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Articles by Benjamin Kunkel
Fredric Jameson, The Art of Criticism No. 5
Interviewed by Benjamin Kunkel Teaching at Duke, 1988. Courtesy of Duke University. The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade.
Fredric Jameson, The Art of Criticism No. 5
Interviewed by Benjamin Kunkel The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade.
The Sameness of Different Things
Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Let us approach Capital as naïvely as possible, while admitting that in the case of Capital this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse.
The Sameness of Different Things
Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Let us approach Capital as naïvely as possible, while admitting that in the case of Capital this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse.
Fredric Jameson , The Art of Criticism No. 5
Interviewed by Benjamin Kunkel Teaching at Duke, 1988. Courtesy of Duke University. The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade.
Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S.
Benjamin Kunkel, Singularity - Sidecar
The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once upon a time ideal-typically a ‘genius’ or ‘hero’ and today more often a celebrity. And Jameson would have none of this. What I mean will take a moment to explain.
The Intractable Puzzle of Growth
Books & the Arts / August 26, 2024 Your Life and Mine The intractable puzzle of growth. The Intractable Puzzle of Growth For more than a century, the key measure of a healthy economy has been its capacity to grow and yet if production and consumption continues to expand at their current rate we might risk the very health of the planet. Ad Policy Then–US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifying before the Senate Budget Committee in 2009.
Having a Monday: What I Learned from Being a Mom about Nurturing Creativity in Other People
I recently taught a class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop about conveying emotion in writing, and I suggested to my students that they could achieve authenticity by showing their characters experiencing more than one emotion at the same time. Emotions so often arrive in bundles of contradictions. My example: my daughter graduates from high school this week, and I’m so proud of her, but also wistful as I contemplate her heading off to college.
A Conversation with Melinda Cooper | Benjamin Kunkel
“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” T.S. Eliot had a character in one of his plays complain, not unreasonably. The chronic problem becomes acute in the case of economic history, where the available words seem at once too technical and too vague. The problem word for the period stretching roughly from 1948 to 1973 is Keynesianism.
How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities
The party with the very longest name is none other than the Russian Social-Democratic Party of Bolsheviks, or Lenin’s Communist Party.
Poet of the People: The Partisan World of Pablo Neruda
Poet Pablo Neruda was born in 1920 at the age of 16. It was in October of that year, anyway, that a young man whose unsuspecting parents had baptized him Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto first signed with the name Neruda the poems that he felt he existed in order to write.
Who Will Build the Ark?
Blog post "Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias." Mike Davis27 June 2023 What follows is rather like the famous courtroom scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947).In that noir allegory of proletarian virtue in the embrace of ruling-class decadence, Welles...
Who Will Build the Ark?
Edited by Benjamin Kunkel and Lola Seaton 15% off 40% off In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key disputes between Green New Deal supporters and proponents of 'degrowth'.
Verso
General Intellects Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty First Century -1 0 1 Paperback Paperback with free ebook $26.95$18.8630% off 336 pages / May 2017 / 9781786631909 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $95.00$76.0020% off August 2017 / 9781786632838 A guide to the thinkers and ideas that will shape the future What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age?
Stewart Brand Saw the Future
You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. Published less than a week later on the front page of The New York Times, the image set off a general ecological awakening. The lesson was: Behold the fragile jewel that is your one possession and cherish it accordingly.
Lingering
The pages in Proust’s long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. The narrator is speaking, across the miles of cable, to his grandmother. More than speak, he listens.
[Podcast] I Multiplied Myself, with Benjamin Kunkel
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Wie die TSG 1899 Hoffenheim die Fan Experience steigert
Mein Sohn und ich sind echte Fußballfans. Wir fiebern immer mit, wenn es gut läuft. Aber wir leiden auch, wenn ein Spiel unserer Mannschaft verloren geht. Und gleich, ob Sieg oder Niederlage, wir zeigen unsere Loyalität mit unserem Club. „Gewinnen ist wichtig – das motiviert ungemein zum Weitermachen.“ Wer das sagt, weiß, wovon er spricht. Alexander Wahler ist der Leiter Sponsoring, Vertrieb, Hospitality, Events, Merchandising bei der TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.
How Amazon changed the way we read
Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon BY Mark McGurl. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. 336 pages. $30. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon DWINDLING ENLISTMENT AMONG STUDENTS and deteriorating market share among consumers; confusion as to immediate method and cloudiness as to ultimate mission. . . . Professors of literature have good reason to feel insecure about the status of literature and literary scholarship.
The Mystery of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries
A curious habit of euphemism governs our way of talking about that genre of novel which has mainly to do with killing people. Mystery and crime: So libraries and bookstores advertise the relevant section of their shelves. But life abounds with mysteries; very few of them have to do with the true authorship of gruesome murders.
The Mystery of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries
A curious habit of euphemism governs our way of talking about that genre of novel which has mainly to do with killing people. Mystery and crime: So libraries and bookstores advertise the relevant section of their shelves. But life abounds with mysteries; very few of them have to do with the true authorship of gruesome murders.
I Multiplied Myself
Discussed in this essay: Pessoa: A Biography, by Richard Zenith. Liveright. 1,088 pages. $40. How to write the biography of a man who scarcely lived? This is the problem facing anyone who would venture a life of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
The Climate Case for Property Destruction
Political protest in the twenty-first century has so far been distinguished by its sheer numerical scale—and its ineffectuality. In 2003, crowds assembled in cities across the planet to register their opposition the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, amounting to the largest street demonstration in history to that date—only to see themselves belittled as a “focus group” by President George W. Bush as he proceeded to rain shock and awe on Baghdad.
In Boulder · LRB 26 March 2021
Born in Glenwood Springs and raised outside Eagle, I grew up on the western slope of Colorado, where guns were from the beginning just a part of life. Before I can remember my father shot with a .22 rifle at the packrats who would invade the cabin up Salt Creek. Sometimes he did this to amuse guests. In an early memory of my own, there’s a fatally wounded mule deer buck in the field of sagebrush below the cabin, and my father goes down there with a rifle to put the creature out of its misery.
How Much Is Too Much?
The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted a shallow revival of Marxism. During the panicky period between the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the official end of the American recession in the summer of 2009, several mainstream journals, displaying a less than sincere mixture of broadmindedness and chagrin, hailed Marx as a neglected seer of capitalist crisis.
Forgive us our debts
Most analysts divide postwar capitalism into two periods. The first extends from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The end of the second appears to have been announced by the crisis – at first a ‘financial’ crisis, now often a ‘debt’ crisis – that broke out in 2008. The precise boundary between the postwar eras gets drawn differently depending on which feature of the terrain is emphasised.
Free Time and Paid Work
JULY 15, 2020 To find LARB’s symposium on Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, click here. ¤ FOR A FELLOW democratic socialist to venture a critique of Martin Hägglund’s book risks churlishness. Here, after all, is magnificent case for democratic socialism that succeeds in wresting the indispensable slogan of freedom away from the publicists for liberal capitalism who seemed to own the word in the first decades after the Cold War.
40% off all Jacobin titles
All Jacobin books are 40% off to celebrate the release of All American Nativism by Dan Denvir. The war on immigrants is having a deadly effect, with migrants dying in detention centers at the US-Mexico border, children being separated from caregivers, and the Supreme Court upholding the Trump administration’s public charge rule, making immigrants ineligible for permanent legal status if they use public benefits.
On Slow Homecoming
Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming has just been reissued by New York Review Books, with the following introduction by Benjamin Kunkel. One of this novel’s minor but telling peculiarities is the narrator’s extreme reluctance to resort to proper names, and to describe the book in its own preferred style would be to avoid for as long as possible any mention of the author’s name or the title of his book.
Benjamin Kunkel · The Amazon Burning · LRB 12 September 2019
He who laughs hasn’t heard the news, Brecht wrote, probably in 1939. Eighty years later, the words could serve as the motto of the eco-tourist, to be pronounced in sardonic tones of knowing guilt.
Verso
Slim, accessible, inexpensive, irreverent introduction to socialism by the writers of Jacobin magazine The remarkable run of self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders for president of the United States has prompted—for the first time in decades and to the shock of many—a national conversation about socialism.
All Jacobin books on sale!
Verso has partnered with Jacobin magazine on a series of books offering short, radical political interventions on the most important issues of our time: housing rights, teacher's strikes, decriminalization of sex work, nationalizing corporations like Walmart, post-scarcity theorizing, the privitization of education, and (coming up soon!) the history of abortion rights organizing and the bipartisan war against immigrants.
Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘Valences of the Dialectic’ by Fredric Jameson · LRB 22 April 2010
Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan.
Nirvana: The Biography - Everett True - Books - Review
Photo Until I received the assignment to review Everett True’s “Nirvana,” I hadn’t listened to the band much in recent years. In this I suspect I’m like most of us who were in our late teens or early 20s when Nirvana’s singer, songwriter and guitarist, Kurt Cobain, died in April 1994, hardly two and a half years after the release of “Nevermind.” There was so much hype — inevitable word — over Nirvana and its demise that the music later seemed somehow buried beneath the ephemera it occasioned.
Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘The Savage Detectives’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, ‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews and ‘Amulet’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews · LRB 6 September 2007
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native country five years later. In his short story ‘Dance Card’, which accords with the known facts of his life and does not present itself as fiction, Bolaño indicates that he hardly distinguished as a young man – if he ever did – between his politics and his love of poetry: ‘I reached Chile in August 1973.
After the Flood
Feb/Mar 2019 John Lanchester discusses his new novel about climate change and migration The Wall Benjamin Kunkel A Novel by John Lanchester W. W. Norton & Company $25.95 List Price For more info visit: Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble BENJAMIN KUNKEL: The scenario of your book is different from our own world, although our present is increasingly resembling the future of The Wall (Norton, $26). Could you outline the world of the novel?
Can American Foreign Policy Be Greened?
In the 1977 novel Edith’s Diary, by the great crime writer Patricia Highsmith, Edith is the mother of a dipsomaniacal good-for-nothing who records in her diary not the truth about her son but, instead, the compensatory fantasy that he is a grad student in engineering, the husband of a charming wife, and father to a pair of delightful children.
Jacobin Bookshelf
The Jacobin series is back! To celebrate, we're offering 40% off the entire series through Friday. March 22. Published in collaboration with Jacobin magazine, the Jacobin series offers short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective.
Full Employment
The inherent right to work is one of the elemental
privileges of a free people. —FDR, radio address, 1937 Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least.
Nothing But Freedom
During the past two decades of conservative Supreme Court dominance, Anthony Kennedy has won liberals’ grudging appreciation for the swing votes he provides in close cases involving individual liberties. In his first and perhaps most famous swing, Kennedy cast the crucial fifth vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), a case that saved Roe v. Wade from invalidation even as it limited abortion rights.
Poet of the People
The poet Pablo Neruda was born in 1920 at the age of 16. It was in October of that year, anyway, that a young man whose unsuspecting parents had baptized him Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto first signed with the name Neruda the poems that he felt he existed in order to write.
Net Neutrality | Issue 19 | n+1
On January 14, in Verizon v. FCC, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the core of the FCC’s Open Internet Order. The Order was the agency’s attempt to codify “net neutrality,” a newish term for the old principle that communications networks should treat all information that flows through them the same. It prohibited broadband providers from blocking or unreasonably discriminating among the content, apps, and devices that make use of their high-speed networks.
Verso
No past revolution, she says, can be attributed to professional revolutionaries. Usually it was the other way around: “revolution broke out and liberated, as it were, the professional revolutionaries from wherever they happened to be – from jail, or from the coffee house, or from the library.” Five great amateurs whose work changed the world, from author of The Amateur, Andy Merrifield.
The Capitalocene
How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic features of the problem are plain enough, when you can stand to look. Universal carbon pollution, known by the mild term ‘climate change’, is already distempering the seasons with bounding extremes of heat and cold, and magnifying storms and droughts; increasingly, it will spoil harvests, spread tropical diseases, and drown coastlines.
Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘The Birth of the Anthropocene’ by Jeremy Davies, ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’ by Jason Moore and ‘Fossil Capital’ by Andreas Malm · LRB 2 March 2017
How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic features of the problem are plain enough, when you can stand to look. Universal carbon pollution, known by the mild term ‘climate change’, is already distempering the seasons with bounding extremes of heat and cold, and magnifying storms and droughts; increasingly, it will spoil harvests, spread tropical diseases, and drown coastlines.
Marx’s Revenge
The many biographies of Karl Marx bring out a basic paradox in Marxism. Biographies are typically narratives of the lives of important figures who loom large against the backdrop of history. Yet Marxism, or “the materialist conception of history,” as the young Marx and his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels called it, warned from the start against reading the past as the affair of solitary individuals rather than antagonistic classes.
Marx’s Revenge
This article appears in the February 27, 2017 issue. Illustration by Tim Robinson. Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue. The many biographies of Karl Marx bring out a basic paradox in Marxism. Biographies are typically narratives of the lives of important figures who loom large against the backdrop of history.
Love's Labor Earned - Dissent Magazine
Love’s Labor Earned How might we compensate women’s emotional labor? Unlike the wife bonus, robust public services would benefit all women. ▪ Winter 2017 Women have been fed up with listening to, comforting, and nurturing the men in their lives probably for as long as they have been expected to do it for free—which is to say, since time immemorial.
A Neglected South American Masterpiece
“Zama,” a brief, indelible novel by the Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto, is a work of waiting—of enforced lassitude, excruciated anticipation, and final frustration.
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