Susan Sontag for almost forty years was the most recognisable public intellectual in America. She inspired an entire generation of critics to read more widely, think and feel more deeply, and stay attuned to the transformative power of art. In her numerous critical essays on art, politics, and our technologically mediated ways of seeing, Sontag built up her own distinctive aesthetic and moral sensibility, one that merged the moral seriousness of high art and the joyful eroticism of so-called low cultural products. Her debut collection, Against Interpretation, made her an almost overnight intellectual celebrity fueled by such iconoclastic essays like Notes on 'Camp'. In this episode, critic and art historian, A.V. Marraccini guest hosts to discuss the legacy and enduring importance of Sontag's writing, orbiting around a discussion of the early Notes on 'Camp' and the mid-period definitive takedown of fascist aesthetics, Fascinating Fascism. Ultimately we argue that a reconsideration of these essays are indispensable to understanding our own neo-fascist moment in which a new breed of grifters and cynical aesthetes are attempting to blind us to history and obscure the baleful influence of the fascist aesthetic’s romantic longings. Re-reading Sontag reminds us of the interwovenness of art and politics and ask us to confront urgent moral questions of the critic's and artist's role during tumultuous political times. How do we avoid complicity in a society in the grip of political nihilism and spellbound by fantasies of domination and purifying violence?

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“Content of the Form” is a new interview series excavating the moral and political meshwork implicit in the use of certain artistic forms and genres. If every form or genre-exercise entails a repertoire of expected tropes with their own often unconscious social history and political function, conversely we can read within the framework of a form a network of concerns and anxieties voiced by the choice of the form. Our first guest in this series, Grace Byron, guides us through the autobiographical works of the french writer, Annie Ernaux. The recipient of the 2022 Noble Prize for Literature, Ernaux's magnum opus, The Years, presents a experiential panoramic history of the 20th century from the situated perspective of an ambivalent bourgeois intellectual who witnesses the triumphs, catastrophes, and disappointments of the arc of the twentieth century amongst the quotidian memories of girlhood, marriage, motherhood, and intergenerational change. Ernaux's characteristic style is diaristic, yet impersonal--striving in its use of the universal "We" to capture a quasi-objectivity on the wreckage of history and loss. Ernaux's formal innovations represent a significant contribution to the development of 20th-century memoir that testifies to a desire to bridge the abyss that separates inaccessible interiority from the universality of unfolding history. Likewise, in Grace Byron's Herculine, interiority seeks out its fitting objective correlate in religiosity and body horror. Herculine is as much a horror story of demonic possession and trauma as it is an allegory of the dehumanization of conversion therapy, the search for trans community, and salvaging a little mystery and beauty for oneself in a world of dogmatic thinking, both mundane and supernatural.

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“Moral of the Story” is a new interview series in which we talk to contemporary novelists and poets about the ethical content of their work, the role of the imaginative writer in making sense of competing moral discourses, and what, if anything, aesthetics has to do with morality and politics in our moment of full-blown neo-fascism. To kick us off, we sit down with the writer Sebastian Castillo to talk about and around his new novel, Fresh, Green Life. Fresh, Green Life is a deeply comic book about the modern construction of the self, disillusionment with academic life, romantic disappointment, and the unexpected turns of holding to one's New Year's resolutions. Join us for a hearty discussion that touches on midcentury American novel aesthetics, the folly of an overly hermetic philosophy, and social media mediated reactionary fantasies.

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Is the legacy of 20th century Marxism one of victory or defeat? On a certain reading, the defeat of the international proletarian revolution has been the distinctive preoccupation of a variegated tradition of thought that has come to be known as Western Marxism. For critics, Western Marxism represents a turn away from historical materialism’s proper focus on forces of production, class struggle, and the unity of theory and practice towards the superstructure of capitalist civilization: ideology, philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. At its best, however, Western Marxism offers the most theoretically advanced and intellectually honest reckoning with the historical defeat of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe and the United States. In this episode, we are fortunate to host Ross Wolfe, author of a recent, timely piece on the legacy of Western Marxism in New International entitled “Neo-Stalinism & Philosophy: Domenico Losurdo’s New School of Falsification.” Wolfe’s three-part series offers a devastating critique of the Neo-Stalinist revival that has lately become popular among the online left and whose standard bearer is Italian Stalinist Domenico Losurdo. Focusing on Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, translated into English earlier this year, this episode attempts to salvage the enduring insights of the Western Marxist tradition from Losurdo’s distortions and outright falsifications, with the aim of exposing the hollowness of Neo-Stalinist scholarship and politics. In doing so, we try to lay the groundwork for what a clear-eyed reckoning with the successes and failures of historical Marxism might look like today and what possibilities for revolutionary anti-capitalist politics are still available to us, here at the end of history. 

Read Ross's tripartite piece here:

Part 1: https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/

Part 2: https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/

Part 3: https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/

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The poet, Alina Stefanescu, joins us for a freewheeling discussion of Jacques Derrida's classic work of politico-ethical deconstruction, The Politics of Friendship, and her new poetry collection, My Heresies. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida ruminates on the interrelationship between our inherited concepts of friendship, fraternity, and democracy, and the distance we have yet to travel in order to work through the inadequacies of our conceptual vocabularies and the living content they embody. Derrida shows that our model of democracy and the future for a democracy to come depends in significant ways on the fate of friendship and its ability to expand the sphere of care, citizenry, and community. The history of friendship and democracy is haunted by the apocryphal citation of Aristotle: "O my friends, there is no friend," and the problematic of the performative contradiction it inaugurates. Is true friendship possible? Can the reach of the polis extend beyond an autochthonous community? Is a politics beyond the friend/enemy distinction imaginable? Can the poet and philosopher be friends?

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In Part 2, we wrap up our consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's midcentury magnum opus by exploring how we move from the inaccessible interiority of consciousness to our concrete relations with others. The latter half of Being & Nothingness takes up the question of what aspects of our being are revealed to us in confrontation with the Other. Sartre famously argues here that it is the Other's look, the omnipresent possibility of being seen, judged, and evaluated by another consciousness that discloses the objectivity of our being through and for the Other. As soon as the Other enters the scene, a fundamental aspect of our being is alienated from us; captured in the Other's appropriating gaze. The various attempts by the for-itself to retrieve this alienated being and penetrate the Other's essential freedom play a determinate role in shaping the contours of our fundamental projects, that is the immanently revisable set of possibilities, meaning, and value we pro-ject into the world.  In the final sections of the book, Sartre sketches an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, asks us to reframe our conception of the autonomous will and the role of giving and asking for reasons, and gestures towards an ethics grounded in criterionless choice.

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Note Bene is a series of off the cuff episodes that delve more into our personal experiences with broader topics with relevance to normativity and the ethical life. In this episode, Charles is joined by the writer and critic, Jon Repetti, to reflect on the art and philosophy of the late American avant-garde filmmaker, David Lynch. While touching upon his entire filmography, the discussion focuses on the LA triptych of films, Lost Highway(1997), Mulholland Drive(1999), and Inland Empire(2006) as the centerpiece of Lynch's mature moral vision of the political unconscious and metaphysical groundwork of American life.

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Jon's Substack: https://fivegoodhours.substack.com/

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Matt McManus joins us to help excavate the common origins of liberalism and socialism within the revolutionary republican tradition and illuminate shared political and normative principles rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism and expressive individualism. His new work, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. functions as an survey of key figures within the tradition of political liberalism and how their ideas of freedom, equality, and solidarity run parallel to the development of socialism. McManus lays the groundwork for a reconciliation between a moribund liberalism and a revitalized form of social democracy that reunites the utopian vision of socialism with the moral foundations of liberalism.

Buy The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism: https://www.routledge.com/The-Political-Theory-of-Liberal-Socialism/McManus/p/book/9781032647234?srsltid=AfmBOoqLejqwPodlJArQhLUWtNwlFd-dSNixTon8cxGXlFhxJ4brH1GV

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In a far-reaching conversation with the critic Ryan Ruby, we unpack the legacy and impact of Fredric Jameson's landmark work of Marxist literary criticism, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson's text argues for the explanatory richness and coherency of a Marxist hermeutical approach to interpreting the social function of the literary text. The guiding principle of Jameson's methodology is that any commentary that fails to historicize the narrative strategies at work as symbolic expressions of terrains of social conflict will be incomplete. Instead, he argues that we should view the interplay between the manifest content and historical subtext of the literary work as enacting imaginative "solutions" to social contradictions immanent to the dominant mode of production. In addition, we connect Jameson's historical materialist methodology to Ryan's new book of poetry, Context Collapse. Context Collapse is a playfully experimental work of philosophical verse that tells the story of the evolution of poetry in the Western tradition through the lense of information technology.

Buy Context Collapse: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4657-context-collapse?srsltid=AfmBOopFByZKYoPP5UObNCZ32p6oIVIkXeNBH5TAW7KUUED-v7bgLPvM

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In Part 1, we explicate Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to build a total existential system hinges on an unusual account of the evanescent character of consciousness at the heart of the meaning of existence. In this episode, we cover the first half of Sartre's monumental work, Being and Nothingness, explaining core concepts derived from his philosophical progenitors found in Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian Existenz philosophy. After discussing Sartre's creative appropriations of these thinkers, we discuss the role of ontological nothingness, consciousness as a transcendence-within-immanence, bad faith, and ethical anguish. These concepts form the backbone of Sartre's unique system of phenomenological ontology that purports to avoid the pitfalls of subjective idealism and naive realism and instead deliver both the reality of consciousness and the world upon which it stamps its meaning and values.


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