Trumping Freedom

July 8, 2017July 7, 2017 by Greil Marcus

I deeply believe that the great source of Trump’s appeal—the insulating factor, which he described fairly early in the campaign as the ability to go out in the street and shoot people without losing any support—is the sense of freedom he offers to voters. If they can’t actually fuck anyone, walk up to women and grab them anywhere they like and laugh as they walk away, treat other people like garbage, lie about anything, cheat anyone who gets near them, break the law without a second thought, declare bankruptcy and stick someone else with the bill, they could vote for someone who could, and feel a little, or a lot, closer to that sense of total freedom, of contempt for all limits, laws, and other people, that is the essence of Trump’s continuing campaign. If they can’t be like him, they can be for him. As for racism, in all forms, stripes, depths, casualness, his promise was that anyone who supported him could be just as free as he is—even more so. Those two things are what made Trump, and what sustains him, and why those who voted for him have not turned away from him, and, I think, won’t ever.

All the liberal editorial writers and New York Times op-ed columnists going on and on about how people voted “against their own interests” and wow, once their health insurance goes up in smoke, their opioid treatment centers close, and their police and fire departments shut down everything will be different—forget it. People’s interests are not defined by economic factors. People vote for people who promise them the ability to live in the country where they want to live, and a lot of people want to live in the USA as Trump defines and embodies it, and they’re willing to pay for it. The people who voted for Trump have bought in. They’re invested. They can’t take out what they invested and invest it somewhere else: Trump took it as a note and he’s not giving it back. That’s why attempts to change the electoral reality by “winning back” Trump voters, or showing them how they made a bad bet, are a waste of time.

Excerpted from a 5/29 post at Ask Greil.

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“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

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Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA