David Foster Wallace, the loquacious novelist behind Infinite Jest, seemingly predicted much of our culture moment from AI avatars to the hypnotic and addictive temptation of the infinite scroll. In his fiction and essays, he agonized over the ways in which advertisers and mass media have coopted techniques of subversion and rebellion like irony to make products that are more entertaining, more flattering to our egos, and more difficult to ply ourselves away from. As a writer of dizzingly erudite, complexly structured, yet morally earnest fiction he was concerned with devising new imaginative ways of competing with our short-circuited attention spans. Great literature he argued, like life, if it is to be meaningful and edifying, requires difficulty, concentration, and attentiveness. Wallace made great demands on his readers, but always with the implicit promise that in wading through the difficulty and by sticking with the forking paths of his sentences and elliptical thoughts, a higher pleasure and more last meaning would arise. The culmination of this effort at demonstrating the virtues of difficuty and choosing what we pay attention to is his posthumously published novel, The Pale King. In this episode, Hannah Smart, joins us to discuss this novel's profound meditations on civics, conversion experiences, and the transcendence of boredom. The novel posits a new kind of modern hero and solution to the problem of meaning that has plagued modernity and life under capitalism. According to Wallace, the secret to enduring modern life is the ability to withstand the despair of boredom and push through tedium and meaningless data to the point of transcendent acceptance and singular awareness. Through a discussion of her recent essay, Nothing Ever Happens: "Mister Squishy" and The Year of the Sentence Diagram, we analyze how Wallace on an atomic sentence level enacts the alienation, fretful search for meaning, and the dissolution of the self. Wallace longed for an escape from the prison of a neurotic self-consciousness and The Pale King was his final attempt to flee the analysis-paralysis of the reflexive self towards a higher purpose.

It is a novel that poses the provocative thesis that true heroism in modern American life consists in the endurance of soul-crushing boredom, and that by cultivating sustained attentiveness and wading through the myriad noise of the culture industry we may find on the other side an enlightened tranquility.

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Eleanor Russell joins us to discuss the mystical writings of French philosopher, Simone Weil. Published posthumously and edited by Gustave Thibon, Gravity and Grace is a collection of fragments from Weil's notebooks that sketch the core themes of her Christian mysticism in crisp, compact aphorisms. Weil did not set out to find God; instead, she was overwhelmed by a mystical experience of Christ's presence, after which her interests shifted from political philosophy to theology. Weil’s Christian mysticism revolves around a central paradox: God’s presence, truth, and love reveal themselves to the fullest only at the extremities of absence, suffering, and grief. In the same way, we can only experience Christ’s radical love and redemptive suffering in solidarity with all those who are marginalized, oppressed, and enslaved. The result was a distinctive form of Christian mysticism that turned the tenets of Catholic orthodox on their head. Weil refused baptism out of her love for that which lies outside of the Church. She located Christ’s apotheosis not in the resurrection but in his final cry of agony and despair, and she considered God’s abandonment of this world to evil, affliction, and cruel fate to be a necessary condition of the Creation. In this episode, we discuss Weil’s enigmatic, fragmentary masterpiece in order to understand that radical form of faith that only becomes possible in moments when God forsakes us and nothing shows itself as divine. Weil’s words kindle a fire in dark times: “If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”

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Susan Sontag for almost forty years was the most recognisable public intellectual in America. She inspired an entire generation of critics to read more widely, think and feel more deeply, and stay attuned to the transformative power of art. In her numerous critical essays on art, politics, and our technologically mediated ways of seeing, Sontag built up her own distinctive aesthetic and moral sensibility, one that merged the moral seriousness of high art and the joyful eroticism of so-called low cultural products. Her debut collection, Against Interpretation, made her an almost overnight intellectual celebrity fueled by such iconoclastic essays like Notes on 'Camp'. In this episode, critic and art historian, A.V. Marraccini guest hosts to discuss the legacy and enduring importance of Sontag's writing, orbiting around a discussion of the early Notes on 'Camp' and the mid-period definitive takedown of fascist aesthetics, Fascinating Fascism. Ultimately we argue that a reconsideration of these essays are indispensable to understanding our own neo-fascist moment in which a new breed of grifters and cynical aesthetes are attempting to blind us to history and obscure the baleful influence of the fascist aesthetic’s romantic longings. Re-reading Sontag reminds us of the interwovenness of art and politics and ask us to confront urgent moral questions of the critic's and artist's role during tumultuous political times. How do we avoid complicity in a society in the grip of political nihilism and spellbound by fantasies of domination and purifying violence?

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