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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.
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