The Picture of John Gray. posted by Richard Seymour

Gray is very good at his destruct jobs. Here he is on Post-Modernism: 'Just the latest fad in anthropocentrism.'; on atheism: 'Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies.'; on environmentalism: 'A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible, but it is humanly unimaginable.'; on Buddhism 'This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.' As you can see, this is not some work of middle brow, Alain de Bottonesque consolation, philosophy viewed as an antiseptic sticking plaster for the fevered mind...

CAMPBELL: Neither did I get a chance to read yours Richard but that's not to say that I won't. But what do you make of what David Aaronovitch has said? It is front page in the Independent. He says Richard Littlejohn's novel is a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: What else do you expect from an overgrown student union leader who used to be a member of the Communist Party? I think it is a badge of honour to be attacked by people like David Aaronovitch to be perfectly honest. I might put it on the cover.

SELF: Well he is right.

LITTLEJOHN: Is he?

SELF: It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.

SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?

LITTLEJOHN: You'll have to read it and find out, won't you.

SELF: Well it won't take me long.

LITTLEJOHN: This is typical of the self-regarding, self-appointed metropolitan elite. If you don't agree with them they don't engage you in argument, they throw slogans at you. If you disagree with them on immigration or asylum, you are a Nazi. If you disagree with them on Europe, you are a racist or a xenophobe or a little Englander. That is all they have got - they have only got slogans - they haven't got arguments.

SELF: I don't have slogans, I have reasoned opinions and I am sitting no more than 2ft 6ins away from you, Richard.

LITTLEJOHN: Well give me a reasoned opinion then. Tell me why it is a recruiting thing for the BNP?

SELF: Because it is the kind of book... I don't actually think it is a very important or serious book and I don't think you really inflame the issue very much and I am grateful for that. I don't think it has got a lot of reach. It is actually a fairly light romp, funnily enough, for a book that is based on really a procession of stereotypes of situations - exaggerations and stereotypes cobbled together into a totally implausible and bizarre kind of moral fable or anti-moral fable. So I am not too worried about your book Richard but I do think that it represents a kind of gross distortion of reality. In a sense, I suppose if you could say it is just a light comic novel then it is allowed to be a gross distortion of reality. It is like a kind of Tom Sharpe for the far right really. Is that fair?

...

CAMPBELL:Well that is the kind of Aaronovitch/Self criticism of what you have done in your book - that all the villains seems to be swarthy, Kosovan asylum seekers.

LITTLEJOHN: Not true at all.

CAMPBELL:With a next-door family of Somalians -

LITTLEJOHN: - that is wrong - if you have 110,000 words, you can pick what you like. That is rather what I expected and what I hoped the Guardian and Independent would do.

CAMPBELL: You are rather pleased about it?

LITTLEJOHN: I am absolutely delighted. The main villains of the piece actually are two white middle-class lawyers and policemen.

SELF: Wait a minute, the solicitor is dubbed as being part of an entry-ist plan by left-wing Islingtonians who kind of submerge themselves - one of them becomes a policeman who incidentally is graphically depicted masturbating with a truncheon - and the other one is a gay lawyer who runs a left-wing - a kind of firm that actually is vaguely impossible - that operates out of the Gray's Inn Road. I have read your book Richard, I do wish you would stop saying that I haven't. I have read 200 pages, I read them quite closely.

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven't read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF: Why?

LITTLEJOHN: In order to understand it.

SELF: Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?

LITTLEJOHN: No it doesn't turn into Tolstoy. I don't set out to be Tolstoy. It is a much more complex book than that.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

...

CAMPBELL: Is what you wrote about the man who called Two Jags, that's a name you coined: "He's a chimp, a pustulating boil of resentment and class hatred, a chippy, thin-skinned puffed up laughing stock, an ocean-going tub of lard, groaning with arrogance, ego, hypocrisy, and inferiority, he's an inadequate, inarticulate embarrassment, a disgrace to Britain at home and abroad." ...Do you sometimes think that this is a human being you're talking about?

LITTLEJOHN: Nah.

[laughter]

SELF: Well he doesn't say he's a human being, does he? He uses the classic form of demonisation which is to say he's a chimp, in other words he's bestial. So he's actually dehumanised the subject of his abuse before he even moves on to piling on the pejoratives, and I think that's very psychologically interesting, of course we're all familiar with the kind of people who demonise other human beings by turning them into bestiary...we all know who does that.

[long pause]

LITTLEJOHN: In the Psychiatrist's Chair with Nicky Campbell

CAMPBELL: Caroline Feraday has the travel.