Author: James Livingston

To say that Trump’s tweets on Epstein’s death are demented is to suggest that he’s suffering from a disease.  He’s not, and to say so is to dignify his cretinous behavior.  This so-called man has been peddling conspiracy theories all his life.     Which is to say he’s been bullshitting, in the technical sense, all his life. As Harry Frankfurt, the expert on the subject, would say, the liar knows the truth and countermands it for a specific purpose, whereas the bullshitter is actually incapable of acknowledging any reality external to his own utterance.      Conspiracy theories thrive on a tragic scheme of motives that, as Kenneth Burke explained, bend toward both the supernatural (vertical) and the utilitarian (horizontal).  The inscrutable Gods up there have convened, and so have the international bankers (the Jews, of course) down here–there’s no way to identify them, nor their purposes, but they are so fundamentally causative that their effects are everywhere.  The conspiracy theorist has faith in the sense that Paul the Apostle, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, described it: “the conviction of things unseen.”    Trump the bullshitter has entertained a lot of conspiracy theories in the course of his so-called career, most importantly the “birther” business about Obama, which made him the president of the United States, dedicated to undoing everything his African-American predecessor had accomplished.  His political capital, like...

I recently  read a piece in Wired about the impact of global warming on the bodies and minds of the Inuit (and the rest of us)—how profound changes in what we take to be the external world manifest as profound psychological (inner) changes, which are themselves somatic effects, registers of physical distress or debilitation.  Most of us know the lacerating, visceral effects of natural disaster, and now of political catastrophe in the form of the Trump White House.   But how do they go together?   Why do we feel penetrated by these events, as if our skin is just a porous veil and our guts have spilled into view?  Why these cramps and lesions and dizziness and anger?  In “the Use and Abuse of History,” Nietzsche announced that what distinguished the consciousness of modern Man was the notion that he had an interior to which no exterior corresponded, and vice versa.  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer turned this idea into the premise of their Dialectic of Enlightenment(1944), and hundreds of other theorists enlisted it to explain “alienation.”  But it doesn’t sound like a self-evident proposition anymore.  Kant was closer to the truth of our times: “But through inner experience I am conscious of my existence in time (consequently also of its determinability in time), and this is more than to be conscious of any representation. It is identical with the empirical consciousness of my existence, which is...