{"title":"Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things","authors":"Bruce Robbins","doi":"10.1111/criq.12759","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12759","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"54-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140487102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"T.S. Eliot, Post-War Geopolitics and ‘Eastern Europe’","authors":"Juliette Bretan","doi":"10.1111/criq.12766","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12766","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Digressing from decidedly prosaic themes in a letter to his mother in December 1919 – a lingering cold, Christmas plans and a vague New Year's resolution of writing ‘a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’ – to include a rousing, two-pronged critique against American apathy towards global peacemaking, and the complicated reconstruction of new nation-states, T.S. Eliot pulls no punches at the state of post-war Europe:</p><p>Eliot was commenting on American isolationism and neutrality following the First World War, with Woodrow Wilson's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and limited American support for the League of Nations. He was also referring to the slow burn and enduringly complex effort to establish the boundaries of the newly appearing nation states of Europe, especially in its east.<sup>2</sup> This is a passage, we might argue, which reveals Eliot's interest in the east of Europe – an interest particularly manifesting as a recurrent anxiety about affairs in Vienna, which he pedestals as a site of inarticulable human suffering, reflecting the widespread popularity of support for the city at the time in British cultural and political circles.<sup>3</sup> However, the letter also suggests a certain tension within Eliot's perspective. For whilst he specifies Viennese sympathy, this is counterpointed against a stigmatisation of the wider political difficulties in the region post-war, which were contributing to civic breakdown. Central Europe and Vienna are to be supported, but the wider politics is a ‘fiasco’; a word which imagines not only disaster but also sheer ludicrousness, as if it is unreasonable to even think of the possibility of a ‘reorganisation of nationalities’ in that area in the first place. For Eliot, concepts of national structure, curation and control have limited scope within what was a multi-ethnic and transforming space.</p><p>Eliot's interest in the region remained; for, three years later, a note he provided within the first edition of <i>The Waste Land</i> – that ‘long poem’ he mentions in his letter – claimed the masterpiece (or, at least, one of its sections) was similarly inspired by what he described as ‘the present decay of Eastern Europe’.<sup>4</sup> Similarly, but not quite: for this time Eliot does not redeem the region with tales of victims of Vienna but simply inflates the appalling conditions in the region to a broad-sweep devastation. His description, as many critics have noted, reflects common stereotypes about the region following the First World War: the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and German Empires, cultural heterogeneity, rising nationalism and lack of legal-political authority in the area meant it was often seen as unstable and volatile within western-inspired and universally applied models of nationality and statehood.<sup>5</sup> In 1919, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George, suggested the region's ‘nations were going straight to perdition’; ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"51-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12766","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139585533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Witch Hunt","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12768","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12768","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.<sup>1</sup> Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it?</p><p>One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.<sup>2</sup> Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase.</p><p>As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch <i>hunting</i> until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.<sup>3</sup> The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch <i>hunt</i> without introduction or qualification.<sup>4</sup> It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now.</p><p>In other words, the ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"121-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12768","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139557497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oh, Mr Hitchens!","authors":"Laura Kipnis","doi":"10.1111/criq.12758","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12758","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2010, when a book I'd written called <i>How to Become a Scandal</i> was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I'm sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men's room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: ‘Christopher – you are a scream!’ she'd written back, to which he responded, ‘Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.’</p><p>I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher's, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you'd go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him. Mocking him on gender could even be fun, as at least there, unlike elsewhere, the positions seemed lightly held. When he published his notorious ‘Why Women Aren't Funny’ piece in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, I responded (I hope a teensy bit funnily) in <i>Slate</i>, where he also frequently wrote, that though it was a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, it was unclear to which decade it applied – it had the slightly musty air of 1960s-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia ‘for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “Oh Mr. Hitchens!” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.’</p><p>My problem with Christopher, hardly mine alone, was (to state the obvious) simply that he was one of the more charming men on the planet and mixed with liquor, this is a dangerous combination. Like most people who knew him at all, a few of the drunkest nights of my life were spent in his company. Conversations were funny, flirtatious, frank. Yet the rightward turn and increasing political rigidity also made him seem ridiculous: eruditely shrill.</p><p>Oh man, the rigidity. On one occasion, Christopher was speaking at Northwestern, outside Chicago, where I was teaching – I believe he was to talk on Kissinger, so it must have been before 9/11 and the endless chest-thumping about Islamofascism. The talk was arranged by one of his devoted local lieutenants, Danny Postel. I knew Danny slightly, in part because his uncle Bo","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"80-84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138826120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Terrorist","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12755","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12755","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of a word. And within that argument, it is perhaps even more surprising that anger should focus not, as usually happens, on something that was offensively said, but exactly on what was not said. The protestors had a specific, favoured term, and were outraged when they did not hear it. This suggests a sort of super-censorship, a regime which, not content with telling broadcasters what they mustn't say, seeks positively to dictate what they must say. Indeed, the point was pressed in just that form when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, told the world's press that they ‘must declare and call Hamas a terrorist organization without ifs and buts, without explanation’.<sup>1</sup> On what basis does the head of a democratic state issue instructions to independent journalists about their detailed lexical choices? And why this particular word?</p><p>Obviously the word itself is contested ground. In a despairing <i>tour de force</i> Alex P. Schmid, a leading academic in the field, compiled 250 different definitions of ‘terrorism’, the great majority of them formulated between 1970 and 2010.<sup>2</sup> It is not surprising that such a heavily debated term should prove to be a flash point at a moment of crisis. On the other hand, it is puzzling that its use is so passionately required (or resisted) when there is such a spectacular lack of certainty about what it actually means. Its clarity seems to be of a different kind, a definiteness that is independent of definition. The people who use it, or who insist on its use, may not be sure of its meaning, but they know very well what they mean by using it. As Schmid notes at the head of his article, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking shortly after 9/11, brushed aside the whole business of defining one's terms: ‘What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism’.<sup>3</sup> This is to ground the meaning of the word in a gut feeling; it expresses an encounter with the concept which is not intellectual and analytic, but sensory and immediate. It thus goes some way to explain the heat of the debate. The belief that this is the right word to use is visceral.</p><p>It is a coherent position, but the trouble with it is that it treats the word as if it were <i>only</i> emotive, and therefore fails to acknowledge that it does also, despite everything, have definite referential content. A glance at those 250 definitions is enough to see that, for all their differences, they converge on a substantive if approximate object. For example, the US State Department's working definition from 2006 is that terrorism is ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 4","pages":"124-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12755","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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