Spurious

Let me put it metaphorically. While the Berlin Wall was falling, Soviet TV brought on a psychic, a guy to do séance sessions. And the idea was that he would tell people, if you have back pain, bring a cup of water, put it next to your left ear, move it around. He was kind of controlling people’s minds. A very conservative reading of that event would hold it as proof that the whole Soviet experiment, as they call it, was just mass hypnosis, daydreaming, mind control. And the fall of the Berlin Wall was like penetrating that dream. An alarm clock — reality waking up. Now, we are 30 years after that supposed penetration of reality into the dream, and it’s obvious that that’s not what happened.

What happened is more like a Luis Buñuel film. We fell into a deeper dream where we think we woke up. It’s called false awakening. We are in this long false awakening where we are inside the dream, but we think we are awake. So, we don’t have access to the dream of, say, socialism. But we also don’t have access to reality. We are stuck in this false awakening. And of course, the digital amplifies this false awakening. Specifically, in terms of fascism, the energy of the extreme right everywhere today — admiration of the state and hate for government, which follows Alberto Toscano’s concept of late fascism. But where did they get this hatred for government? They got it from neoliberalism. Fascism is now the heritage of neoliberalism.

Interview with Joshua Simon

The young have been obscenely burdened with the responsibility to be a voice of moral authority for their parents and their grandparents. People are looking to a young generation to make the decisions that previous generations have been incapable of making. It’s another form of denialism.

I love Greta Thunberg, I think she’s fucking awesome. I’m so proud of all the kids who are out there fighting the good fight. But the media passing it over to a 7-year-old or a 15-year-old, and using them as the frontline that Trump can then tweet his rants at? It’s diseased. We have to start to reckon with the disease that’s curled around every aspect of our lives in this late stage of capitalism. If we’re not doing that on a daily basis, we’re just lying to ourselves.

You ask, “What can we do?” You can talk to everyone you know about this on a constant basis and try to create consensus about it. You can create groups of people and think tanks to try to counter the billionaire-subsidized think tanks that are forming our current trajectory as a species. If there’s anything you can do, it’s to get profoundly involved. Like, quit your fucking job and do something useful. Hold yourself accountable. It’s painful, I can say that from experience. You’re going to have to sit with your own hypocrisy. And then you have to get real comfortable with people telling you that you’re a killjoy.

Anohni, interviewed

Rob McInroy reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs at his blog.

New podcast interview with Juliet Jacques for Suite (212).

References to this blog in the interview refer to Spurious from 2003-2007. Archives here. 

New long interview with me by Markku Nivalainen in 3:AM Magazine.

I refer to the blog for my new novel, working title: Simone Weil, in this interview. It's my lockdown project.

Andrew Gallix reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for The Stinging Fly.

New review of Nietzsche and the Burbs by Dan Fraser in the Dublin Review of Books.