George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

George Saunders

Tenth of December

George Saunders on his latest, "Tenth of December"

George Saunders on his latest, \"Tenth of December\"

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary theorist and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of “Western Marxism” and as a forerunner of 20th-century critical theory. Lukács is best known for his Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Georg Lukács

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Mitchell Cohen is emeritus co-editor of Dissent magazine and a professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Among his books are The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (2017) and The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God (2016), both published by Princeton University Press.

Mitchell Cohen

Georg Lukács’s Two Natures: The Centenary of “History and Class Consciousness”

Aya Labanieh is a Syrian American writer, translator, academic, and aspiring stand-up comedian. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, studying imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in literature and media. She currently serves as research associate for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East, and has led multiple public humanities projects, such as GATE: From Babylon to Berlin (2023), which invited migrant Middle Eastern poets and musicians to reflect on exile, belonging, and Babylonian antiquity at Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and edited volumes Global Science Fiction and Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh. Her public-facing writing has appeared in Aeon magazine, Ancient Exchanges, Culturico, and Politics/Letters.

Aya Labanieh

No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. His first book of poems, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won an American Book Award.

Mosab Abu Toha

This is the first in a series of pieces LARB plans to run on the ongoing crisis. 
 
¤ 
MOSAB ABU TOHA’S poems and journal dispatches have become familiar to American poetry readers following the unfolding Israeli carnage in Gaza for the past 45 days. Between published works, his social media posts updated readers on the destruction of his house in Beit Lahia, his near-death escape of a second bombardment, and the losses of loved ones and life as he had previously known it, even as a survivor of five previous Israeli wars on his hometown. On November 19, we learned that Mosab was kidnapped in southern Gaza as he and his wife and their young children were fleeing Israeli bombardment. Like thousands of other families, they had sought shelter in a school in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, and waited to move to the southernmost city of Rafah. The journey of roughly 18 miles is incredibly treacherous, with roads bombed out into deep craters and dead bodies strewn along the way. Mosab and family only decided to embark on this terrible journey when Israel said there was safe evacuation corridor and they had finally secured evacuation papers that would enable them all to leave to the United States. En route to Rafah, at Deir al Balah, the family was stopped at the Israeli Netzarim checkpoint. Mosab was carrying his American-born son in his arms. A soldier ordered him to put the boy down. Walking in a line, arms raised above their heads, nearly 200 Palestinian men were arbitrarily abducted by the soldiers. Mosab was among them. 
 
This morning we learned that Mosab has been released. He sought medical attention because the soldiers beat him violently during interrogation. He made it back to Deir al Balah and has been reunited with his family, waiting to make it to Rafah. None of the other men captured with Mosab nor those he met in captivity have been released yet. According to Addameer, the Palestinian Support and Human Rights Association, untold numbers of people remain captive in Gaza, and in the West Bank and Jerusalem the number of those arbitrarily detained since the onset of the war has exceeded 2,000. 
 
Mosab is a poet, scholar, and librarian. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, the first English-language library in Gaza. He is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights in 2022. His book won the American Book Award and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mosab writes in the long tradition of Palestinian poets in Palestine and in the diaspora. His love for his home, his land, and his people is channeled in his expansive poems, underscoring the richness of the tradition to which he belongs and the dignity of all Palestinians writing despite state violence and erasure. 
 
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Deema K. Shehabi 
November 21, 2023 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
MOSAB ABU TOHA 
Gaza Notebook (2021–2023) 
<pre> * 
 
My two eyes, when closed, 
each see different things: 
One me leaving Gaza in peace, 
in one piece, 
one me getting jailed at the Erez crossing point. 
 My head: a confused old TV channel 
 picking up crossed <s>signals</s> 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
(In Egypt visiting the Red Sea) 
 
Riding a jetboat for the first time, 
my hat falls in the sea, waves 
wear it now, 
and at night I’m back home, 
unable to sleep. 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
In 5th grade, I visit the school library. 
On one wall next to the door, a poster claims 
“If you read books, you live more than one life.” 
Now I’m thirty and whenever I look at faces 
around me, old or young, on the foreheads I read: 
If you live in Gaza, you die several times. 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
The bomb when it pounded the sea 
made an eye socket underneath the sand. 
The fish thought the sea 
had been crying forever. 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
She asked her teacher: 
If there are four directions, 
then why do we have only two feet? 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
When it rains, farmers think the sky loves them. 
They are wrong. It rains either because 
the clouds cannot carry the sacks of water for too long, 
or because a sparrow has said a prayer 
when it heard a thirsty root begging. 
 
In Gaza it’s been raining bombs 
because death was born here. 
It never left our neighborhoods. 
 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
(1948) 
 
No one at home. 
 
The doorknob only dust touches it now. 
 
The pots grow parched. 
The frying pans miss the smell of olive oil. 
The clotheslines pine for soap scent. 
The flowerpot the window the key 
The [language]. 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
stones of house after explosion get Alzheimer’s 
 
some forget they were in a wall in a bedroom or a kitchen or a bathroom 
some in a ceiling 
some forget they sat behind photo frames for years 
a few stones [forget] they were stones 
those hit by the bomb 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
Birds draw the lines of their homes in the sky, 
and the wind… 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
walking on the beach, 
dreams grow between each two footprints 
on the sand 
 and the waves, what do they do? 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
Her dreams get stale 
 she throws them on the closest sea wave 
 and that wave 		 
 never returns 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
Raindrops slide on windowpanes, 
each one exploring a new space, 
a bed made for the night, 
or, on the kitchen counter, a glass full of water 
 (young ancestors) 
 (or missing siblings) 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
(Gaza July 16, 2014, boys from Baker family) 
 
children play soccer ball 
on the beach they are eight 
eight bombs thump the field four kids killed 
four wounded without checking his watch 
the referee announces a draw (4–4) 
 he knows the game 
should be over [unless there are more planes more bombs 
 more goals] the audience the waves 
 no longer cheers 
 
 an ambulance worker 
glimpses the ball the kids used to entertain the soccer ball [unharmed] 
the referee blows a second final whistle 
 on the smashed scoreboard 
 
 (the kids’ team wins) 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
upon birth mask up your children and leave them unnamed 
 so 
the angel of death won’t find them 
 
someone may ask 
 why not paint their faces change their names 
 every day 
 
a nightingale on the tree of the night exclaims 
 what if both the painter and the registry official 
 work for the angel of death 
 
and a stone near a cemetery suggests 
 what about not giving birth to children 
at all 
</pre> 
<pre> * 
 * 
 
in the camp house small 
power off humid 
drone buzzing fills up bullet holes 	in walls 
 outside 	 
young and old 
spend most of the night 
in the street 
 in the camp 
a street can become a living room 
talking talking watching cats and mice 
scavenging through trash for cheese or meat 
rooms inside: 	drawers where tired souls 
are temporarily stored 
</pre> 
 
<figure id="attachment_365338" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-365338" style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Schermafbeelding-2018-12-15-om-13.39.16.jpg"><img class="wp-image-365338" src="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Schermafbeelding-2018-12-15-om-13.39.16.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="751" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-365338" class="wp-caption-text">Rosalind Nashashibi, “Electrical Gaza,” 2015. Cinematography by Emma Dalesman, production by Kate Parker. Digital video still transferred from 16mm film, animation, color, sound 17:53 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, London, New York.</figcaption></figure> 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
LARB Poetry Editor Elizabeth Metzger was in correspondence with Mosab Abu Toha before his kidnapping and received his permission to publish this work. 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
Samia Halaby (b.1936, Jerusalem) is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Halaby is recognized as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world. Halaby has been collected by international institutions since the 1970s, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and the British Museum. 
 
Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973 in Croydon, United Kingdom) received her BA in painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK), in 1995, after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK), where she received her MFA in 2000. As part of her master’s degree, Nashashibi participated in a three-month exchange program in Valencia, California (United States), at CalArts in 2000. Nashashibi became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in London, after the program was reestablished in 2020. She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017, and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her work has been included in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah 10. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
Featured image: Samia Halaby, Three Way, Nine, 1982. Casein on paper, 57 x 77 cm.

Mosab Abu Toha’s “Gaza Notebook (2021–2023)”

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college’s highest honors. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019–20 academic year). Yancy is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. His latest book is entitled Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (2023). At Academic Influence, he is cited as one of the top 10 influential philosophers in the decade 2010–20, based upon the number of citations and web presence. He has also published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, in books, and at various news sites. He is well known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column The Stone and at the progressive nonprofit news organization Truthout. He is also series editor of Philosophy of Race at Lexington Books.

George Yancy

WHEN I DISCOVERED the field of philosophy at roughly the age of 17, I was seduced by its abstraction from—or its abstraction away from, as the late philosopher Charles W. Mills would put it—the world of nonideal theory; of harmful immigration policy; of pain and suffering; of racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, femicide, classism, genocide, oppression, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, white domination, ableist normativity. I’m sure that this is partly why I fell in love with Plato, especially his theory of Forms, which holds that ordinary physical objects are mere appearances—images, shadows—that don’t provide us with true knowledge but with opinion only. It was the immutability of the Forms that transfixed my attention, not the contingent suffering of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, condemned to death by drinking hemlock for being a gadfly. The implication was that, as a philosopher, I had to transcend the messiness of empirical reality, had to stay focused on and seek out capital-R Reality through conceptual abstraction. 
 
This assumption was indicative of mainstream philosophy as I learned it as an undergraduate philosophy major in the early 1980s. My philosophy professors, for the most part, were mainly engaged in what felt like disembodied abstraction and conceptual minutiae. I recall that there was one philosopher who made it clear to me that he didn’t believe the stuff he taught in philosophy of religion but simply liked to argue. In the classroom, I witnessed what seemed to be a fetishization of argumentation, not to mention philosophical hubris. The objective was to escape, through pure intellection, the cave of ignorance that Plato allegorized as our unfortunate human condition. 
 
So, I was struggling there to see beyond what was before me, trying to extricate myself from what were deemed mere shadows, simulacra. It was only later that I came to realize that practicing philosophy in this vein isn’t about philosophy tout court but rather about a particular understanding of philosophy, a construction that refuses to see the ugly face of human suffering and seems incapable of doing—or unwilling to do—anything to eradicate that suffering. The questions posed, and the answers given, stem from what Mills, in his 1994 essay “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” calls a “perk of social privilege.” 
 
Critiquing a narrow understanding of theory in her provocative 1984 essay <a href="https://openspaceofdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/adrienne-rich-notes-toward-a-politics-of-location.pdf">“Notes Toward a Politics of Location,”</a> Adrienne Rich writes that “theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.” The relevance of Rich’s point regarding how theory can lose the smell of the earth speaks to how philosophical reflection can function as a form of mere spectatorship (theōros), where there is no investment in the world other than to view it at a distance. In this context, I had become a young philosopher who lost his sense of smell, his sense of the mundane, the quotidian muck and mire of human existence. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I met philosopher Cornel West for the first time, not long after he was arrested and jailed for protesting the university’s investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. His actions spoke to what it means to be true to Socratic parrhesia (courageous speech) and how we mustn’t avoid what he calls the <a href="https://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com/2017/04/prophetic-fragments-existential-blues.html">“raw funky stinky stuff of life.”</a> 
 
In this regard, it isn’t lost on me that, at this moment in history, roughly 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children were brutally killed by Hamas on October 7, and that, since that tragic day, over 10,000 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, have been brutally killed by Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. That is the stuff that my early introduction to philosophy didn’t prepare me for. There were discussions of death but not of severed body parts, deep lamentation, the unimaginable grieving for brutalized children. When I was an undergraduate, ensconced within the pristine halls where philosophers pontificated about truth, reality, beauty, substance, justice, ethics, the good life, and the meaning of meaning, the whiteness and maleness of philosophy were hypervisible, and the anti-Blackness held by many of the West’s prominent thinkers, including Hume, Kant, and Hegel, was sidestepped or deemed irrelevant. The painful sounds of a George Floyd calling for his mama, the reality that he was knelt on for over nine minutes by the white police officer Derek Chauvin, would not have been discussed with philosophical vigor given the meta-philosophical policing of professional journals, college curricula, and academic colloquia, the places where “real” philosophy takes place. 
 
These days, these trying times, these moments of existential ruin, where we are 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, I find myself less and less moved by Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of The Thinker. As a philosopher, I find myself immersed instead in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and, as a Black philosopher, located in the midst of what Christina Sharpe calls <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a43012829/christina-sharpe-in-the-wake/">the wake,</a> the horrid afterlife of slavery. Despite my bona fides as a professionally trained philosopher, this identity in no way keeps me safe from being racially profiled or prevents me from being shot by a police officer who mistakes my cell phone for a weapon. That prospective horror—and so much more—makes up the funk, the harsh reality, that philosophy must face, must engage with, must not avoid by abstracting from the smell of the earth. 
 
The decision to curate this special series on philosophy’s importance at times like these was partly motivated by my own practice and understanding of the imperative to do philosophy as a mode of public-facing work. I wanted to demonstrate just how important and relevant specific conceptions of philosophy (implicit and explicit), and specific praxes of philosophers, can be in times of deep social, political, and existential trauma. The six philosophers gathered for this series celebrate what philosophy is capable of. Each is invested in philosophical plurality, which doesn’t mean that anything goes or that all views are equally well-thought-out or critically valid. These thinkers have no pretensions of being able to perform what Donna Haraway refers to as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” Each embodied philosophical voice is deeply situated, invested not in navel-gazing but in bearing witness to other embodied voices that have been marginalized and deemed nugatory. 
 
I have curated this special series because I see philosophy as asking of us nothing less than to face the reality of the world and of who we are with as much honesty as we can manage. It asks us to grieve that world, and to grieve our own mistakes within that world, and yet also to be moved by the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love to transform that world for the better. Asking for modes of change that involve the mutual flourishing of all human beings is, as sad as it may sound, an act of deep risk-taking; it can be dangerous. My public-facing philosophical practice has made me the target of death threats, racist projections, and vicious name-calling. I was even placed on the infamous <a href="https://www.professorwatchlist.org/search">Professor Watchlist</a> for writing <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?_r=0">a letter of love to white people.</a> In these times of narrow ideological allegiances and goose-stepping conformity, philosophers who ask “why?” as a challenge to the status quo are asking an unsafe question. And that fact, more than anything else, shows us why we need philosophy in times like these. 
 
In this special series, I am honored to share this space with philosophers who understand, with clarity and urgency, the role that philosophy must play in transforming the world, in helping to push us closer to the not yet—the manifestation of worldwide justice and the recognition of the unquestionable humanity of all peoples. Coming out tomorrow are essays by Jay L. Garfield and Vanessa Wills. Garfield draws from a panoply of philosophical voices and traditions, arguing for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ways of seeing and doing philosophy. While stressing philosophy’s ability to address pressing questions about climate change and structural racism, capitalism and colonialism, he also argues for the capacity of philosophy to generate beauty in our lives. For her part, Wills engages several issues in what increasingly feels like our inevitable march toward a dying planet: the forcible displacement of human beings, mass imprisonment, book banning, and COVID-19 denialism. Both essays speak to the deep pertinence of philosophy conceived as a forceful intervention in the world, as opposed to an arcane practice performed in the confines of a stove-heated room (à la Descartes). 
 
Next Monday, December 4, essays by Kate Manne and Todd May will be published. And then, on Monday, December 11, two final essays, by Elizabeth Brake and Lori Gallegos, will appear. With clarity of thought and a refusal to think in philosophical lockstep, these six philosophers “talk back” (as bell hooks would say) to the profession of philosophy, to its hermetic proclivities, its pretensions of political neutrality, its silencing of voices that don’t reflect the interests of cishet white men, its refusal to embrace the smell of the earth. 
¤ 
Featured image: Robert Delaunay. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">Rythme/3.</a><a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">,</a> 1938. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, New York, 1983. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 3, 2023. Images has been cropped.

When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of Antarctica Starts Here (2009), a short story collection; After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical, and historical notes on the void; The Stone of Madness (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos, and modernity; and When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book that explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over 30 languages.

Benjamín Labatut

The MANIAC

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions. He is a frequent contributor at several different sites including The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Aeon, Jacobin, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Killing the Buddha, Salon, The Public Domain Review, Atlas Obscura, JSTOR Daily, and Newsweek. The author of several books, he most recently wrote Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost (2023). He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ed Simon

ONCE, MANY CENTURIES AGO, there was supposedly a contraption of gleaming pneumatic tubes and shiny brass gears and widgets, a head constructed of polished metal with lips of copper and eyes that were smooth glass balls within corrugated sockets. The Brazen Head, as the folktale normally refers to this device, is less famous than other manufactured men, from Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s golem to Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein (1818), even if the marvelous moving gearworks’ name endures in a handful of English and Irish pubs for whom he remains a mascot of sorts. Medieval sources claim that the machine, operated by a combination of principles both mechanical and magical, was capable of answering questions posed to it, was capable of thought. 
 
Associated with any number of figures, from Albertus Magnus to Johann Faust, this constructed man was most often remembered as a device built by the 13th-century English Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, a polymath to whom inventions ranging from eyeglasses to gunpowder are often attributed. Bacon was an unusual sort of wizard for, in his own estimation, he was scarcely a wizard at all. “Experimental science is the queen of sciences,” he wrote in his Opus Tertium (1267), “and the goal of all speculation.” An avowed nominalist and disdainer of the occult (despite being an alchemist), Bacon was among the first empiricists and experimentalists in the West. Yet so seemingly miraculous were his experiments that he was easily configured in the collective memory as a necromancer, a man capable of magic. A character in the Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene’s 1589 stage hit Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay enthuses how the monk’s machine is “a brazen head by art, / Which shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms, / And read a lecture in philosophy,” an analytical engine that exists within “rich networks,” eerily prefiguring the internet. There is a newly pertinent aspect to Bacon’s mechanism, for his thinking machine is a clear prefiguration of an automaton, a robot, an android, a computer—an artificial intelligence. Before Alexa, Siri, or ChatGPT, there was the Brazen Head; humanity was haunted by the possibility of artificial intelligence before it ever existed. 
 
Bacon is only mentioned in the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s first English-language novel The MANIAC (2023) by way of a deftly placed epigraph drawn from Greene’s play, but the fantastical aura of the Brazen Head permeates Labatut’s allegory about the ways in which reason, pushed to its extreme, can become its opposite, about how a certain tyranny of unfeeling logic could very well usher in an apocalypse (and soon). The title of Labatut’s novel, after all, refers to the acronym for the thousand-pound supercomputer that once occupied a few floors at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. The novel is ostensibly historical fiction concerning the Hungarian Jewish physicist and father of modern computing John von Neumann, but The MANIAC is actually something far rarer and more unusual—a bona fide experimental novel of ideas that has emerged from a publishing ecosystem that all too often only rewards dry literary fiction or lowest-common-denominator genre fiction. The necessities of marketing and publicity no doubt require the book to be sold as a “novel,” and while obviously the inner thoughts of the scientist’s wife Klára Dán von Neumann or the economist Oskar Morgenstern require a certain amount of speculation on Labatut’s part (even while clearly based on voluminous research), it’s difficult to fully categorize The MANIAC as fiction, even historical fiction. Rather, The MANIAC’s genre is better understood as historical creative nonfiction, philosophical argument, or some conjunction of the two. 
 
The material on von Neumann occupies the bulk of Labatut’s attention, comprising the long middle portion of The MANIAC, wherein several different figures, ranging from the scientist’s wives and daughter to physicists Eugene Wigner and Richard Feynman, give first-person testimony in chronological order (almost as if they were being interviewed for a documentary, but no such framing conceit is offered). Meanwhile, the von Neumann narrative is bookended by a substantial prologue that sketches the biography of marginal Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who was simultaneously haunted by irrationality and the rise of Nazism and so murdered his Down syndrome–afflicted son and then took his own life in 1933. In keeping with narrative symmetry, The MANIAC ends decades later, in 2016, when the Korean Go savant Lee Sedol lost four of five tournament games to the computer program AlphaGO at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul. 
 
That the editors at Penguin were agreeable with Labatut’s novel ending in an 84-page (admittedly riveting) synopsis of the strategies that underlie a complex 3,000-year-old Chinese game speaks to an admirable conception of what novels can do, the way that they can be pushed and can in turn push our conceptions. Because what Labatut’s intent appears to be is nothing less than an interpretation of our nightmares of reason, this engine that powers a “reckless drive toward death and self-destruction” and embodies “an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit.” In that infernal trinity of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence, all avatars of humanity’s Thanatos, there is one figure who dwells within their nexus—Johnny von Neumann, the wizard whose supercomputer calculated the yield of the first hydrogen bombs, who advocated using those weapons as a means to control the weather in a potential Third World War, and who perhaps delivered to us the mechanism by which that conflagration will be fought in the form of the digital revolution. He is, if not in reality than certainly in The MANIAC, a demonic figure. 
 
“He was the smartest human being of the 20th century,” argues Labatut (italics his), and The MANIAC makes such a claim seem anything but histrionic. Von Neumann revolutionized several disparate fields, from quantum mechanics and nuclear physics to economics and computer science. He was the father of mathematical set theory, of proof theory, of game theory, of operator algebras, of fluid dynamics. Of the computer. He was the author of Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), and Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (posthumously published in 1966), among scores of other books, papers, and lectures. “So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania,” writes Labatut. Von Neumann straddled the theoretical and the experimental; able to accomplish complicated mathematical proofs that had flummoxed scholars for decades while he was still just a schoolboy, his pudgy hands also groped at circuit boards and vacuum tubes. If it’s true that von Neumann was the most brilliant human of the last century, then he has ironically dwindled into popular obscurity (a lifelong fear of his), perhaps because, as a character, he lacks the doomed romanticism of a J. Robert Oppenheimer, the paranoiac madness of his friend and foil Kurt Gödel, or even the (studied) avuncular saintliness of an Albert Einstein. Far from being an otherworldly anchorite, von Neumann was a womanizer and a drinker, a gambler and a lover of luxury cars, closer to the military brass who gave him a dozen different security clearances to work at the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and so on, than he was to the genteel physicists of his Austro-Hungarian youth. Yet, as The MANIAC makes clear, von Neumann’s was the animating spirit of our current technological epoch, an individual whose dogged work ethic and almost supernatural intelligence made our current moment possible. 
 
His childhood was elegant and refined (the aristocratic “von” was added by the Hapsburg emperor in honor of services rendered by the scientist’s banker father during the Great War), yet, as his second wife is imagined as remembering, “Johnny loved America.” This infatuation, the transition from Neumann János Lajos who was raised in an 18-room apartment on sophisticated Báthory Street into Johnny von Neumann, American patriot, goes some way towards explaining the scientist’s Faustian proclivities. Labatut has Klára von Neumann further elaborate that America “did something to him. All that maddening, unthinking optimism, all that cheerful naïveté under which they hid their cruelty, it brought out the worst in him. A sleeping demon, a secret desire whispered by the nightmare that he confessed to no one.” 
 
It would be an error, however, to read The MANIAC as merely the Chilean novelist’s indictment of the gringo military-industrial complex, as embodied by von Neumann, because Labatut’s critique drives deeper, indicting the United States’ antinomian rationalism, its instrumental, utilitarian, positivist, rapacious, anarchic logic that so often can appear as its exact opposite. Von Neumann’s fall from grace wasn’t his becoming an American but rather the death of his faith in reason while he was still the most adept wielder of that reason. That self-exile occurs after von Neumann, whose European studies were long occupied by the search for “absolute truth, […] a mathematical basis for reality, a land free from contradictions and paradoxes,” finally encounters Gödel and his infamous incompleteness theorems, which forever laid to rest the naive belief that mathematics could be placed on an entirely consistent or coherent logical basis. The result is a reality that, at its deepest level, implies the existence of things that 
obey no measure and refuse categorization, because they exist outside the order that encompasses all phenomena. These outliers, these singularities, these monstrosities, will not be governed or compared by means of a number, because they lie at the root of what is disharmonious, chaotic, and unruly about the world. 
The conclusion is unassailable—if nothing is real, then everything is permitted (at least somewhere). Gödel reacted by going insane, while von Neumann took a less decent route—not the sanitarium but the Pentagon. 
 
Bacon built a head of brass and copper, but von Neumann’s oracle was rendered in binary and punch card, code and algorithm. In the last years of his life, eventually succumbing in 1957 to metastatic cancer most likely caused by his work at the Manhattan Project, von Neumann became obsessed with machine consciousness, with the idea that humans could create silicon minds far superior to our own. Long before there was any possibility of such a thing, when the processing power of a machine like MANIAC (short for the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer) was equivalent to a single bit, von Neumann was already imagining “the singularity,” the coming eschaton whereby our machines finally outstrip us. As incandescent as von Neumann’s brilliance was, his mind was different from ours only in degree, not in kind. The artificial intelligence he dreamt would survive our nuclear wars (which he had made possible) would be something else entirely—they would be gods. The central preoccupation of The MANIAC isn’t von Neumann but rather von Neumann’s dying obsession, and how, now that we’re seemingly on the cusp of that epoch he yearned for, we can see the full fruit of irrationality hitherto masked as its opposite. Labatut’s novel is a sweeping condemnation of the cult of rationality, an acknowledgment that logic pushed to its extreme transforms into madness—an insanity like the nuclear deterrence method called mutually assured destruction, for which von Neumann advocated, convincing military brass that it was nothing but the clearest of clear thinking. 
 
Our supposedly rational economy drives us towards climate collapse; our apparently logical foreign policy pushes us towards nuclear war; our burgeoning artificial intelligences—paragons of miraculous technology—court apocalypse. Ours is a final age “suffused with a Faustian, boundless energy, a haste, a tragic fall,” an era of much knowledge and no wisdom, which recognizes “no laws, no method, no truth, just a blind, uncontainable surge, a rush of madness that would not stop for anyone or anything but drive us onward even to the ends of the Earth.” Our predicament is born not from a deficit of rationality but from a surfeit of it: logic dialectically pushed towards its contrary through our cowardice and idolatry. If reality has always had the demonic at its core, and if our prophets of science like von Neumann drove reason itself to insanity, then Labatut implies that we’re now witnessing the shuddering birth of a new intelligence, hence the 84-page epilogue about a Korean Go champion bested by a computer program. That program was just one of Johnny’s AI children, “a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter.” As exemplary as the intelligence of von Neumann was, his legacy is the crafting of intelligences far more alien than his own, the gestation of a new reason beyond reason. 
 
In legends of the Brazen Head, it is claimed that the only prediction offered by the mechanical mind was an inscrutable warning: “Time is, time was, time is past,” uttered right before it destroyed itself. Von Neumann himself was treated as a doomed oracle, his delirious brain finally so eaten by cancer that the military locked him up in Walter Reed hospital, fearing that he might start yelling out state secrets. Guarded around the clock by army personnel who hoped they could get von Neumann’s assistance, even while on his deathbed, in finding a few more solutions to their technical problems, the tortured man instead screamed out his own prophecies, which none of the officers could understand, since everything was in Hungarian, the language of the maniac’s youth. 
¤ 
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ed-simon/">Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions.</a>

George Saunders on his latest, "Tenth of December"

January 27, 2013

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?