Burning Archive

The Monthly Book Club Live Call Discussion is scheduled for next Tuesday 30 June at 10 am Melbourne time (+10 UTC). We will discuss Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Here is a calendar invitation to the event. However, you will need to be a paid subscriber to receive the Zoom call details. Paid subscribers can join via Zoom for the live call or watch the full recording if you cannot make this time.

In the third episode of the Slow Read of Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness we read the passage from pages 23 to 35, taking us through Marlow’s trek up the Congo, meetings with the European colonial agents, until the wreck of his steamboat enforces a stop, and a confrontation with the savagery of civilization.

Do you identify as a modern person? Or, in more abstract terms, do you belong to modernity? Do you pursue the freedom of modern life? Are your beliefs brand-conscious yet custom-made, as befits modern thought, where everybody is free to feel good and no one has the time to read the classics anymore? Do you choose the sometimes anxious, shaky attachments of modern love?

The great grasslands of the earth - the North American Prairie, the African Savannah and the Eurasian Steppe - have hosted societies as diverse as the Sioux, the Songhay and the Scythians. They have yielded experiments in civilization that have changed the world, such as Mali and the Mongols. But why does the Steppe of the nomadic Horde still haunt the Western civilized imagination?

Upgrade to paid to play voiceover In the second episode of my Slow Read of Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness we read the passage from pages 14 to 23, in which: Conrad’s narrator and alter ego, Marlow travels to Belgium to secure the captaincy of a steamboat from the private company pursuing missions of profit and civilisation Marlow travels on his steamboat to the heart of darkness, the Belgian Congo, and Conrad presents obliquely the brutal exploitation of the people of the Congo that...

‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 8 Welcome to Week 1 of a slow read of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I am your guide, Jeff Rich, and this is the Burning Archive, where I explore history and literature with you, on the assumption, as Faulkner wrote, that the past is not dead, the past is not even past. And as Benjamin wrote, that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.

What does shopping and freedom of choice have to do with living a lie? Do you remember Mark Carney’s speech at the 2026 Davos World Economic Forum? The one that invoked Vaclav Havel’s fable of the greengrocer who displayed a “Workers of the World Unite” sign and so chose to live in a lie. The greengrocer did not display this political slogan for the benefit of his customers nor to market his wares to them.

In May, I focussed my writing, and some video content, on Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism and the many issues it raises, such as the Holocaust and other genocides, social emotions that mobilise hatred, the USA-Israel relationship, settler colonialism, and perhaps most surprisingly the hidden link between play and Carl Schmitt. Below the line (for paid subscribers, so why not join now?) is the recorded Book Club Live Call Discussion of this remarkable, timely and nuanced book.

Book of the Month: Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life How did we end up in a modern world where freedom is choice and choice is freedom? It wasn’t always historically so. And when, in our post-modern world, we are confronted everyday with a tsunami of ‘choices’—from electricity providers to soap powders to identities to which Substack to read—do we all not feel sometimes like laying down those heavy chains of freedom; or is it responsibility?

Or, why the Julia Set is a better guide to history than a two-dimensional map Upgrade to paid to play voiceover There is a difficult concept that I have not yet fully addressed in my deep dives into decolonisation and the end of empires: Settler Colonialism. This concept, settler colonialism, is central to post-colonial studies. Indeed, settler colonial studies is a defined sub-field in the academy.