To the extent we take seriously the possibility that we live in a simulation, we should be cosmologically and theologically discomfited. We should be rocked with doubt. A simulated world is likely to be much less predictable and sensibly governed than a world grounded on a large, planetary rock or on the immutable word of a benevolent God.
In a 2011 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlant engaged in a spirited exchange about love. At the center was Hardt’s contention that we lack a “properly” political concept of love, in which both reason and passion are deployed to bond us in difference, rescue us from narcissism, and transform our relationships with the world. Love is always “a risk,” he argued, “in which we abandon some of our attachments to this world in the hope of creating another, better one” — why not imagine a kind of political love that could truly provide us the possibility for metamorphosis? Disagreeing with Hardt’s premise more than the proposal, Berlant countered that love has, in fact, long “been floated by so many as a solution — literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dissolution — to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community.” One only needs to look to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Melanie Klein, to see how love has been theorized in an array of political contexts for when things go drastically wrong.
Though she doesn’t care much for politics, this formula for love’s work is vigorously at play in Eugenie Brinkema’s recently published Life-Destroying Diagrams. It not only makes the logic between destruction and love structurally obvious — the first section is organized around horror; the second, love — but poses love as the solution to a crucial problem plaguing formalism. Lovers of formalism, she argues, have become too mollified by the arguments of its haters. Her archnemesis is Fredric Jameson, whose call “for a ‘literary or cultural criticism which seeks to avoid imprisonment in the windless closure of the formalisms’” has emboldened others to accuse formalists “of abandoning the world, its misfortunes, its tumults and things.” Formalists, Brinkema argues, have been cowed by requests to make formalism relevant to the world, and their responses have come at the expense of forgetting about form itself. As Maurice Denis argued in his famous 1890 symbolist manifesto, “Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” “it is well to remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”
All the Lovers in the Night is one of those novels that hangs together so delicately that it’s difficult to discern its overall design; upon finishing it, all you are left with are questions. At heart, though, it is a love letter to finding self-worth and a turbid telling of what it means when our inner loner is finally brave enough to step into the light.
Instead, the surprising frail tenderness that punctuated Moshfegh’s earlier work is more battered than ever in “Lapvona.” With its determined anomie and its coldly beautiful sentences, this fable is in service to a stunning, hard, insistent worship of misanthropy.