The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response! Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: […]
For Americans my age or older, Ravel’s Boléro will always be the music of Blake Edwards’ film “10,” which came out in 1979. Starring Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, the romantic comedy introduced Bo Derek, she of the braids and breasts, to the world. Thanks to Bo and Blake, Boléro came to be associated with sex of the pure fucking sort, so much so that Allan Bloom singled the music out for criticism (along with “rock ‘n roll”) in The Closing of the American Mind. More innocent times, those were. Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s […]
I’ve been meaning to write about one piece of writing for some time, but thanks to two others, I don’t need to. The first is Frances Wilson’s biography of Muriel Spark, which I read in the fall and thoroughly enjoyed. I’d say more about how terrific it is were it not for the fact of… …the second piece of writing, Audrey Wollen’s rollicking, gripping review of it in the current issue of The New Yorker. I couldn’t possibly improve upon Wollen’s piece, even if I wanted to or tried. The review is as terrific as the book, but don’t let its terrific-ness prevent you from enjoying the terrific-ness of the book. And if you doubt me about the terrific-ness of […]
Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online. Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know? But I’ll believe Andresseen. […]
In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….” When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not? Because, despite his saying […]
However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe […]
I read a lot of books this year. A lot of great books, on the principle that the older I get, the less time I have for bad books. But since everyone’s time is finite, I thought I’d just list here my ten favorite books that I read this year. Favorite for different reasons. The sheer joy of reading them, page to page (Ernaux and Kempowksi and Wilson). My appreciation of the scholarship and what I learned from them (Battistoni, Reitter). The way they’ve sat with me long after I finished them (Alexievich, Butler). My appreciation of their sheer achievement (McNally, Clark). And some were all of these (Kempowski, Wilson, Reitter, Butler). And, oh, I cheated: I’ve listed eleven books. […]
Yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, when I stumbled across a reference that sent me tumbling down an afternoon’s worth, or warren, of rabbit holes. In no particular order… 1. In February 1945, as Germany slowly dawned to its likely defeat in the Second World War, two of its representative intellectuals, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, launched the strangest, even by their standards, musing of the mind. Jünger kicked it off. Responding to a condolence card from Schmitt, Jünger stoically itemizes his losses over the last two years: his father, his son (killed during the war), and his hometown. With an unruffled melancholy, he registers the death and destruction that has occurred and is […]
Among the political emotions, vengeance may be the most terrible of them all. On the one hand, vengeance is different than justice. It authorizes those who act in its name to do all sorts of things that they would normally not feel themselves authorized or entitled to do. Vengeance has an extraordinarily permissive licensing structure, freeing the vengeful from any and all restraints. On the other hand, as any reading of The Oresteia will show, vengeance contains a strict and stern element of obligation, even injunction: Whatever else you may do, you are not authorized or allowed not to take vengeance. To not avenge—to forgive or acquit, to do anything that might break the link between the iniquitous past and […]
In shul yesterday, as we headed into the second half of Deuteronomy, we happened on some of those passages that contain one of the invocations of Amalek that Netanyahu made famous after October 7: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek.” These and another passage were mentioned by Netanyahu and a great many other right-wing Zionists to justify and explain the slaughter of Palestinians that ensued in response to the attacks of October 7. But there are two fascinating wrinkles in the Parsha that complicate that simple story. First, the injunction to destroy Amalek comes after a whole series of other injunctions that are designed to turn the Israelites into a civilized, moral […]
Caleb Crain has a lovely post on re-reading Moby Dick for the umpteenth time, but in his 50s. He writes: What’s it like to read Moby-Dick when you’re Ahab’s age? There are probably a number of things I no longer see as acutely as when I had young eyes, but some elements are now in sharper focus. When young, I had only the vaguest sense, in any given chapter, where Ishmael was, geographically speaking. For me then, the important seas to be swimming through were of metaphor and feeling. Now I see that Melville is actually pretty careful to map the Pequod’s journey; in late middle age, my internal GPS module keeps better track of where I as a reader […]
I just spent the last three or four hours in one of the worst reading experiences of my life. Don’t get me wrong: The book was awesome. But it was so upsetting that, 30 minutes after finishing it, my heartbeat is still racing with horror and revulsion. And this during a year when I’ve read too many books about Nazi Germany, ancient and modern slavery, and 1100 pages of Sven Beckert on the history of capitalism. None of those reading experiences compares to the throbbing disturbance of this book. So what is it? Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial. It’s about Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged, I think, twice, and how those letters provide the raw […]
Marxists, particularly those of an academic or scholastic persuasion, often claim that people misread Marx, especially Capital. Spend fifteen minutes on the internet talking about Marx, and you’ll soon enough get a Marx bro telling you you’ve got it all wrong. He’ll cite chapter and verse to you. Actually, he’ll seldom cite chapter and verse. Usually, he’ll just cite name upon name. “You need to Hegel.” “You need to Althusser.” He won’t show you precisely you’ve got it wrong or where particularly you’re misreading. But he’ll tell you, you’ve got it wrong. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about a political project—no, not just a political project, but a world-building project—that’s tied to a text that almost everybody thinks everybody else […]
He’s been called the best writer to occupy the Oval Office since Ulysses S. Grant. Yet when it comes to Israel’s starving the Palestinians, he sounds like one of those apparatchik academics George Orwell pilloried in “Politics and the English Language.” On the topic of deliberate mass starvation, Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, wrote, “The lager is hunger: we are hunger, living hunger.” Starvation in Auschwitz—which could easily have been the title of his memoir, and not Survival in Auschwitz, as it was translated into English—was an experience that Levi kept returning to, in all his writing, across his life. These are just a few screenshots of a small selection […]
I’m seldom one to ride the “we’ve never seen anything like this before” bandwagon. But after reading enough headlines like this one below— —I start to reconsider. The amount of unnecessary death that we tolerate in this country—not just within one group but across many groups, states, and regions, from school shootings to heat waves to floods to fires to covid and now to measles and assassinations—is astounding. “Tolerate” isn’t quite the right word because that sounds like some sort of longstanding practice or habit we’ve accepted for years and decades. But this kind of toleration is new. It’s not the product of ancient holdovers or superstitions or lack of knowledge. It’s an attitude to new forms of destruction that […]
Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, who was born exactly 150 years ago. In honor of Mann, I’m posting this essay I wrote, several years back, about him, The Magic Mountain, covid, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, and late capitalism. The essay never got published, and I’d forgotten about till I read the notification this morning from Lit Hub, that today is his birthday. I first read The Magic Mountain in the summer of 1990, a year after I graduated college and just before I was starting graduate school. I was house-sitting in New Haven and studying German. I didn’t know anyone, and back in those days, that kind of pervasive, seemingly permanent, solitude, made me anxious (nowadays, I struggle […]
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Categories
Economies, Literature, Political Theory, The Left
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Tags Ernest Mandel, late capitalism, Max Weber, The Magic Mountain, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Werner Sombart, Wolfgang Streeck
A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]
My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it. As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch. But writing is very different for […]
The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]
Apollo, speaking in Eumenides, the last part of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia: The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless the god hurts the roots. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: That labour constitutes a cost in a unique sense was, of course, an assumption [of the labor theory of value]. But it was an assumption born of a particular view of what was the essence of the economic problem….The crux of the economic problem, as this theory […]
My mom has been gone now for more than three months, and her death has loomed over much that I read and write and think. It has certainly shaped one part of my reading of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There are two nearly perfect moments in the novel, a novel that I think is mostly imperfect and flawed. They both involve the young Philip Roth’s relationship to his mother. Sons and mothers, or mothers and sons, is not usually Roth’s strength as a novelist; it mostly serves as comic relief, usually at the expense of the mother. Roth is more interested in fathers and sons, and sons and fathers. Though, interestingly, I’d say his truest, most tender, portrayal […]
There’s a moment in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America where the family has just learned that the father, Herman, is going to be transferred by his long-time employer, an insurance company, from Newark to somewhere in Kentucky. It’s very clear that the transfer is punitive, punishment for the father having crossed his sister-in-law, who is very connected with the fascist Lindbergh administration. The transfer order also looks a lot like simple ethnic cleansing, except that it’s framed as an “opportunity” that has been opened up by the Department of Interior, along the lines of the Homestead Act, where you get to be a pioneer in empty territory. But it’s all Jews who are being transferred. Though […]
I’ve just finished reading Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann. The title is a little misleading. Though the book focuses on Heinrich (Thomas’s brother) and Nelly, it’s really a group portrait of a range of European writers and intellectuals from the Weimar era to World War II. And though it’s titled House of Exile, it opens with the back story to several of the writers and their relationships, prior to their exile from Nazi Europe. It also intersperses their story with that of other writers who never went into exile, like Virginia and Leonard Woolf. It’s not clear, throughout, whether it’s meant to be a group biography or a combination of […]
Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer: “The book’s [Harry Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity] thesis…is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from ‘a grave psychiatric disorder,’ whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind ‘the mask of sanity’ there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one…. “Cleckley’s ‘grave psychiatric disorder’ is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the […]