Richard Seymour
Richard Seymour lives, works and writes in London. He runs the Lenin's Tomb website, which comments on the War on Terror, Islamophobia and neoliberalism.Blog
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“Cursed into Obscurity” Fred Inglis, Keith Miller and Alison Flood review Richard Seymour’s Unhitched
Fred Inglis of the Independent recently reviewed Unhitched, a penetrating critique of the life and work of the late Christopher Hitchens. If you forgot what camaraderie looks like, here are a few extracts to remind you:
“Seymour is certainly master of the records; he knows the work closely and cites it scrupulously. But his headlong, foam-flecked interpretation, voiced in a manner recklessly close to Hitchens’s own but without the grace, the wit, the tearing high spirits and the faultless ear for the fall of cadence of his great original, becomes merely tedious, repetitive and unconvincing.”
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Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History sparks debate
Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History is a thorn in the side of twenty-first century liberals. Losurdo's mordant exposition of the racist, classist ideas put forward by giants of liberalism, such as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham or Alexis De Tocqueville, calls into question the liberal nature itself of their thought. In a long review for the Times Literary Supplement, Jennifer Pitts, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Chicago University, takes Losurdo's counter-history as a starting point to reflect on: "how, and why ... should we tell the history of liberalism today?"
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Why it's kicking off in Britain
You've probably heard it said a dozen times today: "It's like 28 Days Later out there." Every thirty seconds, there's a new riot zone. I've rarely known the capital to be this wound up. It's kicked off in East Ham, then Whitechapel, then Ealing Broadway (really?), then Waltham Forest... It's kicked off in Croydon, then Birmingham, then (just a rumour so far) Bradford... The banlieues of Britain are erupting in mass civil unrest. (Lenin's Tomb)
Tariq Ali, writing on the London Review of Books blog, asks the questions mainly absent from much of last night's coverage:
Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can't say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.
Discussions
Discussions occur on book pages throughout the site. The most recent discussions about the works of Richard Seymour are listed below.
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After giving Richard Seymour an audience by reading his essay, "The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens," I've decided that the purchase and investigation of his "Unhitched" effort will be worth neither my dime nor my time. Which is oddly a shame, because I chase a high that Seymour can only understand as fetishized contrarianism, but which bonded me to the Hitch, however briefly, as his student: it includes a passion for having new evidence infect your most cherished beliefs so that your former identity must evolve and so that your newfound "hypocrisy" must be reckoned with as a matter of intellectual rigor. One of my cherished beliefs, I'll admit, is that even when Christopher was wrong, he was principled. Despite sentimental personal attachments, Mr. Seymour MIGHT have persuaded me with evidence. Instead, he appears to think that Hitchens was an unprincipled scoundrel. I understand Mr. Seymour is praised for the extensiveness and exhaustiveness of his argumentation -- even his essays are brimming with footnotes. Taking a cue from Seymour and substituting amateur psychoanalysis for de rigeur analysis, I'm inclined to say that it's as easy to dismiss the author of this book as a person with a tribal bone to pick, and an education in fashionable nonsense that makes his bone picking sound more legitimate than it is. During the time that I studied with the late Hitch, my long term girlfriend was Afghan and Muslim. Seymour's readers would do well to hear her sentiments on the man's "blatant Islamophobia" and on the Taliban who had beggared her country. But if her opinions squared with his, whatever would they do? We have Ayan Hirsi Ali to reference, for a start. I hope Mr. Seymour and Verso enjoy the dimes this book reels in. The rarity of the condition to which I referred above--the addiction to the high of having your most cherished notions shattered by evidence and your tribe membership revoked as a result--is still a rare enough addiction.