Graduation picture from the Lincoln School of Nurses in 1915. Larsen is second from left in the front row.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

The Case of the Disappearing Institution: Reconstruction and the Quicksand of Representation

Lisi Schoenbach

For those of us committed to not hating the state, the problem of convincing others to join us often comes down to an aesthetic problem. Even in our current moment, when institutions, (including universities, regulatory bodies, arts organizations, departments of public health, and organizations designed to promote racial and economic equality) are staggering under the repeated hammer blows of anti-institutionalist oligarchs, it remains a challenge to articulate to the public why such institutions matter or to offer a compelling sense of what is lost when they are broken beyond repair. I call this an aesthetic problem because there appear to be so few aesthetically compelling ways to capture the urgency of defending, building, and rebuilding institutions. The question I want to pose is this: is the state (and its attendant social configurations) unrepresentable or somehow at odds with innovative and exciting aesthetic forms? How might we look to past representational failures or successes in order to develop more aesthetically exciting and engaging ways to capture and articulate the institutional forms on which our collective democratic life depends?

To explore these questions, I’d like to look back to from the 2020s to the 1920s and to the cases of W.E.B. Du Bois, a lifelong institutionalist and advocate for state-building, and Nella Larsen, whose provocatively tragic and beautiful novellas Quicksand and Passing have come to be recognized as two aesthetic jewels of the New Negro Renaissance. Although Larsen and her husband were social acquaintances of Du Bois, and although Du Bois reviewed Quicksand glowingly in The Crisis, calling it “on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,”[i] Larsen’s novellas could hardly be mistaken for a defense of the institutions that Du Bois had championed. In particular, Quicksand offers a blistering attack on the institutions of education and racial uplift. The question I would like to explore here is how and why a novelist whose own life and career had been made possible by the educational, civil rights, and literary institutions developed in the post-Reconstruction moment, and who could clearly see the urgent need for transformation that her moment demanded, would not only fail to make the case for those institutions; but would in fact relentlessly critique them for their collective hypocrisies, cruelties, and failures.

Larsen’s dazzling but tragically short career as a novelist unfolded during an era in which white supremacist retrenchment had followed fast on the heels of Reconstruction’s promise of racial equality and full democracy. The threat of racial terror continued to define public life for African Americans in the 1920s; although the frequency of lynchings had diminished from their peak in 1892, racial violence, segregation, and discrimination continued to define the decade from the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 forward. The New Negro Renaissance unfolded against this backdrop, and took its place among a variety of social, political, economic, and literary movements, organizations, and institutions that were also responding to urgent needs of the moment. From the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Organization, to the many literary journals, black-owned and patronized businesses and clubs, tenant’s rights groups, and civil rights organizations that characterized the vibrant urban community of Harlem during this time, the 1920s saw a variety of political, educational, and cultural developments that built on the institutional legacies of Reconstruction and prepared the ground for the Civil Rights movements of the twentieth century.

These projects followed in the footsteps and in the spirit (and sometimes were the literal handiwork) of Du Bois, whose thought provides one of our richest and most comprehensive resources for the project of “not hating the state.” From his valedictory address upon graduating from Fisk in 1888, on “Bismarck,” (Dusk of Dawn, 16) to his late embrace of communism, which he described in his posthumously published autobiography as “a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part” (Autobiography, 57), Du Bois unwaveringly celebrated the notion of a strong state that could make “a nation out of bickering peoples.”[ii] Although this concept first emerged in his thought as a mode of constructing a shared black identity patterned on the lessons of Germany, as time went on his vision shifted.  Through a series of intellectual encounters with the legacy of Reconstruction, which he understood fundamentally as a state-building project tragically cut short before it had an opportunity to realize its fullest promise, he developed a vision of a “democratic state;” a strong, flexible, and productive set of interlocking social and institutional forms.[iii]

It was precisely its commitment to these institutional forms that had, according to Du Bois, made the project of Reconstruction “(t)he greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world” (The Gift of Black Folk, 75). Such forms included a wide variety of midrange and non-economic institutions, including federal and state governments, schools, libraries, churches, universities, bureaus, business organizations, and social and community groups. Du Bois’s vision of democratic state-building thus distinguished itself both from iron fist of Bismarckian authoritarianism and from the abstractions and generalities surrounding most theories of the State. It expressed itself through a rich and complex commitment to institutional forms, much like those that flourished in Harlem during the 1920s. Many of these organizations, including the NAACP and its journal, The Crisis, were founded and then guided by Du Bois himself.

Du Bois’s embrace of institutions, as I have argued, is the single most coherent and consistent element of his thought over the course of an incredibly long and complex career, one that spanned more than 75 years and encompassed both his early belief in “the talented tenth” and his later embrace of communism and expatriation to Ghana. Yet Du Bois’s commitment to the varied institutions of education, political advocacy, and literary culture that he learned from, joined, founded, and led was also enabled by those institutions’ unconditional acceptance of him. From childhood, Du Bois was embraced, celebrated, and chosen. He was sent by his community in Great Barrington to study at Fisk, recommended by his professors at Fisk to pursue a graduate degree at Harvard, and then sponsored by fellowship to continue his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin. Although his time at each of these places was marked by challenges, and his accomplishments there demanded fortitude, dignity, and relentless effort, he was nonetheless able to find his place. Even at Harvard, where he struggled socially and was sometimes treated as a curiosity by fellow students, his presence was largely acknowledged as legitimate, and he never wavered in his belief that his degree was an important academic credential that would smooth the path to future success. Even when those around him excluded or underestimated him, he saw himself and was seen by his mentors as a future leader of the race, more or less from the time he was a child. His faith in the meritocratic elements of these institutions was enabled and supplemented by a faith in himself that was continually bolstered by the authority figures around him.

Larsen’s experience could not have been more different. Like Du Bois, Larsen was the product of several HBCUs, educational institutions that were also legacies of Reconstruction, including Fisk and Tuskegee, but her experiences at both places were marred by the sense that she did not belong. She was dismissed from Fisk after a year for rebelling against the strict dress code, an episode echoed by Helga Crane’s decision in Quicksand to leave the fictional Naxos. She enrolled in the Lincoln Hospital and Home Training School for Nurses in New York, where her work was so stellar that she was appointed as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute Hospital. She struggled with the culture of Tuskegee, however, and again left within a year. Years later, on an author’s information sheet for Alfred A. Knopf she described her departure as follows: “[she] accepted a position as Head Nurse of the hospital at Tuskegee Institute – the school founded by Booker T. Washington – but her dislike of the conditions there and the school authorities dislike of her appearance and manner were both so intense that after a year they parted with mutual disgust and relief”[iv] (Davis 110).

Scholars, including Larsen’s biographers, have noted Larsen’s alienation from the two HBCU’s she attended. By all accounts, the problem was not merely the educational philosophy or intellectual environment of either place, but rather their restrictive and conservative social environments, and their explicit and implicit embrace of whiteness as the ultimate standard of success.  According to Angela Watkins, “Fisk offered a liberal arts education while Tuskegee focused on industrial education; yet, both schools enforced rigid social practices in their mimicry of ‘civilized’ societies based on Eurocentric ideals. The administration at both schools also emphasized deference to their white benefactors, on whom they relied financially. These experiences inform the narrative for Quicksand, and are the basis for Helga’s disillusionment with Naxos and with educational race leaders” (Watkins, 251).

Behind these principled misgivings lie a more general set of hesitations surrounding institutions, namely their tendency to grow into “a machine,” or a “big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern” (Larsen, 4). One can discern in Larsen’s language, in this image of a dressmaker cutting a pattern, a critique at once of violence and cruelty and of aesthetic standardization. Certainly Helga’s objections to Naxos are framed in Quicksand in aesthetic terms. When we first meet her, she is alone in a room furnished expensively with Orientalist flair, reading an Orientalist novel, dressed in a “vivid gold and green negligee and glistening brocaded mules” (Larsen, 2). Helga’s exquisite taste, it quickly becomes clear, has made her an outcast in this institutional setting. She longs for beauty and individual self expression and Naxos feels repressive, coercive, colorless, and joyless. This, too, is expressed through Helga’s relationship to fashion:

Clothes had been one of her difficulties in Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate ones. Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend. But with small success, for, although she had affected the deceptively simple variety, the hawk eyes of dean and matrons had detected the subtle difference from their own irreproachably conventional garments. Too, they felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks. And the trimmings—when Helga used them at all—seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange embroideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim shoes made them uncomfortable and her small plain hats seemed to them positively indecent. (Larsen, 18)

As I have noted, Helga’s incongruous appearance at Naxos echoes Larsen’s own dismissal from Fisk for dressing inappropriately and her failure to fit in at Tuskegee, which she attributes in part to her “manner and appearance.” However, these passages denote more than a simple disagreement of taste; they represent a modernist sensibility growing out of aestheticism colliding with a doctrinaire Victorian style that continued to “ruthlessly cut all to a pattern” even into the third decade of the twentieth century. The “slim shoes” and “small plain hats,” the “lack of trimming,” the “subtle difference” of Helga’s style all signal modernist style. Although the novel as a whole treats fashion in relation to important questions of objectification, exoticism, and commodification, in these passages we can see that the space of Naxos not only crushes innovative and progressive ideas and denigrates Afrocentric ideas, but that its notions of beauty and of style are outmoded and embarrassing. In this aesthetic failure we see a range of other failures: of attunement to the ideas, feelings, and needs of the people it was designed to serve, for instance, or of consciousness of the “odd,” “strange,” “queer,” and “positively indecent” elements of Helga’s character.[v]  Unlike Du Bois, who was noted for his own dapper sense of style, and for whom dandyism added merely an additional touch of professional polish, Larsen’s sense of fashion and refusal to be “irreproachably conventional” was seen as unforgivably transgressive. Punished, disciplined, overworked, and unappreciated, Larsen first retreated from these institutions and later savaged them in her fiction.[vi]

Educational institutions were not the only target of Larsen’s frustration. A similar tone of impatience pervades her treatment of each institution and social form in Quicksand, and can be seen in her disparagement of the (slovenly, poorly dressed) Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s regurgitated speeches on “the race’s ills” and in Anne Grey’s unthinking loyalty to a racial uplift movement that Helga finds exclusionary, conformist, and hypocritical. Exoticized and homesick in Denmark, Helga returns to the United States only to experience yet another disillusionment in the black church, where she finds herself the resented northern emissary of uplift in a rural Alabama community. Each successive social form she seeks betrays and disappoints her. Rather than building stability and futurity or helping to create future generations of leaders, as Du Bois’s institutions promise, these institutions function as technologies for ideological coercion and  threaten to punish anything that deviates from their narrowly constructed norms. As Helga is repelled again and again by the conformist, middle class, Victorian aesthetic of these institutions, she is excluded from the project of uplift, left alone to struggle for herself without any community to support her, and ultimately pulled under, doomed by her reproductive life to stasis and convention while her modernist soul continues to yearn for freedom and mobility.

Larsen’s own story is tragic in its own way, but unlike Helga’s it is also thoroughly institutional. After Fisk and after Tuskegee, she worked as a nurse for the New York department of public health (serving during the influenza epidemic), and after her marriage she attended the library school of the New York Public Library and worked in the 135^th street branch.[vii] After her divorce and disappearance from the literary scene she returned to her nursing career, working at Gouverneur Hospital, a municipal hospital on New York’s Lower East Side. Her engagement with and dependence on these systems, structures, and forms was more complex than Helga’s. Although she continued to critique the implicit whiteness and narrowmindedness of many institutions, she also owed her professional life and her career as a nurse to the kinds of public institutions that continue to make our collective life and public good possible. Larsen’s work should not be taken as a wholesale rejection of Du Boisian institutionalism then, but as a much-needed complement to Du Bois’s idealistic and often credulous imaginings of institutional forms.[viii] In Larsen’s aesthetic critique lies a substantive and urgent reminder that institutions need constant tending, revising, and remaking or they will fail to speak to the people they were designed to serve. If the institutions of the state are blind to the full richness and variety of the people whose interests they are attempting to represent, then the problem I described at the beginning of this piece denotes more than a failure to make a public case for our necessary institutions. It suggests that the institutions themselves have failed to demonstrate that they can rise to an urgent moment. It is well worth considering these overlapping failures with an eye towards our own moment of institutional collapse and cultural exhaustion.

Lisi Schoenbach is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches and works on twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on modernism, pragmatism, and political theory. She is the author of Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford, 2012) and is at work on a second book project, Institutionalism and the Fate of the Public University. Her work has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, The Henry James Review, American Literary History, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

References 

Blain, Keisha N., “Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the 1920s: An Interview with Shannon King,”  December 10, 2015 In, Black Perspectives, blog for the African American Intellectual History Society (https://www.aaihs.org/community-politics/)

Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. “Amiable with Big Teeth: The Case of Claude McKay’s Last Novel.” Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (2013): 557-576. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0076.

Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Du Bois, W.E.B., The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois): A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: Oxford UP, 2014

Du Bois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. (1940). New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.  1903.New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. 1924. 

Oxford UP, 2007.

Du Bois, W. E. B., “Two Novels,” The Crisis, Vol. 35 Issue 6, 1928.

Du Bois, W. E. B., “The field and function of the American Negro college (1933),” in The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques 1906-1960, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. (pp. 111-133).

Edmondson, Belinda. “Finding Africa in Harlem: Displacement and Belonging in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.” In Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, New York: Penguin, 2025.

https://lithub.com/finding-africa-in-harlem-displacement-and-belonging-in-claude-mckays-home-to-harlem/

Hochman, Barbara. “Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School.” PMLA 133, no. 5 (2018): 1172–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179451

Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Phulwani, Vijay.“A Splendid Failure? Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Tragic Vision of Politics.” A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Bromell, Nick. UP of Kentucky, 2018, pp. 271–302.

Roffman, Karin. “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135^th Street,” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 752–787.

Singleton, Maura. “The Callings of Nella Larsen,” UVA School of Nursing blog, Flashback Friday, May 24, 2024.https://nursing.virginia.edu/news/flashback-the-callings-of-nella-larsen/

Watkins, Angela. “Progression or Regression of the Black Race?: Historically Black Colleges and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” Chapter. In African American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930, edited by Miriam Thaggert and Rachel Farebrother, 258–80. African American Literature in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

[i] “Two Novels” The Crisis, Vol. 35 Issue 6, 1928, p. 22.

[ii] Quoted in Dusk of Dawn. In “The Field and Function of the Negro College,” a graduation address presented at Fisk in 1933, Du Bois elaborated on his inspirational encounter with German culture and identity at the University of Berlin: “And out and around that university of a thousand miles, millions of people shared in its ideal teaching, and did this in spite of caste of birth and poverty, of jostling wealth, because they believed in an ultimate unity which Bismarckian state socialism promised. They sang their national songs and joined in national festivals with enthusiasm that brought tears to the onlooker. And it made you realized the ideal of a single united nation and what it could express in matchless poetry, daring science, and undying music.” (119)

[iii] For a more complete version of this argument, see Lisi Schoenbach, “Institutionalism and the Fate of the Public University,” American Literary History, Volume 33, Issue 3, Fall 2021, Pages 674–690, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab060

[iv] Quoted in Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, a Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life. (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1994), 110.

[v] Like Helga, Larsen did not have the support of her family and understood her alienation in these institutional spaces in part as a result of her “mixed” background (“mixed” not just racially, but economically and socially) and her lack of family connections. However, there is no doubt that what was most “strange,” “queer,” and “indecent” about Larsen was quite simply her gender. Without oversimplifying the many differences between Du Bois and Larsen and their stories, we might still acknowledge the narrower range of possibilities for self-expression and self-determination accorded to a woman within these profoundly normative and prescriptive spaces. Larsen’s treatment of Naxos raises larger questions, however, about the way that any non-normative identity might be punished or threatened within such institutions.

[vi] Larsen was certainly not the first, last, or only African American author of the twentieth century to critique HBCU’s and other institutions of racial uplift in these terms; Watkins notes Zora Neal Hurston’s satirical essay titled “The Rise of the Begging Joints” and Wallace Thurman’s critique of “colorism and stereotypes about ‘good breeding’”  at HBCU’s in The Blacker the Berry (1929) (Watkins 260). Ralph Ellison’s memorable midcentury treatment of Tuskegee in Invisible Man (1952) shares many of Larsen’s criticisms of universities, social and political movement, and institutions.

[vii] See Hochman, Barbara. “Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School.” PMLA 133, no. 5 (2018): 1172–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179451.

[viii] Du Bois’s own understanding of institutions, including educational institutions, would change quite dramatically in subsequent decades, as his thought shifted away from integration and towards black self-determination. For a brilliant discussion of this transition in the context of his advocacy of black owned economic co-ops, see Phulwani, Vijay.“A Splendid Failure? Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Tragic Vision of Politics.” A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Bromell, Nick. UP of Kentucky, 2018, pp. 271–302.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

On Not Hating State Daycare

Christina Lupton

For a few years now I’ve been thinking about the history of British life-writing as a state sponsored activity, something that happens in connection with the victories workers have won over the years: time to attend adult education classes, and to retire in their sixties; time protected by unions, by labor laws around Sundays, or made by state daycare and maternity leave. The idea of a life in which one has a right, not just to live and to work, but to leave a record of having done so has been one of the things protected by the modern state: this has been the focus of my current project.

This paper is taken from the part of that project that focuses on feminist-socialist discussions of women’s labor in the years between 1968 and 1975. These were crucial years in England–as well as the rest of the world–for women diagnosing and articulating the terms of their own oppression. In consciousness raising groups, residential conferences, teach-ins, newsletters and journals, women explored ways to talk, to read, and to write about themselves as workers underpaid in the workplace and not paid at all in the home. The Women’s Liberation Movement that emerged in England in 1970 was a network of local groups that fed ideas and reports to a central committee. National events such as the famously successful Women’s Liberation Conference held at Ruskin College in Feb that year, or the storming a few months later of the London stage at the Miss World Contest, were planned through regional meetings, phone-calls, mailing lists and announced in mimeographed papers with limited circulation. At this same early point in the decade, the Wages for Housework movement, concretized in the publications of Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, was fueling the demand in Europe and Canada and the UK that women’s domestic work be recognized and rewarded through state income.  James was at the helm of that movement in the UK, and her BBC 2 program, “Our Time is Coming Now,” appeared in 1970 highlighted this aspect of the British Feminist cause.  Not all newcomers the Women’s Liberation Movement endorsed the demand for a state income, or the right of women to reject paid employment.  But most local women’s groups represented in the archives show a strong uptake of the idea that what women did–at home, with their children–should be described and compensated as a form of work.

As domestic workers, the argument went, women should be able to claim state pensions and welfare payments; they should also be entitled to holidays, and to study leave and to the time given in paid workplaces to union activity. In 1971, this logic helped to fight off, for example, the proposal that UK family allowances be converted to tax credits, which would have made only formally employed parents eligible for them. Dalla Costa’s 1972 words channeled what many women were feeling: “We have worked enough. We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines.”[i] “Those who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home,” wrote James, “are part of the problem, not the solution.”[ii] This line of thinking is echoed in pamphlets and flyers written by women in these regional groups. “It’s time to put an End to Slave Labor” states one flier of a London Group meeting in 1971: “we don’t need more work we need more money. We need the right to work less.”[iii]

These arguments for a woman’s right to state income ran alongside fights to improve women’s access to and experience of being in the workforce. Examples of those influential on this other front would be Juliet Mitchell, whose “Women: The Longest Revolution” had appeared in the New Left Review in 1966, taking aim at the idea of mothering as a full-time job, and Sheila Rowbotham, whose 1969 manifesto, “Women: the Struggle for Freedom,” expressed the frustration of women “struggling to combine badly paid work with bringing up a family,” and “unable to do work for which we’ve been trained.”[iv] Rather than rehashing here the factions of feminism that have emerged and continued along these lines, I want to zoom in here on childcare as an issue that united those fighting for their right to work less with those of women fighting for equal career opportunities.  In this micro moment of British feminism, the interests of women who wanted and/or relied upon paid work converged on this point with the interests of middle-class mothers wanting time to participate in their own revolution.  In 1970, as now, this made childcare a flashpoint for thinking about what women might need or want from the state:  in 2025 in the US, for instance, the promise of universal childcare was a signature part of Zohran Mamdani’s high profile campaign to become mayor of New York, while the state of New Mexico made headlines for offering its citizens this state service.

As a literary critic, what I want to underscore about childcare is the way discourse itself, particularly in the form of parents in conversation with each other and with or against the state, becomes its own case in point for the importance of redistributing childcare.  As material activity, it bears the weight of the argument that even women without paid employment have a right to time away from care work.  Childcare is not just an issue for women wanting paid work:  it affects for all parents wanting to study, join a campaign, or represent in writing the condition of their own lives.  Childcare, in other words, is intimately connected to the way feminist writing gets done around and about children and their care.  The documents I’ll reference do not just describe this view–they are evidence of the state’s role as childcare provider in supporting or impeding the production of women’s writing.

In England in 1968, the struggle to increase and improve the provision of childcare was a cause supported by many. Women who’d come of age in the early 1960s, been pioneers in going to university, training for careers, and having pre-marital sex, were confronting by their late 20’s the burden of care-work as a bottleneck in their own path to equality.  A co-written paper, “Childcare and Women’s Liberation,” given at a national feminist conference, complains of the fact that there are only 5 places per 1000 children available in England in 1971.[v]  Measured against European states, Britain lagged far behind in supporting middle-class women to pursue careers.  This deficit was also apparent to those who had experience of spaces where multi-generational living routinely involved the distribution of care work.  Buchi Emecheta, for instance, arrived in England in 1962 expecting to find opportunities for women greater than in her native Nigeria.  There she had worked as a librarian at the American Embassy while her mother-in-law looked after her children.  But Emecheta found London to be a city full of women occupied with their babies:

 … at home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept.  But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a monster, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old!  Oh yes, in England, looking after babies was itself a full-time job.[vi]

While Emecheta found her rights as a woman greater in England, she also found herself dramatically disadvantaged as a mother.

Yet many of these British women Emecheta observes occupied with their children were themselves frustrated by their isolation and limited opportunities to be in the public sphere.  In “Why I Want Wages for Housework,” a paper written by a full-time typist, “Helen” expresses the desire “get out of the house…not to bash a typewriter for capitalism, but to be part of the struggle to get rid of capitalism altogether.”[vii]  We might think here of the activities and spaces that Nancy Fraser names as the formation of the “feminist subaltern counterpublic”: the “journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places.”[viii]  Writing of the US, and against the limitation of Jurgen Habermas’s model of the official print public sphere, Fraser is mindful here of feminist engaged more directly with matters of domestic and personal experience than Habermas’s state based model recognizes. Yet for women with children in their care, many of those spaces on Fraser’s list were inaccessible.  Whether they were funded by the state or not mattered less than the question of whether they came with a creche or stipend that would allow mothers to pay for private childcare.

This need for childcare at feminist meetings and gathering was met in some ways that can seem to us now to circumvent almost gloriously the need for state involvement.  Gay men’s groups, for instance, were sometimes enlisted by feminist groups as a force who could step in to care for children at women’s conferences.  The conference held at Ruskin college at Oxford in 1970, in which the male partners of Tufnell Park women’s group staffed the creche, is still held up as exemplary. This image of Stuart Hall still circulates today as illustrative of the victory of the women organizing the event in drawing men into care work:

The press statement issued by the organizing collective at the time left “no doubt that these facilities have been an important factor in the range of attendance at the workshop.”[ix] Catherine Hall, Stuart’s partner and a key member of that organizing committee, remembers the Ruskin Conference underscoring “the importance of looking after everybody else’s children, sharing childcare.”[x]

Archives from this time are rich with examples of flyers like these, which show childcare being offered along similar lines, by members of the feminist community:

Bishopsgate Institute, Working Class Lives Collection, copyright Camden Women’s Group.

LSE Women’s Library, copyright Brenda Corti.

The perforated form of these documents makes clear a material relation, between the language that was circulating above the line, in the workshops and meetings, and the being labor done under it. That line is a significant marker of care work as something mediates writing — and activism, gathering, and conversation – without being directly expressed in it. Words here are not written by those doing the childcare: that’s the very point. Discourse is a direct result of care being redistributed and shared amongst other people who do the work of care in order to free others up to speak.

It is the uptake of care work by people other than mothers that allows for the ‘perforated’ condition under which all women might have the chance to write, talk, print, attend the conference, etc. after their day’s work. For women trying out their own voices, describing their work situation, or simply talking to others about their experiences, the fact of their children being cared for by others was central to the possibility of them correcting the injustices of gender inequality. “We are four women” begins one paper given at the Ruskin conference, “three of us have kids. One three evenings we asked each other questions…we wanted to write a paper.”[xi] Not only does the writing of that paper depend on where and how the children sleep; presenting it at the conference becomes possible because of the children being cared for elsewhere.

This triangulation–of writing done by and between women because of childcare arrangements that relieve them of their daily work–draws on the logic of the Wages for Housework Movement, which insisted that the unpaid work (of cleaning, feeding, soothing, nursing, education) underwrote all of capitalism’s visible, above-the-lines scenes of productivity. Only men free from having to worry about raising their kids, or reproducing life at home, argued James and Federici and Dalla Costa, could hold jobs that were publicly recognized as productive. By this logic, the distributive logic of the perforation matters to the way we read any scene of production. Whether its words or cars that are being made, unpaid care work underpins that output and activity.

Communally organized childcare was important in this sense to the first years of the women’s liberation movement. Collectivized childcare could free up women to gather, to write, to protest, to be themselves. In her preface to a 1970 collection by the “Power of Women Collective,” Priscilla Allen celebrates the opening of spaces in which women have “a chance to relate to people on a fully human level, not as doormat, sacrificing angel, or cannibalizing matriarch.”[xii] Federici stresses on a similar note that the Wages for Housework movement succeeded most powerfully in giving women the chance to leave their domestic lives behind and “write songs, make posters, analyze the newspapers day after day, and find…life interesting.”[xiii] All this entailed women (or men) supporting other women in being able to take a break from their too routine domestic work. To quote from the newsletter of the “Tough and Tender Collective”: “If we give kids space and time and opportunity to play/shout/paint/run/cry with their friends, we also have more time to do the same with ours.”[xiv]

But even when these scenes of the feminist subaltern counterpublic were private, it was ultimately state daycare that many women saw as the enabling condition of their full access to them.  One of the key demands at that Ruskin conference was for 24-hour free daycare.  On this front alone, British feminism was inaugurated as a movement whose premises, texts, and cross-class ambitions were intimately entangled, not only with men or with the collective, but with the state. This shift from women experimenting in community-organized childcare to the demand for 24-hour state daycare happened within months of the Ruskin conference.  The same women (Sally Alexander, Sheila Rowbotham, Catherine Hall) who had organized and advertised the creche staffed by men, pushed back against the demand to reproduce the model in future gatherings. When Catherine Hall sent out notes about the National Conference in London later that year, the organizing committee was suggesting that women’s groups enlist regional childcare support rather than bringing their children to the city.  Marie, writing into the “Mothers in Action Newsletter” describes herself looking for a way not to bring her children:

I would very much like to go to the Lesbian conference in Nottingham next weekend.  However I have a problem.  Would someone please take care of my kids for the weekend.  They are both boys aged twelve and nine.  You could stay with them at my home and I could provide food. They really just need someone to be with them.[xv]

The big follow-up to the Ruskin conference, at Skegness in 1971, offered a creche, but was famously hampered by the sheer complexity of organizing family accommodation at what was meant to be a women’s conference.

While the Ruskin conference succeeded in providing its own childcare, it also underscored the fact if working-class women and mothers were really to be included in the movement, a much more comprehensive system of state childcare would be needed.  Not only were most working-class fathers unlikely to step up in the way the fathers at the Ruskin conference had, working women were already overburdened by their combination of poorly-paid part-time jobs with a second shift of domestic work. The demand for 24-hour state daycare institutions was written into the Working Women’s Charter, which took its final form in 1974. The charter, debated in working groups in 1971-3, makes a connection, grounded in a recognition of working-class women’s experience, between equal pay and opportunity for women, and the provision of free local-authority nurseries “with extended hours to suit working mothers.”

But it also, as its tenth item, emphasizes the fact that working-class women deserve the opportunity to participate in trade unions and ‘political life.’ The 1973 meetings in which the charter itself was discussed made childcare both case and point. Some women felt it wrong that the meetings about the charter did not have creches. Others felt that women had already done enough and had learned their lesson about organizing that service amongst themselves. One pamphlet defending the organization of the campaign meetings without creches states that “one of the fundamental demands of the charter is to fight against the assumption that women are the child-rearers and to fight for adequate child-care facilities.”[xvi]  The state is presented here as the only proper agent in freeing up time for gathering and co-writing: the ability of working-class and single-women mothers depends on children being a zone of state responsibility and organization.  The minutes of meeting and papers given in those years suggest that women of all classes united around this campaign for state daycare, not just as a way of leveling the professional field, but of allowing mothers to participate–as writers, speakers, activists, and trade union members–on equal grounds in articulating their own position.

This is a case not just of not hating the state, but of leveraging its power into being as a mediator of a public sphere in which women with children and with jobs might participate. The hopes for new childcare institutions that emerged in these conversations were ambitious. They conjured up centers financed by the state but creatively controlled by parents and staff. They involved men doing their fair share of domestic organization, with the arrangement helping to support a shorter working week for all. Childcare centers were also described in many papers as being good for kids, with the social and creative opportunities they could provide outpacing what was possible in the private home. “Sounds too good to be true?” asks one leaflet from the London Nursery Campaign. “Well, that’s up to us; we won’t take what the state is dishing out to us at the moment.  It’s time we fought for our rights; nobody else will, and if it means we will change the state, well, we’ll change it.”[xvii]

The axis of change imagined here put women in close negotiation with the state around the care of children in ways we have largely forgotten. But literary critics are well-placed to read and to see how these negotiations played out, in thousands of hours of conversation and dialogue and public speaking, and thousands of pages of talks and newsletters and life narratives that were themselves evidence of the writing that might happen if care work did not fall to the mother alone. In many of these documents, women write and speak in specific reference to the state as allowing them time of work, and as enabling their membership of the public sphere.  We see this playing out very directly in the story of Emecheta, who became by 1970 a conscious advocate of the British welfare state as an institution of care. By that point she had three more children born in England and had experienced in mostly positive terms the National Health Service, maternity leave, local authority daycare for her children, access to free adult education at the University of London, and public housing.  Her two early autobiographical works, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), are openly underpinned by the recognition of these state services as vital to her life as a writer. In her study of the twentieth-century British Bildungsroman, Janice Ho describes Emecheta’s representation of the welfare state being driven by an unusual narrative causality in which “Adah’s interior sense of her autonomy and agency proceeds from – rather than precedes – the welfare state’s recognition of her as a citizen.”[xviii]  The particularity of this relation really does rest with Emecheta’s interaction as a mother with the state.  Her first taste of freedom to write comes with paid maternity leave from her job at the British Library.  This is followed by the welfare payments and council housing that allow her to leave her marriage, and the Inner London Education Authority Grant that provides her with time to study while her children are in state daycare. Emecheta’s early columns for the socialist paper The New Statesman perform as a reminder that much feminist writing, particularly by working-class women, should be read in this order, as evidence of a state shouldering some of a women’s traditional workload. The very possibility of a single mother and working immigrant writing her way into that largely middle-class British Feminist movement is the direct result in Emecheta’s own terms of her imbrication in the state.

In the late 1970s and 80s, Emecheta also became the face of the state, by working as a social worker and coordinator in the same North London childcare group that Rowbotham helped to set-up.  This organization offered community-based childcare that women had argued earlier in the decade should be funded and facilitated by state-funded lines of employment:  “Until we extend the responsibility for raising children beyond the mother to the state, we cannot increase the responsibility of women, nor hope to change the means of production,” writes Sally Alexander in her summary of the minutes to one 1970 meeting of the Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation group.[xix] To read that note in its full force, we need to hear both the limited conversation it records, between middle-class white women who’ve dared to leave their children at home with their babysitters or fathers, and the fuller one it anticipates, of which Emecheta is a part, where a more inclusive discourse would emerge if all children were cared for freely and generously by the state.

Christina Lupton is Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, and author of several books about the history and experience of reading. Her new project, When Writing Wasn’t Work offers an alternative history of life-writing since the eighteenth-century as a non-professional, working-class practice that has held space open for institutions and experiences distinct from those of labor.

[i] Mariarosa Dalla Costa in The Power of Women and the Subversion of The Community (Falling Water Press, 1972), 45.

[ii] Selma James, “Introduction” The Power of Women and the Subversion of The Community, Ed. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa (Falling Water Press, 1972), 16.

[iii] LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 6.

[iv] Sheila Rowbotham, “Women: the Struggle for Freedom” Black Dwarf, January 10, 1969.

[v] Childcare and Women’s Liberation, issued by the Wandsworth Brach of the Women’s Liberation Group, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[vi] Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen [1974], (Heineman Educational, 1994), 45.

[vii] LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 5.

[viii] Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80; 67.

[ix] Press Statement regarding Ruskin Conference, Feb 1970. LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[x] Catherine Hall interviewed by Andrew Whitehead, History Workshop Journal, Volume 96, Autumn 2023, pp. 205–213, 212.  https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad019

[xi] “Ruskin College Women’s Weekend:  Reflections on Politics of the Family” LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[xii] Priscilla Allen, Preface to Writings Produced by Women in The Power of Women Collective, June 1973. LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 5.

[xiii] “Interview with Silvia Federici” in Louise Toupin Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-1977 (UBC Press, 2018, Trans. Kathe Rothe), 241.

[xiv] Pamphlet produced by the “Tough and Tender Collective” LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 4.

[xv] In “Women and Deviancy” newsletter, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 4.

[xvi] “In Defense of the Working Women’s Charter Campaign – a reply to the paper “Some Fundamental Problems with the WWCC”. Bishopsgate Institute.

[xvii] Nursery Campaign Newsletter, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 1.

[xviii] Janet Ho, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 144.

[xix] Sally Alexander handwritten notes.  LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 3.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

On Taxes

Bruce Robbins

How does the slogan “tax the rich!” sound to you? New York City under its new Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not the only place where that slogan has been resounding lately, though of course it has run into stiff opposition, not all of it on the right—for example, from Gavin Newsom in California. If “tax the rich” sounds to you like a proposition that’s at least worth discussing—I’ll accept variants like “tax the 1%” or “tax the billionaires” or “tax secondary residences worth more than five million dollars”—then we might not have much to talk about, at least politically speaking. I mean, you may hate the state, but if you acknowledge as plausible the imperative to tax the rich in order to achieve a more equal redistribution of society’s goods and resources, you would also be accepting the state as the agent of that redistribution. Redistribution needs an agent. The state is the best agent of redistribution we have, perhaps the only agent. Politically speaking, end of story.[1]

If we may not have much to talk about, politically speaking, we may still have something to talk about when it comes to how the politics of the state connects with literature. That’s trickier. I took a stab at that question in my book Upward Mobility and the Common Good, where I tried—I don’t know how successfully—to read the emergent sensibility of welfare state institutions into the role of the mentor/mediator slot in the upward mobility story, as the figure who makes the protagonist’s upward mobility possible, a reading that is implausibly formal given the representational way the question about the state’s connection with literature is typically posed.[2] I’m sure other people have better ideas: ideas about how literature helps display not just that our intimacies are shaped by the social flows and structures around us, but that our intimacies are shaped by collective decision-making, however alien to personal experience the decision-making and the decisions appear.

In spite of general agreement on the need to appeal to the state as a provider of socially necessary services and a potential agent of redistribution, then, and thus also presumably agreement against the defunding and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, the agents we have, it’s possible that we do still have things to talk about, politically speaking. Because there exists, of course, a lot of anti-bureaucratic feeling among progressive people. And there exists of course the old idea that a radically egalitarian redistribution would require something like a revolution, a revolution to topple all that bureaucratic machinery and overthrow the power of the state. I’m not sure there are many who would still want to pursue this argument, the prospects for revolution in the US being as unpromising as they are; but if so, I think it’s worth saying that for such a revolutionary event to happen, for a revolution to happen that would not fall back into authoritarian coercion, that is, for a successful revolution to happen, that revolution would first have to have won large-scale approval of the program of redistributing society’s goods and services in an egalitarian fashion. It would have had to establish radical redistribution as common sense, just as the graduated income tax very gradually established itself as common sense, and over stiff opposition. In other words, “tax the rich!” would have to have become common sense even among those who remain skeptical that the taxing powers of the state could ever serve as the proper agent of radical redistribution. One reason for staging this discussion at a conference devoted to literary culture is literature’s role in helping to shape a society’s common sense.

A recent essay by Michael Denning called “Tax Forms” is frankly skeptical that taxes can serve any desirable social purpose.[3] I suspect that the essay speaks to shared hesitations both about taxation and about the state in general. For Denning, it is a mistake to see the state as an agent to rein in the power of capital, even when forced to do so by pressure from below—as in my view it was forced by pressure from below to create and maintain welfare institutions. One key move in this argument is that Denning rejects the differentiation between the economic and the political. For him, the economic and the political are one; taxation by the state is just another means of exploitation, working alongside exploitation by corporations. There is no daylight between corporations and the state. The state is corporations; corporations are the state. (Literature is one agent allowing us to see some daylight between corporations and the state.) But if there is no separation between corporations and the state,  then it is not wrong to hate the state, and the fact that it is the anti-statist right, not the left, that has made tax revolt a crucial part of its program is not an argument against tax revolts. On the contrary, the implication would be—this is just an implication, not something Denning actually says–that the right has been right to organize revolts against taxation, and following its lead might be a winning strategy for the left.

I don’t much like Denning’s argument, but I suspect that others will look more positively on it than I do, and not just because, as Denning does not need to say, the state has so often used its power shamelessly on behalf of enhancing corporate profit and to diminish the power of workers. If people are ready to assume, with Denning, that it’s a waste of time to try to glimpse any daylight between the interests of the state and the interests of the corporations, one reason might be a strong impulse, in the humanities, to reject distinctions like that between the economic and the political. The proposition presents itself to us more frequently with culture taking the place of politics, so that what’s rejected is a separation between the economic and the cultural. It may look like economics, but it’s turtles of culture all the way down. (On the left, we have to deal with the symmetrical illusion that it’s turtles of economics all the way down.) We who work in the cultural disciplines tend to smile upon the merging of the cultural with the economic, if only because what happens in culture can thereby borrow some of the aura of significance enjoyed by politics. What I’m trying to say, translating back from culture-and-economics to politics-and-economics, is that there is a cost to this refusal of distinction: the cost of losing the state as a potential political agent, an agent that’s not entirely separate from the corporate economy but that’s separate enough from the corporate economy so that, if pushed hard enough, it can be mobilized to rein in and regulate the corporate economy. Unsurprisingly, anti-statism being as entrenched in common sense as it is, the place to look for such a logic, however fragmentary, is among the comeuppances of greedy corporate villains in science fiction.

To my mind, the state/ corporation issue is of a piece with that of whether a line can be drawn between modernity and whatever came before modernity—the Bruno Latour, “we have never been modern” issue. (I had to take this issue on in writing a book about atrocity, a word that could not exist in its modern meaning until attitudes toward conquest and toward violence against noncombatants had changed radically.[4] One of the most complicated themes we could get to, in terms of hating or not hating the state, would be the meta-history of violence, or violence and modernity, and the place in that history of the state, as Max Weber said, coming to enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. Can we assume that the state only exercises violence but does not in the slightest degree restrain it?) For some time sentiment has run with Latour, and against the modern/pre-modern line. To the extent that it has, it has also had to downplay the emergence of the modern state as a distinctive and consequential actor on the world stage.

In postcolonial theory, for example, Robert Young argues that colonialism remains a primary force in the world, so many decades after the success of the national liberation struggles, and the reason is that colonialism imposed on its colonies the form of the modern state, a legacy which is responsible for endless chaos and suffering.[5] The state is the definitive injury that the West has inflicted on the non-West. I think Young is overstating this case, but he’s right that the modern state form is indeed distinctive and consequential. In her new book, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South, Rebecca Oh very rightly insists that despite all the harm for which it is responsible, the intervention of the modern state remains a legitimate addressee of appeals for improvement: “complaint about and desire for the state are two sides of the same coin” (2).[6] Legitimate and, I would add, unprecedented. For better and for worse, and taking our distance from Latour, there is indeed a significant line between modern and pre-modern. And with the state, we are on the modern side of the line.

Within the discourse of Marxism, which is where Denning locates himself, his argument fits into a recent tendency to give more agency to the state in the history of capitalism—more agency, but agency that is entirely on capitalism’s side. This tendency is associated with the phrase “primary accumulation.” The argument is about the origins of capitalism. It goes, very roughly, like this: in order for capitalism to come into being, with some people forced to sell their labor and others in a position to buy it, the sellers had to be impoverished by being uprooted from the land and the buyers had to be rich. How did this happen? Marx’s answer is that the buyers didn’t get rich by frugality, as Adam Smith had suggested; they enriched themselves by uprooting and impoverishing the others, that is, by means of violence, conquest, coercion. Once capitalism is functioning smoothly, this originary violence can be forgotten; now the rich get richer merely by paying their workers less than the value of their labor. That is, by exploitation, not by expropriation. Marx puts the discussion of primal accumulation at the very end of the first volume of Capital in order, it seems, to suggest that violence was a one-time moment, and that after this, capitalism would work mainly by peaceful exploitation, not by violent expropriation. The recent tendency in and around Marxist theory has gone in the opposite direction. Influenced by historians of colonialism and of slavery, thinkers have tended to see violent expropriation not merely as a founding moment that is then superseded–—no Manchester without Mississippi– but as a permanent factor in capitalism’s functioning. As Sandro Mezzadra puts it, “whatever happened for the first time at the origin of capitalism must logically repeat itself every day: this apparent paradox prevents us from seeing the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as merely linear and progressive” (104).[7] Those who are convinced that history cannot be “merely linear and progressive” will be drawn to this argument. Those who get stuck on the “merely,” less so. In any case, if you consider yourself progressive, you might want to reconsider: there is no doubt that history is not merely linear, but there is also no doubt that in some sense history is linear and indeed irreversible. Since the state is a and perhaps the primary dispenser of coercion and violence, the shift from primal, one-time accumulation to permanent accumulation gives the state a bigger role not just in capitalism’s history, but in its ongoing functioning. In this way lots of agency is attributed to the state, but it’s unambiguous bad-guy agency. It’s not the sort of relatively autonomous agency that would encourage strategies of redistributive taxation, or Wisconsin-style sewer socialism, as progressive goals.

In spite of my anxiety that all this may be too inside-baseball, I go on to one more facet of Denning’s argument in “Tax Forms.” Why doesn’t Denning see much promise in the precedent of the graduated income tax? For one thing, he says, because most Americans never fill out form 1040. “For three-quarters of US workers, the payroll tax—a pure wage tax—is the major tax, not the federal income tax. Thus, the famous 1040 form is not your tax form: or rather this document is part of what Marx called ‘the religion of everyday life,’” that is, one of “a host of fetishisms and mystifications.” There is no doubt that, as Denning goes on to say, the tax system brings into being the political identity of the taxpayer, and the political identity of the taxpayer does lend itself to possible mystifications. There is a dangerous illusion of equality in the idea that we all have our wages taxed given how much more income goes untaxed because it doesn’t come from wages but from investments, from wealth.

Still, when Denning inveighs against the payroll tax as “the major tax” on the majority of American workers, he is not saying something that in the context of hating or not hating the state very much needs saying. Money from the payroll tax goes directly into the funding of Social Security and Medicare, that is, into provision for old age and ill health for people whose old age and ill health are not otherwise provided for. I would not claim that Social Security and Medicare are fragments or foretastes of socialist utopia. But I’m simple-minded enough to deduce, from right-wing opposition to Social Security when FDR signed it into law in 1935 and onward to the present, and from the dismantling of so much of the federal bureaucracy that we have seen under the present administration, that the state has been doing things that the corporations have never wanted done. There are more things we can get it to do. The state is in crisis. We shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste.

There are many who feel, in Stefan Collini’s words, that taxation is a kind of “protection racket: pay up, and we’ll look after you.”[8] The assumption is “that the money is emphatically mine, and I’m prepared to let the government ‘take’ a portion only if in return it provides security and other services from which I benefit. But the basis of our existing tax system can’t be as simple as that even if, for the moment, for the moment, we leave aside the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place’” (15). “Taxation is sometimes scanted,” Collini goes on, “as a superficial form of social-democratic tinkering that leaves the underlying structure of economic power untouched” (18). But if a focus on taxation can help raise “the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place,” we will be doing more than tinkering. Consider this an invitation to join the hunt for examples.

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022). He is a long-time member of the b2 and b2o editorial boards. 

[1] On the confused and confusing politics of taxation in the US, see Andrea Louise Campbell, Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.

[2] Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

[3] Michael Denning, “Tax-Forms,” in The Future of Totality: Fredric Jameson and the Prospects of Critical Theory.

Ed. Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, and Robert T. Tally Jr. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026.

[4] Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

[5] Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001

[6] Rebecca Oh, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South. NY: Fordham University Press, 2026.

[7] Sandro Mezzadra, In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjectivity. Trans Yari Lanci. Rowman and Littlefield, London. 2018.

[8] Stefan Collini, “Where To Draw the Line,” The London Review of Books, 19 October 2023, 15-18.

Image: Nam June Paik, Zen for Film. 

The Author as Listener: On the Politics of Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Arne De Boever

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

–Epictetus

The crisis of democracy is first and foremost a crisis of listening.

–Byung-Chul Han

Last Words

Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription constitutes itself almost entirely across two extended scenes of listening that make up the first and third parts of the book: “Hotel Providence” and “Hotel Arbez”. In the first, a young father travels to Providence to interview his former mentor Thomas, a genre-dissolving and genre-founding (32) filmmaker who, advanced in age, is making plans to die with dignity in Switzerland. As several reviewers of the novel have noted, Transcription invites us to pick up on the connections between the character of Thomas (whose talk fills up most of the novel’s first part) and (among others) the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (mentioned in the novel [25]—Thomas has his books lying around, unread, on his couch and floor), who died around the publication of Lerner’s novel at age 94, and is sometimes compared to Jean-Luc Godard, the French nouvelle vague filmmaker who died by assisted suicide in Switzerland at age 91.

The second scene—the third part of the novel—consists of an interview (or perhaps just a conversation; although it is more like an extended monologue) with Max, Thomas’ son, after Thomas has passed away. The reader gathers that the listener—the one who is spoken to–is the same as in the novel’s first part. Max and this listener turn out to have been college friends at Brown University, where Thomas used to teach. Both Max and his interlocutor have young children, girls, who are going through a rough patch: Max’ daughter Emmie is having trouble eating (Thomas, to Max’ irritation, refers to her—referencing Kafka–as a “Hungerkünstler” [47; 50], a “hunger artist”), and his interlocutor’s daughter Eva “is flirting with what the school counselor called ‘school refusal’” (15). Their lives (or at least what we know of them through the novel[1]) appear to be so much alike that you may be forgiven for reading them as interchangeable. Transcription in fact suggests that Thomas, most likely as part of cognitive decline, confuses his former student with his son, unsettling both the student (did he forget that twenty years ago, he was in Switzerland with Thomas to work on a film project? Is Thomas right to accuse him of “tell[ing] this untruth” when he says he’s never been to Switzerland? [48]) but especially the son (“It was as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck” [129]–did his father somehow forget that they were in Switzerland together?). “I felt”, the son confesses to his friend, “perhaps as intensely as ever—the unheimlich. Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger” (122).

The portrait that emerges of Thomas as a father (and husband) is not flattering: he seems incapable of establishing a personal relation with his son (and perhaps also his wife? she committed suicide when Max was eight), instead always fleeing from the dilemmas of parenting and grand-parenting (and perhaps marriage?) into “some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)”(94)—witness the characterization of his grandchild as a “Hungerkünstler”, some figure from a story by Kafka. At the same time, there are aspects of Thomas’ relationship to his grandchild that are also quite endearing (we hear about him reading a story to her over the phone, and interrupting the reading to play some music by Debussy that fits the tale, 93-94)—and Max acknowledges this (93). The impersonal relationship between father and son—at some point, Max started consistently calling his father Thomas—is driven to a head when Thomas ends up in hospital during Covid, and seems likely to die. Only then, with a nurse holding her iPhone to his father’s ear—listening is once again extremely prominent in these pages–, does Max “as a disembodied voice” (111) allow himself to tell his father about love and forgiveness. Against all expectations, Thomas pulls through—Max receives a call that he is “stable” and that “[h]is vitals are good” (114)–, but Max can’t be sure that his father heard what Max told him over the phone. Somehow incapable of directly asking him, he finds himself “listening for traces” (118) when he goes to see his father after the ordeal, looking for signs that the message actually arrived.

In between these two scenes of listening, and holding them together like a hinge, is the shorter part of the novel, “Hotel Villa Real”. Set in Madrid (familiar to readers of Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station) after Thomas’ passing, it takes place on the evening of a symposium in Thomas’ honor where Transcription’s narrator spoke publicly about how his interview with Thomas—and Thomas’ last, it turns out—came about. Although this talk itself is elided in the novel, the reader gathers that it must have presented some version of what we were told in “Hotel Providence”: the story of how the interviewer travelled to Providence to speak with Thomas on the record; of how he dropped his phone—the recording device he was planning to use—in the partially blocked hotel sink, ruining it; and of how he then proceeded to hold the interview anyway, pretending to record it (the extent to which Thomas was aware of this fact seems unclear in the novel, 59). Somehow, our interviewer was incapable of telling Thomas that he’d ruined his phone. What was published, then—Thomas’ last words—could not possibly have been a transcript of an actual conversation, since there was no recording. They could only have been our interviewer’s reconstruction (and reconstruction from memory, since he did not take notes—he was recording, remember?) of what was said. Our interviewer does not find this problematic, given that all published interviews are heavily edited and do not sound like a transcript of their recording (70); but Rosa, the curator who has organized the event at which he spoke, and (according to Rosa) also Thomas’ son Max who attended the event, appear to be “shocked” (72) by this “confession” (74) and by the fact that what they took to be Thomas’ last words are actually not his last words but someone else’s.

“I’m fine”, the narrator hears himself say in response to these accusations, but Rosa didn’t ask him; it seems he is just trying to reassure himself in the face of his growing feelings of authorial guilt.[2] Thomas, though, Rosa acknowledges, would have loved the situation—“would have loved it. Loved the idea that his last published statement was ‘unstable’” (72).

Listening Is Writing

Based on the novel’s title alone, and then further on the fact that its two major parts consist of interviews (of scenes in which someone is being talked to), it seems fair to characterize Transcription as a novel about listening. This is perhaps especially so given that the middle part accuses the interviewer of having concealed the fact that what he published as the record of an act of listening was in fact a document of writing—in other words, that the middle part of the novel seems to clearly privilege listening over writing.

Certainly, the novel sets itself up to be read in this way. In the novel’s first six pages, leading up to the narrator dropping his phone in the sink, we move from (on the train) “I put in my earbuds and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973” (4) to (arriving in Providence) “I still had my earbuds in and I was listening to walking directions” (5), and (checking into the hotel room) “I … turned on the TV and opened the blinds and half listened to the news” (6), to (talking to his daughter Eva on the phone) “‘Yeah,” she said, maybe listening” (8). In addition, the novel notes in these opening pages that “I could hear what sounded like live piano music, but saw no piano” (6); when the narrator needs to call Thomas, he asks himself: “Why was I more nervous about briefly encountering his disembodied voice than spending hours with his embodied one? ‘You should write that down’, Eva said in my head” (7). Such references to listening continue throughout the novel. Everything in the novel appears to be about listening, then, a listening that is not so much made impossible by the destruction of the phone on page 9 but emphatically solicited at this point—as a listening beyond technological recording.

If this is going to be a novel about listening, well, now that we’ve gotten the phone out of the way, the game is really on… Let’s listen. (By contrast, when Max in the third part of the novel actually records his father, he “was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening”, 124-125).

Recalling Lerner’s navigation of his work between poetry and the novel elsewhere, one might suggest that if the novel is typically thought to offer prose to be read, with poetry giving us song to be listened to, here a novel announces itself perhaps not quite as a song but as prose to be listened to—as something more poetic than a novel.

The move that Lerner makes at that precise moment in Transcription is interesting, and marked (for good measure) by two white lines—and three stars. I quote from page 9:

I somehow knocked the phone into the water.

***

For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged. [my emphasis]

The message couldn’t be any clearer: if this is going to be a novel about listening, Transcription is telling us, it is not the kind that is going to pitch “writing” against “listening”, as Rosa—who is not a writer herself–in the middle part of the novel seems to do, thus guilt-tripping our interviewer/ narrator. Instead, the moment when the phone is knocked into the water is also the moment when “writing” (“For the duration of this sentence”) explicitly appears on the page, as if to help out. You can find moves like this all over Lerner’s oeuvre; you wouldn’t be wrong to characterize them as one of his signature gestures. Another one arrives on page 26, for example, when Thomas offers the narrator coffee (which he does not want or need), and he takes “a fictional sip” (my emphasis). That could mean he’s pretending to sip the coffee, of course; at the same time, however, the coffee is indeed entirely fictional—it is written coffee, a pipe that is not a pipe, as a Belgian surrealist artist already playfully told us long ago. Later, on page 38, when Thomas asks about his daughter, our interviewer responds: “I call her Eva in this book” (my emphasis). Transcription emphatically does not pitch writing against listening, then, but seems to advocate for a close connection of the two. How to write as a listener? Are we perhaps, as listeners, “always already” writing? (I will return to this Derridean locution, “always already”, and the process of deconstruction that it marks, below.)

If all of the previous references to listening were fairly casual (but rich in variation—we are listening, half listening, maybe listening, listening to a voice in our head, et cetera), once Thomas enters into the conversation things frequently get technical. For a filmmaker, i.e. someone who is primarily working in a visual medium, he turns out to be quite obsessed by sounds and voices. As a way to get WWII out of the way in the conversation, he wants to start with his “sound memory” (but what memory is ever “sound”?) of hearing “Hitler’s voice” (36) on the radio in 1934; he recalls it as “rising and rising in pitch”, as if it were “eternally ascending”, impossibly so—like a “Shepard tone”, as Thomas correctly explains (37). From the get-go, and here some may find support for our interviewer’s argument that there is nothing wrong with him having reconstructed his conversation with Thomas from memory, Thomas insists that the interview is not going to be about being “literal”: “We practice literature, not law” (37), as he puts it. (It’s worth noting on this count that Thomas’ son, Max, practices law and that he is thus taking some distance from his son, and situating himself more closely to his doppelgänger, our interviewer/ narrator.) “We begin with the voices” (38), Thomas insists—the voices that are there in the ether, in the air. Some of these, we hear; but Thomas is even more interested in the ones we can’t hear—“there is always music playing that we cannot hear” (39). “Do we have ears to hear?” he asks. “[S]ometimes we listen without them. … There is listening beyond the cochlear, yes?” (39)

One assumes that the interview has already started at this point—the narrator is pretending to be recording—but as far as Thomas is concerned they are still recording onto the “long stretch of black leader” (40), the starting part of a recording tape that doesn’t record. “We remain in the black leader part of the interview” (40), he insists, until they’ve come up with the first question—something that suits the narrator, who would in fact prefer this initial evening conversation to be “the leader” (44) with the real interview following the next day, after he’s gotten himself a new phone. But much that is important to Transcription is already being shared in this part of the interview (it includes, for example the first version of the confusing conversation about “Switzerland”, 43)–and of course all of it appears, mysteriously transcribed, in Lerner’s novel. How can we have a record of what could not have been recorded on this long stretch of black leader? How could this miracle have been brought about?[3]

There are only two conclusions we can draw, within the limits of the fiction at least: either the narrator was bullshitting about dropping his phone in the sink, and the interview took place as planned, was recorded and then dutifully transcribed (and this is why we have the first part of Transcription); or he did indeed drop the phone in the sink, and everything we are reading is transcription from memory, and perhaps thereby approaching “fiction”—which is, let us not forget, the overall form or category in which the interview is presented to us here (as part of “a novel”). But in that case the questions come quickly: does an interview become “fiction” simply because it was not technologically captured, and transcribed from memory? But if such an interview is similar, as the narrator argues, to actually published interviews which are always heavily edited, why do interviews that were technologically captured but heavily edited not enter into the realm of fiction? What, exactly, does or does not constitute the fictional in these cases? And where, exactly, do we locate what we might call “authorship” in them? (An author is considered to have been at work in the first case; but in the second, we talk about editing rather than authoring. As an author who also works as an editor, I admit to having been occasionally confused on this count myself, in particular with texts that need a lot of work. Am I editing them? Am I writing? Editorial mediation vanishes; writerly mediation is marked.)

Once the “interview” is over, the narrator wonders “what I’d do if he [Thomas] asked to see a transcript” (54). Transcription then offers, as a closing reflection and further turn of the screw, the account of our narrator’s breakdown in college, when he suffered from “auditory hallucinations” (56): surely not the most reassuring thing to find out about someone who has just conducted an interview without recording or note-taking. The narrator tells us that Thomas helped him with these hallucinations. But how so? As one may suspect from someone interested in voices audible and inaudible floating in the ether, Thomas helped not by trying to get rid of the hallucinations but by engaging the narrator in an auditory experiment designed to prove that everyone has auditory hallucinations, that all listening is, effectively, a kind of writing—that there is no objective listening or that there is no outside-writing, no outside-the text. Like a psychoanalyst, who does not aim to cure you out of your weirdness but instead starts from the assumption that everyone is weird and that some—their patients—just find that fact harder to handle than others, Thomas starts from the baseline that everyone hallucinates when they listen (and that some just find that fact harder to handle than others). “You see”, Thomas says after having had the narrator hear voices in “a MIDI file” (56) in which they have effectively become inaudible to the human ear, “we all hear phantom voices. It is a question of the right conditions. Or the wrong ones. Unconscious inference, our brain guessing, making us hear what it thinks is likely there. We hear as if. We are together, erring” (57). This is, clearly, the Thomas who loves being “unstable”; it is also the Thomas who keeps insisting in the novel on the social aspect of things, which is tied for him to politics (doing things together). Hearing voices, the narrator is not having a pathological breakdown; he is, rather, tapping into the ether, as we all do. The laughing he hears “in the rustling of dried leaves” (55) (likely another one of the novel’s references to Kafka [68, 95]—in this case to “The Cares of a Family Man” in which the laughter of a creature called Odradek sounds like the “rustling of fallen leaves” [Kafka 428]) is there, as far as Thomas is concerned. Nothing to worry about—you are fine. I don’t know if this is good mentoring, but the narrator does note that he was “helped” by it: helped by the demonstration of the fact that all listening is writing.

Mosaic Authorship, Stone Tablets, and Impeded Speech

It is hard to avoid—and Transcription invites—the associations between a novel that revolves around listening and the sacred, religious (and, if we want to cast the net a bit more widely, spiritual) texts that reveal themselves to be the records of acts of listening, that come about in response to dictation, in which the interviewer/ writer is effectively no more than a medium, but a medium that does not mediate, that merely relays to us, without intervention, the divine word of the one interviewed or listened to, the one doing the dictating (the dictator, if you will… more on the politics of all this later).

How does Transcription operate within these associations? Consider, for example, the first five books of the Bible—the so-called Pentateuch—which were, or so it is believed, dictated by God to Moses. Moses supposedly merely transcribed what God told him, but of course—and especially because this transcription takes place long before the invention of recording devices such as the iPhone—this opens up the entire, and much discussed, question of Mosaic authorship, and the extent to which Moses may have intervened in the words that were passed down to him from God. With Moses and God, we’re not even in the black leader portion of the tape; we’re in a blackness way before that. Transcription presents to us a kind of Mosaic authorship, activating the uncertain borderline between listening and writing not so much with respect to God, but with respect to his stand-in in the novel: the mentor and flawed father (wasn’t God a flawed father as well? Which all-powerful being allows his son to die on the cross?) who survives Covid against all odds—the great artist Thomas.

The association between our interviewer/ narrator and Moses was, for me, immediately evoked by Transcription’s cover, which features what appears to be a stone tablet in the shape of an iPhone. The stone tablets are another famous instance (within the Pentateuch, as a mise-en-abîme) of Moses transcribing God’s dictates—God’s “Ten Commandments”, his “law”. Thomas, of course, does not want to be God, and situates himself on the side of literature rather than law, a position that is perhaps suggested in the Bible itself given that Moses, angered by his people’s worshipping of the golden calf, smashes the first version of the tablets to pieces (and the second version of the law that the Bible offers is not identical to the first, even if God states that “I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables, which you broke” [Ex. 34:1]!). Perhaps the entire problem is captured by the fact that Moses, when God initially selects him as his spokesman, argues that the role should go to his brother Aaron instead because he is a bad speaker—“slow of speech and tongue” (Ex. 4:10) and “of uncircumcised lips” (Ex. 6:12), perhaps an indication of a speech impediment, like a stutter or a cleft palate. (The equivalent of this speech impediment in Transcription would be the interviewer/ narrator’s auditory hallucinations. All of us are impeded in our speech, none of our speech is clear. Not even mine, in this text.) Moses is not who you want to choose as your communicator—unless, of course, that is the entire point: that there is something unstable in the divine law, an instability that is to be embraced. Law is always delivered as impeded speech, and thus it begins to approximate literature. It is Thomas who talks about his granddaughter, Emmie, “bowed over her so-called tablet … as if in prayer” (47). Transcription in this context tells us, with respect to the sacred text, that while it may present itself as the record of an act of listening, it is always already a document of writing, with Moses not so much as the vanishing medium but very much as the mediator—it’s a novel that foregrounds mediation (“For the duration of this sentence”, “a fictional sip”, “I call her Eva in this book”, et cetera). Could it be that the Bible does so as well? What may be the consequences of such an insight? From such a point of view, it seems the stone tablet becomes, as Thomas puts it in a discussion about “icon painting”, “a secular detail” (46) rather than a sacred dictate—although “secular detail” is not quite the right name for what Transcription is either. For that, we will have to dig more into the fictioning that the novel does.

The bigger point here then becomes that the word of God, or, in the case of Transcription, the word of Thomas, can never be accessed as such, because all acts of listening are already acts of writing—we cannot listen objectively, there is no listening-outside of writing (as I put it before, evoking Derrida: Transcription’s narrator does so himself when he points out, considering whether the wine he drinks at Thomas’ house is medicine or poison, that there is “a third option”, and that it might be both [34]—this was, of course, exactly Derrida’s point about the pharmakon in his reading of Plato [who is referenced in Transcription two pages later, 36]; more broadly, however, Transcription’s point about listening-as-writing is Derrida’s argument about speech and writing in his Grammatology).[4] From such a perspective, Rosa’s objections to our interviewer/ narrator reconstructing his interview with Thomas from memory—her guilt-tripping him over his authorship—appear naïve, more precisely they appear to be naively invested in the idea, the phantasy, that one could ever really access the word of God/ Thomas. Listening, Transcription argues, never works in this way: it is always already writing. Rosa seems to criticize our interviewer/ narrator’s authorship in favor of some kind of direct access to Thomas’ speech, but really what she is trying to access in this way is just some bigger Author, whose words also could never be directly taken in (because to listen is always already to mediate). Transcription is a meticulously construed criticism of this kind of attitude, which Lerner already discussed in Hatred of Poetry (people hate poetry, he argued there, because it can never realize the virtual, ideal, Platonic Poetry that they want; and so the metaphysians are always left disappointed…). Rosa suffers from a metaphysical affliction, a wanting to get beyond writing to access Thomas/ God directly, immediately. But there is no outside of mediation, Transcription tells us: even a transcription is a form of scription, after all. The mediator never truly vanishes. Instead, it’s authors everywhere.[5]

Political Fiction

This is not to say that Transcription is not rethinking the author and authorship, as no doubt we should in a time when “authoritarianism” has become the political keyword of the present.[6] For while Transcription argues that there is no listening that is not always already writing, it also emphatically makes the reverse point: that writing really is a form of listening. The writer, in Transcription, is emphatically a listener, and most of Transcription’s record is really the record of an act of listening. The novel does not make this point naively, by indulging in the phantasy that there could be a listening without writing; but it makes it nevertheless, in response to an understanding of writing as law-making, dictating, commanding—in short, against an authoritarian understanding of the practice. It seems abundantly clear that Transcription’s narrator wants to present himself as a listener, a listener who is then—due to the ruination of his iPhone—solicited into a listening beyond technological recording, a situation in which (“For the duration of this sentence”), writing will come to his aid to help him deliver a reconstruction from memory (a record) of a conversation, of Thomas’/ God’s speech. On the one hand, this marks an investment in writing; but it’s an investment in a writing that operates in the service of listening, with the author being recast as a “transcriber”, as perhaps more of a poet in relation to a song than as a novelist in relation to prose. Transcription appears to be an activity that takes place somewhere in between the prose of the novel and the song of poetry, a writing-as-listening and listening-as-writing that, as an emphatically social activity, always taking place in the realm of the more-than-one, is arguably also sharply political in a time of the increasingly loud dictates of authoritarianism. Under such contemporary conditions, authorship should be rethought—and Transcription is a novel that takes on this task.[7] As such, and perhaps in spite of appearances, this slim fiction is intensely political, as all of Lerner’s other work.

This becomes perhaps most clear with respect to the notion of fiction that the novel articulates, and that—in the time of fake news and bitterly fought contestations about historical facts—is embedded in these political concerns.[8] Indeed, the transcriber is, perhaps contrary to the naïve understanding of the word, a kind of fictioner. But in what sense?

The key passage for this is likely the narrator’s account of his visit with Anisa–the best friend of his college girlfriend, and to whom he becomes unexpectedly close after he and his girlfriend break up–to the Natural History Museum on the Harvard campus. The museum has a “dimly lit gallery dedicated to the [glass] flowers”, “botanical models made by glass artists—a father and son—from Dresden a century ago” (20). Transcription ends with multiple references to these flowers, including in an epigraph following the narrative’s end, so the novel makes it clear that this is an important passage. There is, of course, the reference to the father-son relationship that is worth noting; in addition, we are dealing here with something very fragile, a fact that is perhaps further underlined by the artists being from Dresden, a city heavily bombed by the allied forces during WWII (overall, this scene evokes the work of W.G. Sebald [perhaps in particular his work On the Natural History of Destruction] who is, in addition to Kluge, a reference in Transcription; Sebald is one of those authors who, as a novelist, rethought writing as listening, offering fiction as a record of acts of listening that are often multiple and embedded within each other—see, for example, Sebald’s prose work Austerlitz, which presents itself as extended record of an act of listening). Finally, however, and most importantly, the narrator’s experience of seeing the flowers leads into a reflection on fiction:

I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually, I’d call this “fiction”. (21)

In between organic and artificial, duck and rabbit, nature and culture, the given and the constructed—let’s add: student and son, medicine and poison, and, of course listening and writing. This is where we are with the fragile, glass flowers, so delicate that around them, visitors are asked “to keep our voices low” (20); this is where we are with Transcription as well, in between the given and the constructed. The interview is supposed to give us the given, but Transcription delivers the message that all interviews are constructed; in fact, all listening constructs, it writes.

Still, writing as a construction does not stand on the other side of the given—“fiction” has something to do with seeing the constructed in the given, and drawing out the given in the constructed. In that sense, it is not law, dictation, or commandment (which are all construction). It listens as it writes (it draws out the given, but the given can never be given). The suggestion appears to be that it is this kind of listening that prevents writing from becoming a lie, such as the lies that Anisa tells the narrator about the life of his ex-girlfriend in New York (50 and further). What we get in the novel, rather, is a plea for the transformative, reality-adjacent practice of fictioning through a writing-practice that is listening-based and transcribes the world between the given and the constructed.[9]

In that sense, Transcription is, like the Hotel Arbez with which it ends, “a complex space. Non-euclidean” (128). As Max eventually explains to the interviewer/ narrator, who must have been there even if he appears to have some difficulty remembering it, the Hotel Arbez is:

            The one that’s famous because different parts of the hotel are on different sides of the border. The lower half of the stairs are in France, but, beginning on the seventh step—

            You’re in Switzerland. Right. Jesus.

            And during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase. Remember we went up, ascended to Switzerland? (128)

Transcription’s fictioning is in between things, the way in which the Hotel Arbez is in between Switzerland and France—and it’s that in-betweenness that enables Max Arbez, one of the Max’s after which Thomas’ son is named (the others are Horkheimer “and my mother’s favorite uncle”; but one may want to throw in here Sebald as well, who preferred to go by Max) to shelter Jews from the Nazis. The return of the phrase “impossible staircase” is interesting as well, because Thomas had used it in part one of the novel to refer to how, in his “sound memory” of Hitler’s speech, his voice appeared to be “eternally ascending, an impossible staircase” (37). “This is a wondrous but terrible fact of our wiring,” Thomas commented then, “how clockwise movement across the pitch class creates this impression” (37). Terrible in the case of Hitler; wondrous in the case of the Hotel Arbez; here too, “it is a question of the right conditions. Or the wrong ones” (57). A fact of our wiring, to be sure—something that “our brains will allow” (37). But also an effect of our writing, our fictioning, our transcription.

This is, perhaps, the closest indication we get of how Transcription, the kind of literature it practices, can save—but not in the way that the sacred text saves. Transcription saves not as a Holy Writ that delivers dictates; it does not save as authoritarianism. Instead, it saves as a writing-listening and listening-writing that exposes the phantasy of all such law-like commandments. The fact that it always inevitably writes does not mean that it lies. Rather, as a construction, Transcription fictions: it highlights the mediator not simply to expose the constructed in the given, but to offer a version of the constructed that can deliver the given, like a glass flower. Delicate and fragile, it asks you to keep your voice low as you approach, so you can listen–which is also to say write–all the better.

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program for over a decade. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as seven books on contemporary comparative fiction and political and aesthetic philosophy. His most recent books are Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), Being Vulnerable (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), and Post-Exceptionalism: Art after Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). His books Silent Music (co-written with the composer Michael Pisaro-Liu) and Secular Detectives and are forthcoming with Bloomsbury and the University of Nebraska Press respectively.

References

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Coetzee, J.M. and Mariana Dimópulos. Speaking in Tongues. New York: Liveright, 2025.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

—. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Hölling, Hannah B. Revisions: Zen for Film. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015.

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1971.

Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011.

—. 10:04. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.

—. The Hatred of Poetry. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

—. “The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory”. Harper’s Magazine December 2023, accessible: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/12/the-hofmann-wobble-wikipedia-and-the-problem-of-historical-memory/.

—. Transcription. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2026.

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. Meridian: New York: 1974.

Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

—. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003.

Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.  

[1] My impression is that Lerner very carefully sets up this situation as an effect of repeated structural elements in both part one and part three of Transcription; and then also by leaving certain elements within that structure empty, by playing with the fact that fiction does not have to fill in every detail. I appreciated this set-up even more after reading J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos’s reflections on this aspect of fiction in the context of their discussion on translation in Speaking in Tongues.

[2] It is probably significant that this guilt about authorship arrives in Madrid, where, in Leaving the Atocha Station, “Adam”—a stand-in for Lerner—“arrives” as an experimental writer. It is, in Lerner’s fiction, the “adamic” birthplace of Lerner’s fictional self as a writer; it is, now, also the place where his authorship is drawn into question.

[3] I am reminded of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, which was made some time between 1962 and 1964. For this project, Paik ran transparent empty film leader through a projector, allowing it to collect traces, scratches, dust as the film was played. As Hannah Hölling in her work on the film has pointed out, Zen for Film cannot be seen in the same condition twice, as it is forever and irreparably changing each time it is projected. The film, it is worth noting, was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33’’ composition (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence), which was in turn inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Painting [three panel]”. The link to Cage highlights the connections between Paik’s film—a work of visual art—and the practice of listening to which 4’33’’ drew attention. Like Transcription, all of these works highlight that we see and listen more attentively when we are working “in the leader”, in other words, in a certain kind of silence. I want to thank my student Lukas Mackinney for bringing Paik’s project to my attention in this context.

[4] The other reference that seems relevant here is to Derrida’s student, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, and his work on what he calls (after Edmund Husserl) “tertiary retentions”, i.e. technologies—like writing or the iPhone—through which speech is recorded. One of Stiegler’s points is that such tertiary retentions do not simply post-date speech but in fact precede it: as children, we start speaking in worlds that are always already recording; in fact, children record before they start speaking. Transcription’s variant of this is that there is no listening without writing, that writing always already pre-dates listening and is operative within it.

[5] This position counters, for example, what Walter Benjamin at the end of his famous essay “The Task of the Translator”, writes about “the Holy Writ”. Benjamin posits there that it is “unconditionally translatable” because it is supposed to be “‘the true language’ in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning” (82). The position is peculiar, because it insists on the medium—language—in its immediacy—without the mediation of meaning. Language as pure means. This is Benjamin’s understanding of “sacred writings” and their purity. In Transcription, Lerner counters such phantasies of purity or immediacy. I bring up Benjamin on this count because Transcription includes several references to his work. 

[6] I want to acknowledge Martín Plot’s thinking about “the author” (versus “the actor”) in the work of Hannah Arendt, and the relevance of this distinction for our theorization of “authoritarianism”. I am tempted to capture such a thought under the title “Authors Against Authoritarianism”.

[7] This is not to say that under different conditions, turning human beings into mere recording devices could not also work against authoritarianism: witness the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where humans are turned into living recordings of great works of literature that are being burnt, for an example of precisely this situation.

[8] That Lerner is interested in these questions is clear elsewhere in his work, for example in his story “The Hofmann Wobble”, which presents us with an author who is using and abusing Wikipedia to rewrite history and promote ideological positions. Transcription signals that it is situated in this vein of thinking when it evokes “the wobble” in its third section (129) to capture Max’s state of mind in his relation to his father.

[9] In Lerner’s 10:04 (Lerner 2014, 244), this idea is expressed through reference to a story that Lerner finds in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, and that is attributed there to Walter Benjamin, who likely found it somewhere else, namely about how after the arrival of the Messiah, the world will be exactly as it is now, just a little different. The idea returns in Transcription in other ways as well. “It was as though everything in the house had shifted a few millimeters”, Max says in Transcription when he encounters his father after he has survived Covid. “He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed” (116). 

Life Wisdom: Learning from Kluge and Kiefer

Bruce Robbins

A Review of Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer, Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances. Trans. Alexander Booth. London: Seagull, 2025. 

When the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge died on March 25, 2026 at the age of 94, a translation of his exchange with the painter Anselm Kiefer had just been published. Also just published, or perhaps just about to be published—when someone dies, the chronology gets blurred—was Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. Lerner had joined up with Kluge in the astonishing collaboration The Snows of Venice (2017): early poems by Lerner inspiring texts by Kluge, which inspired further texts by Lerner. The collection is illustrated with artwork by painter Gerhard Richter, Kluge himself, and others. Presumably Lerner did not anticipate when he gave the manuscript of Transcription to his publisher that its publication would coincide with Kluge’s death. But in the character of Thomas, who does die in the course of the novel but does not share all his details with Kluge, Lerner nevertheless delivers a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the artist. Any English speaker who desires an introduction to Kluge’s many-sided work could go there first.

As a novelist, Lerner won’t let the reader forget that the artist is also a parent, which is to say condemned to emotional imperfection. I did not know Kluge well enough to judge whether Thomas’s tendency to always retreat into “some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)” (94) from painful dilemmas of parenting and grandparenting was true of Kluge as well. What I recognized immediately in Thomas were Kluge’s gentleness, his experience of being bombed as a child, and his tendency to hear angels in voices on the radio. I recognized, too, the love of dreams, and changing eye-colors, and cave painting. What I would have liked to see more of in Thomas was Kluge’s ability to make art and politics converge in unpredictable ways. Lerner has proven himself politically inventive as well, for example in his perhaps-autobiographical, auto-fictional story about the political hacking of Wikipedia, “The Hofmann Wobble”.  

Consider how this—the convergence of art and politics—happens in Kluge. A young woman walks in slow motion across the screen. The camera, motionless, watches her pass from across the street. Then a voice-over stops the action, and the camera zooms in. First, on a swath of her dress. Where was the fabric manufactured? The camera moves to her boots—same question. To her handbag—what is the history behind its making? Leather craft, we are told, goes back to the Middle Ages. There are histories behind everything we have been seeing: the building in the background, the intercom on the door, the company that invented the intercom, the door lock, the grating in the sidewalk, partially blocked up, the brightly-colored signs on the wall marking the presence of gas and water pipes under the street, along with the amenities they enable, the dried-up chewing gum and the cigarette butts in the cracks between the cobblestones, the cobblestones themselves.

The histories come fast and furious. It’s hard to focus on any one of them. If what you want is to watch the woman, you will be disappointed. Still, the total effect is weirdly entertaining. The film seems to be about capitalism, and there is no doubt that it disapproves, but the disapproval doesn’t leap out at you. Discovering the hidden background of things doesn’t always provoke the expected indignation. You might even say that it brings with it a perverse kind of pleasure. 

The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein had a plan to adapt Marx’s Capital. In 1929 he went to Paris to meet with the author of Ulysses to discuss the project. The film, Eisenstein thought, had to put everyday life at the center, as James Joyce did. For example, Eisenstein would not film the stock exchange as part of the project. Joyce was not interested, however, and the movie didn’t get made. But in 2008 Kluge took the project in hand. A memorable part of it, a collaboration with Tom Tykver available from the Kluge archive at Cornell, is the deep dive into the objects surrounding the young woman on the sidewalk. It’s entitled “All Objects Are Enchanted People.” 

The title is not a bad translation of what Marx in Capital called the fetishism of the commodity, the process that allows me to forget, lifting a sack of rice or unpacking a new laptop, the lives and labors of invisible people far away that brought the commodity here to my hands. By making the labors and the lives visible again, Marx wanted to define the fetishism of the commodity and demystify it. Demystification is not quite right, however, as a description of Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances, another collaboration with an artist, reveals. Kluge, a philosopher in the lineage of the Frankfurt School and a filmmaker sometimes described as the German Jean-Luc Godard, enters into dialogue here with the celebrated German painter Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). The book is more interested in life wisdom than Capital is and less interested in demolishing falsehoods as a way of life. It makes you realize, however, that demolishing falsehoods is only part of what Marx was up to in Capital. In the background of that book too, there is a vision of how life might be lived.

***

This dialogue between Kluge and Kiefer is entitled (you may need reminding—I did) “Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances.” Borrowed from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, that title is paradoxical enough to count as advice on how to live. It implies that there is no principled way of reconciling principles with changing circumstances. Since circumstances can be relied upon to change, especially political circumstances, it follows that remaining faithful to your principles can only be achieved by the practice of an art (Kunst) and that art cannot itself hew to absolute principles. Artists should therefore expect to be criticized by political allies who think their principles have been violated, and both Kluge and Kiefer have been. The tone of their book, however, is not defensive. And it invites the reflection that, since the art in question is intelligence itself, it can be practiced equally by people who are not professional artists. One moral for the rest of us is that, however overwhelming the urgencies of the present, it’s useful to stock up on knowledge of the lives and labors of the artists, writers, and thinkers of the past, however distant. Or, as Kluge puts it: “I faithfully memorize—with music in operas, without music in storytelling and with particular relish in film and visual art—all the errors which have been made and the experience they contain. These will-o’-the-wisps are more trustworthy than all of the rules of wisdom.”

Quality time spent in the company of the dead will send you back to your principles, however indirectly. An example: Immanuel Kant remaining faithful to the French Revolution despite bad news from Paris about the guillotine. Another example, also from the French Revolution: the woman in Beethoven’s Fidelio who, faithful to her lover, rescues him from death amidst seemingly incomprehensible shifts in ruling regime. Life wisdom: revolutions, like lovers, are not easy to be faithful to. Faithfulness requires the exercise of intelligence.

Kluge and Kiefer’s book is a treasure-house of plot sketches and anecdotes, many on the brink of breaking into parable. One might describe it as a companion, though not in the usual reference-book sense of a “companion-to-X”. Intelligence offers friendly companionship to those of us who are struggling in isolation (and who isn’t?) to remain faithful to our principles.

Kiefer was born in the small southern German city of Donaueschingen, which is credited by some as the source of the Danube. The Wikipedia entry on the city does not mention that it was devastated by an Allied bombing raid on March 4, 1945, four days before Kiefer’s birth. As the book reminds us, he was born in a bomb shelter. A month later, on April 8^th, the city of Halberstadt, where the 13-year-old Kluge was living, was largely destroyed by another air raid, leaving some two to three thousand of his neighbors dead. Kiefer was too young to remember the bombing, but he would have heard stories. It seems likely that these two contemporary German masters were drawn together by common memories of a hometown devastated from the air.

Kluge published about the bombing in different forms, including a short, collage-like, somewhat absurdist book. Air Raid has been accused of heartlessness for its failure to empathize sufficiently with the victims. It dramatically omits his personal feelings about being bombed. It’s as if the occasion was too big for personal feelings; in Transcription, Lerner makes much of this emotional evasiveness in Thomas. Much of Kiefer’s painting, famous for its mixing of paint with materials like straw, ash, and sand, could also be seen as a reference both to the Holocaust and to the bombing. It reproduces a haunting atmosphere of ruination, most often without revealing who or what is bring haunted or mourned. It’s easier to see Kiefer’s career as aiming to cut through the complacencies and euphemisms of the “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle of Germany’s post-war recovery, and to insist on (to paraphrase Kluge) the blood and horror lying at the bottom of all good things. But that is not the only sense that has been made of him. Was he pointing his finger at the Nazis? Or (as German romanticism has always tended to suspect) blaming modern technology? His Norse gods and dark green forests left the question open. Of course, any German artist who dared step into the minefield of Holocaust memory, and did so by returning to the seemingly anachronistic genre of representational painting, would have to expect controversy even if he did not begin his career, at age twenty-four, with a series of photographs in which he gives a sarcastic “Heil Hitler” salute at different locations in Europe.

In a review of Air Raid, Katie Trumpener notes that Kluge’s early films were on the receiving end of feminist critique for their depiction of post-war women as bumbling and confused. It’s true that Air Raid, too, does close-ups of women in the midst of the bombing of Halberstadt who cannot take in what is happening around them: the ticket-taker at the local cinema who tries to tidy up with a broom after half the building has been blown away, the mother of three who tries to protect her three small children from the falling bombs with a random sheet of tin. But no one in Halberstadt, male or female, can make much sense of what is happening. The same is true in the aftermath, when the war is over (the war ended shortly after the bombing, which served no military purpose) and an American investigator asks the locals who is to be blamed for the mass killing. The Americans? The Nazis? War as such?

The question was of some interest to me when I first read Kluge’s book some years ago, as I had recently discovered that a squadron of B-17s that bombed Halberstadt on April 8^th, 1945 was commanded by my father, Captain Eugene Rabinowitz. (I write about this in Atrocity: A Literary History [2025], and, now that I think of it, in other places as well). When I had the good luck to meet Kluge in 2016 and talk about all this, he steered the conversation gently toward other acts of violence in the more distant past. My notes from that meeting also include some poetry, though I can’t remember who it was from: “Like a tornado touching down, the dream selects its sleeper.” (In Transcription too, Thomas has much to say about dreams.) As a motive for reflecting on the distant past, present violence in its most tornado-like aspect sends me back to my own dreams and sleeper-like passivity, but also to the project of filming Capital: how deep into the background of objects does one want or need to go? Is there a point where one goes too deep—so deep as to lose the thread of present indignation?

Kiefer’s mentor, Joseph Beuys, had tried to “do” Auschwitz without human figures, relying instead on objects like a dead rat, vials of fat, and moldy sausage. The assemblage allowed for considerable uncertainty of interpretation. Like Beuys, Kiefer is experimental in his recourse to materials, but he is unafraid to paint human figures, even mythological ones like Wagner’s Nibelungen that the Nazis seemed to have rendered taboo even for would-be satirists. Was this a humanizing of Germany, critics asked, a covert participation in Germany’s rightward turn, a step toward national reconciliation with the horrors of the past? Maybe not. Andreas Huyssen understands Kiefer’s imagery as either deliberately ironic or as performing a necessary working through, given that, in spite of the Nazis, the imagery still carries emotional weight. Many of the black-and-white illustrations in Intelligence are fabulous, but they are perhaps not the best way for the uninitiated to catch up on either the irony or the working through. I would watch the Wim Wenders documentary, Anselm, instead. Film, Kluge’s other medium, is better able than a book to transmit the scale of Kiefer’s massive architectural sculptures, as monumental as the Nazi structures they satirically echo. A book is a small thing, physically speaking. Still, it is Kiefer who in the opening pages praises the book as a physical object: “I don’t think Noah’s ark was full of animals, but books” (2). And the colorlessness of his visual contributions to Intelligence is not an accident attributable to the costs of book publication. The grayness is intentional.

In deference to Paul Celan, Kiefer shows us dark, dead sunflower stalks in a snowy field with no sun. As the Wenders documentary reveals, he burns straw and undergrowth on a wall using a flame-thrower and the wall becomes a painting. In an assemblage, sunlight shines on empty white dresses, the heads replaced by bricks, plastic cases, books, barbed wire. In another painting, metal rods stick out of cracked slabs of concrete, the ruins of some habitation. After Gaza, Kiefer’s work has come to seem less commemorative than prophetic.

Intelligence foregrounds Kiefer’s Celan-inspired Margarete/ Shulamith series, where as Huyssen observes, Kiefer’s remembrance of the Holocaust comes through brilliantly. Those paintings are a tribute to the poetry of Celan, the Romanian-Jewish German-language poet who lost his parents in the Holocaust and himself survived one of the forced labor camps. They reference in particular Celan’s most famous poem “Todesfuge”, “Death Fugue”:

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

In one painting you see a German woman’s blonde hair against a dark, barren landscape. In another you see a Jewish woman’s black hair superimposed on a memorial to the German war dead. “Mother,” Celan wrote in “Wolfbohne”, “they are writing poems.” It is good that art continues, adapting our principles and our circumstances, even if, as here, the artistic act is pitifully incommensurable with its occasion.

***

Besides family memories of the Allied bombing, the two artists are also joined by the pleasure they both take in large time scales. “What moves me about Anselm Kiefer’s work (and has led to our collaboration),” Kluge writes, “is the timespan of over 300 years (oftentimes over 3,000 or even 40,000 years) in which its actuality moves” (110). Both artists show a confidence that time spent in deep or mythic background will not be wasted. I noticed a leaden B-17 in an assemblage that Kiefer had labeled “The Argonauts.” Intelligence features a daisy chain of poets, starting with Pindar, the archaic (that is, pre-classical) Greek poet whose poetry is saturated in an era when the Olympian gods had not yet taken over. Hölderlin, who translated Pindar, also influenced Celan. Kiefer pays tribute to all three. And Kluge ends the book by recalling the potentiality embodied in Pindar’s centaurs, a potentiality which persists despite “the Big Five in Silicon Valley, those modern usurpers who are building a new Valhalla on an imaginary stage by Richard Wagner” (203). Today’s world is much like the world ruled by Zeus. But enchantment has not disappeared. “Nothing has been irrevocably decided. No reason for fatalism” (203).

In Transcription, a child’s seemingly incurable eating disorder—labelled an “art of hunger” by Thomas in one of his evasive moves–does what a novelist is obliged to do: it brings the temptation of hopelessness closer to the everyday life of people today who purchase and read novels. Like Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard is another novelist who has spent years contemplating a great artist. In his 2020 profile of Kiefer, entitled “Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist,” Knausgaard does not try to refute Kiefer’s greatness, but he does include a reference to bad parenting and he notes–whether at his own expense or at Kiefer’s is unclear—that Kiefer sometimes does not seem to know his name, and sometimes seems to have forgotten him altogether. In Transcription too, Thomas sometimes treats the Lerner avatar as an old friend and sometimes just as cheerfully confuses him with someone else. Is this blitheness a characteristic of the great artist, or of the artist as seen by the novelist? Or might it be an instance of life wisdom, the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances that Kluge and Kiefer discuss? The eating disorder in Transcription, it’s worth noting, is eventually cured by the application, perhaps intelligent and perhaps merely lucky, of parental indifference. Perhaps indifference, then, is part of what’s needed to stay the course. 

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022). He is a long-time member of the b2 and b2o editorial boards. 

A Review of Resurrection by Bi Gan

Joséphine Haillot

Often, at a certain stage of artistic maturity, filmmakers turn their gaze back upon the history of film. They hold up a mirror to the 7th art and inspect its techniques and forms: what cinema has been, what it is, what it might yet become, attempting to compose a history of the medium from within, inscribing their own work into a genealogy, sketching the outline of a manifesto. Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma is a grand instance of such an endeavor. Through a palimpsest of film fragments, the twentieth century is drawn from the visual archive it produced.

In Resurrection, Bi Gan, like Godard, reaches for the longue durée. Onscreen, at once a history of cinema and a history of modern China, the two unroll conjoined—the nation cutting moving images to fit its silhouette, moving images refashioning nationhood. Bi Gan, however, eschews Godard’s essayistic, documentary register. Instead, he embraces the narrative form. He imagines a world in which humanity has traded the unconscious drifts of sleep for immortality. Only a rare few still possess the capacity to dream—outliers known as deliriants. The film follows one of them, an anonymous fugitive who seeks refuge by leaping from one cinematic remnant to another, slipping through time, sharing the same faculty as the nameless protagonist of La Jetée (1962).

Resurrection traces a chronological arc across six vignettes: a prologue, an epilogue, and, in-between, four short films. Spanning from the first opium war (1839-1842) to the present day, each chapter registers a new phase in the making of Chinese modernity: British occupation and the end of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese civil war and the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Cultural Revolution, Dengism and the Reform era, the Socialist Market Economy period, and Xi Jinping’s techno-nationalism. This sequencing also resonates with the conventional periodization of Chinese film history into successive “generations” of filmmakers, each emerging from a particular historical moment. Beyond this historical progression, the six-chapter structure gestures toward another order, the Buddhist doctrine of the six sense organs and the six consciousnesses. Bi Gan ventures here a theory of cinema that confronts the problem of perception—the nature of experience, the formation of consciousness—by turning to a philosophical and religious tradition rooted in Asia. He unsettles the dominant Western paradigms that have long organized film theory, ​​from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of spectatorship to Bazin’s ontology of the moving image, Arnheim’s gestaltist approach of animated pictures, and Metz’s semiological analysis of film.

Between the tableaux, time-lapse shots of burning candles interrupt the narrative, wicks collapsing into pools of wax. Far from decorative, the image invokes a Buddhist account of continuity. When King Milinda asks the monk Nāgasena what is reborn if there is no self, Nāgasena answers with an analogy: one flame lights another. What passes on is not substance but causation, leaving imprints that condition a new stream of consciousness, neither identical nor wholly different. In Resurrection, the history of cinema and the history of China unfold along two overlaid understandings of time: the dialectical progression of historical materialism and the Buddhist image of successive ignitions.

The Deliriant represents cinema’s constant rebirth and metamorphosis—a plasticity that tips into monstrosity. It figures as a Western graft: an alien, infectious body trailing in the wake of British and French occupation.

In the overture, the Deliriant emerges as a figure from early horror cinema—pale, dark-eyed, and eerie, like Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) or Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). His back splits open to reveal a projector wired into his spine. Enslaved, the Delirant is confined in a subterranean chamber buried at the heart of an opium den, a replica of the expressionist architecture of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The Deliriant is sustained by poppy blossoms and produces “poppy tears” for the den’s patrons. The trapdoor to his cell doubles as a phenakistoscope, one of those proto-cinematic machines that prefigures the cinématographe. On its spinning surface, an opium seed morphs into a skull. The Deliriant appears as a byproduct of the Opium Wars, twin to the narcotic that underwrote Western intrusions within the Middle Kingdom. A woman—named Big Other (大她者) after the Lacanian concept—rescues him and restores the projector lodged in his back. Her intervention signals a turning point: wrested from colonial custody, cinema is reimagined within Chinese society and its symbolic order. Once repaired, the film glides into a reenactment of L’Arroseur arrosé (1895). Transplanted from its French garden into a luxuriant landscape of wildflowers, the medium becomes organic to China: nourished and naturalized in its new ground.

In anthracite tones and sharp chiaroscuro lighting, the second segment adopts the visual style of 1930s–1940s film noir, as cinema enters the age of sound. It tells a spy story: after a composer dies, the Deliriant steals a theremin and sheet music believed to contain a cipher. The chase leads through a ruined train station, a space that recalls Shanghai’s “Bloody Saturday” of August 28, 1937, when Japanese air raids destroyed the South Railway Station.^[1] There, in this devastated landscape, the Deliriant is caught off guard as he lies asleep in the baroque-carved bed of a motionless railcar, its faded glamor redolent of the Orient Express’s opulence. He is arrested and interrogated. He hangs suspended by the arms in the basement of an administrative building. The lash falls across his back, his body sways above a circular drain reminiscent of the round hatch that sealed him inside the opium den. The image doubles back on itself, creating a motif of continuity and rupture: from the Opium Wars and the waning Qing dynasty to the Republic of China, the civil war between the Guomintang and the Communists, and the Second Sino-Japanese War, in which Shanghai occupied a combustible place.

The second vignette depicts a brutal era of transition for both China and cinema. By the 1930s in Shanghai, movie theaters flourished, attracting young audiences as Hollywood films dominated screens and spurred local industry growth. Leading Chinese studios like Lianhua and Mingxing adapted the American studio model and reshaped its aesthetics to reflect Shanghai’s turbulent modernity. With its procession of gangsters, detectives, and femmes fatales, Hollywood provided archetypes with which Shanghai filmmakers addressed what agitated the city: The Goddess (1934) and Street Angel (1937) depict the grind of urban poverty, the merciless struggle between leftist and far-right forces, and the mounting threat of Japanese aggression. Yet, after the Nationalists seized Shanghai in 1927, they instituted a stringent system of censorship, subjecting books, newspapers, and films to scrutiny as presumed vehicles of moral decay.^[2] Just released from Western geôles, the Deliriant—alias Cinema—finds himself swept up once more, this time by the nameless bureaucratic and violent apparatus the detective works for. Intelligence gathering, kidnappings, torture, assassinations—methods that echo those of the Military Bureau of Statistics and Investigation—the Nationalist secret police, which played a ruthless role in the repression of Communists. For the Nationalists, the Deliriant is no mere entertainer but a vessel for subversion, infused with progressive and non-traditional values—western, if not Communist ideas. Pushed to his physical limits, he offers a bargain: he will lead the detective to the place where he has stashed the score and the theremin—an abandoned house lined with mirrors, a derelict labyrinth of refractions. In a replay of the climactic “maze of mirrors” scene from The Lady from Shanghai (1947), images multiply and fracture. As film reels struck, restruck, the Delirant splinters into a thousand doubles, each reflection becoming another. Beyond containment, he vanishes into his own infinite reproduction.

The Deliriant wakes in the back of a moving truck, rattling along a wintry mountain road. Once a Buddhist monk and now forced into labor by the Red Guards, he is returned to his former temple with orders to destroy its relics as part of the Cultural Revolution’s campaign against old traditions. Assigned to guard the desecrated temple overnight and suffering from a severe toothache, he hears a voice instructing him to extract his aching tooth with a fragment from a shattered statue. Upon doing so, a demon resembling his father emerges. The Deliriant confesses to euthanizing his ill father using poisonous potatoes. The Demon traces two ideograms on the fountain’s surface, covered by green lentils: bitterness and sweetness (“甘” and “苦). Later, the Deliriant inscribes them again with pieces of wood upon the frozen earth of the temple garden; they gradually disappear beneath the fall of snow.

The film conjures the style of revolutionary Model Operas with its costumes and rural settings, but lacks their clear moral dichotomy. There is no virtuous revolutionary set against a villain—no landlord, bourgeois traitor, or Japanese imperialist. Even the opposition between the monk, figure of the old order, and the Red Guards, agents of the new, doesn’t stand in a sharp ideological divide, the evil and the good. What emerges instead is a tale of ambiguity and in-betweenness, a meditation on Cultural Revolution cinema: a cinema that sought to sever ties with pre-revolutionary iconography to purify itself through auto-critique and a radical tabula rasa, ultimately forfeiting its capacity for dialectic. Bitterness and sweetness, past and present, loss and gain, propaganda and art all intermingle. At dawn, beneath the temple gate that marks the separation between the sacred and the profane, the Deliriant finally reckons with duality.

The fourth vignette begins almost exactly as the third. Playing on continuity and rupture, it opens on a visual echo—much like the round cell door and the circular drain sutured in the first two episodes. In medias res, the Deliriant wakes in the back of a moving truck. Whereas in the third tableau cinema traveled from a metropolitan area toward the rural hinterland, he now makes the return journey: the 1980s witnessed a re-centering of narrative cinema on the urban, attuned to the new rhythms that animate Chinese cities following Dengist reform. The Deliriant returns as a small-time con artist, freshly arrived in town and already devising a scheme. Refusing to partner with two coarse thugs, he instead recruits a young orphan girl. He trains her in card tricks and drills her in a covert language of cues: a choreography of signals she must memorize for every card. One of these codes relies on scent. Finally ready, he brings her before an old, wealthy man who has placed an advertisement in the newspaper seeking someone with supernatural abilities. As she is blindfolded, the old man presents to her a blackened metal box filled with ashes—the remains of a letter lost in the fire that killed his daughter. He asks the girl to “read” what has turned to dust. She recites a message addressed to an absent father. After being paid for their services, the Deliriant resolves to leave town alone, abandoning the girl behind. At the bus station, as he decides to turn back, the two thugs reappear. They rob him, a blade flashes, he bleeds out to death.

The vignette deals with the question of transmission. It stages the passing on of a technique, the apprenticeship of illusion: the sleights of hand the Deliriant teaches the girl find their analogue in the cinematic craft, which, since its earliest days, has spun legerdemain from montage cuts.^[3] In 1978, the Beijing Film Academy reopened after the Cultural Revolution, training the cohort that became the Fifth Generation.^[4] As the Deliriant initiates the orphan into the art of deception, so Chinese cinema in the Reform era relearns its language, renewing itself by piecing together its lineage beyond the socialist realism of the Mao era. The vignette also turns to another form of transmission—not of knowledge, but of capital. The old man stands in for the Chinese Nomenklatura: the state apparatus and its command economy that provisioned film production throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Deliriant secures money only after staging a demonstration, letting the old man assess the girl’s magical talents as though submitting a film project to a state commission for approval.

Though the Deliriant also makes money with side hustles: he runs a scatter of small ventures, diversifying his petty-crook business to keep himself afloat. His con runs parallel to the broader liberalization of the Reform era, when getihu—individual household entrepreneurs—burgeons favoring the development of an interstitial economy.^[5] Similarly, film production slipped into a hybrid system, combining state ownership with market incentives, that left room for informal, gray-market activities: the studios were expected to cover part of production costs through box-office revenue, keeping surplus beyond quotas.^[6] But as the Deliriant learnt at his expense, competition seeps in where state funding once sufficed. In the new economic order, the two thugs he refused to associate with return as predatory business rivals, stripping him of both cash and life. Despite this tragic turn, a note of hope lingers. As the old man becomes convinced of her extraordinary gift, the girl comes to believe in it: what began as a hocus-pocus scam takes on the texture of reality. In other words, cinema—handed down to a new generation—recovers its generative force, its power to estrange the spectators, long constrained by the aesthetic stricture of Maoist doctrine.

1999, on the eve of the new millennium. The Deliriant smokes alone on the docks. A gang of youngsters roars in on motorbikes. Hidden behind a concrete pylon, he watches unnoticed as they toy with a man, before hoisting him up by the arms and abandoning him there—the image reverberating backward to the second vignette, where the Deliriant himself hung suspended. Once again, Bi Gan threads a motif across time. Binding the civil-war era to the late 1990s, it urges the spectator to ask what makes the two epochs alike, however irreducibly different. In the 1940s, Shanghai cinema teemed with noir tales of mafia, spies, detectives, and seductresses. In the last years of the 20th century, the underworld and its catalogue of opaque characters resurfaces: Hong Kong gangster movies—Johnnie To, Andrew Lau, John Woo—illegally flood the mainland thanks to video compact disc (VCD).

Watching the hazing as if it were a film, the Deliriant fails to notice he has entered the frame. On the pylon, like shadow play, a projection, the profile of a woman. The watcher is watched. And we, the audience watch this nesting of spectatorships and spectacles. Unaware of all the eyes on him, the Deliriant rifles through the hanging man’s pockets; on the ground lie broken VCD players and hundreds of shiny discs. She steps out and whispers her name, Tai Zhaomei—a name she shares with a Taiwanese pop singer. Glinting like a disco ball, VCDs line the walls of a karaoke bar—the hideout of a triad boss who traffics contraband Taiwanese records—where the Deliriant has followed Tai Zhaomei.

She belongs to the godfather—produced and sold by him like a pirated disc. The metaphor—linking underground film distribution to human trafficking—turns literal when the Deliriant realizes the boss is a vampire, and Tai Zhaomei his blood child, condemned to a nocturnal life of exploitation. As he is bitten, she sings “Magnolia Flower”^[7] (by Tai Zhaomei), an homage to the karaoke scene of Xiao Wu (1998), the debut feature of Jia Zhangke.^[8] Leading figure of the Sixth Generation, Jia examines the social consequences of rapid modernization and globalization in contemporary China and brought Chinese cinema to international film festivals, where it began to compete with the more widely circulated auteur cinemas of Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang), and of Hong Kong (Wong Kar-wai)—an ambition that Bi Gan undoubtedly shares.

This fifth tableau stages an impossible love story between mainland Chinese cinema and the cinemas and pop music of Taiwan and Hong Kong: it ends in tragedy. At daybreak, the lovers flee together on a boat whose shape alludes to the barge transporting Lenin’s statue in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995). Their embrace captures the optimism of China in the early 2000s, amid accelerating integration into global capitalism. Though, the couple also rushes toward death: now that she turned him into a vampire, the sunrise promises annihilation rather than renewal. The scene has a double-edge, forward-looking and elegiac. Like Lenin’s statue, which signals the collapse of the USSR, it mourns the disappearance of old communist China. It also laments a way of watching movies: the VCDs that democratized access to films sped up the decline of movie theaters.^[9] A bitter-sweet chronicle of triumph and loss. In filigree, Bi Gan draws the idiograms of vignette 3.

The film circles back. The “Big Other” washes the Deliriant’s corpse and prepares him like a mortuary cosmetologist, applying prosthetics to remake him as the monster from the opium den. She then slides him into a strange morgue cooler that resembles both a funeral lantern and a fantasized data tower. The final shot pulls back to the rear of a miniature movie theater, a wax diorama slowly melting into darkness. What form will cinema assume in the age of digital platforms and AI? 

Number one at the box office, Resurrection achieved a rare feat for Chinese arthouse cinema, seducing mainstream audiences.^[10] While it fulfilled its ambition at home—demonstrating that Chinese cinema is as monumental and self-reflexive as its Western counterpart and may offer new breath to the 7th art—it proved less successful abroad. Described, with a touch of Orientalism, as mysterious and enigmatic, the film exposed the persistence of an insular Western critical gaze—even as China stands as the leading global power.

Before beginning her Ph.D in Romance Studies at Cornell University, Joséphine Haillot received an M.A. in Art History and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She was an invited researcher at the Cinémathèque française (2019-2021). Her current research focuses on representations of working-class life and the wider problematic of class consciousness in French film and literature after 1989; drawing on intellectual history, socialist thought, psychoanalysis, and media theory to investigate the cultural residues of posthistoire from the fall of Berlin Wall to the crisis of neoliberalism.

^[1] “Bloody Saturday” is the name given to the black-and-white picture taken on August 28, 1937. The image shows a baby crying amid the bomb-shattered ruins of the Shanghai South Railway Station. Testimony to Japanese wartime violence, the photograph provoked waves of outrage abroad.

^[2] Wakeman, “Licensing Leisure,” 21.

^[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8oP9FdFL_o

^[4] Angus W. K. Lam, review of Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films, by Paul J. A. Clark, China Perspectives, no. 63 (January–February 2006), published December 20, 2006, accessed February 23, 2026.

^[5] Mark Dodd Jacobs, Market China: An Historical and Institutional Analysis of a Chinese Marketplace and Its Market Environment (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2010), 21.

^[6] Ying Zhu, Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

^[7] https://open.spotify.com/intl-fr/track/5RzLI8SXLZmSZc18z5Qc5C?si=cfb8b19f3f2d41ea

^[8] https://youtu.be/vWgTfOAnYYY?t=1861

^[9] https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20230623A06T1500

^[10] https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/china-box-office-bi-gan-resurrection-1236590546/