Professor of Medieval Literature, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY. Author of How to Make a Human (Ohio State UP 2011) and How Not to Make a Human (U of Minnesota P, 2019)
first Tawada published in English translation! Bridegroom was a Dog, her award-winning, career-making first story, has been excerpted and published by itself since, elsewhere, but this very attractive early edition has two more stories: one about a mail-order bride who finds herself married to a husband who provides but never appears, in a kind of reverse Bluebeard story (you can see everything BUT your husband), and a travellog about the Gotthard railway.
Not an easy book to write. Kirsch boils down certain strains of misanthropist ecocriticism and posthumanism (like the anti natalism of Benatar or the frankly goofy gothic pessimism of Patricia MacCormack) and especially the range of often bonkers transhumanism into something digestible on a medium-length flight. He falls, though, into the trap of so much ecopessimist writers (eg Roy Scranton): the "we" trap (we who? who's the we he's writing about here? who's responsible). A very small set of humans are responsible for global warming (here in NYC, it's the people with cars and the folks who take a lot of flights -- responsibility varies neighborhood by neighborhood).
We don't, however, get much of a survey for ecoterrorism, no acknowledgement of the existence of, say, certain book about blowing up pipelines. So I'd say the moral vacuity of the "we" trap leads Kirsch into a certain set of merely …
Not an easy book to write. Kirsch boils down certain strains of misanthropist ecocriticism and posthumanism (like the anti natalism of Benatar or the frankly goofy gothic pessimism of Patricia MacCormack) and especially the range of often bonkers transhumanism into something digestible on a medium-length flight. He falls, though, into the trap of so much ecopessimist writers (eg Roy Scranton): the "we" trap (we who? who's the we he's writing about here? who's responsible). A very small set of humans are responsible for global warming (here in NYC, it's the people with cars and the folks who take a lot of flights -- responsibility varies neighborhood by neighborhood).
We don't, however, get much of a survey for ecoterrorism, no acknowledgement of the existence of, say, certain book about blowing up pipelines. So I'd say the moral vacuity of the "we" trap leads Kirsch into a certain set of merely pessimistic readings, where he's more inclined to read Morton than he is, say, anyone writing outside the Anglosphere. There's absolutely NO sense that anyone in the Global South -- the primary victims of global warming -- have anything to say about ecological disaster; no sense of the necessity of Revolution, whatever that might look like.
So that's a fatal flaw.
His survey of transhumanism, though, is useful.
My sense, however, is that Kirsch is familiar only with a narrow range of mostly "literary" science fiction -- or that he's not given the space to refer to much unfamiliar fiction in this book's 96 pages. So we get Welles (Time Machine), a little Swift, a little McEwen, but no, say, Olaf Stapleton, no sense of how writers have imagined that the end of the human species doesn't mean that intelligent life won't evolve from raw minerals yet again.
Rand gave several talks at Brooklyn College some 60 years ago, in a cape and with a cigarette holder decorated with a dollar sign, and that a pirated Italian translation of her We the Living was made into a film, Noi Vivi, that won the prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1942, before the fascists decided it wasn't fascist enough and pulled their support
also interesting: Duggan roots her reading of Rand in Rand's comparison of a killer, William Hickman, a "nietzschean superman." Striking how the revolutionary left (eg Walter Benjamin, Richard Wright) and the right each admire the great criminal for their freedom and indifference to social rules. Freedom is an empty value.
Blames Rand for Neoliberalism, which is now the Great Enemy of the Humanities Left.
Rand gave several talks at Brooklyn College some 60 years ago, in a cape and with a cigarette holder decorated with a dollar sign, and that a pirated Italian translation of her We the Living was made into a film, Noi Vivi, that won the prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1942, before the fascists decided it wasn't fascist enough and pulled their support
also interesting: Duggan roots her reading of Rand in Rand's comparison of a killer, William Hickman, a "nietzschean superman." Striking how the revolutionary left (eg Walter Benjamin, Richard Wright) and the right each admire the great criminal for their freedom and indifference to social rules. Freedom is an empty value.
Blames Rand for Neoliberalism, which is now the Great Enemy of the Humanities Left.
Rand gave several talks at Brooklyn College some 60 years ago, in a cape and with a cigarette holder decorated with a dollar sign, and that a pirated Italian translation of her We the Living was made into a film, Noi Vivi, that won the prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1942, before the fascists decided it wasn't fascist enough and pulled their support
also interesting: Duggan roots her reading of Rand in Rand's comparison of a killer, William Hickman, a "nietzschean superman." Striking how the revolutionary left (eg Walter Benjamin, Richard Wright) and the right each admire the great criminal for their freedom and indifference to social rules. Freedom is an empty value.
Blames Rand for Neoliberalism, which is now the Great Enemy of the Humanities Left.
Rand gave several talks at Brooklyn College some 60 years ago, in a cape and with a cigarette holder decorated with a dollar sign, and that a pirated Italian translation of her We the Living was made into a film, Noi Vivi, that won the prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1942, before the fascists decided it wasn't fascist enough and pulled their support
also interesting: Duggan roots her reading of Rand in Rand's comparison of a killer, William Hickman, a "nietzschean superman." Striking how the revolutionary left (eg Walter Benjamin, Richard Wright) and the right each admire the great criminal for their freedom and indifference to social rules. Freedom is an empty value.
Blames Rand for Neoliberalism, which is now the Great Enemy of the Humanities Left.
I've read Grossman's Stalingrad and Life and Fate and now this. Their trajectory follows a gradual souring on Stalin and totalitarianism until we reach the end of Everything Flows, Grossman's last book, which is a desperate cry for freedom and "humanity" (an underdeveloped concept here).
The chapter on Stalin and the secret freedom he's trying to crush inside him is fab. Grossman's rooting of Soviet totalitarianism in the Russian slav(e) mentality -- the "Asianic despot" of the Russian soul -- embarrasses, but one also has to be sympathetic, given what he'd lived through. But his association of freedom with the west -- given the roots of western democracy and capitalism in transatlantic slavery -- scuttles nearly the whole last essay. It may be, in fact, that democracy is the special case to be explained, and that despotism is the trend of all plots and political orders. What's striking though …
I've read Grossman's Stalingrad and Life and Fate and now this. Their trajectory follows a gradual souring on Stalin and totalitarianism until we reach the end of Everything Flows, Grossman's last book, which is a desperate cry for freedom and "humanity" (an underdeveloped concept here).
The chapter on Stalin and the secret freedom he's trying to crush inside him is fab. Grossman's rooting of Soviet totalitarianism in the Russian slav(e) mentality -- the "Asianic despot" of the Russian soul -- embarrasses, but one also has to be sympathetic, given what he'd lived through. But his association of freedom with the west -- given the roots of western democracy and capitalism in transatlantic slavery -- scuttles nearly the whole last essay. It may be, in fact, that democracy is the special case to be explained, and that despotism is the trend of all plots and political orders. What's striking though is Stalin's role as, essentially, continuing the worst excesses of the Tsars, but hypocritically.
The chapters on the camps and on the Ukranian famine are essential reading, as essential as anything in Life and Fate.
Wondering whether this is read at all in Putin's Russia.
