“One of the two Naomis then embraces a form of paranoid politics, while the other does not.”
Klein, or is it Wolf (?) still to this day perpetuates the myth of mass graves of indigenous children across Canada, despite *no evidence whatsoever.*
What Mr. Eagleton means to say is that one of the Naomis remains on the left and is therefore one of the goodies.
Typically rambling piece from a man who’s more interested in making snide remarks against anyone he dislikes (which appears to be everyone) and advertising his credentials as an intellectual – look! Nietzsche, Freud, Greek tragedy! How smart am I? – than actually saying anything of value.
Not possible to agree on a definition of “conspiracy theorist”. Hence your second sentence is moot.
In general, I distrust people with near and/or exciting theories.
Facts tend to be partial, often inchoate, and generally dull.
Excitement should always be confined to the visceral.
Be-ige!
Steve Murray
7 months ago
Eagleton likes to think of himself as different from other academics, and he is. He simply inhabits a different type of ivory tower.
Reading him is like witnessing him trying to toss himself off (the tower) and failing.
“Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.”
I doubt it. Mr. Eagleton strikes me as someone who would disapprove of innocent until proven guilty as a bourgeois concept propagated by top-hatted capitalists and climate deniers.
Good point. I doubt there would be lamppost references about non white non males.
Carmel Shortall
7 months ago
What self-satisfied drivel! Takes 10 paragraphs of rhubarb and flannel to crawl round to the real point of the article: Klein’s Doppelganger book with its OFF THE CHARTS narcissistic premise.
“Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism…”
…may have been once but is now a bought-and-paid-for climate hysteric/current narrative stooge and all-round compliance monkey.
carl taylor
7 months ago
I may not be the most avid reader of Unherd, but even so, this is by far the worst article I’ve ever read here. It’s all over the place. I genuinely have no idea what the author is trying to say. Pointless drivel.
I reviewed Doppelganger myself: Who’s afraid of the big(-haired) bad Wolf?
There is another long but beautifully written review by Andrew Barr: Authors Who Haven’t Read Their Own Books
I think it would be fair to say that both of us are at odds with the somewhat gushing reviews it has been getting in legacy media, and we both home in on the same fundamental problem at the heart of Klein’s book.
David Wildgoose
7 months ago
Just a load of rambling, incoherent sneering. I presume he expects to be paid for this vacuous nonsense, which is just an insult to us all.
Allison Barrows
7 months ago
The very best thing about bylines is they tell you who you can skip.
Dumetrius
7 months ago
I once acquired an online fan who started imitating me in chat, repeating back to me lines from speeches I’d made.
It was eerie.
Almost like being in Canada.
Last edited 7 months ago by Dumetrius
Richard Craven
7 months ago
“Look,” replied the astronomer, “somewhere in the universe at this very moment, someone looking very much like you is asking that question of someone looking very much like me.”
Not at this very moment, because then it would have to be in this very space, which it clearly isn’t.
Right-Wing Hippie
7 months ago
Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary
So…Klein is a Wolf to Klein?
Let me fix this for you Terry:
“[Left-wingers]… have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent [the Right], so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame [capitalists].”
Last edited 7 months ago by David Harris
Dumetrius
7 months ago
.
Last edited 7 months ago by Dumetrius
Tyler Durden
7 months ago
The logic of sense precludes doppelgangers but a jabberwocky could be created in a test-tube then cloned.
Traditionally, doubles lie in the realm of the demonic which always stems from some kind of fear of nature and its stranger phenomena i.e. identical twins.
In any case, modern popular culture now prefers the time travel story and ‘meeting one’s former self’. This is stupid to the point that I’m personally relieved when another demonic twin pops up in the mirror during a derivative horror movie.
Last edited 7 months ago by Tyler Durden
0 0
6 months ago
“Clam dever”, as the man says in Ulysses. Indeed it is, and chilling too in its searching account of our impending apocalypse at the psychic and symbolic level – which after is the final arbitrar of cultural histories and the surest measure of their decline and fall. One sentence, virtually shorn of cleverality, is a moving stand-out:
“It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released.”
The closing question about the fate of the American left is intriguing although I do think that the date of the Democratic Party has more torque given the limited us of a left-Right in popular American discourse around election candidates – at least in the dialectical sense shared in common by communists and fascists.
It seems that the division of loyalties over the Hamas-Israeli conflict of the moment us likely to split the liberal vote which rather tenuously united to put Biden in the White House. It may be just a wild surmise but I guess this will do more to cleave the Left in twain than recent quarrels over trans, toilets and Olympic competitions.
Though perhaps – and here I admit the limits of my purview – it will simply serve to further polarise Republicans and Democrats, turning the former into proxy Zionists and the latter into proxy Jihadists. To say that this spells the death of the liberal imagination is an understatement but there is some consolation in the form of comic writing Professor Eagleton has invented. I for one can’t get enough of it though his “we” and “our” doesn’t always square exactly with mine.
“One of the two Naomis then embraces a form of paranoid politics, while the other does not.”
Klein, or is it Wolf (?) still to this day perpetuates the myth of mass graves of indigenous children across Canada, despite *no evidence whatsoever.*
What Mr. Eagleton means to say is that one of the Naomis remains on the left and is therefore one of the goodies.
Typically rambling piece from a man who’s more interested in making snide remarks against anyone he dislikes (which appears to be everyone) and advertising his credentials as an intellectual – look! Nietzsche, Freud, Greek tragedy! How smart am I? – than actually saying anything of value.
Nice line, though, about Wolf grooming Al Gore to exhibit human characteristics.
It does, though, have the virtue of summarising much of the output of the Guardian’s and the BBC’s favourite academics.
Another article slandering ‘conspiracy theorists’. As though non of their warnings ever come true.
Not possible to agree on a definition of “conspiracy theorist”. Hence your second sentence is moot.
In general, I distrust people with near and/or exciting theories.
Facts tend to be partial, often inchoate, and generally dull.
Excitement should always be confined to the visceral.
Be-ige!
Eagleton likes to think of himself as different from other academics, and he is. He simply inhabits a different type of ivory tower.
Reading him is like witnessing him trying to toss himself off (the tower) and failing.
On the upside, there are at this moment several million Eagletons on right wing planets tossing themselves off from a great height and succeeding.
With respect Steve, you missed out the “on” between “off” and “the tower”.
I consider the brackets did the intended job…
“Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.”
Meant in jest, perhaps, but still distasteful.
I doubt it. Mr. Eagleton strikes me as someone who would disapprove of innocent until proven guilty as a bourgeois concept propagated by top-hatted capitalists and climate deniers.
Good point. I doubt there would be lamppost references about non white non males.
What self-satisfied drivel! Takes 10 paragraphs of rhubarb and flannel to crawl round to the real point of the article: Klein’s Doppelganger book with its OFF THE CHARTS narcissistic premise.
“Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism…”
…may have been once but is now a bought-and-paid-for climate hysteric/current narrative stooge and all-round compliance monkey.
I may not be the most avid reader of Unherd, but even so, this is by far the worst article I’ve ever read here. It’s all over the place. I genuinely have no idea what the author is trying to say. Pointless drivel.
All his articles are like that. Brace yourself.
I reviewed Doppelganger myself: Who’s afraid of the big(-haired) bad Wolf?
There is another long but beautifully written review by Andrew Barr: Authors Who Haven’t Read Their Own Books
I think it would be fair to say that both of us are at odds with the somewhat gushing reviews it has been getting in legacy media, and we both home in on the same fundamental problem at the heart of Klein’s book.
Just a load of rambling, incoherent sneering. I presume he expects to be paid for this vacuous nonsense, which is just an insult to us all.
The very best thing about bylines is they tell you who you can skip.
I once acquired an online fan who started imitating me in chat, repeating back to me lines from speeches I’d made.
It was eerie.
Almost like being in Canada.
“Look,” replied the astronomer, “somewhere in the universe at this very moment, someone looking very much like you is asking that question of someone looking very much like me.”
Not at this very moment, because then it would have to be in this very space, which it clearly isn’t.
Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary
So…Klein is a Wolf to Klein?
Excellent.
Let me fix this for you Terry:
“[Left-wingers]… have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent [the Right], so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame [capitalists].”
.
The logic of sense precludes doppelgangers but a jabberwocky could be created in a test-tube then cloned.
Traditionally, doubles lie in the realm of the demonic which always stems from some kind of fear of nature and its stranger phenomena i.e. identical twins.
In any case, modern popular culture now prefers the time travel story and ‘meeting one’s former self’. This is stupid to the point that I’m personally relieved when another demonic twin pops up in the mirror during a derivative horror movie.
“Clam dever”, as the man says in Ulysses. Indeed it is, and chilling too in its searching account of our impending apocalypse at the psychic and symbolic level – which after is the final arbitrar of cultural histories and the surest measure of their decline and fall. One sentence, virtually shorn of cleverality, is a moving stand-out:
“It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released.”
The closing question about the fate of the American left is intriguing although I do think that the date of the Democratic Party has more torque given the limited us of a left-Right in popular American discourse around election candidates – at least in the dialectical sense shared in common by communists and fascists.
It seems that the division of loyalties over the Hamas-Israeli conflict of the moment us likely to split the liberal vote which rather tenuously united to put Biden in the White House. It may be just a wild surmise but I guess this will do more to cleave the Left in twain than recent quarrels over trans, toilets and Olympic competitions.
Though perhaps – and here I admit the limits of my purview – it will simply serve to further polarise Republicans and Democrats, turning the former into proxy Zionists and the latter into proxy Jihadists. To say that this spells the death of the liberal imagination is an understatement but there is some consolation in the form of comic writing Professor Eagleton has invented. I for one can’t get enough of it though his “we” and “our” doesn’t always square exactly with mine.