Verso

Beyond chutzpah is a long, tedious and barely readable rant, known less for its content than for the childless controversy it succeeded in provoking. Despite the promise of its subtitle, the book makes no meaningful attempt to describe or to understand the misuses of anti-Semitism. It is, instead, an obsessive assault on another book, The Case For Israel (2003), by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has gained prominence for defending O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Klaus von Bülow and, more recently, Israel.

Already it has been a big year for fascists. On Australia Day, a handful of neo-Nazis from across Australia assembled in Sydney. Dwarfed by tens of thousands of protesters at Invasion Day rallies, the fascist stunt still generated the desired confrontation with the state and response from journalists drawn into the spectacle. Two weeks earlier, German investigative journalists published details of a late-2023 meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. At a neo-baroque lakeside hotel, an assortment of old money, political chancers, and neo-fascist intellectuals discussed a proposal for ‘remigration’. Among the retired dentists, bakery franchisers, and parliamentary staffers was Martin Sellner, the one-time, hot-young-Austrian-face of the European identitarian movement – a man so reactionary that even post-Brexit Britain denied him a visa.

In the chapter ‘Revolutionary Terror’ in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), world-renowned Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek briefly discusses Georgi M. Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005). Derluguian’s book traces the extraordinary career of one Musa Shanib, from Abkhazia on the Black Sea, who moved from being a Soviet dissident to a democratic political reformer and, finally, a Muslim fundamentalist, all the while maintaining an unwavering intellectual loyalty to the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. 

On 21 July 2021, one of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, staged a press conference in the small town of Van Horn, Texas, the purpose of which was to boast about his recent ten-minute joy ride into space atop a rocket so comically penis-shaped that one could be forgiven for thinking that the whole exercise was intended as an outrageously expensive joke, albeit one that Mel Brooks would likely have rejected for its lack of subtlety.

The 2021 centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth was a moment of acknowledgment but also involved some assessment and testing of his ongoing relevance. Williams seemed to live many lives: son of a railway worker in rural Wales, Communist Party member, wartime tank commander, tutor in the Workers’ Educational Association, novelist, author of key texts within cultural and media studies, professor of drama at Cambridge University, founding figure of the British New Left, television reviewer and commentator, socialist activist and Welsh nationalist, cultural and Marxist theorist.

It is now well accepted that the invasion and colonisation of the Indigenous territories we call ‘Australia’ are emblematic of a particular type of colonialism. A settler colony, unlike, say, an extractive colony (where Indigenous peoples may be exploited in pursuit of resources but where permanent settlement does not necessarily follow), seeks to establish a new society on an acquired territory (regardless of the means by which that territory was acquired), intentionally displacing and eliminating the Indigenous inhabitants. In settler colonial societies, the settler came to stay.

Among historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’.

Judith Butler is acutely aware of the extent to which violence is an accepted part of human affairs. ‘The case for nonviolence encounters skeptical responses from across the political spectrum,’ Butler writes in the opening sentence of their latest book, The Force of Nonviolence. It is not so much that most people unconditionally advocate violence. Rather, it is considered an inexorable feature of life, a necessary measure to resist evils and prevent atrocities against populations and the marginalised. Nevertheless, Butler pushes back against that orthodoxy, declaring that we must ‘think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible’. It is a bold yet hardly indefensible claim. Indeed, the bleak alternative would be to doom the future of humanity to the internecine violence recently demonstrated in Washington, Ethiopia’s war in the Tigray region, and Australia’s inhumane asylum-seeker detention policy. It is, perhaps, a duty of writers and philosophers to free themselves from the mire of the status quo and to pave a way forward that ushers in a better, more equal world.

In the novel Demons, Dostoevsky’s narrator describes the character Shatov as ‘one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever’. This ideal person is one whose ‘whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them’. The people who populate Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism are Americans rather than Russians, but they too are living in the last writhings of the strong idea that dominates their lives: the idea of Stalinist communism.

Obituaries for neoliberalism have been coming thick and fast in recent years. Resurgent populist governments appealing to white, middle-class values, with rich subsidies for privileged sectors but austerity for others, might sound the death knell for the self-regulating markets, small government, and economising rationality commonly associated with contemporary neoliberalism. ‘That key voices on the right,’ economist Richard Denniss recently quipped regarding Australia, now ‘devote so much time to advocating the importance of Western culture and Australian values is proof that they have abandoned the fundamental neoliberal tenet that economic growth can solve all social and environmental problems’.