Politics as Weather

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Wake up, check the weather, and dress appropriately. People do it everyday. Sure, some climates, like that in the UK, are unpredictable and change throughout the day. That 20% of rain means it’ll probably rain at some point and that’s what the expandable umbrella tucked in the bottom of a bag is for. There is no way the weather will pass without affecting those who live under its regime, so the rain will soak some, the sun will burn others, pollen will enflame the nasal passages, and so on. There is not much one can do, in the end, to escape the weather.

For some time this is how I have related to politics. It’s probably a bit too pastoral an image for some and it certainly is not heroic. But it does capture something of the reality.  I get online in the mornings, no longer muttering fuck after months of intense therapy to confront and accept my anxiety, and I read the posts of those who know. Everyone appears to know what’s probably going to happen, or why it happened, or what we should to stop it. It would be interesting if it wasn’t so pathetic. Knowing is important; knowing is power. I think of this scene in that (admittedly rather poor) documentary about Negri where he looks at a picture of his younger self behind bars in some Italian dock (as if placing defendants in a cage isn’t prejudicial). He says that, speaking of his merit, he never lost the intelligence (a word he settles on after rejecting the word “hope”) to understand everything that was happening to him, despite the contradictions. That intelligence is not on display on social media chatter about the state of politics. My own understanding is perhaps idiosyncratic, but I have no less faith in my intelligence for knowledge than any of the intelligent people I follow. The energy to speculate may be lacking. Frankly it feels like it might make me ever stupider if I expended it.

So, I treat it like the weather. My anger hasn’t gone away, but it’s anger at the storm blowing out of paradise. And how do you fight a storm? You weather it, learn to escape it, to find places of refuge, to shelter others from its violence with your own body. But the time to affect the climate for good, to change the weather, is long past.

 

Mark Fisher

Adam Kotsko1 Comment

I was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Mark Fisher. Mark was one of the pioneers of theory blogging and para-academic independent publishing. I learned a great deal from his blogging at K-punk, where he wrote incisive political commentary and undertook bold philosophical speculation, and he blazed a trail when he published Capitalist Realism, which brought the Zero Books series (now succeeded by Repeater Books) to international prominence. He supported a lot of us in this corner of the blogosphere, and I personally owe him a debt of gratitude as his recommendation helped make the publication of Awkwardness and its sequels possible.

Mark was truly a model of how to pursue a life of public intellectual engagement for a generation of young thinkers.

Long-term goals

Adam Kotsko3 Comments

For the past couple months, I’ve been working on a couple projects that fulfill long-term goals. I’m going to finally have a published French translation on the books, which I have been hoping to do ever since I was thwarted in my attempt to publish the Derrida translation I did as my masters thesis. And I’m getting tantalizingly close to completing an edited volume, which hasn’t been a major ambition of mine but feels like the kind of thing every academic should do at least once.

This put me in mind of other longer-term goals that I have had in mind for a significant period:

  • Learning to read biblical Hebrew and classical Arabic — I bought all the books for Hebrew many years ago, but the can keeps getting kicked down the road. More recently, I was told that Hebrew would be a good stepping stone to learning Arabic, and being able to do at least some minimal “compare-and-contrast” work with the original text of the Qur’an would be cool.
  • Teaching a Natural Sciences course at Shimer — I really enjoyed the opportunity to take Shimer’s chemistry course as part of my training, and I’ve taught some evolutionary theory in an interdisciplinary course, so I think I could make a go at our lower-level Natural Sciences curriculum. I almost got to do the chemistry course this semester as an overload, but it turned out to be more practical to let one of the traditional science faculty do it. (A next step beyond this goal would be to teach the whole Shimer curriculum, but realistically speaking, the upper-level science courses are really hard.)
  • Gaining teaching competence in a non-monotheistic tradition — Being pushed to teach Islam a few years ago was a really great experience that stretched me in a lot of ways. While I hope I get to continue deepening my knowledge of Islam through teaching, it would also be an interesting challenge to take a step further out of my comfort zone of monotheistic/prophetic traditions.

What about you, readers? Do you have any very long-term goals that you keep in the back of your mind?

Obama’s last, best gift

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In recent days, some people have been joking that Obama should resign a few days before the end of his term so that Biden can say he was president. In some iterations, this is a way of subtley screwing over Trump, who has already received gifts addressed to the “45th president” and a brief Biden interregnum would make him 46th.

I of course support this plan, but I think it could be taken a step further: Biden should also resign the day before Trump’s inauguration. This would make Paul Ryan President, and since it is not permitted to hold two government offices at once, he would have to resign his House seat. Presumably he could win again in a special election, and he could technically be elected Speaker again even without being a member of the House, but reopening the question of who should be Speaker could throw things into chaos.

There’s a certain poetry to it, insofar as one of the highlights of Biden’s vice-presidential career was screwing with Paul Ryan in the debate. I also like the idea of potentially derailing, or at least complicating, Ryan’s career by giving him what is so clearly his ultimate goal: “You’re an ambitious young man, clearly you want to be president — well, here you go!”

Critique of Judgment

Adam Kotsko10 Comments

Presumably we have all seen The Social Network, or at least heard of the primal scene of Facebook that it stages. One night, a bored Mark Zuckerberg uses his ability to type really fast to set up a website to judge the hotness of the women of Harvard. It proves so popular that it threatens to bring down Harvard’s entire computer network. Here was the kernel of Facebook, with a foretaste of its worldwide success.

While it has evolved into something far more complex than its “hot or not” roots, Facebook is still a technology for passing judgment. The zero-level gesture of engagement with Facebook is to click “like,” a positive judgment that was recently diversified to allow one to express a range of judgments corresponding to the range of emotions we learn to name in kindergarten. People have found many other uses for it as well — it is, after all, a flexible discursive medium — but the core functionality remains that of passing judgment. It is the easiest thing to do on Facebook, almost effortless.

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Varieties of atheistic experience

Adam Kotsko18 Comments

There are three varieties of atheism. Only one of them is actually interesting.

  1. “Matter of course” atheism — this is the position that belief in God is clearly superfluous, both for explaining the natural world and for developing a coherent moral code. It’s not a matter of deep conviction, hence not very interesting in itself.
  2. “Smarter than you” atheism — this is the worst kind, represented by the New Atheists. It goes beyond “matter of course” atheism by supposing that atheism can be a positive doctrine that must combat benighted religious doctrines. It always threatens to veer toward racism, because when they notice societies where atheism has failed to make major inroads, they start to wonder if there’s something… intrinsically wrong with them, you know, as a group.
  3. Protest atheism — this is the only kind worth discussing, because it calls the God of monotheism to account for the injustice and suffering in the world. Interestingly, from my perspective, it continues along the path laid out by monotheism itself, which is grounded in a demand for a divine principle of justice. Protest atheism holds onto that demand while pointing out how monotheism itself failed to deliver on its own promise.

“Smarter than you” atheism sometimes incorporates elements of protest atheism in the form of a moral or political critique of the effects of religion. But that aspect is grounded in the basic assumption that religious beliefs are false and therefore holding them makes you stupid — meaning, as a corollary, that you do stupid and destructive things. By contrast, the smart atheist, free of the blinders of religion, has arrived at the best and truest way of life: secular liberal capitalism. So the end result of being really smart, unlike those religious freaks, is conformism, leaving us to wonder whether all the harsh rhetoric and college dormroom “gotchas” were worth it in the end.

Protest atheism, for its part, always threatens to collapse into “smarter than you” atheism when suffering and injustice become steps in a disproof of theistic beliefs rather than representing a genuine and heartfelt outrage. Even so, protest atheism at least preserves the sense that the world is not as it should be — and unlike the impoverished social critique of “smarter than you” atheism, it does not scapegoat some particular group or belief system (“If only we could get rid of those idiot religious people, we could have our utopia of reason!”). This scapegoating instinct is another element in the elective affinity between “smarter than you” atheism and racism.

Pacing myself

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I’ve been thinking lately about which projects I choose to undertake.

For instance, I look at the two projects I’m wrapping up right now — a translation of Nicole Loraux’s “War in the Family” (the essay Agamben discusses at length in Stasis) and Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage, the edited volume on Agamben’s sources. In the former case, I saw the opportunity to get a published French translation on the books while contributing to the field in a material way. In the latter case, I felt I had a good idea, I had never done an edited volume before, and I had a highly capable co-editor (Carlo Salzani, one of the hardest-working men in academia). Both were “might as well” kinds of things. I was in no position, either intellectually or practically, to embark on a major new research project before The Prince of This World had even appeared, so they seemed like good ways to bide my time. One benefit was that they were one-off projects — I am not going to begin a career as a major Loraux scholar (nor indeed as a French translator) or a serial editor of volumes.

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An open letter to Olivet Nazarene University

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To President Bowling, Members of the Board of Trustees, and the Administrative Staff of Olivet Nazarene University:

It has come to my attention that Olivet Nazarene University will be sending its marching band to perform in the inauguration of President-Elect Trump. Many of my fellow alumni have expressed concern about this de facto endorsement of Trump and all the hateful things he stands for. Indeed, as of this writing nearly one thousand of them have signed an online petition asking you to withdraw Olivet’s participation in the event.

I am not among those alumni. I am writing this letter to make clear my reasons for abstaining. It is not because I support Trump — far from it! I am utterly revolted by the man and view him as the enemy of everything that is important to me. I am abstaining because protesting this decision would imply that I view Olivet Nazarene University as less than fully, irredeemably corrupt. The institution has proven to me time and time again that it is beyond hope — willing to cast aside its values, instrumentalize its most vulnerable students, and throw its most dedicated faculty members to the wolves in the pursuit of the illusory power promised by the religious right.

Participating in Trump’s inauguration is the logical endpoint of everything I know of Olivet. And so, in the words of Holy Scripture, I exhort you: “Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy” (Revelation 22:11).

Yours sincerely,

Adam Kotsko, Class of 2002

January speaking dates

Adam Kotsko

I am planning to kick off next year with two speaking dates. The first will be part of a larger event on “The Temptation of Christ” for the DePaul Humanities Center on Monday, January 16 (PDF flyer), and the second will be a conversation with Peter Coviello (possibly known to you as the author of one of the best post-election essays in existence) on The Prince of This World at the Seminary Co-op on Thursday, January 19 (JPG flyer).