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Pierre D'Alancaisez and Amir Naaman, "Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual" (Verdurin, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
- [00:53]
Caleb Zakrin
And Doug.
- [00:54]
Marshall Poe
Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [01:08]
Amir Naaman
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [01:12]
Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [01:13]
Caleb Zakrin
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
- [01:17]
Amir Naaman
Liberty Savings.
- [01:19]
Caleb Zakrin
Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [01:22]
Jack Daniels Sponsor Voice
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- [01:47]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:51]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Amir Naaman and Pierre d' Alencet about their new edited book, Gay Life after the Homosexual. According to Amir and Pierre, homosexuality is in crisis because it has found itself incapable of debating its position in the culture wars, regardless of whether their particular grievances are bogus or politically salient. Homosexuality is in crisis because having turned all art and culture gay, it has lost the friction that once sustained it. The essays in this volume examine what it means to be homosexual today, with a focus on controversial topics that are too often neglected. Inversions is a book about art, culture, politics and transgression. To take us through these debates. I'm pleased today to have Amir and Pierre on the podcast. Thanks both for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:39]
Amir Naaman
Thank you.
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Pierre d'Alencet
Thanks so much, guy.
- [02:42]
Caleb Zakrin
It's a really great thrill to be able to interview a former NBN host. Our hosts go on to brighter futures. Once they leave nbn, of course, they then start to do interesting things. I've been following your work, Pierre and Amir as well, for a little while now. Your post NBN work, you've been doing some really interesting hosting some really interesting salons, bringing in all sorts of public intellectuals, especially, you know, really interesting, you know, thinkers, you know, especially British thinkers that, you know, our American listeners might not be as familiar with some of the people that you, that you have been featuring, but just incredibly fascinating debates that you've been hosting. And, you know, as you describe in the book, this, this book was. The birth. Was birthed by one of your salons. So I was wondering if you could both just introduce yourself a little bit and talk a little bit about the projects that you've been doing that led to this book.
- [03:39]
Pierre d'Alencet
Maybe I'll start by excusing myself from having become the subject, from having been the object of a New Books Network channel in the past. In the last couple of years, I've been running a, for lack of a better term, a salon called Verdurin, which is based in London, in East London, where I live. And I've been running a whole bunch of conversations which were kind of inspired by my experience of being a New Books Network host some years ago, which essentially sort of an opportunity to bring people together, to think out loud, to disagree constructively with some kind of artifact in the background. In as much as in the New Books Network, when the host and the interviewee meet, there is a book, there is a body of research, and the events that I do. Sometimes this happens, we host book launches, but quite often we take slightly more abstract themes and we bring together people who have made films, staged events, have been instrumental in particular histories. And it was one of those events or a theatrical event that was produced by colleagues that Amir and I met. And the idea of the book and the events that we put together, that inspired, that came together.
- [04:59]
Amir Naaman
My name is Zamir Naaman, I live in Berlin and I came to London about two years ago and discovered Pierre's Salon and the kind of cultural organization that goes around it. And Pierre said, thinking out loud, this is something which has been. I almost forgot how it, how is it possible to think out loud in today's culture, especially in Berlin, where I live. So it was really a breath of fresh air for me. And yeah, we did our event called Gay Amnesia, talking about the unspoken elements of gay culture in the event itself, it was more history. But then Pierre kind of had the idea of getting it, putting it into contemporary life like it is today. That's how we began.
- [05:48]
Pierre d'Alencet
So Inversion, to introduce the book very briefly is a collection of essays by 11 writers, many of whom we picked up from seeing snippets of dissent and serious analysis by writers who comment on gay culture, queer theory, homosexual history. And we found that as middle aged gay men we sort of come to. We don't really know where to point to. Like unless one is today really immersed in liberal kind of progressive culture, there's not that many places to look around. And we picked up a bunch of writers. We were aware that one finds interesting serious dissenting critiques in places like Compact Magazine, which I know will be already like I'm starting on with a red flag for many listeners already. First things, you know, a Christian magazine, tablet and so on and so on, but also some spaces on the left. But somehow I couldn't conceive of. I couldn't think of a place where gay culture would be discussed seriously, but not in a kind of hysterical culture war manner that we come across, I mean, quite easily online. There are plenty of publications that sort of like get themselves titillated by questions of trans and so on and so on. We sort of felt that this is not good enough and there is something that's not being discussed, but are certain historical, theoretical, critical positions that are not being exercised. And we started, as Amir said, we started by trying to put together a couple of events like trying to do like historical revisionism, trying to get together people who were present at the foundation of Stonewall, the charity in the UK. We invited the editor of 1996 collection of essays, Anti Gay Mark Simpson, who was kind of in our imagination the last gay man who sort of stood up to the gay machine and said hey guys, look at yourselves. What is happening? And we sort of struggled. So we decided to put together a collection of essays that in the ways that you the linear to Caleb addresses the sort of slightly left behind or slightly the taboo actually there's no good way of going around it. Yeah, quite a lot of the things that we cover are taboo in a way that they would not be acceptable within a queer theory department, would not make it into mainstream media and so on. And we do that with a completely sort of massive breadth of positions. All of them are quite serious, but they range from socialist left to Maga Anon. They range from sex addicts to. To TR. Catholics. Yeah, so this is what we try to do.
- [08:40]
Caleb Zakrin
What do you find with these salons and with this particular project? How do you make it work? Because I. I think that when I was reading the book and seeing the various point of views that. That are expressed, you know, I. I could just imagine people descending into, you know, throwing shoes at each other and, you know, wanting to. You know, oftentimes in academia, I think that people. There's almost this. This sense that. That if you have a viewpoint that slightly differs from what the other people might. Might be sharing, that, you know, you could. You could be in serious danger of, you know, being ostracized. So how. How do you actually go about addressing these topics without, you know, necessarily, you know, in a fearless way? Let's say.
- [09:28]
Pierre d'Alencet
Well, Amir has an even longer history of confronting uncomfortable topics than me, so maybe he can address those not necessarily.
- [09:37]
Amir Naaman
Confronting the topics, but definitely. Or also not definitely. But I do have a little history of confronting kind of, let's call it when the topics don't matter and it's all just the hysteria around it. When Pierre star from all the events I've been at Verdurin, Pierre starts his talks always with kind of a small introduction about how this is a safe space in order.
- [10:03]
Pierre d'Alencet
I tend to say them, you say.
- [10:05]
Amir Naaman
Them, or at least that's how I remember it because I live too long. But what he means by that, from what I understand, is that here we're going to talk about the topics about the subjects about the artifact. We're not going to perform. We're going to think. That is extremely freeing. When I was a few years ago, I had a bookshop in Berlin where we did events once in a while. And one of the events we did after Trump was elected, I was in charge of doing some, let's call it, talks about esotericism, stuff like that, which I was interested in at the time. And New York Times articles ran about Steve Bannon's interest in Julius Evola. And I said, okay, the new President of the United States is interested in kind of a cult fascist thinker from the 20th century. Let's talk about it. And needless to say, that did not go down so well. And I was kind of carrying that with me all these years. And that's why meeting Pierre and the circle around Verdun really taught me actually to think again and allow myself to ask questions without Fearing constantly the reaction.
- [11:21]
Pierre d'Alencet
Yeah, I mean, very sweet to hear Amir articulate all of this. And also his story in the bookshop in bullying is sort of like quite foundational to what we now call cancel culture in a very perverse sense. But I want to say that actually the solution in the end is to be serious and to stand your ground. I'll try to without necessarily, you know, blowing smoke up my own self too much. How did I do my interviews for the New Books Network that I think was slightly different than many of the interviews, which is to read the book seriously and then find a place where I disagreed. And I did this 50 times, and nine times out of ten authors are pretty happy that someone has engaged with the content of the work. Because most of the time academic books don't really get coverage of any sort. They don't get readers. And provided one has respect for the artifact as opposed to the expectation of how the artifact is received, I think that's all we really need to do. This doesn't really. This is not a magic solution. Networks lose listeners in real life. Events in London did not get audiences who would be offended by the thing they, more often than not, imagine they might encounter. So to make this slightly more concrete for naming names, before our book was published, there was a series of threads on bluesky denouncing it purely on the basis of what was written on the back cover and someone Googling the biographies of a couple of the writers. And, you know, and the whole like, hey, how can we make sure that this gets nowhere? And I will say a couple of very simple things to it. I will read the biographies of the writer, which include Roger Lancaster and Oliver Davis. Both of them are seasoned academics, both of whom have appeared on the New Books Network. And it turns out these people can be completely serious. And I think this is the only trick that I. The only thing that I have actually done is to always say, without using that cringe face. I do say this is a safety space. Or rather the best trick is you don't actually let the other contributors read the book before it's published. So we were able to, in our editorial process, to bring together people and encourage them to engage with the pertinent questions. And we actually wrote a commissioning brief with sort of slightly incendiary. And every time. And every time we proposed, please write an attack on X or write a look critical reading, we always said to each of the writers, and please include yourself as the subject of critique. So the supposition of the book is that the gay man has Sort of made himself redundant. Whether it's through the fact that he was absorbed by queer theory, whether it's because neoliberalism sort of turned everyone gay, or any other reason. How do we ask that question with the writer as a. As a subject at the center?
- [14:36]
Caleb Zakrin
Many of these essays focus on gay men. What it means to be a gay man in various ways. Could you talk about why you wanted to focus so much on the. The gay male identity, which is I think in a lot of the. The essays argue, is. Is not actually well understood anymore. People don't actually know what it means to be a gay man any.
- [15:03]
Amir Naaman
Since we are both gay men, it would be a good start because we know more what we're talking about. Second thing, looking around culture and society, and I live amongst gay men to a degree, we have been kind of taught not to look at reality, at what we are seeing, but rather than that, kind of believe what is being said about the gays. And lately there's been less said about the gays because, yeah, they have become somehow redundant to the bigger project of progress in culture. So kind of checking, looking back in the mirror, let's say, I think my.
- [15:43]
Pierre d'Alencet
My contribution to this would be slightly more narcissistic. You know, like, what prisms do I have to look at the world? I mean, I used to. I used to believe that everything is terrible around us because of contemporary art and contemporary. And I thought that because contemporary art was the thing that I do day by day. And what's the other big problem? Well, gays ruined everything for everyone. And I'm being flippant with this, but also I think this is something that we could take seriously in a sense that the liberated subject of the 1990s, the gay man who's just survived the AIDS crisis and like very quickly tried to forget its horrors, becomes this super consumerist body. The 90s are sort of a moment of incredible optimism. I mean, in Britain we go all the way to things can only get better. Consumerism, the gym. These are things that Mark Simpson, who I already mentioned, writes in his book in the 90s. But if we take this as a paradigm and take a couple of critical categories, for instance, one, gay marriage. So, you know, gays get gay marriage just as marriage ends up sort of stops meaning anything to anyone. The other thing you could think about is dating out. When Grindr was interviewed, introduced the. The response was, oh, this would never work for women. You know, like women would never go for this. Yet we are 10, literally fewer than 15 years on. We are In a live in a society in which all relationships are formed online. So gay men to a certain extent have been kind of a precursors, test rabbit, the foot soldiers of both the sexual liberation movements in the conventionally positive sense. But also they have, in a certain reading, been the kind of test rabbit of everything collapsing on itself. And one of course, can make a moral judgment on all of this, saying like, well, it's great, you know, that we. They were brilliant. Their coalition between feminists and gay men of the 1970s helped us get this far to destroy the structure of the family and then turn us into kind of consumer shoppers. Well, let's move on. Now is the time for the queer subject as opposed to the gay subject. But I think there's something to be gained from, as Amir says, looking in the back mirror and seeing like, what did we do? And this is, you know, again, the we is important. We have to be able to account for this. And placing ourselves in the center of the critique allows us to be slightly more unflinching. But as usual, when we come and analyze the pernicious aspects of the culture as it unfolds now. So is there, for example, something slightly dark about the massive and rapid rollout of prep the prophylaxica against HIV over the last decades in the Western world? This is sort of like being taken as manna from heaven by the quote unquote gay community. But is there something more to be said about this? Does it link to a broader biopolitical critique that we could deploy? And so on and so on.
- [18:59]
Caleb Zakrin
The essays in this book, you know, they look at different topics. They look at art, they look at language, they look at politics. I want to start with this language piece because you use the, the term homosexual quite a bit. And there's an essay that, you know, looks at these different terms that we might use to refer to, to gay people's, particularly gay men. You know, like the word gay, like homosexual, like some other terms which might not mention. But how do you think about this, this, this term homosexual and the deployment it. Because I really don't feel like people use the word homosexual that much anymore. At least when I, you know, when people talk about it, you, you don't hear often, oh, I'm a homosexual. People say, I'm. I'.
- [19:43]
Pierre d'Alencet
Well, we've made it even worse by putting the word inversion on the COVID So like, we extend this to all the possible covers. I mean, in a sense, all of our essays are about language. And one of the horrible things that I discovered in putting this book together, that quite a lot of our sexuality is undeniably socially determined. So if you think about the kind of cultural pushback that we hear from the. Those people who would like to split gay from queer or LGB from everything else that comes into the Alphabet, quite often they make a cult with biological essentialism, which I think is still valuable. And I think there's quite a lot of our critiques are centered around this. Mine for sure. Stephen Adubato speaks about sodomy because he really wants to kind of come back to some kind of biological realism. But the reality is, if we look historically at the various terms that you have to have just listed, Caleb, there is an element in which someone comes up with a category, that category has a medical or cultural or theoretical meaning, and then people opt in and out of that category. This is sort of like obvious, and it's very Foucaultian. Critiques could be mounted of all of this. But homosexuality, gayness, queerness, inversion, earlier than that, faggotry, which is, by the way, completely fine as a word. Nothing offensive about it as far as I'm concerned. These are all both categories that have meanings that are biological, social, that are to do with identity constructions. And all of these change historically. So the first problem we encountered is that like you can sort of say, you start by saying gay, not queer, you know, because that's a marker. We're both middle aged, so we get to be gay, not queer. And maybe we can fantasize that people 10 years older than us could be saying, oh, I'm homosexual, as opposed to one of those newfangled gays. But the reality is these things change. Blake Smith, who's very optimistic as he opens the book, writes about this history and he looks at literary identification. And it happens that the history is complicated in the sense that the homosexual is a medical term to start with. Gay is a sort of like a political term. Queer is only a political term. And they have always coexisted. Maybe, Amir, you want to say a bit more.
- [22:28]
Amir Naaman
This is your territory more than mine.
- [22:30]
Pierre d'Alencet
Okay, I'll be quiet from now on because you know what happens. Caleb, this is instrumental. I just talk all the time.
- [22:37]
Amir Naaman
No.
- [22:39]
Caleb Zakrin
I think that's interesting. And I want to look at this Blake Smith essay a bit. And this historical evolution that you look at, what sort of gay world does Blake imagine? What is he picturing? That doesn't exist?
- [23:02]
Pierre d'Alencet
I think Blake's concern is one of a sort of intellectual stroke, community care, which he doesn't use those words particularly, but I do that in my essay. So I'm going to sort of put my words in his mouth in a sense. Blake's interest as a historian is in the work of Simon Danley, who's a literary figure. He's an editor in the 1970s associated with one of the presses in magazines around Stonewall like Post, the Stonewall Inn. There's kind of a movement towards emancipation as homosexuality becomes legalized. It needs to find a public outlet. The gay world that the terms themselves comes from Hannah Arendt. It's a world in which we perform certain duties to one another. In which we tend to a sort of a shared object. And what Blake does is he outlines quite astutely that actually even at the points of great liberation, even at the points of this political success from the literary records, which is what he's concerned with. So he looks at quite kind of high brow gay writing. There's absolutely no agreement as to what the political purpose of the terminology is. There is absolutely no agreement as to, you know, whether gay men should write gay poetry as gay men for other gay men or whether they should just fuck. So the that the artifact, the sociality, the politics are not necessarily so easily elided as they are in the version of sort of queer politics that we receive now. So I think one of the useful moments that Blake highlights in his essay is that this is all entirely up for grabs today. We are trained to find any attempt at assimilation. So gay men who sort of pretend to be straight, like the kind of conservatives who would get married and adopt a child and not have blue hair. This is somehow a betrayal of politics where the reality is that this is not. This has historically not been the case. I in my essay which concerns itself with the impossibility of a gay community impossibility, sort of with a question mark. I make an example of the first ever so called gay magazine which comes which starts being published in Germany at the end of the 19th century century. It's called Der Eigene, which translates as the unique. So one wonders whether the moment homosexuality could manifest as in culture. Why is it that it's telling us, by the way, we don't particularly want to do exchange. We're just here for ourselves. There's of course complexity. The Eigeny, the unique connects to the philosophy. Mark Stirner in the way that the magazine is formulated. And this is not as straightforward as to say that all gay men are completely egotistical and alone. But yeah, tracing the trajectory of the medical to the individual, to the artistic, to the political, to the Sexual is, I think, very useful because we don't do that in our discourse today. Like, there's an idea that queerness dominates and queerness is multifaceted, but it always has certain preconditions which are alien. They're kind of new inventions. This is not. Which would be completely incomprehensible to a homosexual of the 1920s and even the homosexual of the 1970s.
- [26:52]
Caleb Zakrin
I would suggest going off of that. I was wondering if you could talk about Ron Hilbrun's essay, Abolish Queer Theory.
- [27:01]
Amir Naaman
First, I want. I'd like to add a little bit to what you said before about. But the language and the idea of making this huge community and making it. Making it some kind of big one community, a kind of nation building. Which reminds me of in our events we had, we discussed Proust and Sodom and Gomorrah and the idea of the gays as kind of forming this kind of subculture, sub country in the country and the fantasies of a sodomite kingdom. And it seems that today the thought of nation building itself is. And connectivity and care is something that you also talk about in your sapie is kind of not in favor as it used to be back in the day. And then the meaning of words that we try to use to organize around this. To organize this community around it, if the community exists, don't mean anything. And now regarding Ran's essay. Let's start with the most basic aspect of it where that the gay man who has lost reading material and has lost ways to contact academia because academia has completely does not speak to him anymore. I mean, it's kind of a joke now to say that queer theory about gay men is written by women, some of them lesbians, not even all. And some kind of. If I. There's this quote from Ramstex, if I. If I'm not mistaken, which is what if I get off on the binary. Right. Because breaking. Breaking and breaking more of the. Of these terms and codes leaves you with nothing at the end. Pierre, could you add a bit about that?
- [28:55]
Pierre d'Alencet
Sure. The disappointment with the discipline, I think, as Amir says, is quite palpable. Queer theory as a description of sexuality does not serve homosexual sex in any sense. So Ran very methodically. And I really admire this essay for its. For both its clarity and sort of like wide range of examples. It sort of goes through all the different strands of queer theory over the last 20 years and finds ways in which they just completely give up on the premise. Now, one could say that actually this is the point of queerness that queerness is the evasion of particularities, the evasion of one form of behavior, one form of thought over any other. But I think one might still wish to be able to say something quite serious about sex and sexuality as it exists between gay men. So, you know, there's a jibe that comes from Leo Persani's kind of infamous 1978 essay is direct to my grave, which is sort of like a foundational Duma essay of the discipline. He asks that his job is there is a big secret about sex. Most people don't like it. And the joke that Ann goes on to make, although quite possibly this is already a joke coined by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean. Oliver is another one of a contributor. And Tim and Oliver have been on the New Books Network before. They sort of updated the three of them to say, well, actually there's a secret about queer theorists. They don't like sex very much. And then goes not only into the detail of queer theoretical writing, including, he does sort of commit a bit of fratricide. Like he does critique Oliver Davis, a co contributor for Holding Back. He critiques unrealistic and therefore unsupportable, therefore and unproductive treatments of sex. So he critiques desexualization, digitalization. So I sort of don't want to be too simple and like echo what Amir said, which is there's so much of queer theory is written by women for women. But if we remove any tension, any value judgment from that statement and simply ask, so what is happening with descriptions of gay sex and the culture it produces? I think that leaves a void which can only be filled if we stop producing, you know, putting energy into queer theory. Queer theory cannot produce a description of male gay sexuality. It's just not possible. So I'm very happy that right in the middle of the book we have, you know, 50 pages in which that point is made eloquently and for the final time, we don't have to discuss this ever again eloquently.
- [32:06]
Amir Naaman
And I want to also add that it has some humor in it. I mean, which the queer theorists deserve a little bit of this mockery. And there's even some light heartedness to bring back how to talk about kind of gay male sexuality, which I think Gan does very well in this essay.
- [32:26]
Caleb Zakrin
In addition to taking on queer theory, a lot of these essays consider art and the role, you know, what, what is gay art? What is that? What does that necessarily mean? And one thing I'm struck by too is just how many great works of art In. In history have been produced by, you know, what we might think of as closeted gay men or, you know, men that weren't out. Maybe they were out in their, you know, little community, but. But not, you know, not. Not necessarily widely. Widely known. And, you know, oftentimes these. This is presented in a way of, you know, a sort of a tragic way. Like, you know, if you look at someone like Oscar Wilde and, you know, or not an artist but, you know, someone like Alan Turing, for example, that. That, you know, they were so brilliant and then they were punished for. For being. For being gay, essentially. But, but how do you think about. About this kind of, you know, this idea of. Of these, you know, these artists that, you know, they weren't necessarily putting their sexuality at the forefront. It was something that was maybe more submerged and was expressed through. Through their artistic works, maybe in a more. In a delicate way.
- [33:41]
Amir Naaman
I think this talks too, a little bit about the paradox that, for instance, I had going into this project of inversion is a mix of idolizing this thing which might be a fantasy of the great outsider looking at the world and interpreting it because it is not part of it, which we associate with the romantic idea of like, the homosexual, the artist, the poet, and stuff like that. On the other hand, now kind of that idea of the complete outsider as a homosexual has been degraded. The homosexual is not an outsider. And both me and Pierre and other gays in the west, we kind of enjoy, you know, normalcy. But a lot has been lost. I sometimes I think about this a lot and listen, I'm not as eloquent as many of our writers in Spiel, but allow me to share what I'm. For instance, this reminds me how a lot of times we associate with today with gender, things which are not necessarily of gender. For instance, I sometimes before I go to sleep, I listen to. I look at Twitter and most. The most horrible parts of it and all of the kind of myriad kind of genders that are available today. Okay, for instance, I don't know too much about what two spirit means, but suddenly, if you like smart people with glasses, for instance, it's a kind of sexuality or a kind of gender. And so some things are just personality types and are not actually a gender. And I wonder if the great artists were homosexual and became great artists or they had just this kind of. They were outsiders and it somehow brought them either to homosexual or maybe they were not actually homosexual as we understand them today. One of our writers, Marcus Lancaster, who wrote the last text in the book, which is a Work of fiction, not a proper essay like the others, when he's a huge fan of Proust and I've heard him argue that Proust was not a homosexual.
- [35:47]
Pierre d'Alencet
Convincing. Convincingly, I think. Look, this is. This is a. This is a good question. We have. We have authors in the volume who argue different aspects. But, you know, Travis Jeppeson, who's an art critic and an artist who lived through New York in the 90s, an American kid who sort of grew up and came of age and came out before the Internet, sort of. He bemoaned the complete normiedom that queer culture has become. And he was of the generation who were surrounded by writers like Dennis Cooper and sort of the peak of Bruce Le Bruce, for instance. And one can legitimately ask, as Amir was intimating, whether a certain type of transgression punkiness was anything to do with sexuality. Why were queer punks a thing that was productive in the early 90s but became complete cliches by 2005? So there's a social, cultural question to ask there. Another one of our writers, David Moulton, takes this, I think, slightly more sort of personally, I would suggest, bizarrely. And he writes about Shenre, and he has this thesis about the gay art of suffering. You know, he thinks about Ivan Illich and he thinks about the great, great medicalization of our society today, this kind of desire that we should all take a pill and be affirmed into feeling completely better. And if a zomaya says if my glasses and my personality type correspond to a gender stroke or diagnosis, isn't that brilliant? Because we can define subculture for ourselves. Those subcultures are now massive. What quarter of a Generation Z people identify as lgbtq? I mean, that's not a subculture. That's de facto majority, because these are the vocal people who create the culture. So one wonders whether the historical record of know Proust dying of consumption in bed, as we'd like to imagine him, Genet reminding us that he's fantasizing about the smell of latrines while in prison. You know, whether this tells us anything about what we might have lost culturally. So I think David's question would be whether with some experience of a life filled with friction, and that friction can take many forms. You know, it can take the form of prison. It can take the form of, like, uncomfortable sex. There was a point at which gay sex, like when I was a teenager, gay sex was supposedly culturally painful. It isn't anymore. It's a natural, pleasurable thing. These things have changed. So if we are to either join homosexuality to a kind of notion of outsiderness and to think that culture value is produced by this. We have to be very aware that all the descriptors, all the adjectives have changed over the last 40 years. The gay man is not an outsider. The queer subject loves to tell us he's an outsider, but it just isn't so there is a trade off. Things have changed since.
- [39:09]
Amir Naaman
Also there has been. Sorry, it seems there's been a mix of myths regarding the changing of the guards of, of the gay. Gay artists and gay writers. David talks about this a little bit about how just as today you can find like LGBTQ etc books for children and kind of bemoaning that this is kind of propaganda teaching them to be. Well, he doesn't say teaching them to be gay. Right, but teaching you how to think about this. It's the same as, you know, for my generation and older generations. Jeanette told us how to be homosexuals, how to be gays, to be taught. Taught us this myth of debauchery, let's call it, and. And filth. Okay. John Waters did as well. So. And it reminds me a little bit. Pierre talked about how a gay sex used to be known as painful sex, but it is not anymore. Kind of reminds me how in Greek literature, in ancient Greek literature, the. The ocean was green and then it became blue in our society. So we are just. The myths are evolving, changing. And we're kind of hoping with this book as well to kind of put a little stop sign. Look at, look at it. Look at this change.
- [40:30]
Pierre d'Alencet
Oh, this is so beautiful. Like, look at this beautiful sunset. Sunset over a green sea.
- [40:37]
Amir Naaman
So gay. The gay green sea.
- [40:40]
Pierre d'Alencet
Yeah.
- [40:41]
Caleb Zakrin
This, this Travis Jefferson essay on gay culture and transgression. I find that really interesting. And this notion of friction that you're, that you're putting forth, that you know, how friction might produce it produce culture in a way.
- [40:58]
Amir Naaman
You know.
- [40:59]
Caleb Zakrin
Could you just dig into that a little bit more about gay culture and transgression? You've been talking about it a bit, but I'm really quite interested in this particular essay.
- [41:08]
Pierre d'Alencet
There's a way in which Travis in his essay which is called Gay Shame, Eric Respective sort of looks back on the things that have changed in culture, but also in his life and in society as large. So I describe Travis's coming of age in the US but he does end up. I'm so sorry, I'm going to nag on Amir as well. He moves to Berlin. Like everyone moves to Berlin. It was cool to move to Berlin. I Almost bought a house in Berlin in the early 2000s. I thought it was going to be great, but it turns out it isn't. Because what happens when you produce too much edginess, too much outsideriedness? It ends up normalizing, it ends up institutionalizing, it ends up depending on NGOs, it ends up when even that collapses, when even that cannot encapsulate and make enough people and make every single one of them into this radical subject. And the word radical can mean anything here because the transgression can go in any direction. You can be a radical leftist, you can be a radical coprophiliac. I mean, honestly, at a certain level it doesn't matter. And the kind of references that Travers makes that do include, as I mentioned earlier, Dennis Cooper and a whole kind of milieu of writers obsessed with obscenity. Like the kind of last generation, I would say, of people in the mold of Jean Genet, the kind of people who would describe gay sex and say, hey, if we let this go, this ends up in blood. Like, I mean, not literally, but, you know, like dirty things happen. Like people's. Not only hearts, but throats get slit, for instance. What I think Travis describes as a kind of broader experience in which all of that culture becomes evacuated, becomes replaced by an institutionalized NGO supported and therefore HR department controlled modes of cultural expression. And I have to say that I'm sort of full of trepidation because we have a book launch in Berlin which I've just been nagging on in a couple of days, and it's in one of those places that I think the HR department is at the door and I've been asked to not be impolite and I've been told not to mention anything from the book. Essentially. Yeah. But I think the question remains, what has changed in social formations? One of the kind of easy cop out responses which we do not accept at all would be that capitalism did this. This is plenty of times if you want to ask someone what has gone wrong in society with X, and X is their field of study. But the easiest answer is to say that capitalism and neoliberalism has done this to us the last 10 years. We've started changing the tomb. You know, it's, it's fascism that's making our lives terrible. It's Donald Trump and Georgia Maloney for the three days that she supposedly was a, a fascist in charge of Italy, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we find, you know, we find the same kind of terrible excuses there is in even within gay men. I mentioned earlier that like the, the, the body of gay men who try to like react against the fact that they have sort of dissolved into. They love to spend the time saying that they are where they are because trans people have taken over. Like. Well, you know, this is both true. Like both capitalism and trans are categories that are in some way implicated in social changes over the last 40 years, but they in very little sense account for the abdication of agency, abdication of that kind of transgressive impulse in art and, and in culture, which is maybe not the only thing we're interested in, but in a kind of sterile, liberal cultural production of the last decade. God, I, as you know, as an art critic by day, I would love to see some art director. Jenny surprises me and scares me with something. And I have to say I'm just not saying that being produced by institutions who have DEI statements written above the door, it's just not happening. So, yeah, that's kind of one of the questions that arise from the book. And Travis Jeppesen's essay I think is a nicely formulated and no holds bar sort of lament. But also Jacques, with some well argued names of people who we might want to avoid and do better than.
- [45:51]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, one of the essays takes up this idea of, of bad gays. So, so gay men that might have political views that, that aren't necessarily considered, you know, the mainstream for, for what most people might share. You know, I, this thing I've thought about quite a bit recently. There was this, this, this profile the New York Times on the gay men in the Trump administration, you know, focusing on Scott Besant and, and this, this kind of a crew where it's, it's been quite normalized inside the Trump administration to be, to be a gay man. And you look at some, or Oliver Davis rather looks at some controversial gay men. Could you talk a bit about this essay?
- [46:40]
Pierre d'Alencet
I guess I should take this. Before we get Amir to disclose himself as a gay man, Oliver does this incredible thing. One of the readers responded to this essay and says congratulations on stepping on every single possible landmine at the same time, which I, you know, as an. I just, I'm incredibly proud to hear. Oliver writes about Renokmy. Renokami in the 1980s is Francis, successor to Jean Germain. He writes a novel called Tricks, which is essentially like a series of short stories narrating sexual encounters in bath houses in Paris, in parks in San Francisco. You know, the heady days were just before AIDS sort of swept through all of this. And Camille by the early 2000s is sort of about to be canonized, to be like the literary successor of Jeuner, having been trained and having been kind of in the French Academy, having been a darling of Renault. Camille, for instance, who writes to Sorry, professor, apologies. He writes the foreword to Tricks. All of this completely crashes because in a diary that Camus publishes, as he does regularly, he is accused of expressing some racist views. I think that happens. The affair originally happens around the year 2000 and there's a kind of beginning of an assault censoriousness in French culture. He's accused of the worst. The worst, like it's essentially like the Holocaust again. Now, that is kind of overblown by all accounts. And Oliver makes a good argument for actually engaging with the text. But what happens to Camus later? What Camus does as he keeps on publishing, publishing more and more and being more and more forthright with his opinions, particularly on migration, is both more complex, at some points less forgivable, but actually much more deserving of attention. And to finally get to the point, Reno Camus is the author of the Great Replacement Theory. Camus comes up with the idea that the population of the west, or rather the population of Europe, is being replaced by migrants of primarily northern African, Middle Eastern ethnicities. And that that is happening on purpose. That is happening as a sort of conspiracy of, say, the European Union. Now, I will, before whoever is still listening at this stage, sort of reaches for the smelling soul, say one, this replacement. Whether it's, well, the word replacement is to taint it, but the ethnic change is happening. This is just undeniably happening. So Camus is observing something that is real. Camus is defended quite straightforwardly by the census. For instance, migration into Europe has changed European ethnicity very, very fundamentally. What is of course the matter for the conspiratorial is how this has come about. And Camille writes in many different ways. Some of them are pejorative, some of them are political, some of them are polemical. Some of them are actually to do with how we think about language. In which prism to understand Camille from the perspective of someone who's trained in a kind of post structuralist tradition, when the France and hey, language can mean anything. You can. I'm obviously caricaturing the French Academy of the 70s and 80s here. But Camille is a person who essentially reacts to, hey, we were told when we were young that things were like this. Then we were told that we would find our freedom by throwing the dictionary out of the window. And we've done that. And now we're living in a completely different world. The interesting thing about Camus is that he's been just completely pushed out of polite society, partly because he has done things that are now, not necessarily because, well, they're now under new law, new legislations, illegal. Camus, for instance, was barred entry into the UK earlier this year when he wanted to attend the conference of a national nationalist Homeland party, I think they're called. The Home Office denied him entry to the UK on grounds of the undesirability of his presence. So Camus is objectively, legally a person who counts as a bad person, as opposed to bad gay. But what Oliver does is he sort of tries to read them, read him not merely as a racist, but actually as a gay man in whose earlier work, including the iconic sort of liberationary work from the 1980s, one can already see the traces of what comes later. And this is interesting because Oliver calls us to be a lot more detailed and a lot more sort of careful with how we brandish designations at Bad Gaze. Badgaze is sort of a riff on a very popular podcast, gosh, also recorded by two Berliners. I really can't go to Berlin. And Oliver sort of makes a point about what it is that we. How we cheat ourselves by designating the bad gay as somehow external. So in a kind of hypothetical reading of the Bad Gays podcast of someone like Renaud Camus. Camus is gay, like the listener, but he's bad, unlike the listener. So the category of the bad gay creates a sort of moral separation that we don't practice anywhere else in culture. And I think we do that at our peril. Like to deny that not only is everyone capable of both good and evil, to then to kind of create the construction that somehow the bad gay is a special type of a gay in which we can all, in a liberal culture, make sure that we isolated from this is not the case. And to sort of pay homage to what Oliver did, this is like his essay is the most rigorous one academically in a book. He really does a close reading. And it turns out you don't have to express any moral judgment at all over Kumi. Like, his writing is sort of like he hangs himself. But also, if you pay close attention to the text, you don't have to dismiss the things that he happens to be right about. And the interesting thing about someone like Camille, whose great replacement theory is that that does allow us to think about the anxieties that a lot of gay men do feel, as I earlier intimated, about the encroachment of queer and trans and so could we construe. And I'm slightly departing from what Oliver writes here. Could we construe the replacement of gay men of the homosexual. Whichever category we cling on to by those newer categories, Is that. Is that being produced conspiratorially? Are there a bunch of NGOs who are preferring queer over gay? I. I don't have to write the great gay replacement theory myself. I think that's. That's pretty, Pretty clear on the. On the. On the face of it.
- [54:31]
Amir Naaman
I want to bring down to the gutter, if I can, for a minute, just to add something. The bad gay is a category that can exist because you have a Camus for one from one side. And it reminded me of the Jeffrey Dahmer, a miniseries that appeared on Netflix a few. I think it was two years ago, and we're talking about a homosexual serial killer, sex killer. And to try to divorce it from his homosexuality, his gayness is impossible. While you can't really have a bad queer, because queer means that you are embodying the culture in the correct way. So Camus can be a bad gay. And we don't want to talk about it because bae, a gay, has in it something which is not necessarily fitting the culture. But Camus would never be queer, for instance, because that's impossible.
- [55:28]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. And I think that actually leads in a way, even though it's not ordered this way in the book, it actually leads into your essay a bit, Amir wars of Desire, where you talk about this, you know, this. This phenomenon of. Of activism, queer activism.
- [55:49]
Amir Naaman
Could you.
- [55:49]
Caleb Zakrin
Could you discuss this essay and the argument that you. That you make in it?
- [55:53]
Amir Naaman
Of course. I actually realize more and more how connected my essay is with Travis's, even though his comes from a completely different angle about some kind of obsession of gays, also gays in my generation, but also younger, with this idea of transgression. And unlike we talked before about blaming capitalism for all of our faults, I would actually, I will blame transgression to capitalism and in culture. And let me tell you why it's for me. I've started noticing it as a child. I lived there. I grew up in Israel. And I remember I saw this documentary. This was my first red pilling. Okay. I saw this documentary about the 1968 riots in Paris. And I remember hating, hating the rioters because they get to be in the Sorbonne and smoke and meet all these amazing people, and I'm stuck, like, in West Asia and, you know, whatever. So I. This was my first kind of insight into people who have a lot allow themselves to make trouble. This could also be connected to Camus, who is, if I'm not mistaken, an aristocrat. Right. He's not like, okay, so being that gay, that's not quite.
- [57:11]
Pierre d'Alencet
Sorry. He lives in a castle which he inhabited himself.
- [57:14]
Amir Naaman
Well, good for him. And anyway, I think the transgressive queers and stuff like that are a result of a capitalist free society. Now, I am pro free societies, and I'm not opposed to capitalism completely, but it created this kind of subject who thinks the world has always been as it is and he cannot get hurt. And this is why I am very skeptical about a lot of the kind of the. The will for transgression and violence. Transgression, as I put it in my text, and how it has appeared to us in popular culture and how it came to be in the last two years of the Israel war with Hamas, where violence was everywhere and everybody embodied, tried to perform a part in this orgy of violence, if I may. And I also added, I guess, that a lot of the what is masquerading as political ideas are actually some kind of sexual cosplay of. Let's call it just like in S and M play, you have the dominant and the submissive. So this kind of got expanded into geopolitics on the streets of mostly of Europe.
- [58:43]
Caleb Zakrin
I don't know if either of you have seen the movie One Battle After.
- [58:46]
Amir Naaman
Another and did, unfortunately.
- [58:51]
Caleb Zakrin
I think. I think what's. What's interesting is, is, you know, for those who haven't seen it, but there's this, you know, they. They depict these. These rap political radicals. You know, there's one of the radicals has a sort of a sexual relationship with the, you know, the. The commanding, you know, kind of American neo fascist, you know, policeman. And it's depicted in this way where there's this, like, erotic tension between the. The activist and between the, you know, the police officer. And I was talking with a friend about it. We were just talking about how so much of what attracts people to activism is the sexiness of it. That obviously there is, like, authentic activism that people are driven towards. But there's also that, you know, but also people, you know, young people, they. It's. It's sexy, it's fun, it's cool to be an activist, to believe in something.
- [59:48]
Amir Naaman
Deeply and to be able to kind of give yourself up for a cause which is not just your own. Because, as I said, you. When you have the Sorbonne, you can burn it okay, and you can give it up. And there's something sexy about saying, I don't like. You know, when two lovers are in love and they say, in the movies, at least, they say, oh, we don't need money. We don't need. We just need each other. And there's this kind of feeling of, I can give anything up. But I think people don't fall in love anymore so much so we need to find a different path to our totalizing kind of instincts.
- [60:28]
Pierre d'Alencet
I think this is also a question of what fights we have left. I may suggest that we. We already have plenty of freedom within us, our Western liberal societies. And one can, of course, make any sort of critique, any number of critiques on our legal and social settlement. But what exactly was homosexuality's trajectory and its fight for its own emancipation historically? This is very complicated. In as much as we know that gay rights, gay emancipation is kind of twinned with some feminist activism in the 1960s and 70s. Of course, this happens differently in different societies, but there's sort of a void. What does it mean to be a gay subject kind of concerned with your own emancipation? I don't think that the question really means very much anymore. I mean, we can have activism for prep. Really, that's the last time that gay men were activist for anything. So what Amir does is he finds this sort of great number of people who are fighting for causes far away. So in particular, Amir, let's put a name to it. There is a way of thinking about actions like Queers for Palestine through this. Exactly. This kind of sexiness of desire. And this is possibly sort of like a contentious reading, but actually, this is a reading that's completely fleshed out in the historical record. Jean Genet, out of all people, goes and talks about his sort of love for the Palestinian cause. And between the lines in Prisoner de la Mort, you can really see, like, oh, no, he's getting on often on the idea of the warrior. This is as much as a political solidarity as it is a psychosexual fixation. And this is not to diminish it. I mean, even though there's quite a lot of stupidity being produced in today's sort of, you know, Instagram and Grindr activism. You know, like, only this morning, I found a man on Grindr who had a little video of him flexing topless in the gym, and the banner says free Palestine. And, like, dude, what the hell are you doing? Yeah, fuck you. Why are we talking about Palestine? What does that have to do with anything? And, yeah, the thing is, it has a lot to do with everything. We are capable of producing whole social settlements in which sexuality is twinned with a completely different idea. The idea of a righteous struggle gets displaced. The fact that the people of Gaza are suffering horrendously is elevating for those who observe from the west and sort of project themselves onto histories of struggle. This is not in any sense limited to queer societies. When the Gaza war started intensifying, all us college campuses lost their mind, if you recall. And suddenly we had American 19 year olds thinking that literally it is their activism that was going to change geopolitical gridlocks that have been going on for decades. So we're all capable of this. But when sexuality enters, something very interesting happens that Amir tracks very, very astutely in the book with lots of historical examples. And it's also something that we reproduce and venerate in culture production. We like this. We want, we want a warrior in our culture. And the closest warrior we can imagine now is thousands of miles away at the moment. So we might as well project themselves onto them, because that's free. It's only cost is the complicity and complete alignment with the thoughts and projection of the people around us, of our end group. So we get to fantasize about war by being locked in, into kind of these censorious. I was going to say circle jerks, but maybe that's a bit.
- [64:43]
Amir Naaman
Very well put nonetheless. Pierre.
- [64:45]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I recognize we're reaching time, so there's a lot of other essays that we won't be able to touch on that much. But I want to ask a bit, Pierre, about your essay. You've mentioned a little bit about your understanding of gay community and how it diverges a bit with the first essay featured in the book. And obviously, you know, you're, you know, with your, your salon, you're quite involved, you know, in building community in your own right as well. So, you know, I was wondering how that. That informs, how you think about, you know, your, your own attempts to build a community of, of, you know, like minded or sometimes disagreeable intellectuals informs your own sense of, of. Of the gay community.
- [65:30]
Pierre d'Alencet
Gosh, I absolutely hate the word community. And of course, when it's prepended with the letters LGBTQIA2S+ and whatever other letters, it's a fiction. So my essay, which is called Freedom of Disassociation, sort of a trait of many a middle aged gay man, you know, as I was talking about the unique. Lots of gay men sort of hate the idea of being put together in a group even when you're in a club in a dark room and everyone is topless. Not that I've done that ever, or at least for a long time. Even then, everyone is sort of out for themselves. Everyone is looking for the sexual or otherwise prize for themselves. I try to think about the fantasy of a gay community historically. I already mentioned the idea of a kind of coalition between feminists of the 1970s, radical leftists and gay liberation. The UK Gay Liberation Front is sort of very interesting history to look at, partly because it has gay men adopting as their own a lot of very crazy demands of the radical left, like the dissolution of the family and artificial wounds, for instance, come up in the gay Liberation fronts manifesto in 1972. What that has to do with gay men and their community is really nobody's guess. But it's an interesting historic point of view, coalition building. I already mentioned the kind of the type of gay man who wants to be separated from queer and trans. Now this community is finding another type of solidarity with terthy gender critical women. Is that a community? So I look at those kind of examples and I try to think about the formation and the viability of communities through Roberto Esposito's framework of communitas and immunity. So community, the manus, the munus, rather the root of the words that Roberto Esposito proposes is the formation of a community as a shared burden, as an obligation. So I try to think, what is it that gay men have to do with one another in a sense that would oblige them to come together to act in a court? And actually, I'm sorry to say, I find very, very little evidence of this being operative now, of this being possible. One of my examples, which I've already referred to, is the introduction of prep. If you think about a certain kind of biological care for one another, a community, there used to be, I don't know, sort of in the era of prohibition, you would sort of look out for each other's back. I'm fantasizing that, you know, we're discreet. We don't push you out into. We don't entrap one another. We, you know, we keep secrets from each other's wives kind of thing. Well, all of that has completely gone in a moment of liberation. The fact that the biological peril of AIDS is now overcome to the extent that it becomes second nature. The daily, you know, taking over the daily prep pill means that you just never considered in London. The prep pill comes in the post, by the way. It's like given to me by the state, almost, whether I ask for it or not, it's assumed that I want it. So these things have grave consequences for how communities are formed. And kind of the most shocking thing that I construed as an example of these changes over the last 20, 30 years. Responses to Actual Peril so I have three examples I'll run from them very briefly. One is the murder of Matthew Shepard in laramie, Wyoming in 1997. Matthew Shepard was this angelic boy who was supposedly killed in a homophobic attack. And it completely shook the world. I knew, living in Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe at the time, I knew who Matthew shepherd was. This beautiful boy who was like me, was martyred for his gayness. Turned out later had very little to do with my sexuality, with the drug deal gone wrong. But years on, nobody in the town, none of the activists, NGOs will accept the reality. And I put this in contention with another event that takes place a year earlier, which is the nail bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho in London, where three people died. And that does not become part of the kind of homosexual law. It is not a holiday we observe, it is not something we commemorate. And the question is interesting as to why. It's interesting because what comes up is that that attack was not in any sense motivated by homophobia. It was a far right insane attack by someone who tried to also attack other groups. Like he had, you know, he attacked the Pakistani community and he talked about how he would go and murder some Jews. So it was like an omni hate. So we have in close proximity Matthew shepherd, who is a martyr because he's gay. But we have in reality gay people being killed in London, but somehow them refusing to be victims because of that. So how do we construe the kind of solidarities of. Of fear, solidarity, of resilience? I hate this word, but resilience does matter in those contexts. Why do they have such completely different effects? And very briefly, the cold shower that I bring this with is the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando a few years ago, where we know this was not a homophobic attack. I mean, it was horrific. It was the biggest loss of life to enter a terrorist attack in the US since 9 11. So beyond a shadow of a doubt, a serious moment. But the attack was carried about by an ISIS sympathizer who, as far as the official record confirms, did not even understand that he was in the gay club. Yet activist NGOs continue to exist, insist that this was the greatest attack on their community. And the lines get blurred so, you know, whether it's a political project that communities are built around, whether it's like a sexual viability discretionary, whether it's defense from disease, or whether it's like a greater survival panic. In my essay, I try to go through every different way of understanding what might lie the formulation of a community. And I am, unfortunately, because I'm probably the most doomer of all the writers in this book, I conclude that the homosexual is probably by his very nature, the nature, the kind of the. That I referred to earlier, the unique, that the homosexual is probably best left alone as a lone wolf and deserves neither pity nor rescue. But that's just my turn of phrase and I'm pretty sure the other writers would not agree with this assessment.
- [72:50]
Caleb Zakrin
With this book due to come out and you know, some of the various conversations that you're sort of initiating with it, you know what. Is there anything that you write in it that you, you know, if you were to do, let's say, do a follow on other topics that you, that you want to further explore sort of.
- [73:11]
Amir Naaman
In this, in the same vein about the gays or. In general.
- [73:15]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, or in general, because, because it obviously expands quite a bit beyond just, you know, dealing with, with homosexual homosexuality. But if you were, you know, if you were to do another edited volume, you know, just looking at some of the, you know, the, the interventions that you're trying to make with, you know, various authors, do you have any ideas of future projects, future collections? Obviously, you know, the ink is still drawing on this one.
- [73:37]
Pierre d'Alencet
Well, I mean, I don't think Amir and I want to ever touch another man or even not even if it's the same man at the same time ever again. This is, this was a way to get aspects of this out of the system. But I have a feeling that we'll both be drawn into having these conversations because again, I'm sorry to be slightly self congratulatory, but this is quite a daring thing out there and I think it will be read and it will annoy a lot of people. But one of the things that I want to do next is to put together a collection of essays that will reflect on sort of cultural politics in the kind of big, let's put it politely, vibe shift, the kind of right wing turn. I know a lot of people who were, for instance, involved in the political turn in Poland when the liberal government gave way to populism. I know people connected to sort of cultural machinations of the Trump administration. I mean, look at the third remove. But I'm Trying to figure out whether there's something to be said in kind of cultural theory that would let us understand how the political changes have been playing out in different European and Western countries that have had major changes of direction. So I'm trying to change direction. My work means that I have to be interested in absolutely everything every day. And that's one thing I look forward to.
- [75:06]
Amir Naaman
Yeah.
- [75:06]
Caleb Zakrin
What are you mir.
- [75:07]
Amir Naaman
Well, my idea, my ideal, like if editing another compendium with Pierre, it would be either the kind of unseeming of reality and like through, and probably look at it through aspects of the supernatural. As we had an event like this in Verdun, which was very thought provoking and interesting. And I'm also very interested in hate self hate in culture and politics. So I'd love to get everybody to hate on themselves.
- [75:46]
Pierre d'Alencet
We're also starting a publishing imprint that will carry all of this. So there will be more contentious and serious and otherwise odious. But I think I'm done with gay.
- [75:57]
Amir Naaman
Things for the gays are. We've said what we said.
- [76:01]
Caleb Zakrin
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for, for both d guests on the New Books Network. Pierre, great to have you back on and you know, great to, to meet you both face to face. I think this collection is, is really, really quite thought provoking and I'm, I'm excited to see the responses and you know, what, what debates and arguments and agreements, disagreements, thrown, you know, thrown glasses, you know, hugs it will generate. So, so I, I, I, I look forward to hearing, hearing how it all goes. So thank you so much and it was really great to have you both on.
- [76:34]
Pierre d'Alencet
Thank you.