What if, far from being an indictation that God had abandoned France, the sheer molten plasticity of the Revolution, its resentment and foolishness incarnating itself in numerous constitutions, regimes, reactions, reactions to reactions, using and discarding ambitious politicians as so many masks, was nothing more than a divine purgative, a "great purification", to free the metal of France from its "sour and impure dross", so that it could be made more malleable in the hands of a future king?
Maistre does not formulate the above as a question. Every sentence in Considerations on France appears in the form of a declaration: the Revolution just is God punishing and purifying France; the victory of the Republic against royalist insurgents just is a Providential guarantee of the integrity of France as a nation, not a vindication of republican government. In fact, republican government simply does not exist. We'll come back to that one, but let's be clear: Maistre is not interested in argument, "sound reasoning", or even internal consistency: if any of these things are present, it is not integral; it is merely an effect. The grandiose mad fury of his reactionary conservatism has less in common with Catholicism as a religious practice than it does with the intimidating, inhuman beauty of Catholic architecture.
Nothing could possibly live inside Maistre's architectonic hatred, but even for a nonbeliever it's one hell of a tourist attraction.
*
Maistre does not believe in any such thing as common humanity. With vicious brio, he declares: "In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me."
This embodies the conservative insight that people do not float indeterminately and accidentally through societies that have no hold on them, but exist in and through their history, culture, and language. In Maistre's thought, this is charged with reactionary disgust at cultural and ethical criticism as an unjustifiable and seditious leap into abstraction. Liberal political and ethical theory insists on the impossibility of fixed natural hierarchy, the solubility of ethical disagreement, and the categorical universality of political and ethical laws, and so liberals tend to find empirical reality embarrassing. Forgetting the men they live amongst, they are always inclined to speak of "the natural rights of man". For Maistre, this language commits a category error: rights belong to really existing people, not just to "man", a thing that has never existed and never will.
You may have heard this one before: Every attempt to bring "man" into being leads into satanic inhumanity, tyranny, and � God forbid � atheism...
*
From Maistre's reactionary contempt for the great mass of humankind (which is not the same thing as humanity � human beings are a particular kind of animal requiring constant and harsh discipline; humanity is nothing more than a rationalist hallucination), the following claim emerges: "A large and free nation cannot exist under a republican government." Democracy in modernity is, strictly speaking, impossible. The liberal postulate is that man is a rational animal capable of self-legislation and, by extension, universally valid legislation within a state. Maistre finds this absurd. He doesn't offer a "rational" argument for this and he doesn't feel a need to: empirically speaking, the Revolution is a clear refutation of democratic principles.
"Representative democracy" is a contradiction in terms, and even if it were not, the tendency for representatives to find themselves snatched up by parties, and then for parties to be dominated by certain ambitious personalities, which themselves use the organs of state to intimidate and to crush dissent, demonstrates the futility of this idea of democracy in practice. What is funny is just how modular this critique is. Who still believes in the abstract and universal human being of liberal theory today?
But reading it from the pen of someone like Maistre, does that worry you?
*
"There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoiled by a modern philosophy that tells us all is good, whereas evil has tainted everything, and in a very real sense, all is evil, since nothing is in its place... But let us not lose courage: there is no chastisement that does not purify; there is no disorder that ETERNAL LOVE does not turn against the principle of evil."
I share with Maistre his impatience for rationalist abstractions, and his delight in rubbing the obvious fact of human evil in the faces of reformers and optimists too wilful to see it. Everything else about him is entirely alien to me � and idiotic: his monarchism, his delight in mystical or absurd argumentation, his naive insistence on the intrinsic value of tradition. Not once did I agree with anything in this text that wasn't merely a mirror of myself. This is an otherwordly psychology; a different genus of mind. Don't mistake convergence for sympathy.
People describe Maistre as cold and dry; frankly I think the opposite. The hand that wrote these words was slick with sweat and flush with hatred. As an insight into the fascist mindset, Maistre is exemplary: his contempt is not dangerous; his hope is....more
Well, I wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks � as long as they have something interWell, I wanted to enjoy this book. Despite my personal politics, I'm by no means allergic to reactionary cranks � as long as they have something interesting (or at least well-written) to say. Hence my enjoyment of Schmitt, Nietzsche, Land, and so on. And I'd always heard Mishima was a truly excellent writer. Perhaps it was just the translation, but he wasn't quite my taste. Which is a shame. If you liked it or it is in someway personally important to you, that's cool, maybe we'll hit the weights in the sun together sometime, but I've gotta vent my spleen on this one. Get a load:
“For man to encounter the universe as he is, with uncovered countenance, is death. In order to encounter the universe and still live, he must wear a mask—an oxygen mask.�
I just... can't take this seriously. Every time I glance back up the page at this quote I start sniggering. HE MUST WEAR A MASK..... AN OXYGEN MASK...... If this passage appeared in Cioran I think it wouldn't stand out too much, but like many of Cioran's aphorisms it would clearly be meant to make you chuckle. Mishima, however, is entirely humourless and he wants me to take him entirely seriously. And there just isn't anything here that I am capable of taking seriously. Topics fumbled with include:
- "The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence" - The appropriate response to twink death (stop going outside) - Where the "profoundest depths" of the imagination lie (death apparently) - How important it is to pursue intellectual and physical excellence
I don't know if it's Mishima's influence or just cosmic rightist convergence but I feel like I've heard the following sentiment a thousand times:
“The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero...�
Yes, liberal, indeed. You might think it was stupid and pointless for Mishima to do a terrorism, get laughed at by a bunch of soldiers, disembowel himself and then die painfully to a three-times-botched beheading, but have you considered I have already depicted you as the soy wojak?...more
About two years ago I got really ill and I thought to myself: "Oh fuck, I've fucked it haven't I? My youth has ended! AND I WASTED IT ALL ON PHILOSOPHAbout two years ago I got really ill and I thought to myself: "Oh fuck, I've fucked it haven't I? My youth has ended! AND I WASTED IT ALL ON PHILOSOPHY! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!11"
This precipitated a massive lifestyle change. I ditched cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food. I got a gym membership. I got into combat sports too, and promptly fucked my knees, back, and shoulders. I bulked too hard, had to diet, then resumed bulking. As a weak, sedentary nerd, I was bound to fuck the whole thing up in every way I possibly could, but somewhere along the line I stopped being injured and worn out all the time and instead I was simply healthy, resilient, strong. Turns out exercise is good for you � who knew?
Now let me tell you what happens when you start trying to get healthy. Capital, as the boundless drive for more, recognises something of itself in the budding athlete's drive for self-improvement, but with an important distinction: the human body, like all living things, is destined to age, decay, and die. Capital is not a living thing, but "dead labour", not given to limits, but continually pushing back its own limits in its never-ending expansion. Understandably, then, "be happy with your body" is bad business, and that's why from the day I started working out, the adverts I've been served have been desperate to give me Body Dysmorphic Disorder:
- CAN'T GET IT FULLY UP LATELY? EMBARRASSED THAT YOU AREN'T ABLE TO GET ENTIRELY, COMPLETELY ERECT WHEN YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN? HERE IS A VIDEO OF AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN LOOKING EXASPERATED. EVER WORRY THAT'S HOW AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN WOULD RESPOND TO YOUR NOT ENTIRELY ERECT PENIS?
- HELLO MALE IN THE 25-TO-34 AGE BRACKET. PERHAPS YOU HAVE NOTICED THERE ARE MORE HAIRS IN THE SHOWER LATELY. OH, YOU HAVEN'T? WELL. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO WORRY THAT THERE ARE. ANYWAY. IF YOU GO BALD YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO HAVE SEX WITH ATTRACTIVE WOMEN. DOES THAT CONCERN YOU? HERE IS A VIDEO OF A BALD MAN WHO IS SAD. DO YOU WANT TO BE LIKE HIM?
- HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING TIRED RECENTLY? YOU NEED TESTOSTERONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY. YOU NEED TO INJECT TESTOSTERONE INTO YOUR BODY. YOU NEED TO PAY US APPROXIMATELY ONE-TWELTH OF THE MEDIAN SALARY IN YOUR COUNTRY PER YEAR SO THAT YOU CAN BECOME DEPENDENT ON US FOR A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF EXOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE.
Yeah yeah, impersonal economic forces embodied in our information infrastructure want me to be suicidally depressed so that I'll give them my money. So what? That's nothing new. Sure, but it's interesting when you consider the premise of this book. I like this book, and I like Pope. He seems like a good egg. But when Pope wrote this in 2000, he believed that by getting men to open up about their experiences of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, "bigorexia", etc. that we'd be able to fight back against the pernicious influence that the media has over our body images. The Spinozist position: knowledge is power. If you know you can't get as big as Arnie without steroids, then you'll stop worrying that you're inadequate as a man if you're not as muscular as him, right?
Maybe. But if you look at the state of fitness-related Instagram accounts, or YouTube channels, or online forums dedicated to fitness, you will see almost nothing but negging, infighting, absurd body standards, blatant steroid users pretending to be "natty", open steroid users saying "natties" are wasting their time, constant whining about women (including incredulous rage about how "she dumped me for a guy who can't even bench press his own bodyweight"), people insisting that if you can't deadlift 180kg or more the first time you walk in the gym you are WEAK, LOW T, etc. The sheer rate of innovation in methods of inducing self-hatred in anyone who happens to stumble across this stuff is impressive. And these are people who on some level ought to know better. Never being satisfied with your physique, always feeling small, putting down anyone who is pleased with a relative improvement in themselves � that's just the culture. It makes the stuff Pope describes in this book seem pretty chill, by comparison.
The truth is, this book is outdated. I'm sure the advice he gives for the worst sufferers (get on SSRIs and see a therapist) would work, but in 2000 the assumption was that for most people, knowledge would be enough. These days, knowledge is abundant, but so is rationalisation and propaganda. For many gym-goers the body is no longer just a personal statement, but a moral and political one, too: leftists are weak, effeminate, soy-eating homosexuals who go to therapy and talk about their feelings all the time � you don't want to be that, do you? Pope at one point suggests that part of the explosive growth of the gym and supplements industries in his time had to do with the "threatened masculinity" men were experiencing in response to feminist successes in gaining economic and legal equality for women. I think that thesis is sadly correct. But Pope is a good liberal, and so he thinks that "political" problems in this sense are given to rational disintegration. But political problems are actually libidinal problems, and those run very, very deep indeed.
None of that is to say that anyone who goes to the gym is a fascist, obviously. Otherwise, that's worrying for me. But ultimately every problem and every trend Pope talks about in the book has been accelerated and radicalised by social media, by the growing perfection of advertising technology, by the centrifugal ideological forces driving us all into ever more intense political and libidinal corners. "Talk about your feelings" is no longer an adequate solution on a large-scale. It probably never was.
But enough about the large scale. I was doing some RDLs a few months ago, probably had something like 120kg on the bar, but I'm not sure. This absolutely massive guy comes up to me and asks if he can work in, and of course I say yes. To my amazement he proceeds to do bent over barbell rows, maybe 7 or 8 reps, and I tell him that it was very impressive, because it was.
"No," he said sadly. "I used to be a lot stronger. Before I got injured."...more
“My ills are reticulate; my woes are granular. The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .� � Fiona Apple, Left Alone
Introduction, or, You People Need“My ills are reticulate; my woes are granular. The ants weigh more than the elephants. . . .� � Fiona Apple, Left Alone
Introduction, or, You People Need To Get A Grip
Let’s get this out the way: I don’t know Anna Marie Tendler and nor do you, not even if you do read her memoir. But from the very little I’ve learned about her from reading this, I quite like her. I don't think she'd like me, but that's okay. I don't tend to make my reviews about other reviews, but this is a special case. Even my rating (4 stars, when realistically it's more of a 3) is a concession to the reception I've seen the book receive both on GR and online more generally. I'm, quite simply, trying to skew the average. Reading some of these point-missing GR reviews written by vampiric ghouls desperate for juicy deets, I’m reminded of the old words: “I don’t watch heat; I got shooters that’ll watch it for me.� I’m happy to be that shooter, Ms. Tendler.
For years now, we have been seeing calls to “destigmatise mental illness�. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of that future, imagine long-winded and annoying memoirs stamping on a human face � forever. Like all possible futures, this isn't ideal, but what's worse is the seething reaction this memoir seems to solicit. For my part, I truly have no interest in “critiquing� Tendler for her faults and failings, and I’m not sure why anyone does. “But what about the loan-repayment-haircut thing with Theo! She's so ridiculous!� Okay? God forbid a woman do anything, including pen a memoir of middling quality in a time where universal literacy is primarily used for dunking on whatever fragment of the pop culture machine has been favoured by the algorithm “lately�. I’ve even seen one reviewer admit that the only reason they were interested in this book was that they were hoping Tendler would “drag� her ex-husband, but now that they’ve read it, they’re on her ex-husband’s side! HELLO? CRINGE DEPARTMENT?
You People Need To Get A Grip, Part II
To continue this rant a little longer, I think anyone with a spiteful, resentful spirit will have a great time shitting on this book. There is so much to hate Tendler for. I have a comically-large gameshow dartboard mounted on my living room wall, and each segment has a different accusation. My show assistant spins it and I throw my dart with impeccable precision. Its ballistic trajectory carries it squarely into the segment marked: “WHITE WOMEN BE LIKE�. The crowd goes wild. Watch this, dear reader: I make this shit look easy.
“Did you know?� I begin with a malice that will build into an orgasm before I’m through. “That in Chapter 7, Annamarie says that women with consumption were thought to be the epitome of beauty in the 19th Century? She points out that the beauty standard correlates with the symptoms of a deadly disease: ‘impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move.� But what she neglects to mention is that the fetishism of a pale complexion mobilises classist and racist anxieties for its efficacy. After all, the 19th Century is the time of the Scramble for Africa, the emergence of scientific racism, the radicalisation of beauty standards by way of white supremacy. Of course it is awful that middle and upper class women should have felt such extreme pressure, but consider the working class and colonised women who were excluded to even make the standard possible! And yet she FAILS to mention that! Am I really meant to feel SORRY for women who willingly sold themselves to BAD MEN rather than GET A JOB?�
The crowd are on their feet, and I personally need a new pair of boxers.
If that bit seems unfair, read some of the one-star reviews of this memoir and come back to me. And if it still seems unfair after that, well, then it was just a joke, so calm down! Can’t you take a joke? Why are you acting so crazy right now?
There’s a serious point to be made here, though. Yes, Tendler is oblivious, privileged, WHITE, needs to touch grass, etc., but it is absolutely out of control to bring that kind of “criticism� to bear on a mental health memoir. Nobody made you pick up the memoir subtitled "a memoir" where a typographical flourish on the front cover squeezes the "M" and "E" in "Men" together in an affront to subtlety so explosive it could escape Earth's gravity. “Oh, this mentally ill person seems strange and annoying and lacks self-awareness!� On god? Were you expecting something else? This entire fucking genre started with Michel de Montaigne!
Why Would A Guy Who Mostly Reads Dead Racist German Philosophers Even Read A Book Like This, Anyway?
Fun fact: I don’t even know who John Mulaney is. Apparently he’s funny for a living? Personally I couldn't give less of a shit about The Divorce. I followed Tendler on Instagram a few years ago for like three reasons:
1. I like her photography, especially Dinner in March. Call me basic and tasteless if you want. I’m a Kantian; that ship sailed a long time ago. 2. I like her sincereposting. People should do it more. 3. I think she’s pretty and I like seeing photos of her every now and then.
Then she started posting about a memoir and I thought, “yeah, I’ll read that. That seems right up my alley.� Does that seem strange to you? Just because I’m Enneagram Type 5 and I rant at women about Spinoza on a first date? Well, it shouldn’t. I had Fiona Apple’s ‘The Idler Wheel� memorised before you had even heard of her (which was after ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters�, of course). I was on Tumblr before you. I am more smug than you, I am more pretentious than you, I have reached voids of self-awareness you can’t even imagine. I am capable of dwelling on slights that didn’t even happen � in fact I’m doing it RIGHT NOW. My Spotify playlists are legion, and they follow entire narrative and thematic arcs. All of my friends are lesbians � even the men! Now where’s my BRAT vinyl? Oh, yes, right here. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me. . . .�
About the Whole Misandry Thing
Maybe it’s just because many of my friends declare their hatred of men on a regular basis, but I wasn’t all that fussed whenever Tendler would express her antipathy for my gender. I don’t particularly like men either, not even the ones I want to have sex with, so she was quite relatable to me.
What you have to understand is that Tendler’s “patchy� relationship history is a symptom: of fear, of early childhood distress, of an inappropriate relationship with her emotionally abusive and unstable mother. Her pain and anxiety flows through the machinery of desire and patriarchy and enables couplings of sometimes devastating and sometimes merely disappointing consequences. It’s a shame we hear so little of what Tendler felt or said during her relationships with men, but I think I understand. A turbulent life with no stable familial foundation can feel like a montage, a series of images drawn with great intensity, but with an absence in the centre. On occasion, I imagine, Tendler was nothing other than this absence, this bristling negativity � negation of past heartbreaks, negation of elitist judgments, negation of childhood dependency on an explosive mother and an inept father, negation of pointless and unrewarding jobs, negation of negation itself, the will to reject all true criticism of parental failure, to refuse to sink into that despairing negativity that points the finger at a mother who meant well but fucked up anyway � my heart broke to hear about the birthday where Tendler was spanked merely because she didn't want her photo taken � and to block off that channel so that all this surplus rage could go the only other place it could go: towards the men in her life who were certainly not innocent either.
“There is a whole history before me and a life she thought she’d have—child-free, working in fashion, living in New York City. Instead, she ended up a stay-at-home mom who cooked dinner every night and carted her children to their activities. She never held that against me; instead she made her whole life about my brother and me.�
That last line is complete bullshit, but if you want to blame Tendler for believing that, you’re one sick puppy!
About the Whole Misandry Thing, Part II
Chapter 29's anti-psychiatric feminist rant had me nodding along as a son of Deleuze. A line from her psychiatric assessment courtesy of Dr Samuels reads: “CAUGHT IN A SADOMASOCHISTIC TRANSFERENCE-COUNTERTRANSFERENCE ENACTMENT�. Wow. Much science. Very insight. And Tendler is right to be sceptical of her male psychiatrist who writes a little too dismissively of her aversion to men. Tendler is right to point out how much easier it is for men to disregard the psychological consequences of patriarchy and instead return to the eternal image of the bad mother. Maybe that's even what I'm doing now, but while Tendler furiously rejects Dr Samuel's suggestion that her hatred of men is the product of a displaced rage towards her mother � and that matters far more than any opinion I could form � I do find it interesting that between Tendler’s description of her mother’s abusive behaviours, and Dr Samuel’s guess that Tendler is suppressing rage against maternal figures, there is mostly silence.
As I have said before, “Anna� is often not the name of a person in this memoir, but instead the name of an absence. Platitudes about how difficult life was for her mother aside, I’ve seen very little to indicate any sort of healthy coming-to-terms with her mother's behaviours at all. I don’t believe in sadomasochistic transference enactments because I’m not a hack, but even a hack can pick up on suppressed maternal resentments, and Tendler’s disavowal does not convince me, even if I absolutely agree that the men in her life have done plenty of damage themselves. I'm not angry with her that she doesn't see completely eye-to-eye with me, a random stranger (and a man too!) about the relevant facts of her life, and I admire her bravery in putting this information out there.
Anyway, enough is enough. I was told that after Rayman 2 I'd be cast as a tormented artist who falls for a girl with great, big... eyes. And here I am, still playing the sidekick in a low-budget flick. See ya in Rayman 4!...more
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