The unconscious is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of...
What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere.
The tulip bubble is the most famous financial bubble in history, but as historical examples go it is also, in one crucial respect, misleading. That’s because anyone can see the flagrant irrationality which was at work. At peak tulip madness in 1637, rare bulbs were so expensive that a single one was worth as much as a fancy canalside house in Amsterdam. You don’t have to be...
Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of money are pouring in. Is it a bubble? Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.
The Misery Index, a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s...
Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the basis of its appeal.
The language and conduct of Israel’s unceasing war against Gaza suggests that there is something more than the rational interests of a nation-state at play. The sheer extent of the carnage hints at a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the...
Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate guilt, the more it entrenches itself, bringing the wrath of the gods, so to speak, down on your head: guilt is tenacious or it is nothing.
The world you see depends on where you start from. Imagine that the centre of the known universe is the Milwaukee-Chicago corridor, on the shores of Lake Michigan, once the heartland and crossroads of American farming and industry: Wisconsin’s vast dairy herds to the west, Flint and Detroit’s clanking automotive plants and steelworks to the east. Railroads radiate from the...
The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s your point of origin, from which everything flows.
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The life of the tenth Ottoman sultan, Suleyman, known in Europe as the Magnificent and in Turkey as the Lawgiver, has the trappings of a Greek tragedy or a soap opera. There is murder, sex, duplicity and betrayal, all taking place at the court of one of the richest and most powerful empires of the 16th century. Even before his death in 1566, dramas began to be written about Suleyman, and...
The life of the tenth Ottoman sultan, Suleyman, known in Europe as the Magnificent and in Turkey as the Lawgiver, has the trappings of a Greek tragedy or a soap opera. There is murder, sex, duplicity and betrayal, all taking place at the court of one of the richest and most powerful empires of the 16th century.
When Samuel Pepys, wifeless and childless, died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered....
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.
Let us say, life changes at a glance. Let us say you’re walking forward, you turn your head to look over your shoulder, and behind you the landscape has changed. One life, a life you might have led, is snatched back into the shadows. A different life begins.
This is the day I meet my stepfather; it is the day he meets me. I must not take for granted that you know the topography. You...
Let us say, life changes at a glance. Let us say you’re walking forward, you turn your head to look over your shoulder, and behind you the landscape has changed. One life, a life you might have led, is snatched back into the shadows. A different life begins. This is the day I meet my stepfather; it is the day he meets me.
‘If only one could write! After that, perhaps one could think,’ Gaston Bachelard writes in The Flame of a Candle, published in 1961, a year before his death. He is picturing himself at his desk, waiting in vain for the ability to write to return, for the solitude of the blank page to end. There were too many times, he says, when thinking he was thinking (‘croyant...
Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which? I suppose the answer depends on how we feel once we have accepted the invitation.
In his History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from.’ The execution of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted...
Above all, Jackson presents James as a ‘king of words’. No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His ‘manual on kingcraft’, Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’), became a bestseller. He could swear like a sailor, but coined new words – Anglican, anorexia, Highlander – and is quoted more than 650 times in the OED.
In September, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a rail of clothes and forgotten. Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98, but the suitcase hadn’t been touched in more than forty years. I was staying at the house next door, where her archive is kept,...
In September, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a rail of clothes and forgotten. Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98, but the suitcase hadn’t been touched in more than forty years.
Marble kouros (c.590-80 BCE).
For young men, all things are as they should be when they are in the brilliant flowering of their youth, an object of admiration for men and desire for women, and beautiful in death in the front rank.
Tyrtaeus, ‘Fragment 7’
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a...
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. Light hits the sculpture from the left – light from the east, strong and steady. And always, whether it’s years or days since the last time I stood here, it is the colour of the stone that takes me by surprise. Surely before it wasn’t this pink!
Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned excelebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.‘
‘You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.’ At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial.
In 1676, during the period of colonial conflict known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept...
Reading the work that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry. If much of her writing sounds like the apotheosis of Eliotic impersonality, it’s surprising, and moving, when she allows the home lights to glow through the thickets.
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another . . .
Edward George’s exhibition Black Atlas, at the Warburg Institute until the end of January 2026, operates in the tradition of Aby Warburg’s . . .
One of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or something from which copies can be made: at the heart . . .
The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the West Papua National Liberation Army’s . . .
Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie . . .
The annual World Conker Championships take place every October in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms, a pub in rural Northamptonshire. The 2024 . . .
Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in November 2021 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, was punched in the chest by an Evin guard during a protest . . .
I enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza in 2022. As I started my second year, I hoped I would do well enough to get a scholarship to spend . . .
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them.
For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha,...
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843,...
‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next went far beyond that. A small team of Treasury bureaucrats weaponised the global economic system itself, and built a financial nuclear bomb.
Archive in this episode:Indictment of Islamic Charity...
‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to...
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them.
For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha,...
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine...
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, the crossings of ‘small boats’ over the English Channel and the use of ‘asylum hotels’ have become a focal point for protest, violence and escalating rhetoric,...
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi...
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,...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843,...
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...
On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works.
Catch up on our four series running in 2025: Conversations in Philosophy, Fiction and the Fantastic, Love and Death, and Novel Approaches. New episodes are released every Monday.
This year’s Winter Lectures include Amia Srinivasan on politics and psychoanalysis (12 December), Adam Shatz on ideas of America (16 January) and Seamus Perry on pluralism and the modern poet (30 January).
View details of each lecture and buy tickets here.
In the next issue, which will be dated 22 January, David Runciman on Kamala Harris; Thomas Meaney on William F. Buckley; Colm Tóibín on Yeats, Auden and Eliot.
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