January 1st, 2019
In the post, dated January 1st, 2019, Critchley describes a dystopia in which the President has committed suicide, people either have sex in public or not at all, and the Russian search engine that overtook Google has instituted a "1:1 drone to person charity program."
Critchley's dystopic brief embodies what he has proposed as the appropriate approach to art today: "the heart of any artistic response to the present should perhaps be the cultivation of the monstrous and its concomitant affect – disgust."
The post includes a meta-review in which Critchley's fictional international political force "The League of Rootless Cosmopolitans" offers a disclaimer for his piece:
This rag from Comrade Critchley has not one shred of truth contained within its bowels. The League of Rootless Cosmopolitans, a fine organization of lumpenbourgeois entrepeneurs, is not the 1%. The 1% are our enemies; we are the 0.1%, the devante-garde of humanity. We have embraced the values of full communism, albeit of the meritocratic sort. Our politics are simple: once you devour your competitors, you have the right to enjoy the spoils of mankind without charge or limit. We are the true heirs of Blanqui, Lenin, Debord, and Steve Jobs. We despise work, we love drinking, and the party comes before all. Our party is international, interracial, intersexual, interwoven interstitially in interesting intersubjective intercourse interminably in situ.
More from Critchely on art can be found in The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing, which he coauthored with Jamieson Webster. Verso will release the paperback edition of Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology in February.
Visit Communists in Situ to read his piece in full.