Jun 10, 2025 07:05 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 10, 2025 07:09 PM by C C.)
The Political Journey of Thomas Mann
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/...homas-mann
EXCERPT: There is no real inconsistency here, of course. Conservatism is itself a venerable ideological commitment within liberalism, and there were any number of anti-Nazi conservatives who suffered as much for their resistance as those on the left did. What’s significant about Mann’s anti-Nazi conservatism is that even as he bravely denounced Hitler, he remained the author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.
That is, unlike many Marxists, he could never reduce all aspects of human experience to material conditions and class conflict. He understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical. True to his conservative inclinations, Mann was drawn to metaphors of disease and infection—cholera in Death in Venice, tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, even tooth decay in Buddenbrooks.
When he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he named democracy a disease, but he came to see that the opposite was true. For Mann, the method of analysis remained unchanged, but he would put it to different ends. Thinking like a man of the right, he would work for left-of-center ends—and do so even more effectively precisely because of his fundamentally conservative disposition... (MORE - details)
Obviously, insanity at the end of the tunnel didn't halt or hamper Nietzsche's ebbs and rises in popularity or influence.
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What happened to Shulamith Firestone?
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/hazards-of-reality/
EXCERPTS: Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Firestone spent the next decade in and out of the psych ward at Beth Israel, sometimes stable, sometimes paranoid and screaming, sometimes lucid, sometimes terrified of poisoned food and government agents hiding behind the faces of friends, sometimes simply catatonic. When she suddenly re-emerged in 1997, not only evidently working again but having already completed an entire manuscript...
[...] Her second book would also be her last. Although Firestone lived another fourteen years, she never published again, much less returned to public politics. She’d only been able to write Airless Spaces with the support of a psychiatrist and network of friends who had assumed responsibility for her care...
[...] In Harper’s, meanwhile, Audrey Wollen presents a more sophisticated reading of Airless Spaces, finding her way to unity between the two Firestones by reading her earlier work as a failed “prophecy.” The Dialectic of Sex, she writes, was a “wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung” work that “verges on the silvered edge of science fiction.” But the feminist future Firestone predicted came to pass in precisely the wrong way. The second wave fell apart. The utopian technologist revolution Firestone envisioned instead produced the technology for patriarchal revanchism: where Firestone saw the technological future liberating women from the vagaries of childbearing and heterosexual subjugation, it instead delivered the secret children of Elon Musk. Firestone’s prophesy was “off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth,” Wollen writes.
[...] At the turn of the century, the critic Catherine Prendergast found schizophrenic writers trapped between two kinds of readers: the dismissive and the fawning. “Historically, the severely mentally ill have been granted either no insight or insight of an enhanced and often creative or spiritual nature,” she wrote. They are either “mad poets” or “mental patients” producing “music” or “word salad.” “I sense from reading Foucault that the position of the mad poet is to be regarded as preferable to the position of the mental patient,” Prendergast went on, but barely... (MORE - details)
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/...homas-mann
EXCERPT: There is no real inconsistency here, of course. Conservatism is itself a venerable ideological commitment within liberalism, and there were any number of anti-Nazi conservatives who suffered as much for their resistance as those on the left did. What’s significant about Mann’s anti-Nazi conservatism is that even as he bravely denounced Hitler, he remained the author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.
That is, unlike many Marxists, he could never reduce all aspects of human experience to material conditions and class conflict. He understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical. True to his conservative inclinations, Mann was drawn to metaphors of disease and infection—cholera in Death in Venice, tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, even tooth decay in Buddenbrooks.
When he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he named democracy a disease, but he came to see that the opposite was true. For Mann, the method of analysis remained unchanged, but he would put it to different ends. Thinking like a man of the right, he would work for left-of-center ends—and do so even more effectively precisely because of his fundamentally conservative disposition... (MORE - details)
Obviously, insanity at the end of the tunnel didn't halt or hamper Nietzsche's ebbs and rises in popularity or influence.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What happened to Shulamith Firestone?
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/hazards-of-reality/
EXCERPTS: Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Firestone spent the next decade in and out of the psych ward at Beth Israel, sometimes stable, sometimes paranoid and screaming, sometimes lucid, sometimes terrified of poisoned food and government agents hiding behind the faces of friends, sometimes simply catatonic. When she suddenly re-emerged in 1997, not only evidently working again but having already completed an entire manuscript...
[...] Her second book would also be her last. Although Firestone lived another fourteen years, she never published again, much less returned to public politics. She’d only been able to write Airless Spaces with the support of a psychiatrist and network of friends who had assumed responsibility for her care...
[...] In Harper’s, meanwhile, Audrey Wollen presents a more sophisticated reading of Airless Spaces, finding her way to unity between the two Firestones by reading her earlier work as a failed “prophecy.” The Dialectic of Sex, she writes, was a “wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung” work that “verges on the silvered edge of science fiction.” But the feminist future Firestone predicted came to pass in precisely the wrong way. The second wave fell apart. The utopian technologist revolution Firestone envisioned instead produced the technology for patriarchal revanchism: where Firestone saw the technological future liberating women from the vagaries of childbearing and heterosexual subjugation, it instead delivered the secret children of Elon Musk. Firestone’s prophesy was “off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth,” Wollen writes.
[...] At the turn of the century, the critic Catherine Prendergast found schizophrenic writers trapped between two kinds of readers: the dismissive and the fawning. “Historically, the severely mentally ill have been granted either no insight or insight of an enhanced and often creative or spiritual nature,” she wrote. They are either “mad poets” or “mental patients” producing “music” or “word salad.” “I sense from reading Foucault that the position of the mad poet is to be regarded as preferable to the position of the mental patient,” Prendergast went on, but barely... (MORE - details)