and teaching as a Lecteur d’anglais at the University of Nice. It is quite peculiar, however, that the writers whom I found myself inexplicably drawn to – including Nabokov – were also sportsmen.[2] I had spent a great deal of time dipping in and out of Nietzsche’s philosophical corpus, like many men I know, since I was a teenager and had always had difficulty comprehending it fully throughout my undergraduate studies, up until the moment of my convalescence. In my current status as a believer, in synchronicity among other things, I realise now that it was somehow fated that I ended up on the Cote D’azur, where the philosopher himself would often winter for his perpetual ill-health. Indeed, not far outside of Nice is the Chemin de Nietzsche, a mountain path Nietzsche frequently walked, leading up to the picturesque town of Èze. It was his habit to write much of his aphoristic work whilst hiking, so when I finally felt myself capable – and in great need of inspiration for various reasons – I went to walk it. I hadn’t been hiking since high school, and I found the prospect daunting. But I needn’t have worried, since even at my very sluggish invalid pace, I was able to complete the hike in under 30 mins. Afterwards, looking out over the indescribably beautiful Riviera from high above, I was filled not with a sense of achievement and exhilaration as I had expected, but rather with the sense of disappointment that it was over, that it was in the end so easy, and that I could quite easily have done a great deal more.

Indeed, even in my numerous readings of Nietzschean philosophy, like many before me, I struggled (in vain, I now understand) to find a coherent system that might prove actionable as a life-philosophy. Being as I was then, as most are, an imperfect reader, my biggest mistake was to treat the work as only philosophy. It was only many years later, in reading an essay by the English-Sri Lankan perennialism scholar and critic Ananda K. Coomerswammy,[3] that Nietzsche’s philosophical ‘lessons’ began to cohere:

Certainly, Nietzsche was not a philosopher in the strict sense of the word. He is essentially a poet and sociologist, and above all, a mystic. He stands in the direct line of European mysticism, and though less profound, speaks with the same voice as Blake and Whitman. These three might, indeed, be said to voice the religion of Idealistic Individualism. If it were realised that his originality does not consist in an incomprehensible and unnatural novelty, but in a poetic restatement of a very old position, it might be less needful to waste our breath in the refutation of theses he never upheld. [4]

For Coomerswamy, Nietzschean ‘philosophy’ was unmistakably perennial – and this thesis begins to cohere when we realise the extent to which Schopenhauer relied upon eastern philosophical doctrines in the construction of his own system, and the initial inheritance of that very system to Nietzsche. The virtue of the Übermensch, Coomerswamy maintained, as an ideal type that stands beyond the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – simultaneously the follower, leader, and saviour of men - recurs frequently in various iterations of eastern thought; in the Superior Man (君子; jūn zǐ) of Confucianism; the Arhat (adept), the Buddha (enlightened one), the Jina (conqueror), the Tirthakara (finder of the ford), the Bodhisattva (incarnation of the bestowing virtue), and most of all in the figure of the Jivan-mukta (the one freed in this life). Coomerswamy thought Nietzsche’s mysticism, which he regarded highly, as a poetic articulation of a recurrent wisdom that needs, in all times and places, to be re-stated and rediscovered:

The leaders of humanity have never been such as have acted from a sense of duty, in the ordinary sense of the world. Duty is but a means of playing safe for those who lack the Bestowing Virtue. The activity of genius is not an obedience to rules, but dedication of life to what is commanded from within, even though it should appear to all others as evil.

Standing atop that mountain many years ago, I didn’t have access to this plausible, if somewhat tendentious, explanation. In any case, I intuited as much without realising. ‘What constitutes the virtue of any action is the complete coordination of the actor’, Coomerswamy continued:

We should act according to our own nature: and when that nature has developed to its fullest stature, then what is divine attains complete manifestation.

A rebel by nature, I hadn’t ever been much for rules myself and possess a natural aversion to external discipline in almost all of its manifestations. But I’ve never expressed any sort of desire to lead; it’s not something I’ve ever actively or willingly sought. But I’ve had instilled in me a very palpable sense of what evil is. What occurred to me at that moment was the certainty that Nietzsche was likely as disappointed as I was after that trifling walk. Yet, his dissatisfaction, his frustration, his propensity towards a sense of victimhood at all that was clearly tragic in his own life – a life that to all practical intents and purposes came to an end in an Equine embrace in Turin - actually animated him towards creation. But I realised that it was simply not in my nature to be satisfied only with a sense of tragedy with regards to myself, to contemplate it endlessly, to be merely a spectator in the great game of life. I had a strenuous desire to play it too.

Growing up, I actually had no interest in ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ pursuits and was entirely preoccupied with playing sports (I’ve never been a huge ‘fan’ as such). But the sports I excelled at early, particularly the High Jump, I wasn’t at all drawn to. What I wished to excel at was Football, in a country, Scotland, with an oversized national obsession and enthusiasm for the sport that has never been matched by any sort of achievement. But it is the sport that everybody plays, and – in a not dissimilar way to Friday Night Lights – a central organising force within an environment where bleakness and misery are never too far from the surface. My problem, in retrospect, was that I wasn’t exceptionally good at Football; I was merely alright. However much I might have wished otherwise, it simply wasn’t my sport. I showed some early promise playing limited minutes for my older brother’s club team at a young age, but fate seemed to intervene at every turn. I had a big growth spurt in my early teens when I was probably at the peak of my abilities. I was tall, a decent sprinter, and once I decided to focus on playing as a centre-forward, as a target man, I began to understand the game on a fundamental level. However, my finishing left a lot to be desired, and I didn’t have enough power and physical presence to hold the ball up and distribute it well. I was tall, lanky, and some way away from being the ‘big man up top’ in every sense.

However, all of this was moot, as on the day of the trials for the school football team, I was given detention and wasn’t able to attend. What seems strange now is that it was for a minor infraction by my favourite teacher, who I usually got on with incredibly well, but who seemed unusually intent, despite my pleading, that I shouldn’t be let off. Later, I managed to regularly train with the local club team, which, like our school team, produced quite a few players who would eventually turn professional, some even playing at the very highest levels of the game. But they already had one exceptional striker and a few others who could play the role very well, so after a brief period of training and sitting on the bench, I was dropped completely from the team. I realise now that this moment had a profound effect on me, since not long after, I would quit playing sports completely. Ostensibly, this was because I discovered playing the guitar, music, and books. I don’t believe that these creative/intellectual activities were sought only as forms of consolation or compensation, to ameliorate a sense of rejection. Rather, it was the result – considered in the fullness of time – of a misapprehension of my own relation to sport, which I see now was also innately aesthetic; that what I sought to find in literature, music and art was a continuation, cultivation and sublimation of already existing artistic impulses.

Indeed, during the entire time I was hopelessly trying to be good at football, I also played basketball at a high level, winning leagues, tournaments and medals with both club and high school. It was a sport that I was far more physically suited to playing (at almost 6ft 3, I have quite a freakish 6ft 7 wingspan) and I excelled at it without much effort. I found the sport more amenable in other ways; its balance of aggression and power is always coupled with a graceful physicality, there’s a lot of banter, and it places a high value on style, rhythm and elegance of movement. Despite this, I never initially considered it to be a ‘serious’ sport since there wasn’t anywhere for me to go with it. Much of this was also due to the ease and pleasure I took in playing, which rarely felt like hard graft. Having lived away from Scotland and the UK for a whole decade – I can now judge from the outside a certain ambient conditioning not dissimilar to that dramatised in Friday Night Lights. Basketball was something which very few people are interested in in Scotland – it’s generally seen as an American imposition, a foreign import, a sport wholly at odds with the austere and miserabilist sporting climate which prevails there. In many ways, the sporting culture across the British Isles is manifestly an outdoors culture, reflecting a dismal climate and the severe muscular Christianity which spawned its most famous games. Those games, after all, were conceived by dominies and schoolmasters – mostly to instruct certain virtues and principles, and to serve as analogues for a desired national will and spirit. Any ‘love’ for the game was only an afterthought, an unintended effect.

In my view, there is very little that is bleak about basketball, and it is rather ironic (but unsurprising) to learn that its inventor, James Naismith, was an exceptionally high-achieving Canadian born to Scottish parents, and rather tragically (yet symbolically) orphaned at a young age. In some respects, its invention is a testament to what was the obligatory optimism of the New World, and its erstwhile ability to strip away the parochialism of low expectations and resentment that afflicts small countries. At the time, however, I was completely incapable of seeing that I had already found ‘my sport’ in Basketball, seeing only that I excelled at something which nobody around me cared about. Thus, I quickly gave up on it too. My renunciation of sport was comprehensive; aside from one or two half-hearted five-a-side games, I never played any sport ever again from the age of around 15 up until my bout of Mono. My exercise regimen consisted of walking everywhere, occasionally running for a bus, or a particularly vigorous bout of coughing after smoking too many roll-ups. I played in bands, stayed up at all hours of the night reading, slept late, went to gigs, took a lot of drugs, and partied hard for close to a decade. My existence was one of a rather miserable but agreeable Oblomovism. I don’t care to speculate on the correlation between those forms of dissipation and one’s mental state, but I can recall now that very little of what I did and made seemed to have had any merit, and during much of the time, I was incapable of functioning without antidepressants and other medications.

After three months of lying in bed weak and sick, and spurred on by the ambivalent lessons imparted by a slightly hackneyed TV show – I felt an overwhelming urge to play sports again. I wasn’t sure what sport, initially. I started lifting weights and going jogging, solitary pursuits which are all good and fine – but they didn’t do anything to satiate my urge towards action. But seeing that there was an outdoor basketball court near my apartment, I went along one day dressed in black-on-black converse, board shorts, and probably a Husker Du t-shirt – drawing a few odd looks from the mostly African and Maghrebian guys at the court. Within the first 10 minutes of playing a half-court pick-up game, I genuinely thought I was about to have a heart attack or pass out; I coughed so violently that someone asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. But I persevered, and by the third game, some of the muscle memory around pivoting, movement, cutting to the basket, making lay-ups and the proper shooting form had returned. And then in one moment, switching off completely from complete exhaustion - I went around a screen set by my team-mate, popped up to the top of the key to catch a high pass, tried to back down a much taller defender, countered and then made a fade-away right over him, which swished into the basket. It wasn’t a particularly impressive move, but there was enough in it to give pause – during which someone casually remarked: c’est jolie ca (that’s pretty). I remember thinking at the time that it was an oddly poignant way to describe something so arbitrary, but it was, on reflection, entirely appropriate.

A particularly cherished cliché within the football commentary of my youth was to describe moments of beauty within the sport as ‘Poetry in Motion’, a description that seemingly elevates a particular sportsman to the purportedly more exalted level of the ‘artist.’ (No doubt such a phrase was not far from James’ own mind when thinking about Matthew Bondman). Or rather, a very specific genus of artist, different, and like various of the great sportsmen slightly ‘savage’ – but an artist in some crucial aspects superior to the type most people might have in mind. This is an artist whose medium is nothing less than a temporary mastery of space and time itself. His art is a form of conjuration that transforms the otherwise mundane elements of movement, rhythm and action in such a way as to create a palpably unique and affecting moment in time which, unlike most artworks, has an immediately aesthetic quality appreciated on a more universal level than any painting, book, film or record. And yet, such moments are rarely afforded a place within those same ‘artistic’ categories. However, we need not try very hard to experience the feelings they invoke. Watching Doctor J ‘rocking the baby to sleep’, or Vince Carter’s ‘dunk of death’ over a 7ft 2 defender; Diego Maradona’s goal of the century, or Zlatan Ibrahimović’s 30-yard bicycle kick over the goalkeeper, one begins to understand, if only intuitively, why these varied pieces of corporeal genius hold just as much power as any piece of physical art or theatre. These sporting moments are as close as it is possible to get to a collective sublime vision. Yet they remain, regrettably, still within the realm of the spectacular.

Johan Huizinga, in his foundational work of cultural studies Homo Ludens (1938), posited that the realm of ‘play’ must be thought of as a distinct activity that exists outside of the order of normal life, but which nonetheless has its own structure and order. ‘Play’ for Huizinga was a serious business, and we’re almost able to glimpse through the page the no doubt serious expression he assumed while writing the following lines:

…the attribute of beauty does not attach to play as such, play nevertheless tends to assume marked elements of beauty. Mirth and grace adhere at the outset to the more primitive forms of play. In play the beauty of the human body in motion reaches its zenith. In its more developed forms it is saturated with rhythm and harmony, the noblest gifts of aesthetic perception known to man. Many and close are the links that connect play with beauty. All the same, we cannot say that beauty is inherent in play as such; so we must leave it at that: play is a function of the living, but is not susceptible of exact definition either logically, biologically, or aesthetically.

By ‘play’ Huizinga did not mean sport specifically, but it could not have been far from his mind when writing of rhythm and harmony as the zenith of the human body’s beauty. Yet there is in Huizinga’s charming work a residue of that enlightenment, neo-classical strain, under a modern humanistic guise, particularly in his understanding that ‘Solitary play is productive of culture only in a limited degree.’ Indeed, the beauty of sport, its ‘virtue’ as such, comes from its agonistic nature – the thrill of competition, of struggle, of being an integral part of a collective, a team, within conflict or battle.

After my first time at the basketball court, exhausted and filled with adrenaline and endorphins, I was unable to sleep, but in all other respects, I felt entirely renewed. I returned to the court almost every day for what was left of my time in France, each time reacquainting myself with the rules, rituals and skills I had once known well. Within 6 months, I started playing regular full-court recreational games at gyms, and within a year, I had regained enough conditioning to get a respectable amount of minutes at the amateur level in Glasgow and Strathclyde third division. Re-joining competitive team sports was, for me, a revelation, or rather several. I discovered to my surprise that I had the same natural ease and rapport with athletes that I previously thought I only had with musicians and bohemians, and that in some ways I actually preferred their company. I discovered a passion for winning. I found out that I could often be extremely aggressive and mono-maniacally competitive, but I taught myself to channel and sublimate this aggressivity and competitiveness into productive results on the court. In time, whether winning or losing, I learned to be completely at ease with the result if I knew that I had, at the very least, ‘played’ the game. I realised that I could dunk.

It seems to me that the genuine creative impulse is less a form of discovery and novelty than it is a form of rediscovery, and in my case, I was able to rediscover in my persistent desire to ‘play’ the game, a love for it that I never previously fully acknowledged. Ultimately, I came to realise that, for me, playing basketball is an aesthetic experience unlike any other that exists. I do not need to lessen this experience by making it a mere heuristic about how one should live life, as an analogue for a vague notion that the lessons on the court inculcated more important (more ‘real’) lessons off of it. Rather, the game has within it all of what is really ‘alive’ and tangible in life - not unlike the Dance of Shiva – it both represents and encapsulates, through its own forms of abstraction, the shape and meaning of existence.

It has now been more than ten years since I started playing basketball again, and in the intervening period, I moved around a lot and played on many different courts around the world, where I never failed to find an unspoken bond and commonality with others. When I lived in Tokyo, almost every weekend I played pick-up games at an outdoor court near Takadanobaba station with a big group of mostly Chinese guys. They could speak neither Japanese nor English, but we played, hung out and had a lot of laughs and banter for three years – and during the entire time, I don’t think we were once understood by each other through mere spoken communication. When I moved back to Europe in 2023, I started playing again at the competitive level – and I still currently play in the Landesliga, the Austrian third division. Last year, with an incredibly strong team composed of a couple of ex-professional players who once played in the Serbian 1^st Division, we managed to reach the semi-finals of the regional league, but ended up narrowly losing. It was a lamentable experience in many ways for me. Passions ran high, and during the game itself, which we narrowly lost, we never acquitted ourselves well on the court strategically or personally. For my part, I played harder than I’d ever played, but my determination did not come from a desire to just ‘play’ the game, only to win it - something which immediately puts one at odds with the first principle, and essential wisdom, of the game itself.

Within the Vedantic literature, ‘action’ is undertaken not through any particular need but ‘by way of sport, in its common understanding.’ This is what gives meaning to the words of Krishna concerning ‘action’ in The Bhagavad Gita. As Coomerswamy maintains:

The emphasis is always on upon the idea of “pure” activity that can be properly described as “playful” because the game is played, not as “work” is ordinarily performed with a view to securing some end essential to the worker’s well-being, but exuberence […] The best and most God-like way of living is to “play the game” […] it should be realised that in traditional societies all those actual games and performances that we now regard as merely secular “sports” and “shows” are, strictly speaking, rites, to be participated in only by initiates; and that under these conditions proficiency is never merely physical skill, but also a “wisdom.”

As a result of our collective ‘passions’ (colourful language, an unwieldy aggressivity that almost got a little out of hand), myself and several members of our team – comprised like much of Austrian Basketball, mostly of Yugoslavians – are currently serving a two-match ban for the current season…which I fear will be one of my last. Ever since that first day on the court, I’ve given little thought to physical longevity – but I now feel every day the effects of ageing and the inevitable decline in the body’s facility to perform vigorous action. Over the past years, I’ve had several injuries: torn ligaments, rotator cuffs, calf muscles, and sprains of every description and severity – but what I’ve now started to experience are not injuries per se, but the signs of an inevitable and irreversible decrepitude. I am reconciled to it. A life ought to consist of distinct stages and transitions: no point in lingering in one stage beyond the allotted time.

My team-mates are almost all tradesmen and artisans; carpenters, mechanics, bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, lumberjacks, plasterers, house painters, etc. They are not, on first glance, what one would normally associate with the modern category of the ‘artist.’ But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the art which they practise is one eminently worthy of such a distinction, and is in many ways more vital and intense than those which result from contemplation alone. For most, the division between their art of ‘work’, and their art of ‘play’, is relatively seamless – and unlike myself, most did not require a prolonged detour through contemplation to arrive back at the start, to rediscover a love for the game which never actually left them, and has been constant and unyielding across decades. I envy them, but I have no regrets. However, if by some mystic bargain I were able to trade some of my years of dissipation and despondency for only a handful more chances to simply ‘play the game’ at the modest level I’m only just still capable of, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

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[1] Saracen is very likeable, and significantly, despite lacking the physicality of the rest, is incredibly skilled. At the end of the series, rather appropriately, he goes off to Art School.

[2] Vladimir Nabokov was, like another of my youthful favourites, Albert Camus, a football goalkeeper.

[3] I wrote previously on Coomerswamy here and here.

[4] A Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

The curious paradox at the heart of the internet lies in its shadowy and bellicose military origins set against the quasi-utopian ideology of its Californian hippie progenitors. A by-product of this dynamic is that the internet has always had an inherently counter-cultural effect: an unmistakable air of informality, which nonetheless never seems completely authentic. At first, we might be confident in our ability to describe what an ‘influencer’ is and what they do – but after some enquiry, it becomes clear that the roles of Influencer and Critic have become indistinct, if not the same.

We might begin with an allusion to three much-cited but vaguely understood cultural theories. The first is the theory of “parasociality”, which derives from a strand of social psychology and anthropology from the 1950s, and has since been used to analyse human relationships in mass media and technology. Another is the theory of “mimetic desire”, originating in Desire, Deceit and the Novel (1961) by the French Catholic literary theorist René Girard. Having spent the majority of his career at Stanford University, Girard’s geographical (and putatively ideological) proximity to Silicon Valley gave him a number of faithful acolytes among the more esoterically inclined tech plutocrats of the 2000s, most notably Peter Thiel. The last theory is not as readily invoked as the other two, yet in my view ought to be accorded equal prominence: the theory of “interpassivity” by the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller. In part conceived as a response to “relational art”, this theory originally posited the notion of a delegated enjoyment felt by the spectator towards artworks. However, this relationality is applicable to all other forms of vicarious experience and interaction within the realm of social media and the internet.

All these theories have equal resonance when considering the archetype of the influencer. The relation we feel towards an influencer is indeed parasocial; their common attributes tend to reflect an approachable, self-effacing, and ironic figure devoid of the rarefied otherworldly celebrity that characterised previous eras. The influencer is often an aspirational figure who, on a more abstract level, is also your friend, or at the very least could be given the right conditions. In this way, Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that the subject’s desire is always that of the Other; that the fundamental ontological drive does not reside within the self, within individual agency, or indeed through subjectivity – but rather within imitative desire and mimetic rivalry. Yet the influencer is not an object of mimetic rivalry in a straightforward manner, because they often mirror their audience in some crucial aspects; similar in taste, temperament, worldview, and perhaps even appearance. To account for this, Girard offered the notion of “internal mediation” to describe the similarities between model and imitator, who only differ in their lopsided material success. However, by fixating on the influencer’s superiority to their audience, we would ignore the palpable sense of consolation that features heavily in the symbiotic dynamic they share. The audience has a vested interest in preserving the influencer’s success, since this success, always precarious and impermanent, somehow also belongs to them. This vicarious relation, as interpassivity, between influencer and audience, makes the latter a figure of solace, and only nominally a superior model of aspiration. Perhaps then, it can be described more accurately as a process of delegated suffering rather than simply of enjoyment.

Despite the value of these theories, I fear that an overreliance on them obscures a simpler truth about the conditions that have produced The Influencer, who is merely a symptom of a culture that has become synonymous with lifestyle. A fixation with self-help, self-care, and self-optimisation, perhaps inevitably begets auto-fiction, self-portraiture, auto-theory. There are historical antecedents for this tendency, but what seems undeniable in the current moment is that there no longer exists a sharp distinction between artist and critic, performer and spectator, writer and reader, teacher and student, producer and consumer. People go to exhibitions so that they may themselves be artists, read books and write criticism so that they may one day be authors, attend concerts so that they can eventually perform on stage. Such individual aspirations once generally went unfulfilled, and were previously regarded as shameful to admit to unless one possessed the requisite self-belief or some form of acknowledged talent. Failure often manifested in quiet resentment, or achievements upon what Jacques Lacan referred to as the ‘inverted ladder of desire.’ In this vein, perhaps the billionaire philanthropist who endows galleries and museums that bear his name is motivated less by generosity than a sense of regret at having made money instead of art. This dynamic once constituted an underlying truth of the symbiotic relationship between artist and audience, and its transformation in the present moment has made the public forums of cultural exchange into vast classrooms and workshops that also function as group therapy sessions.

The commonly understood social stratifications of “taste” once served as markers of class divisions, famously detailed by Pierre Bourdieu in his seminal 1979 study Distinction. Now, “taste” can no longer reliably be transmitted only through a social habitus produced by historical circumstances or class-based conditioning. For this very reason, within the atomised forums of cultural exchange that now take place almost exclusively on the internet, the most popular “content” often takes the form of advice, recommendations, tips, endorsements – a realm where influencers have attained prominence. This is hardly surprising, given that today there is a sense of profusion, oversaturation and overproduction within all spheres, professions, and in all directions, often exceeding demand. And yet, this departure signals a shift from our previous understanding of “distinction”, where social status was subject to autonomous artistic creation and the material concerns that underpinned it. As Bourdieu noted:

To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the “subject”, the external referent, which involves subordination to functions – even if only the most elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something […] the shift from an art which imitates nature to an art which imitates art

In this passage, Bourdieu is describing how the habitus of “taste” relied heavily upon the decadent bourgeois ideology of l’art pour l’art. This tendency can be demonstrated by the conditions of a counter-cultural recent past, when artists were more prosperous and “free” to be expressive. To this day, their legacies still serve as universal shibboleths of good artistic taste.

In contrast, the “influencer” is not an artist in that sense that most of us might understand. Their ‘art’, such as it is, is primarily centred on themselves and is not concerned with creation (or production per se) but also – paradoxically - with something more intangible and external to themselves - a ‘potentiality’ they share with an audience composed of others similar to themselves. The distinction is metaphysical, according to the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, a former Dadaist painter and poet turned esoteric fascist mystic. For Evola the signal characteristic of a corrupt modern technological world, hopelessly fallen in his eyes, is its preference for ‘becoming’ over ‘being.’ There is an element of truth within Evola’s insight, despite its disreputable source. Perhaps a world as perpetual “becoming” most accurately describes that inhabited by the influencer, whose “parasocial” and “interpassive” appeal is often to be found in their journey – which matches our own – to becoming something other than themselves. The journey, however, is one without end.

The figure of the influencer clearly pre-dates the internet, and we can see that the same tension between culture and lifestyle are not far from these historical accounts. One of the first truly acrimonious splits within the lively milieu of advanced early 20th-century British artists occurred right before World War I. A central influencer within the Bloomsbury Group, the art critic turned painter Roger Fry established the Omega workshops in 1913 at 33 Fitzroy Square, alongside the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf. It was Fry’s fervent belief that the differences between fine and decorative art were false, and to this end, the Omega workshops' goal was to bring the influence of Post-Impressionism and the rarefied aesthetic ethos of Bloomsbury to the world of interior design, furniture, and textiles. Fry imbued his entrepreneurial scheme with the supposedly benevolent intention of providing younger and poorer artists with a steady income. Impressed with his work Kermesse (1912), a lost painting for which no visual document now exists, Fry engaged the irascible and talented young painter Wyndham Lewis to work at 33 Fitzroy Square.

On the advice of the Daily Mail’s art critic P.G. Konody, the artist Spencer Gore visited the Omega Workshops to discuss a commission for the newspaper’s Ideal Home Exhibition at the Olympia forum in Kensington in 1913. Impressed by their work at the Cave of the Golden Calf cabaret, the organisers wanted Gore and Lewis to provide paintings to decorate the walls of a model room, and for Fry to provide the furniture. Lewis was not present when Gore visited, and the latter left a verbal message regarding details with Fry, who then informed Lewis that his part would only consist of carving a mantelpiece for the fireplace. This puzzled Lewis, since it was not his speciality. Already suspicious, Lewis asked if there were to be any paintings to decorate the walls. Fry denied that there would be. Nevertheless, when Lewis returned from holiday to the workshop, he found a set of large wall paintings for the Ideal Home Exhibition painted by Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Lewis, along with several other disgruntled artists, quit the Omega workshops and founded the Rebel Arts Centre, and subsequently the Vorticist movement – one of the only substantive London-based avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

For Lewis, the fallout from this incident became the source of a lifelong hatred of the Bloomsbury Group, whose wealthy upper-class members would come to dominate British culture after World War I. It was a conflict which many were able to avoid serving in due to their political connections and powerful protectors, while many of Lewis’s more talented, less moneyed friends and collaborators would die in the trenches. As Lewis wrote bitterly in his first autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937):

I have always thought that if instead of the really malefic “Bloomsburies”, who with their ambitious and jealous cabal have had such a destructive influence upon the intellectual life of England, something more like the Vienna Café habitués of those days could have been the ones to push themselves into power, that a less sordid atmosphere would have prevailed. The writing and painting world of London might have been less like the afternoon tea-party of a perverse spinster.

But “they had money” and “we hadn’t”, Lewis recalled bitterly. Although his antipathy was undoubtedly underpinned by an objection to their wealth and influence – they were in a sense the original “nepo babies” – it is clear that these material complaints underpinned other aesthetic objections. As Bourdieu maintained, the Post-Impressionism which Roger Fry championed was the “product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation, demands categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded conditionally.”

An attention to “form” was arguably something that Lewis and Fry shared, but their attitudes towards it diverged significantly. The occasion of their split – the Ideal Home Exhibition – is noteworthy in defining this opposition. First staged in 1908 at a time when 90% of the British Public rented their homes, the Daily Mail’s owner Lord Northcliffe conceived of the exhibition to encourage discourse over better housing conditions for everyone. However, it quickly became a forum for expensive design, luxury interiors and products catering to the wealthy. Fry likely thought nothing of taking such a commission away from an impecunious and déclassé artist such as Lewis, since the ethos and principles of the exhibition predominantly matched his own. For Lewis, form was an essential philosophical category that could never receive proper expression in any sort of consumer product. This much was clear in the acerbic letter he circulated on leaving Fry’s Omega workshop:

As to its tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instincts to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck […] despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family of strayed and Dissenting Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party or command more attention.

Evident in his fondness for the “tea-party” analogy vis-à-vis Bloomsbury, it’s clear that Lewis thought poorly of the commercial aestheticism of Fry. Indeed, its de haut en bas pose of supposed dissent and radicalism was also amply reflected in the queer and liberated promiscuity of the Bloomsbury group, which was insulated from the legal and societal constraints imposed on sexuality within wider society. Lewis found all of this to be anathema to the vitalist masculine impulses that he admired most within the artistic avant-garde of Europe. Yet beyond these reflexively antagonistic, homophobic and petty criticisms, something more important was signified by this debacle that returns us to the material interests of class. As Professor Paul Edwards concisely observed in his seminal study Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000): “For Lewis, the episode became paradigmatic of the problem of the economics and politics of Art in England, where moneyed people who should have been patrons competed as “artists” themselves with the professionals who depended on them.” As with the Ideal Home fiasco, the embryonic forms of the issues that now define the age of the influencer, are situated within the transposable domains of culture and lifestyle.

No other contemporary art critic channels the OG influencer spirit of Roger Fry more than Dean Kissick, who clearly possesses significant publicist instincts on a par with Serge Diaghilev, F.T Marinetti, and Warhol – even if they are somewhat tempered by the requisite demands of relatability and internet parasociality. My objection to Kissick’s viral Harper’s essay “The Painted Protest” (2024) – a rather anodyne “anti-woke” intervention into contemporary art discourse – was not due to my attachment to vagaries of “wokeness” or tedious political art in general. In our theory of the Ideological Aesthetic (2023), art historian Christos Asomatos and I suggested that in the present moment the domains of the ideological and the aesthetic often dissolve into one another, becoming interchangeable, mutually constitutive and dialectically related. Such a phenomenon thrives under the conditions that produced “woke art”, namely, a social field defined by technological excess, characterised by a cumulative state of hyper-politicisation which results in a state of effective depoliticisation. Within this paradigm, political art can only be made in terms of an institutionalised oppositionality, a form of antagonism that focuses on the free expression that makes it possible, whilst simultaneously rendering that same freedom inconsequential. To forge an interesting position on this dynamic would require a willingness to engage in an honest and immanent critique. Kissick’s refusal to do so reveals that he is less motivated by his purported function as an earnest art critic, rather than by his other, more authentic role as influencer, as a trend-setter – a cultural factotum of taste.

Of course, Kissick’s salvo against the identitarian artworld is unconvincing in no small part because he once passionately championed the same aesthetics of cloying familiarity he now apparently bemoans. Yet the most risible facet of the essay was its middling attempt at “artful” auto-expression, its dubious self-portrait of the sympathetic critic as artist, its reflexive recourse to the subjectivity of the trite personal essay format, and the faux solemnity of its appeal to some sense of collective fatigue among his parasocially inclined audience. But what remains most exasperating is its clear kinship with the pretty and fashionable draperies, Victorian languish, and instrumentalised aesthetics of the duplicitous Roger Fry. When Kissick bemoans the loss of the art world of a decade ago, his nostalgic lament seems to be principally for the loss of a lifestyle rather than culture. By my recollection, the lost world he mourns was just as aesthetically unimaginative, trite and awful ten years ago as it is now. It is one of the most incomprehensible oddities of contemporary nostalgia that the yearning for phantom wounds becomes more bizarre, that the time periods become more short-lived; the objects of longing more puzzling. Nostalgia, generally, is less a longing for an object than it is for a fleeting state of being, mostly for that of youth. But for the youth today, forced to perceive culture in terms of lifestyle, object and being are interchangeable. By acquiring the product, they hope, in vain, to acquire the spirit in which it was created.

In this way, Kissick’s argument has much in common with the current appetite for the most forgettable and derisory aspects of early to mid-2000s music, which have now been re-branded as “indie-sleaze”. Perhaps in a few years from now, this bizarre nostalgia might even evolve to become a yearning for the fashions and questionable music of “posh-wave” bands like Mumford and Sons. A horrifying prospect! But if there is money to be made, or blood to be drawn from the desiccated stone of recent lifestyle-culture, those who only serve the cannibalistic imperatives of our present economic system will happily oblige the whims of the highest bidder. It seems that in the contemporary moment, lifestyle as an “art of living”, has replaced both “art” and “living”, leaving in their place a disparate collection of objects and products from which we can only try to forge some semblance of culture. Yet no sense of inevitability should attach to this moment, because the conditions which have produced it are not immutable. If we can break free from our overreliance on the pseudo-reality provided to us by rapacious technological Semio-corporations, the influence of which seeps into every aspect of the spiritually impoverished present, the spell of the Influencer can be broken.

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The earliest forms of cultural expression, such as cave paintings, were not far removed from a state of ‘nature.’ They served intangible ritualistic functions which we still don’t quite comprehend. Yet we do understand, instinctively, that they existed on a completely different plane from the instrumentalised demands of the art ‘market’, from branding, publicity, advertising, and all other forms of confected influence that have come with the catabolic and fundamentally destructive economic system we are forced to inhabit. Clearly, the Influencer is not a completely neutral figure within this paradigm, but neither are they an entirely nefarious one. Rather, the centrality afforded to this figure – merely a version of ourselves, after all - and the amorphous guidance they provide to those otherwise adrift in a sea of lifestyle content, should inform us that the influencer is a symptom of an impending shift in contemporary aesthetic production and consumption. The outcome of this shift is still to be determined. Teetering on the precipice, below a raging deluge of AI slop and de-personalised affectless art, more and more people are starting to agree that the elusive secrets behind those ‘aurochs and angels’, painted in durable pigments for mysterious reasons, might indeed be the most important of them all, and that it ought to be our duty to attempt to fathom them.

In his most famous, much alluded to but little read, work Postmodernism (1991), Fredric Jameson wrote about a nostalgia for the present, which he traces to certain works of American literature of the 1950s:

the misery here is the misery of happiness, or at least contentment (which is in reality complacency) […] the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite program on the sofa-which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn't know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.

This summer has unfortunately been spent visiting people in cities (Glasgow, Munich, Berlin), seeing family, friends, acquaintances, etc. Almost everything felt like an obligation, and I seemed to have begrudged every minute of it, which in retrospect makes me a little ashamed.

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To some extent, this is a companion piece to an earlier essay I wrote called ‘Divine Violence and the End of Pain’ in April for The Mars Review of Books ‘, which is now de-paywalled.

The epilogue to Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) alludes to the aestheticisation of politics as a signal characteristic of fascism. Though not made explicit in this piece, one of his principal targets of criticism was Ernst Jünger, the leading light of the German Conservative Revolution, and for Benjamin a writer who embodied the ‘depraved mysticism’ at the heart of German Fascism. He saw within Junger’s exaltation of war as a spiritual experience of the highest order, remnants of the bourgeois aesthetic tendency of I'art pour l'art, which he vehemently opposed. Yet Benjamin was wrong in his appraisal of Jünger, as he was in much else. And it is clear that Benjamin’s antipathy partly derived from an unacknowledged commonality that transcended political affiliations and loyalties. Both men expressed a fascination with the potency and efficacy of ‘divine violence’ as a revolutionary principle, and were obsessed with how technology might hasten or hinder such a revolution. We find in Jünger’s philosophical writings from the 1930s the same ambivalence towards technological society expressed by Benjamin. In his essay On Pain (1934), Jünger’s insights into the nature of technological anomie in his time sound a prophetic forewarning to the present. The photograph, according to Jünger,

…stands outside of the zone of sensitivity. It has a telescopic quality; one can tell that the event photographed is seen by an insensitive and invulnerable eye. It records the bullet in mid-flight just as easily as it captures a man at the moment an explosion tears him apart.’

The emerging power of technology was for Jünger embodied in the unreality inculcated by the dominance of the photographic image, which functions as an ‘expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing… a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession.’ These insights were informed by his experience in the First World War, the first truly technological war, and one which exterminated almost an entire generation of young men, leaving countless others with both physical and psychological afflictions. As one of the twentieth century’s most faithful disciples of Nietzsche, Jünger actively sought out the conflict and was highly decorated for his service, which provided inspiration for his memoir Storm of Steel (1920). Writing in 1934, he proposed that the coming decades would be determined by men who, having survived the turmoil of that war, could gain spiritual insight and mastery over the physical and psychological ‘pain’ that was its inheritance:

Wherever values can no longer hold their ground, the movement toward pain endures as an astonishing sign of the times; it betrays the negative mark of a metaphysical structure. […] The amount of pain we can endure increases with the progressive objectification of life. It almost seems as if man seeks to create a space where pain can be regarded as an illusion, but in a radically new way.

Jünger portrayed the First World War not as a societal aberration, but as instructive of what was to come out of an increasingly technological society, and it was this analysis that made his writings unique. Yet such arguments were merely speculative, diagnostic as opposed to prescriptive, as his subsequent political trajectory and resistance to Nazism should attest. If a new society was to emerge from the destruction of the First World War, it would require a new type of man. This man should be suited to a future that, through the intervention of technology will become increasingly disembodied, causing him to drift further and further away from the ‘Zone of Sensitivity.’ Jünger would later come to acknowledge after the second catastrophic war of the twentieth century, that it is precisely such disembodied insensitivity which hastens the descent into depravity and moral turpitude.

In the 2012 documentary McCullin, the war photographer Don McCullin provides a moving description of his underlying philosophy, one which set him apart from the obscene and macabre voyeurism that attaches to the field. Unlike Robert Capa, McCullin’s work rarely betrayed a romanticised fascination with war – and it resisted the somewhat academic didacticism of James Nachtwey. McCullin’s first assignment was to cover the brutal civil war between the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus, where he witnessed many atrocities. He entered one house where all of the men in the family had been murdered mere hours before; the bodies had yet to the cleared away, and the blood had been warmed by the midday sun. The women and children of the family were still present, stricken with grief and despair. Among all this chaos and unfathomable misery, he discovered an unexpected dynamic, a silent accord between photographer and subject. Those family members still permitted him to take pictures – often through wordless gestures, sensing the importance of his role as a witness to this atrocity. He noticed too, the first stirrings of a consistent leitmotiv amidst the Goya-esque horror of war – scenes that were captured not in retrospect through some mannered artistic rendering onto the canvas, but in the very moment they occurred.

He would take some of his most iconic images by dropping to his knees, such as the photograph of a woman learning that her husband had been murdered. In moments of such raw, debilitating grief and pain, McCullin noted that people always looked up to the heavens, involuntarily pleading. It was also in Cyprus that he came across a village being evacuated by British peacekeeping forces before an attack, and witnessed a soldier attempting to move along an elderly woman so infirm she had two walking sticks. After taking a single photo, he lay down his camera, picked up the woman, light as a bag of bones, and carried her to safety. Despite the inherent cruelty of the medium in which he worked, McCullin decided that his philosophy was to always be on the side of humanity, of life against death; that his job was not to shun pain, not to see it as merely illusory, but to confront it head-on.

McCullin claimed to be neither a poet nor an artist. Yet his former editor at The Sunday Times remarked that from the first published photos one could already tell that his most valuable asset was a ‘sensitivity,’ a genuine sense of empathy that is impossible to fake. Those photos were of a Teddy boy street gang known as ‘The Guv’nors’, implicated in the murder of a policeman. He had grown up around them in Finsbury Park, and he was able to hold his own in that impoverished, unforgiving and violent environment. As a child he had wanted to be a painter and received a junior arts scholarship to study at a local college, but since his father died when he was fourteen, he was compelled to work. During his national service with the RAF, he learned photography and bought a camera. Though barely able to read due to dyslexia, and lacking much formal education, he was able to nurture his artistic talent through determination. He understood early, and instinctively, that a sensitivity is of paramount importance to any worthwhile artist – and that it ought to be attached to some form of principle beyond oneself, however abstract – which will then serve as a defence against the cruelty and brutality of the world.

McCullin recalled not only the most memorable photos he took, some of which have become the most famous images of war in modern history – but also the ones that he did not. Witnessing a summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong insurgent by a policeman with a handgun on the streets of Saigon, surrounded members of the foreign press corps snapping photos gleefully – he recalled being the only one among them to put his camera down, not wishing to bear witness to a murder. The title given to a collection of his photographs was Hearts of Darkness (1980). The reference to Conrad’s famed novella at first seems rather apt, but on further reflection seems incongruous. What partially redeems that nightmarish tale is the ‘infinite pity’ of Marlowe, which spurs him in the end to protect Kurtz’s betrothed from the painful knowledge of that man’s true depravity. It is a concession to the importance of illusions. Yet the very specific talents of Don McCullin (the confrontation with pain, the necessity of shattering of illusions) stand in stark contrast to the ‘universal’ genius of the malevolent Mr Kurtz. Also driven out to seek his fortune by his ‘comparative poverty’, exposed to enough sordid brutality to drive most men mad, McCullin was able to persevere through loyalty to a simple principle – one that did not require the veneer of eloquence to disguise a fundamental deficiency - or to deflect from the abysmal hollowness at its very core.

McCullin’s personal ethos was inevitably imperfect. He was, by his own admission, addicted to conflict, to putting his life on the line with no good reason and for modest rewards. Like many men before and since, it’s likely that his fine moral sentiments, no doubt genuinely held, obscured that unconscious, irrational masculine drive which often seeks the affirmation of life through proximity to death. He also deliberately strived for objectivity to placate the media gatekeepers of his time, a habit which made his later canonisation into the British establishment quite seamless. Doubtless this was a necessary strategy, one familiar to all working-class upstarts who attempt to transcend the sclerotic class boundaries of Britain. Nevertheless, he believed that if he allowed his work to be political, it would suffer as a result. However, in disavowing the overtly political and self-consciously didactic, by allowing his empathy and sensitivity to lead his work, like all good artists, he was able to stake some claim to the vital domain of moral right.

With the advent of social media and the overwhelming proliferation of images depicting war, suffering and death, the opportunity for expressing a ‘sensitivity’ has almost completely vanished. In 1969, the outrage caused by McCullin’s images of the children caught up in famine amidst the Civil War in Biafra, a conflict that was a legacy of the British Empire and Britain’s postcolonial rear-guard policies, had a galvanising political effect on people around the world. As McCullin noted, he wasn’t entirely sure what he intended his photos to convey ‘except, perhaps, that I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people.’ In the present moment, high-definition images of atrocities are beamed directly to our phones of children in Gaza being bombed, maimed, burned alive and slaughtered with impunity by a rogue ethno-state, which acts not only with the tacit approval of the West, but also with its material support. Yet such images have failed to instil any comparable sense of moral outrage. The most generous explanation is to attribute to this indifference some form of collective fatigue; powerlessness in the face of democratic societies where normative expressions of outrage have negligible efficacy. This explanation deflects from another, which addresses a marked shift in our relation to the aesthetic effect of images of war, and to the very notion of the aesthetic in itself.

I have a friend, more than a decade older than myself, who once wrote for Vice magazine at its inception. I have the feeling that his worldview was highly representative of his generation, and the publication he once wrote for. He had an unshakeable ironic detachment; a purposeful lack of passion towards anything and everything. A highly intelligent man, he affected a deliberate air of anti-intellectualism, of studied ignorance worn as a virtue. His principles, possible to discern only vaguely, seemed to be defined by his faith in a decontextualised notion of counterculture; a vague commitment to an expansive idea of freedom; of speech, expression, thought, assembly, markets. He loved expensive and obscure streetwear brands, Fred Perry polo-shirts, sneakers, the idea of football hooliganism, a lover of ‘street-art’, up-market casual dining restaurants. He was militantly individualistic and politically ‘libertarian.’ What irked him most were ideological grand narratives, particularly those of the left. Underpinning his worldview were two contradictory beliefs. The first was in the irremediable corruption of the political and the capitalist ownership classes. The second was an unshakeable faith in their preferred forms of governance and economic policies. He purported to take nothing seriously, yet his whole being seemed to yearn for something that could command his respect. Vice Magazine was the pre-eminent publication of an erstwhile recuperated counterculture that became mainstream culture. The worldview of Vice is thus imbued with an additional layer of infantile resentment towards that same culture – the culture of the boomer parents. It was a simultaneous faith in the aesthetic value of counterculture, and a rejection of the conditions of hyper-politicisation that produced it. When this peculiar worldview was applied to the field of conflict reporting and images of war, something disturbing began to emerge.

Vice’s conflict documentaries were inspired by the gonzo journalism of a bygone era; ironic detachment was its default mode, as was the rejection of moralising and judgment. Yet it also foregrounded the aesthetic touchstones and leitmotivs most beloved by its audience amid the more prosaic and dull horrors of war and destruction as reported by the mainstream media. Much like the tabloid journalists' preference for plain-speaking and common-sense values against the abstractions of the hated intelligentsia, this new type of conflict journalism sought to make its appeal primarily through a shared sense of the aesthetic and an instinctively ironic – though nonetheless sincere – valorising of the cultural artefact over the human subject.

Despite its superficial emphasis on the aesthetic, the result is not the universal sensitivity championed by photographers like Don McCullin, but rather a form of spectacular and strangely neutral fascination that borders on perversion. The ‘aesthetic’ in this case is far removed from its Kantian associations and is better expressed by what I, and art historian Christos Asomatos, have termed the Ideological Aesthetic. The term describes a state of culture, driven by the alienating forces of technological anomie, where the ideological and the aesthetic become conflated, becoming mutually constitutive and dialectically related. The conditions which produce it are themselves paradoxical: a social field over-saturated by technology and prey to a cumulative hyper-politicisation that eventually results in de-politicisation. Signs of this tendency are everywhere in the contemporary digital culture, evident in the increasingly muddied everyday lexicon of young people for whom the very term ‘aesthetic’ is both noun and adjective. Here, the Ideological Aesthetic shapes the conditions in which the rebel of a recuperated counter-culture thrives. The rebel is the product of an institutionalised oppositionality, whose putative antagonism legitimises the conditions of his freedom, while continually rendering that freedom impotent and inconsequential.

The recent generation of modern conflict reporting platforms on social media that have come in the wake of Vice continue its hackneyed pseudo-gonzo style, but they more fully embrace the denatured forms of the Ideological Aesthetic. This new approach to conflict reporting betrays an even more untethered lust for spectacle, one which delights in the capacity to shock but remains indifferent to the purpose of shocking. There exists an unabashedly fetishistic and almost pornographic relation to the violence of the conflicts covered, which invariably reduce conditions of human suffering to the status of an apathetic spectacle, confirming the viewer’s suspicions of the inherent corruption of the world and his insulation from it. The spectators are mostly young men, conditioned to look to these images merely for confirmation of an already bleak and cynical worldview, provided to them without any account of material conditions and causes, free from judgement, or any semblance of moralising. What is left to the spectator is merely the injunction to observe at a distance, as morbid entertainment. This crude form of ‘war photography’ is eminently worthy of the conceited bourgeois principles that Benjamin abhorred in the ideology of Art for Art’s sake. It was, however, a connection he was unable to identify in his own blind faith in the revolutionary potential of technology and the power of cinema. Theodor Adorno, who read an early draft of Benjamin’s famous essay, immediately saw this lapse:

“The laughter of the audience at a cinema…is anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism.”

The difference between the black and white photography of Don McCullin and the high-definition video and stylised fashion images produced by what I refer to as the New War Photography is clear on the level of formal qualities. Less obvious is the yawning chasm that exists between the palpable sensitivity of the former, and the complete absence of the same in the latter. If McCullin’s was a refusal of an overt didacticism, it imparted lessons nonetheless. At the most visceral level, he inflicted the pain of his subjects upon the viewer. In contrast, the New War Photography has succeeded in accordance with Ernst Jünger’s prediction. Encouraged by the unprecedented objectification of quotidian life by technology, and by way of the Ideological Aesthetic, it has created a nominally radical new space of insensitivity that thrives amidst the blurred distinction between virtuality and actuality. In this new disembodied space, pain can indeed be regarded as an illusion – even as a perversely edifying and gratuitous spectacle. Contra Jünger, this is not in any way a harbinger of revolutionary dynamism but rather of entropy and dissolution. Breaking free of its spell will require us to reject our cruel fascination with the image, and reacquaint ourselves with the humanity that lies behind it.

I suspect that the publicist who sent me the first English translation of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s Gilles (1939), and the translator of the book itself, though going by different names, may be the same person. It amuses me to imagine that the work of this publisher, Tikhanov Library, is driven by the labour of this dedicated, obsessive (slightly mad) individual with multiple personas for different roles, as such a situation would accord with the type of work which they have so far published, and will hopefully continue to publish. Since I am engaged in a similarly thankless and mad publishing endeavour, I appreciate that such passion projects still exist. The introductory essay to this volume is nuanced and informative, and its enigmatic epigram is a quote by the African Marxist revolutionary Thomas Sankara. However, a cursory glance at Tikhanov’s other offerings (H.L Mencken, F.T Marinetti, Harukuichi Shimoi, the memoirs of White Russian aristocrats, et al.) seems to suggest a certain ideological persuasion. I may, of course, be wrong in this appraisal and I’m happy to be corrected. In any case, there is very little that is so politically objectionable to me as to prevent intellectual exchange and dialogue, which most people forget is usually possible right up until the bullets start flying…and in some cases even long after.

Such a dynamic would not have been unfamiliar to a ‘fascist intellectual’ like Drieu la Rochelle, who counted among his close friends Communist artists and provocateurs such as André Breton and Louis Aragon, and the liberal writer and statesman Andre Malraux. The latter remained his friend until Drieu’s last days in occupied Paris, where he would eventually commit suicide days before liberation in the certainty that he would be executed as a collaborator. One of Drieu’s last requests was that Malraux be present at his funeral. Malraux later remarked that ‘Drieu La Rochelle fought for France. Until Death.’ The two men, though on different sides of the political divide, admired one another as intellectuals and ‘men of action’ raised under the unwieldy influence of Nietzsche. They were part of a generation that shared a fervent belief that one must live life fully and strenuously, not shying away from the great upheavals and conflicts that defined their age. Yet if the prose of Malraux survives to this day as a historical curiosity (the work of a liberal ‘man of action’, much admired by the late, great, Robert Silvers, legendary editor of the NYRB), in my opinion, it has limited interest as literature. On the other hand, I believe the work of Drieu la Rochelle speaks more to our present than it did in the decades after his untimely demise. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conspicuously pathological character of his writing, where private anxieties concerning women and sexuality found disturbing, oftentimes lyrical and affecting, expression in his rich fictional work. In many ways an exceptionally talented novelist with a deep knowledge and love of the French literary tradition, as well as an equally knowledgeable proponent of European modernism - it is nevertheless unlikely that Drieu la Rochelle’s reputation will ever escape the taint of his activities as a fascist collaborator.

Over the years, some people have questioned my interest in fascist literature, suspicious of some potential latent ideological tendencies. This is, of course, absurd. My interest is not merely anthropological, however, and is probably better described as a slightly morbid fascination with the aberrant psychology at play. Admittedly at the outset of my research, I mostly sought confirmation of certain biases, which for the most part were easy to locate since much of it is overt and explicit, given that such personalities tend towards the theatrical. What I also found, however, is that when one delves deeper into the damaged psychology behind the literature of fascism, it reveals some things that are more universal to masculinity and its aesthetic expression, evident in writing across the ideological continuum from that period and beyond. An intangible factor, this elemental interiority encompasses both a creative will and a will to self-destruction - something which thrives in proximity to some affirming Élan vital, and yet remains fixated by a palpable death drive.

Elements of this tendency are to be found in the novel Gilles, an evocative, self-referential bildungsroman set mostly in Paris. It recounts episodes from the life of a young man named Gilles Gambier from the First World War until the Spanish Civil War, and is undoubtedly Drieu’s most accomplished novel, ambitious at a scale comparable to modernist classics such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg though never quite attaining their greatness. Jean-Paul Sartre, offering ambivalent praise in a 1948 review, described it as un roman doré at crasseux (a golden and dirty novel), capturing the dual effect of its grand ambition and its sordid historical material.

Drieu intended Gilles to be in the tradition of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869), works that provided French literature with its most memorable portraits of ambitious and deeply flawed young men navigating a world riven by conflict and revolution. Drieu was heavily influenced by visual art and this stimulus comes to the fore in his magnum opus, which takes its title from an enigmatic painting of a Pierrot-like character by the 18^th century painter Antoine Watteau. Drieu seems to have been obsessed with this particular painting, reflecting on it 1941 following the publication of Gilles:

Until 1750, man is substantial, solid, intimately related to himself, filled with a solid joy. I see him painted by Watteau. Gilles is a crucial point of reference for those who love life and eagerly seek its incarnations. He is an important station between the graceful power, the velvety austerity of the figures in Reims and the shrinking bones, the tense nervous fatigue of men depicted at the end of the nineteenth century, the men of the impressionistic and symbolist era, the last and most acute romantics […] In Gilles what vigor and health. A hint of introspection is barely sketched. His faintly mocking, imperceptibly disillusioned smile marks a turn towards the self that has not yet become wicked…The malady of the soul has not yet passed into the body.

These insights, with their longing for a time before the turmoil brought by the Enlightenment and the dual Revolutions, have an obvious analogue in contemporary Neo-reactionary thought. The novel Gilles consists of four parts, roughly chronological, beginning in 1917 before proceeding to 1927, taking in the late twenties and thirties, and ending in 1937. We encounter Gilles at various points; as a young soldier, as a government functionary on the make in the 1920s and as a collaborator of the Surrealists whom he eventually comes into conflict with; as a journalist and political firebrand embracing and proselytizing for the fascist cause in wake of right-wing riots of 1934, and eventually as a volunteer for the Falangists in Spain during the Civil War. Rather than aiming for historical verisimilitude, each of these episodes sought to break with the totalizing linearity of the 19th-century realist tradition, to provide instead a non-synthesizing and impressionistic account. We witness Gilles, the tragic Pierrot-like figure who resembles the author, in different poses and costumes, a figure of a bygone era - a Julian Sorel, a Frederic Moreau – forced to navigate a world seemingly on the cusp of some impending cataclysm, but mired in decadence and entropy.

In my long overdue scholarly work on technology, masculinity and fascist modernism – which has a chapter on Drieu la Rochelle – I contend that if one wishes to truly understand the nuances of the writer’s relation to what I describe as the fascist Ideological Aesthetic, we can do no better than reading his finest and most well-known novel Le Feu Follet (1931). The rather middling American English translation was published in 2023 by NYRB, and for some reason accompanied by a characteristically silly and verbose introduction by the journalist Will Self. I maintain that Gilles, ostensibly an auto-biographical account of Drieu’s embrace of fascism, is too on the nose to provide the requisite illumination into the complex nature of Drieu’s ideological path. It does, however, provide incomparable psychological insight into a certain psychological type overrepresented within the ideology

On paper, Drieu possessed many of the attributes associated with masculine prowess, reflecting men's sense of their desirability to women - a sense that (much like its opposite) often falls short of reflecting reality. He was a decorated war hero, wealthy, socially affable, handsome, refined, an intellectual and an artist. Drieu was nonetheless unable to assuage his pathological feelings of insufficiency up until his suicide. In this sense, as Renee Winegarten noted, he was a highly representative figure of the generation of 1914:

This dandy who frequented the Parisian nightclubs and brothels of the twenties, this perspicacious egoist whose principal subject is himself, this self-loathing and self-destructive nihilist serves as a valuable witness of his age, more revealing in this particular regard, perhaps, than many of his contemporaries of superior talent. Immersed in his epoch, sensitive to local undercurrents, at once troubled and exhilarated by vast new upheavals, he confesses his reactions with an almost bare simplicity, even at times with naiveté.

From his celebrated debut collection of war poetry Interrogation (1917) onwards, it’s clear that the theme of masculinity loomed large in Drieu la Rochelle’s literary imagination. If it was one of his principle themes, however, women were his idée fixe. The title of an early novel L’homme couvert des femmes (The Man Covered in Women) provides a recurring leitmotiv that permeates his fiction. Throughout his oeuvre, Drieu presents for our consideration a variety of protagonists that betray a certain temperamental consistency; the successful womanizer who can’t seem to get beyond a sense of inadequacy with women; the man who compulsively uses women but can never satiate his psychological dependence on them. Women for Drieu are suffocating; objects of intense fixation, and a fascination which often transmutes into hatred.

Drieu seems to have been overly fond of speculating on the effect of his dysfunctional family dynamics on the negative development of his character, enumerating them in his diaries. The relationship with his father seems to have been one of intense hatred, evidenced in Gilles – and his other fictions – by protagonists who are orphans and without paternal attachment. The father - a financially unsuccessful provincial lawyer, reactionary, and philanderer – seems to have styled himself as a stern, sometimes violent, disciplinarian who valued virility and manliness and scorned any perceived weakness in his son. However, he was, above all, mostly absent and indifferent – which I am increasingly convinced is among the worst sins a father can commit.

The absence of the father caused a hatred that was only tempered by the son’s latent desire for approval, which becomes an insatiable need to prove his courage and manliness. The opportunity would come in war, where Drieu led a bayonet charge against a machine gun position at the Battle of Charleroi. The charge was repelled, but having survived this absurd and brutal ordeal he came to regard it as his defining moment, his trial by fire. I’ve noted that the most interesting facet of his recollections is the emphasis on the physicality of this event and its attendant symbolism; the human body facing down the machine, the rebellion of a corporeal subjectivity against the encroaching subjugation of technology. He would remark retrospectively, though not aware of it at the time – that it was at that very moment that he became a fascist. In this particular vein, however, it seems necessary to acknowledge the other sentiments he expressed in a letter around this time:

I called for war because I wanted to die, because I wanted to efface by death the too weak being that I thought I was. Not thinking I could be great by living, by creating, I desired to achieve grandeur at least by a military death, by a public sacrifice. And also I expected the war to fill men with love and devotion and power.

These rather adolescent yet sincere thoughts would, without much modification, later find their way to descriptions of the eponymous hero of Gilles, for whom the masculine realm of war is a welcome reprieve from the domestic realm of women:

For a few moments during the war, he had felt alive, no longer like a plant or an animal that grows and then declines with ravishing inflections, but like a spiritual quiver ready to detach itself, motionless, mysterious and therefore unspeakable. It was in these moments, when he was closest to death, that he secretly felt the most alive. Beyond the agony, an intimate life was calling him. In the trenches, he had had hours of ecstasy; it had taken the most terrible convulsions to wake him up. During his first periods of leave, he had had no desire for women or for Paris. As if in a daze, at his Guardian’s house in Normandy, he would look out at the sea or walk endlessly in the village church, glancing from time to time at the Virgin, Mother of God, at the God who became man to take man by the hand and lead him into the depths of hell. He felt drawn into the divine cycle of creation and redemption. This was his most exquisite beatitude in the trenches: the imperceptible sigh of the eternal within being.

Proximity to death providing a lease on life is something intellectually comprehensible to most men, even in a present that is characterized by technological alienation and anomie. Despite the recent re-emergence of anachronistic and internecine wars of position, ethnic cleansing revenge campaigns, aggressive diplomacy, re-armament, and a marked shift towards bellicose rhetoric among the political class - a culture of psychological, emotional and decadent Safetyism is deeply embedded within the modern subject. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to notice the suppressed hints of a spectacular death drive, an aberrant longing, which we can see in ‘conflict reporting’ social media accounts, popular across the political spectrum, where mostly young men consume fetishized images of war and destruction with the flimsiest of ideological justification or rationalization.

Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of the Todestrieb (Death Drive) departed significantly from Freud, who originally conceived of it as a natural phenomenon; a resonance of biological determinism that instils in every living being the fundamental alterity of the inanimate in relation to itself - as a forewarning of the eventual state to which it will return. In stark contrast, Lacan held the death drive to be cultural rather than wholly natural. For Lacan, every drive is ‘virtually’ a death drive, because each attempts to push beyond the pleasure principle to attain an excess of Jouissance, where enjoyment eventually transmutes into pain, abjection and suffering:

man’s death, long before it is reflected […] in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth.

This is, of course, very familiar territory; the interplay between death and sex, Eros and Thanatos etc. However, anyone who has witnessed a birth first-hand, though awe-inspiring, will understand that it truly warrants the somewhat overused term ‘trauma.’ They will also be forced to accept that it is impossible to speak of the ‘trauma of birth’ without speaking of the influence of the Mother. Without giving too much credence to a lazy taxonomy of psychological types, the biographical elements of the fascist writers I have studied do tend to cohere with a certain rough pattern of neglectful, cruel, and violent fathers - and doting, demure, and indulgent mothers.

The hero of Gilles declares that he can do ‘without’ men, whom he finds easy to hate, but cannot do without adoring and being adored by women. His actions and thoughts, however, demonstrate moments of unbridled hatred, manifested in several instances of covert and overt sexual violence. It is not surprising that in Gilles and elsewhere, Drieu’s protagonists seem to desire older women the most, towards whom they feel a quasi-maternal-filial relationship. Much like his fictional counterparts, Drieu’s reliance on women was among other things also material. The extravagant dandy lifestyle Drieu lived was supported by the rich women he married. A ‘kept man’ for much of his life, scholars and critics have questioned whether much of Drieu’s fascist politics didn’t simply derive from the resentment of a petit bourgeois who felt economically and socially humiliated by women, as an attempt at compensation for the material emasculation he had suffered.

The familial wounds ran much deeper, however. ‘I hated and feared my father’, Drieu wrote in his secret war diaries at the end of his life. But this fear of the father reveals a grudging admiration at his strength and virility, with the brunt of hatred transposed onto the young and beautiful mother. He came to feel that she coddled and overprotected him in childhood, taking him everywhere on her errands, on her visits to friends, keeping him apart from other children she considered vulgar; giving him the ‘life of a pusillanimous and domesticated bourgeois female.’

He would attempt to elaborate on these dissonant feelings towards his mother, who was on the one hand a

…young woman, a pretty maman. I loved her youth, her sex, her perfume, the grace of her tenderness. I loved her flesh as she loved mine. Joined by the same substance, we were not yet distinctly separated. Children ignore the affection, the friendship which is the stuff of the spirit. They are all sensuality […] I loved the kisses of my mother rather than her goodness. I loved to be in her room, near her, breathing in her half-opened wardrobes. I did not knock long before entering her room so that I might surprise her off-guard in her physiognomy and posture.

These distinctly Oedipal, though by no means uncommon, recollections later become something darker and more condemnatory when the love of the mother is given to fall short; variously neglectful, inconsistent, insufficient – and we suspect simply not enough because it can never hope to wholly compensate for the hated (though intensely desired) paternal presence and attention. Admiration thus mutates into hatred:

My mother did not do enough for me to love her…I love what I admire. My mother might have been able to attain a certain grandeur by rigorously sacrificing herself. But she regretted the most paltry things…Her face was puffy from heavy crying and I lose my way in the depths of disgust when I think that without her unhappiness she would have been trivial…She chose the path of renunciation rather out of social responsibility than out of fear of God.

Drieu hated his mother because she suffered the cruelties of his father in silence. Such clear irrationality should inform us of a certain masculine psychopathology - the resentment, hatred and disgust of weakness in others in lieu of self-hatred, which is usually not far from the surface either. Despite accomplishing acts of physical bravery, courage, and heroism – a man can still betray spiritual cowardice through a deficient attitude to weakness.

Louis Ferdinand Céline, also a writer with a disreputable political trajectory, also similarly affected by a violent yet ultimately indifferent father – provided an uncomfortable fictional insight into the hatred of feminine (motherly) weakness that often results from this pathological dynamic. Convalescent after being wounded in battle, the mother of Ferdinand Bardamu, the protagonist of Voyage au bout de la nuit, comes to visit him in hospital. She is visibly, and he feels rather extravagantly, distraught at her son’s wounded condition:

She was glad to see me again and whimpered like a bitch whose puppy has been given back to her. She thought she was doing me a lot of good by kissing me, but was miles behind the bitch, because she believed what they said when they took me away from her. A dog only believes what it can smell.

The genius of Céline lies in his ability to succinctly express psychological complexity through demotic speech and ‘vulgarity’, in a manner that evoked the tradition of Rabelais. The above also relates to the ‘trauma’ of birth, of the young man removed from the safety of the maternal embrace and sent off to war, just as the infant was once removed from the safety of the mother’s womb and thrust involuntarily into the world, and eventually charged with the task of prolonging his own life long enough to ‘succeed’ in the struggle for existence - which he is, in the end, fated to lose nonetheless in death. Without the ability to physically ‘grow’ life, unable to regard his role in creation in anything other than abstract terms – the fixation with death remains throughout, difficult to surmount completely.

For C.G Jung, the figure of the masculine hero is an expression of the ‘libido’, an integral part of the ego which should be understood not only as sexual desire, but more properly as a psychological ‘purpose.’ The individual ego desires to replace a dependency upon the unconscious with some form of autonomous direction, but to do so he must struggle against, and come into harmony with, the figure of Mother – who represents the chaotic and imaginary realm of the unconscious. In examining the perennial images of this struggle in mythology, Jung was emphatic about the need for a man to attain ‘deliverance’ from the mother. The actual person of the mother pales in significance to what she represents. Jung was clear on the consequences of an inability to attain deliverance:

The forward striving libido which rules the conscious mind of the son demands separation from the mother, but his childish longing for her prevents this by setting up a psychic resistance that manifests itself in all kinds of neurotic fears- that is to say, in a general fear of life. The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious cycle is formed: fear of life and people cause more shrinking back, and this in turns leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother.” […] The son will naturally try to explain everything by the wrong attitude of the mother, but he would do better to refrain from all such attempts to excuse his own ineptitude…

Indeed despite all of the rarefied intellectualism and blustering pronouncements, in the person of Drieu la Rochelle we see that the fascist persona’s adoration of force, the fixation with virility and strength, the profound disgust at weakness, when rooted in a personal sense of lack, amounts to a distinctly passive psychological state. Francois Mauriac described this tendency in Drieu as the ‘crime of female natures.’

In the literature of fascism, the metaphor of the Crowd plays an equivocal role, simultaneously attractive and repellent. On the one hand, the Crowd is a symbol par excellence of the individual Will subordinated to the collective; the mannerbund, the marauding mob dispensing justice; Vox Populi, Vox Dei - the single branch that becomes unbreakable when bundled into the Fasces – the weapon carried by Roman magistrates that provides the ideology with its etymological origin. It is, however, also something else, something less desirable. As Wyndham Lewis suggested in 1914 - the role of the media in modern societies is to keep men in crowds, thereby ‘enslaving them to the feminine entity of their meaningless numbers.’ The same observation was reflected by Drieu in 1933:

When there is a dictator it is because there is no élite, it is because the élite is no longer doing its duty…you have not done anything against misery and boredom, so all that remained was the crowd, the female crowd. And it searched for a male.

The above quote seems to capture well the dichotomy inherent to this aberrant psychology. An uneasy self-image as belonging to an ‘elite’ sits alongside another – perhaps more unconscious – of oneself as a passive member of ‘the crowd’, unable to assume one’s masculine duty, waiting to be dictated to by a Paternal authority. As ever, the significance of the Nom du Pére is more profoundly felt by his absence. Such a temperament also signals a fundamental infantilism and feebleness, an inability to manfully bear struggle and adversity - a disavowal and refusal of the masculine principle of action, of self-making, which the subject purports to hold dear. Robert Soucy perceptively recognized this characteristic within the various contradictions of Drieu La Rochelle:

[he]…regarded himself as a victim rather than the bearer of decadence, as an object that was acted upon rather than a subject responsible for his own actions – as if he were still a child dominated by adults, too weak to assert any will of his own. In not assuming the responsibility for his own weakness, he remained a child all his life, a dependent personality. In Drieu’s eyes, his parents were to blame, women were to blame, France was to blame, liberalism was to blame – but not himself, not really.

When one recognizes this pattern, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere in the present moment, particularly within the dynamics of tedious and ever-evolving culture wars fueled by grievance and ressentiment. Particularly apposite to this is the concept of the ‘Longhouse’ popular among the heterogeneous collection of aggrieved personalities that constitute the online ‘Right.’ The term invokes the communal hall that served as the focal point of settled agrarian societies. Within this domestic sphere, an effective matriarchy ruled as a consequence of abandoning the masculine principles of violence and aggression common to warrior societies in exchange for safety and security. According to Jonathan Keeperman, publisher of Passage Press, the Longhouse ‘is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary’

It is my understanding that Keeperman himself for a long time hid behind a pseudonym and online avatar for fear of reprisal, and to protect his employment as a university lecturer in expository writing (his writing, and thinking, appears to bear the mark of that distinctly American cultural imprimatur). This seems to be a consistent pattern within the online vitalist ‘Right’, who purport to valorize masculine Virtu but can’t seem to surmount the Safetyism of online anonymity, which they cling to as petulantly as they presumably did to their mothers’ skirts. For these men, beyond being the focal point of their ressentiment, the ‘Longhouse’ is a cause of great dread and anxiety - an almost fetishistic disquiet. To be “cancelled”, Keeperman rather ambivalently posits with dread bordering on exhilaration ‘is to feel the whip of the Longhouse.’ For Keeperman, the devouring maternal dominion of the Longhouse is the fons et origo of all the ailments in contemporary society, a powerful thing to fear:

The implications of the Longhouse reach yet further across the social landscape. The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist. When Marc Andreesen declares that it is time to build, he must understand that the recognition of merit and willingness to assume risk that such building depends on cannot be achieved under Longhouse rule.

He appears to be somewhat confused in his aetiology, mistaking symptom with cause. The function of Safetyism as a constraint upon contemporary masculinity serves a distinct purpose. Like much else within the culture war – it exists merely to distract and deflect from the increasingly brazen peculation of the public purse enacted by the political class; much like the championing of superficial diversity and inclusion perpetuates the appearance of benevolence and largesse, while it insulates the dominance of the economic order and its profligate and perverse logic. After all, the primary aim of the sham existence perpetrated by social media and the Nerd plutocracy, as made explicit by ideologues such as Peter Thiel, is the curbing of political and revolutionary violence (‘Divine Violence’) which has historically proved the most efficacious means for fundamentally re-making society.

As with Drieu la Rochelle, what we can observe in the pronouncements of the online ‘Right’ who decry the Longhouse, beyond their admiration of superficial strength and assertive will, is an admission of being dependent personalities, passive victims of psychological conditioning imposed upon them, thereby providing a retroactive excuse for their deficiencies, and rendering them incapable of giving a plausible account of the true nature of the problem, let alone of themselves. In acknowledging the ‘rule’ of the Longhouse, one tacitly admits a proclivity (and willingness) to being ruled.1

The Longhouse metaphor itself is not without interest, but Keeperman and others seem to be mistaken as to its actual significance. If there has been a feminization of the social field that has resulted in Safetyism, it is merely a symptom of a much wider transformation – the supremacy of material and mercantile principles over intangible metaphysical ones. These principles were, after all, the economic reasons why the Longhouse came into existence, as humans emerged from the forests into clearings, as harmony with nature gradually became a dependence upon culture. Much like the ‘death drive’, this transition instils within the subject a sense of his atavistic alterity; not only to death, but to the very principles of a civilization made possible only through repression and sublimation.

The primordial myth of this first, and perhaps most poignant loss, was to my mind best evoked in Akira Kurosawa’s magisterial Seven Samurai, perhaps one of the greatest films of all time. In 16th Century Japan, a motley band of impoverished Rōnin are hired by a village of farmers to protect them from marauding bandits who plan to raid their harvest. The samurai ultimately succeed in repelling the bandits, but the majority of them are killed in battle. At the film’s close their stoic leader, watching the jubilant peasants harvesting their crops and shunning the samurai, looks to the graves of his fallen comrades and reflects that they have lost the battle too, since the victory, and thus the future, will belong to the farmers.

Like all good parables, the message is ambiguous. Those best suited to defend society because of their capacity for violence and loyalty to abstract principles will - almost by necessity - eventually be shunned by those they have protected when a society is at peace. This should not in any way affect the duty of the strong towards the weak, even if as a consequence, the higher metaphysical principles of nobility and honour are replaced by others less venerable and exalted. To decry that such societies fail to recognise one’s merit (if such merit does exist) is a failure to apprehend that the perennial lesson of honour and masculine virtue has always been the injunction to perform one’s duty, and one’s work, for itself without expectation of dues and rewards. The situation of peace may not itself last, and may eventually lead to stagnation, corruption and decadence - but as long as it does last, this is the price that must be paid for civilization.

A suspicion towards ‘Grand Narratives’ was inculcated, and has to a large extent been naturalised, by the Millennial generation heretofore resigned to the novelties of the meta-narrative as the highest form of creative subjectivity. Such narratives have, in turn, become somewhat stale. The Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, despite describing the realist novel as a ‘Bourgeois Epic’ - was thoroughly convinced of their political value. In Lukacs’s view, the novel served the Bourgeoisie well in their revolution against the Aristocracy. Lukacs wished for a Socialist Realist tradition to match those of the great bourgeois realist novelists such as Balzac, Zola, Dickens et al. For Lukacs, this was necessary antidote to the bourgeois ‘decadence’ of modernism, exemplified for him by the work of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, where ‘subjectivism’ and ‘irrationalism’, dominated:

This tendency gradually turns the novel into an aggregate of snapshots from the inner life of a person and leads in the end to the complete decomposition of any content and any form in the novel

Such conclusions were wholly rejected by the likes of Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno - who wished to defend the revolutionary vitality of the avant-garde, and form as a disruptive revolutionary potentiality. Indeed, the faults of Lukacs’s somewhat reactionary aestheticism was perhaps best summarised by the late Fredric Jameson:

What is really wrong with Lukacs’s analyses is not too frequent and facile a reference to social class, but rather too incomplete and intermittent a sense of the relationship of class to ideology. A case in point is one of the more notorious of Lukács’s basic concepts, that of ‘decadence’ – which he often associates with fascism, but even more persistently with modern art and literature in general. The concept of decadence is the equivalent in the aesthetic realm of that of ‘false consciousness’ in the domain of traditional ideological analysis. Both suffer from the same defect – the common presupposition that in the world of culture and society such a thing as pure error is possible.

It might well be claimed by many that this fundamental critique of Lukacs is what motivated the recuperation of meta-narrative subjectivity, in literature as well as in wider culture expression. And yet, since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of a technocratic Hyper-Capitalist China, we are a whole generation removed from ‘real existing Socialism’ and its aesthetic prescriptions. There is now in contemporary literature an unmistkable strain of the decadent bourgeois subjectivism which Lukacs warned about…a strain more potent for the fact that it is so banal, so stale, trite and formally uninteresting, and so far removed from the vital genius of the modernist writers who’s place in the bureaucratic ‘canon’ is assured, that it has in turn prompted a noticeable reaction against it.

Glass Century is an ambitious work which I think forms part of that, and it is quite far from ‘decadent. It’s very much in the tradition that Lukacs grudgingly admired, and its appearance should be of critical interest, at the very least for the fact that there are millenial writers capable enough of writing plausible and compelling social novels that give account of the familial, social and ideological forces that have shaped their generation…but for much more besides.

In this episode we discuss some of his influences, including the work of American master John Doss Passos - and his landmark novel The Manhatten Transfer, how his day-job as a political reporter, and his personal and professional engagement with the history of New York, informed the writing of his novel.

Glass Century will be published on the 6th of May 2025.

Pre-order Now.

On reflection, I’m grateful to have done the majority of my shagging when I was completely skint. I believe it taught me several valuable lessons, though it’s difficult to say what they are exactly. Perhaps that attraction in its most authentic and essential form is inherently atavistic and far removed from other material factors, which are taught to be quite important. I sense that it’s a lesson somewhat alien to younger men who have come of age as digital natives; those whose adolescence and maturation have occurred wholly under the relentless gaze of the digital panopticon, and whose relations, sexual and otherwise, are mediated by the banal technocratic logic of Semio-corporations.

Many have seemingly grown accustomed to viewing themselves, and others, as composed entirely of a set of attributes (or ‘data’ points) both physical and mental, negative and positive. Such a view either takes the form of a drive towards optimization, usually taking the form of a tendency towards homogenization that accords with prevailing trends - or a descent into extreme states of solipsistic despair at what one seemingly lacks. Even the vibrant and variegated forms of youthful counter-culture, which once offered a sense of refuge and respite from normative expectations, seem to exist now merely as costumes which one may adopt or discard at will, assuming characteristics, mores, and behaviours in place of any organic personal investment in them.

In his essay, Anthony Galuzzo draws all of the necessary connections between the affective, political and material conditions of what seems, at first, to be a very contemporary problem - but which has a history that pre-dates the technological present. I need not reproduce his nuanced essay in full, but I hope that he will forgive my quoting from some of his sources. In particular, I was very taken with his engagement with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, an acolyte of Rene Girard, and his 2007 article on the ethics of nanotechnology.

Depuy writes of the significance of the Greek myth of Amphityron, whose wife Zeus unsuccessfully attempts to seduce by transforming himself into a perfect simulation of her husband. However, he is ultimately rejected by her as an imposter:

When one loves somebody, one does not love a list of characteristics, even were it to be sufficiently exhaustive to distinguish the person in question from everyone else. The most perfect simulation still fails to capture something, and it is this ‘something’ which is the essence of love, that poor word that says everything and explains nothing.

On a less profound level than Love (on which I prefer to say as little as possible), the intangible dimensions of attraction seem similarly to be misunderstood in the contemporary moment. Galluzzo has imbued his wonderful essay with some recent personal experiences of contemporary dating. His reflections prompted me to think back to my own, limited and earlier, experience with the same.

Memories of romantic encounters in my early twenties are no doubt idealised and somewhat vague, and it is perhaps this unknown quality that elicits nostalgia. For much of my younger years, I had a basic ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phone and never often sent texts. Any text I sent served some practical purpose, a prelude to some physical meeting or interaction. Everyone would go out, and that’s where one would inevitably meet women. When those interactions progressed they sometimes involved little talking at all – which is not to say that they lacked communication, which, after all, is only 45% verbal - of which only 7% consists of actual words and speech.

This rather idyllic youthful situation came to an end when I found myself single again in my mid-twenties, which coincided with coming off anti-depressants after many years and what seemed like some sort of turning point, a wider cultural retreat. All of these factors contributed to a hazy sensation of having been unpleasantly awoken to a bizarre new reality. I soon discovered that I was completely unaware of what my particular ‘attributes’ were, at a time when they mattered more than ever. In truth, I had no idea what it was that made me attractive to some women (it’s always best not to know, in my opinion). It had never been quite enough to instil unassailable confidence, but just enough to initially convince me that it always would be easier than it often became. Undoubtedly much of the previous ease can be attributed to youth, circumstance and proximity. However, it would be a mistake to presume that this gives a full account of the nature of the problem, which is that attraction, like communication, is comprised of much more than mere perception.

I think I once saw Scarlett Johansson in a bar in Glasgow around the time she was filming Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (I was very drunk, so it’s difficult to be sure). The film Lost in Translation came out when I was 17 years old, and I saw it in the cinema. I realise now that the soundtrack to that film, which a friend gifted to me on CD, has had an almost subliminal influence on my tastes and sensibilities. I remember listening it to on repeat a lot in my first year of University when suffering from insomnia, and it was often still playing when I woke up. I lived in Tokyo for three years and found it to be one of the only cities that was almost exactly like how it was depicted in films. The film I mostly had in mind, I think, was that one. Whenever I walked around the striking neon landscape of Shinjuku, it was often the bands which appeared on that soundtrack in my head. I would often take the three stops from our apartment on the Seibu-Shinjuku on a balmy evening and just walk around listening to this music on repeat. The Japanese always seemed to me a temperamentally melancholy sort, and they designed their built environment with this in mind - so even the experience of being depressed always had an almost pleasant poetic quality in Tokyo. (I will write more about Japan soon since I have been back for two years now).

Like many men my age, I was completely infatuated with Scarlett Johansson in that film. For me, I believe it was the contrast between her velvety, deep, somewhat gravelly voice and her diminutive figure; her slightly awkward but charming expressions, her plump sensuous lips, and her soft delicate curves. But when someone pointed her out to me that night, I had to do a double-take. Even dressed in non-descript clothes and without make-up, a single glance was enough to assure anyone that she was – objectively– a very beautiful woman. Yet I was struck by how little attraction I felt seeing her in the flesh, and how indifferent her presence left me. The distinction, of course, is between image and reality, representation and reflection; virtuality and actuality.

A friend gave me a smartphone when I went to NYC in 2013 for a few months. I had no idea what to use it for except the maps function, which was admittedly quite useful. I also used it to download the Tinder app, which everybody kept talking about. The first time I used it, I was transfixed and found myself swiping for several hours while lying in bed in an un-air-conditioned sublet room in Bushwick, during an almost unbearably hot summer. I have no idea if this is still the case, but in my limited experience, it always seemed much easier to meet women in New York than anywhere I’ve ever been. There seemed to be so many of them around. I didn’t quite understand the need for an app. The app, however, magnified the existing dynamic significantly. I was confronted by an endless parade of seemingly attractive and cool women who had tastes, predilections, and opinions which seemed as carefully curated as their photographic images. It was thrilling and addictive in equal measure. I recall that it was around this time that I began to hear the word curation in everyday conversation, a word I had previously heard infrequently - if at all. Matthew Gasda recently wrote:

Curation replaces creation a mode of self-expression. If you’re more invested in curating your image than in your own artistic potential, then it’s an act of narcissism rather than art. In many senses, curators are failed artists.

I believe Gasda is also speaking here of ‘art’ in the perennial sense, a universal conception of ‘art’ as equivalent to one’s mode of existence, an obligation and pre-requisite for an individual to exist within any given society. Those who have not chosen to withdraw from society, ought to be artists in some sense. Ananda K. Coomerswamy frames it well:

Primitive man, despite the pressure of his struggle for existence, knew nothing of merely functional arts. The whole man is naturally a metaphysician, and only later a philosopher and psychologist, a systematist. His reasoning is by analogy, or in other words by means of an ‘adequate symbolism.’ As a man rather than an animal he knows immortal things through mortal things.

Although unable to articulate it at the time, despite its novelty there seemed something not quite mortal in that experience, indeed something quite diabolical, and thus something distinctly Art-less, which attached to the whole process. A similar feeling, a mere echo back then, is now instilled by anything which has the tinge of AI ‘machine filth.’1 When I went on dates with some of these women, I couldn’t quite shake the sense that they were women whom I would never have interacted with ordinarily, aside from a passing glance or fleeting impression whilst out and about. There seemed, at first, something poignant about this - after all, what isn’t exciting about the idea of a seamless movement outwards to the world, of never regretting some missed opportunity or connection? However, beyond the novelty of these meetings taking place at all, there was a disquiet; a feeling that there was something markedly uncanny in them.

I’m certainly not the first to note that the particular appeal of these apps is in the dichotomy they create; a simultaneous sense of plenitude and scarcity which drives the compulsive behaviour few are immune to, and which seems to have the effect of flattening what ought to be one of the most intense of human experiences, to a state of indifferent anhedonia. Their popularity speaks to an innate desire within the modern subject to approximate the idealised relations of a bygone era, but with all possibilities of risk and emotional turmoil disavowed. The risk of rejection at the hands of the desired Other, perhaps the most injurious to one’s sense of self, can be negated by the fact that one’s investment in them was merely transitory and essentially meaningless in the first place - since they are, in fact, not a real person at all, completely disembodied; ‘alive’ only in the speculative sense. Indeed, even when those encounters were successful, I always found them permeated by that same unreality, as if unable to break free from their spectacular origins, which brought a chimeric and monstrous quality to them. They seemed, in short, to not just be tempting fate, but to be taunting it.

Many of those women had physical ‘attributes’ that I thought I found attractive, and yet I recall there being little attraction. On one level the problem seemed to be one of interpretation, aesthetic in the original sense as being related to perception. I had perceived ‘something’ within their idealised virtual image that was not there; a certain gesture, a subtle reading of the eyes, or my interpretation of a scenario from their lives they had presented or implied that did not seem to cohere with actuality. I was always wrong about them and thus also about my sense of what I desired – which didn’t account for both its first, and second, order manifestations. Such a realisation is always perturbing, to say the least.

Based only on limited visual criteria, I had rather carelessly attempted to construct a highly subjective interpretation, to overlay and attribute meaning using only the crudest of semiotic fragments. In any other scenario, such thinking would never be accepted. Seeking out only attributes can only lead to disappointment since attributes alone cannot hope to fathom the imperceptible and intangible ‘something’ of attraction.

Many persist, nonetheless, since they feel they have little choice. This is, of course, not the case. The need to reduce the most difficult aspects of human existence to a facile transactional dynamic, free from risk and pollution, constitutes a very palpable collective psychopathology which, as Galuzzo notes, is apparent across the political spectrum.

I’m told that some have even begun to feel nostalgic for that first iteration of Tinder before there appeared to be some huge modification to the mechanics of the algorithm as its popularity grew. Indeed, my subsequent experiences never quite matched that initial unwieldy and disquieting couple of months in 2013. The last time I used it, very briefly, was almost a decade ago. Perhaps much has changed in the intervening period, no doubt for the worse.

I’ve spent the past five years collecting material in archives, editing, annotating, and writing an afterword for Left Wings Over Europe, a volume of The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis, finally published by Oxford University Press at the end of February. Lewis was one of the most prolific and significant artists, writers, and intellectuals of English High Modernism. Once described as a ‘one-man Frankfurt School’, his work has fallen by the wayside since he died in the late 50s, no doubt because of his ill-fated political entanglements with, and support for, fascism in the 1930s.

The process of editing was, at times, very difficult and tedious, but it taught me a great deal in retrospect. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to engage in this type of literary scholarship, essentially an act of faith - one dedicated to the preservation and curation of literary history, and in the service of a future generation of readers that is far from guaranteed. If you’d like to order the book for your University Library or institution, or if you would like to request a review copy, then please do get in touch with me or fill in this form. Below is an essay which takes in some themes explored in this work and Lewis’s other artistic, philosophical and political output from the 1930s. The themes will seem very timely in light of recent events.

Composed hastily and with little foresight as to its potential consequences, Left Wings Over Europe was published in 1936. The book is one of three works of political invective written by Wyndham Lewis against the international order of the western powers, the Soviet Union, and sympathetic towards the fascist regimes in Italy and Nazi Germany. Lewis’s interest in political writing emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, where he had served as an artillery officer and official war artist. He would come to see the war as a completely senseless conflict from which he was lucky to have emerged alive, and one which took the lives of many of his friends. For Lewis, this first technological war portended a new world, one that would be determined by inhuman technologies now capable of transforming the very category of nature.

The eight-mile wide belt of desert across France will be a green, methodic countryside in five years’ time. The harsh dream that the soldier has dreamed - the barbaric nightmare - will be effaced by some sort of cosy sun tinting the edges of decorous lives. At Austerlitz the trees waved pleasantly all through the carnage with Schilleresque oscilliations; the earth at Eylau could not have had many wounds to show […] Ypres and Vimy, on the other hand, were deliberately invented scenes, daily improved on and worked at by up-to-date machines, to stage war. There is, or was, no trace in one of the valleys before Ypres except of this agency.

Motivated by this experience, all of his subsequent non-fictional works were in some sense ‘anti-war’, and Left Wings is no exception - and alongside notable works of the period, it offers a valuable insight into the motivations of an antagonistic modernist writer, artist and thinker of unparalleled originality. For Lewis, any critique of the British liberal establishment’s ‘Left-Wingism’ was inseparable from the cultural establishment’s comparable tendencies, with his longstanding conflict with the writers and artists of Bloomsbury not far from the surface of these accounts. We are also able to witness the decidedly holistic view Lewis had of the world - always viewed through the rubric of aesthetic principles - and the extraordinary breadth of his intellectual interests.

Much like 1931’s Hitler, one of the first English language accounts of the Nazi phenomenon written two years before Hitler’s election in 1933, Lewis’s overwhelming and visceral opposition to war led him to overlook the central elements of the Nazi ideology - its virulent antisemitism and its insatiable appetite for conquest - and to accept at face-value the Nazis’ supposed desire for self-determination and peaceful co-existence. All of these works will leave an indelible mark upon Lewis’s substantial artistic and intellectual legacy—a fact which he himself would acknowledge in his second autobiography, Rude Assignment (1950).

Nevertheless, the experience of writing those political books allowed Lewis to determine the coordinates of his future political thinking, which in the final analysis departed significantly from fascism – as borne out by two works published in 1939 that recounted his previous positions, and later works such as Anglosaxony (1941), and America and Cosmic Man (1946) where Lewis embraces and promotes the post-WWII liberal democratic consensus. Towards the end of his life, afflicted by ill-health and blindness, Lewis would come to embrace the principles of a Catholic universalist theology (though never formally converting). Upon his death, it was discovered that Lewis had an enormous cerebral tumour on his pituatory gland, the suspected cause of his later blindness - but in retrospect perhaps also the cause of a very palpable split personality noted by contemporaries; possessed of an endearingly affable, humourous and helpful nature on the one hand - and a sometimes violent, paranoid and illogically oppositional rage on the other.

Left Wings covers in significant detail the political and diplomatic atmosphere of the mid to late 1930s. It begins by analysing and describing the stratification of British political life in particular and western European democracies in general; the role of mass media in provoking, shaping, and forming public opinion, and the conflicting motivations and interests that were preparing the way for another major conflict. The rapidly shifting role of the press comes in for particular scrutiny. Lewis uses Lord James Bryce’s book Modern Democracies (1921) to analyse how newspapers had begun to possess a degree of political power unmatched through history. Newspapers, Bryce maintained, have not only made democracy possible but are themselves democracy, i.e. an ideological state apparatus that intended to provide only the illusion of discourse and plurality, whilst concealing the true machinations of power - and possessing the ability to sway and form opinion in favour of the powerful.

The overarching impetus for this book came from Lewis’s vigorous opposition to the prospect of another European war. The work was written in response to fast-moving political and diplomatic crises, and though composed and published quickly, events overtook Lewis’s analysis of them. The first half of the decade witnessed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Adolf Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933, and the gradual disentangling of the various restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Two events in particular provided Lewis with the motivation for writing Left Wings; the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and German remilitarization of the Rhineland.

In supporting Germany’s right to defend its borders and to have unfettered access to one of its most productive industrial regions, Lewis was in accord with many others across the British political establishment and press who had come to regard the Treaty of Versailles as grossly unfair. The main thrust of Lewis’s argument focuses on what he believed to be the reasons behind what was, in his view, a self-defeating British foreign policy; a left-wing orthodoxy that spanned the world of letters, journalism, and politics superficially motivated by an abstract philosophy of ‘uplift’, which ultimately had the goal of making the world ‘safe for communism.’ As D.G Bridson noted, for Lewis, ‘everybody was Left-wing who did not happen to see eye to eye with himself. That which was not avowedly classical was necessarily romantic: all who were not wholeheartedly with him were against him.’[ii]

The scholarship surrounding both Lewis and his close friend and erstwhile collaborator Ezra Pound suffers from a persistent and curious inversion of focus; Lewis’s involvement with fascism tends to be overstated, whereas Pound’s is understated. It is well to note that only the latter materially contributed to the cause of a fascist state and was tried for treason after the Second World War. There are several possible explanations for this curious disparity, but it is sufficient for our purposes to focus on one: with Lewis it is possible to trace the dynamics of his political transformation almost step-by-step. The effect of such an exhaustive intellectual record is subtle but powerful. It provides an unprecedented insight into how a writer and artist, with no recourse to claims of mental incompetence, rationalized a tacit support for one of the most destructive ideologies in modern history.

This inevitably creates a discomfort related to the study of fascism in general, one which derives from a tendency to completely mystify the ideology by imbuing it with a certain exceptionalism and aberration free from material, historical, and ideological determination. This tendency obfuscates the fact that for many, Lewis among them, support for fascism was a political commitment primarily motivated by pragmatism. The most salient observation in Fredric Jameson’s noted study Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979) is in its description of how Lewis makes ‘himself the impersonal registering apparatus for forces which he means to record, beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all of their primal ugliness’.^[iv]

Indeed Lewis’s reputation has suffered as much from his belligerent and antagonistic personality as from his ephemeral political opinions. The Lewisian oeuvre in its totality amply demonstrates the difficulties of giving expression to a multifaceted system of thought through an instinctively contrarian and volatile public persona. With its litany of opportunities missed and acrimoniously squandered; patrons, supporters, friends, and lovers insulted and cast aside; its multitude of libel cases and petty squabbles—Lewis’s biography demonstrates how work alone, even work of considerable genius, is insufficient to sustain a legacy in and of itself. One also requires a certain amount of reciprocal goodwill for genius to shine through the miasma of history. Yet Lewis, to his clear detriment, was temperamentally incapable of pandering to a cultural establishment he deemed irremediably dishonest and nepotistic. In Left Wings, Lewis’s belligerence and anti-establishment hostility is at the very forefront, albeit transposed onto the political establishment as an appendage of, and a proxy for, the cultural. In this work, as elsewhere, seemingly straightforward opinions and ideas are, upon closer examination, more intricate than they first appear.

In common with many men of his generation, the war left an indelible psychological impression on Lewis. Before the war, Lewis’s interest in the political was ancillary to his artistic practice and his aesthetic philosophy. As the progenitor and main ideologue behind Vorticism, the principal British avant-garde movement of that period, he was one of very few artistic provocateurs within a decidedly staid and overwhelmingly bourgeois artistic milieu. This privileged and bourgeois bohemian tendency within the British art world was embodied for Lewis by the critic Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers. After briefly joining Fry’s Omega workshop in 1913, Lewis acrimoniously left after a quarrel over a commission and subsequently set up the Rebel Art Centre with Kate Lechmere in 1914, shortly followed by the publication of the first issue of Blast.

This publication would provide the basis for the Vorticist group, which also included Pound, Edward Wadsworth, Henri Gaudier-Breszka, Helen Saunders, and Jessica Dismorr. The group’s activities, which brought Lewis a great deal of attention and admiration, were cut short by the onset of war. Lewis served as an artillery officer in the trenches for most of 1917, then as an official war artist for the remainder of the war. Some of Lewis’s collaborators and friends, such as Gaudier-Breszka and T. E. Hulme, were killed. In his first autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering, published a year after Left Wings, there are some telling insights into Lewis’s mentality in the post-war years. Recalling his war service, he bitterly recounts how:

The ‘Bloomsburies’ were all doing war-work of ‘National importance’, down in some downy English county, under the wings of powerful pacifist friends; pruning trees, planting gooseberry bushes, and haymaking, doubtless in large sunbonnets. One at least of them, I will not name him, was disgustingly robust. All were of military age. All would have looked well in uniform.

Holding court among fellow artists and conspirators at the Vienna Café on New Oxford Road or at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant on Percy St., Lewis once hoped that they would be the ones to head some future regeneration of European culture. This hope was dashed by the chaos and destruction of war, which brought with it a realization that the sclerotic English class system would always coddle and protect its wealthy elites, even despite their purportedly ‘radical’ and progressive political views. They ‘had money and we hadn’t’, Lewis remarked, ‘ultimately it was to keep them fat and prosperous—or thin and prosperous, which is even worse—that other people were to risk their skins’ (BB: 183). The ‘ambitious and jealous cabal’ of Bloomsbury had made the artistic and literary worlds of England into ‘the afternoon tea-party of a perverse spinster’ (BB: 279). ‘But one cannot choose one’s Government’, Lewis concluded, ‘And we have been governed, in matters of taste, by “Bloomsbury” aesthete-politicians for the two decades and a half that have elapsed since then, especially in the post-war’ (BB: 279).

Such statements are indicative of the profound ressentiment that Lewis held onto long after the war ended. With his promising artistic career interrupted, interest in his work declined significantly, and he often found himself in impecunious circumstances. Conversely, the Bloomsbury group—many of whom already possessed substantial familial wealth—appeared to thrive culturally and materially. Furthermore, it appeared to Lewis as if all of the institutions of the British cultural establishment aided and abetted their cause. Lewis’s suspicion of what he believed was the inherent ‘left-wingism’ of British society can be said to originate partly in his antipathy towards the Bloomsbury set and what he perceived to be their politics. This antipathy was initially aesthetic—as many of Lewis’s opinions were—but soon became ideological. On 3 February 1925, Lewis completed the manuscript for a sprawling and ambitious work he wished to publish as The Man of the World. Rejected for publication in its entirety, it was eventually broken up into separate parts, expanded in places, and published over several years. Among these publications was The Art of Being Ruled, which was published by Chatto & Windus in 1926. For Lewis, its publication signalled the moment when ‘politics began for me in earnest’ (BB: 303).

The abstract political and philosophical thinking advanced by Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled is to some extent removed from the more pragmatic motivations behind Left Wings over Europe. Nevertheless, an understanding of the former is essential to contextualizing the latter. The Art of Being Ruled is a multifaceted work which, in common with some of Lewis’s other non-fictional writing, includes a great deal of lively but mercurial analysis which renders some of his various arguments indeterminate. There is, however, a peculiar logic to this approach. The work is a response to the various destabilizing and alienating forces unleashed by the war. As such, it seems to replicate in form and content the overwhelming multiplicity of this disorientating array of phenomena. In his second autobiography Rude Assignment, published in 1950, Lewis suggests briefly that he intended to utilize the tripartite structure of the Hegelian dialectic, by allowing the ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ to ‘struggle in the reader’s mind for the ascendency and there to find their synthesis’ (RA: 169). Almost immediately, however, Lewis counters that he ‘did not take this very far’ and that any remaining vestiges are a ‘source of occasional embarrassment’ (RA: 169).

Nevertheless the willingness to deploy a philosophical strategy so heavily associated with Marxist political theory demonstrates how far the complex philosophical arguments in The Art of Being Ruled diverge from the hasty and tendentious political analysis of Left Wings over Europe, where the ‘primitivism of the “brave new world” of the Soviets’ is formed of a ‘saurian spinal cord’ provided by the ‘materialist dialectic of Marx’ (p. 5). In The Art of Being Ruled the topics under examination are social, cultural, technological, and libidinal. Lewis addresses the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of revolutionary movements and socialism, feminism, masculinity, homosexuality as a political subject, the educational system, the decline of the family, and cultural infantilism, among other topics. These analyses are not merely descriptive, however, and throughout, the focus remains on the potential consequences for the individual and how these phenomena exist in relation to governments, power, and the ruling class. The following, again from Blasting and Bombardiering, is a concise appraisal of what Lewis viewed as the book’s main purpose:

The title of this book speaks for itself. I had attacked the problem of government. But it is important to notice that it was advice to ‘the ruled’ that was tendered, not to those who do the ruling. It was instruction for people in the gentle art of keeping the politician at bay. That was what would be called a ‘Leftwing’ book. I’m doing to-day just what I was doing in 1926, when I began. I am trying to save people from being ‘ruled’ too much—from being ‘ruled’ off the face of the earth, as a matter of fact.

It is, of course, absurd to judge works of the past by the standards of the present, and there is much in The Art of Being Ruled that will offend modern sensibilities. Nonetheless, the above description is accurate insofar as The Art of Being Ruled ultimately advocates some form of ‘Leftwing’ socialist redistributive economic programme. The specific details of this programme and its form, however, are noteworthy. Lewis at this point believed in certain forms of racial and national essentialism which diverged from the properly political conception of racial consciousness that would later find expression in the Nazi ideology. Lewis’s thinking on race was conventional for his moment, when culture and tradition were synonymous with a biological understanding of race—and when related neighbouring nations, no matter how close linguistically and physically, tended to constitute themselves as racially distinct. However, it is incredibly difficult to simply dismiss Lewis as a racist - particularly in light of the help and support he gave in the 1950s to the young impoverished Afro-Carribean painter Denis Williams, part of the Windrush generation, on several occasions:

I do not wish to be guilty of what is called overpraising … but I consider Denis Williams a young man of very remarkable talent. He paints pictures the size of a pantechnicon with as little effort as the blackbird sings. But these huge canvases are not the apparently carefree vocalism of a bird, they are heavy with human import … The canvases are big because there is such a volume, such a weight, of emotion there, requiring a big receptacle into which to pour itself …

Lewis sought on several occasions to help Williams out with a job (eventually succeeding in getting him appointed as a teacher at the Central College of Art in London). This was a very difficult task in 1950s England, and before eventually succeeding, Lewis wrote with frustration on one occasion to his friend Herbert Read:

… if he is to survive he must be found a job. Because of colour this presents great difficulties. It is a pity that all this talent should be lost for no better reason than that its possessor’s skin is controversial.

Lewis indeed would later come to view his 1930s views on race as a dead-end and tentively celebrated the potential of the American racial ‘melting-pot’, which he had himself denigrated previously. Lewis believed that as modernity progressed and cultures became more inter-mixed, race would inevitably disappear and cease to be of much importance. Overall, he believed this to be for the best. In this he has been proven to be mostly right - but also mistaken in some sense, for he failed to see how American democracy - deracinated though it is - needed to hold onto a utopian and incoherent conception of a ‘white’ (and ‘black’) race to incentivise the forms of organic solidarity lacking among economic immigrants from heterogeneous (and sometimes openly antagonistic) national cultures, that would otherwise be at odds with each other.

Nevertheless, in The Art of Being Ruled Lewis believed that because of the specific national context and ‘racial’ characteristics of Anglo-Saxon countries, in addition to the structure of their parliamentary democratic system, the type of socialism he favoured was ‘some modified form of fascism’ (ABR: 369) Such a striking statement requires to be understood in context, written as it was in 1926—a mere four years after Mussolini’s bloodless coup of October 1922 following the Fascists’ March on Rome. Lewis’s understanding of fascism was coloured by this event, and the still embryonic and little-understood form of ideology which hadn’t yet been superseded by its more racialist and anti-semitic Nazi iteration. Indeed, Lewis considered Fascism to be a variant of extreme left-wing militancy that had arrived at the same objective as Bolshevism by other means. In the case of Italian Fascism, these means were (via the Futurism of Marinetti) aesthetic:

All Marxian doctrine, all étatism or collectivism, conforms very nearly in practice to the fascist ideal. Fascismo is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to the tail, or, if you like, the head, of marxism. (ABR: 369)

The aesthetic and the ideological were inextricable for Lewis, as they were for many of his contemporaries in the volatile political atmosphere of the 1930s. For Lewis, however, the equivalency of socialism and fascism as he understood them also seemed theoretically consistent when viewed through the work of the French political theorist Georges Sorel, author of Réflexions sur la violence (1908), which was translated into English by Lewis’s friend T. E. Hulme in 1912. Another consistent element in Lewis’s thinking was a tendency to approach politics in terms of personalities, the more interesting, forceful, or compelling of whom tended to spark the most interest.

Lewis’s unyielding interest in the exceptional personality or individual derived from his view of artistic production as a necessarily subjective and solitary pursuit. In the end, the type of political power which Lewis promotes in The Art of Being Ruled is a form of centralized power, which he believed to be the most conducive to individual artistic expression. A decade later, in Left Wings this position is turned on its head—with the centralization of power now representing ‘politically, the greatest evil it is possible to imagine’ (p. xi). The result is the inconsistent and ill-thought-out position advocated throughout the work, which decries the centralization of power through the League of Nations and the increasing ideological and diplomatic confluence of the western allies and the Soviet Union; whilst commending the Hitlerite dictatorship as a bulwark against these processes, ignoring its comparable centralization of dictatorial power.

To further understand how this shifting conception of the political relates to Left Wings, which is a book about political ‘personalities’ as much as it is a book about political events, it will first be necessary to turn to Lewis’s most infamous political work, Hitler. Based on a trip Lewis took to Germany in November 1930, the material originally appeared as a series of articles in the left-wing feminist periodical Time and Tide under the heading ‘Hitlerism: Man and Doctrine’, which were hastily revised and published in book form in March 1931. Lewis’s views, as expressed in Hitler, were influenced by a growing anxiety that political and economic events were leading to another war. Writing amid the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Lewis privately believed (correctly in retrospect) that the economic fallout from this momentous economic catastrophe made war all but inevitable. Lewis considered the prospect of war an emergency, and to this end was prepared to entertain any ideological viewpoint that purported to oppose war—even if this meant accepting a racialist ideology that he believed to be a ‘prejudiced Zoology’:

I do not write this book from choice, for instance: I would far rather, if it rested with me, be engaged in scientific research, or in artistic creation. Ever since in the War, where I served on the Western Front with the Artillery, I was first under fire, there are certain questions I have asked of life which it would have never have occurred to me to ask before . . . .

A state of emergency came to appear for me, as for most soldiers, a permanent thing. Unlike, I daresay, most of my companions, I realized that something in this ‘storm of steel’ required explaining: and the academic meteorology of average public opinion, or of the Press, for these monstrous disturbances, was unsatisfactory. And since that time it is naturally easier to convince me of the imminence of such a condition or of its being a condition inherent in the very nature of our life. (H: 127–9)

The passing reference to Ernst Jünger’s First World War memoir In Stahlgewittern (1922), which posited war as a spiritual experience of the first order, gives us an idea of Lewis’s still ambivalent and unresolved attitude to that conflict. Yet evident also in the above excerpt are the emerging fissures within Lewis’s political thinking, which were clearly in the process of being exacerbated by his visceral opposition to war. Indeed many of the views expressed in Left Wings—for example the various justifications for Nazi antisemitism and some occluded antisemitic sentiments themselves—are in evidence within Hitler. Very early in the work, we are again reminded of how Lewis’s interest in politics is mediated through personalities: in ‘the doctrine of Hitlerism’, he maintains, it ‘is a person rather than a doctrine with which we are dealing’ (H: 31).

In comparison to the cult of personality surrounding Charles Maurras and Action Française, who Lewis now dismisses as ‘amateur’ nationalists, Hitler is said to be an ‘Everyman’, and perhaps most scandalously: a ‘Man of Peace’ (H: 32). However, Lewis’s more fundamental error in this work (and in Left Wings) lies in the assumption that antisemitism is incidental to the Nazi ideology; that it is an inconvenient fact which is peripheral to its more tangible potential advantages, rather than one of its main pathological features. As a result, Lewis rather naively saw within Nazi racialist ideology the potential for western nations to see themselves as kin, and by doing so, to resist all moves towards self-destruction through war and (left-wing or communist) revolution. This view was heavily coloured by a mentality which he himself satirized in his novel The Apes of God, where the literary and artistic worlds are awash with detached and entirely utopian left-wing politics and delusional ideas regarding the working classes espoused by bourgeois fellow travellers of socialism or communism. What is most obvious in Hitler, however, is that Lewis seems completely oblivious to the very same detached and subjective utopianism he himself is projecting onto the Nazi ideology from afar.

The entire text of Hitler is imbued with a certain febrile quality, where we can witness Lewis’s cognitive dissonance in the face of ideas and concepts that require large feats of rationalization and justification. At times, Lewis appears almost unable to accept the views he is himself conveying, yet perseveres nonetheless. Such is the overriding faith he has in his visceral opposition to war, an altogether overwhelming faith in hindsight, which assumes a further level of dissonance in the various analyses of political events put forward in Left Wings. At this point, the question of Bloomsbury and Lewis’s aesthetic and ideological opposition to what he viewed as their hegemony within the British political and cultural landscape returns to the fore.

The working title for Left Wings over Europe was Bourgeois-Bolshevism and World War.[vi] It is a title that brings to mind the bourgeois-bohemians whom Lewis excoriated in his first and most well-known novel Tarr (1918); a depiction intended to represent the Bloomsbury group, among others. It is also worthy of attention that Left Wings was published two years after Lewis’s work of literary criticism Men without Art (1934). In that work, he speculated widely on the aesthetic practices of many of his modernist contemporaries and sought to question the fate of modernism in general and the role of the artist within contemporary society in particular. Of specific interest is Lewis’s essay on one of Bloomsbury’s most prominent writers, Virginia Woolf. We need not dwell too much on the content of this essay, which was negative and dismissive of Woolf’s ‘pretty salon pieces’ and ‘undergraduate imitations’ of Joyce, to understand that a certain ideological antipathy underpins the putatively aesthetic critique, evident in the comment with which Lewis ends the piece:

For fifteen years I have subsisted in this to me suffocating atmosphere. I have felt very much a fish out of water, very alien to all the standards that I saw being built up around me. I have defended myself as best I could against the influences of what I felt to be a tyrannical inverted orthodoxy-in-the-making. (MWA: 114)

The term ‘orthodoxy-in-the making’ is notable here, not only for the extensive use of the word ‘orthodoxy’ in the various descriptions of the political status quo in Left Wings, but also in anticipating to some extent the title of Lewis’s third hastily written political work Count Your Dead: They Are Alive!: or, a New War in the Making (1937). In a review of Men without Art for The Spectator on 19 October 1934, a young Stephen Spender wrote that ‘Twelve well-filled pages of malice and ill-temper—often amusing examples of both—are devoted to attacking Mrs. Woolf’.^[vii] Focusing on the above, Spender highlights what he views as Lewis’s persecution complex at the hands of Bloomsbury. ‘This is totally unexpected’, Spender wrote, ‘Why should Mrs. Woolf seem to suffocate Mr. Lewis?’.^[viii] This seemed to hit a nerve with Lewis, who wrote a testy letter to the editor in response:

I should indeed be ‘suffocated by Mrs. Woolf’ (to quote from a very muddled sally of Mr. Spender’s)—though in no other sense that I could imagine—were I to be threatened with the policeman should I happen to mention her Lighthouse with disrespect! (Letters: 223)

The suggestion that Woolf’s status as a member of a selective cultural group intimately connected to the political elite implies a connection to the repressive authority of the state, is of course an exaggeration, and surely the product of Lewis’s own paranoia. And yet during this period, so many of Lewis’s works were withdrawn from publication or suppressed due to their libellous content that he did have some cause to suspect a secretive and concerted effort against him. Furthermore, he could not help but conclude that the reasoning behind this effort lay in his political positions and sympathies. ‘That your reviewer is a Communist . . . remains in no doubt’, Lewis wrote in response to another negative review of Men without Art in the Times Literary Supplement on 22 November 1934:

That a member of the Society of Jesus would not be an appropriate person to choose to do a review of a reprint of Darwin’s Works is obvious . . . . But surely a Communist or a Marxist is disqualified in much the same way, for the purposes of ‘literary’ review. (Letters: 226)

It is no mistake then that Lewis begins his contribution to ‘Notes on the Way’, the series of essays that were a prelude to the themes explored in Left Wings and published in Time and Tide where he had serialized Hitler five years before, with a salvo against the politics of the British literary and cultural sphere. A particular emphasis is placed on the ‘intellectuals’ of Bloomsbury:

The world of Letters and of journalism is a ‘Left-Wing’ world. No student of politics can afford only imperfectly to grasp, much less to neglect, that momentous fact. The newspapermen of Fleet Street, as much as the ‘intellectuals’ of Bloomsbury and Hampstead, are ninety per cent. ‘Left-Wing’ in sympathy. All the best advertized ‘authors’ are ‘Left-Wing’ in sympathy. Indeed, it is impossible to be a really well-advertized author unless you are ‘Left-Wing’ in sympathy. You must be a spiritual child of Macaulay—with a mind open on the side of Trotsky, but a mind shuttered on the side of Burke. To write, apparently, in England at this time, is to be ‘Left-Wing’. (p. 163)

There was almost two years between the publication of Men without Art and Left Wings. During this time Lewis suffered from a succession of recurring illnesses that required hospitalization and surgery. Though engaged in the composition of The Revenge for Love, and preparing for a solo exhibition at Leicester galleries, this fallow period was unusually long for a writer as prolific as Lewis and perhaps gives some explanation for the disparity in mediums and subjects—from the abstract speculation of Men without Art (a work of literary criticism) to the journalistic and tendentious prose of Left Wings over Europe. However, this superficial formal discontinuity obscures a certain thematic consistency. If Men without Art intended to take stock of the aesthetic failures of the modernist project and his place within its desultory pantheon, Left Wings over Europe seeks to explore the political consequences of this very failure, which he believed were precipitating another war.

As a result of the harm that Left Wings did to Lewis’s reputation and career, it was clearly not a work which he looked upon favourably in later life. He received ‘practically nothing’ as an advance for these books, and less money than for any other type of book. And yet: ‘I did myself so much damage that at the time it diminished the value of my other books.’ This was no boast, Lewis contends: ‘One does not boast about being a fool.’ It appears then, that Lewis was genuinely contrite in the sense that he had been unwise, and as ever perceptive in noting how these works of hasty and tendentious political invective would, to some extent taint the unique achievements of his otherwise incredibly rich and multifaceted literary and artistic oeuvre, the reult of the lively intelligence of its author. One hopes that it is an oeuvre that will be rediscovered by future scholars, students and artists in the years to come.

[i] D. G. Bridson 1972.

[ii] Bridson 1972, p. 146.

[iv] Fredric Jameson 1979.

[vi] Paul O’Keeffe 2001, p. 358.

[vii] Stephen Spender 1934, p. 576.

[viii] Spender 1934, p. 576.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty perceptively noted that Vladimir Nabokov hated Sigmund Freud

in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche. In both cases, it was resentment of the precursor who may already have written all one’s best lines.

At first glance,…

Read more

Through what becomes at times a rather meandering and nostalgic discussion, both Matthew and Udith discover many parallels in their artistic and intellectual development.

In sharp, compelling prose, Gasda reveals how choices often betray ideals. Each character in The Sleepers pursues success and fulfillment, yet stumbles into self-deception and hypocrisy, blurring the line between professed values and private desires. Gasda offers a riveting exploration of identity, ambition, and moral compromise—a nuanced critique of a generation caught between who they claim to be and the messy realities they inhabit.

- Cover Blurb

You can pre-order The Sleepers here:

https://a.co/d/7B95b5P

And a collected edition of his plays:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781493090228/Zoomers-and-Other-Plays

Both are forthcoming in May 2025

I had a very broad and stimulating discussion with Nina as part of Sublation Media’s new monthly feature on contemporary literature. We talked about the origins of my novels Horizontal Rain (2020) and Agonist (2024), the work of Hyperidean Press, class and the art world, romanticism, aesthetics, internet culture, technology, nature, and what the future might hold.

Hosted by writer, academic and publisher of Hyperidean Press, Udith Dematagoda.

For more information on our books and work, please visit www.hyperideanpress.com or follow us on Instagram

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