Essays
American Idols
Death in the magnetic age
[Sam Kriss]
That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.
Militants for Peace
Christian pacifism and human nature
[Peter Mommsen]
Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. One of these is that humans are wired for violence. Another is that a world without bloodshed is an impossible ideal that dreamers may yearn for but can never realize in history. The story I am about to tell is partly a story about how I came to agree with Christian pacifism that both of these assumptions are wrong.
My Father’s War
Anger and inheritance
[Oliver Bateman]
Ira furor brevis est, as Seneca quoted—anger is a brief madness—and my father’s rages were nothing if not mad: the wild eyes, the grimace, the guttural roar, the groaning and bellowing. But brief though the outbursts might have been, the fury smoldered until his bitter end. “It’s you or me,” he would sneer at us whenever we mustered the courage to fight back, “and I damn sure hope you want it to be you, because I sure as hell want it to be me.”
Symposium: What is violence for?
Demonic Force
[Mary Gaitskill]
I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand, in the way I understand the dreams that horrify and bewilder me: on a primitive feeling level that translates into images but not words; maybe we just don’t want to admit that we understand.
The War Habit
[David Bromwich]
As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.
Fear and Trembling in the Garrison
[Theo Lipsky]
Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness.
Propaganda of the Deed
[Sophie Pinkham]
She had been worried, before Solovyev’s attempt two years earlier, that a failed shot at the tsar might “bring about still more serious reaction.” She and her fellow assassins seem never to have considered that success could have the same effect.
Kinds of Killing
[Claudia Verhoeven]
The cases intersected in 1969, went to trial simultaneously in 1970, then concluded in early 1971, with the death sentences and guilty verdicts of both appearing side by side on the front pages of American newspapers. It was this convergence that made it so obvious, and so culturally confrontational, that Manson and My Lai shared gruesome content and form.
Popular Justice
[Geoff Shullenberger]
Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial.
What We Become
[Alia Malek]
Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened.
Dialogue
Is Death the Muse
A conversation with Shane McCrae
[Shane McCrae, John Palattella and Julia Aizuss]
“To some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion. It’s maybe an extended exercise of Keatsian—although is there any other kind?—negative capability, where you pretend you don’t know what you do know, because otherwise you will adulterate the thing that you make.”
Survey
Capturing Violence
A survey of photojournalists
Is there any instance or aspect of violence that you would not photograph?
“I don’t want to photograph the funerals of my fellow journalists who were martyred in the field in Gaza, or any of their families, or even their homes that were destroyed by the Israeli occupation. I don’t want to photograph any of my relatives or friends who were injured or harmed by the army. I feel that my duty here is to offer my condolences to them, not to photograph them. I feel that my family could be in their place one day. I don’t want to photograph them. There are many scenes that make you lose the desire to photograph, especially if you are filming in your country and you have to convey the image to the world.”
Literature
Permanent Impermanence
[Jenny Erpenbeck]
Translated by Kurt Beals
At Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bleached bright white, and birds chirp from a quince tree. On the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side, there’s a beautiful park with large chestnut trees.
A Letter to Vania
[Yousri Alghoul]
Translated by Graham Liddell
I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.
Reviews
Porn
[Lillian Fishman]
Because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. For better or worse, we’re going to stay on the front page.
Jiu-Jitsu
[Jessa Crispin]
For the left, Penny was not only a racist vigilante who had executed Jordan Neely—yet another unarmed black man—but also, because of his former military service, an extension of the state. For the right, Penny was a hero, someone who was stepping up to help protect innocent bystanders from the chaos of contemporary urban life. My husband, who is a jiu-jitsu blue belt, saw something else: a bad rear naked choke.
Violence and the Left
[Jacob Abolafia]
The left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right. And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real.
Explicit Content
[Alex Rollins Berg]
When I watched the CCTV footage of U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a married 37-year-old and father of a newborn, obliterate himself in a fireball, I had a wildly inappropriate thought: damn, that’s a nice shot.
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 35. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Letter from the Editors
A note on issue 35
[The Editors]
It can seem perverse, so long as violence is ongoing, to ask for philosophical reflection on violence. In some sense, it surely is. It is a perversity that is coequal with intellectual life itself, which will always seem decadent or ineffectual in view of some more urgent concern or other, and yet remains our only avenue for understanding why something feels urgent to us in the first place, or why it seems less so to others.
Etymology
Terrorism
“The Terrorist … is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.”
Essays
American Idols
Death in the magnetic age
[Sam Kriss]
That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.
Militants for Peace
Christian pacifism and human nature
[Peter Mommsen]
Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. One of these is that humans are wired for violence. Another is that a world without bloodshed is an impossible ideal that dreamers may yearn for but can never realize in history. The story I am about to tell is partly a story about how I came to agree with Christian pacifism that both of these assumptions are wrong.
My Father’s War
Anger and inheritance
[Oliver Bateman]
Ira furor brevis est, as Seneca quoted—anger is a brief madness—and my father’s rages were nothing if not mad: the wild eyes, the grimace, the guttural roar, the groaning and bellowing. But brief though the outbursts might have been, the fury smoldered until his bitter end. “It’s you or me,” he would sneer at us whenever we mustered the courage to fight back, “and I damn sure hope you want it to be you, because I sure as hell want it to be me.”
Symposium: What is violence for?
Demonic Force
[Mary Gaitskill]
I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand, in the way I understand the dreams that horrify and bewilder me: on a primitive feeling level that translates into images but not words; maybe we just don’t want to admit that we understand.
The War Habit
[David Bromwich]
As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.
Fear and Trembling in the Garrison
[Theo Lipsky]
Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness.
Propaganda of the Deed
[Sophie Pinkham]
She had been worried, before Solovyev’s attempt two years earlier, that a failed shot at the tsar might “bring about still more serious reaction.” She and her fellow assassins seem never to have considered that success could have the same effect.
Kinds of Killing
[Claudia Verhoeven]
The cases intersected in 1969, went to trial simultaneously in 1970, then concluded in early 1971, with the death sentences and guilty verdicts of both appearing side by side on the front pages of American newspapers. It was this convergence that made it so obvious, and so culturally confrontational, that Manson and My Lai shared gruesome content and form.
Popular Justice
[Geoff Shullenberger]
Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial.
What We Become
[Alia Malek]
Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened.
Dialogue
Is Death the Muse
A conversation with Shane McCrae
[Shane McCrae, John Palattella and Julia Aizuss]
“To some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion. It’s maybe an extended exercise of Keatsian—although is there any other kind?—negative capability, where you pretend you don’t know what you do know, because otherwise you will adulterate the thing that you make.”
Survey
Capturing Violence
A survey of photojournalists
Is there any instance or aspect of violence that you would not photograph?
“I don’t want to photograph the funerals of my fellow journalists who were martyred in the field in Gaza, or any of their families, or even their homes that were destroyed by the Israeli occupation. I don’t want to photograph any of my relatives or friends who were injured or harmed by the army. I feel that my duty here is to offer my condolences to them, not to photograph them. I feel that my family could be in their place one day. I don’t want to photograph them. There are many scenes that make you lose the desire to photograph, especially if you are filming in your country and you have to convey the image to the world.”
Literature
Permanent Impermanence
[Jenny Erpenbeck]
Translated by Kurt Beals
At Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bleached bright white, and birds chirp from a quince tree. On the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side, there’s a beautiful park with large chestnut trees.
A Letter to Vania
[Yousri Alghoul]
Translated by Graham Liddell
I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.
Reviews
Porn
[Lillian Fishman]
Because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. For better or worse, we’re going to stay on the front page.
Jiu-Jitsu
[Jessa Crispin]
For the left, Penny was not only a racist vigilante who had executed Jordan Neely—yet another unarmed black man—but also, because of his former military service, an extension of the state. For the right, Penny was a hero, someone who was stepping up to help protect innocent bystanders from the chaos of contemporary urban life. My husband, who is a jiu-jitsu blue belt, saw something else: a bad rear naked choke.
Violence and the Left
[Jacob Abolafia]
The left’s fascination with violence, its Mangione memes and Sinwar graffiti, appears to have few real-life consequences outside the hurt feelings of some undergraduates and the ruffled feathers of those business and cultural figures who seem glad of the excuse to be able to finally defect to the rampant right. And yet I am going to try to convince you that the left’s violence problem is serious and real.
Explicit Content
[Alex Rollins Berg]
When I watched the CCTV footage of U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a married 37-year-old and father of a newborn, obliterate himself in a fireball, I had a wildly inappropriate thought: damn, that’s a nice shot.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.