It is an existential condition that we never know the internal state of another being with certainty.
Andrea Celenza, Transference, Love, Being
The superego, which has all too easily passed into ordinary language as the secular equivalent of the conscience, has had a rather chequered career as both an idea and as one of the main ‘characters’ in our so-called internal world....
The superego – and its precursor, conscience – refers to the part of us that has no curiosity about ourselves. It’s the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves. And that part of us, like a narrow-minded fascist, has only one project: to destroy our pleasures in being alive by trying to kill our curiosity (or by making us frightened of our curiosity, which amounts to the same thing).
What happened to the veterans of Occupy Wall Street? In the case of Bree Hietala, she moved to Detroit with her husband, bought cheap derelict houses left behind in the city’s decline and abandonment, fixed them up and rented them out. They planted an urban farm on empty lots where houses had once been. Hietala started a flower business with a friend. She had two children. She began...
Detroit is the largest city in Michigan, a swing state. To win the Senate, the Democrats need to hold on to the one Michigan seat (out of two) that is up for grabs, and have chosen a new candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, a moderate leftist in European terms, a ‘communist loser who hates Jews and Israel’ according to Trump, ‘very, very evil’, per J.D. Vance.
At the end of September, Google Maps updated its satellite images of Gaza from the set taken in the summer of 2023. Entire cities have disappeared, wiped from the surface of the Earth. Some names still hover over the indistinct dunes of rubble. Pins marking the Green Farm pharmacy, Abu Khalid bakery, Jalal grocery, Al Qarara Museum, Algerian Hospital, Lama coffee shop for women, Abuahmad...
Gaza has been experiencing an old-fashioned scorched-earth campaign reminiscent of the Nakba of 1948 and no different from the settler-colonial genocides of previous centuries. Yet much of the outrage generated by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film NAZA concerns Israel’s use of artificial intelligence and other computational technologies to select targets and calculate how many people will be killed.
Early in July 1942, people on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaidō became aware that a man was rifling through their rubbish bins. This would have been peculiar behaviour under any circumstances, but the man was their prime minister. Tōjō Hideki was a little over half a year into an all-out war with the United States and Britain – to add to an older conflict still...
Early in July 1942, people on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaidō became aware that a man was rifling through their rubbish bins. This would have been peculiar behaviour under any circumstances, but the man was their prime minister. Tōjō Hideki was a little over half a year into an all-out war with the United States and Britain – to add to an older conflict still raging in China – and it was taking its toll.
The Roman Empire has left its mark on the West as a model of power, governance and society. Since its founding, the United States has styled itself as a republic, complete with Senate, checks and balances; modern European empires attempted infrastructure projects reminiscent of the ancient engineering works that carved straight roads and aqueducts through alien territories, and claimed a...
Ordinary people in the Roman Empire rarely tracked incoming and outgoing amounts in the same place, but they did assiduously record them, scribbling numbers on scraps of papyri, potsherds, wood tablets and walls, or in more formal documents that were written and notarised by the village scribe. Some of this care was a result of living under the watchful eye of the imperial authorities, and a consequent nervousness about proving that taxes had been paid.
Of all Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin is the most swan-concerned. It’s true that Parsifal has a narratively propulsive swan-shooting incident in Act 1, which is a great relief for audience members feeling desperate about the lack of action up to this point. (Everyone on stage has been standing still and shout-singing about the king’s bath for 45 minutes.) It is in Lohengrin,...
To be in or even near Bayreuth is to have Wagner drilled into your consciousness. The festival lasts for a month, consisting exclusively of repeat performances of his operas, and everything in the town is oriented towards him. Wagner’s face is everywhere, on busts and billboards and flyers for hair salons, staring down from ads for Pilates studios with that off-puttingly candid look in his eye and the trace of hysteria about his pressed lips.
In 2021, a refugee crisis unfolded on the Poland-Belarus border. Having been lured to Minsk with tourist visas, hotel packages and rumours of obliging smugglers, desperate people – many fleeing war zones in the Middle East – hoped to cross into EU territory through the ancient Białowieża woodlands. On reaching the militarised zone, most were turned back by Polish forces....
By the late 1600s, the most important commodity from Russia’s forests was no longer fur or fish; it was the trees themselves. The expanding Russian Empire required a naval fleet to defend itself: oaks, larch and pine were chopped down to build ships. Forests became a resource to be managed.
Richard Wollheim once recalled receiving a postcard from Adrian Stokes some time in the early 1960s (the postcard, he said, was ‘tantalisingly dated “Tuesday afternoon”’), which contained the sentence: ‘I shall discipline and keep myself in trim in wondering for what simple reason Palestrina avoided concerning himself with a tone poem on the plangent fountains...
To write good music is stratospherically difficult and few attain to it. Composers are forever falling short, disappointing the expectations their sublimities have awakened in us. Not even Bach is perfect.
Missouri Williams’s novels are vicious, lurid and raucously nihilistic. Her first book, The Doloriad (2022), is set outside a ruined Prague, where an incestuous clan – the only known survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event – scramble in the dirt. At first four people remained: the Matriarch, her brother, the brother’s wife and a legless schoolmaster. The...
Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors presents a bleak view of academic institutions. Its scholars are fraudulent and vain: ‘Their activity was a sham. All they did was generate piles of useless papers that they used to justify the continued existence of their departments.’ The university is little more than a breeding ground for a vapid politics of victimisation.
Tom Cruise has made a career out of playing cocksure studs sporting with danger: the teenybopper pin-up with a death wish. When he was young, he seemed to literally shine, reflecting light off his Ray-Bans and his famous back-of-the-cereal-box smile (the kind of all-American smile Jean Baudrillard called ‘auto-prophetic’: ‘Smile and others will smile back’). But...
The last time Tom Cruise played a villain seriously was more than two decades ago, silver-haired and wolfish as a hitman in Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) – the last chill of sociopathy before his Herculean efforts at reputation laundering began. There’s a reason Digger’s prosthetics look like one of the latex masks Cruise peels off in the Mission Impossible films: he’s not meant to be Tom Cruise.
In the mid-1930s, Mary Lavin was working on her PhD in Dublin. Her subject was Virginia Woolf. That she chose an author associated with such experimental works as Orlando and The Waves in a grey, conformist city that did more to send modernist writers into exile than to read them (Joyce and Beckett) tells us a lot about her confidence. Even more striking, though, is what led her to abandon...
Mary Lavin published some of the finest short stories since Joyce, along with two novels, children’s books and a clutch of poems, and the scale of her achievement was recognised by J.D. Salinger, Eudora Welty and V.S. Pritchett. But as her liberal, educated Catholic Ireland slipped into the past, and lost some of its credibility by association with a disgraced Church, her work too faded from view. Now she is being rediscovered.
Football players and managers often use the phrase ‘the dark arts’ to refer to practices that stretch, but don’t always break, the rules. Examples include time-wasting of various kinds, feigning injury and – most recently – what’s described as ‘grappling’, usually inside the penalty area during corners. Off the field, they include putting...
Helenio Herrera’s life was enveloped in layers of fantasy and invention. He even faked his date of birth. We can’t know for certain what went on in dressing rooms and team hotels or on training grounds when Herrera was a manager in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. What we do have are many, often contradictory, stories told by players, managers and journalists trying to sell papers – oral histories, essentially, many of them unverifiable.
Some people convert to Catholicism to answer their doubt, others to give their doubt shelter. Fanny Howe belonged to the latter party. ‘Did I have faith or was it hype,’ she asks in one poem. And later: ‘Did I believe or was it hope.’ Even within the idiosyncratic terms of her faith she was a refusenik: ‘I am secular. I walk the streets./I feel sorry for...
Fanny Howe’s poems station us somewhere between pilgrimage and itinerancy. Pilgrimage implies devotion and destination; itinerancy is governed by precarity and happenstance. This oscillation is characteristic of Howe, who proposed – in what is probably her most famous essay, ‘Bewilderment’ – ‘bewilderment as a poetics and a politics’. Her aim is precisely, paradoxically, to get lost.
‘And immediately/Rather than words comes the thought of high windows’. Note the rhetorical sleight of hand: what, if not words, is Larkin coming forth with? But you fall for his gambit because during the preceding lines of ‘High Windows’, speaking voices have dominated. First that of an ageing grouch – a familiar Larkin persona – casting a rueful glance...
Michael Andrews did not achieve brand recognition of the kind secured by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, with their readily identifiable manners and bodies of imagery. Yet those older friends of his would, I think, have understood my own testimony as a painter in Andrews’s wake: that his work presents as high a challenge as anything in 20th-century British art.
Early Wallace and Gromit character development (1989).© and TM Aardman Animations LTD, Wallace & Gromit LTD. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Animation was invented in France, but plasticine was invented in Britain. In 1892, Charles-Émile Reynaud showed his Théâtre Optique for the first time in Paris: hundreds of hand-drawn images on...
Everything in an Aardman film is at a small scale: there’s a playfulness that nods to its young audience, to the child’s repurposing of household objects for games. These animators spend their days tinkering with plasticine, which for most people is the stuff of childhood. Big, shiny technology is often the source of agitation and danger in the films.
In March 1973, before taking his new play, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, around the village halls of the Highlands, John McGrath accepted a last-minute invitation to perform it at a leftist conference in Edinburgh. This was tricky: he was still writing on the morning of the performance. Bill Paterson recalls McGrath handing out notes to the cast as they stepped on stage....
Girning about hydro power in Strathglass is a bit like moving to Soho and complaining about the noisy nightlife. This energy landscape isn’t ideal if you’re in search of wildness. For Kassabova, the present upheaval is a further instance of ‘industrial ways’ being imposed on native pastoralism. The history she gives is uncertain.
On the evening of 16 October, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron were filmed from the stalls as they danced in a private box at a Céline Dion concert in Nanterre. Macron appeared a little guarded, but Brigitte was animated, clapping and waving her arms, her head bobbing up and down. ‘The dates match up,’ read the caption of a social media post that went viral the following...
The call to mobilisation began to spread at the start of September: first on TikTok, then across social media platforms via AI-generated graphics announcing ‘le retour des gilets jaunes’. The date has political resonance: on 17 October 1961, Maurice Papon ordered the Police Nationale to attack Algerians protesting in support of the FLN. This time, graffiti across Paris read: ‘Nous sommes les descendants des Algériens que vous n’avez pas noyés.’
Lincoln Kirstein, the finest historian of the dance and one of its greatest ideologues, has observed that in the 19th century what the prestige of ballet really amounted to was the reputation of the dancer; and that even when there were great choreographers (notably Petipa) and great dance scores (from Adam, Delibes and Tchaikovsky), dance was still almost entirely identified for the large theatrical public with the personality and virtuosity of great dancers. That triumphant mutation in dance taste and in the composition of dance audiences which occurred just before World War One, in response to the authoritative intensity and exoticism of the Ballets Russes, did not challenge the old imbalance of attention – not even with the subsequent invention by Diaghilev of dance as an ambitious collaboration, in which major innovative artists outside the dance world were brought in to enhance this theatre of astonishment. The score might be by Stravinsky, the decor by Picasso, the costumes by Chanel, the libretto by Cocteau. But the blow of the sublime was delivered by a Nijinsky or a Karsavina – by the dancer. According to Kirstein, it was only with the advent of a choreographer so complete in his gifts as to change dance for ever, George Balanchine, that the primacy of the choreographer over the performer, of dance over the dancer, finally came to be understood.
It is often said that dance is the creation of illusion: for example, the illusion of a weightless body. But it would be more accurate to call it the staging of a transfiguration. Dance enacts being both completely in the body and transcending the body. It is, or seems to be, finally, a higher order of attention, where physical and mental attention become the same.
The government’s justification for its reform of the courts has shifted from clearing the backlog to modernisation and rationalisation . . .
How did Lula defeat Bolsonaro so handily, by a far greater margin than in 2022, after losing in the first round? How did the hoped-for virada . . .
On Wednesday, 21 October, four days after France’s biggest student protest in a generation, Inès stood in the rain outside Art . . .
‘Things are normal,’ Sofya texted me on Sunday. ‘People really can’t wait to vote. It’s a good atmosphere.’ . . .
On 19 October, the World Food Programme announced that it would be reducing its monthly food assistance in Gaza, providing support to 1.1 million . . .
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October . . .
My mother rang to say that my father had called a water truck owner and offered to pay him to fill our jerry cans, but the man said his truck . . .
My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books . . .
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try something different, a narrative poem based on an old yarn about a man who goes missing at sea for more than ten...
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of...
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi...
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the...
Tom McCarthy, writing in the London Review of Books, described James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior...
Tom McCarthy, writing in the London Review of Books, described James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’;...
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi...
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be...
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived...
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote...
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that...
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have...
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the...
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention,...
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956)belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine...
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956)belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator,...
In Middlemarch, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political,...
In Middlemarch, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession,...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’.
In...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist in Algiers and planned his writing career around three concepts based on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, a scheme that he never finished.
Jonathan Rée...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment,...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...
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