Philo-Aesthetic Digest 9/27/24

Spinoza, Stanley Rosen, Sally Rooney, Rieff

Spinoza, Lispector, Rosen on Spinoza

I’ve read a fair bit of Spinoza in the past two weeks, sharing space with Kafka and Hawthorne, Melville and Proust and all the other books I’m not finished with. I began with the Theological-Political Treatise, which is a fascinating text, among other things one of the earliest philosophical defenses of democracy. This is surely a facile and over-whiggish interpretation, one that you’d chastise an undergrad for, but Spinoza’s description of democracy felt somewhat like an intermediate stage between Hobbes and Locke to me. It’s interesting to note that the entry on Spinoza in the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy was written by Stanley Rosen.¹ In his late-life recollections of Strauss & his education Rosen was extremely dismissive of his work on Spinoza, but I enjoyed the chapter even if I don’t completely agree with what Strauss makes of Spinoza.² The Ethics on the other hand I feel much less able to summarize or comment on even inadequately. It’s clear to me that this was an important text for Clarice Lispector, one of my favorite authors. She quotes it (if memory serves) several times in Near to the Wild Heart, and The Passion According to G. H. (which is probably my favorite novel) in particular was written under the pantheistic influence of the first sections of the text.³ The used one-volume collection I’ve been reading all these texts in had been pretty thoroughly underlined and annotated (he had particularly strong disagreements with the second half of the Theological-Political Treatise) by a previous owner, so I mostly avoided leaving my own marks, merely putting down a bookmark by a proposition which reminded me of Joyce’s approach in Ulysses.

The therapeutic as theologian: a somewhat directionless look at Rieff on Jung

I was interested the other week to see that the then-newest piece at

Mary Jane Eyre

’s fascinating blog had a productive footnote about Jordan B. Peterson

Why did I fall for Daddy Peterson? Obvious Freudian explanation is obvious, but I think it’s because he was the rare “public intellectual” with a serious interest in Jung.

This was of note in part because while at the beach several weeks earlier with a close friend I had engaged in a lengthy discussion about Peterson (whose thought I generally do not esteem highly) and his relationship to C. G.Jung (whose thought I have a long and somewhat ambivalently positive relationship to.⁴) In any event I was sent running for my copy of Philip Reiff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic, about a third of which is composed of a fascinating analysis and critique of Jung as one of three failed prophets who tried to derive from psychoanalysis something like a theology.

Jung represents a conservative, or traditionalist, trumping of the psychoanalytic game. He is perhaps the most subtle of modern conservatives, trying to save not this tradition or that, but the very notion of tradition, which can be defined, in Jungian terms, as shared archetypes internalized. When the theologians will finally catch up with Jung, they might discover in him that particular psychology for which they have been seeking, in a prolonged agony, a substitute for all those ontologies crumbling at the foundation of theology.⁵

As the (co-)author of a famous book on Freud, Reiff regards these men-Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence-as deviations from the norm of a midcentury Freudianism which at this point he continued to hold as a basically positive force, albeit with an increasing ambivalence one often detects throughout Triumph. While I think he’s too harsh overall, there’s quite a bit of cutting insight to be had here. Rieff’s observation that Jung’s system works primarily for artists and dreamers, people prone to establishing their own inner faiths seems particularly astute.

Jung did not comprehend his own nihilism, for it opposed whathe considered to be the nihilist position: the rationalist murder of the communal imagination. For this reason, Jung is so much at pains to plunder history, so as to find earlier contents of the archetypes and to train his readers in an historical awareness of creative efforts from the collective unconscious. Jung's mania for antiquarian shopping in disused modes of thought thus has a powerful tendentious quality. It is directed to trimming down all specific beliefs, ending all creedal strife, so as to supply a language of faith that can serve the individual without compelling him to serve a creed. Psychological religion becomes a form of edifying self-examination, calculated to distract the individual from what would otherwise be the meaninglessness of living. This is a strictly personal faith. It cannot have social consequence except as the therapeutic, satisfied inside his private myth, stirs no social trouble. This modern form of quietism is a powerful answer to the question of how to live in the modern world. It is also an answer that denies, in principle, any significant social responsibility. Jung seeks less to transform the modern world than to avoid it -or, better, to create an enclave of invulnerable privacy that is yet not insanity. This is religion of a sort - for spiritual dilettantes, who collect symbols and meanings as others collect paintings.

If Reiff’s Freud is a bourgeois revolutionary of the inner life, clearing away obfuscating cobwebs in the mind of the west, his Jung is perhaps the last great romantic, and yet ultimately a failure where earlier romantics were more successful.

Literary musings: Sally Rooney and her discontents

I do not have strong feelings about Sally Rooney. I don’t love what I’ve read of hers, but then I don’t find her exemplary of trends that I dislike in contemporary literature either. It’s nothing personal really, it’s no great shakes, certainly nothing to write invectives bemoaning the state of the novel about. I enjoyed in a kind of ambient way the one book of hers I’ve read, Beautiful World, Where are You, finding it an interesting (if, for all its length somewhat underwritten) update on the Austenian domestic novel for the 21st century. I suspect it is perhaps in the end somewhat middlebrow, its use of Hemingwayesque prose signaling the final and total assimilation of that particular strand of American modernism into the Anglo-Irish Great Tradition, but in the end that’s no discredit really: Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are middlebrow too, as is Joyce if you get down below his literary devices.

On the other hand, many people do have strong feelings about Sally Rooney! The takedown I’m most familiar with is of course Becca Rothfeld’s “Sanctimony Literature” published in 2022 in Liberties.

In Conversations with Friends and Normal People, two fine exemplars of the sanctimony tradition, Sally Rooney reminds us over and over that her characters, like their author, are Marxists with the Right Opinions. “I’m gay, and Frances is a communist,” one character in Conversations announces as she introduces herself and her friend to some new acquaintances. Later, Frances the communist avows that she “want[s] to destroy capitalism and consider[s] masculinity personally oppressive.” In Normal People, one character remarks that an injustice has occurred for reasons she cannot comprehend: “it’s something to do with capitalism,” she concludes gravely. Her interlocuter replies dolefully, “Yeah, everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

These books — millennial agit-prop, millennial middle-brow — are inflated and animated by an unshakable faith in their own rectitude. Impossibly foreign to their guiding sensibility are such characters as Henrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the mesmerizingly bloodthirsty protagonist of Michael Kohlhaas, or Philip Roth’s Portnoy, the venomously sexist yet perversely charismatic anti-hero of Portnoy’s Complaint. Now all the eponyms read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle. When and if they do make minor political gaffes, they acknowledge their faults and repent immediately, in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable torrent of external criticism.⁶

More recently and relevantly for recent discourse, Ann Manov has moved from thrashing Lauren Oyler to an acerbic evaluation of Rooney’s newest offering, Intermezzo. Not having read the book, I won’t comment too much on the substance of the review, but instead offer some passages that could perhaps speak for what I’ve sampled of Rooney’s corpus.⁷

This is a pretty little world in which the girls wear lots of nice skirts and the boys are real softies and the worst thing that can reasonably happen is that it gets rainy in Ireland, as it tends to do at sad moments.

Manov compares Rooney unfavorably to Michel Houellebecq in terms of her new book’s examination of inceldom, arguing that it fails to attain the insight into maladjusted masculinity of the French author (who I have not read.)

Setting Manov aside, let’s turn to another esteemed voice of our present moment, Andrea Chu, who in her capacity as New York’s resident Marxist literary critic recently published an unexpectedly positive critical overview of the Irish novelist’s work. Otessa Moshfegh might have been cut down as an idolater, Hanya Yanagihara chastised as a practitioner of exploitative torture porn, Zadie Smith denounced as a lib, but Chu as it turns out is more or less in favor of Sally Rooney!

The literary novel is, as it were, the missionary position of literature: In order to pass itself off as a representation of “real life,” it must deny the inherent conventionality common to all novels, whether “literary” or not. Compare genre fiction, where the same conventions may be used as selling points in marketing campaigns and openly consumed by fans.

I found it a perplexing essay. Moreover, to engage in a bit of minor self-recycling, I sometimes wonder about what the pivot from Chu’s incendiary early essays in N+1 and the NYT to the very by the books marxist line she takes in her literary criticism means for the contemporary literary scene, for all of us.⁸ Chu used to be radical, she used to be extreme, you were never entirely sure if she wanted to be taken seriously or not, while now she’s a safe girl to love in New York panning Zadie Smith for being a liberal or complaining that Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t believe in the revolution. All that’s stayed the same is that still somehow you're still never quite sure if she wants to be taken seriously or not. I bring all this up to sloppily conclude this overview with a point about this peculiarity of the evolution of an idea or set of ideas in light of the evolution of a thinker. How brilliant! how strange! to cite György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel in the interests of a positive evaluation of an oeuvre one imagines a scholar-critic of a different era such as Nancy Armstrong or Edward Said eviscerating. Perhaps this doesn’t conclude the digest on quite the right note, but oh well.

1. I increasingly find Rosen one of the most interesting minor(?) figures in late 20th century academic philosophy. Hermeneutics as Politics contains probably the best criticism of Strauss and Kojéve I’ve ever seen, and what I would probably call an insightful critique of Derrida inasmuch as I understand him. I’m partway through Nihilism now and it’s fascinating. I’ll certainly keep you posted.

2. I’m so serious when I say that this blog would turn into The New England Review of Straussian Books if I didn’t restrain myself.

3. An orthodox Straussian would likely argue that the pantheism-or-whatever was merely a feint on Spinoza’s part, a move to hoodwink the rubes into accepting him into the polis. In general I tend to find this esoteric insistence (I am wildly generalizing here) that the philosophers through the ages have always been something like mid-twentieth century atheists one of the weakest parts of the whole Straussian thing, maybe the central element I can’t quite accept. If one aims to understand a thinker as they understood themself, surely we should allow for religious or mystical beliefs that we ourselves might not endorse?

4. In the spirit of MJE’s admissions about being a “crystal girlie” and former Peterson fandom, I’ll cop to an embarrassing amount of my early exposure to political theory and continental philosophy in my teens having taken place as a reader of various Mark Fisher-derivative postmodern pop culture bloggers. These people were very interested (for what I now suspect were Deleuzian reasons) in the whole half subterranean complex of western esotericism, Hermeticism, alchemy & the like, and thus while still not exactly embracing Jung, nevertheless read him more positively than would likely have been the case in a contemporary academic setting.

5. I’ve spent much of the last few of these warning you against taking too seriously the insights of a thinker (Christopher Lasch) who got a lot of his juice from the Rieff of Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I’ll triple down on that point: you can go too crazy with Rieff’s analysis—he’s maybe most productively read partly against himself. That being said, there are a number of remarkably prescient observations in this book, especially in the introductory chapters. In one which is perhaps of particular interest to us now, he argues that on a deeper psychological level the Marxist-Leninist states of his day were in essence the true conservatives.

By contrast, the Communist movement may be viewed as culturally conservative, belonging to the classical tradition of moral demand systems. The revolution in the West is profoundly cultural whereas that in the East, withal its defensive doctrine of the cultural as a mere superstructure of the techno-political class system, has been less certainly so. Of the two, our revolution is, I think, the more profound one. Communist culture, no less than the Christian, is in trouble; it cannot stave off a revolution coming out of the West, in part as a repercussion, in that it renounces the renunciatory mode of Communism. The Russian cultural revolution is already being signaled by the liberation, however grudgingly, of the intellectuals from creedal constraints.

In the 1960s, before the wall came down, before the internal rot and contradictions were even fully apparent, this seems to me already anticipating the curious Ostaglie one sometimes finds for the old Soviet Bloc on the right(?) today, as remarked upon and exemplified (if I remember correctly-it’s paywalled and I refuse on principle to subscribe) by this Compact article from last year.

6. There’s an obvious argument I am largely successfully restraining myself from making- because I think it’s too much of an oversimplification-again, the sort of thing you’d probably chastise an undergrad for arguing-about contemporary marxism serving the role of conscience of the bourgeois domestic novelist in the way Christianity once did for her nineteenth century predecessors.

7. Owing to aforementioned lack of strong feelings Sally Rooney is not an author whose new novel I would read asap without being incentivized to in some professional manner, which has not taken place, and so I have not read Intermezzo. I am thus less interested in Manov’s review qua review, and more in what she says about Rooney more generally.

8. Real ones will know that I wrote about Chu several times in the first year or so of this blog, most recently (albeit fleetingly) in February. As I’ve written less about gender issues recently there’s been less cause to bring her up, but also I’ll admit to finding her new guise as marxist literary critic more dull than interesting. As I wrote another time, there’s almost nothing more straight (in the Jazz/hipster-usage of the word) than Marxist literary criticism.