Tag Archives: Plague Thoughts

An historian friend smugly assures me that professional historians have not neglected the years 1917-20, which saw American participation in the war in Europe and repression at home. That is no doubt true, but what distinguishes American Midnight from all the discussions of its various sub-histories is its insistence that the seemingly separate strands ofContinue reading “American Midnight and my Personal Reflections on our Heart of Darkness”

The New York Times this morning (Dec. 15, 2022) carried an article about the unbearable pressure caused by the overwhelming and rising number of immigrants crossing the border into the relatively welcoming city of El Paso, Texas. Demonized by conservatives, ignored as much as possible by the Democrats whose program offers no solution, the acceleratingContinue reading “The Immigrant Flood as “Event””

We tend to see political correctness and “cancel culture” through the jaundiced eyes of right-wing commentators. A closer look at two cases reveals the degree to which our own authoritarianism has succeeded in sanctioning what is blatantly racist and, conversely, in imposing upon one of the most effective denunciations of racism and imperialism a proscriptionContinue reading “Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul: politically correct or piously racist?”

We have a fondness for the metaphor of a world turned upside down. It is a preferred metaphor of history writing and history-making. Successful revolutions are said “to turn the world upside down.” Marx supposedly turned Hegel’s dialectic upside down (or right side up depending on how one sees it). We need a new metaphorContinue reading “A World Turned Inside Out”

Badiou’s conversion, which he himself has called his “road to Damascus” (alluding to the exemplary mystical conversion of the Apostle Paul), was his experience of the solidarity of French students and workers in May 1968. It was an event that could claim universal significance. It seemed to echo the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, and itContinue reading “Badiou’s Wrong Turn Between the One and the Many”

Globalization doesn’t result from a few bad decisions by Democratic politicians in the mold of a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair. Anyone with a clue about how the world works can see that competition compels firms to search for raw materials, cheap labor, and lucrative markets beyond national boundaries. Globalization is something more deeplyContinue reading “Getting Our Minds Around the Global Expansion of Capital”

The new Puritanism of our “cancel culture” of the Right and of the Left has not only rendered certain words and behaviors unutterable. Since those words and actions were not as rigorously sanctioned in the past, the past itself has come to seem unbearably obscure and evil. The past is an unthinkable darkness. An unintendedContinue reading “The Dialectic of the Normal and the Abnormal”

If you can recall a college roommate whom you mildly disliked yet shared unforgettable experiences with, this is how I feel about reading the books of the French author Emmanuel Carrère. He was once referred to as “the French Knausgaard”—the ultimate hypnotically self-absorbed author. He can’t rue his male malfeasance without regaling us with theContinue reading “A Badiouvian Reading of Emmanuel Carrère”

Where are we in the swirling ocean currents of history? Postmodernism has gotten us used to speaking of and distancing ourselves from the so-called “grand narratives”: the narratives of continual progress or revolution or regression. We could carry this metaphor of narrative structure further by attending to the motifs or recurring plot figures that historicalContinue reading “Apocalypse or Liberation: Narrative Patterns of Opposition”

On this quiet gray Saturday afternoon, in the last days before an election that seems to come at us like a road approaching a chasm without a bridge, I read two interesting articles in short order. The first by Stephanie Burt writing in The New Yorker (“The Never-Ending Story”) is about the prevalence of theContinue reading “On the Meaning of Multiple Worlds”