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Twenty-five years ago this Friday, folk music and indie rock changed forever. One of the most overwhelmingly grating and bizarre albums of…

"With his tropically torrid, thunderously locomotive “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, Jeff Mangum grabbed together this nostalgia and this grief as one great and terrible prayer and inscribed it deep in the heart of indie rock, and we are all still healing."

#lookingfornoonat2pm #neutral milk hotel #in the aeroplane over the sea #indie rock #folk music #folk punk #grief #grief and loss #nostalgia #hauntology #ghosts

One of the things that has been fucking me up the most about Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation is how much I connect to it.

And I want to say that what follows is not meant as a correct take. It is not meant as an opinion or a corrective or as advice or even as wisdom. It may even be outright and absolutely negative. But it must be said, and I must say it.

During the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic, as I was working in total isolation as a mental health professional, I thought about self-immolation a non-trivial amount. I thought about going to the CDC headquarters and lighting myself on fire as a protest against privatized medicine. The failure to provide free healthcare during the pandemic is, to me, one of the most monumental failures of our government, and of our society, in my lifetime. It is a failure to which I feel deeply connected. As a disabled person, as a professional, and as a child of a mother and a brother of a brother, my body and heart scream from the pain of knowing that all of us are alone when we are in ill health. I fantasized that my death could provide a flashpoint around which there could be a rallying cry for meaningful change.

I was also deeply afraid and alone, as so many of us were during the years from 2020 to 2023. Such fantasies, as they often do for the suicidal, offered a fantasy of escape and of righteousness when I worked as part of an indefensible system.

Even writing about this feels like spitting on the cause of Palestinian liberation and of the end of Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people--because I am making a post about myself and about my own experiences.

But what compels me to write all of this is that, as a mental health professional, I cannot stomach the idea that we are all just going to write Aaron Bushnell off as "sick" or "unwell." I'm not even convinced it is proper to call his death a suicide, in the sense we use to refer the terminal ends of depression and despair. We must be able to think and to write and to understand spiritual and political life outside and beyond the medical or the clinical or the merely pleasurable or painful.

We MUST be able to acknowledge the truth of sacrifice. People really do sacrifice for things that are greater than themselves, and such sacrifices are not sick, or wrong, or delusional.

The irony of my demand for universal healthcare coming along with my demand to take seriously the human being beyond the medical is not lost on me. But the contradiction is only apparent. Below both of these--the call for a political and spiritual life beyond the medical or the financial, AND the demand for the provision of the human right to medical care--is a profound belief in the absolute dignity of the free human person. And it is in fact the ongoing war machine, of which the Israeli genocide is a part, that is the other side of the machine which denies me and my clients and my fellow citizens a meaningfully free social world.

If you see Aaron Bushnell's death, and the people who acknowledge and honor his martyrdom, and think that this somehow justifies your own suicidal ideas or fantasies, I beg you to reconsider. If you see Aaron Bushnell's death, and think that the best thing you can do is die for a noble cause, I beg you to think about how much more your living body can do than your dead body can. But I cannot and I will not accept the idea that we must think of sacrifice as meaningless. Aaron Bushnell did not die for nothing, and I, and millions of people like me, will see to it that he did not.

#lookingfornoonat2pm #aaron bushnell #free palestine #free gaza

4/8/24

under a crystal chandelier of stars,

strewn like rice for a wedding,

suspended in invisible wires,

held by tittering spirits,

sponsored by dead titans,

there is the streetlight,

and under it,

the rotting camelia petals,

their faces upturned

in bloated, sallow,

dying bliss

the wet evening clears, and,

under a starlight

that almost blends

with the city's,

plump yellow stamen,

gazing upward,

still ripe

#lookingfornoonat2pm #poem #poetry #30/30

4/22/24

Returning to bed one night,

I met a shadow in the hall.

He said, please, to turn the light.

I said no, stay there on the wall.

There my nighttime shadow stayed,

a gray and somber night's adieu.

But I could not pass, nor he fade.

A block we could not undo.

Us just smiling, wincing in wait.

An hour passed, and then a few,

We chatted, held hands, and we ate

The shade sad, though not quite blue.

For my part, I wanted charms.

Something the shadow couldn't do.

I wanted candies and wrappers,

the shadow was more subdued.

The impasse gave way to jokes,

to me and the shadow starting

anew. My shadow and I, folks,

What are you gonna do?

Dawn peeked out, my daunted shade

stepped back in scorn, in much dismay.

I felt frail, and my shadow bade

goodbye, to face sleepless day.

I couldn't blame him his side

My shadow is ever my friend.

But me with only meat inside,

the darkness surpasses me again.

#lookingfornoonat2pm #poem #poetry #30/30

This is one essential reason why I have so much trouble taking American anarchists seriously any more. The entire intellectual project of imagining a society as if it springs from nowhere is premised on the free real estate of moving westward through settler colonialism, made possible by first the British and then the US army literally wiping out entire native populations. So when rightwing libertarians and american anarchists are talking about founding a utopian society, they are not truly interested in reforming (much less revolutionizing) existing society. They are talking about settling and colonizing "empty" land. One can see this very plainly in Oregon, which is dominated by both leftwing anarchism on one side and libertarian right-wingers on the other. They do not truly imagine a different Portland, a different Medford, a different Eugene. They mostly imagine a cottage-core dream of colonizing lands.

#oregon #lookingfornoonat2pm #communism #anarchism #el problema es el capitalismo #libertarianism #libertarian #communist #anarchist #settler colonialism

On the Zizek-Peterson Debate

The simplest way to explain the Zizek-Peterson debate that I can think of is that their ideas are not mutually unthinkable on any level, yet it is clear that the two men would never come to pose as the other. In some ways, this is characteristic of our moment of aesthetic radical centrism. What is agreed upon is the sanctity of continuing with the basic traditions of modernity, in spite of the looming specters of climatic apocalypse, nuclear war, holocaust, and political re-feudalization. Zizek, the pessimist, assents to continuation of what he undoubtedly considers our folly, that is, modern life, as we have not yet been stimulated by enough horror to change. Peterson, the man who tries to connect his suburban fatherhood to De-Lillo-esque mythical, cosmic forces, believes the primary task of modern life is to live it. Neither of these men communicated a moral mandate that transforms our humanity, or our understanding of the relationship between politics and the biosphere. What distinguishes one from the other is primarily style: lifestyle. Certainly not intellectual or literary style--Zizek dwarfs Peterson as a speaker, a philosopher, a theorist. But if you walked away from that debate thinking that that was what "winning" means, and are therefore overly enthusiastic for Zizek, you haven't learned the same lesson the Democratic Party still hasn't learned since 2016: being smart isn't especially politically important.

Rather, their clothing probably marked the greatest difference in their lifestyles. Zizek prides himself on his time spent contemplating shit, and made sure to include it in his rhetoric. For this delivery he chose a zip-neck long-sleeve blah of a sweater with slacks and loafers, over his usual tee-shirt and jeans. Peterson appeared in a three-piece suit, bars above his usual average white male professor look. While it is easy to dismiss style as utterly irrelevant to the philosophical content pertinent to the reason for the debate itself, it reflects what kind of event each man believed he was headlining. Certainly both dressed "up" from their typical attire. Peterson appeared to be a salesman, an honored deliverer of a message. One could just as easily imagine him at church or at a tech conference about the future of clinical practice and its relationship to automation. Zizek, on the other hand, made sure at a certain point, to address the audience and attempt to discipline their applause away from sporting. "Please don't do this! Because I really think that, and please, Jordan, I hope that you agree, that why we are here engaged in this debate. Don't take it as a cheap competition. It may be that--[laughter]--but we are, as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems." Peterson showed his real commitment to the protestant work ethic by (apparently) trying to type up a response on stage while his opponnent spoke. The way that Zizek prepares himself personally to confront those problems is to dwell upon morose topics.

Dwelling is not an idle word here, as he, as much as Peterson, has many public photos of himself in his bedroom, in his sweatpants. Bedrooms indeed compose a crucial artifact of theorization for both of them. They simultaneously represent two dramatically different faces of the resurgent interest in psychoanalysis, and the entire philosophy of sex, sexuality, perversion, and inversion that hangs on to psychoanalysis as techniques of explication. Furthermore, one of the most memorable moments from the debate came on the subject of tidying one's space. Peterson reiterated his famous point that one should have one's things in order before attempting to criticize others, or remake society. Zizek responded that we very often find that the reason our homes are not in order is that our society is not in order.

As a social worker, this is fundamental to the way I think about psychological and social problems. When working with someone to reflect on the improvement of their life, everywhere you encounter the pernicious effects of an oppressive society. Yet as a soon-to-be clinician, it is absolutely imperative that I care for myself and my own well-being in order to do any of that reflection effectively, and in a way that can create a meaningful relationship between myself and my client. When this tension emerged in the debate last night, both agreed to some vague delineation along the lines of "One improves one's society as one improves oneself." I find this unsatisfying: it does not resolve the primary philosophical difference between the two, which is between Zizek's illiberal democracy and Peterson's "family-friendly" authoritarianism. Agreement certainly feels nice, though.

Make no mistake, the aesthetic dimension is here entirely constitutive of the debate between the two men. Even if Zizek is right, and it is indeed a convening of illiberal minds to create a future beyond the failures of neo-liberal hyperindividualism and neo-conservative chauvinism, then the expressive mode of that convention is rather like a World's Fair: a just-for-fun festival in which attention and investment are given by the audience in exchange for a comforting image of the future. Like in a world's fair, the competition here is in our economy of attention. If one wanted, one could dig deep into the citations--Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Foucault, a slew of clinical literature on the topic of resilience. But the only reason to do this is, again, to try to win politics through correctness, rather than through the processes of empathetic communication, negotiation, and solidarity. Peterson's fumbling through a shallow reading of he Communist Manifesto, and a fairly uninteresting history of the USSR and its catastrophes reflects one important thing he understood about the debate: the point was to demonstrate a sincere emotive connection to collective humanity. We are in a time of desperation and loneliness. Aesthesis matters because attachment matters--no one is going to think through the problems we are facing unless they have somewhere safe and warm to dwell, and people with whom to do it.

I do not mean to say that Zizek did not communicate such a sentiment, because again, these two men share much more than one would hope for in such a famed debate. Instead, I mean to caution anyone reading this from taking it as any kind of epic, mythical, world historical, or any other sort of watershed moment. This was two men who are psychoanalysts discussing a series of psychoanalytic questions related to a certain image of how human power systems work. Zizek reflects no small number of men I know whose approach to politics is a kind of internalization of horror, and a reflexive forbidding of having too much fun while the world burns. Peterson meanwhile appeared in a costume that reflected the huckstering that surrounds the entire occasion. Indeed he began his introductory speech by remarking that tickets to the auditorium were being scalped for enormous costs. I attend here to their clothing, and to the aesthetic dimensions of the debate mainly as a way to say that philosophy, especially political philosophy, is not something that can be won. As the libertarians say, this is simply voting with your feet, buying this recycled product or this other organic one because of something you saw at the World's Fair, or on Amazon. It's all well and good for you to do that. The real efficacy of this kind of public performance is to help agglomerate groups that can safely discuss futures, produce ideas, and so on. Zizek was the only of the two to mention the real political problem of our moment--that is to say, the problem of and by the composition of the political realm itself, the existence of rights or personhood instead of barbarism, and the crass rule of sovereign brutality--the displacement of whole regions of humanity into social precarity through borders, camps, and walls. For them, there is no room from which to philosophize.

#lookingfornoonat2pm #slavoj žižek

Love As a Political Force

Introduction

This piece ended up longer than I would have liked, but I am publishing it, even unfinished, because I’m not in any university. I’ve tried to keep it spicy, with a lot of provocations, hot takes, and rhetorical flares. I welcome comments, feedback, and (non-shitty) criticism. It grew to be so long because I wanted to not only move towards a politics of love, but to describe the chief challenges it must rise to. Doing the reading is helpful, but not essential. Familiarity with the play, Angels in America, will help a lot. It would also be helpful to be familiar with Erick Erickson’s structural theory of psychosocial development, as well as Carol Gilligan’s crucially important feminist critique of it. Much of what I’ve written follows a rhetorical path meant to reflect these concepts of individual social and emotional development. But this, too, is not essential. You can get away with only reading part one. The rest addresses contentions and then seeks to invoke radical social change.

Love as a Political Force

tw: rape mention, HIV/AIDS, suicide

More Life

“But still. Still. Bless me anyway,” says Prior Walter to the angels in heaven, in Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, Angels in America. Facing the likelihood of a life cut short, and dramatically diminished by AIDS, in 1985, before AZT became widely available, Prior begs the angels to allow him to endure, even in all the pain and sickness. They tell him that the world will be undone, that life on Earth will end, and that there will be more death than all the great disaster of history thus far. But still—“More life.” Prior Walter blesses the audience at the close of the play. He survived long enough to get on medicine, and outlived the AIDS crisis by the play’s ending. The angels ask him: Who could want to live through such times? Who could want to face the apocalypse and not flinch? What is cowardice now, if we are all willing towards exactly that blessing, all trepidation aside? Much philosophy is dedicated to the question of what sort of person desires beyond the horizon of their death. We are all that now. Instead, I want to ask who the person who faces that horizon must become in order to not be alone on the other side. That answer is easy: A person in love.

We all like that. There, you are done: you have loved, you are forgiven of your duty to reconsider. You know what you mean by love. What could reading on possibly contribute to that? Especially if Hannah Arendt was right, that love is killed the moment it is displayed in public: if you were to argue with me about love, we would both lose everything on this account, or else arrive at not much more than an aesthetic, mutually inscrutable juxtaposition. Arendt is wrong, but I’ll get to that momentarily. Love, I will argue, is the chief theological question of our time, and if you do it right, we might just make it out alive. What I mean by love here is not agape, or the love of the divine, or even a love which is its English homonym, an “agape” love that accepts all. What I mean is a certain kind of love that is a political love. And it is a love which is not a given, nor naturally felt by all, the way the banal emotions are. For this kind of love to exist, politics must exist. But still it may not be the sort of love of Prior Walter for the audience.

Certainly, it is not the love of his ex, Louis—or of God—the characters who abandoned their beloveds once sin and disease befell them. At best, these forms of love are a kind of useful evil. As Zizek said in an easy-to-find youtube video, love is evil. Of all the many reasons to exist, the many reasons to give life, the many reasons to work or to improve oneself—or even to endure horrible indignity in the name of sacrifice—I choose this one. You. You, in particular, above all else, are my reason. This is the love of young sex mates, and of the narcissistic parent. This sort of love says I was ready to abandon this world, to give all my time and wellness to font a fountain in my own bath tub, my own personal Red Sea of healing, but then you came along. You, in particular have given me a reason to share the glories of being, the trials of becoming. Once you cease to be a sufficient reflection of my own reality, somewhere to project and reflect my deepest fears and individual needs, you are no longer worthy of my petty love. Our desire for this reflection is always in surplus of the limited capacity of any person to provide for it. To demand they do so any way, this is philia, and I absolutely chose that word in order to make this tangent: God is a homophile. But he does not love us. Not since we asked for more. Not since we began to ail. It is still love, however, and that is important. Our identity and sensation begins to crawl into the skin of another, and we are put at risk of great disturbance thereby. But it is only the beginning of what love can do for us.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes that young lovers should like to fall in love with a great “tearing down [of] all boundaries; [while] on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude.” If my touch is the only boundary between myself and the object of my love, my own self-destruction appears to be aimed at them, and I feel theirs to be aimed at me. This would, however, remain true of two lonely stone towers, however joint. No doubt, Rilke’s understanding of love is head-and-shoulders above the mystifications of Zizek or of Arendt. But, if Rilke’s love-as-a-sanctuary respects the dignity and autonomy of the individual, it also robs autonomy from love itself. Love, on this account cannot possibly be theological in its nature (unless our theology is ecstatic or dualist), because it flits out of our reality the moment we stop working with our partners to maintain this sacred vigil. Rilke’s mistrust of our tendency to overextend ourselves in the name of love is related to his distrust of the crowd and populism: that we often find ourselves the instruments of irrational forces. Love in this way can be tragic—we love against our own well-being. Rilke proposes the equity of solitude as a remediation to this threat. It redounds, therefore, to a condition in which love is a sort of contract, and once again our world depends on the well-being of our trustee. Your sex mate chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes just now, or guzzled a heart attack of coffee, or drove home drunk—you are at war with the horizon again. We may disrupt our solitude to try to save them, but this is the folly of the person who is always trying to save their lovers. If you can love from this distance, even in crisis, and you remain in love in spite of these failures, then higher love cannot be either what keeps us separate, or what breaks down our little ego forts. This is love. But it, too, is only another level of love in its development.

The achievement of autonomy and the overcoming of egoism are essential political tasks. Arendt’s mystification of love then can be understood as a latent desire for illimitable love, of the kind Zizek amply describes. Still, her politics contain the form of isonomy before the disaster and before apocalypse which I believe is core to love as a political force. By Arendt’s account, politics can be very nearly encapsulate by this contradictory mandate: Become more yourself even as you forswear any pursuit which empowers that self over others. Yet for Arendt these selves are aggregable, and she resolves this contradiction in the process of alliance, and the being-towards-the-future of natality. We mate and produce offspring (provincially, and not necessarily) with those we love, and we see our reflections in our community, and ideally, in the other communities that make up our political sphere. For we cannot be egoists about the world where we’re dead; “the general future of mankind has nothing to offer the individual life, whose only certain future is death.” Our autonomy is enumerated in part by what we elect (or are forced) to replace ourselves with. This choice can only ever be made by the abolition of individual autonomy and the choice to extend sensation and identity to another, over whom we have no control. Isn’t that another way of saying love? Not love of the state, nor an anonymized brotherhood, but love of our children, and the possibilities their world may contain is what guides, for Arendt, our private love to take on a public life.

There. We may have a tenable sort of love now. Arendt names as “the political” the process by which we will ourselves into immortality and therefore die. Arendt wouldn’t call this love, of course, but she could not imagine a love that is beyond the individual, like Zizek, or Rilke, or Louis or God. In his magnum opus, The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille writes, “Individual love is not in itself opposed to society; yet, for lovers, what they are has no meaning unless it is transfigured in the love that joins them; otherwise it is unavoidable meaninglessness… [Love] is in itself an opposition to the established order.” While Bataille’s writings on love pale in comparison to his writings about sex, we can detect something of what we’re looking for in this passage on silly young people fucking. We want an idea, a sensation, like a talisman or idol that will contain for us the whole of another way of being, even when we are submerged in the evils of life, even amidst apocalypse. As in Zizek’s image of love, the rest of the world fades away, and the object of our love becomes the center of a new, subversive symbolic order. Bataille’s thought here is helpful when we find, for example, that our habits of mind or body, taught to us by our society, are found to be harmful to the people we love. We change, therefore, in our will towards this love. Rilke might blanch—wouldn’t this be allowing love to overturn our sovereignty? In fact, it is the very opposite. When we aim to change to please our beloved, we compromise ourselves and that very ill-founded growth. When we aim to change the quality of our love, we must start with affirming our own sovereignty in that process.

Prior Walter isn’t the only person in Angels in America to actually see the angels. While coming to visit her newly made friend, Prior’s ex-lover’s new lover’s mother, Hannah Pitt is also visited by the angel that has given Prior his visions. Actually, the angel makes her cum. It’s really great, you should totally watch and/or read it. I mean, Meryl Streep performs the divine orgasm in the HBO version, and come one. You want to see that. What brings Prior and Hannah together, oddly, isn’t Prior’s newfound religiosity, but Hannah’s steadfast one. Hannah flew to New York to try to save her closeted gay son’s failed marriage, and finds herself spending most of her time at a Mormon community center. Prior walks in, in a daze of heartbroken misery and HIV-associated dementia, and she starts to try to help him. There are three ways to read this. The first is that Hannah is simply acting out of charity: she sees someone ailing, she’s a good Mormon, and so she helps him. The second is that Hannah is reacting in distress: she sees someone in pain, and seizes upon the demand that places on her—as a person, or a Mormon, or a community center volunteer. Either of these can be easily explained away because charity and duty both stop short of beginning to listen once Prior, the apparent madman, begins to speak. The third, and I believe correct one, is that Hannah is acting out of love. What can we call this love? Something like spontaneous, atomization-crossing enjoyment of the presence of the other.

Crucially, Hannah begins by listening to Prior. He tells her that he knows her son. She’s his ex-lover’s ex-lover’s Mormon mother. So when he collapses in the community center, Hannah begins to actually help him because he has something she wants. She allows herself to be curious about the needs and experiences of a total stranger. She wants to learn more about him. But that’s only a moment before Prior falls to the ground. In 1985, she could have easily called the police, and convinced herself that the sick man was going to make her sick as well. Our excuses for not helping those in our immediate path are plentiful. But Hannah doesn’t only help him stand up, she also goes outside to help him get a cab. She doesn’t only help him get a cab, she goes with him to the hospital. Because of this, and only because of this, Prior learns that she has something that he, as a budding prophet, needs: theology. The book of Hannah and Prior is the book of political love. Wrested from angels, it is a love of love itself; a love of the heroic possibilities and catastrophic risks entailed in pursuing a shared thriving. And it takes practice. Hannah delivers probably the deepest cut against our overdeveloped pseudo-intellectualism: “At first it can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is […] because that’s what it is and have to accept it.” The Mormon mother turns out to have amor fati. What’s more, it is this present, living, breathing love that puts Hannah in a position to receive those in need of it.

The absolute poet of love in our time is bell hooks. On the subject, she has written so much that to address it briefly is cruel both to those who adore her work, and to those who are yet deprived of her insights. However, for the purpose of exploring a politics animated by love, bell hooks cannot be avoided. She writes, “For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families.” This is because love and abuse cannot coexist. We needed fuller, more satisfying, more fire-quenching love, and for too many of us, our parents were either too overworked, or too dependent upon petty pleasures to provide it. And it is now up to us as adults to relearn even the first, all-consuming love so that we can strive to contain it in the second, co-equal love, and develop it further into a love of love itself. Only then can we begin to practice healing that is a vocation of our heart, instead of being blood-bags for the desperate. Hooks furthers her critique through both dialogue with regular people, and material analysis of the actually existing society. She notes that our capacity to love cannot develop under conditions designed to dominate, or which teach us to dominate. We must be be both alive to our connections with other, and respectful of the illimitability of inner experience. Arendtian love disappears in our need to speak honestly and frankly about our families and how they taught us to love. Zizekian love, in its joyful negation of the world in favor of its object, severs the social and spiritual connections which in fact comprise the persons themselves and therefore must be overcome. Rilkean love begins to multiply its autonomy-stewardship dynamic, ideally, to a point where solitude becomes untenable as a description of our lives.

What hooks describes as “a commitment to spiritual life,” is based on the fundamental understanding that in order to thrive, we must have a material base of minimal comfort, and social base of recognition. While we can recognize that love, in its own sovereignty, may bless us with greater capacities to love than what a statistician might predict, this understanding of the spiritual life is core. When we love and seek to magnify that love, and seek to extend its possibilities for the lives of others, we everywhere confront material and spiritual deprivation. Even children of wealthy families find their parents locked in the narcissistic pursuits of public esteem and private capital, and therefore unable to give them the love they needed to thrive as young people. “Spiritual life,” writes hooks, “is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inner-being an interconnectedness.” Thus, we can see the political life of love as the extension of this network of reciprocity, admiration, nourishment, and respect. When we love love, we desire for all people to develop this capacity to its utmost. We are called on, therefore, to act not from charity, nor from duty, but to protect and uphold the possibility of love growing from every corner of our communities.

When I asked my lover what she thought political love could mean, she described an experience she often has on the subway. Some old woman, or some sad-looking man will board the train, and spontaneously, she will feel that that person deserves her unconditional support and love. The feeling may pass, but the moment is absolute if it seizes us. We become, like Hannah, instruments of love, when we allow our futures to be altered by the love of those we find along the path. We can have this experience with neighbors, if you’re not too closed off to it. We can have this experience with whole communities, if you spend enough time in public to enjoy the life of the city streets. This sort of love does not die by exposure to the public. It lives only through our exposure of ourselves to its possibility in the stranger, the fellow bus passenger, or the neighbor. And we can develop in ourselves our capacity to feel this love. Because I am, in many ways, still trapped in Zizekian love, I will take my lover’s authority on this matter to be beyond critique. Arendt’s structure of the frail plurality of the future, and our relation to it describes the same gambit love as a political force demands. bell hooks describes what that love must contain in order to be a strong, capacious love. Kushner’s Prior Walter shows us how to love ourselves, and protect ourselves from neglect and wrong. Kushner’s Hannah Pitt shows us how essential and unbreakable the love of love becomes when we practice it daily.

The Virtual and the Spiritual

It is an exciting time to be alive, if you have even a modicum of derring-do and/or masochism. The perennial cycle has arguably returned to theology (from its stint in aesthetics from 1989 to 2018) precisely because of the stakes in our politics: Once again, the apocalypse isn’t just an idle threat of clerics, or Schmittian protestants, or geopolitical goliaths. It is a visibly active force reshaping whole countries, and it is a sort of polymorphous death angel: Here the death of a democracy, there a coup; here the burning Amazon jungle, there the burning down of all our parents understood to be honor; here a culture wiped out, there a culture that fetishizes the new to the point of cannibalism. Here a hurricane, there a singularity. The specificities of the apocalypse are uninteresting to me, philosophically speaking, because they all amount the same thing: an unavoidable horizon, and after that, perhaps a freefall. Supposing it is a freefall, there is surely value in investing in parachutes, so to speak, but that’s what people said about bitcoin. The air might be too thin for the parachute to spread properly. Acid rain may burn it any way.

In practical fact, the apocalypse is primarily a matter of labor value. Understanding the apocalypse in terms of freedom is less than useless—noxious, even. You are free to die. Go ahead. Understanding the apocalypse as a matter of justice comes closer to confronting the theological dimension: the caprice of the Earth which produces the obviously unjust situation in which the most polluting nations have thus far experienced the mildest consequences. Labor value more fully encapsulates the primary practical consequences of apocalypse. Life will be made considerably cheaper, to the point of the rule of sovereign brutality. Furthermore, thinking about it in terms of labor value connects our immediate experience to what is beyond the storm. It’s hilarious these days to go to interviewing for white collar jobs. I haven’t heard the question, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” since 2016. We know the answer, and it’s probably either shoveling heaps of shit or else meticulously placing your shit in the shit container to be delivered to the shit heap. But what is the work for? What good does it do a person to work all their life, if the fruits are enjoyed by someone else? Why should I develop myself any further if I’m just going to jump into the gristmill of someone else’s idea of progress? Understanding the practical reality of the apocalypse as a matter of labor value reasserts the importance of love: what we live for, what we commit to against our better judgment, what wills us beyond the horizon. However we characterize the passive feeling of love, its ugly namelessness accompanies us unconditionally whenever we desire beyond possibility, for the wellness or joy of others.

But which others? For the conservatives, that is practically the only question. With the advent of the virtual, we of course have a massive panoply from which to answer this question. That changes absolutely nothing for the conservative, of course: if anything, it lengthens the list of people not to let past your little stone fort. The earning of trust and respect is paramount for the conservative of course because he believes it is in man’s nature to seek conquest. Only in love is there an exception. However, even if consent is given, his love remains a sort of rape because it is love for him insofar as it is illimitable: the Zizekian love, the Platonic love of abstraction, the love of Tony Kushner’s Roy Cohn for the law. What can we call this sort of philia? Perhaps a chauvinist love—a trap I may well fall into myself by seeking out the highest love. Nevertheless a difference persists. Who you allow into the realm of intimacy—the realm of sovereign connection, where emotion is the primary rationality, and relationship is based on identity-as-genital/s, and expands out from there—reflects who you are as a person. In treating love as this holiest of exceptions, against which neither god nor God nor society can intrude, the conservative reveals his failure to love love.

It is easy to see how charity and duty are handily enough satisfied by the virtual, to the point of imbecilization. Love demands more. The best this mistrust of love itself can achieve is Rilke’s love between spouses, and even then, the conservative political project is underwritten by a belief that only one gender truly deserves their solitude.

The german idealist notion of the virtual/representational as the spiritual persists in our irony towards it, but it is false. The virtual is fun, but fun is the shallow end of a blunted spectrum. The other side is nausea. We watch these horrors, and while the horror is easily felt to be universal, it is absolutely essential to sort it out. Our virtual relation to the global, and therefore to each instance of the apocalypse, can go no deeper than fun or nausea as its absolute extremes. It is a horizontal abyss in which, as Baudrillard says, “only few things and at rare moments achieve pure appearance.” On this account, our love can walk the streets, perhaps even chant and hold our fists high, but only because the public has been eclipsed by the virtual. Every disaster has a gofundme by the end of 24 hours. The state’s response to climate change is implicit already in its response to each small calamity, each life boat on the Gulf or Mediterranean. It is already culpable in the displacement in the first place, as centuries of colonialism rot into wasteland. The apocalypse, as it is made to appear in the virtual, seduces us to stay comfortably lost between nausea and fun.

Love—political love, love that is a force in politics—is like chocolate. You ever see a kid eat chocolate candy for the first time? They didn’t know how empty and meaningless their life had been until that first rush of dopamine. Love is chocolate for the apocalypse. We can expanded our capacity to love such that the virtual horrors inspire something more than fun or nausea, not just sometimes, but as a way of relating to the world per se. Perhaps then we could see the biome and its torments as implicit in our decision to love on a day-to-day basis. You don’t know how good you can be until you’ve tasted it.

That expansion is something people actually already know how to do. And it is the practical life of spiritual development. Expansion of sensation and suspension of identity are not boxes on a spreadsheet, which can be supplanted for this-other-religious-belief, or that-other-political-commitment. Extending empathy is a skill you can actually improve, using your actual body. Actual bodies require labor. And if any of our actual bodies make it out to the other side of the apocalypse, they will not be drawn together by the ecstasy of the virtual, but by the necessity of the spiritual. There are hundreds of thousands of people who have already survived an apocalyptic visitation, and they have names, and if you live in a democracy, you can probably go meet them if you’d like.

You, Yer Dad, and Everyone You Know

One time at a party, I got trapped in the corner with some insufferable hippy like myself, and he made me listen to his spiel. He said, “According to the Buddha, if there are gods, or even, you know, big-G God, then that changes nothing. If they have an identity and a desire, they’ve got the same problems as you and I.” He smelled bad, but the lesson is a good one. Supposing this is true, it would remain true of any sort of hostile AI singularity event. On the Buddhist account, life is suffering, and compassion is the key to unlock what lies between ourselves and our enemies. If it suffers, then the humanity can love it. Well, so what? The machine doesn’t love me back, so who gives a shit? We are done with what Sloterdijk called “loser romanticism,” so this love had better actually do things. Because, if it doesn’t, we all have a lot of other emotions—hate, greed, boredom—that motivate whole industries.

Love is an essential political task now because so few people seem to be worthy of it. You, yer dad, and everyone you’ve ever loved is living on a planet that is dying, and the apathy with regard to that fact is galling. Even some of the brightest, most optimistic minds cleave to a sort of processual nihilism. “We’re doing everything we can!” said one friend. Another said, “If what it takes is some kind of horrible, overwhelming violence, or dictatorship, or both, to turn climate change around, maybe it was meant to happen. Maybe that’s the tragedy.” You can hear echoes of this in almost every response to climate change that isn’t coming from a tanky or a nazi. The religious find a different confidence. We need love, not just to have it, but to pursue it, magnify it, and seek within each instance the grain of a higher love. We need it because if we actually loved ourselves and our loved ones as much as we say we do, we would not need to scrunch down and hide when we look at the apocalypse. Love becomes a political force not by some fiat, some laser eye-beam of pure eros. Nor does it become a political force merely through solidarity with either our tight little chauvinist circle, or our cadre, or merely our fellow worker. Love becomes a political force when we seek with others to magnify the possibility of love, for ourselves, and for others.

The mystics may balk, but we as a society actually know a lot about how to produce that kind of love. Without the ability to form secure attachments as a toddler, that ability is hampered throughout life. Without the opportunity to play and make mistakes free of repudiation or humiliation as a child, our capacity for open play is hampered throughout life. Without the ability to assert oneself authentically as a young person, one’s ability to do so in relationships with lovers, friends, or family is perpetually hampered throughout life. Without the opportunity to give, receive, and reciprocate intimacy through the kinds of intense relationships that form as a young adult, our belief in solidarity, and ability to extend trust is damaged. These are essentially empirically sound facts gathered from a century of psychological science. And at each phase, the ability to form a higher love can be thwarted or nourished. Without stability, without assurances of health and well-being, and accompaniment, none of these capacities can thrive, and yield the fruit we crave. The love of hooks, the political love of the stranger—these are not given to us simply by our development as human creatures, but rather require practice, and the security in which to fail. So why don’t rich kids become rich people who love more? They hit about 21, form those intense relationships we all like to reminisce about, and get cock-slapped by patriarchy and capitalism. At some point, your dad says something amounting to “You’re letting a bunch of fuckin faeries steal all the weed outta yer garden! You dumb fuck. Stop feeling so much and get your shit together.” And somehow, they always do.

We can, in fact, observe empirically how lower forms of love grow to become higher, more secure, more generous, more certain forms of love in the individual lifespan. These transformations appears to be an individual choice one some level. We have to practice good communication to be any good at it. There is some genetic component, but it appears to be made negligible by the simple power of a present, loving face, warmth, and food at infancy. Yet under all of that is the value of labor. If the value of labor is high, parents spend more time with children, neighborhoods have more healthy activities in them as people naturally bridge their isolation with their free time—they may then neglect their children, as bell hooks says, by supplanting loving presence with material objects. Yet the fundament of material safety is necessary to develop our fullest capacity to love. Political love which is love of the leader or the country or the state is in fact simply chauvinism: loving what you see of yourself in the object (and is why romantic love can be a source of danger under the rule of any philosopher-king). But it does not ascend the level of loving difference, as Rilke’s true partners might. Instead, if we want a politics of love that is not chauvinist in nature, we have to begin at the moment of immediate experience, which is to say, praxis.

When was the last time you experienced a sudden, uncontrollable desire for the health, happiness, and joy of another? Have you sought to cultivate this capacity in yourself? What is stopping you from doing so? Why do you associate love, and especially the radiant quality of your own love, to be a liability for you? Was yer dad a cruel prick?

Angels in America ends with the characters having what is supposed to look like an ironically unwinnable conversation about theory and practice, and the necessity of both. Louis comments that he doesn’t want the play to have a Zionist tone, with its reference to the angel who would bring forth a new wellspring in the holy land. Kushner’s writing intones both a joy and a detachment with regard to theorizing: the only character who does it, really, is the sick-lover-abandoning Louis. Identifying the practice of love, and the magnification of love, with the daily experience of living and loving is not meant to subvert the divine. Divine love is no doubt something we are all capable of with the proper development, and besides, it radiates through us any way, whether we like it or not. Prior Walter, the AIDS-stricken prophet, has blessed you with more life. He wants you to thrive, like the bodhisattvas and the Christ. No one can take that away from you. But they can take away your polis. The massive chasm that separates love in its form as a political force from love as the force of creation itself is that political love must be willing to defend itself. If capital is an imminent force of calculability, then love emerges as its opposite, not because of its illimitability, but because of its refusal to supplant or replace or liquidate or substitute. Love cannot do without its particularities, given from each according to their ability, and seeking always for needs it can meet. Love in its chauvinist form is seductive for our political impulses because it promises to magnify our love for our neighbor by replacing him with someone we already love. Love in its political form—which is to say, love that respects the autonomy of self and other, while still seeking to overcome individual egoism—is the expansion of sensation and identity by means of cultivating this capacity in oneself, and guaranteeing the minimum social needs are met for your neighbors to cultivate it as well. You don’t need to bless the whole audience, you just need to bless more than the person you bless.

This is the love you must be in in order to survive the apocalypse. If a love that is so open-ended yet certain and specific; that is defined by its radiance, rather than its negation, or its qualities of exchange, cannot be willed into history, it will be willed out of it in retrospect by whatever comes next.

#lookingfornoonat2pm #slavoj zizek #bellhooks #hannah arendt #politics of love #apocalypse

one who keeps tearing around

everyone says life is too good to pass up,

and then throw parties where no body comes

and no body says anything about anyone.

everyone says life is too good to miss,

and then hate the janitor for even being

a symbol of dirt for having cleaned it.

you missed a spot:

your delicate sensibilities

everyone says life is worth living,

and then refuses to debate the matter,