On September 7, 1945, only a few months after the Allies accepted the Nazis’ unconditional surrender, the Deutches Theater in Berlin reopened its doors with a very deliberate choice of performance. Like many theaters across the country reopening in the wake of the Second World War, Deutches Theater began its new run with a production of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s comic drama about religious tolerance and reconciliation, Nathan der Weise, or Nathan the Wise, which had been banned under the Nazis. A tale of friendship across religious divisions and near-fatal misunderstandings, Nathan the Wise is the story of a wealthy Jewish merchant –the titular Nathan–and the series of complications that arise when he returns home to Jerusalem to discover that his adoptive daughter, Recha, has been rescued from a fire by a former Knight Templar, who himself owes his life to the unlikely mercy of the Muslim Sultan Saladin. Here as elsewhere, Lessing’s play functioned as a cipher for an entire history of anxieties about German national identity, Jewish emancipation, and the promise and peril of secular modernity. In this episode, we talk with Jonathan B. Fine, Assistant Professor at Brown University, about Lessing's complex legacy and his pivotal role in the German Enlightenment and the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere. Lessing is nothing short of an embodiment of cultural modernity and the spirit of the European Enlightenment, and one of the main progenitors of the sphere of public debate and discussion that we take for granted in liberal democratic societies and which serves as such an important counterweight to state power. Upon receiving the Lessing Prize from the Free City of Hamburg in 1959, the political theorist Hannah Arendt returned to Lessing's critical role as a public intellectual in a lecture on humanity in dark times. We return to both Lessing and Arendt in this episode with a similar feeling of foreboding. How can the public realm, the world in which free and equal citizens can exercise their reason in deliberation and govern their lives in common, be salvaged from the rising tide of authoritarianism and the ascendance of technocapitalism? To understand where we are going, we must understand where we came from, and for this there is no better place to begin than Lessing.

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David Foster Wallace, the loquacious novelist behind Infinite Jest, seemingly predicted much of our culture moment from AI avatars to the hypnotic and addictive temptation of the infinite scroll. In his fiction and essays, he agonized over the ways in which advertisers and mass media have coopted techniques of subversion and rebellion like irony to make products that are more entertaining, more flattering to our egos, and more difficult to ply ourselves away from. As a writer of dizzingly erudite, complexly structured, yet morally earnest fiction he was concerned with devising new imaginative ways of competing with our short-circuited attention spans. Great literature he argued, like life, if it is to be meaningful and edifying, requires difficulty, concentration, and attentiveness. Wallace made great demands on his readers, but always with the implicit promise that in wading through the difficulty and by sticking with the forking paths of his sentences and elliptical thoughts, a higher pleasure and more last meaning would arise. The culmination of this effort at demonstrating the virtues of difficuty and choosing what we pay attention to is his posthumously published novel, The Pale King. In this episode, Hannah Smart, joins us to discuss this novel's profound meditations on civics, conversion experiences, and the transcendence of boredom. The novel posits a new kind of modern hero and solution to the problem of meaning that has plagued modernity and life under capitalism. According to Wallace, the secret to enduring modern life is the ability to withstand the despair of boredom and push through tedium and meaningless data to the point of transcendent acceptance and singular awareness. Through a discussion of her recent essay, Nothing Ever Happens: "Mister Squishy" and The Year of the Sentence Diagram, we analyze how Wallace on an atomic sentence level enacts the alienation, fretful search for meaning, and the dissolution of the self. Wallace longed for an escape from the prison of a neurotic self-consciousness and The Pale King was his final attempt to flee the analysis-paralysis of the reflexive self towards a higher purpose.

It is a novel that poses the provocative thesis that true heroism in modern American life consists in the endurance of soul-crushing boredom, and that by cultivating sustained attentiveness and wading through the myriad noise of the culture industry we may find on the other side an enlightened tranquility.

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Read the LARB piece: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/

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Eleanor Russell joins us to discuss the mystical writings of French philosopher, Simone Weil. Published posthumously and edited by Gustave Thibon, Gravity and Grace is a collection of fragments from Weil's notebooks that sketch the core themes of her Christian mysticism in crisp, compact aphorisms. Weil did not set out to find God; instead, she was overwhelmed by a mystical experience of Christ's presence, after which her interests shifted from political philosophy to theology. Weil’s Christian mysticism revolves around a central paradox: God’s presence, truth, and love reveal themselves to the fullest only at the extremities of absence, suffering, and grief. In the same way, we can only experience Christ’s radical love and redemptive suffering in solidarity with all those who are marginalized, oppressed, and enslaved. The result was a distinctive form of Christian mysticism that turned the tenets of Catholic orthodox on their head. Weil refused baptism out of her love for that which lies outside of the Church. She located Christ’s apotheosis not in the resurrection but in his final cry of agony and despair, and she considered God’s abandonment of this world to evil, affliction, and cruel fate to be a necessary condition of the Creation. In this episode, we discuss Weil’s enigmatic, fragmentary masterpiece in order to understand that radical form of faith that only becomes possible in moments when God forsakes us and nothing shows itself as divine. Weil’s words kindle a fire in dark times: “If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”

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