I explained here what the Shitzek op was and is up to. Fifteen years later, tragically, infuriatingly, their successes in this rhetorical and symbolic revanchism are plain for all to see. Nina Power was the lead emissary of the racist joke prank, the alternative programme for the Idea of Communism conference whose aim was to keep everyone but ressentimental white boys out of the auditorium, thus creating a safe space for a revival of Shitzek’s Nazi phantasmagoric entertainments under the banners of communism, leftism, and Marxism.
Badiou, the partner in crime, and Power’s entry to this circle through his translator Alberto Toscano with whom she was then living, is a more ambivalent figure, who at some point seemed to catch on to Shitzek’s bullshit and fraudulence. I won’t make excuses for him, but only to say I can imagine how he was drawn in to this scumbaggery sort of unwittingly. It is worth noting that on current affairs, he always took the right stance, if often explaining himself in odd ways. He resisted the hijab ban shit (a provocation perfectly designed to draw in prominent French feminists, among whom numbered many maghrébines, as being about fashion), and he was emphatically not Charlie. But his academic philosophy is execrable woo woo and reaction. He is famous for his metaphysics of subjectivity. His claim is that human (fully human, politically, intellectually, morally, philosophically human) Subjects are created by something he calls (the) Event, of which the Jacobin Terror is the modern age model, and fidelity to that Event. And just by the bye, there has never been an Event in Africa. So there are no subjects there. Nothing to see here. Simultaneously, all modern political ideological leaders fail somehow, so we are going back to ‘Saint Paul’ whose Subjectivity befell him eventfully on the road to Damascus. Shitzek himself, Agamben and Badiou all issued books about Paul around this time. In Paul they found the venerable ancient dogma against the radical social movements, women’s liberation, the black freedom struggle, anti-colonial revolutions, they were looking for. Paul said everyone is a generic something a generic sinner in the body of Christ. Therefore all these differences were mere illusions. History is trivial, merely concrete, Untruth, not philosophical. Blah blah.
Nina Power was an errand boy excuse me errand tom boy in this milieu, which coheres with her own quirky style of bashing of the social movements (eruptions of viceral loathing) but not with her sudden pose of coming to reform feminism with a better feminism.
A feminism it turns out which is to benefit by having its content simply replaced with ferocious revanchist masculism and misogyny right out the Friekorps Imaginary.
This ‘critique of and new manifesto for feminism’ of her ‘chap book’ all originated as hysterically misogynist rants, not at all posing as disappointed and ‘deprssed’ feminist sentiment, on her blog titled with youthful humility Infinite Thought. Then bits were cut out and a frame affixed that was to sell it, from Zerobooks, as better feminism.
(Shortly thereafter, she picked up her ever-present shtick where this would end we are not slapping this face that dares to be disquietingly tawny to condemn her vileness but to try to understand it.)
So: a section had its origin in a blog post on Infinite Thought in which Power, like a monty python drag caricature of little England ladies reading the Sun in their kitchen and declaring oh my stars! well i never! at the foibles and adventures of individuals in Britain, reacted to what she saw on the telly. She religiously watched Sex and the City and Big Brother, and then read Mark Fisher’s k-punk blog to scavenge expressions of outrage and amazement. Translated by Zero Books into a New Manifesto For a New Bold Marxist Feminism, these blog posts would be shorn of the mention of their being reactions to episodes of Big Brother and would just be presented as Nina Power talking about GLOBAL HUMANITY.
On Big Brother she observed women touching their breasts a lot, or so it seemed to Mark Fisher, who told her what she saw. This became a bold call for New Feminists to Stop Touching Their Breasts and remember they were created by God Almighty for feeding babies not your own pleasure!
(This very enlightened sciency lady thinks breasts feed babies, brains and stomachs and blood not entering into this breast bizniz. Brains make Infinite Thotz and Rockets!)
So this proceeding was a bit eccentric in the context of the Zero books project and its broader trotty shitzekian intellectual production, tho this mirrored Shitzek’s own declaration that he had come to reform Marxism and Communism by making it Hitlerian. But except for Power and Fisher, and later Kotsko, most of those books were somewhat serious and tried at least to conform to some scholarly standards, or at least sound like John Hoberman or E. Ann Kaplan when they were just discussing movies and pop music.
In any case, my theory, which is not random but an hypothesis based on what I know about her personally and this environment and on the development of her text product (hesitate to call it opinions, too shifty and dishonest) which I observed in real time, is for her this decades-long freak-out about uppity feminists buying lots of shoes and disrespecting men all really started with a psychotically envious reaction to the output of one Ashley Sayeau.
It’s not a good thing that half the world’s feminists thinks feminism is about buying shoes and the other half thinks it is about basic necessities and not being raped and killed.
(Now she would add the shtick pretending she wasn’t suggesting there was any good feminism vs. bad feminism, but here she is happy to assert without that disavowal that feminism about buying shoes is evil, and feminists who content themselves with access to basic necessities and not being raped and killed are virtuous.)
There was a Nation piece much like the one linked up there a couple paras, but much earlier. 2008 or 9. I have the link, it happens, in an old email, but its dead. In any case, it was much the same thing: Sayeau noted that as expected, in this financial crisis, as always in economic downturns, the media was full of hatred for women who enjoy shopping, and energetically scapegoating feminism for the economic downturn and coming austerity. Ellen Willis once wrote, also in the Nation (she went very bad I know) that people who hate shopping hate women. Sayeau made the point that men’s consumption, of say cars, assault weapons, nuclear warheads, managed not to draw upon it this strange condemnation as somehow hostile to both socialist struggle and the capitalist economy, the way women’s shoe and cosmetics buying, and baby having and baby stuff buying, routinely did from the bourgeois soi-disant progressive commentariat. She failed to note but ought have noticed that of course consumption by black men, especially young black men, is more viciously condemned by that industry of thotz than women’s consumption. The Manolos are bad; the Jordans are often portrayed as criminal, things of moral turpitude. I recall stories in the respectable media like NYTimes in the 80s about people being murdered for shearling car coats, and they weren’t working in the supply chain. At the time Nina Power began heating up this enraged rhetoric about nail polish, the British media was pretending bewilderment that teenagers ‘looting’ liked beautiful new sweatshirts. I talked to my ancient auntie now deceased about this. We were so delighted to have found her some really good Champions for 6 bucks at a sample sale, we liked them better for being ‘practically free’ as my friend Phyllis says of real estate in Calabria, how can this possibly be pathologized? Me I love sales. If I could loot I probably would. Nina Power was the type of person who would say, I think she did in fact write a story like this, if memory serves, that looting would be forgiveable if instead of nice sweatshirts you grabbed things of transcendant value like copies of Mein Kampf, things that would make you a better person. She was always this walking, lisping cliché.
Ashley Sayeau, defending shoe purchases against all the old hat berating of women as selfish and shallow and vain unless barefoot literally, masquerading as ‘critique of feminism’ which of course involved misindentifying the women’s liberation movement globally as Sex and the City, drove Power nuts and set all this off, I believe. Sayeau, about her age, getting to write this in respectable prog press, being also rather beautiful, and above all having an expensive London flat, (Nina Power’s psyche is I think largely a casualty of the property ladder’s post 911 new normal) about which Power knew from her relationship — a matter of dispute as to its nature, I have my opinions — with Sayeau’s then husband.
Anyway, something set Power off so that daily on her blog, she used a lot of exclamation points in alarm at women who are so selfish and shallow and vain and greedy and lascivious they ‘don’t deserve the cosmos!’
A commenter on my blogs who used to call herself anodyne lite, a natural scientist of some sort, noted à propos of Power’s crazed rant about the Iranian exec in space that in fact the creation of chocolate bars that don’t melt was a much more difficult and advanced scientific undertaking than space travel. One must also note the way Power’s slavish perverse kneeling awe of Men and their Manly Accomplishments, what she believes to be the work of the Great Phalluses, leads her to this batshit babytalk about the military projects of national space programs, appearing to her as nothing but Art Philosophy Truth Seeking, ‘the pointless beauty of extraterrestrial exploration.’
Here’s a cap of an old email of mine responding in a discussion about the book chapter, in which I quoted at length the original blogpost with interspersed comments:
In the book it’s cleaned up a bit, and is just monty python without the exterminism, Well I never! Lady wants a Cadbury in Space!
…to be continued