Content of the Form: Hannah Smart on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

In honor of the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, novelist Hannah Smart once again joins us for a discussion of the ethical limits and critical revaluation of this maximally ambitious and chronically misunderstood novel.  A polygenetic and polyphonic novel, Infinite Jest's interlocking themes and characters circle back to the urgent need and paradoxical impossibility of self-forgetting and transcendence within the American psyche ravaged by the grotesqueries of late consumer capitalism and the imperatives of individualism. Infinite Jest builds its literary DNA out from the spiritual seriousness of Dostoevsky, the parables of Kafka, Pynchon conspiracism, and Gassian forebodings of the infantile fascist lurking in the intellectual artifices of the hidden American heart. It is a novel about the deadly pleasures of the culture industry and temptation of the hedonic oblivion promised by advertisers. In this discussion, we focus on what it can still teach us about the hard-won discipline of sustained activity of reading, what's still true about the ethics of individual responsibility, and hold up a comic mirror to the horror of our American political present and besieged future.Follow Hannah on Twitter(X): @fowlinghantodSubscribe to Hannah's Substack: @howlingfantodPreorder Hannah's debut novel, Meat Puppets: https://merchtable.bigcartel.com/product/meat-puppets-by-hannah-smartRead Hannah's LARB piece: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/Please consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

On September 7, 1945, only a few months after the Allies accepted the Nazis’ unconditional surrender, the Deutches Theater in Berlin reopened its doors with a very deliberate choice of performance. Like many theaters across the country reopening in the wake of the Second World War, Deutches Theater began its new run with a production of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s comic drama about religious tolerance and reconciliation, Nathan der Weise, or Nathan the Wise, which had been banned under the Nazis. A tale of friendship across religious divisions and near-fatal misunderstandings, Nathan the Wise is the story of a wealthy Jewish merchant –the titular Nathan–and the series of complications that arise when he returns home to Jerusalem to discover that his adoptive daughter, Recha, has been rescued from a fire by a former Knight Templar, who himself owes his life to the unlikely mercy of the Muslim Sultan Saladin. Here as elsewhere, Lessing’s play functioned as a cipher for an entire history of anxieties about German national identity, Jewish emancipation, and the promise and peril of secular modernity. In this episode, we talk with Jonathan B. Fine, Assistant Professor at Brown University, about Lessing's complex legacy and his pivotal role in the German Enlightenment and the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere. Lessing is nothing short of an embodiment of cultural modernity and the spirit of the European Enlightenment, and one of the main progenitors of the sphere of public debate and discussion that we take for granted in liberal democratic societies and which serves as such an important counterweight to state power. Upon receiving the Lessing Prize from the Free City of Hamburg in 1959, the political theorist Hannah Arendt returned to Lessing's critical role as a public intellectual in a lecture on humanity in dark times. We return to both Lessing and Arendt in this episode with a similar feeling of foreboding. How can the public realm, the world in which free and equal citizens can exercise their reason in deliberation and govern their lives in common, be salvaged from the rising tide of authoritarianism and the ascendance of technocapitalism? To understand where we are going, we must understand where we came from, and for this there is no better place to begin than Lessing.Follow Professor Fine on Twitter(X): @jonathanbfinePlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

David Foster Wallace, the loquacious novelist behind Infinite Jest, seemingly predicted much of our culture moment from AI avatars to the hypnotic and addictive temptation of the infinite scroll. In his fiction and essays, he agonized over the ways in which advertisers and mass media have coopted techniques of subversion and rebellion like irony to make products that are more entertaining, more flattering to our egos, and more difficult to ply ourselves away from. As a writer of dizzingly erudite, complexly structured, yet morally earnest fiction he was concerned with devising new imaginative ways of competing with our short-circuited attention spans. Great literature he argued, like life, if it is to be meaningful and edifying, requires difficulty, concentration, and attentiveness. Wallace made great demands on his readers, but always with the implicit promise that in wading through the difficulty and by sticking with the forking paths of his sentences and elliptical thoughts, a higher pleasure and more last meaning would arise. The culmination of this effort at demonstrating the virtues of difficuty and choosing what we pay attention to is his posthumously published novel, The Pale King. In this episode, Hannah Smart, joins us to discuss this novel's profound meditations on civics, conversion experiences, and the transcendence of boredom. The novel posits a new kind of modern hero and solution to the problem of meaning that has plagued modernity and life under capitalism. According to Wallace, the secret to enduring modern life is the ability to withstand the despair of boredom and push through tedium and meaningless data to the point of transcendent acceptance and singular awareness. Through a discussion of her recent essay, Nothing Ever Happens: "Mister Squishy" and The Year of the Sentence Diagram, we analyze how Wallace on an atomic sentence level enacts the alienation, fretful search for meaning, and the dissolution of the self. Wallace longed for an escape from the prison of a neurotic self-consciousness and The Pale King was his final attempt to flee the analysis-paralysis of the reflexive self towards a higher purpose.It is a novel that poses the provocative thesis that true heroism in modern American life consists in the endurance of soul-crushing boredom, and that by cultivating sustained attentiveness and wading through the myriad noise of the culture industry we may find on the other side an enlightened tranquility. Follow Hannah on Twitter(X): @fowlinghantodSubscribe to Hannah's Substack: @howlingfantodRead the LARB piece: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/Please consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

Eleanor Russell joins us to discuss the mystical writings of French philosopher, Simone Weil. Published posthumously and edited by Gustave Thibon, Gravity and Grace is a collection of fragments from Weil's notebooks that sketch the core themes of her Christian mysticism in crisp, compact aphorisms. Weil did not set out to find God; instead, she was overwhelmed by a mystical experience of Christ's presence, after which her interests shifted from political philosophy to theology. Weil’s Christian mysticism revolves around a central paradox: God’s presence, truth, and love reveal themselves to the fullest only at the extremities of absence, suffering, and grief. In the same way, we can only experience Christ’s radical love and redemptive suffering in solidarity with all those who are marginalized, oppressed, and enslaved. The result was a distinctive form of Christian mysticism that turned the tenets of Catholic orthodox on their head. Weil refused baptism out of her love for that which lies outside of the Church. She located Christ’s apotheosis not in the resurrection but in his final cry of agony and despair, and she considered God’s abandonment of this world to evil, affliction, and cruel fate to be a necessary condition of the Creation. In this episode, we discuss Weil’s enigmatic, fragmentary masterpiece in order to understand that radical form of faith that only becomes possible in moments when God forsakes us and nothing shows itself as divine. Weil’s words kindle a fire in dark times: “If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”Follow Eleanor on Twitter(X): @eleanoirPlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

Susan Sontag for almost forty years was the most recognisable public intellectual in America. She inspired an entire generation of critics to read more widely, think and feel more deeply, and stay attuned to the transformative power of art. In her numerous critical essays on art, politics, and our technologically mediated ways of seeing, Sontag built up her own distinctive aesthetic and moral sensibility, one that merged the moral seriousness of high art and the joyful eroticism of so-called low cultural products. Her debut collection, Against Interpretation, made her an almost overnight intellectual celebrity fueled by such iconoclastic essays like Notes on 'Camp'. In this episode, critic and art historian, A.V. Marraccini guest hosts to discuss the legacy and enduring importance of Sontag's writing, orbiting around a discussion of the early Notes on 'Camp' and the mid-period definitive takedown of fascist aesthetics, Fascinating Fascism. Ultimately we argue that a reconsideration of these essays are indispensable to understanding our own neo-fascist moment in which a new breed of grifters and cynical aesthetes are attempting to blind us to history and obscure the baleful influence of the fascist aesthetic’s romantic longings. Re-reading Sontag reminds us of the interwovenness of art and politics and ask us to confront urgent moral questions of the critic's and artist's role during tumultuous political times. How do we avoid complicity in a society in the grip of political nihilism and spellbound by fantasies of domination and purifying violence?Purchase We The Parasites: https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/we-the-parasitesFollow A.V. on Twitter(X): @saintsoftnessPlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

“Content of the Form” is a new interview series excavating the moral and political meshwork implicit in the use of certain artistic forms and genres. If every form or genre-exercise entails a repertoire of expected tropes with their own often unconscious social history and political function, conversely we can read within the framework of a form a network of concerns and anxieties voiced by the choice of the form. Our first guest in this series, Grace Byron, guides us through the autobiographical works of the french writer, Annie Ernaux. The recipient of the 2022 Noble Prize for Literature, Ernaux's magnum opus, The Years, presents a experiential panoramic history of the 20th century from the situated perspective of an ambivalent bourgeois intellectual who witnesses the triumphs, catastrophes, and disappointments of the arc of the twentieth century amongst the quotidian memories of girlhood, marriage, motherhood, and intergenerational change. Ernaux's characteristic style is diaristic, yet impersonal--striving in its use of the universal "We" to capture a quasi-objectivity on the wreckage of history and loss. Ernaux's formal innovations represent a significant contribution to the development of 20th-century memoir that testifies to a desire to bridge the abyss that separates inaccessible interiority from the universality of unfolding history. Likewise, in Grace Byron's Herculine, interiority seeks out its fitting objective correlate in religiosity and body horror. Herculine is as much a horror story of demonic possession and trauma as it is an allegory of the dehumanization of conversion therapy, the search for trans community, and salvaging a little mystery and beauty for oneself in a world of dogmatic thinking, both mundane and supernatural.Purchase Herculine: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Herculine/Grace-Byron/9781668087862Follow Grace on Twitter(X): @emotrophywifePlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

“Moral of the Story” is a new interview series in which we talk to contemporary novelists and poets about the ethical content of their work, the role of the imaginative writer in making sense of competing moral discourses, and what, if anything, aesthetics has to do with morality and politics in our moment of full-blown neo-fascism. To kick us off, we sit down with the writer Sebastian Castillo to talk about and around his new novel, Fresh, Green Life. Fresh, Green Life is a deeply comic book about the modern construction of the self, disillusionment with academic life, romantic disappointment, and the unexpected turns of holding to one's New Year's resolutions. Join us for a hearty discussion that touches on midcentury American novel aesthetics, the folly of an overly hermetic philosophy, and social media mediated reactionary fantasies.Purchase Fresh, Green Life: https://softskull.com/books/fresh-green-life/Follow Sebastian on Twitter(X): @bartlebytacoPlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

Is the legacy of 20th century Marxism one of victory or defeat? On a certain reading, the defeat of the international proletarian revolution has been the distinctive preoccupation of a variegated tradition of thought that has come to be known as Western Marxism. For critics, Western Marxism represents a turn away from historical materialism’s proper focus on forces of production, class struggle, and the unity of theory and practice towards the superstructure of capitalist civilization: ideology, philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. At its best, however, Western Marxism offers the most theoretically advanced and intellectually honest reckoning with the historical defeat of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe and the United States. In this episode, we are fortunate to host Ross Wolfe, author of a recent, timely piece on the legacy of Western Marxism in New International entitled “Neo-Stalinism & Philosophy: Domenico Losurdo’s New School of Falsification.” Wolfe’s three-part series offers a devastating critique of the Neo-Stalinist revival that has lately become popular among the online left and whose standard bearer is Italian Stalinist Domenico Losurdo. Focusing on Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, translated into English earlier this year, this episode attempts to salvage the enduring insights of the Western Marxist tradition from Losurdo’s distortions and outright falsifications, with the aim of exposing the hollowness of Neo-Stalinist scholarship and politics. In doing so, we try to lay the groundwork for what a clear-eyed reckoning with the successes and failures of historical Marxism might look like today and what possibilities for revolutionary anti-capitalist politics are still available to us, here at the end of history. Read Ross's tripartite piece here:Part 1: https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/Part 2: https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/Part 3: https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/Follow Ross on Twitter(X): @rosswolfePlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

The poet, Alina Stefanescu, joins us for a freewheeling discussion of Jacques Derrida's classic work of politico-ethical deconstruction, The Politics of Friendship, and her new poetry collection, My Heresies. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida ruminates on the interrelationship between our inherited concepts of friendship, fraternity, and democracy, and the distance we have yet to travel in order to work through the inadequacies of our conceptual vocabularies and the living content they embody. Derrida shows that our model of democracy and the future for a democracy to come depends in significant ways on the fate of friendship and its ability to expand the sphere of care, citizenry, and community. The history of friendship and democracy is haunted by the apocryphal citation of Aristotle: "O my friends, there is no friend," and the problematic of the performative contradiction it inaugurates. Is true friendship possible? Can the reach of the polis extend beyond an autochthonous community? Is a politics beyond the friend/enemy distinction imaginable? Can the poet and philosopher be friends?Purchase My Heresies here: https://open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/products/04-29-2025-stefanescu-alina-my-heresiespos=1&sid=e14f5bb93&_ss=rPlease consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]

In Part 2, we wrap up our consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's midcentury magnum opus by exploring how we move from the inaccessible interiority of consciousness to our concrete relations with others. The latter half of Being & Nothingness takes up the question of what aspects of our being are revealed to us in confrontation with the Other. Sartre famously argues here that it is the Other's look, the omnipresent possibility of being seen, judged, and evaluated by another consciousness that discloses the objectivity of our being through and for the Other. As soon as the Other enters the scene, a fundamental aspect of our being is alienated from us; captured in the Other's appropriating gaze. The various attempts by the for-itself to retrieve this alienated being and penetrate the Other's essential freedom play a determinate role in shaping the contours of our fundamental projects, that is the immanently revisable set of possibilities, meaning, and value we pro-ject into the world.  In the final sections of the book, Sartre sketches an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, asks us to reframe our conception of the autonomous will and the role of giving and asking for reasons, and gestures towards an ethics grounded in criterionless choice.Please consider becoming a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: @DevinGoureCharles: @satireredactedEmail us at: [email protected]