Absolutely: the novel

 

Certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Absolutely, for instance. Exciting or excited.

Actually.

 

Absolutely that became fixed as a certain sound in my ear years ago. I was living in Santa Fe and, for a time, writing lyrics for a band. The singer would say, absolutely, a lot. The singer was a sweet woman, who couldn’t hold a tune – you could glue it to her tongue and she would still mess it up.

So we would go through the song and she would be asked if she heard it, and she would say: “absolutely”.

 

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word came out of some combo of tv, movies, music and coolhunting. And it ended up in business school.

 

One could probably track it through trendy novels. It begins as a sort of Britishy complement – in phrases like, say, absolutely stunning. It occurs in Less than Zero – a marker of the eighties if there ever was one – both as an affirmative and a complement. But only once as the former. Checking into seventies zeitgeist novels – In Alison Lurie, it occurs in the form of “absolutely sure” or “absolutely necessary” – holding on as a modifier, and not pushing aside the “sure” to star by itself.

 

Ann Beattie, whose signature method as a short story writer and novelist in the seventies was to keep as close as possible to the oral tics of the time, used absolutely the way Alice Lurie did. She only introduced absolutely, as a single word, after the eighties.

 

These are not definitive proofs of the origin of the bogus absolutely, but I’d like to coordinate its mission creep with the “morning in America” that was the Reagan era – an era in which the bogus made a comeback, from Wall Street to the shores of Nicaragua.

Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to the dignity to their paychecks. “Sure”, the older Americanism,  was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio. Sure was Rabbit, especially when yes means no, as in “sure sure.” A doubling that allows Rabbit to hop away from his responsibilities in Rabbit Run.

 

Absolutely is Rabbit in his desuetude, Rabbit in Florida, Rabbit self-pitying in the strip club. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at Starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

 

I sure hate what absolutely did to the States.

 

Genius is primarily egalitarian: Emerson and the newspapers

 

 I read the newspapers like Don Quixote read his romances, fulmination and prophecies race through my brain and come out of my fingertips, perched on the keyboard, and I know that I am behind, utterly behind on everything in my life, that what I do is plunge into what avails not and what I don’t do is what does avail and must avail and this is my mortal sin, and then the night is here, quicker than I expect it to be, always.

With this attitude towards the newspapers, I have long held that not enough is made of the parallel between the literary culture of the moderns, from the 1700s on, and the newspapers, which have been the great angels of Chronos during this same period of time. Even now, as newspapers dwindle down like a pencil too often sharpened, we see the form find its home and bearings on the internet and the internet swell with it.

                                                               1

I like to think of certain coincidences. Emerson, writing about the London Times, in English Traits: “There is no corner and no night.” Emerson happened to visit the Continent, and especially England, in the wonderful and terrible year, 1848. Year of the Communist Manifesto, of the French revolution, which Emerson celebrates in his journal – seeing that this time it is about “socialism”. He notes that Carlyle, at that point still his friend, never read the newspapers until the Revolution broke out.

And after 1848, Marx, in England, becomes the great European correspondent for Emerson’s sometimes friend, Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune, was the great American answer to the Times. Emerson and Greeley met on the lecture circuit. In 1851, the New York Tribune started publishing articles by the man the paper called “one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced—no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy.”

At the time, Greeley was a Fourierist.

Emerson wrote about Fourier in an article in Margaret Fuller’s The Dial:

“We had lately an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and their theory from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushes his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and importunacy. As we listened to his exposition, it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant's step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere trifler.”

                                                           2.

I have not found any hint in Emerson that Marx had crossed his intellectual path – although surely he read some of his articles in the Tribune. But the coupling of Fourier and Swedenberg predicts, mystically, the messianic Marxism of Bloch and Benjamin, which crosses Marxism with Klee’s angels.

There is something else in Emerson’s note on Fourier that is consistent with his notion of the democratic theme that runs through the newspaper form: the notion of an egalitarianism founded upon genius.

Our feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New-Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier's system is that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is, that this particular order and series is to be imposed by force of preaching and votes on all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. … nay, that it would be better to say, let us be lovers and servants of that which is just; and straightway every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized…”

                                                                        3.

I love it when Emerson just rides. 

But to break back into thought from such motion and rhetorical glory - the newspaper or its form plays a central role in Emerson's intuition that genius is inherently egalitarian - that is, our private lights are, above all, new lights, new courses in the world marked by our ever anonymous and gigantic particularity. I am the we. And as this we, I must go back to the tabloid as Antaeus had to go back to the earth. It is my strength..

COLLECTING, CULTURAL HISTORY, FETISHISM

 

“In brief, cultural history only represents a surface strike against the insight [of historicism], but not that of dialectics. For it lacks the destructive moment, which certifies dialectical thinking, as well as  the experience of the dialectic thinker. It means to increase the treasures that weigh on the back of mankind. But it doesn’t give humanity the power to shake this off, in order to take them in its hands. This is true as well of the socialist educational work at the turn of the century, which took cultural history as its guiding star.”

This passage from Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs came to my mind as I was reading Mel Gordon’s Horizontal Collaboration, his book about the erotic culture of Paris, which is meant, I think, to be paired with his earlier (cult) book about the erotic culture of Weimar Germany.

Like Fuchs, Gordon is a collector. Nothing brings together cultural history, fetishism and a certain sense of hidden forces like abundantly illustrated books concerning the vintage wanks of yesteryear. But Gordon utterly lacks a dialectical mindset. For him, pleasure is a unified property – not something divided between consumer and worker. Thus, he plunges into the “happy” world of Parisian brothels and comes up with the anecdotes, which take the place of any ethnology.

This is the blind spot of the fetishism that motivates pilling up the “treasures”, whether of cheesecake photos or art objects of a higher order – objects that are so often rooted, in the avant garde visual and literary culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the same atmosphere of brothels and dance clubs whose photos, placards and anecdotes spill out over Gordon’s pages – but never gets around to the moral intellectual shudder that will free us from these things, so that we can recognize them.

The erotic life, here, is utterly commercial. From the brothel fuck to the photographer to the spectator – for there was as much a market for spectacle as there was for tactile sex – “life” is restricted to what is outside of “normal life”.

In the end, in the late 1960s, the identification of the erotic with a certain marginal spectacle dissolved before the feminist critique, which correctly identified pleasure as a heterogenous and often exploitative property of “liberation.” The revolutionary moment, in the “sexual revolution”, was all too non-dialectical. It was a revolution in the chains of a very bourgeois positivism.

And don’t we all, generation after generation, bear the marks of that lie? We still have not found the open sesame that will give us, at the heart of normativity itself, our happiness back. Instead, we make our separate treaties. It is this, I think, that has disempowered the avant garde in my lifetime.

Biden's foreign policy: let's bet everything on authoritarianism!

 

And watch it all slip away
(Por fin se va acabar)
Or leave a garden for your kids to play
(Jamás van a alcanzar)

 --- The Black Angels, El JardinThe Black Angels, El Jardin

American foreign policy inhabits the same paradox that American domestic policy lives in: what does it mean to be a democracy?

During the Cold War period, the paradox, at least on the foreign policy side, was simplified by the idea that whatever was anti-communist was democratic. This was, of course, technically not true: from Nazi Germany to the Pinochet’s Chili, from Syngman Rhee’s South Korea to Thieu’s South Vietnam, the United States chose authoritarian states over any possible democratic alternative.

This led to millions of deaths around the world.

At the end of the Cold War, however, there was a sense in the American foreign policy establishment that perhaps the U.S. could be an interventionist liberal power. Weighing in on the side of democracy. The last shreds of this solution were dissolved during the Bush regime. Although we rhetorically wanted “democracy” in the occupied state of Iraq, it turns out that we wanted it on our terms, with no interference from the Iraqi population.

We now seem, under Biden, to be reconstructing a Cold War foreign policy that is even more contradictory than the one forged under anti-communism. Here, democracy is the equivalent of being pro-Israel, no matter what Israel does.

The only way any state in the Middle East, or North Africa, or Central Asia can sustain that as a policy if for that state to be firmly under the thumb of a dictator – be it Sisi in Egypt or the House of Saud or Jordan’s “parliamentary” mock democracy. The U.S. policy is entirely dependent, under Biden, on maintaining and strengthening these authoritarian powers.

This is the kind of paradox that will corrode Biden’s message in the current election: the message that this is an election of “democracy” against Trump’s authoritarianism. It is pretty simple to see that this message relies, in Biden’s politics, on a limit: democracy cannot be entrusted to people like, say, the Jordanians. This tacit principle makes a mockery of Biden’s domestic view, that no persons because of race creed or gender should be denied full civil rights.

Meanwhile authoritarians elsewhere have recognized that whether Biden or Trump is elected, they have a friend in Washington. In Europe, the far right has become absolutely loyal to Israel for two reasons: the historical antisemitic psychopathology, out of which these parties spring, had one great success, from the antisemitic point of view: the murder of six million European Jews. That means practically that in a place like the Netherlands, where the Nazis murdered three quarters of the Jewish community, Jews now form only a tiny percentage of the population – around 50,000 in a total population of 17 million. In comparison, the Muslim population – immigrants mostly from Netherland’s colonies – constitute around a million. The Far Right under Geert Wilders, which is the coalition partner in the Netherlands, has decided to use a new tactic – attacking the Moslem population as antisemitic. That the ideological and real ancestors of Wilders collaborated with the Nazis is now easy to apologize for – with a grin, of course. Dutch Jews do have reasons to fear increasing antisemitism among the Islamic population, as that population absorbs the idea that opposing Israel is antisemitism.

In essence, the far-right part of Europe has been given a gift by the right in Israel and its biapartisan allies in the U.S. Thus, a program that was condemned in the 1990s in the war in Yugoslavia – the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims – has now become less criminal, and more understandable. Those Muslims were antisemitic! Thus, nobody blinks when Netanyahu teams up with Orban to demonize the Hungarian Jew Soros.

Bad times are coming, no matter who is elected president in the U.S.

The new economy is simply a ratio

 

The New Economy that came into being in the nineties names, really, a ratio – that is, the rise in the ratio between price and earnings. Just as the world starts, in the Upanishads, with the first man, Pragapati, floating in a golden egg that he has somehow fertilized himself, so too do we find our plutocrats floating in golden eggs made out of financial instruments which exist solely in order that plutocrats can grow the most enormous golden eggs the world has ever seen.

In an early era – in the Progressive era – the p/e ratio had another name: overcapitalization. And instead of celebrating an economic mechanism whereby speculators are allowed and encouraged to treat themselves to stunning windfalls, the Progessives justly saw overcapitalization as waste and fraud.

Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, has, I think correctly, seen the first two decades of the 20th century in America as the period in which the limits of American progressive politics – and by extension, the limits of anti-corporationism in the West – were drawn and hardened. By 1920, the attempt to reform the stock market from the root had failed.

The high point of the reform effort came in 1911. In that year, the House of Representatives passed a bill a bill that was narrowly turned down in the Senate, S. 232. S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137)

Martin Sklar, in The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, summarized the spirit of the drafts prepared during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that stood in the background of the bill’s eventual configuration in this way: ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all stock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

I’ve already manifested my manifesto for a new Soviet version of 21st century capitalism – one that destroys the corporate form and replaces it with hundreds of thousands of small scale enterprises in flexible cooperative structures. It does not overturn capitalism, but it does radically turn capitalism around. The limitation of both the corporation and the state is a kind of capitalism with a human face – which is much more radical than where ‘socialism’ is at the moment. For this kind of harmony of opposites, of cooperation and competition, to really work, the speculative economy would have to be radically subordinated to production. The pleasure palace of the oligarchs, the four hundred trillion dollar derivatives structure that burdens the earth (even as it actually does not exist – truly, an extreme case of economic neuroses), will have to be burnt to the ground. From a historical point of view, instead of a prescriptive one, however: one has to marvel at what the railroad companies wrought.  Most studies of railroads concentrate on their physical structure, and their role in transport. But if you look at financial history in the U.S., you find that railroads basically invented the modern stock market. By overcapitalizing far beyond the needs of stock and expansion, and by being the model that shaped the constitution of interstate businesses, they forged the stock market as an instrument of overcapitalization that it has since become. In the first decade of the twentieth century, state attorney generals, elected by populists, tried to make railroad companies adhere to their contractual obligations under state law. Well, that took state's rights too far, and was overruled by the Federal government. The Scotus, which piously devolved the rights of women over their own bodies to the states, would shriek with horror if the states took up the right to regulate the interstate commerce that comes through it. There is a limit to every reactionary thing, after all! Common sense, among the plutocrats, has agreed to this. And who are we to tell the rich assholes no?

My slang-ophilia - a history

 

For a writer with the proper equipment – an ear, curiosity enough to kill a dozen cats, and a large capacity for laziness -  Twitter, Tik Tok, blogs and the infinite cesspool of comments on Internet is all, somehow, quicksilver, full of slang mutants that often live have the half-lives of a celebrity goof on a reality tv show but that flash, in their plunge towards death, some signal from the Weltgeist. Some unutterable, utterable sadness.  The slang, the acronyms, the rapid erasures of jargon and slogan, I am in love with them beyond any ideological position.

This love of slang: it has a deep history. Before Rabelais, there were the Roman satirists, like Juvenal, and before Juvenal, Aristophanes, and before Aristophanes, the scribes of Egypt. I suppose. According to W. Puck Brecher’s The Aesthetics of Strangeness, the Japanese thematic of kyo, or madness, which generated a whole subculture in 18^th and early nineteenth century Japan, was attracted to the eccentric possibilities of slang – which seems to be paralleled by the way obscene slang became politicized under the French Revolution, particularly by the rather disgusting Hebert, the writer of Pere Duchesne, a revolutionary journal that made the word fuck a regicidal weapon. “I am the real Pere Duchesne, foutre” was the slogan of the journal. Hebert became, by one of those odd throws of the dice of history, one of Marie Antoinette’s judges, and in a glorious moment, when he accused her of incest with her boy, she appealed to all the women in attendance to help her – and they rioted.

The charge was withdrawn.

According to Charles Brunet, Hebert’s biography, the newsboys in Paris in the 1790s would sell his journal with the catchphrase, “Il est bougrement en colère aujourd’hui le Père Duchesne!” “He is bleeding angry today, Père Duchesne!” Bloody, of course, used to be more vulgar than it is now.

The love of slang in modernism – its use – was part of a double movement, on the one hand towards erudite reference, on the other hand towards popular culture: Leopold Bloom’s love of Paul de Kock, or Eliot’s love of music hall, on the one hand, the footnotes to the Wasteland on the other. Modernism, whatever it was and is, is a difficult vehicle for straightforward ideological readings. In France, Marcel Schwob, the great friend of Colette and the great admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote a famous essay on slang – argot. The connection between class, colonialism and the stranger comes out where it always does, in the metaphoric:

And it isn’t an affair, here, of the slang of the métier, the technical languages that exercize a necessary influence on the names of instruments, or of mechanical procedures ; the slang which we study is the special speech of the dangerous classes of society. An imperious necessity pushes us to produce this language. The words of our language are neither chased after nor tracked. But those of raw speech live approximately with the respresentative of social justice like the miners in Arizona with the Arapahoe Indians. Thus these miners form a young nation, vivacious, which immigrates and colonizes constantly. Slang is like a nation of miners which disembarked on our shores with cargos of immigrants. It is easy to see that these ports of arrival are divided between high society and low. At the low end, are the workers who gather the words and carry them towards the center of language. The terms so introduced are often designated in the dictionaries as « vulgar ».  

The metaphor of the miners and the Arapahoes never quite works, at least in as much as it is supposed to do conceptual work. Slang is the miner; always colonizing, always emigrating, always tearing up the land and water. But in this image, the Arapahoes are the social police – which inverts the usual colonialist hierarchy without making much sense. Schwob moves on to a more illuminating metaphor when he seizes on the miners as emigrants, making, in a sense, in their underground tunnels a movement towards the center of language.

The nearness of slang to “life” is a common trope among the slangophiliacs. Mencken took from Whitman his interest in “Americanisms” and American slang, and quoted Whitman’s wonderful demand for a Real Dictionary:

“The Real Dictionary will give all the words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws, even by violating them, if necessary. . . . These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations. Far plentier additions will be needed, and, of course, will be supplied. . . . Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words. . . . The appetite of the people of These States, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance. This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one.”

Probably Schwob knew of Whitman, since he was an Anglophile, and Whitman was a reference in the 1890s. The idea that we put the declaration of independence in our mouths anytime we speak shakes off the dead forms of Victorian British English – makes the language live. This battle is always being waged – as for instance in the battle over black English, which gets a going over in the movie American Fiction – although there the direction taken is rather the reverse of what one expects, not a defence of black English but a glance into how it becomes exoticized, commodified and neoliberalated.

Mencken was inclined to think that slang words were invented by some particular someone. And this may be, but slang dies if it is just some cute invention. It is slang because it is taken up, used and evolved. That Jack Doyle, the “keeper of a billiard academy in New York City”, invented hard-boiled may or may not be true, but hard-boiled is a mass event, as slang.  Like jokes, generally, slang is unsigned. As a philologist, one might be interested in the fact that John Marston the Elizabethan playwright invented the word “puffy” – but its manifold use is a matter of reinvention and readjustment. When I was writing my novel, Made a Few Mistakes, I had a character who founded a magazine about strip joints, and I wanted some grasp of stripper slang. I went to Tumblr, which was before it committed suicide and excluded porno, and found many stripper written sites. There I had a whole course in the argot of the metier – for instance, I learned about “rain.” For a writer, the internet is a wonderland -as is a bar, a street argument, and a group of tourists at Notre Dame.

Sometimes, it is all good.

 

 

Pain is Other

 

Buddhism came to Europe and America in the nineteenth century as a series of text, a philological affair, rather than as a set of practices, rituals, prayers, and sacrifices. It came firstly as intellectual history, rather than as history. The intellectual interest in it was charged by the eighteenth century’s rediscovery of idealism – starting with Berkeley and proceeding to Kant’s thing-in-itself, against which all philosophers and physicists have thrown themselves in vain. This, at least, gives us an outline – a semi-fictitious frame – to understand how Buddhist texts were inscribed by European and American thinkers in their own enterprises in the twentieth century. Stephen Spender said that Eliot, at the time of the Wasteland, said that he would have been a Buddhist if not for being stuck, as it were, in his own culture.

Buddhism , or at least its image, in American poetry in the twentieth century is enormously important.

In Europe, Buddhism did not have the same poetic force. It was, however, picked at by philosophers who were at the margins – neither comfortably continental, by which I mean influenced by phenomenology and Marx, nor analytic. Sages.

Cioran was, if anything, a sage. He was a sage of suicide, or rather, of the internal death drive that creates a sort of longing for the end. His journal, which was also a workbook (similar to the operational method of Emerson) is full of cries and whispers and readings. As a Sage, Ciorna was an inveterate gloss-er – it was in picking over the lines and textual bits of others that he could stake a place for his own thought.

I came across this sequence in his journal for 1962:

 

“What is impermanent is pain ; what is pain is not-itself. What is not-itself is not mine, I am not this, this is not me.» (Samyutta Nikaya)

What is pain is not-itself. It is difficult, it is impossible to be in agreement with Buddhism on this point, this very important point. For us, pain is more it-self  than ever. What a strange religion! It sees pain everywhere and it declares, at the same time, that it is irreal.

I accept pain. I cannot do without it, and I cannot, in the name of pity (like the Buddha) refuse it a metaphysical status. Buddhism assimilates appearance to pain, it even confounds them. In fact, pain is what gives a depth, a reality to appearance.”

 

I rather agree with Cioran’s response here.

The mention of “pity” brings into focus this objection to the cold metaphysical indifference to pain – to pain as not-itself – because pity does not even get off the ground if pain is, in the end, simply negative, simply the not-self. Here the dialectic applies, for pain as not-itself does not mean not-pain is itself – it means, rather, that all that is pain and all that holds the possibility of pain - all that is sentient - is not. It is the opening wedge of the Great dissolution. Cioran is in the line of twentieth century thinkers – like Unamumo – who insist that the tragic, that seemingly aesthetic category, is at the center of the moral life. I have some sympathy with that, which works against my otherwise happy American pragmatism. Without the tragic, pragmatism becomes, in my view, unhinged. It seeks out – as every philosophical instinct seeks out – an end, an ultimate, and only finds another transaction – which is why pragmatism accords so well with the cash nexus.

 

Cioran, that old reactionary, is good to read against the grain of pragmatism. Interestingly, it is this which makes me suspicious of the American poetic theme of Buddhism. It is all too much in the American grain.