Welcome to CLiuAnon New Subscribers

What happens here...

I write about politics, culture and academia occasionally. I test out ideas, I make a few jokes. I write for pleasure here and for a readership interested in ideological critique, literature, fashion, taking down liberals. Occasionally, I will write about really controversial issues or personal matters and I will put that material behind a paywall.

Paying subscribers also have access to monthly reading groups which happen on either Saturday or Sunday and began with discussion of the authoritarian personality in the liberal age. We started with the later Freud and moved on to The Authoritarian Personality by way of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. We have a nice group of people who are fairly committed to the group, but we welcome drop ins and first timers. The next three months, possibly four are devoted to Film Noir. Links to films and readings and schedule here.

The sessions are on Zoom and not recorded because of privacy issues. We have better discussions and can be more free without the threat of digital surveillance and context free snipping of intimate, intense discussions. For five dollars a month, you can join a monthly discussion group/seminar with people from all over the world, from Pune India to the UK, to Australia. It’s a bit cathartic for those of us dealing with the collapse of Left politics. I try to keep us on track with critical discussion, but the early sessions dealt with questions of collective redemption and collective guilt (in Freud and in politics) so there is a cathartic element of critical theory that the sessions have been able to embody.

Paying subscribers can also comment on my posts and I try to respond. I started posting excerpts from my memoir Panda Gifts and I will be resuming that for paying subscribers in the next six months.

I am finishing my book on trauma culture tentatively titled Traumatized — forthcoming with Verso and I have gone through a hard patch, having lost my mother in a very sudden and shocking manner to cancer — so I’m not posting as much as I normally would.

I have been thinking about my own grief, but in our last discussion session, I realized we’re all dealing with the sadness of lost political possibilities and the receding horizon of revolutionary change. The liberal and conservative institutions are more and more repressive, so we have to look for each other on the platforms. They’re riddled with problems, but this substack is about allowing people who are interested in my work and in dealing with some of the questions it raises to travel through this rough time together.