Intellectuals

Benardo lambasts the central conceit of Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, that the work of the New York Intellectuals reflected a “secular Jewish masculinity,” and that this could be conceived as an ideology, or even “a coherent perspective.” For Benardo, the intellectual fervor and varied political commitments of New York Intellectuals cannot be adequately explained by such a reductionist framework. Indeed, Jewishness was hardly primary for many of these writers, tied by their “adherence to ardent writing and the fructifying convergences in politics and culture.”

“Saddled with a shaky definition of what masculine means and asserting that brilliant women writers sought to enact a “masculine” sensibility amid “hypermasculinised intellectual warfare,” we are left with an unsatisfying theory of the case. Instead of conceptual clarity we get analysis by anecdote. Grinberg seeks to locate the New York Intellectuals’ voracious hunger for argument and critique as a sign of a new-world masculinity that would transcend the people-of-the-book stereotype and assign a newly conceived machismo to the art of disputation. She further suggests, bafflingly, that New York Intellectual writers such as Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick weren’t card-carrying feminists because, well, they wrote like men and their oeuvre wasn’t peppered with writings on the subject of women. The only way for a woman within the New York Intellectual crowd to pass muster with her peers was, per her own title, to write like a man. Can this really be so? Can one meaningfully place a gendered valence on the craft of writing?”

Meaney recounts this year’s Munich Security Conference, which took place in a grim geopolitical context of ongoing war in Ukraine, Vernichtungskrieg (war of extermination) in Gaza, coups and insurgencies in the Sahel, and hard right insurgencies in Europe: “Lost on the managers and technicians at Munich was that security is not the same thing as peace.”

“One could be forgiven for thinking that the golden age of the Atlanticists was the Nineties, when American power still seemed supreme, when China was just becoming an oil importer, Indian internet connections were patchy, and Russian children drank vodka on Nevsky Prospekt in the chaos of post-Communism. But the real golden age was the early Sixties, when American power was not merely maintained but in ascendance, when wide domestic opposition to wars of choice abroad had only just made itself felt. When there was an enemy to be faced down across the Iron Curtain that organized moral life. When the old Nazi-built Tempelhof Airport in Berlin included a U.S. air base with a bowling alley and a basketball court. For Atlanticists, most of them aging men but with no shortage of youthful pretenders among them, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been the equivalent of a blood transfusion.”

China’s leftist intellectuals, socialist critics of a regime they once feared was succumbing to neoliberalism, have shifted to support state power and the Chinese model under Xi Jinping. This transformation, influenced by events like the 2008 financial crisis and the Chongqing model, has led them to embrace statism and nationalist pride, sidelining their earlier focus on social inequality and workers’ rights.

“In the 1990s and 2000s, early New Leftists like Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Hui were regime critics because they feared that China might follow neoliberalism as the nation emerged from its Maoist past. Yet now that China is stronger, the fact that the nation’s success is based on a relatively neoliberal order is being ignored by the next generation of leftist thinkers, whose vision of socialism at home is also a vision of nationalist pride. Already, the new New Left sounds more than a little smug.”

Antón Barba-Kay’s book A Web of Our Own Making compares the digital revolution with Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic revolution, highlighting the profound and often unnoticed impact of digital technology on our lives and society. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology reshapes our perceptions and behaviors, becoming an intrinsic part of our reality, while critiquing its deceptive nature and urging a critical reflection on our reliance on digital devices.

“Whereas others warn of a digital apocalypse in which humanity is enslaved or destroyed by AI, Barba-Kay reveals how much we have lost already. In the book’s climactic chapters, Barba-Kay argues that the digital corrodes political action itself. …For Barba-Kay, ‘the internet’s most powerful political desire—the political attitude that most visibly emerges from our collective uses of it—is the desire to escape from politics altogether.’ Even when we log on to express our political preferences, we do so from nowhere, addressing no one in particular. Our venues of online speech are run by corporations that have exploded trust, abdicated political responsibility (in pursuit of neutrality, that is, profit) and encouraged partisans and ideologues to dominate the conversation. To ask whether the internet is good for liberal democracy (or any other regime) therefore misses the point. ‘The internet is entropic to the realization of political form; it is a force of political incoherence and discoherence.’”

The chronic pain and illness experienced by North Africans in France is deeply intertwined with their postcolonial trauma and the socioemotional deficits stemming from systemic racism and alienation. In this searing essay, author Farah Abdessamad writes about her enduring pain, which has been shaped and constrained by a history of colonial violence, marginalization, and the ongoing struggle to belong in French society.

“Pain is located in the body. As such, it brings us back to our physical constitution, which for North Africans in France is synonymous with a political identity. Our bodies are the sites of multiple, superimposed dimensions—symbolic, real, subjective—that together operate in a hierarchical social terrain most recently acquired from Orientalist-colonial projections. We are told that we belong to strange lands intrinsically different from Europe, and must be ‘civilised’ and conquered. We are the object of external scientific research, prevented from telling our own stories—we must be told who we are by European experts.”