Jon

@thelitcritguy.bsky.social

2731 Followers 585 Following

writer. phd in gothic literature. writing on horror, utopia, the gothic nightmare of capitalism CAPITALISM A HORROR STORY out now, working on a new book about HOUSES

Poster for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

We’re very happy to announce that contributors to Issue #3: Gothic Marxism will appear alongside these fantastic writers whose amazing work inspired this issue’s theme:

Gretchen Felker-Martin: author of Manhunt, Cuckoo, Black Flame, and the forthcoming Chimera
Jon Greenaway: author of Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination and co-host of the podcast Horror Vanguard
Alison Rumfitt: author of Tell Me I’m Worthless and Brainwyrms
We’re also gonna be interviewing China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station, The City & The City, and the forthcoming The Rouse
Comrades, do yourselves a favor and buy all their books.

Nick Kyne, "Deathfire"

Part Four - Legitimacy, Sovereignty and The Emperor's Two Bodies

Whisper it, but I have finally managed to make my way to the halfway point of The Horus Heresy novels. Finally, there are fewer novels ahead than there are behind me which is a profound relief as the morass of names, battles and planetary settings is in danger of merging into a linguistic smoothie. I've found myself feeling deeply dislocated, constantly flipping back to earlier books, short stories or other texts to try and keep track of all these relatively interchangeable, giant men.

Laurie Goulding, (ed) "Legacies of Betrayal"

David Annadale, "The Damnation of Pythos"

As Hegel's spirits improved in Bamburg, he pursued his passion for good eating and drinking; in his layers, he spoke of how good the Bamburg beer was and even grumbled a bit about how he feared the newly introduced Bavarian regulations might come to hurt the quality of that excellent local beer. (He also made references to drinking excellent wine, a taste that had been with him since his Frankfurt days). He asked Niethammer to procure a special "Rumford Coffee maker" from Munich for him - Hegel was an avid coffee drinker - and a few months later was joking to Niethammer (in a manner still recognizable among contemporary academics) about "how much my scientific activity is indebted to this coffee"

Graham McNeil's "Vengeful Spirit"

Terry Pinkard, "Hegel: A Biography"

The Khan bowed his head.

All emperors are liars.

Dan Abnett, "The Unremembered Empire"

Nick Kyne, "Vulkan Lives"

Deena Helm, "Our Cut of Salt"

For Arnault, money is something to be hoarded, to be counted and accounted for—in this, he’s perfectly in keeping with the classic representations of the Vampire, resting in their coffin full of gold. But the dramatic tension of Arnault’s relationship with the vampire siblings is that he is a vampire that is always-already nostalgic. At heart, Arnault is a crypt-dweller being left behind by the shifts underway in the mode of production. In contrast, money for Victor and Françoise is not to be hoarded but is to be put to work: a liquid, endlessly fungible tool for extraction and the satiation of desire. There’s a telling scene in which Arnault accompanies Victor and Françoise to one of Paris’s new department stores (an homage to Zola again—this time, The Ladies Paradise) and finds himself bewildered by the sheer quantity of commodities available in the same place and at such scale. Ultimately, the red sacrament of the title isn’t simply blood as human essence or life force but blood as the flowing operation of capitalism itself—its profits, its necessary casualties and its costs.

Part Three: Kierkegaard on Calth: Existential Crisis and the Problem of the Political

I am at present just about to start Book 26 in The Horus Heresy. At this point - still quite some distance from halfway through, I’m having a variety of emotional responses to each book.

Screenshot showing I bought Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader on steam

The great Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once argued that capitalism produces spaces so vast, abstract, and systemically interconnected that individuals can no longer form what he called a “cognitive map” of the world they inhabit. We try to make sense of our present condition by situating ourselves within it, but the world in which we exist is marked by constant change, globalization, and the erosion of all traditional structures, leading to an existential and political sense of dislocation. This mapping is not simply about navigating a changing world, but allows for both the exercise of agency and the development of politics. After all, in previous generations we might find the world easier to navigate, or make sense of—you might live in a particular community, shop at the store you could afford to go to, and work in a specific location.

Modern horror is always a revelation about the world that produced it, but few of our contemporary myths feel as precisely calibrated to the present moment as the Backrooms. The Backrooms are not a haunted house, nor an abandoned ruin, a cursed forest, or any of the traditional thresholds through which the uncanny once entered human life. Instead, they are a vision of horror stripped of enchantment: an endless, fluorescent purgatory assembled from the leftover materials of late capitalism. In the Backrooms, the mystery is not supernatural but rather infrastructural, a place where the hidden architecture of modern life from its storage spaces to industrial offices swallow the individual whole. It is a nightmare born from the aesthetics of contemporary capitalism’s logistics, a world in which even our terrors have been flattened into endlessly repeatable, industrial modularity.

My book, a primer on utopian philosophy on the shelves of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris

Christian Dunn and Nick Kyne "Shadows of Treachery"

James Swallow "Fear to Tread"

Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Christian Dunn (Ed) "The Primarchs"

Hegel, by Charles Taylor

Oh, and it was great to make the previously rather square and un-hip loyalists (by comparison with the über-cool badass traitors) look great for a change. I mean, Guilliman punches a Space Marine’s head clean off… in space… without a helmet on… in space… holding his breath… clean off… one punch… I mean, come on!

Dan Abnett "Know No Fear"

You think you're the only real person: Reification and the Horror of Obsession

What would you do if you could get anything that you want? What would you rationalize and excuse away? This is the premise behind Curry Barker’s new horror film Obsession.

Gav Thorpe "Deliverance Lost"

A quote from the book "Deliverance Lost" -- As they had so many times before, Alpharius and his Legion had stepped upon a narrow path, playing a part to two opposing sides to achieve a third, more desirable outcome.

Graham McNeil The Outcast Dead

Graham Greene, The end of the affair

Age of Darkness edited by Christian Dunn

‘The melancholic humour is misunderstood,’ he said. ‘You think too literally. It has, in fact, the quality of autumn. It is the spirit of contemplative change, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world so that a new one may rise. This is my purpose. I am not sad.’ Of course, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was angry.

Bloch makes a fare grander and more sweeping set of philosophical claims than Jameson — crime is not just the subjective appearance of the functioning of a wider social totality but the cultural expression of a near universal philosophical problem, what he would call in other writings the darkness of the lived moment, a revelation of our own fundamental inability to understand who or what we are. In a sense the detective story is not just about the cooperation of ideology (though it most certainly is that) but rather a haunting reminder that we are strangers to ourselves. No Oedipus has yet answered the Sphinx’s riddle, says Bloch and as he asks his reader, “is the reader of these mysteries not caught in the darkness of his undisclosed momentary being continually renewing itself?”

Graham Greene, "England Made Me"

Graham Greene The Ministry of Fear

Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

Aaron Dembski-Bowden, "The First Heretic"

Rather, the precipitating incident is a crisis of sovereign legitimacy, or in other words, a conflict between the military and political forms of sovereign power. After the Emperor and his sons secure a great victory at Ullanor, he retreats from military modes of power and retreats to Terra, to take up an at-first-unspecified great work. This can be seen as a move from the material to the Ideal, or, in other words, from the realm of power as immediate force to one in which power is understood as politics. It is this which triggers the inevitable collapse of the Imperium into civil war, and Horus forsaking his father.

After all, the Emperor's "Imperial Truth" is an attempt at absolute secular sovereignty: banning religion while claiming god-like authority (the classic Schmittian sovereign who decides on the exception). The Primarchs are his homunculi, designed to be extensions of sovereign will, yet granted semi-autonomous personhood. This creates an immediate legitimation crisis: they are both sons and tools, individuals and gene-wrought weapons. Horus' "abandonment" (the Emperor's secrecy, the withdrawal to Terra) exposes the paternal fiction and their own inherent disposability under the Imperial regime. For these genetically perfected soldiers, the end of the war is the end of meaning itself, an unforgivable subordination of the real to the Ideal.

James Swallow, "Nemesis"

Graham McNeil, A Thousand Sons"

Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Me and my friends would have killed ET with hammers I can tell you that much

Angelo Tijssens, The Edges

The tweet from Sadiq, "why do bash "dead-beat" days for not being there for their kids but we never question if the child has bad vibes? Or if they're just unpleasant to be around?"