The destructive work of totalitarian machinery, whether or not this word is used, is usually supported by a special kind of primitive social philosophy. It proclaims not only that the common good of 'society' has priority over the interests of individuals, but that the very existence of individuals as persons is reducible to the existence of the social 'whole'; in other words, personal existence is, in a strange sense, unreal. This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery.Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie," Is God Happy? Selected Essays, Basic Books, 2013, p.57.
Anti individualistica, la concezione fascista è per lo Stato; ed è per l'individuo in quanto esso coincide con lo Stato, conscienza e volontà universale dell'uomo nella sua esistenza storica.
Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in historical existence.
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) & Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), La Dottrina del Fascismo, "Doctrine of Fascism," 1932.
What we bring with us -- embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it -- is the mystery of how we become who we are....
[Of Emily Dickenson:] Few voices are more solitary than her first person, yet few are more intimate: she writes I to I.
Judith Thurman, The Left-Handed Woman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, pp.6,65 [note].
5.631 Das denkende, vorstellende, Subjekt gibt es nicht.
[The thinking, representing subject does not exist.]
5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921/22, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 1972, Translation by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness, pp.116-117, more literal translation in brackets.
University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis defended the murder of a conservative protester and said he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence.
The university later elevated Loomis to director of graduate studies of history.
He continued to espouse such views as denouncing “science, statistics, and technology [as] all inherently racist.”
Jonathan Turley, "Only thing shocking about machete attack was a college actually firing a woke professor," "The Nutty Professor, Prof's Mayhem," The New York Post, May 25, 2023, p.12.
In the background of decisions to defund police, refuse to enforce laws, permit street drugs, release felons, eliminate bail, turn a blind eye to assaults by blacks on Asians and whites, tolerate shoplifting, treat vagrancy as a personal right, and turn all public space over to the mentally ill and the addicts -- somewhere in the background to all that -- are college professors.
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars, June 2023, fundraising letter, p.8.
Es ist nicht sein Weg zum »Glück«, von dem ich rede, sondern sein Weg zur Macht, zur That, zum mächtigsten Thun, und in den meisten Fällen thatsächlich sein Weg zum Unglück
The path I am speaking of does not lead to "happiness" but to power, action, to the mightiest action, and in most cases to actual unhappiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.242, translation modified; Zur Genealogie der Moral, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.25
Lear Does any here know me?...
Who is it that can tell me who I am?King Lear, William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 4, Lines 232,236
ἢ οὐκ ἔξεστί μοι ποιῆσαι ὃ θέλω ἐν τοῖς ἐμοῖς;
Aut non licet mihi quod volo facere?
Or am I not allowed to do what I wish with mine own?Matthew 20:15
Ἵνα τί ἐφρύαξαν ἔθνη, καὶ λαοὶ ἐμελέτησαν κενά;
Quare fremuerunt gentes, et populi meditati sunt inania?
Why do the heathen [gôyim] rage, and peoples imagine vain things?Psalms 2:1
Merve Emre is identified as "a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Weslleyan" and an associate professor of American literature at the University of Oxford. She is working on a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits. Her article in The New York Review of Books caught my attention just because of its title, "The Illusion of the First Person," 
which promised, or threatened, to express some of the essential evil that has gripped modern academia. If the "first person," i.e. the pronoun "I" and its reference, is an "illusion," then individual personal existence, as noted by Leszek Kołakowski, is unreal. And, as Kołakowski concludes, having lived under Communism himself, this is a "convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery."
This goes far deeper than the currently popular neo-Marxism of "Critical Race Theory," which simply recycles and disguises attacks on capitalism and freedom in the name of "liberation," "anti-colonialism," "decolonization," "anti-racism," and "anti-imperialism," which are all smokescreens for totalitarianism and dictatorship. Instead, Emre goes to the political, moral, and even metaphysical heart of the matter: the aboliton of the existence of the individual person, leaving everyone naked to the blast of power of the State and its Stalinist functionaries. Emre obviousy has her bid in to join those ranks. If she is willing to morally debase herself enough, and abandon all decent principles, her application might be accepted. Or she could be purged, since there is no honor among thieves -- and the Revolution devours its own. Or, as we will see below, Emre dangerously departs from the Party Line on one issue, which could be fatal for her absorption into the Collective.
The metaphysics of personal non-existence goes back to Hegel, for whom only universals are real, and where what seems to be individual existence is an illusion that contains a "contradiction" that is resolved, in favor of the universal, by death. Despite what seems to be his materialism, this is inherited by Marx, for whom individual existence dissolves, in a practical and political, if not metaphysical, sense in class identity and class structure. This is all inherited by the modern academy; and Merve Emre's ostensible treatment of the "personal essay" is dense with Marxist references and terminology, with adverse implications for personal freedom and the liberal political order.
We are quickly tipped off at the beginning of Emre's article by her citations of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Louis Althusser (1918-1990). These are all representatives of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, responsible for the vicious nonsense of "Critical Theory" and so for the poisonous "Critical Race Theory"
that has suddenly been foisted by academic charlatans on much of the rest of American society. Emre's references are less to this kind of "Theory" than they are to more classical Marxism, which seems to mark her as a more informed and hardcore Old School ideologue.
Emre sets off to discredit the idea that a "private individual" exists:
The private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre that story may be. The private individual is not a proper name [lists several essayists]... Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity.
In other words, as Hauser says to Quaid, "You are not you; you are me" [Total Recall, 1990, both played by Arnold], where the right "you" means the social and ideological forces that produce the apparent "you." So the "I" is an "artful construction," a "made-up self," a "series of 'distorting representations' of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers." And this is not, as we might think, something crafted by the individual to detail one's experiences and thoughts, improve one's image, conceal guilty knowledge, or deceive others. No, it is the product of the social and ideological forces that have created that "consciousness" in the first place. It is an "artful construction" of class, race, and gender, not of a free and individual mind.
Thus, Emre says, "What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the 'I' with which it so prettily speaks?" Indeed. "Individual subjectvity" is itself an ideological construct of social and/or economic forces, with their attendant "ideology," i.e. the fictions that Marxism sees as the false veneer of the alienation and exploitation that capitalist society needs to justify itself.
If individual existence is a fiction and a function of transient historical ideology, then it would have an origin at some point in time:
According to [Walter] Benjamin, the private individual was conceived sometime between 1830 and 1848, during the reign of Louis Philippe, often known as the first "bourgeois monarch." Under his rule, the European ruling class and the middle class came together [in an "intentional fallacy" of agency] to realize their defining goal [as though they were deliberately planning history]: the separation of the public domain from the private, where, as Karl Marx observes, the bourgeoisie could rejoice in "Property, the Family, Religion, and Order." [editorial comments inserted]
Of course, Louis Philippe, was known as the, not "the first," bourgeois King -- he was the last King of France. At the same time, the "separation of the public domain from the private," which is the definiton of "civil society," goes back at least to Hobbes and Locke, and was rejected by Rousseau, whose thought has been identified as the preparation for the Terror of the French Revolution. Marx, who concurred with Rousseau, and whose thought prepared for the subsequent Terror of every Marxist revolution, thus supplemented Hegel's metaphysical abolition of the individual with the erasure of all private life and existence.
This is the perfect definition of "totalitarianism," a term that we owe, however, to Benito Mussolini, who fully agreed, as we see in the epigraph, with these characteristics, metaphysical and political. But this is the irony of Leftist politics, which shares its origins with Fascism, wanting only the nationalism of the latter -- until, that is, the worthies of the Soviet Union decided that "national liberation" would appeal to the peasants of the Third World better than the revolution of the (non-existent) industrial proletariat. The Left is always desperate to pin Fascism on capitalism and liberalism, however paradoxical, rather than have its own roots exposed.
Thus, we can see Merve Emre for the frightening ideologue she is, with a fair range of ignorance beyond the narrow confines of her indoctrination -- just what we may have come to expect from the modern Academy. We see her ideology restated through the rest of the article:
Once labor had been cordoned off from life, once the productive activity of work had been extricated from the supposedly unproductive experience of dwelling, the private individual was born. He was, quite naturally, blind to his own history as a derivative creature, an artifact of political and economic processes that he has little incentive to question.
In fact, Civil Society separates one from politics, not from labor. Civil Society is all private relationships, which will include most economic ones. Since this includes all private business, that is why Marx could smear it as the Hobbsian "war of all against all" -- as though political relationships were not founded on force, threat, and violence themselves, as Marxists know well, while Civil Society in a liberal state is supposed to be protected from force and violence by law.
Thus, Emre misunderstands her own Marxism, where "labor" is supposed to be removed to political society, but it is not there yet, before the Revolution, when Civil Society is abolished. But the implication here is interesting, that "labor" is the uniquely "productive" activity of life, against which "Property, the Family, Religion" are meaningless substitutes. But then, that is Marxist orthodoxy. And perhaps family and religion are indeed meaningless to Merve Emre. We are all to be reduced to drones of the State, or its (irresponsible) functionaries, with no private existence.
The motto that Feminism used, "the personal is political," reflects a principle that all personal life is properly political, including, for Marxism, all "labor" and "production." If you want to get away from politics and your job, you have a "false consciousness." And, as we see, the private individual is "blind to his own history as a derivative creature," meaning, again, "you are not you; you are me."
 |
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| Automat, 1927, by Edward Hopper (1882–1967); Des Moines Art Center -- the private, solitary individual. |
We know we are getting a lot of orthodox Marxism when we see a lot of talk about "production." Now, Marxism at least has the virtue of awareness that goods are actually produced. Marx, as much as Adam Smith, is a child of the Industrial Revolution. This is a leg up on a lot of recent academic belief, "English Department Marxism" (as in Emre's own English Departments), which is little better than Cargo Cult economics, accepting the principle that goods are somehow simply found, like "natural resources," and must then simply be "distributed." However, Emre is not free of the errors that creep into even apparently orthodox Marxism. Recent ideologues have trouble grasping that capitalists, according to Marx and Engels themselves, are unconscious victims of a historical dialectic and material forces that they don't understand.
The moral basis of Marxism, such as it is (especially when it contains, strictly speaking, no morality), at least holds that depriving the workers of the fruit of their labor is "alienation," which drives all social change -- although this is then immediately contradicted by the principle, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- which will alienate any worker from "production" that he does not "need" -- a principle subsequently used to starve to death millions of Ukrainians in Stalin's Terror Famine -- as Putin now mercilessly bombs their descendants.
Subsequent Marxists, however, like the idea that anything we do is "production," so that Plato writing the Republic is the same sort of thing as industrial workers producing an automobile. Thus, Merve Emre can see the essay she writes here as "production." However, Plato's philosophy, or Emre's essay, is not the sort of "production" that distinguishes modern life from that of Ancient Egypt -- while Emre's "production" does not need the help of anyone else, let alone fellow workers, managers, entrepreneurs, or capitalists -- although actual publication is something else. Marx thought that mechanization would eliminate the need for the exploitation of labor, allowing for the "end of history."
Looking at the rest of Emre's essay, she seems to think that "exploitation" is what we get when writers are not paid for their status, regardless of whatever it is they write, if anything. 
An actual job is unnecessary. Indeed, it is unclear from the little that Marx says about his communist utopia, with no money, government, or businessmen, whether anyone might just avoid employment and live off the fat of the land, letting the "production" of others satisfy his every need. If productive workers objected to that, then obviously they are "kulaks" who are withholding what others "need."
Emre continues:
The domestic sphere was his incubator, his sanctuary from commercial and social [except kinship] considerations. There he could retreat, wide-eyed and mewling, to probe what he believed [!] to be his thoughts, lodged in his self, his mind, his body, and his home. "The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions," Benjamin wrote, explaining how the ownership of property mirrored the ownership of subjectivity. He continued, "From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior -- which, for the private man, represents the universe."
From his we gather that in the communist utopia, there is indeed no privacy, no private life, no home, no thoughts of your own, and no barrier between you and the blistering, involuntary "reality" of politics and "production." Not only are the exterior manifestations of privacy, like your own property, swept away, but with them go your own self, your mind, you body, and everything about you that is "interior" and subjective or unique to you or owned by you. Your inner life and everything you could call your own is absorbed, not just into public social life, but probably, from the evidence of history, 
into the State and the Cult of Personality of Big Brother or some other kind of "Dear Leader." You are not you, you are HIM. Or rather, there is no "you."
Notice the actual contempt expressed by Emre in an expression like "wide-eyed and mewling." This is a contempt for all other people, people who expect to be themselves and not just a reflex of Emre's totalitarian ideology. But the police will take care of that. Dissenters will get "re-educated" ("deprogramming" according to Hillary Clinton) and will learn better. Or else. At least now, you can be no more than expelled from the modern university, and not (yet) sent to a labor camp or executed. That's next (as we learned from some Bernie Sanders staffers -- camps where presumably Clinton's "deprogramming" will take place, perhaps with the help of Communist Chinese interrogators).
For Benjamin, the best representative of the private individual was the collector of decorative objects, “the true resident of the interior” as an architectural and an existential space. For us, it might be the personal essay collection, which props up the same ideology. The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial -- that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie, the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language, art, and education, as Adorno explains. The personal essay appears as the purest, most unflinching aesthetic expression of the lie, for the simple reason that, for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place, the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed, “implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity,” Adorno wrote. [boldface added]
The brutality of this is breathtaking. That you exist as an individual is, to Marxism, an "ideology" (which, in Marxism, is always a fiction -- Marxism itself is not an "ideology"), and a "lie." Actually, that latter is not good Marxism, as a lie requires a liar, which requires that the liar knows the truth and speaks the lie instead. This is an "intentional fallacy" denied by Marx and Engels. The capitalist himself responds to forces he does not understand. The idea that capitalism involves conscious agents who know their own evil is not proper Marxism, it is a decayed and confused version of neo-Marxism, the "English Department Marxism," that has lost touch with the original principles of the theory. It is "moralistic," which is as great a sin in Marx as it is with Nietzsche, both theorists of pure power.
The highlighted block, however, is good Marxism; and it is from expressions like "bourgeois individualism" that we clearly see Emre's brutal Marxist dogma. Individualism remains the principal enemy of Rousseau, Marx, and people like Adorno and Emre, just as the denial of the metaphysical existence of the individual is the foundation of so much of it in Hegel. You are not you; you are a cog in the dialectic of the "social formations." So don't try telling us about yourself. You have only "false consciousness." We will tell you what you are. Otherwise, shut up.
The personal essay appears as the purest, most unflinching aesthetic expression of the lie, for the simple reason that, for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place, the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed, "implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity," Adorno wrote.
As we might imagine, the "lie" of the "primacy of the private individual" carries away with it the primacy of the personal and natural rights of the individual, let alone any kind of government that would enforce them, which the Marxist condemns and rejects along with the bourgeois and capitalist culture that created this so-called "lie." As Kołakowski, who saw this all in action, says, "This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery."
This theoretical background out of the way, Emre can continue on to venting her animus against the "personal essay." First we hear that any one of the older cohort of essayists, such as Montaigne, "is unwilling to disentangle the individual from the conditons of man or nature," which seems to mean that they would agree with the erasure of individual consciousness and existence. Of course, they would not, not in the era when the distinctive "liberty of the moderns" was identified, which immunizes individuals from state action, in contrast to the collective "liberty of the ancients," which allowed Socrates to be condemned for practicing free speech. 
The Marxist, naturally, doesn't believe in free speech, or in any immunity from state action. You will be naked before the power of the State, and its agents, like Merve Emre.
As Emre goes along, we get swipes at the "quintessence of the spirit of bourgeois intimacy," which means your relationships outside of the politics of the communist police state -- this is why in communist Cambodia people were executed for expressing affection to relatives. But we get a particularly revealing reference in the discussion of Charles Lamb (1775-1834):
Writing under the pseudonym Elia lets him throw a small but devastating wrench into the personal essay's production of individual personhood -- its demand for "a single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontested readability of his proper name," as Paul de Man writes in his essay "Autobiography as De-facement."
It is unlikely that Lamb, in an era when many pseudonyms were used, for various purposes, thought that this is what he was doing. A pseudonym would not detract in the least from the sense of self the author may have had. The entire Federalist Papers, written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, were published under the pseudonym "Publius." The "uncontested readability of his proper name" is simply irrelevant. Political anonymity could protect one from retaliation by, among other things, a malicious government -- like the one Merve Emre envisions.
This is still an issue today, when the FBI and the federal Department of Justice have become unprincipled instruments, goon squads, of one political party and its tyrannical goals. It is also now a tactic of the political left to harrass and even vandalize people at their homes, where exposing people's home addresses is called "doxxing." These tactics came together when mobs were directed to the homes of Supreme Court Justices. This violated federal law, a law that was then not enforced by the FBI or the Department of Justice, which obviously, for their own corrupt and vicious political purposes, wanted the Justices to be harrassed. I was perplexed that the Supreme Court exercised no power to protect itself, such as subpoenaing the Attorney General and requiring him to show cause, on pain of Contempt, why he is not enforcing the laws to protect the Court. The Court is not a party to cases before it, but that is not the case in matters of Contempt of Court.
But the interest here is the invocation of Paul de Man (1919-1983), whose status as one of the luminaries of the "deconstruction" movement was fatally damaged when it was discovered that he had been writing Nazi propaganda pieces during World War II. It did not help when Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the godfather of the movement, tried to help by arguing that de Man's writings meant the opposite of what they sounded like.
Since in "deconstruction," anything can mean anything, this kind of argument could be used to say that Adolf Hitler actually loved the Jews, even in killing them. So the upshot to the business was to discredit, not just de Man, but Derrida and deconstruction altogether. It was much like the moment when Derrida protested that he had been misunderstood by John Searle, when one of his principle claims had always been that authors can never be "understood" in terms of their own "authorial" intent, which is lost and irrelevant to the reader.
So Merve Emre perhaps should have thought twice before invoking a discredited Nazi propagandist; but perhaps she was unaware of the controversy. She may only have been a child when de Man was exposed and many realized what had been going on with "deconstruction." Her ignorance in other areas of general knowledge may carry over to this.
In Emre's view, Virginia Woolf's critique of essayists suffers from a failure to damn "bourgeois individualism," but she does condemn "the spread of education." So perhaps some value can be derived from her. I don't find it very edifying. But we know where Woolf really falls short:
The intimate connection between education, the bourgeois public sphere, and the specter of private individuality compels Woolf to judge the personal essay "a sign of the times." It is the genre whose formal conventions -- the "capital I" of "I think" or "I feel" -- not only draw the individual into public view, but also insist upon the primacy of the individual.
Heaven help us in the face of the "specter of private individuality." One begins to wonder about the possibility of any value from Emre's essay if all we are going to get is repeated exercises applying the Marxist cookie-cutter that Emre employs. The only value I can see in this is the further illumination of the cookie-cutter itself, with all its ugly implications, and not in any of the conclusions that Emre may draw from it. The conclusions are intrinsically vitiated by Emre's ideology and method.
The way Emre highlights the "formal conventions" of "the 'capital I' of 'I think' or 'I feel'" might remind us of the novel Anthem [1938] by Ayn Rand, where individuality, personal names, and the pronoun "I" have been abolished in a dystopian future. It is not hard to imagine Emre as a cheerleader for such a society -- what we see of her is so vicious and so terrifying. Indeed, if the "first person" is a "fiction," as Emre tells us from the masthead, a society without personal identity would seem like the most natural thing.
After wandering around with Joan Didion a bit, Emre concludes with:
Public styles are always marked by nationality, literacy, class and race; there exists no such thing as a perfectly inclusive or universal language. Yet the claim to mediating friendship through style nevertheless reveals how, against the rising tide of individualism, the famliar essay demanded that its readers place the highest premium on the imaginative interactions of nonintimate selves.
The interest of these statements may be, first, that this is the first mention in the essay of race, which is the lodstone and polestar of "Critical Race Theory." So, curiously, Emre's Marxism may have not gone the full path of Frankfurt School doctrine. We might wonder why not, but there is no answer in the essay. Race does come up, briefly, again.
The next point is Emre's denial of "universal language," which Emre takes to mean that there is nothing to mediate the "imaginative interactions of nonintimate selves." What is inclusive and universal, however, is not the language, but the human condition. Literary effort seeks out that universality, since the particularity of all human life, its individuality, is nevertheless an expression of common human nature. Thus, we are intrigued about what is unique to individuals, since, like variations in music, it illuminates the common theme. Emre's goal, of course, is to erase all that variation and reduce it to a totaliarian sameness and conformity -- just like at Harvard, Yale, etc.
We see her failure to grasp the point of the particular in the universal at the beginning of the next section:
Why are people attracted to stories about individuals? The answer is as obvious as it is petty and perhaps cynical. The fiction of private individuality projected by the personal essay allows bourgeois subjects to accrue various economic, cultural, and social rewards. These rewards are dispersed by institutions that are both constituted by the fiction of the private individual and responsible for reproducing it. The most obvious institution of this kind is the school and, as Adorno observes, its elevation of “pedagogical necessity” into “a metaphysical virtue.” Once the production of personhood becomes bound to and administered by pedagogy, its illusions gain in intensity and reach, as does the personal essay.
We are attracted to stories about individuals because we are individuals, and we enjoy the varieties of human life. We are intrigued by all the possibilities of life. It is an aesthetic variety -- something to be lost in the "socialist realism" of Emre's Sovietized art. If Emre finds this "petty and perhaps cynical" it looks like it is because she is contemptuous of other people and their stories. She doesn't like them, doesn't care, and is equipped to dismiss them as suffering from "false consciousness." This is not unusual in the self-styled "social justice" elite, who love humanity in the abstract but can't stand people in the concrete -- unless it is burying them in the mineralogical kind of concrete.
And false consciousness, of course, is in the service of capitalism, so "bourgeois subjects" are able "to accrue various economic, cultural, and social rewards." We expect that the "rewards" from various "institutions" will be the loot of capitalist exploitation, but Emre surprises us by turning on "the school," where, presumably, the "fiction" and "illusions" of "personhood" are part of the "production" of this institution.
Emre, of course, is ostensively writing about the "personal essay"; and so what we get next is to tar such essays, as they become part of college entrance applications, as instruments of oppression. In this case, the oppression was real enough, as Ivy League schools decided that "too many" Jews were qualifying for admission. The worthies of Harvard, etc., seemed confident that the deficiences of Jewish character, certainly not up to WASP standards, would be revealed in their personal essays, providing a pretext for rejecting them.
Whether the essays turned out to be sufficient for that was, at the time, irrelevant. There were no anti-discrimination laws; and if Harvard, etc. wanted to reject applicants for being Jews, no one was going to stop them, and there really was very little public disturbance about it. Thus, Emre's strategy here of vesting the "personal essay" with all the evil of anti-Semitic discrimination looks like a stretch. Even if it were true, a "personal essay" used for some disreputable purpose does not discredit personal essays, since there is nothing about them that is intrinsically wrongful -- except as a "lie" identified by Marxism. You can use many things for a disreputable purpose, like using a Marxist essay in The New York Review of Books to promote tyranny. Indeed, Emre thinks that what the essays were supposed to display was, "one's commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism," which was propably not what Harvard admissions officers, free of Marxist jargon, had in mind.
More interesting is Emre's next attack, which is on the much more recent habit of Ivy League Schools to keep out "too many" Asian or Asian-American applicants. The open discrimination of Harvard against Asian students went all the way to the United State Supreme Court, which decided to enforce the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Harvard lost. The Left, of course, wants to suspend the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Right act in favor of extra-constitutional, ad hoc, and dishonest principles of "diversity" that prohibit an "overrepresentation" of Asians -- or Jews, probably: There has been a suspicious decline in the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard:
Among many saddening discoveries, we see that Jews have been purged across campus – from the administration and the Board of Overseers to the faculty and the student body. A century ago, Jews swelled to 28% of Harvard’s student population, culminating in 1923 when Harvard’s President Lowell, a publicly proud antisemite, systematically decimated Jewish enrollment to 15% (where it stayed for half a century).Harvard dropped those discriminatory policies in the 1970s, and for the next four decades Jews comprised roughly 25% of total students. That was certainly the case in the 1990s when I was a student. Yet today, the class of 2027 is barely five percent Jewish, according to a recent article in the Harvard Crimson. And nobody can explain why. Little wonder I now view the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision ending preferential admissions at Harvard and other elite institutions in a very different light. ["Crimson Tide," by Adrian Ashkenazi, The New York Post, December 3, 2023, pp.40-41, color added]
While Emre clearly wants to hang the burden of racial discimination on the "personal essay" (the goal of her whole essay), she does admit that there is more to it than that:
The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay -- and the college application process in general -- places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever.
Indeed, Harvard "overtly" relied on personal interviews with applicants to judge their personal characteristics. When Asian applications did not seem socially stunted enough, Harvard admissions officers actually altered the evaluations after the fact, making the students less personable and likeable. This dishonest and fraudulent procedure, violating their own stated principles and inregrity, was actually ignored by previous judges in the lawsuit brought against Harvard -- revealing their own bias and bigotry and invalidating their rulings.
Emre must be careful about this. If Harvard is condemned for such actions, as it is, then Emre has put herself on the side of critics of "
affirmative action," and she is in some danger of being "cancelled" by the forces of academic righteousness. She is on thin ice here, to imply that the Asian students have a case and that, perhaps, the Supreme Court should rule against Harvard. If Harvard where to lose, as it has, it is the Asians students who will be portrayed as the racists and "white supremacists," and perhaps Merve Emre also. She may be targeted for a Maoist browbeating "struggle session" (批鬥大會, pīdòu dàhuì) from persons holier-than-her.
Since we are not in the regime Emre would prefer, at least it won't be a literal beating -- unless it is in a Washington DC jail, where her regime is the closest to being realized -- as January 6 defendants, many elderly, have been detained without bail (as bail is abolished elsewhere by "Progressives"), beaten, and denied medical care, with all this allowed by judges: an American GULAG already being born, as "Antifa" rioters, who openly advocate the overthrow of the government, go skipping merrily along.
Otherwise, Emre is not going to let go of her thesis, so, essays or not, the value of the process "places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever." This is especially noteworthy here in that it is a rare targeting of "capitalism" by name. "Bourgeois" we get from Emre a lot, but "capitalism" not so much. But we never do hear exactly why the fruits of capitalism are "spoils." That is assumed; but, naturally, it will be well known to most of the equally corrupt and morally debased academic readers of Emre's essay.
The last sections of Emre's essay begin with a confessional addition to the personal essay, "used to conceptualize new notions of personhood":
At the start of the last century what Peterson has described as the "Catholic tradition of confession," with its ponderous moral and spiritual accent, its desire for masochistic public exposure and redemption, had yet to enter the scene of personal essay writing and did not do so until the mid-1960s.
It sounds like Emre may not be familiar with Catholic confession, which does not in the least involve "masochistic public exposure." The privacy and sanctity of the confessional is taken pretty seriously by Catholics. Perhaps she is confusing Catholicism with Protestant Evangelical and Revival testimonials of conversion and redemption, which can be pretty masochistic, if not ponderous. If so, this is a pretty serious confusion, and a testimony to her ignorance or carelessness. But the use of "ponderous" may tip us off that Emre has no respect for the Catholic rite, or religion, whatever it is like -- she is likely no stranger to the "New Atheism" but has not bothered to inform herself about what the practice of particular religions involves.
On the other hand, if Emre thinks that confessional writing did not occur until the 1960's, I might wonder how the Confessions of Augustine fits into that narrative. A story of moral development and personal salvation sounds pretty individualistic for the 5th Century AD, when Emre's thesis is that nothing of the sort existed before the 19th century. But we have already seen that Emre's historical sense may be gravely limited by a Marxist ideological filter.
However, Emre does mention Augustine, Rousseau, and, of all things, even Freud, but this is through a particular interpretation, about what only "coalesced" in the mid-twentieth century, with a literature that "originates 'in [their] subject matter' and that writers 'mean, at least literally, what they say'." I'm not sure that either point makes much difference. Augustine sounds pretty literal. So it is really only the subject matter that will make a difference, since it allows for Marxist social structures to enter into the mix, where now we can get back to race:
The rise of confessional writing authorized new groups to speak as individuals, amplifying the voice of the “voiceless” in testimonies to dispossession. Yet as Cheryl Butler argues in The Art of the Black Essay (2003), the essays of James Baldwin, Rebecca Walker, and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates are only awkwardly aligned with the tradition of the personal essay. Even if personal experience is what authorizes the essay form, its function as “a weapon for the downtrodden and the desperate-to-be-heard” presumes that personhood was, from the outset, an unequally distributed resource. Nowhere is this more evident than in Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” in which he examines himself from the self-estranged perspective of the white Swiss villagers who rub his skin and touch his hair, astounded by his blackness: “There was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”
What Emre, or Cheryl Butler, may have overlooked are the slave narratives, which recount the experience of Africans sold or born as slaves but who later obtained their freedom -- one that begins in Africa is that of Olaudah Equiano (d.1797), who seems to have been born an Ibo but ended up as an Abolitionist in England. With any historical consciousness, these accounts are difficult to ignore, 
since we see the speculation that "six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist." These were valuable documents to the Abolitionists, who protested the humanity and brotherhood of Africans. Are these narratives not "personal essays," and "testimonies to dispossession," about, indeed, the "voiceless" and downtrodden, often before Marx, or Louis Philippe, had been born?
In comparison, James Baldwin's experience in a Swiss village, whose inhabitants may never have seen a black man, sounds a little silly. American Indians often had the same reaction to black American "Buffalo Soldiers." But that was before Baldwin's time. Closer to home, we have Judith Thurman's account of a baptism she attended in a village in Tuscany in 1971:
That morning, the baby's godfather, an expatriate writer, had caused a stir in the church, since none of the villagers, most of them farmers, had ever seen a Black man in person. Some tried to touch his hands, to see if the color would rub off; there was a sense of awe among them, as if one of the Magi had come to visit. [op,cit., p.401]
"Awe" does not seem like the sense we are supposed to get from the similar Swiss villagers. And we might wonder how Baldwin happened to find himself in a remote Swiss village. Doesn't sound like serious political activism to me [note].
The uncanniness that Butler identifies in Baldwin’s moment of double-consciousness [realizing that he is different to himself and to the Swiss]... resides in the moment when the essayist recognizes “who I am.” Yet this recognition is also the moment when the question of the private individual is dissolved by the knowledge that the ability to write and to speak as an “I” is a restricted social and political phenomenon. “Haunted by sociopolitical dramas around issues of race, sex, and class, for example, the essay itself might arrive as a racy document with a radical politics left unveiled,” Butler writes. Had the personal essay followed in the footsteps of the racy documents of the 1960s, it might not exist anymore, having yielded entirely to the countercultural currents of the political essay.
This betrays some wishful thinking. If only that pesky personal consciousness had just evaporated, leaving us with the truly serious and real "political essay." That's real consciousness. And then we could get the revolution where individuality is abolished. But Emre herself looks forward to when the "ability to write and to speak as an 'I' is a restricted social and political phenomenon," abolished by the communist police state. Everyone is allowed to voice only the Party Line.
The final section of Emre's essay complains about the "confessional" version of the personal essay in magazines and on social media. The humor of a parody essay by Christy Vannoy is something that Emre, of course, wants to turn into a condemnation of capitalism:
...the Personal Essay Vannoy ventriloquizes channels the genre’s conceptual production of personhood as a salable commodity.
We're back to "production" again, and now the problem seems to be that someone, like Vannoy, might get paid for their essays. Is Emre paid for her essay in The New York Review of Books? I don't know. Is that bad? Presumably.
Apparently we can't have that:
Under what conditions is content king? When the personal essay makes the production of personhood not only publicly legible but also monetizable.
Indeed, perhaps this is what Emre has done herself. But how is this supposed to work? Should Vannoy or Emre be paid a "basic income" and then allowed to write essays for the fun of it? That is what Marx's Utopia sounds like, where you don't even need the income, since you can take any product available for free -- since everything is produced in such abundance that there can never be any shortages -- and Marxists then have the gall to accuse Capitalism of "overproduction" (part of their senseless explanation for the Great Depression) -- when Marxist regimes always feature shortages of everything, to the point where people starve in North Korea.
But will a "basic income," where money remains necessary, really finance the jet-setting lifestyle to which Merve Emre, and all of our ruling class elite, may have become accustomed? Not many people have professional positions in both New York and Oxford. It must involve a lot of travel, and nice dinners. I'm not sure how this is supposed to work out; but then that has always been the paradox of Marxism advocated by "swimming pool socialists." Perhaps Emre doesn't actually have a swimming pool. That works better in California, or Florida, than in New York or Oxfordshire.
Vannoy's parody essay ends with a competition for "the most promising personal essay," with the prospect of the winner buying multiple magazines as trophies of the win:
If there is something painfully anachronistic about buying every copy of Marie Claire, then there is something equally painful in the recognition that the Personal Essay’s performance of personhood only gives her access to exploitative labor conditions. But this is as good as it gets.
So we get the drift that selling essays to magazine is part of a system of "exploitative labor." If so, I'm not sure how Emre thinks that is supposed to work. Of course, the "personal essay" is not even going to exist after Enlightenment, and perhaps "women's magazines" won't exist either. It is hard to imagine how anything of the kind would survive with nothing but the sort of raging political content that might pass muster with Emre.
The confessional has proved a highly successful strategy for extracting literary production from an increasingly deskilled workforce that needs to do little more than share experiences.
My curiosity here is what "deskilled" is supposed to mean -- things like this are rarely explained by leftist writers, who always assume that their audience already knows the political catechism. There may be a labor shortage of electricians and plumbers, but even the most skilled of them are not going to be submitting articles to The New York Review of Books. They are going to be fixing your wiring and plumbing. So the writers targeted by Emre will be the triumphant graduates of some kind of school, who, in this day and age, may be more likely to write the kinds of essays Emre would value than otherwise. Someone like, say, Merve Emre herself. So if someone endures "education" without becoming a brutal Marxist ideologue, perhaps Emre thinks they are therefore "deskilled" -- which would be true.
The Personal Essay who narrates the conditions of her own existence is more matter-of-fact about what other essayists have failed to recognize, or, in Tolentino’s case, have helped to perpetuate: the precarious conditions under which creative labor is performed.
Finally, this seems to be what the complaint is all about. "I'm not getting paid enough." We might also remember that there are no more "precarious conditions under which creative labor is performed" than acting. Aspiring actors, certainly in Los Angeles or New York, notoriously work as waiters while trying to get acting jobs. Or Harrison Ford and Adam Carolla had honest jobs as carpenters, although Carolla was looking for comedy gigs rather than acting parts.
Ford got his break while building a deck for George Lucas. While being a waiter certainly contributes to social flourishing, we might even think that carpentry produces something more substantial and enduring. Or we might remember Wally Shawn in My Dinner with Andre [1981], whose character mooches off his "girlfriend Debbie" while shopping around his scripts for plays, complaining that now he must take the subway, while when he was young it was always taxis. This sounds a bit like something out of personal experience of "precarious conditions."
A Marxist is certainly going to think that such situations would amount to "exploitative labor conditions," although what "deskilled" labor would have to do with it is a little mysterious. Emre, perhaps like Marx himself, may have little sense of what her utopian society is going to be like. At the very least, however, there will be no individual persons in it. Some sort of free floating social consciousness will produce the political rants that will pass for literature. But Emre will expect to be supported, like so many of her class, in the style to which she has become accustomed.
Since Merve Emre never provides any evidence or reasons why the "first person" is a "fiction," apart from Marxist ideology, then the title of her essay should more honestly have been, "The Fiction of the First Person, According to Marxist Ideology." But honesty is never what we might expect in these matters. The background of the issue, in Hegel's metaphysics, itself is never discussed or candidly admitted even by Hegelians, whose commitments are often only revealed by their politics, not by their stated philosophy -- a dynamic we see with the Hegelian apologist Robert Solomon. We may reflect on the dishonesty of this when it appears that people like Solomon know how bad all of this would sound to the public, so it is concealed through evasion or under the kind of verbiage at which Hegelians, and now "Theorists," excel. Hegelians now hope to reconstruct Hegel as some kind of Wittgensteinian, actually rejecting metaphysics and so, after a fashion, erasing the scene of the crime. Evasion may be more obvious and, if anything, more dishonest in Solomon's own whitewash of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Merve Emre does not favor us with her political opinions, which is a kind of achievement in its own right, since leftist writers often cannot resist some kind of swipe, at least, at Donald Trump. So Emre displays some admirable restraint. However, even an essay safely directed only at other essays, the "personal essay," cannot conceal its illiberal and horrifying premises. She would have nothing to say otherwise. As I have said above, I was alerted to her essay by nothing more than the title, which already proclaims her animus against other people and, indeed, humanism -- let alone to liberal democracy, human rights, and the prosperity of capitalism. With the shocking hostility now widely expressed against free speech by academics and public figures, we can see the influence that people like Merve Emre have been exerting. In Britain, a woman was recently arrested for standing and silently praying, by her own confession, outside a (closed) abortion clinic. This is where we are headed.
In this collection of essays by Judith Thurman, pretty much every single one of them falsifies the thesis of Merve Emre that is examined above; for every single essay is, in a sense, a "personal essay" displaying the autonomy of its subject, in a way that is erased by Emre's "fiction of the first person" -- although, to be sure, these are biographical rather than autobiographical. But the quoted epigraph to which this is noted, about Emily Dickenson, already contradicts Emre: "The mystery of how we become who we are..." is no mystery to Emre; it is all in the economic determinism described by Marx.
A great deal about Thurman herself emerges in the essays, including those in an earlier collection, Cleopatra's Nose, 39 Varieties of Desire [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007]. Thurman's curiosity and liking for people, and her intellectual interests, clearly becomes evident, where all of these seem to be missing from Merve Emre, whose dislike and disinterest about people, and general ignorance, is painfully obvious. Even where Thurman writes about general topics, like the preservation of dying languages, or the phenomenon of extreme polyglots, this is presented with a focus on individuals who themselves are part of the phenomena.
Sometimes, it is Thurman whose self, in the first person, enters the story, perhaps "wide-eyed and mewling," as Emre says. Thus, an article about New York brownstone houses, which begins with the Weather Underground bomb makers blowing up themselves, and their brownstone, in 1970, then leads to Thurman's own brownstone, after her own extensive research and shopping. We also get flashes of Thurman living in Paris and Rome, as well as visiting Berlin, Japan, etc. In Rome, she dressed once in costume for a Holloween party, only to discover that no one else was wearing costumes. Little does she know that, according to Merve Emre, her own self is an illusion, reflecting the false consciousness of capitalism -- although making her own costume subversively undercuts the Holloween-industrial complex.
Thurman's own interest in language intrudes, since she apparently speaks French, German, and Italian, as well as English, and describes her own experience trying to become familiar, to an extent, with Vietnamese. Thurman is thus, in her own way, an exemplary journalist, essayist, and even intellectual, and her oeuvre amounts to her own "personal essay."
The treatment of Thurman's book(s) in a footnote to an essay about Merve Emre is suitable in that the contrast between the two exposes a faultline right through establishment feminism. Thus, Thurman treats of creative individuals in literature, art, fashion, museums, and even industrial crafts -- we get Japanese tofu makers in Cleopatra's Nose, along with a high end Japanese kimono designer, who Thurman met in a friend's apartment in Paris -- and sometimes a bit of history, as with Madame de Pompadour or Cleopatra, although this can be in connection to a museum exhibit.
This is pursuant to the general feminist promise and program of individual liberation, creativity, autonomy, and self-determination. Most of her stories, whether of women or men, are accounts of breaking away from dependency -- physical, social, moral, and intellectual -- and into the clear, independent air of self-expression, freedom, and creative novelty. Most of this would be inexplicable on the basis of Marxist social or economic determinism. Creativity in general, indeed, can come out of nowhere and has been inexplicable ever since the Greek gods, in particular the Muses, were abandoned as explantions of inspiration.
On the other hand, the program of Leftist politics is always collectivist; and totalitarian regimes set their sights on (successfully) crushing all individuality and creativity. There has been no modern explanation for creativity, but Marxism at least knows how to crush any expression of it. Emre's whole essay is an attack on the very possibility of self-determination and individual creativity. Instead, the paradigm is evident in the title of the infamous book by Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village [1996], which was translated by a liberal commentator, I think it was Nicholas Kristof or Nicholas von Hoffman (a "Nicholas" anyway), as It Takes a Police State.
Judith Thurman's own sentiments are generally Leftist, but restrained, and we usually get them only in flashes, such as the absurd remark that the mortgage market collapse of 2008 was because of "laissez-faire capitalism" -- rather than of banks forced into granting bad loans because of threats from government regulators. But she is obviously either unaware or uninterested in the collectivist principles that would exclude, discredit, or "cancel" the creative individuals she profiles.
The inconguity of the conflicting goals of feminism, individual or collectivist, calls for serious reflection, if not soul searching. And it always comes down to how the modern woman is expected, by various political and social forces, to live their lives. Unfortunately, the political commitments of institutional feminism usually means that women get sold out to overriding political interests and activism.
Thus Mark Steyn points out how Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is tossed overboard because she opposes radical ʾIslām, despite radical ʾIslām being against absolutely everything that feminism and "progressive" politics are supposedly in favor of -- "feminist" icon Germaine Greer is even complacent about female genital mutilation.
Similarly, When comedian Chelsea Handler recently made a video, "Day in the Life of a Childless Woman"; she apparently was insensible how narcissistic, hollow, and absurd it made her look. Her supporters were also similarly unaware the impression it would make on most people. Here we see her skiing in a bikini, which ought to persuade anyone of her seriousness.
But the feminist hostility to dependency, so contrary to Leftist valorization of government dependency, goes both ways: against a woman being dependent on men ("A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," said Gloria Steinem), and against women being burdered with the dependency of children on them.
The latter leads to an actual valorization of We might reflect on the origin of human female dependency. A little sociobiology here goes a long way. Lionesses go off alone to give birth. They raise their cubs, for a while, alone, until they are large enough to be accepted back in the lioness's pride. If they return too soon, or if the other pride lionesses find the cubs off on their own, they are likely to be killed. It is not clear why the pride lionesses should be so picky about accept new cubs; but the solitude of the mother is no more than what is characteristic of cats in general.
In some older human cultures mothers also go off to give birth alone; but meanwhile, pregnant women mostly cannot survive alone because pregnancy in its later stages leaves them weak, slow, and awkward. They need help and protection just to live. Similarly, once children are delivered, their dependency, so unlike most mammals, imposes a burden on mothers that also makes them slow and awkward.
They can be helped by other women; but human societies provide for a stronger defense in the males, who can be attached to particular females because of female continuous sexual availablity -- also unlike most other mammals -- and the ability of the larger and stronger males, like the larger and stronger male lions, to defend the women from attacks. Human males, as hunters, can also provide significant nourishment, while male lions tend to be parasitic on female kills and serve as protectors mainly against other predators, like packs of hyenas, whom the smaller lionesses may not be able to contend with. Thus, we get the traditional stereotype of a human "family," as we see in the Egyptian group here of husband and wife. It is noteworthy that the removal of the female figure would leave the male still sitting, alone, in the same attitude. His pose is not dependant on the female. But it is quite the opposite for the female figure, whose arms would be left awkwardly hanging in the air were the male figure removed. The message is clearly, pace Gloria Steinem, that the female is dependant on the male, as the male is not on the female. And the male does look rather smug about it. The female, with a suitable mate, may be rather smug in her own way.
Since the stereotype of female dependency goes back to Ancient Egypt, its origin cannot be ascribed, as feminism usually does, to Judaism, the Romans, Christianity, capitalism, advertising, racism, or any of the other deceptive candidates suggested or asserted by academics, ideologues, or activists (but I repeat myself). The censors, indeed, will need to go to every tomb in Egypt and hack out every image of the "subordination" of women. I doubt they will get much cooperation from modern Egyptians, however.
The central place of this kind of family in human society follows from several considerations. First, children are needed to look after the parents (and/or grandparents) in their old age. No ancient government undertook to do that, and charitable provisions for the indigent elderly, while developing in the Middle Ages, were never seen as desirable (let alone feasible) for society as a whole. Next, in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, and China, children were necessary, not just to look after their parents, but to continue the care in the hereafter of all the ancestors of the family, who otherwise would be deprived and miserable, as we see with a warning in the Bhagavad Gita 2:42 -- there is a "debt" to be discharged in favor of the ancestors. No one in modern life takes this seriously anymore.
Third, there is simply the meaning of the family, where humans as social animals value the company of others, especially "their own," namely, close relatives. Thus, the Navajo judge someone who is selfish and uncaring as "acting like they have no relatives." Part of Hinduism is the elaborate system of "stages of life," in which the personal and religious meaning of marriage and family life are built into the basics of religious observance. Neither men nor women can sacrifice and attend to their ancestors without being married.
In some religions, like Christianity and Buddhism, those who, for whatever reason, renounce family life, nevertheless may find community as monks or nuns. Religious hermits or mendicants almost never include women, who, alone, would be at the mercy of any (human) predators. Thus, the sacred virgins of the Inca were all raped by the Spanish Conquistadores, once the Inca Atahuallpa was in their power.
In modern life, there is a new form of meaning. People have "careers," which means that work is not just a way of earning a living, often by doing things that are hard and thankless, as we see Egyptian scribes describe the lot of the peasant, but it becomes a form of life meaningful in itself, to which much else, like children or family life, might be happily sacrificed. This is a bit like the monks and nuns renouncing family life, but we might consider how often modern "careers" are genuinely as meaningful as devotion to a religious regimen. Waiting tables or cleaning out sewers are rarely seen as activities fulfilling in themselves -- and somehow large numbers of women are not fiercely breaking the "glass ceiling" to get into the empire of the sewer cleaning business.
This becomes, not just a paradox of modern life, where "meaningful" careers may actually be relatively rare, but for feminism in particular, whose establishment forms come down, not just to recommending careers, but to devalorizing, denigrating, and even forbidding traditional family life. And now we also see open hostility to children, who are a burden on "career" women, a burden easily lifted, apparently, by killing them in the womb -- the meaning, it would seem, of the present apotheosis of abortion, which now, in "enlightened" jurisdictions, can be effected up to the moment of birth, or even after, if infants who survive birth can be left to die (or be killed).
Indeed, laws attempting to secure care for infants who survive abortions are fiercely denounced by "progressives," and their supporters smeared as misogynists, Nazis, murderers, or something. The New York State legislature burst into applause when the bill was passed allowing abortion (i.e. fetal homicide) up to the moment of birth. It used to be that infants received legal protection when they became "viable" outside the womb. Nevertheless, live birth is now regarded as a threat to the "health" of women.
In fact, feminism in this regard begins to look like nothing so much as a cult of death, although presented to the public as "women's health care." This goes way back. In Thurman's own profile of Simone de Beauvoir we see:
With de Beauvoir in mind, I might note that Thurman, who is not uncritical about her, nevertheless leaves out her criminal conviction for procuring young female students for the sexual appetite of Jean Paul Sartre. Her French teaching license, which Thurman recounts her proudly obtaining, was revoked. As with other sellouts of feminist principles mentioned above, de Beauvoir's debasement for Sartre's lusts might remind us of the political protection afforded to the sexual predator President, Bill Clinton. We might be left with the impression that, while feminism supposedly condemns predatory "sexist" men, it is often just such men for whom their principles are surrendered and their very persons humiliated. It took years for the conspiracy of protection for the abominable Harvey Weinstein to finally crumble -- shortly after he had dinner with the Clintons, as it happened.
Since "progressive" politics now includes mutilating children and rendering them sterile, called "gender affirming care," the very possibility of further children will be cut off at the root. We might begin to wonder who actually benefits from this -- cui bonō? It might be that those who have ruined their own lives seek some kind of revenge, or we suspect that "health care professionals" see a jackpot in unnecessary surgeries, dangerous drugs, and medical remediation that will last a lifetime for all the "trans" patients, whose quality of life falsifies the Hippocratic Oath itself.
It is not clear exactly where we can place Judith Thurman (or even Merve Emre) in the middle of this mess, since Thurman does have children of her own. Her biographical profiles run the gamut from family people, to the solitary, to the miserably self-destructive. So if what we want is an invesigation of differing paths of life, Thurman is providing it; and we can judge for ourselves the resulting meaning of different lives. Usually, just because Thurman is writing about them, these are lives with some kind of noteworthy achievement or lesson to them. Sometimes the "career," whatever wreckage it leaves behind, rises to a level of historic notice. On the other hand, this will always be rare; and the woman sitting up late at night in a law office, writing up contracts, perhaps for what Mort Sahl (1927-2021) used to call "banana wackies," might begin to wonder if it is really worth it.
Judith Thurman, "Broad Stripes, Bright Stars," 2003, Cleopatra's Nose, op.cit., pp.333-334. This bit of delightful personal detail from Judith Thurman is a little unusual, but not unique, in her essays. She has previously bummed a cigarette in Paris, after having quitted smoking years previously. My experience with ex-smokers is that they don't want to be within ten miles of cigarette smoke. So I must say, I rather admire Thurman simultaneously for her taste, restraint, and toughness. It is of a piece with her tribute, as "an unreconstructed old sinner," to Donatella Versace, "She still smokes." However, that is probably not something that contributes in a positive way to Donatella's appearance, about which Thurman says, "Her skin is the color of Russian amber," which seems to mean an unflattering combination of aging, sun, and/or lamps and chemicals.
It might be objected that Thurman's personal aside is as narcissistic as Chelsea Handler's "A Day in the Life." However, Thurman's account does not expose any kind of hypocriscy, and she is already past childbearing age, not subverting it or celebrating barrenness. Her diversions in Paris are not even characteristic of a tourist but recall the time she was actually a resident of the city. She is revisiting a life such as she has previously lived. Her pleasure in that I can well understand, with my own memories of the particular enjoyment of living in Beirut (before the civil war), Honolulu, and Austin (before it grew larger than San Francisco). Now, I would love to be able to revisit the life of New York City before the Wuhan lockdowns and the crime wave unleashed by the Democrats.
This particular essay otherwise began with shows of men's fashion in Milan, during a heat wave, after which Thurman adjourned to Paris. The essay ends, however, with reflections on a handful of men's designers, whose productions are custom made, i.e. "bespoke" as everyone now seems to say, finally at another show, of Carol Christian Poell, in Milan, of unclear date (she began the section with a reference to "last spring"), where the models floated down a canal. The clothes were getting wet, but it seemed to work.
Needless to say, we don't get any personal detail from Merve Emre, who wouldn't want us to attribute any personal reflections to her own non-existent self. Thurman's own career clearly involves many delightful diversions. Great work, if you can get it. For all of her interests, she seems to have hit the jackpot.
A Window on Totalitarian Ideology, Note 1
A Left Handed Woman, Essays, by Judith Thurman,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
we see a feminist sellout the way that women's sports frequently now allow men to compete against women, as long as the men "identify" as "women." This is a disgrace, but women athletes who protest about it are vilified, without defense from "feminists," even when it comes down to "women" with male genitals in the women's locker room.
abortion, as a good in its own right, and perhaps a necessary rite of passage for the liberation of every woman. We see this here in the pin worn by many Democrats at the 2023 State of the Union address, which shows one vowel of the word as a heart, as though abortion is loved, despite it being, justified or not, the active killing of a being, in fact an actual or "potential" human being. This is a social and political development that can only be called "sick."
Many readers have also been alienated by Beauvoir's visceral horror of fertility -- the "curse" of reproduction -- and her desire, as they see it, to homogenize the human race [i.e. erase the differences between the sexes]. ["Book of Revelation," A Left-Handed Woman, p.399]
By the time I got to Paris, the heat had subsided. I did some laundry in my hotel room, went to a few shoe stores on the rue de Cherche-Midi, mentally converted euros to dollars and didn't buy anything, drank a coffee at the Flore, considered bumming a cigarette from a chic woman in white linen at the next table, dismissed the notion, remembered I had no opaque white underpants to wear under my own white linen suit, looked for a pair up and down the rue de Rennes, coundn't find any -- there is no such thing, in Paris, as opaque white underpands, which is a reason to love Paris -- went to a bookshop on the boulevard Saint-Germain, bought a novel, had another coffee at the Café des Beaux-Arts and considered bumming a cigarette from the art student at the next table who was wearing a cowboy shirt and discussing American imperialism with a girlfriend in adorable bangs and clashing plaids, angrily chided myself, ordered a ham sandwich, and read my newspapers.
But perhaps Paris has this kind of effect. In fact, her previous lapse of control had been for a Gauloise, a brand of French cigarettes I had encountered in Beirut: extremely smokey, nasty, and unfiltered. Everyone I knew regarded them as the least pleasant cigarettes of anyone's experience.
