LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, July 30, 2012

Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

This appears in the latest Verso catalogue, scheduled for publication in November:

Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchensby Richard Seymour Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist.

Among the forgettable ranks of ex-Leftists, Christopher Hitchens stands out as someone determined to stand out. Rejecting the well-worn paths of hard-right evangelism and capitalist “realism,” he identified with nothing outside his own idiosyncrasies. A habitual mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a “Marxist,” the role he adopted late in his career—as a free radical within the US establishment—had ample precedents from his earlier incarnation. It wasn’t the Damascene conversion he described. His long-standing admiration for America, his fascination with the Right as the truly “revolutionary” force, his closet Thatcherism, his theophobia and disdain for the actually existing Left had all been present in different ways throughout his political life. Post–9/11, they merely found a new articulation.

For all that, the Hitchensian idiolect was a highly unique, marketable formula. He is a recognizable historical type—the apostate leftist—and as such presents a rewarding, entertaining and an enlightening case study.

Labels: 'new atheism', anticommunism, apostasy, christopher hitchens, hitchens, liberal imperialism, Unhitched

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The late Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

My autopsy of the late Hitchens, in the form of a review of Hitch-22, is now available on the ISJ website:

The strength of Hitch-22 is that it makes a serious effort to recall how it felt to be a different kind of person, to feel otherwise about the world, without trying to repudiate it. The weakness of Hitch-22 is that where it does attempt to resolve the amassing contradictions of Hitchens’s persona, it is largely through solipsistic devices of the kind “I would have suspected myself more if…” and “I wasn’t about to be told…”. The resulting memoir is an alternately riveting and sickening tribute to the late author’s narcissism...

Labels: christopher hitchens, hypocritchens, imperial ideology, john bullshit, liberal imperialism, narcissism, petty bourgeois individualism, the liberal defence of murder

Friday, December 16, 2011

The late Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

Don't take this the wrong way, but the glowing tributes to Christopher Hitchens are both tasteless and incorrect. Have some decency. The boring wisdom has it that Hitchens broke the mould intellectually. He did not. For all the unique saleability of the Hitchensian idiolect (or intertext), he was a very conventional thinker, in addition to being a provincial. He also had a reputation for being a fierce defender of universalism, but in fact his was the provincial universalism of empire. One might, in the same speech, catch him defending the right of others to disagree with him, then find him denying that right to Iraqis, insisting that they be coerced at gunpoint into vouchsafing his opinion. He had a reputation for possessing a powerful intellect. He was certainly an intellectual, and a powerful speaker and writer, a polemicist who out-classed many of his opponents. Yet, by insisting on the difference between being an intellectual and having an intellect, I don't merely mean to be scurrilous. His difficulty in handling complex ideas was as notorious among his peers as his facility with emotionally potent oversimplifications.

Hitchens was a sensitive literary critic, but in a way this underlines his tendency to think viscerally. He grasped instinctively the 'John Bullshit' that, for example, made Larkin tick. Indeed, he grasped it with precision because it was a part of his own political personality, manifest in his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, his support for the Falklands War, and the blimpish outbursts redolent of the character of the 'Commander' in his memoir, Hitch-22. Yet when he had to deal with literary theory or applications of it (see Orwell's Victory), I think he tended to flounder. It is for a similar reason that he wasn't especially good as an atheist. Convinced as he was that there was no intelligent way to be religious, and no need to grasp theology in any theoretical depth, he tended to rely on demotic arguments demonstrating the implausibility of religion along the lines of: "so God made the universe billions of years ago; created the life forms that would over millions of years give rise to the only species capable of worshipping him; allowed them to suffer for millenia; and only then decided to make himself known by means of human sacrifice (and at that in an illiterate society) banking on the certainty that Emperor Constantine would turn to Christianity as an official state ideology of the Roman Empire...". This is to say nothing of the vulgar anti-Muslim rants and ugly blood-lust that he ventilated without care, and which sentiments formed a transparent motive for his turn to hypertrophic theophobia after the occupation of Iraq began to fail badly. And what of the crude sociobiological reductionism that he pinned his mast to? At this point, it is arguably more pernicious in its effects than even the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, or the opinions of Muslim scholars.

What he lacked in theory, he could make up for in empirical work. Hitchens could write decent biographical and historical essays. Blood, Class and Nostaglia as well as Hostage to History form extended historical essays in their different ways on Anglophone imperial succession. Richly contemptuous of the abuses of empire's subjects, these books arguably expressed a liberal humanist critique of imperial malpractice rather than a marxist critique. Perhaps there is also evidence of a decline in his standards. His book on Thomas Paine's Rights of Man seems to have been plagiarised, riddled with factual errors and cliched to boot: what Hitchens might call a "triple crown howler". Yet it was in his favoured role as a polemicist, that his limits were most clearly visible. For all the efficiency with which he despatched opponents, tore up or mended reputations, exposed official crimes (or colluded in them), he was clearly obsessed with personnel. The structures of imperialism and capital accumulation were never objects of his inquiry, even at his best.

A final cliche which should at least be qualified is that Hitchens was a wit, and all round dissolute bad boy. Well, he could be witty, but he could also be extraordinarily priggish, crass, or just boorish. The effect of his little joke about child rape ('no child's behind left') was ruined by his later taking an extremely high-handed tone with a rabbi who joked about circumcision. The humour in his 'heartless' bon mot about Louis Althusser applying for the Electric Chair in Philosophy was really purchased at the expense of Helene Althusser. It was not funny when he called the Dixie Chicks 'fat sluts', no matter what the editor of his collected quotables believes. Consider these remarks in the context of Hitchens' mildly hedonistic lifestyle, and they become no more sparkling. Rather, they tend to communicate a meanness of spirit, a sniggering cruelty, that was increasingly evident in later years, and contrasted markedly with the personal warmth that many of his former colleagues describe.

Labels: british empire, christopher hitchens, islamophobia, liberal imperialism, thatcherism, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Ye of bad faith posted by Richard Seymour

Max Dunbar is not a commentator I take all that seriously, but this kind of stupidity deserves to be pointed at. He says:

blogger Richard Seymour (currently valiantly struggling to contort his anti-imperialist narrative around the Obama era) declared faith ‘an enabling narrative for liberation struggles’ and atheism ‘an ideological accessory to empire’.

The first quote comes from this:

Religion can be used as a tool for control, but to reduce it to that function without qualification is both erroneous and, if it matters, profoundly anti-marxist. Religion is a work of labour, a performance by people working in different contexts, deriving meanings that appear to be apt for their circumstances. That means that, while it is open to highly reactionary, patriarchal and authoritarian readings - indeed, it may even have a sort of elective affinity with political authoritarianism - it is also open to democratising, emancipatory impulses. It can, even as it engages people in fictions, also furnish people with a means to obtaining lucid insights about human beings.

To avoid caricature, I should point out that I am not inviting anyone to believe in the scriptures or the Qu'ran or the Torah or the complete works of Deepak Chopra. Nor am I saying that there is no potential harm in religion. What I am saying is that far more important than what is written in religious texts - which are indeterminate - is the way in which people receive, interpret and operate on those texts. Religion does not, on the whole, drive war or exploitation or any of the major evils that the world is experiencing. At most, it is an enabling factor, just as it is also an enabling narrative for liberation struggles.

The second quote comes from this:

The 'war on terror' and the Israel-Palestine conflict are seen as being driven by 'religious extremism' in this purview. Naturally, when discussed in those terms, people like Sam Harris conclude that Islam is the worst religion, the most menacing kind that exists on the planet, mandating all sorts of extreme measures including torture and bombing. Naturally, Amis concludes that the 'extremists' (Muslim extremists, he means) have a 'monopoly on self-righteousness and violence' and produces all kinds of fulminations about Islam and Muslims to accompany this. This is the quite logical result of a culturalist reading of a dense mesh of geopolitical struggles. To this extent, the 'new atheism', where it is not just naive and bossy, is an ideological accessory to empire.

I think I can safely say that in both cases I have been misrepresented. And, weirdly, this is not the first time that comments of mine written for haloscan have been miscited by critics. Johann Hari and Marko Atilla Hoare are both guilty of this. One assumes that these people don't credit their audience with the desire or ability to check their references. As a subsidiary point, Dunbar goes on to cite the ~~conspiracy theorist~~ 'feminist' Caroline Fourest, who remarks that colonists "rarely modified the habits of the occupied countries". Now, this is not strictly germane to the argument that the 'new atheism' (not atheism in toto) operates as an ideological accessory to empire. After all, we are talking of this phase of empire, not any previous one. And secondly, the issue is how such doctrines mobilise opinion in the imperial 'metropole', not whether such doctrines are translated into practise in the 'periphery'. However, I would just like to point out that colonists did indeed go to great efforts to modify the habits of occupied countries. Need I really essay on the 'humanitarian' imperialism of the British in the Pacific, and the prolonged British missionary position? The tirades of Cardinal Lavigerie and the clerical colonialism of the French empire? The Christianising efforts of the Spanish in Latin America and the Philippines? (And while we're on the subject of religion in the Spanish empire, it would be remiss of me not to credit the religious humanism of Bartolomé de las Casas). I have hardly exhausted the list of available examples. Why do these people make it so easy? And why do they give the impression of sniffing around my bins, and listening in on conversations for 'evidence' to submit to imaginary tribunals?

Labels: 'new atheism', christianity, christopher hitchens, imperial ideology, imperialism, religion, the liberal defense of murder

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

On Press TV posted by Richard Seymour

Press TV has broadcast my interview with George Galloway. You can watch the whole video here. This is the edited version:

Labels: christopher hitchens, george galloway, pro-war 'left', the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Last will and testament posted by Richard Seymour

It has been said that 'Orwell's Victory' was the late Christopher Hitchens' last decent book before he went fully over to the dark side. It does a decent enough job of defending Orwell from some unfair critics, defends Orwell's anti-imperialism (albeit he doesn't linger on the support for the Palestinians, almost unique among European left-wingers at the time), shows that his insight into 'totalitarianism' in part derived from his experience of the colonial labyrinth, and contains some judicious criticisms of Orwell's prose where necessary. It also has an embarrassingly poor section, seeking to defend Orwell's notion of linguistic transparency against the 'postmodernists', in which he barely sets a foot right (apparently, postmodernism is 'in essence' the proposition that nothing will ever happen again for the first time). There is a dubious defense of a conception of Englishness and bourgeois values such as 'decency'. But what is worse than embarrassing and actually a little sickening is the psychologising about the urge to dominate and be dominated. At the end of chapter 8, Hitchens has this to say:

With a part of themselves, humans relish cruelty and war and absolute capricious authority, are bored by civilized and humane pursuits and understand only too well the latent connection between sexual repression and orgiastic vicarious collectivised release. Some regimes have been popular not in spite of their irrationality and cruelty, but because of it. There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winston Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus's rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold. This long and steady look into the void was Orwell's apotheosis of 'the power of facing'. (pp 169-70)

I raise this passage because it concentrates in a few sentences a number of themes prized by 'antitotalitarians'. (Hitchens places Orwell alongside that bunch, including Koestler and Silone, which would actually seem vaguely insulting, since Silone was a police informer and Koestler a supporter of Zionist terror, who jokingly referred to himself as a 'colonial'). From the BHLs to the Kanan Makiyas, this posited instinct for cruelty and evil is a mainstay of 'liberal antitotalitarianism'. Nick Cohen's inchoate attempt to 'explain' what he insists is inexplicable (said 'totalitarianism') rests on a mish-mash of pseudo-psychoanalytical motifs - the will to obey, group solidarity, etc. The Cold War psychology of Maslow and the pre-Cold War psychologisms of John Spargo are drawn from the same well. And, of course, the fear of the masses, and the exaltation of Camus and his lone rebel, is commonplace with this crowd. It's a pleasing, self-serving fiction for the soi-disant contrarian, but one already dismantled by Alistair Macintyre. All of which is just to indicate that this flight from serious left-wing politics to individualised moralising about 'integrity' and so on was already much in evidence before the fat Englishman had his meltdown post-9/11.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Richard Seymour and his critics posted by Richard Seymour

I suppose I should have something to say about this, inasmuch as it briefly reviews my contribution to 'Christopher Hitchens and His Critics'. The author of the review, Max Dunbar, describes my piece as 'scatological', which is true to the extent that it contains one swear word near the end. But I'm sure he meant to say 'abusive', which is far more to the point. He says that my critique of Hitchens is that he changes his mind a lot. It is not that. It is, partially, that he fabulates, retrospectively adjusting his positions so as to render them a great deal more coherent than they actually are (the tale of his Damascene conversion in a Kurdish jeep is the key example). This is not the end of Hitchens misrepresentations, but since the author of the Butterflies and Wheels article doesn't bother to deal with these, neither will I.

Dunbar says that I claim "that the jihadis and ex-Baathists in Iraq are a ‘grassroots guerilla movement, one that has arisen because of the brutality of the occupation’", and that my "sources for this statement are the CIA (!) and a bunch of antiwar websites similar to his own." In fact, the antiwar websites mentioned just provide graphics of data gathered by the Multinational Forces in Iraq and supplied by the US Department of Defense, which I have cited directly elsewhere (Dunbar could have asked me, or he might have checked the dossier in the sidebar). The statistics speak for themselves: the vast majority of attacks by insurgents are directed against occupation troops, not against civilians or even America's local auxiliaries. The exclamation mark beside 'CIA' is also unwarranted. In this case they provided 'evidence against interest'. In other words a branch of the American state supplied information about the nature of the military opposition to the occupation that directly contradicted a case being produced and disseminated energetically by that state.

Dunbar accuses me of "believing that the murder of young working-class Americans is somehow understandable". I don't. I think the killing of occupation soldiers (which is presumably who he means) is more than understandable - it is an absolute necessity. I am not persuaded, as Dunbar appears to be, that one should not defend oneself against an armed occupation soldier because he may be working class. He adds that I "perceive the killing of trade unionists and aid workers and the bombing of mosques and UN buildings as mere collateral damage." Not only did I not say this in the article, but I don't think I've ever said it. It isn't even implied, so far as I can tell. That exhausts Dunbar's engagement with the article in question, but there is one other thing. He mentions, before he gets to discussing my piece, that I run an "unreadable" weblog. On this evidence, it would be more accurate to say that he finds it unreadable, because he is demonstrably incapable of properly reading what he purports to be criticising.

Labels: belligerati, christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Drowning Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

Whose idea was it to stop?

Labels: christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Also appearing... posted by Richard Seymour

An article of mine will be appearing in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, published by New York University Press. If you absolutely can't wait, you can read the original at MRZine.

Labels: christopher hitchens, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder