 anger. I'm someone is just filled with compassion and understanding. I'm just a regular man of the people and if forty won't stand up for the people against the oppression that they're suffering at the hands of the intellectuals, then who will? And so I say to you this day, right? I say to you Harvard University, I say to you Yale University, I say to you the University of Chicago, Stanford University, I say to you UCLA and Oxford and Cambridge, I say to you this day, let my people go. They will no longer be slaves to you. They will no longer subsidize you, right? They will no longer be, be, you know, little objects that you manipulate, right? You won't have the soul of the earth that bash around anymore because forty is saying let my people go. Right here, right now, I'm taking a stand. I'm saying enough of this intellectual elite contempt for the common people. You know who also had contempt for the common people? You know who also had contempt for the first person essay? Adolf Hitler, right? So these Hitlerian exterminationist, genocidal attitudes of contempt for the common people. Well, I'm not putting up with it anymore. I am saying to you here and now enough, right? So this is the act of persuasion, a words without borders conversation with Professor at Oxford University, Mervé Emery. Everyone that Adam is a champ because he has COVID. And he told me not to make him laugh because he'll honk like that if I do. And I want to apologize in advance because there are a bunch of drunk college students outside of my office making lots of noise. So if you hear honking on my end, that's where it's coming from. Great. Well, make sure maybe they'll really learn something from us tonight. I doubt it. And I always know. So speaking of heroism, when I see Mervé in her business pajamas, I know it's going to be an excellent event. Is it 11 at night where you are? It is 11 at night. It is 11 at night where I am. And I don't know who stays in there, you know, jeans or whatever until until near midnight, but I don't. We're not going to put up with this. All right. We're not going to be manipulated just because she's in a very classy pajamas just because she's drop dead gorgeous. All right. We're not going to put up with being de-personed, dehumanized. All right. So let's go to the impersonal essay, Oxford Center for Life Writing. And we're not going to put up with this anymore. Thank you for joining me today. The title of my talk is the impersonal essay. And it is the first part of a longer essay on the history and the aesthetic function of the personal essay as a genre that will be appearing sometime next year in the Cambridge companion to the essay edited by Evan Kindley. So this sounds, oh, all right. This sounds, you know, so academic. It sounds, you know, filled with love and kindness, but you don't understand the monster behind these pretty words. You don't understand what's really going on. So I'm talking about this Mervey Emery essay in the November 3rd, 2022 edition, the New York Review of Books. So please get out your latest edition of the New York Review of Books and let's walk through this together. Okay. You got me in my business jammies. Yeah. We're exhausted. We're on cough medication. Let's get into it. You're ill. Yeah. Let's do it, man. Yeah. It's going to be great. So we wanted to start. This website is amazing. Okay. Take it away. You guys have done so. So please, I want you to pick up the November 3 New York Review of Books. All right. Mervey Emery, the fictions of the personal essay. So please pick up your New York Review of Books. Let's do this together. All right. We are not just individuals having a subjective experience. We're children of God who are having a social and transcendent and spiritual experience. We're not just physical beings. All right. Having physical experiences. We're spiritual beings who just so happen to have physical manifestations. And so it's on page 43. All right. The illusion of the first person. All right. See how it works. The illusion of the first person. She's saying that what we're having right now, aside from the social and the objective experience of this is just like world-class live streaming. I mean, this is like Top Gun theology, philosophy, literary criticism. I mean, this has got it all. But we're also in addition to all those awesome objective experiences or those social experiences that we're having right now, we are allowed our subjective experiences, but she wants to deny them to us. All right. Page 43. Please turn in your New York Review of Books. The illusion of the first person. All right. I'm having a social experience with you, but I'm also having a subjective personal first person experience. And she wants to say that doesn't count for anything. This is just like shitless list. All right. I'm like that little girl, except I'm not wearing red. All right. I'm like that little girl. I'm being sent to the gas chambers right now. And all I'm going to leave behind essentially is this live stream. Like this live stream is my teddy bear from shitless list saying, no, let my people go. We get to have our subjective first person experiences. And you don't get to diminish them. You don't get to deny them. All right. I'm not going to put up with it. I'm going to stand up for the people. All right. So she claims that the first person is illusion. All right. This is, this is absolutely bonkers. Like how on earth could a smart, charming, beautiful woman with such a nice free neck and lovely pajamas like Oxford scholar, Merve Ebrey believed this. The best explanation for why she believes something so bonkers is that she's been overtaken by the insanity that's simply endemic to her social class of intellectuals. So I want you to also pick up go to your bookshelf right now and withdraw from it. John Kerry's 1993 book. I think he is also an Oxford scholar. The intellectuals and the masses pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880 to 1939. Right. His thesis is that once the masses gained literacy, intellectuals had to deny the humanity of those people in order to feel good about themselves. That's what these intellectuals here are doing when they're saying that there's no first person is just a fiction. I don't believe that my subjective first person experiences are fictional. I don't believe they're nothing. I feel. I yearn. Right. I have weaknesses. I have longings. I have desires. I have passions. I have hopes and dreams. Don't tell me that they're a fiction. Right. Here's the subhead to her essay. A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie. Wow. That's that's pretty heavy wording here. Purest expression of the lie. That individual subjectivity. Right. That's my own personal experience aside from the collective social transcendent objective transformative revolutionary moral philosophical and religious experience that we're all collectively having right now. I'm also having my own individual inner first person subjective experience. And does that count for nothing? Am I just like that little girl being sent into the gas chambers? Right. My individual subjectivity is a lie. Right. So this is what she says. Historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. Okay. So there's no individual subjective experience prior to participating in society. What about those of us who essentially grew up outside of society? Do we not have a genuine inner life? I was raised. I was raised in Outback Australia by kangaroos and dingos. And did I not have feelings? Did I not have first person individual subjective experiences? And then, you know, later on, I made common cause with aborigines. You know, as I was navigating the complexities and dangers of life in Outback Australia. So I grew up outside polite society. You know, I grew up with some of the Adventists. I was on the margins. I was shunted and shunted away from society. You're going to deny me my genuine inner life. You're going to deny me the importance of my subjective experiences. And she begins her essay with a quote from Theodore Adorno, who, as we all know, is a member of the Frankfurt School, right? These left-wing Marxist socialist deconstructionists. Theodore Adorno says, the essay form bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories. And I'm just trying to get my iPhone to open up here that bad essays, all right, bad essays, tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. So what the hell? Why exactly is telling an essay about people? Like, how is that inferior? Why isn't a bad essay, if you're telling a story about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand? Why can't the matter at hand be the individual and his subjective experiences? I long. I loathe. I feel. I love and hate. I desire. I have passion, right? Sometimes I feel lost and lonely inside. I feel scared. I feel helpless. Sometimes I feel strong and mighty, right? You're going to tell me that those feelings count for absolutely nothing. Why are live streams about my inner subjective experiences, like bad? Why are these bad blogs? Why do I have to elucidate some objective matter at hand? Why can't we just spend time here talking about my subjective experiences? I don't mind talking with women, right? I mean, I've gotten to understand, right, you know, what's been going on, why I feel so much fatigue, right? I understand my profound sense of fatigue. Oh, you can't see it. It's not objective. It's my subjective experience. Yeah, I understand the feelings of emptiness that I've had following COVID, but luckily I've been able to interpret these feelings correctly. They're all about loss of essence. And this woman, Merve Emery says that my essence, my inner subjectivity, accounts for nothing. Now, I can assure you that these feelings have not recurred. It is professors like Merve Emery, they sense my power. Dr. Merve Emery, she seeks the life essence. And I do not avoid the professors. I do not avoid the women, but I do deny them my essence. And I say to them, let my people go, no more sucking at the public tent to deny people their individual subjective experiences and to say that essays about people are somehow bad people. Let my people go. I mean, this way of thinking represents a complete loathing of you and me. It's a loathing of the people. And naturally, Merve Emery, she is a Virginia Woolf scholar. Virginia Woolf shortly before she died. This is what she wrote in a journal, Wednesday, 26th of February, 1941. Yesterday in the ladies' lavatory at the Sussex Grill, a Brighton, I heard. She's a little simpering thing. I don't like her. But then he never did care for big women. He has wonderful white teeth. He always had. It's fun having the boys. If you don't look out, he'll be court-martialed. They were powdering and painting these common little tarts. Notice the contempt here, these common little tarts. I mean, I don't speak that way about women. I respect women. I love women. I adore women. While I sat behind a thin door, peeing as quietly as I could, then I was at Fullers, a fat, smart woman in red hunting cappins, checksker consuming rich cakes. Why shouldn't fat women eat all the rich cakes they want? Are you going to deny them their subjective first-person experiences? Her shabby dependent also stuffing. So a fat woman and her kids are eating cakes, and you want to deny them that? You just want to pour out your contempt on them? They ate and ate, and that's a bad thing. Something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Look at this contempt that the intellectuals have for ordinary people and their subjective first-person experiences. Where does the money come to feed these fat white slugs? You know who also had these attitudes? Adolf Hitler. John Kerry in his great, great book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice among the literary intelligentsia. He knows that when Virginia Woolf wrote this entry in her journal, she had only a short time to live. Madness and suicide were soon to claim her. She's nuts, but it's a kind of insanity that is endemic to her social class of intellectuals. This harmless chatter that Virginia Woolf is listening to with rage and loathing. It's the same sort of women's conversation we hear in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. The topics are the same. Men, teeth, the army. The phrasing is echoed. This is what's going on. T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Adolf Hitler. They all load ordinary people doing ordinary things. This scene is invented. The women followers are not slugs. I mean, common little tarts is such a dismissive way of describing the occupants of the Sussex Grill Laboratory. I mean, she imagines the women and she's just absolutely infuriated by what she imagines. The intellectuals have these fantasies about the masses and it just rouses in the intellectuals this fury, loathing and fear. They are not comfortable to live with the masses. The intellectual phobias that dominate people like Mervé Emery and Virginia Woolf and Adolf Hitler, these phobias are circular, they're self-deluding. The mass is invented by the intellectual whom the invention then gives pain to. This is insanity. Here's another example. Rainer Hepenstahl, 1911 to 1981. He was a friend of George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Eric Gill, Middleton Murray. He worked for 20 years as a drama producer for the Highbrow BBC third program. He was an archtypical 20th century intellectual. He regarded himself as a failed artist to being neglected by a Philistine public. He achieved brief celebrity with his first novel, The Blaze of Noon, published in 1939. His later novels met no comparable success. Though his BBC job gave him ample income, he watched the dwindling proceeds of his writing resentfully and he enjoyed contemplating the extinction of large sections of humanity, just like Nietzsche, just like H. G. Wells, just like Adolf Hitler, just once the extinction of large sections of humanity. So he writes in his journal, there are a whole race, the Arabs and the Mongol people, the Irish. Richard Spencer also has these inclinations. Upon whom, if it were possible, merely by pressing a button, I would happily commit total genocide. This is Richard Spencer's attitude towards Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA crowd, Turks, all these other people. So let's get back to Mervé Emery. This is how she begins. The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define. Why? What's so difficult? I didn't even graduate college, I can define it, but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but it's content, the per-stop. A permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality writes Adorno. So a list of counterparts to the personal essay might include or admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Whereas Adorno insinuates the good essay which prioritizes elucidating the matter at hand instead of telling stories about people as bad essays do. So why is the personal just so delicious to denounce? Why are the structural, the communal, the public, the critical, and the impersonal essays superior to the personal essay? Do my feelings not count? What's wrong? What is lacking in value in my subjective first-person experiences? What we have here at core is just a loathing of humanity so intense that it is insane. There is no inherent justification for believing that the personal is of less importance than the structural and the impersonal. The only way to believe as Movey Emery does is to have this overwhelming need to distinguish yourself from ordinary people by simply pouring out contempt for that which is humane, such as the feelings and experiences and the yearnings and the longings of the individual. So the talk as it is structured begins with an epigraph and that epigraph comes from Adorno's the essay as form and here it is. The essay form, however, there's some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter. To speak of the Why is that bad? What's so horrible about that? Sorry, I'm sure you had something planned that got us to this point. I'm going to skip it all and say that I think what you guys have done is absolutely extraordinary. That's because it's intellectuals who are doing awards without borders thingy. It's not ordinary people so she's got lots of praise for the intellectuals but the yearnings and subjective first-person experiences of the regular Joe, she only has contempt. So by the late 19th century we had universal education. We had the spread of literacy to the masses and this impelled intellectuals like the Mervei Emery's of the 19th century to produce a mode of culture which is called modernism that the masses could not enjoy. So the new availability of culture through TV and other popular media has now driven intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that essentially reprocesses all existing culture and takes it out of the reach of the majority. You can call this post-structuralism or deconstruction or just a theory. Essentially begins with the work of Jacques Daridah in the 1960s and then he attracted all these imitators among academics, literary students eager to identify themselves as the intellectual avant-garde. So to do that they have to establish their anti-popular, anti-individual, anti-first-person subjective experiences to establish their anti-popular status. Right? They need a theory to define, not necessarily a highly educated audience. So another problem that intellectuals have with the first-person essay and with TV and with popular culture is that awful thing human interest. Right? TV has brought appeal because it focuses on personality. Right? Intellectuals like Moewe Emery, they load the subjective first-person experiences of individuals. Right? So in TV's cultural coverage that they interview writers, actors, directors, right? But theory dismisses biographical approaches as trivial and irrelevant. It denies that there is any ascertainable connection between authors or artists in the meaning of the works they produce. So theory is basically in accord with the early 20th century aesthetics of Clive Bell's work Art and Ortega E. Gasset's The Humanization of Art, which taught that only people incapable of emotion look for human interest. It's somehow low and beneath you to look for human interest and take a concern with the subjective first-person experience. And these are just sentimental irrelevancies in artistic work. So the passion and the pain of the man behind the poet, that's simply the province of the degenerate masses. It's not for the specially gifted minority. Right? Theory is all about making a basis to Nietzsche just like Richard Spencer. Right? Richard Spencer, here's the typical modernist intellectual with absolute contempt for populism, nationalism, and the people. So this theory teaches that art and literature, they're all just self-reflential, self-reflexive. They have no relevance whatsoever to the real world as the life of ordinary people lead. This is perfectly in accord with the Bloomsbury aesthetics, horror of the photographic realism of the gross herd. You know what the ordinary people clamor for? Newspapers, realistic writing. This led Clive Bell to disdain 17th century Dutch art as simply a collection of chromophores. Colin Bart wrote an essay, The Death of the Author. This is a landmark in the late 20th century dehumanization of literature. And he urges his disciples to be aristocratic readers. And that's essentially the mission here of a Moewe Emory. I spent hours that I did not have to spend today reading through you know, the first seven or eight pieces that are highlighted on the home page. So really congratulations and congratulations to the whole. Yeah, but that's only congratulations to the intellectually lead. A personal essay is to speak of a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce in a loud, almost indignant clamor to the world at large. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form. It passes unscathed, but it's apparent content, the personal, a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profanity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality, writes the Adorno in the essay. So notice all this tension here in a throat, man. She could receive so much benefit from a good Alexander technique lesson. So let's go to Moewe Emory's second and third paragraphs here. What makes essays that tell stories about people bad? For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, one of the essays that Adorno most admired, essays about people betray the true object of essayistic criticism, the private individual. Private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell it, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre their story may be. Private individual is not a proper name, not Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Hardwick nor Joan Adidian or Zady Smith. Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity. Right. So there's nothing bad about essays that tell stories about people. Like to believe this is inherently bad is to require a leap of faith into an insane world. Now, I'm sure we're all better. We're all better here. We're all better off. We're all grateful for the piercing insights of hierarchy people such as Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who blessed us with such profundities as the objective essays about people is the individual. Without Adorno, without Benjamin, without the Frankfurt School, without Merve Emery, I would never have known that the objective essays about people is the individual. Who would have thought such stunning commentary? This is why we need Oxford and Cambridge and Stanford. Who else could have come up with this? It would never have occurred to me if Adorno and Benjamin hadn't said it. Otherwise, I would have thought that the true objective essays about people were black hole physics. Right. So when Merve Emery states that the private individual is not a proper name, she's saying regular people count for nothing and they are worthy of extinction because what kind of person is not worthy of a proper name, only a useless eater? Merve Emery writes, most essays and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that it's I is by necessity and choice and artful construction. Such stunning insight. You know what else are artful constructions? Luke Ford live streams, the New York review of books and his productions, the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Chichen Itza, Petra, Machu Picchu, the Christ the Redeemer Statute in Rio de Janeiro, the Colosseum in Rome, the Taj Mahal in India, what do all these things have in common? They are all artful constructions. How on earth is something nothing and useless just because it is an artful construction? How is something reduced to nil by being artistic and constructed? Like from my primitive perspective, artful constructions are usually far more worth than unartful deconstructions. Merve Emery writes, watch they say as flickers in and out of focus as a simulacrum, a chameleon, a made up soul, a series of distorting representations of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. So if the subject of the personal essay or the live stream doesn't flicker, if he remains in focus, then it's objectively good. You know what stays in focus? Luke Ford live streams, realist writing, good TV, good movies. What exactly is worthless about a subject that flickers, is created and has chameleon qualities? Do only those objects that never change and always shine brightly deserve our respect and attention and admiration? Why? The individual does not originate from himself and the individual does not only register in himself. The individual is always the product of two people meeting and he's usually born and raised in a tribe and he knows himself through his interactions with others in the tribe upon whom he makes varying impressions. I don't only register in myself, I register in your heart and soul. Consulting even the soberest of entries in the Oxford English Dictionary does nothing to shake the dismissal and suspicion the personal evokes. If anything it only intensifies it. The personal we are reminded is what is individual and private. Its concerns are bodily, physical. It signals the presence, immediacy, and particularity. Oh, shoot. Whoops, I just accidentally deleted that window. Anyway, what is of so little care and concern about the body? Like, what's wrong with the body? The body is awesome, right? There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to have contempt for the body. I mean, Hitler had these same attitudes, right? Wyndham Lewis, right? The intellectual is intellectual. Rebecca West said, there's no one who can more deeply throw one. TS Eliot calls Wyndham Lewis the most fascinating personality of our time. The greatest prose master of style of my generation, right? Wyndham Lewis was a big champion of Hitler and Hitler's worldview, the masses are essentially useless eaters. That's the same attitude of these intellectuals. The masses are a fiction. You know what's a fiction? It's not the individual and his first person subjective experiences. The masses are a fiction. This is John Kerry in his great book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. The masses functions to eliminate the humanity of the vast majority of people to deprive them of those distinctive features that make users of the term masses in their own esteem superior, right? St. Augustine wrote about the masses, right? The condemned mass. And he meant the whole race with the exception of those elect individuals whom God had inexplicably decided to save. So, yeah, there's a well-established Christian precedent for disposing of the surplus mass by a combustion, right? And this was finally given practical expression in our century in Hitler's death camps. Now, probably the classic intellectual account of the advent of mass culture in the early 20th century was by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega E. Gasset. His book was called, in English translation, The Revolt of the Masses. It was published in 1930s. It's all worried about population increase. His ideas really come from Nietzsche, who also deployed over population. Many too many are born his Zarathustra declares, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm eating this from the tree. Everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master, right? Doesn't this sound like Richard Spencer? So, Nietzsche is probably one of the earliest products of mass culture. Mass culture generated Nietzsche in opposition to itself, right? The immense popularity of Nietzsche's ideas among early 20th century intellectuals suggests the panic that the threat of the masses roused. So, W.B. Yates recommended Nietzsche as a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity. George Bernard Shaw nominated Thus Spake Zarathustra as the first modern book.