John Pistelli is my favorite critic—one of the few people I ‘read,’ in the sense of regularly checking his substack/tumblr (GrandHotelAbyss) and recommending to my friends (I am a very poor ‘reader’; I don’t have much room in my head for contemporaries, or maybe I already have too much room devoted to them and have to tetchily defend the cramped remainder from my own tendency to envy, revile, etc., them—one of the reasons my Twitter is locked!). He’s erudite—with an easy, expansive mastery over the modern canon and its scholarly-critical adjuncts—and abreast of ‘internet culture’ in ways that I’m not but (mostly) appreciate someone else being (more from the implied ‘however’ later).
I fantasized about—and obviously didn’t get around to—putting together something like a Pistelli Top Ten, showing the range of his critical talents. One of the problems I suppose with anyone who manages to be ‘productive’ on a Substack/Tumblr/social-media format is that there is Too Much. I like, when I read someone, to have a sense, if not that I know what their ‘project’ is (a ‘project’ is something I hate having ascribed to me, even when it’s by someone as sympathetic as Daniel Oppenheimer—but of course I do want to discover the secret unity behind other people’s work…and I suppose anyone only ‘reads’ us because they are able to classify us as something, ‘for’ and ‘against’ causes and ideas—unfortunately), then at least that, without too much effort, some future self could scale the mountain and from there survey His Whole Deal. Or maybe it’s less a desire to ‘know’ what the other person is than a kind of dread that the encounter with their work will be, instead of an entrance into a walled garden, another concatenating internet-infinity, clicks further and further back towards an endlessly receding origin while the front page keeps updating. I miss the boundaries of the book and magazine, the author who comes once a month!
But here’s one example of Pistelli in action, reviewing a profile of the poet Jorie Graham (whom, indeed I’d never heard of! My partner, who grew up getting the NYT and The New Yorker, was surprised—“she’s very famous!”) by Kerry Howley (who I don’t know either! So you see how much at least ignorant me benefits from reading him).
Pistelli starts by pointing out—lightly, bemused—the PC ethical framing (Graham’s mother’s abusive awfulness is excused in a way that surely wouldn’t apply to a father’s; Graham as white-lady-teacher is presented only through the voice of a student who works, we’re told, on “Black pleasure”), which seems designed to excuse Graham’s being a child of (white) privilege. To which he responds: “I don’t care about checking anybody’s privilege, but the insiderness of this life may produce a poetics that could use some aeration, and not from the corporate-curated news feed her left-liberal guilt addicts her to.”
(I admit, in passing, to being myself particularly addled by such antics of insiders, and indeed wanting to take away their privilege in an enactment of provincial middle-class Jacobinism. I hate that I don’t even get to express straightforward envy of media-sphere nepo babies, since they and their defenders are always out in front turning their guilt into exquisitely sensitive political attunements that detect in my envy, my brooding marginality, the reactionary evil that prevents the world from being as it should—only a wicked loser would seethe! Well, I don’t so much mind the blackmail—I’ve been through ‘you’re a faggot if…’, ‘you’re going to Hell if…’, so ‘you’re a reactionary if…’ doesn’t concern me—and I don’t know when I was supposed to have agreed to some sort of social-emotional compact declaring, in a retarded version of Nietzscheanism, that to be immoderately alive to perceived slights and the sense of not having one’s due, was to reveal oneself to be unhappy and therefore unworthy—there’s such a tremendous joyous vitality in being aggrieved! “Why are you even mad about this, you weirdo?” To have life, and more abundantly!)
Pistelli, whether sincerely or in dumping-coals-on-her-head fashion, is quite positive about Howley’s writing, as writing, but ends, devastatingly, by observing that in her personal-political profile of Graham, she oops forgot to do any criticism: “Howley scarcely discusses Graham’s poetry. I have a vision of the woman—walking barefoot in Iowa to feel the earth, dressed all in black, scolding the school board because they’ve dumbed down the multiplication table, helplessly transfixed by Ukraine and climate change and her mother’s death on her phone—but not of the work. She wrote long lines and now, in her late phase, cancer-stricken, she writes short lines. This is what I come away knowing about her poetry.”
This is him zooming in and being subtle—he can also zoom out, in a free-wheeling Harold Bloom-type panorama, and let provocative generalizations fly, as in this post in which our current era of feminized literature appears as a moment of a swinging between male and female literary regimes: “What was modernism? A semi-conscious conspiracy of men of all sorts and conditions alongside some queer women—most of them small-press-published and self-published—to take the novel out of the hands of primarily straight women, e.g., Joyce parodying Gerty MacDowell’s reading material. Not for the first time either: Fielding in the middle of the 18th century, Scott at the beginning of the 19th, represent a similar phenomenon, with their sense of the novel as epic rather than domestic. In America, there was Melville, languishing in the shadow of bestselling female novelists whose names we don’t now remember (Susan Warner, Maria Cummins) until he was rescued by the modernists. It’s not about anybody “liking” anything or disliking it, nor about who has the better model of fiction: the history of the novel is the dialectic of masculine and feminine sensibilities.”
This is a bit bonkers, like all binaries, but it stayed with me—I find myself saying it to other people, seeing what they make of it, replaying the excitement of how it renamed the landscape.
***
Now a confession—Pistelli reads me. And the way he reads me is one reason I think he’s a good critic.
It’s embarrassing, or ought to be, when I find myself appreciating someone who appreciates me, and thus, surely, appreciating them to whatever degree because they appreciate me. It’s even more embarrassing that I came across Pistelli in the first place only because I’d been googling myself.
In the summer of 2020, when I’d just started writing public (non-academic) essays on politics and culture, he posted on his website (here again the problem of too-much—the website as well as the substack and tumblr!) a review of Miller’s Passion of Michel Foucault (a lurid book I put off reading for years because I don’t want to hear a straight guy jack himself off about AIDS and the death drive—it’s bad enough when Bersani or Araki do it!) that mentioned a couple of things I’d written in what became a suite applying Foucault to the current moment: https://johnpistelli.com/2020/07/10/james-miller-the-passion-of-michel-foucault/
“I think, too, of his late-life realization that liberalism was the best protection for whatever vitality lay under institutional power. What could be more unfashionable if not utterly impermissible on today’s left? The practical political implications must give us pause. Writing in two center-right publications, the scholar Blake Smith suggests, first, that Foucault, were he still with us in 2020, would side with those protesting against pandemic lockdowns, on the grounds that the protestors are challenging statist power over life, and, second, that Foucault would side against those toppling statues and monuments to protest white supremacy, on the grounds that they are enabling and abetting an identitarian “race war.””
I had and have to complain. It’s very unfortunately normal—although I think not typical of Pistelli who is usually above this—to take me, or anyone else, talking about some dead thinker as saying ‘what X would say if he were alive.’ X, if alive, would of course say ‘Help, help! I’m trapped in a coffin!’
My point has never been to ventriloquize Foucault or anyone else (perhaps at my worst I do this, which is bad!). Nor to endorse the lockdown protests and condemn protests/riots against ‘white supremacy.’ I did however in 2020 want to show how the points that the academic left was in the habit of making with Foucault (and Agamben, and a whole associated critique of the powers imagined to rule us) made funnily for quite good company with right-wing skepticism of the bio-medical security state (which I rather support myself—I am not against Leviathan, the regime, etc.—nor am I much concerned about rights, at least in situations of collective danger). I wanted too, to think about the strange about-face when protests suddenly shifted in the discourse of mainstream media from an irresponsible, stupid, selfish medical threat to a ‘mostly peaceful’ civic responsibility against the ‘real pandemic’ of ‘white supremacy’—and it seemed that one, to me amusingly mischievous way of doing that would be to show how the summer 2020 protests participated in a logic that Foucault describes as ‘race war’ by which history’s losers reactivate conflicts in order to overturn what they see as the illusory neutrality of liberal norms. I elaborate this point at greater length here: https://tocqueville21.com/le-club/foucault-on-liberal-democracy-historicism-and-philosophy/
It's of course polemical, but also I hope not, or at any rate not just, a plea for sympathy for (misguided) anti-lockdown protestors and suspicion of the left/establishment’s celebration of churning anti-whiteness—more importantly, the essays are moments in my thinking from a Foucauldian perspective about the incapacity of liberalism either to preserve in emergencies the rights it supposedly holds inviolable or to resist ‘race war.’ Eventually, by maybe 2021 or 2022, I came out of that writing with a new appreciation for a certain kind of liberalism.
***
I was initially irked, although of course, at that point, I appreciated being read and discussed at all—and appreciated that someone was interested enough in the work of a very obscure person, me, to be trying to put pieces together. Since then Pistelli has, more than anyone else in public, kept putting pieces together, in a very generous spirit, talking about my essays on Barthes, Macron, Sedgwick, Chu, etc. His response to my Sedgwick essay is particularly funny, sharp and perceptive:
He recognized and, in an opening reminiscence from grad school, expanded on my initial ‘typology’ of the two kinds of women who identify too much with gay men:
“All that preamble just to say that the women in attendance answered, mostly, to Smith’s cruel description of Sedgwick’s social type: straight women (though they might now call themselves queer) getting their rocks off in the gay canon, just like their now-adolescent weeb daughters up to their eyeballs (as Smith mentions) in boys’ love manga, more dignified—but how much more?—than straight men gawking at lesbian vids with tumescence in fist. One of my female colleagues in the fellowship, the one married to the Silicon Valley guy, admitted this to the company in so many words. She had married her high school sweetheart and accordingly studied Salomé for kicks. Which is why I laughed when I read Smith’s opener.”
(I’ll note, since it’s now come up again, that Pistelli seems to have a different relationship to typing than I do—I think there’s obviously something mean and pleasurable about doing it, but it also raises my hackles. There’s a certain type [but there I go typing!] of critics who get a lot out of binaries—Bloom, Davenport, Sontag—and many of Pistelli’s posts spin around oppositions like The Jamesians vs The Melvilleans, Men vs Women, etc. I think there are never Two Things. Maybe infinitely many, maybe one big one, but surely not two! Although, of course, in a spiral of ironies (the infinitely varied) one could only resist the binarizing operation by casting oneself as the enemy and counter-pole of the Typers, thus becoming one with/of them…)
Pistelli saw that the point of this bit of typing was not only to be cruel but also to show the pleasure-danger of categorizing people, to illustrate Sedgwick’s point by applying it to her and to many of her academic fans (this inspired a lot of angry Twitter commentary). He also drew out my implications—further than I was thinking them at the time—to anticipate what ended up being the subtitle (not chosen by me) of my next essay, the one on BAP, in which “aristocrats of the spirit” should be having “sex with each other” instead of overthrowing the regime (a joke, but also of course not—this is after all the Gorgias as read by Strauss-Foucault):
“He concludes with a Bloomian call for the restoration of the esoteric to public life in place of the omni-identification Sedgwick’s “nonbinary thinking” so balefully incited, where we all languish inside the glass prison of self-applied and reductive labels while telling ourselves it’s liberation… Instead of a democratic pluralism that has all and sundry toying inexpertly with the kind of play once reserved for persecuted minorities who doubled as aristocrats of the spirit, let’s rebuild that aesthetic aristocracy even in the (temporary) absence of the hostility that gave it shape. This preserves the defense against Marx-Freud’s will-to-power over the private life without swamping the public in mawkish personal fantasies of variable persuasiveness. And it is, Smith suggests, truer to the spirit of the novel, whether Austen’s or Proust’s, which is less a transparent record of credible (fictive) self-accounts than an unpredictably entertaining narrative of human folly and perversity.”
His descriptions of what I’ve been up to in the past couple of years at Tablet are… I hesitate whether to say ‘the kindest’ or ‘the most accurate’ I’ve seen. I can’t in good faith say both. I’ll say they’re ‘what I would like to be true’:
“Tablet… I admire them for the kind of thing they're willing to publish in the culture section just in terms of complexity and superficial unsexiness of topic, of which Blake's less controversial essays (on Laura Riding, for example, or Jacob Taubes) might be the premier examples”
“Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps.”
***
Pistelli also sees me in company I’d rather not be seen in, however—people like Ann Manov and Katherine Dee, whose wide-eyed ‘internet anthropology’ I find insipid. On Manov—although I promise I’m not going to make fun of her again!—a friend sent me her most recent piece: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-considerable-aura-on-adam-shatzs-writers-and-missionaries/
It begins: “THE NEW COLLECTION from London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz, jointly published by the LRB and Verso, comprises mostly essays previously published in that magazine. And despite its title—Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination—it is less the missionary function of writing than the value of that periodical that the book most clearly illuminates.”
And continues, fawningly, wordily: “And yet, what is his argument? Nonfiction books, in their quest for a cognizable marketing hook, often concoct a “thesis” in a somewhat limiting, formulaic way. It would be hard to say what the thesis of Shatz’s collection is, or even of one individual essay. As is common with LRB pieces, it is very hard (perhaps impossible) to detect where they shift between common opinion on the subject, an argument made by the reviewed text, and an argument made by Shatz himself; this was my experience even in cases where I had closely studied the authors in question.
But if the collection doesn’t contain a thesis, per se, it certainly displays some consistent tendencies. Politically, all the essays operate under the basic assumption that while “the Right” is hateful, wrong, and so on, “the Left” is certainly far from perfect, and it’s essentially good to poke fun at one’s idols and ideals (indeed, his criticism of giants like Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida are virtuosic). And crucially, Shatz’s book adopts the basic assumption that philosophy, theory, and literature are inextricable from the lives and times of their authors, and that any interesting critical reaction is one that combines the two. In other words, it is basically “historicist.” Yet there is a third factor that, while never explicated, is unmistakable: Shatz, while mostly eschewing the “I,” makes little attempt at impartiality.”
I’m not sure what makes a person who writes such stuff worth following! One list of people Pistelli reads runs: “whether in old media or on Substack, I keep up with Christian Lorentzen, Ann Manov, Blake Smith, Alex Perez, Leo Robson, friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz, and the writer behind Castalia.” I’m baffled at how mixed this crew is! Not that I know quite what company I’d want to be in. More disorienting still to consider is that it’s perhaps because he reads and takes seriously a range of people, including a number I think are uninteresting mediocrities worth studying only as typical cases of non-talents in ascendance—including truly silly people like Logo, Ulysse, Yarvin, and the world of Urbit—that I ever came into his horizon! What bug wants to know why it’s pinned?
Pistelli is more capacious and tolerant than I am—at least once every week or two I find myself stung with annoyance asking ‘how could he be interested in that?’—which is part of what makes him a critic worth reading. I admire his ability to make so much of the world shine in the mirror of his criticism, and am grateful to appear in it. Perhaps part of why someone like me needs to reason their way into liberalism, as Pistelli finds me doing—and why someone like me needs to read Pistelli—is that in the moods when I am not myself taking the pose of the resentment-minded loser of history I want to see the incompetent driven into oblivion rather than enjoy the variety of our human pageant—as Pistelli invites us to do.
No complication to the affinity, shared opinions or otherwise aside. You each are far more interested in things than in yourselves, immensely clever, writers of overly long lines that are somehow passionate yet breezy--all of which spells charisma in prose, the rarest thing now going.
Why is the existence of Two Things any less likely than the existence of the one or the infinitely many? Especially since the pedantically infinitely many so often reduces naturally into the Two?