Agnes Callard COVID & Beyonce impersonation

One of the most terrible afflictions we have had to suffer through during the present pandemic is the obscene manner in which narcissistic pedants have sought to promote their nostrums under the mask of altruism or empathy with the suffering.

A particularly outre example of this tendency is Prof. Agnes Callard who, writing in the New Yorker, explains 'what the Humanities do in a Crisis'-

Universities are cloistered gardens. The classroom is the innermost sanctum of that cloister, where worldly demands can be blocked out long enough for a group of people—some of whom had no prior interest—to share a poem by Horace, or an argument by Aristotle.

I happen to live within walking distance of two 'cloistered gardens'- one of which once had actual cloisters. I notice that there are 'Meet-Up' groups which, during the Summer, discuss Poetry or Philosophy over a picnic lunch in these storied places. But these groups don't issue credentials which can affect one's earning power. Universities do issue such credentials. They are not like cloistered gardens where people meet up purely to improve their minds.

Callard thinks 'worldly demands' are terribly importunate things. Some hermetically sealed 'inner sanctum' of something already secluded and cloistered is necessary to 'block out' these 'worldly demands' if only briefly. Yet we all have no difficulty 'blocking out worldly demands' for at least 8 hours a day. Poets spend a lot of time writing and reading poetry. Philosophers, similarly, spend a lot of time writing and reading Philosophy. Other savants occupy their time with research into their own subject areas. They don't do so in the 'classroom' precisely because it is a noisy place where stupid people with unpleasant accents air their grievances against a World which thinks little of them.

The truth is that people go to Universities because of, not despite, 'worldly demands'. Why? The answer is employability. If you have a PhD in fingerpainting, then you can teach fingerpainting to the next generation of cretinous Trustafarians. At the very least, there is a reputational benefit or boost in perceived status.

Callard views the class-room as a sanctum where alone Horace or Aristotle can be studied. It may be that this is true of the cretins she associates with. Yet, throughout history, people have read Horace and Aristotle by themselves and for their own reasons. It is not the case that some special sanctum is required to do the thing. Even small children can be home-schooled. There is no reason to believe that neoteny, as an evolutionary strategy, requires classrooms.

In the past few weeks, as schools have sent students home, that sanctum has been breached. Moving classes online means replacing the shared, clean space of the classroom with a collection of private and cluttered rooms. Even when we cannot see the piles of dishes and laundry, or hear the children yelling, the cares that lurk in the background divide and distract us.

Callard may be surprised to learn that many people find class-rooms deeply boring. We tend to fall asleep as the cretinous instructor drones on. By contrast, smart people can think about poetry or philosophy or mathematics while doing the dishes or rocking the baby or ironing shirts.

If Callard and her ilk are incapable of thinking about academic subjects save when in the class-room, it is likely they are not fit for the life of the mind. Their class-rooms are in the nature of gold-fish bowls where an exotic, but very stupid, species is able to flourish, but only does so because it has not the memory span to understand that it is trapped and going nowhere.

Many universities are expanding their pass/fail options, an acknowledgment of how hard it is to keep the coronavirus out of the room—and to keep Horace or Aristotle in it.

WTF does this mean? I suppose, Universities are going to award something similar to aegrotat degrees- which is perfectly sensible. The fact is, the class of one's Humanities degree doesn't matter very much. The liberal professions have their own screening mechanisms so no great mischief can be worked.

To some, these problems will seem trivial.

No. These problems are trivial.

Don’t we have bigger concerns at the moment than ancient poets and philosophers, or the difference between a B-plus and an A-minus?

We all always have bigger concerns than worrying about whether Betty deserved a B seeing as how Archie got an A.

Even in good times, the humanistic academy is mocked as a wheel turning nothing; in an emergency, when doctors, delivery personnel, and other essential workers are scrambling to keep society intact, no one has patience with the wheel’s demand to keep turning. What is the role of Aristotle, or the person who studies him, in a crisis?

To write worthless shite.

Perhaps the most pessimistic answer to this question can be found in the essays of Jean Améry, an Austrian Jew, born Hanns Mayer, who wrote movingly of how his own humanistic learning failed him during the Second World War.

But this guy was too poor to attend a fancy College and thus was not actually a Credentialized Humanist. Yet, he was able to cultivate the life of his mind on his own and with the help of the Vienna Adult Education Center, while earning a modest living.

Fleeing Austria after the Anschluss, he courageously participated in the Belgian Resistance. The Nazis captured and tortured him. He survived Auschwitz and Belsen because his literacy enabled to get him a clerical job though at other times it was only his ability to perform manual labor which made it worthwhile to keep him alive. After the war, he was a journalist and a writer. He was never part of the Academy. His pessimism had nothing to do with a Paideia he had no taste for- he hated School and quit at 12- and which, in its classical form, he never possessed. Rather, Amery was expressing disillusionment with German literary 'Bildung'- i.e. the notion that German, not Classical, literature would mould an enlightened citizenry- and his sense of the lack of the sort of Religious or Ideological Faith displayed by Jehovah's Witnesses or hard line Stalinists who, he thought, were better able to survive torture. Sadly, he eventually took his own life.

Faced with the sheer physical brutality of the concentration camps, Améry came to see the intellectual life as a game, and intellectuals as “nothing more than homines ludentes,” or people playing. He compared himself unfavorably to those prisoners who had a political or religious cause to cling to—Marxists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and practicing Jews. Being part of a larger struggle made them “unshakable, calm, strong,” he wrote. Their cause served as a kind of substratum, which made life during the camps continuous with life before and after it, whereas people like himself—humanists, philosophers, skeptics—fell into despair, and, in the face of atrocity, “no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind.”

The problem with this view is that Amery wasn't a 'humanist' or a 'philosopher'. In any case, some 'Humanists' have great Religious or other Faith. Some survive torture, some don't. But that had nothing to do with the auto-didact, Amery, who had to struggle as a youth and would have to struggle again after the war. As a point of fact, he survived torture. But the wife he hoped to be reunited with died a few days before he could get to her. He remarried but remained childless. This is a tragic story but not one uncommon amongst people of his generation and heritage. Like most of them, nothing was handed to him on a plate. Still, he made the best of his opportunities and many ordinary people with a similar background found his work to be valuable.

Améry was ready to grant that intellectuals with a practical mission, who advocate for a moral cause, are capable of heroism. We might count Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Marx and Gandhi; Jesus and Muhammad; and Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony in this group. These intellectuals fought for equality, dignity, and the sanctity of human life. Jean Améry did not identify as one of them.

Amery was not himself identified as an 'intellectual' or even a 'skilled worker' because he lacked academic credentials. The reason he was in Auschwitz was because he was a Jew.

 Still, he did manage to get a clerical job because of his good German orthography. It was not the case that he had made his name before the War. It was only in the Sixties when he began writing about his experience of the Concentration Camps that he gained the status of a man of letters. Still, it is noteworthy that his exposure to the Vienna Circle proved no inoculation against Satrean shite. But at least he didn't fawn over Heidegger like Celan. With hindsight, he became 'a professional Holocaust survivor'- his own mordant description- at exactly the right time. The public was prepared for what he- with sound journalistic instincts- served up for them. But there is a 'kairotic' quality to works of this sort which is itself philosophic.

Améry was also tortured by the Gestapo, and confessed that he would readily have betrayed his comrades if he had had any information to reveal. He thus distinguishes himself from another sort of intellectual hero—those who have the fortitude to refuse to speak, when tortured, or to insist on speaking, when pressured to remain silent. Galileo is the classic example of such an intellectual martyr. One might also cite Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Spinoza.

One might cite whoever one likes but it doesn't change the fact that Amery was regarded as uneducated and unskilled. Thus he couldn't have been regarded as an 'intellectual martyr' for the simple reason that his Society did not regard him as an intellectual. Also he wasn't persecuted for his opinions. It was because he was three quarters Jewish by heritage.

Had he had a University degree, his path may have been easier. He might have secured a teaching appointment far from Europe. Even in the Camps, he may have been accorded superior treatment- perhaps as an Medical assistant, or senior clerk. Instead he was often forced to do the most demanding and demeaning type of manual labor.

Nothing prevents these two categories from intersecting: some people are both silenced and have causes. But many humanistic intellectuals belong to neither category—no cause to fight for, no enemy to fight against. These causeless, unmartyred intellectuals are the people whom Améry found wanting. He described not only their physical weakness—they have trouble fending off pickpockets, enduring an uppercut, or even making their beds—but also how poorly they fare socially, their inability to communicate with non-intellectual comrades.

But Amery wasn't an intellectual. He had met some 'literary folk' through the Adult Education Center. Callard seems to think the guy had a College degree. This simply isn't true.

Amery's father was Jewish and he came to identify as a Jew. What he is describing is supposedly 'Jewish' traits. Back then, a guy who had graduated from Cambridge or Harvard was likely to be a better boxer- in any case he would have weighed more and been taller- and to have had 'the habit of command'. Anyone who had been through the British Public School System would know how to make their bed perfectly. Having become accustomed to cold showers, appalling toilets, disgusting food, ferocious bullying, sociopathic punishments etc. etc, they rather thrived than went under even in Japanese Prison Camps.

The reason the 'Humanities' were valued was because that sort of paideia went hand in hand with preparation for military service or arduous enterprises in far flung colonies. Waterloo was won 'on the playing fields of Eton' because though an education which focussed on Virgil and Horace was useless, the physical and social training imparted in conjunction with that drivel turned boys into men who could cross the seven seas and govern an Empire on which the Sun never set.

Since the establishment of Israel, the image of the Jewish savant has greatly changed. I may correspond with Professors at the Hebrew University and point out errors in their scholarly work in a manner they might find offensive. But I wouldn't want to do any such thing if I had to meet them in person. They would probably Krav Maga my sorry ass.

Améry’s hope was for such people to prove heroic in every disaster, including those of great physical deprivation.

So, this cashes out as Zionism. The fact is people like Amery who managed to get to Palestine kicked ass big time in 1948 and continued to kick ass while breath remained in their bodies. Some were remarkable scholars but this did not turn them into pussies.

If we ask, instead, whether they do so in any disaster, our outlook might change.

Nonsense! Asking stupid questions won't change our outlook.

In fact, if there is any crisis that ought to prove the worth of the humanistic intellectual, it is the peculiar one that we face today.

Ought? Why ought? Either a crisis proves the worth of something or it doesn't. Wherefore this 'ought'? As a matter of fact, a medical crisis proves the worth of medical savants. It may test the mettle of certain applied mathematicians who build epidemiological models. Similarly, during a crisis there may be a market for 'improving literature' which we would expect Moral Philosophers and 'Humanities' mavens to supply. That is what Callard is doing here. But, she fails. Why? Because she is stupid. She needs to find an example of a savant who faced a similar crisis. Instead she focuses on a guy who wasn't an intellectual or a Humanist who did not face a similar situation.

The coronavirus is, for the vast majority of us, a call to inaction.

Nonsense! Social distancing requires a positive action.

It puts life on pause, diminishes our place in the world, and forces us to turn inward.

This is not the case if we are poets, philosophers or are otherwise engaged in purely Humanistic studies. To the extent that we weren't already 'turned inward' we were shite at our vocation.

In response, we have settled on some shared tactics.

Nonsense! Everybody's tactics, as opposed to strategy, has to be different because our family and other living arrangements are different. It is not the case that all those involved in the Humanities represent a homogeneous class.

Those who have no practical part in ameliorating the crisis might, if they are free to do so—no children to entertain, the ability to earn money from home—strive to bury themselves in work.

If they can earn money from home, then what they are doing is earning- not burying themselves. To occupy oneself in a rational manner does not represent any type of self-interment.

Productivity can serve as a talisman, or a coping mechanism.

If you suffer from a mental illness personality disorder, you may well have this type of irrational belief. It is important that you get counselling.

One might also indulge in distraction: video games that simulate the work we cannot do, movies that substitute a fictional world for the one that might be collapsing around us, alcohol to blunt the pain and fear. Productivity numbs us in one way, distraction in another, and when both routes fail to yield the desired effect, we turn to anxiety—namely, by consuming the news.

The lockdown has certainly led to much inconvenience and many different types of deprivation. But it hasn't changed what constitutes sanity and a healthy way of life. It is never a good idea to spend too much time playing video games or binge watching Netflix or getting drunk off one's head. Also reading Callard type crap- save to make fun of its crappiness- is never a good idea.

Numbness or anxiety: are these our choices?

No. Don't be silly. It is Amazon Video vs Netflix.

Humanism points to another possibility.

Common Sense points to the only possibility we are faced with when Callard asks a question- viz. that it is a stupid question.

Aristotle distinguished between relaxation (anapausis), which is when we take a rest from activity with a view to resuming that activity, and true leisure (scholē), which is inaction meant for a higher purpose—theoria, or contemplation.

Everybody distinguishes rest from leisure activity. Kids, in the old days, spent some time doing chores and some time in school and some time resting. Why drag Aristotle into this? The fact is he was selling one type of leisure activity in competition with wrestling coaches and horse riding instructors and publicans and prostitutes.

The academy exists for the sake of contemplation. (Indeed, the English word “school” comes from scholē.)

No. The Academy exists for the sake of Credentials which have a Reputational benefit. This may translate into higher earnings. As a matter of fact, many Greek academics became the slaves of Roman patricians. They used what they had been taught to advance themselves. Livius Andronicus, the father of Latin poetry, was enslaved after his native City was conquered. Thanks to his literary education he was able to gain his freedom and make something of himself.

Contemplation does not require the Academy. But, to be useful, it requires Common Sense and Good Character. Sadly, these are in short supply in the Credentialist Ponzi Scheme that is a Liberal Arts Education.

Contemplation is not readily classified as a belief that one fights for, and attempts to squeeze its value into the language of justice or dignity or basic human rights will fall flat.

Nonsense! For any given type of Contemplation there is a corresponding Belief system which specifies when violence is justified and which expresses itself in the language of justice, dignity, and the basic human right of good people like ourselves to fuck over them dirty furrin infidels.

It is better characterized as an object of love and reverence, and a source of fulfillment.

In some Belief Systems this is true. But them dirty furrin infidels still get fucked over unless they are strong enough to fuck us over in which case, obviously, God will really fuck them over after they are dead.

For humanists, contemplation is not a cause. It is a calling.

Like name-calling.  These guys used to stride around campus sneering at the Chemists and the Business Majors and so forth. Now they creep around quietly muttering about their own intersectionality as cisgendered eunuchs of various oppressed types.

At the moment, if someone can dedicate empty hours to a higher calling, she is turning straw into gold.

No she isn't. She is deluding herself.

It follows that humanists should find ourselves well equipped to flourish, given the circumstances.

But the only circumstance which matters is that credentialized 'humanists' have shit for brains. No doubt, they may hope to spin that shit into gold but shit it will remain.

Now is an apt time to ponder the fact that the human condition means living under the shadow of death.

Now is an apt time to ponder how to reduce our species' vulnerability to viruses which originate in bats. It is not an apt time to ponder platitudes even if uttered by the utterly bat-shit crazy or terminally stupid.

It is an apt time to situate the present in the broad sweep of history.

But you need to be smart to do that. Callard is stupid and ignorant.

Deprived of the reality of human connection, we are at least in a position to appreciate the idea of it. And, given that many of us are teachers, we should also be able to communicate this to others—to offer them a way out of numbness and anxiety. For perhaps the first time in history, a global catastrophe has forced a huge, literate, Internet-savvy population indoors. And yet, if this is the test we humanists have been waiting for, then it is a test I find myself unable to pass.

Because you are stupid.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the same fantasy over and over again. In it, I fall asleep and wake up when the pandemic is over. To relieve my guilt over not helping others, my mind extends the sleep over the whole land, as in fairy tales. Everyone healthy and not caring for the sick just lies there, peacefully, for months, even years. Then they wake up happily, and things go back to the way they were.

Suppose I wanted to help others. Then there's some boring work I could do- e.g. translating the latest medical articles into Hindi, or helping update relevant databases etc. etc.- right now. At the least, I could be part of a 'befriender' scheme, supporting vulnerable people over the phone. As a matter of fact, a lot of good people in my neighborhood are doing things of this sort. I too do my bit by telling them to fuck off if they try to ooze their noxious sympathy all over me- the fact is I've been wearing a face mask for purely aesthetic reasons. Anyway, it beats the paper bag my g.f insisted I wear over my head.

In fact, I am not asleep. I am awake, following the news incessantly, annoyed by the tiniest inconveniences and obstacles.

And writing this dreck for the New Yorker. Nice work if you can get it- eh?

Jean Améry was tortured by the Gestapo; I am having a panic attack because I can no longer access my campus office.

That is entirely reasonable. One keeps one's best porn and bong in one's office filing cabinet.

People outside are gasping for air, dying; meanwhile, the mess in my bedroom prevents me from working. What depresses me most is my laxity. Suddenly, it’s O.K. to let my kids play video games, to wear the same clothes as yesterday, to put minimum effort into dinner, night after night, to read and write and think less than usual. My forgiveness of myself strikes me as a form of despair—the very opposite of rising to meet a challenge, which involves holding oneself to a higher set of standards. I have never felt less heroic.

Callard is marketing herself as a failed 'Super-Mom'. Magazines believe that women with sadder lives will greedily read of the sordid domestic mise en scene of celebrity blue stockings. In a similar vein, I'd happily read Amartya Sen's dreck if only he mentioned the savage beatings his wife dishes out to him for peeing in the sink.

Allowing for the possibility that other humanists are faring better,

i.e. their wives are beating them for peeing in the sink and they drunk-dialled their Agent and told them about it and then the Agent sold the rights to the story to Netflix for mega-bucks and Kevin Bacon is going to play them and Selma Hayek is going to play the harridan wife.

I must nonetheless concede that my own humanistic learning has failed to prove itself in a crisis that seems almost to have been designed to showcase its strengths. It has not produced meaning or purpose or psychological fortitude, either for myself or for others.

So Callard writes an article saying 'sorry, this article is crap. I'm a great big failure- boo hoo. My kids think I'm a smelly old woman. They keep trying to ring Child Services but end up talking to Gayatri Spivak who now has an Emeritus Chair in a Call Center in India. Such is the life of the great female savant in Liberal Arts Departments.'

Is this a strike against humanism? I say no.

It is a strike against Callard.

I say it is a strike against crises.

Fuck you Covid crisis! You were meant to make me write something wonderful. But instead of 'spinning straw into gold' I've shat myself on the pages of the New Yorker.

Améry thought that the Holocaust exposed his true self: “nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real.”

Yup. Being under fire on the battlefield or living in a Nazi Concentration Camp sure focuses the mind in a way which attending a Metaphysics Seminar does not.

The brutality and horror Améry was subjected to was persuasive. It persuaded him that his previous life, when he was a student studying literature and philosophy in Vienna, when he wrote a well-received novel, when he believed in the life of the mind—all of that was illusion, pretense, word games.

Where did Amery study 'literature and philosophy'? The Adult Education Center. Callard makes it sound like he was swanning around in some tony College. Also, what was this 'well-received novel' he is supposed to have written? Is it a figment of Callard's imagination? The fact is Amery wasn't living the life of the mind. He was barely getting by. Why pretend he was 'playing word games' when his was a hard scrabble existence?

But it wasn’t. Brutality is not an argument, and it is tragic that having one’s sensibility brutalized by cruelty should seem, to the one undergoing it, like being awakened to the true nature of reality.

Brutality is an argument of a precise, game-theoretic- kind. It can be effectively countered- indeed, it must be countered for superior 'correlated equilibria' to take hold. Talk of wokeness or being 'awakened to the true nature of reality' is mere talk. Amery, because of long practice, was good at writing. Furthermore, he had experienced something that people felt they needed to acknowledge. By contrast, Callard writes badly and her experiences are of no interest to others- save in that we may experience some schadenfreude at seeing a person with superior credentials write in a more ignorant and cretinous manner than we ourselves do.

Being the beneficiary of a much gentler crisis, my vision is less distorted than Améry’s.

Callard's 'vision' is shit.

I have never been surer of the value of scholē—the power of dedicating your time to a higher calling—than now, when I cannot and wish I could.

You stupid cretin, if you can do some worthwhile type of study or contemplation, in your chosen field, then you can do it at home as easily as at work. Or is what you are really saying is- my kids are monsters. They are driving me crazy- then, by all means look for someone who will take them off your hands. Campaign for Concentration Camps for kiddies so Moms can get on with writing shite.

Some of the best things are delicate. The fact that they can be crushed is not an argument against their value but one in favor of providing them with protective enclosures.

Nonsense! The fact that something is delicate is an argument against its value in a specific context. Don't wear a silk ballgown when doing the gardening. There is no argument for putting a protective enclosure around that silk ballgown so as to be able to do the gardening while wearing it safely. 

Yes, it is possible to spin the straw of empty time into gold, but such a pursuit requires many supports. I can teach you to see something in the abstruse arguments against atomism in Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption—to become excited by them, engaged by ancient physics—but things need to be just right.

I don't believe Callard. She can't teach me anything because she is too stupid.

I need a physical classroom, a blackboard, a set of students I have spent a quarter getting to know.

As opposed a toilet cubicle, a large radish and a bunch of elderly Japanese tourists who got lost on the way to the Louvre.

I need the world outside to stay quiet.

As opposed to doing the hokey cokey in a rambunctious manner.

The fact that current circumstances impair that setting is not a refutation of philosophy.

But it is a refutation of the proposition that Callard isn't as stupid as shit. The fact is people who actually did Philosophy had no classrooms or students- unless pedagogy was their sole means to make a living. Everything worth learning in the class-room evolved outside it. The only reason class-rooms exist is to warehouse kids and stop them from masturbating for a short while. But there are more efficient methods of instruction- for those who care about that sort of thing. Still, class-rooms were cheaper till relatively recently.

Callard is trying to make out that what she does is valuable. But she fails to convince. There are many reasons the world should put a lot of effort into defeating this virus. But, expediting Callard's return to the class-room simply isn't one of them. Nor, I am obliged to admit, is it vital that I be able to resume my career as an unemployed Beyonce celebrity lookalike.

It is a proof of how much effort we should put into getting things back to normal, so that we can once again help each other see the world of the mind for the beautiful, wondrous place it is.

This is what Callard signally fails to do.

Perhaps the special danger of a crisis that leaves a lot of time for thinking is that one will try to learn too many lessons while inside it.

A danger Callard is immune to. Her expensive and extensive education has made her stupider than would otherwise be the case.

Crises are, at least while they are happening, not educational opportunities.

Nonsense! We learn from crises. That's educational. Pedagogical opportunities are seldom educational opportunities and vice versa. That is why we have contempt for pedagogues- though no doubt we might want to warehouse smelly teenagers on some remote Campus till they grow out of their more repugnant hormonal urges.

They are events that befall us, that harm us. They target everything about us, including our faculty for learning.

Not unless we are gravely ill or otherwise physically affected. So what if classes are suspended? Crack a book. Do some research on the internet. Make up your own mind. Don't rely on teacher spoon feeding you shite received wisdom. 

Should we believe in intellectual heroism—even of the causeless, unmartyred variety? Of course. But instead of looking for it in a time of crisis, we might turn our attention to the world inside the garden, and remember the last time it happened that a student whose head was full of unspoken brilliance finally, one day, raised her hand.

I might equally say- 'instead of looking for smart people able to figure out a way to combat this pandemic, let us look inside the closed world of unemployed Beyonce celebrity impersonators and remember the last time a drunken homeless person, sighting one such, raised her skirt and said 'Furk off yee great big wangie kunt. Oo dyachink u are you big poof! Gerr in thar you wangie fook. '

Reading over what I've written, I see I've failed to come up to Callard's high standard of making this global crisis all about herself and her shitty little teaching gig.

We should contemplate what happened next: how the words poured forth, how she laid herself bare in the face of her terror and self-doubt, how the classroom listened, rapt, learning from her.

Is it just me or does everybody get the idea that Callard is teaching mentally retarded survivors of horrendous physical and sexual abuse?  I suppose what she intended was for us to picture her student as a sort of Helen Keller. But Helen Keller was genuinely blind and deaf. What is Callard's students major malfunction?

Every teacher knows that intellectual heroics are real.

Provided they picture their students as mentally retarded survivors of horrific sexual abuse. Thus when the student says 'A-ris-turtle' and teacher says 'Yes! Aristotle! Very good!' and the student says 'A-ris-turtle woz Geek', and teacher says 'Greek, but okay close enough, this is fantastic progress you are making, have a PhD you heroic young genius!'

We also know something about what they are like: communicative, pedagogical, and often invisible to the person engaging in them.

Very true! Intellectual heroics, like virtuosity in twerking, is often invisible to the person engaging in Beyonce impersonation. But, oh!, what can match the wonder and the magic of that very first time a toothless bag lady raises her skirt at you and says 'wangie Beyonce wanker' or words to that effect.

And that lesson brings us back to the story of Jean Améry.

A story about a guy who did well without going to College and sitting in classrooms saying slowly 'A-ris-turtle woz Geek' to great acclamation from the faculty.

Améry wrote a book about suicide, and, a few years after writing it, he took his own life.

Quite a lot of people who write books on suicide either top themselves or engage in such reckless behavior that the verdict of 'accidental death' is somewhat hypocritical.

He understood his wartime experiences as a test of everything he was—a thinker, an aesthete, a reader, a person—and he judged himself a failure.

But thus had he been regarded in Vienna coz he hadn't the money to get a Higher Education and his writing career hadn't really taken off. Anyway, lots of people were topping themselves around that time.

He wrote, of the experience of being tortured by the Gestapo, “It still is not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself.” But what Améry could not foretell was the effect of his writing, which is deeply sensitized to pain, to indignity, to deprivation and loss. He speaks of suffering in the voice of someone who was able to protect himself from none of it, and he drives this vulnerability home to the reader by way of careful, dispassionately precise analysis. His tone is measured, literate, comprehensive. He is a man, and he is every man.

But he isn't a pedagogue nor an apple polishing student.

Améry’s essays tell the truth, but not the whole truth. They tell the story of how his humanistic learning failed him in the concentration camps, but they do not tell their own story—how it was possible for a man to convey an experience that borders on the incommunicable. The answer is: humanistic learning. Wracked with shame, Améry invites us to gaze upon his destroyed person, so that we may learn a truth we refuse to know: “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.” In his hands, a whole set of words— “concentration camps,” “brutal,” “exile”—are exposed as having been, in the mouths of others, placeholders for an understanding we had been hoping never to acquire. I say this as the granddaughter of four concentration-camp survivors. My grandparents never could—and perhaps never wished to—convey to me what Améry did. If ever I spoke of “torture” before reading Améry, I was homo ludens, playing a game with words.

But this is still true after reading Amery. This is a game with words where the loser is the ability to talk other than shite.

He who wishes to speak of the destruction of the human spirit

is a stupid cunt?

cannot expect a receptive audience.

coz he is a stupid cunt.

Améry understood his reader; he knew what he was up against. His words sail across the gulf of time and space and culture—and the deepest gulf of all, between the one who has been tortured and the one who has not—to address the reader in the native language of her own mind. In the end, she cannot help but let him in. This is an astonishing communicative triumph; one would not have thought that humanistic learning was up to such a test. But Jean Améry proved that it was. He was a hero. He was a teacher.

Except that Amery was not considered to have 'humanistic learning' by his own milieu. He had been apprenticed to a bookseller at the age of 12. He didn't have a Gymnasium education in Greek and Latin. He had literary tastes and talents but his first novel remained unpublished. Nothing was handed to him on a plate. He made his own way. I can well grant that a man of such grit would have become a hero of the Resistance. But he wasn't a teacher. He wasn't a philosopher. He wasn't an 'intellectual'. He was a journalist who, by dint of hard work and a determination to find interesting things to say, went on to receive acclaim as a man of letters.

There is no rhyme or reason for Callard to mention Amery- unless she simply wanted to drag in a mention of her grandparents being survivors of Nazi camps. I suppose what she is getting at is that some things are ineffable but some type of 'theoria' which can occur in school makes it accessible. I may say the same thing about my twerking. After all, in ancient times, Memphis, the mime, could communicate the entire Pythagorean philosophy by but a twitch of his butt cheeks. Why shouldn't my own Beyonce impersonation have the same property? Callard may be wrong in thinking that the present crisis must be overcome so she can go back to teaching- and get away from her own kids- but a proper appreciation of the philosophy of various dudes wot dun topped themselves shows that the true benefit derivable from ending this global pandemic has to do with my going back to strutting the streets as a Beyonce impersonator for hire .