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I was telling a friend what a relief it is to realize that I don't need to stop believing what I believe simply because the youth don't believe it. He said that's how you become right wing. I said so what?

Maybe it's my duty in the dialectic to be the obstacle that is overcome. Seems absurd to roll over and show your belly simply because someone says you're now the enemy instead of the vanguard

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Yes, and I don't even think most youth believe these things; they're just ideas that have been branded "youthful," rather than the thoughts of middle-aged academics, which is what they are. I only experimented with that style of radicalism for a few years around the Iraq War in my mid 20s; I was "right wing" (not really, not exactly) before and after that, including for the entirety of my teen years.

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I meet a lot of Gen Z women at my writing center. They believe some far out stuff that I previously only thought existed on Twitter. Like that it's coercive for a 37 year old to sleep with a 20 year old. I was like...I slept with hella old guys in my 20s. Much older than 37! Another woman is of Indian descent but her family has lived four generations in another country (think, say, trinidad) but won't say she's of that country bc she's not indigenous to it ;)

Very nice people though! Fun to see Twitter politics in the real world

And I do think a lot of these far out ideas originated amongst the youth on Twitter, Tumblr and tiktok. Like if there was an academic background to these ideas on righteous political violence, they would reference George Sorel and Carl Schmitt more. IMHO the academics are just along for the ride.

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Oh yeah, I teach in an art school so I hear all that stuff too. (They were arguing in my class the other day about whether it was *ever* okay to depict rape in a fictional narrative. They decided it was, within certain parameters.) I was referring less to generic social justice, which I agree comes from the internet, and actually does resemble hippie-type thinking in its way, than to the cold hard Leninism of the recent pro-Hamas statements. I think even most of my students would stop at that, and I personally do blame it on academe since I heard those ideas in academe long before social media.

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That's a valid distinction. I still don't know how to explain what I've been hearing on Twitter in terms of this pro hamas stuff. It's really shocked me. Seemed very surprising! I try never to discuss israel Palestine w friends, so have no idea if I actually know anyone who is pro Hamas.

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I think it's coming from academe, e.g., those grad student organizations, and, as some have have pointed out, it's coming online from the anti-woke left, like the dirtbag Chapo crew. The argument that, beyond latent anti-Semitism, it's a remnant of loyalty to the old Soviet line may have something to it.

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Having spent several years deeply immersed in adjunct union organizing (the most active members still with an eye on the job market, so that the “union” stuff is just another part of the suite of possible protest activities) yes, the call is coming from inside the house.

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I tend to have a less cynical but maybe grimmer view of that side of the left-much less of it is conscious than we realize, I think. (A lot of this goes for parts of the right as well, although this isn’t relevant to the discussion. It might just be a characteristic of the type of person in question.) I’m not sure I completely agree that Jamison is useless, although of course, I concur with your conclusion that he is as politics. Part of the fire and the rose (which like the fall I understand as something within human cognition and maybe just is what I was glossing as metamodernism recently) is recognizing and understanding the horror baked into the world as tragedy without believing that its very existence annuls all beauty.

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I agree with you about the fire and the rose, I just think it can't be realized politically (I almost said collectively, but maybe it can be realized collectively, in an organic way, as with an audience at a play or movie or a church congregation or, who knows, maybe the spectators at a football game). The problem with Jameson is that the Marxism always kicks in at what would be an impasse in an honest argument. I know it's a cliche that New Critics always end up at ambiguity and deconstructionists at aporia, but not all dialectics can be resolved. He can definitely be illuminating, especially when he's equal to the subject (he's better on high modernism than pop culture), but it's always the same deus ex machina, or, if he's in bad mood, lament that it's not coming. The Kirsch essay on Yeats that I linked is about this personality type on the right, probably why Jameson is good on high modernism. I love Jameson's line from Postmodernism about how he admires Heidegger more for becoming a Nazi than he would admire a philosopher who remained an apolitical liberal!

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Yes, I meant Jameson more as a synecdoche for a certain worldview than as a critic himself. On the point about Aporia – I saw someone who has probably read more philosophy than either of us argue recently that the real problem with the French theorists was that they were really theologians who didn’t understand that was what they were doing, which is an insight that probably applies to many marxists and literary critics as well!

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Unfortunately I still experience "trauma" from the graduate seminar (it was called "Thinking the Unthinkable") where I proposed (not originally) that Derrida was an apophatic theologian only to be called "facile" by the star of the seminar who later went on to tenure at Dartmouth, so I am unable to reply cogently...

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Yes, I think perhaps you’ve mentioned this fellow before re: Heidegger and calling you a lib (you really must write the John Pistelli book of academic grievances if we’re all still here in twenty years or so, it could be like Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book for millennial ex-Stalinists) As a history major (who admittedly did not go on to grad school) it always fascinates me how out there some of the other disciplines get to be.

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Yep, same person, same seminar! (In other contexts, I would defend Heidegger but not these contexts. Like, if some analytic philosopher were coming after him...but I'd defend him in spite of his politics not because of them!) That book would be extremely fun to write; I don't say it's the world's greatest personality trait, but I remember every last slight.

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Yes, that would be my take on Heidegger as well, I haven’t read a lot, but the impression of what I have is that there’s someone else who didn’t understand that the fall didn’t happen in time.

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Wow “White Girl” is from 2019?! I know that stuff was simmering for a long time but it must have looked prophetic a year later.

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Thank you...I wrote it and it was first published in a now-defunct journal in early 2016. I try to keep my ear to the ground!

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