LARB AV

Radio Hour: Schmaltz, "Citizen Four" & Rachel Cusk's "Outline"

Radio Hour: Schmaltz, \"Citizen Four\" & Rachel Cusk\'s \"Outline\"

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

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

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”

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)”

<h4>Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He holds a PhD from Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society through the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on comparative philosophy, social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, modern Jewish thought, religion, and media studies. He has written for Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues.</h4>

Ajay Singh Chaudhary

<h4>Raphaële Chappe is a core faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and founding chief operating officer of True North Business Exchange. She holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research, and an LLM from New York University School of Law. Her research interests include the link between financial markets and wealth inequality; political economy and the history of economic thought; and the philosophical foundations of microeconomics. Raphaële lives in Brooklyn with her wife and their twin daughter and son.</h4>

Raphaële Chappe

The Supermanagerial Reich

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.

Radio Hour: Schmaltz, "Citizen Four" & Rachel Cusk's "Outline"

By LARB AVMarch 12, 2015

LARB Staff Recommendations

Radio Hour: Günter Grass, Shame Reading, & Laurie's Apology

Radio Hour: Literary Immortality, “Wolf Hall,” and the LA Times Festival of Books

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?