Notes on the London Review of Books 41/10 (23 May 2019)

If there's a theme to this issue of the London Review of Books it is surely historical materialism and its ghosts, for lack of a better phrase. A case in point is a review of Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), 394pp. The review discusses Christophers' evidence of how much land has been sold off, and so cheaply and with so few requirements or regulations, in the last several decades in the United Kingdom, whose government has deliberately kept poor, vague, or non-existent records of much of this transformation. One result of this is that it has jacked up housing prices by an enormous margin ("on average--that is, for all kinds of housing--land now accounts for 70% of a house's sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent").

Jacqueline Rose has a long essay, "One Long Scream," that makes for very harrowing reading indeed. She has done some very interesting work in a number of areas, including the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and trauma. She also notes one of the few psychoanalysts in South Africa today, Mark Solms, whose work has gained international attention

Her essay looks back over the last quarter-century in South Africa, discussing a number of works, including My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata.

As an Anglican coming of age in the 1980s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a hero to me from a great distance. I followed the move from apartheid to freedom with great interest, and later on I would review the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in great detail for how it handled some truly vexed questions about memories of the past and their possible healing.

But I have not followed events closely since the turn of the century, blithely assuming that progress was being made much more quickly and comprehensively than Rose shows it actually is. The tortured state of progress is illustrated in part by Rose discussing various presentations and evaluations of the life of Winnie Mandela, including, most recently, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018).

Clair Wills next reviews Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Haymarket, 2018), 330pp. This is a reissue of a book McCann first published in the 1970s. It shows the enormous complexity of the issues in the latter half of the twentieth century and how the politics was often shifting.

The essay has really forced me to start reading in Irish history. Previously I confess that my Scottish and English grandparents have left me with a residue of snobbery about the Irish, and a very strong pride about British imperialism. But I am increasingly recognizing that both were grossly unjust.

Sudhir Hazareesingh next reviews Herrick Chapman's France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard UP, 2018). It only reinforces my desire to read more about de Gaulle, who seems by all accounts to have been a maddeningly complicated man.

Poor Charles Darwin. Rosemary Hill reviews the latest volume (26) of his Correspondence. It seems the fate of all revolutionary men that they are bombarded with letters, and Darwin, we are told, is no less the case. But apparently with extraordinary patience and effort, he responded to nearly all his letters personally.

Capitalistic Colonizing of the Christian Mind

Patrick Deneen's new book has been attracting a lot of attention as have other authors in the past few years who cheer the rise of an anti-liberal movement and speculate on what might replace it. But the problems with such exercises are very serious indeed. Alasdair MacIntyre himself is perhaps aware of those problems more than just about anybody else, and because of that is extremely reluctant blithely to prescribe solutions even after thinking about these issues for more than half a century. But the great man's reticence has not at all stopped those rushing to bury modern liberalism with puerile glee (e.g., some pamphleteer called Rod Dreher) even as they have not the slightest interest in the hard work of coming up with answers as to what we do in the chaotic aftermath--never mind in the much longer term. This essay disabuses such people of their apocalypticism on the cheap, and is worth your time, not least for insights such as this: "Liberal capitalism concludes with a march of destruction through the human psyche itself."

The author's point is born out by several recent and important books, some previously noted on here under the suspect category of "spirituality," which, as I have remarked elsewhere, doesn't exist until and unless you have a market economy interested in such a thing, at which point it becomes just another commodity.

Other books showing the colonizing of the mind by capitalism must include the deeply rewarding work of Todd McGowan, whom I discussed here in detail. He is also the author of Capitalism and Desire: the Psychic Cost of Free Markets, which I have ordered and hope to begin reading as soon as the semester is over. 

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn's Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, published in late 2016, is a very useful attempt to look at the problems of capitalism through the seasoned eyes of a minister and therapist steeped in pastoral theology and aware of the practical and psychological issues among the people he works with and their very real and increasing suffering.

J. Carrette and R. King are the authors of Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion which is useful in showing how popular appeals to "Buddhism" and "mindfulness" have been little more than capitalist projects in disguise.

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power  by Byung-Chul Han was released last Christmas, and is on my list to read, as is the forthcoming book by Benjamin Fong, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism.

About the former book the publisher tells us this:

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

And about the latter we are told the following by the publisher:

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation.

Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.