Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do just that. In his younger years, a career-minded socialist, he emerged from the smoke of 9/11 a neoconservative “Marxist,” an advocate of America’s invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity. Throughout his life, he played the role of universal gadfly, whose commitment to the truth transcended the party line as well as received wisdom. But how much of this was imposture? In this highly critical study, Richard Seymour casts a cold eye over the career of the “Hitch” to uncover an intellectual trajectory determined by expediency and a fetish for power.
As an orator and writer, Hitchens offered something unique and highly marketable. But for all his professed individualism, he remains a recognizable historical type—the apostate leftist. Unhitched presents a rewarding and entertaining case study, one that is also a cautionary tale for our times.
Paperback, 160 pages
ISBN: 9781844679904
January 2013
$16.95 / £9.99 / $18.00CAN
Other Editions
Ebook
ISBN: 9781844679911
January 2013
$9.99
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Part of the Counterblasts series
Reviews
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“Clever, incisive...Unhitched offers a more thorough and in-depth discrediting of Hitchens than anything previously published. And in doing so, Seymour has made an important contribution to understanding the political role of the intellectual celebrity in our time.”
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“Richard Seymour's Unhitched, a slim and scathing denunciation of turncoat scoundrel Christopher Hitchens, is a thoroughly satisfying and politically important book by one of the few remaining great radical left journalists.”
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“Seymour reveals Hitchens as having had a lifelong admiration both for the United States and for empires as civilizing forces.”
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“Richard Seymour employs a unique technique to shred Hitchens’s political philosophy to pieces: Seymour puts the late writer on trial.”
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“Well-argued... I think Seymour rather pitied Hitchens, as the married man pities the philanderer.”
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“He is not worthy of changing Christopher Hitchens’s printer cartridge.”
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“A nasty piece of work...(Full disclosure: Hitchens was a friend, mentor, and neighbor of mine.)”
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“Seymour’s book offers an exciting counterbalance to the often uncritical praise that has flowed heavily since Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010.”
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“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 a cadence of his great original, becomes merely tedious, repetitive and unconvincing... This little book is 134 pages long. The author shouldn’t have done it. It is paltry and it is trivially abusive. Its subject was as eloquent, cultivated, exuberant, unstoppable, sheerly gigantic a journalist as British or American politics has known since George Orwell.”
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“Caustic demolition of Hitchens – not dissimilar to Hitch’s way with Mother Teresa or the Clintons.”
Blog
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How Far Did the Strident Marxist Go? The Washington Post, The New Statesman and Newsweek Review Unhitched
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Richard Seymour’s Unhitched has roused Christopher Hitchens’ legion of defenders and apologists to indignation, and Seymour has risen to the occasion in characteristically scathing fashion.
In the Washington Post: “The author — a Marxist writer and activist born in Northern Ireland and living in London — has done his research, apparently having read almost everything his subject ever wrote, but in the service of the narrow goals of the over-zealous prosecutor…Seymour insists on advancing his argument from solid ground onto very thin ice.”
In response, Verso will soon be publishing Seymour’s new trilogy of Stieg Larsson-style books: “The Strident Marxist Who Went Too Far, The Strident Marxist Who Didn't Go Far Enough, and The Strident Marxist Who Went Far Enough, Took Pictures, Came Back and Mailed Them To Your Mama.”
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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.”
Discussions
Begin a discussion about this book-
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.
