IJ study archive

DFW19: Ethics, Freedom, Infinite Jest (ISU conference panel, 2019)

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TL;DR

Three-paper ISU 2019 panel. Paper 1 is the keeper: a philosopher's close reading of "self-forgetting" in IJ — the Bernini/St. Teresa shot in JOI's Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, Gately's capital-N Nothing, and why substance self-forgetting is inferior to the religious/artistic kind. Paper 2 is a Marxist reading of E.T.A. and consumer freedom that deliberately reads against the grain of the novel's own counsel. Paper 3 is a reception-studies alarm about Wallace being recuperated as a Jordan Peterson-adjacent figure. Auto-captions; paraphrase only.

Key claims — self-forgetting (~min 1-25)

  • "Self-forgetting" appears just three times across the whole novel, per the speaker's count — twice in Joelle's reflections on JOI's work (~min 5).
  • Joelle's verdict on JOI: a brilliant optician/technician, "an amateur at any kind of real communication" — technically gorgeous, hollow, no movement toward an audience: the artistic analogue of the psychic imprisonment the novel fights (~min 5-6).
  • The exception: in Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell (God and Satan play stud for an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman's soul), a motionless 240-second shot of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa fills the frame — the only four minutes not from the salesman's POV; his head is absent because, immersed in beauty, he has "momentarily escaped himself." Joelle names this the grail of self-forgetting (~min 7-10).
  • St. Teresa's autobiography (the pierced-entrails vision) + Augustine's melting-fire: ecstasy as literally standing outside oneself; the moan as pleasure/pain indiscernibility — nested in one page of IJ: Bernini immortalizes Teresa's ecstasy, the salesman loses himself in Bernini, Joelle loses herself in the film (~min 11-16).
  • Gately's Nothing (~min 17-21): not lowercase nothing but Nothing capital — print: "an edgeless blankness" — worse than the unconsidered atheism he came in with; read as a feeling of absence, not absence of feeling (contrast Kate Gompert's wish for anhedonia); paired with Poor Tony's withdrawal stillness, "as if he were the very space he occupied", and the seizure as a kind of "orgasm of the head" (la petite mort — ecstatic self-loss in the damned register).
  • Gately's prayers going out and, in the speaker's figure, never hitting anything with an ear, read via Derrida's skeptical prayer: the suspension of certainty is part of genuine prayer; conceptual confidence about the divine would be idolatry — i.e. self-will still in charge (~min 21-23).
  • The hierarchy: substance self-forgetting is an inward vortex that feeds the ego it tries to cancel — you haven't escaped the self, in her figure, you've just angered it, and when the anesthesia subsides it comes back hungry; religious/ artistic self-forgetting is outward, toward the boundless; JOI's "reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism" is the program statement (~min 23-25, 60-64 in Q&A).
  • Q&A adds: AA's structures/steps as the disciplinary practice that distinguishes it from the substance shortcut; right-wing religiosity explicitly excluded as ego-reinforcement, not escape (~min 60-65).

Key claims — Marxist reading (~min 25-41)

  • Builds on Andrew Warren's "Wallace and Politics" (Cambridge Companion): the novel stages "the problem of equal liberty" but, this speaker argues, advocates equality/social responsibility over individual freedom — even if Wallace voted for Reagan, the work has a political unconscious (~min 25).
  • E.T.A. as capitalist competition machine: the depressed prorectors; "the show"; Poutrincourt's suicides/burnout/spoilage speech as systemic indictment (~min 28-32).
  • Contrarian close reading: the E.T.A. counsel litany — "Learn to care and not to care.", "They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are.", "let what is unfair teach you" — read NOT as therapeutic counsel but as ideological complicity — adaptation counseled where protest is needed (Harvey, Gramsci, Jameson cited) (~min 30-33).
  • Videophony masks as manufactured vanity — consumer "freedom" as manipulation for profit; under a hegemonic market, the speaker argues, there is no real freedom to choose (riffing on This Is Water's "no such thing as atheism") (~min 36-38).
  • Lands on Marathe's "how is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?" as the novel's most indicative political statement — a moral-pedagogical state/community as the missing condition of freedom (~min 40-41).

Key claims — Peterson/reception talk (~min 41-58)

  • Speaker self-describes as the demographic fascism recruits, pulled back partly by Wallace; biographical near-twin framing of Jordan Peterson (born 111 days after Wallace, academic parents, the big everything-explaining book) (~min 42-44).
  • Richard Spencer's NPI recruitment video was substantially a consumerism critique — criticism of the very sort found in Infinite Jest, as the speaker puts it — i.e. fascism arrives carrying roughly correct critiques and supplies the meaning/duty/sincerity that Marathe demands (~min 46-49).
  • Peterson retweeted (7 Feb 2017) one of the era's popular "DFW on postmodernism" video essays; "St. Dave" (the this-is-water, anti-postmodernism internet Wallace) is recuperable as a neoliberal responsibility-guru unless scholars resist — the will-schoder-style video essays that resolve EUP into Parks-and-Rec sincerity are the warning case (~min 50-55).
  • Prescription: tie Wallace into Hayes-Brady's and Severs's lines, into hooks/Baldwin conversations; revise "hip cynical transcendence of sentiment" to include the systems (patriarchy, economy) as the water (~min 55-57).
  • Q&A (~min 58-66): AA's "fascistic tendency" in the novel (the do-what-you're-told-to-get-old doctrine, as rendered on the tape) and Bill Wilson's actual reading habits; Schtitt as the fascist who is nonetheless the only one offering anything that sounds good (the speaker's rendering of the Bookworm exchange); answer: ground the needed responsibility-and-duty talk in empathy for the genuinely other, not shared identity.

Themes

addiction-recovery (the Nothing, prayer, AA discipline), entertainment-self (self-forgetting vs. spectation), irony-sincerity (reception battles), the-body-tennis (E.T.A. as system), nationalism-onan (Marathe's freedom speech), film-optics (JOI's filmography).

Cross-references