It’s not good. It’s the first post on a blog about shitty books, which means that, out of my long history of enjoying bad literature privately, this was the one that pushed me over the edge. Allow me to explain.

I am a doctoral student in Cultural Studies, which means that for the past seven years, the books I read have mostly been chosen for me. This is a process that is almost certain to net you some stinkers, but for me, the way you know it’s really bad is when you open up Google Scholar and start searching for reviews to see if you’re crazy, or the book you’re reading just sucks. In reading Atmospheres of Violence, this was not helpful. The reviews I read were, for the most part, positive, if a bit vague. I looked up the author, Eric A. Stanley, and saw that they were a new associate prof at UC Berkeley, probably the most prestigious non-Ivy in the country, and graduated from the History of Consciousness doctoral program at UC Santa Cruz, where they studied under Donna Haraway and Angela Davis. I am definitely not a poststructuralist, but these are impressive bonafides. Going in, my hopes were high, but it was not to last.

Before I get into my specific criticisms, I want to make one thing very clear. I don’t hate this book because it is queer critique. My areas of research are Marxist cultural critique and critical theory, focused mainly on the ways that social identities are produced by differing relations to capital. Queer critique is not my primary lens of analysis, though I do have an interest in the cultural production of identity, and I certainly have a bone to pick with the way class tends to be elided in intersectional or identitarian critique, but this review is not to be construed as a temper tantrum aimed at the “alphabet mafia” or “postmodern Neo-Marxism.” This book is not bad because it is about transness. It’s bad because it is poorly written, lacks critical rigor and focus, and, most of all, because it treats its subjects in an inexcusably disrespectful manner.

As best as I can tell, Atmospheres of Violence is an anarchist or anti-state reading of transphobia, especially transphobic violence. The back of the book states: “In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond [the state], Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.” This, however, is not truth in advertising. Praxis does not exist in Atmospheres of Violence. Aside from a few flaccid exhortations to embrace life in the margins of society or practice solidarity (whatever that’s supposed to mean), Stanley is much more interested in creating a pornography of suffering than shedding light on these ephemeral “livable futures.” The closest they get is a throwaway line in the introduction:

“I insist that the liberal state, or more precisely the para-colonial democratic state, can never be anything other than an engine of brutality. This assertion, rather than a descent into nihilistic inaction, opens up our histories and futures of practicing interdependency otherwise–a post-politics for the end of the world that might just save us from the present” (16-17).

Now, this isn’t necessarily wrong, I just disagree. This makes me feel like an undergrad again, listening to a guy that I’m never going to fuck tell me how stupid it is to go to a protest, because the government is telling you where to walk. He’s not wrong, but he is insufferable, and, like Stanley’s, his approach doesn’t get us anywhere. In Stanley’s narration, it would seem, our first step should be to put our CashApp in our Twitter bio and start posting in #MutualAid, and the second should be to soothe the pain of knowing that society is never getting any better and that we’re all unbelievably fucked with the smug feeling that comes with knowing that you’re smarter than all of the other rubes that are still fighting for their futures.

In one sense, this is understandable: it’s a lot more difficult to come up with something new than it is to tell an audience about things that have already happened–ask any Marxist. If the argument of the book is, as it seems to me, that gendered and racialized violence (specifically transphobia and its intersection with anti-Blackness) cannot be addressed without the withering-away of the state, fine. But if I go in looking for a path forward and leave without one, I’m already a little annoyed. Moreover, the book begins with a trigger warning, beginning like this:

“This book describes a number of anti-Black, ableist, racist, and anti-trans/queer scenes of violence. This structuring violence appears as corporal attack, medical neglect, murder, suicide, and suicidal ideations. Throughout the text I articulate why I believe the event calls for a renarration while, in other moments, I refuse to reproduce the incident. These imperfect decisions are guided by a radical commitment to keeping each other alive and toward ending the world that produces this unfolding archive” (ix).

Later, in the introduction, Stanley writes: “The specter of representation, its world-building and world-destroying power, is everywhere in these pages. Connected to this affective materiality is how representation drags with it the question of aesthetics in the multiple scenes of devastation that I’m attending to. I do not reproduce the scenes in image because of the ways they circulate as objects of pleasure that do little to confront their ongoingness. However, I do anxiously narrate a number of them in an attempt, however failed, to pay quiet attention to the specificity of not only lives but also deaths” (15). In the margins, I have written the words “Yeah. OK” and drawn a middle finger.

Admittedly, I didn’t have a choice in reading this book, because it was assigned to me. Even if I hadn’t been compelled, though, this warning would not have stopped me. I usually handle this kind of thing just fine. Even if the topic of suicide is difficult for me, I push through. It’s the job. We have to read things sometimes that make us sad. I can tell you, however, that in seven years of post-secondary education, this is the only book I have read that has caused me to have a depressive episode. I cried to my mom about how much I hated this book. That is how affected I was by the completely inexcusable way that these topics are dealt with. Not to mention that there is a nice little note included that the author’s profits will be donated to LGBT Books to Prisoners. Nice, unless you know that the author’s profits for an academic book, even from a relatively big publisher like Duke, amounts to approximately doodley, with a side of squat.

But fuck it. At least the analysis is good, right?

No. The analysis is bad. It’s bad on the level of communication–because of the overly-embellished style–imprecise, and, above all, immoral. I’ll break it down using themes.

Exploitation of Victims of Violence

The point at which I truly lost patience with this book comes on page 27, wherein Stanley begins his analysis of the murder of Rashawn Brazell. Brazell, a nineteen-year-old Black gay man, disappeared on February 15, 2005, and his remains were found a week later.

“According to the autopsy and coroner’s report,” Stanley writes, “Rashawn Brazell was kept alive for two days before he was surgically dismembered. The report also suggests that the murderer had a ‘working knowledge of human anatomy’ as all the cuts were ‘clean’ and on the joints […] The never-found knife that traced Rashawn Brazell’s body into pieces is but one of the artifacts that assemble the afterlives of this murder. […] The original offense, the mutilation, torture, and disarticulation of Rashawn Brazell, is made to repeat, to reiterate, its trauma and terror as a grammatical constellation of the long histories and cultural narratives that equate Black queer sexuality with inevitable catastrophe. The reiteration of the murder serves as a monument to what must become of young Black queers who find pleasure in the anonymity of sex” (27-28).

What Stanley fails to mention, however, is that in 2018, three whole years before this book’s publication, Brazell’s own cousin and former neighbor, Kwauhuru Govan was charged with Brazell’s murder. To my knowledge, Govan has not yet been convicted, and may certainly be innocent. It may well be that Govan, who was also convicted of armed robbery and another second-degree murder, was simply a convenient target for the cops. And if Govan did kill Brazell, that does not mean that the murder could not be motivated by homophobia. I found a claim (in the New York Post, so take with a grain of salt) that Govan told cops that his cousin was an “abomination” because of his sexuality. It is beyond inappropriate, however, for Stanley to grossly misstate the circumstances of Brazell’s death, imply that the victim was murdered after a sexual rendezvous with no evidence, and state that the murder was punishment for “find[ing] pleasure in the anonymity of sex” (28). Moreover, even if Stanley’s narrative of Brazell’s death was one hundred percent true, I find it beyond inappropriate to appropriate a murder–the violent end of a human being’s life–into an occasion for an intellectual and philosophical stroll through the park. Perhaps the next section will illustrate my point a bit more:

“The case of Rashawn Brazell, like that of Gwen Araujo, is, in many horrific ways, ordinary. From the gruesome murder itself, to the ritualistic dismemberment, and the aftermath of silence punctuated by sensationalistic pulses. Rashawn Brazell, like the overwhelming majority of murdered Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans/queer people in the United States, remains in the swimming generality of cold cases, murders never solved, killers never really feared, and body parts never found. Rashawn Brazell’s death, even with all the shocking details, is made unremarkable by the social that demands it. This typicality is not because of Brazell’s worth but should be read as an indictment of the world that produces his life in particular, and Black queerness in general, as such. The true terror is felt once we begin to read this case as so chillingly common. Such consistency places Brazell in a mass grave of anonymity, a queer burial of unmarked pain” (28).

This mode of analysis, which is reminiscent of Afropessimism, flattens the experiences of Black people into an unending, inescapable chain of disaster that cannot be changed, only borne witness to. This is objectionable not only from the standpoint of praxis–if these oppressive structures are all-encompassing and immutable, there can be no path forward, no real political struggle–but because it dehumanizes the very people Stanley claims to center in their analysis. This ideological framing reduces trans people, and especially trans POC, into helpless objects of brutalization destined for violence, murder, disarticulation, annihilation. I am not someone who believes that white authors cannot write on the history of race or racism, but I have to say, I was a little poleaxed by how many “clueless white revolutionary LARPER” boxes Stanley’s book checked. From making provocative and broad blanket claims (that anti-Blackness is an organizing principle of film, for example–more on that later) with no follow-up evidence or explanation, engaging in a voyeuristic and gratuitous pornography of misery, a fetishizing and dehumanizing reduction of Black subjects to “bodies” that are acted upon, but have no agency of their own, Stanley trots out all the greatest hits. Moreover, the decision to describe a dismemberment as “unremarkable” is…a choice. Moreover, and I cannot repeat this enough, Rashawn Brazell’s murder is, at least according to the cops, solved. Whether you trust pigs or not, Stanley either did so little research about the person whose dismembered corpse they have paraded across the pages of their book, or deliberately misrepresented the facts of the case to prove a point, when there are entire organizations–like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the related Sisters in Spirit organization–dedicated to addressing the impact racism has on the attitudes of law enforcement towards missing persons and homicide victims. MMIW causes included the case of serial killer Robert Pickton and the Highway of Tears murders. Why not mention these cases? Were they not shocking enough? Was it because they didn’t have enough to do with queerness? Sisters in Spirit looks specifically to advocate for two-spirit victims of violence as well as cis and trans women and girls. It would be one thing if Stanley had a personal or emotional connection to Rashwan Brazell’s murder, or if the section acted as some kind of call for awareness for this particular loss, but the tone of the section isn’t compassionate, or even angry. It’s a performative, detached blandness that at once appropriates the pain of “Black queers” in a kind of philosophical martyrdom and obfuscates the particularity of their lives and deaths into an epistemic mass grave that offers neither dignity nor answers going forward. Stanley closes this section with the following passage:

“This hope is but a stand-in, or perhaps a horizon, that forsees a subjectivity in the hold; Rashawn Brazell’s mother siezes us with a similar plea: ‘I want who did this off the street, and I want the rest of my child’” (29).

Now, I have a B.A. and M.A. in English literature, have read all three volumes of Capital cover-to-cover, managed Ulysses and Trout Fishing In America with a little work, but I have no clue what “a subjectivity in the hold” means. Now, maybe I’m crazy, but I think every sentence in a book should mean something. Maybe I’m just a rube, but I’m pretty sure I am squarely in Stanley’s target audience, and if they’re not reaching me, they’re probably not making their case properly. Whether this is happening at the level of language–if Stanley is too poor a writer to properly communicate their point–or whether this is an unintentional repeat of the Sokal affair from a post-structuralist high on their own supply, I’m not sure. In my opinion, Stanley does not quote Brazell’s mother to give the family a voice. In my opinion, she is portrayed here as a rube who has not yet realized that she is part of “the social that demands [Brazell’s murder]” (28). Moreover, in a later discussion of trans woman Duanna Johnson’s beating by the police, Stanley writes that “[A] guilty verdict would not have offered justice, as it would have only helped build the legitimacy of the practice of imprisonment” (70). Admittedly, I am not a prison abolitionist. I think drugs, property crime, and sex work should never land a person in jail, but that there will always be an incredibly tiny percentage of the population that should not be roaming around. A violent, unaccountable thug like McRae (the cop that beat Johnson) or Brazell’s murderer would probably fit the bill. And frankly, that’s already a hard sell for the families of the victims. A desire for vengeance shouldn’t guide our policy, but Brazell’s mom isn’t calling for his murderer to be publicly executed. She just wants his killer off the street. Why quote Brazell’s mother’s plea for closure at the end of a section predicated on the ongoingness of anti-trans violence? To expose the fallacies in her view of the world? To hold her up as an example of incorrect framing? To mock her from the safety of increased cultural capital? Yikes.

This next section is the second-worse one in the book, and I encourage you not to read this if you’re at all triggered by descriptions of queer and transphobic violence. It starts with a section entitled “Surplus Violence.” You have been warned.

In reference to the murder of Lauryn Paige, Stanley writes: “If trans/queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing that which is constituted as already dead must go beyond normative times of life. In other words, if Lauryn Paige was dead after the first few stab wounds, then what do the remaining fifty words signify?” (33)

I am repulsed by this not just because of the invocation of a real person who died a real death, who suffered real pain and betrayal in meatspace, not in a thought experiment, but because here, the corpse of a murder victim is once again produced as a text to be read–essentially, a conversation starter–not as the remains of a unique individual who will never be seen or touched again in this world. It’s violating. It’s exploitative. It’s invasive. If this was your sibling, your child, your friend, how would you feel about a stranger using them in this way? Would you feel that it was done with respect? Scotty Joe Weaver’s loved ones probably wouldn’t. Stanley spends three whole pages narrating, in excruciating and ghoulish detail, the Weaver’s brutal murder using phrases like “vivisection,” (36) “partially decapitated” (35), “terrorizing sexualized intimacy” (36), and “tender hostility, of ravaging love and tactile brutality” (37). The section ends there–with an assertion that this violent death displays the “complex structure of phobia and attachment” (37) and a meditation on the psychological state of one of Weaver’s murderers. Later on, when discussing the beating of Duanna Johnson, Stanley provides what I think is the Rosetta Stone for their mode of analyzing violence. Stanley writes:

“While Johnson’s stated wish for the public to see the tape unties some knots in our viewing, that watching is always an accumulative process persists. And while I return to the scene and the testimony in an act of solidarity with her, within the generalized field of anti-Black and anti-trans violence there is no space of purity or epistemic escape. In other words, to reproduce the attack by way of its narrativization, to view the video, or to conceal its existence–all bind us to the scene and its repetitious afterlife” (69).

What Stanley is basically saying is that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s true, to a degree, but it’s not an excuse for outrageously bad behavior. Stanley uses the impossibility of complete non-complicity in structures of oppression to excuse the blatant exploitation of victims of violence for their own purposes. If I scream at my Instacart shopper and don’t tip them, I am not excused by noting that ethical consumption under capitalism is impossible.

Being Weird About Black People, a.k.a the Most Common White Liberal Sin

I brought up this motif a bit in my previous section, but it deserves a section of its own. I think I know the genesis of the way Stanley talks about Black people–it’s a tic shared by both Michel Foucault and Ta-Nehisi Coates–and, while I don’t like it when they do it either, the wheels really come off the bus when Stanley gets behind the wheel. Coates, in Between The World and Me, locates the experience of racism within the bodies of Black people, using, as R. L. Stephens notes in his critique of the book in Viewpoint, the word “body” over 300 times in nearly as many pages. While Coates uses this approach to examine racism’s material results, it has the side effect of hollowing out the interiority of Black people, eliding their strategies of resistance and reducing them to passive recipients of brutality. Stanley cranks this tendency up to eleven. From referring to queer murder victims as “nameless flesh” (30) or the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting as “a puzzle of Black and Brown [sic] flesh still grasping onto each other in a now failed attempt to patch wounds, stay silent, and become invisible.” (45)

Look, I’m a white woman. I don’t have the authority or knowledge to predict how any specific Black person would react to this. I can only say that from my point of view, this is fucked. Not only does Stanley drag the corpses of murder victims center-stage in their narrative, but their reduction to mere “flesh” is a bizarre choice. Why use the dismembered body of a murder victim to prove your point? Evidently, Stanley feels that the shock value provided by their constant invocation of disarticulated, tortured, beaten, and butchered bodies (usually of Black queer/trans people) is necessary to elicit the desired reaction from the reader, but the only reaction it elicited from me was contempt for an author who was willing to exploit the pain and terror of the LGBT community. There doesn’t even seem to be much of a point, because everything surrounding these granular, voyeuristic descriptions of hate crimes is pointless, pseudo-intellectual verbal masturbation. Maybe the editors at Duke UP are willing to believe that because something is hard to understand, it must be saying something smart, but I’m not so easily fooled. There are no takeaways from this book, no guiding thrust to Stanley’s analyses beyond a focus on anti-queer violence and the kind of anti-racism you would expect from Robin DiAngelo, not an Associate Professor at Berkeley.

Beyond a lengthy digression into the “bio-ontologization of race” (46) that boot-straps a shallow understanding of primitive accumulation into an argument that American racism both predated and grew out of slavery, Stanley does not come up with any one way that race fits into their analysis, choosing instead to surprise me every time I run across the topic again. Either the book is about queerphobia and racism, in which case the connection of the topics should be established at the very beginning, or the discussion of racism is incidental to the discussion of queerphobia, in which case I should understand why racism is being mentioned whenever it is brought up. More than anything else, this book reminds me of Internet Humor Inventor Seanbaby’s theory that tidbit books are more revealing than any psychological text, because they require a complete purging of all information from the brain. I almost want to call the style “stream of consciousness,” but in most cases, authors achieve the semblance of a stream of consciousness (through a process we roughly conceive of as “art”) instead of directly transcribing the contents of their dumbass brain. Either the writing process was so rushed that there was no time for these kinds of revisions, or this is some kind of bizarre stylistic choice. The book doesn’t seem to be a hastily-reworked dissertation, so I suspect the latter, but let’s call it a “I report, you decide” scenario.

Fuck This Book (TW: Suicide)

I don’t usually include trigger warnings in my writing or teaching, so go ahead and take this one seriously. I was persuaded to do this mainly because I felt that exposing myself to this chapter was actually deleterious to my mental health. I have depression, and, like many depressed individuals, I have experienced suicidality at various points. I’m not making the argument that this book’s treatment of suicide is bad because it offends me, as someone who has experienced suicidal ideation. I’m arguing that this book’s treatment of suicide is bad because it grosses me out as a human being, and because, as an academic reader, I can tell that any theoretical interventions coming from this analysis are so lukewarm and pointless that they don’t even make a down payment towards the means used to achieve them.

I’m not making any wild claims here–I don’t think Stanley’s book is going to cause even one suicide, so I’m not accusing anyone of anything–but I will say that reading this book, particularly “Dead Drop,” the chapter I will discuss here, made me pretty miserable for a few days. It was hard for me to chew up and spit out Stanley’s discussion of suicide as a critical theorist who cares deeply about the issues for which Stanley positions themself as a passionate crusader. And congratulations–we have indeed discovered that there is a paradigm for mental health advocacy that is somehow worse than standard-issue awareness. To use the suicide note of a child as a platform for theoretical philosophizing displays what I could charitably call a profound lack of self-awareness, or, uncharitably, a depraved indifference towards the dignity of people whose lives (and deaths) form the backbone of Stanley’s narrative. I’ll give you a taste, and keep in mind as you read this that Stanley is discussing the real suicide of a TWELVE YEAR OLD CHILD.

“Unable to sustain even the rawest form of life, Seth calls upon a ‘better place’ as referent for their existence (as nonexistence) to come. Seemingly only available through negation, this better place, which is both a grave and an escape hatch, posits the unknown of metaphysics as more survivable than the harshness of the here and now. In the end, it was their gender nonnormativity, a gift to us all that was returned to them as debt, which tethered them to the ruthless dialectics of sterile indifference and vicious obsession […] Under [the domain of the human] suicide and suicidal ideations are at times mandated and at other times forcefully prohibited. How then does suicide teach the endurance of humanism and its racialized anti-trans/queer contours as a practice of shuttling abjection?” (100-101). r

All of the distancing language, thematic parallels, and clever use of jargon cannot obscure the fact that Rashawn Brazell, Scotty Weaver, Duanna Johnson, and Seth Walsh were real people with real families that suffered real pain, bled real blood, and died very real, lonely deaths. There is a line–fine or not–between generative attempts to wring change and purpose from the pain and death of those fed into the meat grinder of late capitalism and authorial grave desecration. In my opinion, Stanley jumps, airborne, across this line on a motorcycle through a ring of fire like Evel Knievel. Bad writing and bad critical theory are like pornography in that they are difficult to define, but you know them when you see them. 

The chapter ends with another mangling of Walter Benjamin’s famous “angel of history” fragment that, like Stanley’s earlier knife fight with the theorist over his definition of violence, makes me feel like I accidentally ordered a cursed book designed to drive the reader insane in a way that is tailored to his or her own psychological profile.

Why Is This Here?

This section is for narrative threads that have been introduced and dropped like a too-hot bagel on the kitchen floor. The first is–and I am not making this up–the only reference I could find to the new lifeways promised on the back of the book. Stanley writes: “[O]ur aim here is to continue to pull at the form [of racial capitalism], not simply in the name of analysis but to build new practices of anti-capitalist sabotage” (52).

The paragraph fucking ends there. It ends! The next paragraph is a discussion of FDA guidelines for blood donation! New practices of anti-capitalist sabotage like what, Stanley?! Like buying your book? Visualizing a hate crime I read about?

Next up: Blackness and Narrative Cinema.

“On the psychoanalytics of the image Christian Metz suggests, ‘Thanks to the principle of a moving cutting off, thanks to the changes of moving between shots (or within a shot: tracking, panning, characters moving into or out of the frame, and so forth), cinema literally plays with the terror and the pleasure of fetishism, with its combination of desire and fear.’ To this end, the anticipatory gaze is comforted from its fear of racial difference–Fanon’s ‘phobogenic object,’ or what Hillary Clinton called the Black ‘super-predator.’ As loss and reconciliation, the filmic produces Blackness, through form and not simply narrative, as perpetual threat while it simultaneously offers remedy, by way of white coherence” (76).

To prove I’m not an idiot, I’ll try to work through this passage in public. First, the Metz quote–film uses the withholding of the thing you want to see–good or bad–to build tension and, in turn, provide relief. Not too difficult. I’m not even mad at the idea that racial difference is a site of anxiety, though I would clarify that this is an anxiety produced through intertwining mechanisms of institutional racism. However, Fanon’s “phobogenic object” is a much broader theoretical concept than the figure of the super-predator, which is an incredibly specific episode of American anti-Blackness with its own ramifications. These examples are not equal in their specificity, and definitely not in their legitimacy. Then we get the idea that “the filmic produces Blackness, through form and not simply narrative, as perpetual threat” (76). I assume Stanley is discussing narrative cinema here, since Metz’s quote refers to the technical and narrative aspects of film, which is fair enough, but I’d like some evidence–like, any at all–evidence for the assertion that narrative film is organized around Blackness as a threat. I’m not dismissing the proposition out of hand, since I’m not a film historian, but it does provoke some basic incredulity. Stanley moves on, however, like a greased-up pig wearing roller skates, to discuss surveillance video, which is definitely not narrative cinema. Re-reading their assertions in the context of surveillance video actually makes a lot more sense–in the context of the overpolicing of Black neighborhoods, the omnipresence of surveillance cameras turn every person that innocently walks to Walgreens to pick up baby wipes or vape pods into a potential criminal. If this is Stanley’s argument, we shouldn’t be forced to learn this by going back and re-reading a previous section that didn’t make sense and combining it with a later section to forge our own meaning like a seventeenth-century blacksmith.

The Politics of Representation

Stanley writes:

“As is clear, representation has been produced as the primary site of struggle over diversity in the United States from at least the middle of the last century to our current moment. Positive representation, as a visual common sense, traffics normativity’s drive but with a decorative adornment that announces itself as departure. Even with little evidence of its ability to yield a more livable world, positive representation is still offered as the remedy for the years of degraded images that are the history of film. This substitutional logic, where representational change is argued to be analogous to structural change, provides positive representation as both a remedy for and evidence of domination’s inevitable end–the promise of equality fulfilled. This respectable image, where neoliberal ideas of economic maturity and proper individualism transpose the stunning disturbances of gender, racial, and sexual excess to the failures of our insolvent past, reconfirm the idea of our progression“ (85).

Here’s the problem with this–this book is just a warped recapitulation of a politics of representation. By transforming any notion of praxis into the impotent, voyeuristic act of “bearing witness.” Performing an intellectual interpretive dance on a bloody crime scene is not only a reprisal of that violence, but literally a re-PRESENTATION of the only possible interaction between queer people and the state as one of brutality. What we are left with, after the post-structuralist buzzwords are stripped away, is a pseudo-intellectual rehearsal of transphobic violence that sidles uncomfortable close to reifying queer identity as simply an object of violence with neither past, present, or future. Stanley wants credit for bearing authorial witness to the acts of violence that provide the narrative background of their book while taking sanctimonious potshots at a politics of representation. I say, six of one, half dozen of the other. And to the imaginary work that Stanley is doing, I say, with all due respect, that and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee. Marx famously wrote that philosophy desires to describe the world, but the object should be to change it, and I refuse to be condescended to by anyone who has forgotten this.

Still Fucking Here:

I don’t have much to say about this brief section, other than my suspicion that it is meant to serve as an identitarian, post-hoc explanation of the exploitation that preceded this brief coda. Stanley reveals themself as a former truant and expellee who benefited from mutual aid. Objection: relevance?!

Final Thoughts

My goal in writing this post is to 1) force myself to start a side project I’ve been wanting to pull the trigger on for a long time and 2) make a critical, scholarly intercession. I don’t intend for this to be a Duke UP-bashing blog–I think I’ll review a conservative pundit’s novel next–but social critique is a field I am deeply invested in, and it makes me angry when attention and acclaim are focused on books and approaches to theory that are aimed at the author’s mind-palace, not the world that we live in, the world that is so desperately broken and in need of immediate aid. Books like Atmospheres of Violence are like a guy smoking on the deck of the Titanic and making fun of the guys trying to get passengers onto lifeboats. “We’re all going to die anyway, so what’s the point?” The point? You can’t tell a man trying to get people onto a lifeboat that he doesn’t have purpose. He has more purpose in that moment than he will ever have again in his life! And if we go down, I, for one, want to go down swinging. I want to go off into that good night rough enough that it’ll be a net calorie loss for the shark that eats me. I reject–now and forever, wholeheartedly and with every fiber of my being–any scholarly project that posits quitting as an option. I believe that would make me a rube in Stanley’s eyes, but I would always rather be a rube than a quitter.

Finally: I am not writing this with the intent of Eric Stanley reading this review. This is not a targeted attack. It’s not a smear job. It’s a book review. If they do come across it, I hope they take seriously the criticisms I have made and seriously re-evaluate their approach to writing. However, I think it is infinitely more likely that praise from the likes of Lauren Berlant and Jose Munoz will mean that Stanley could likely give two shits what some doctoral student thinks, which is a real shame, especially considering the fact that I’m right.

-Marxist Faildaughter