I’m pleased to share a recording I made of part of the introduction to Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge Mental Health, 2023) as one of the “Anarchist Essays” hosted by the Anarchism Research Group, based at Loughborough University in the UK. See below.
The introduction to Queer Tolstoy (chapter 2) is available open-access for reading here.
Check out my recent conversation on Thomas Wilson Jardine’s podcast Ideologica Obscura about my review of Mohamed Abdou’s Islam and Anarchism on The Commoner:
I am very excited to announce that my newest book, Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography, will soon be available from Routledge! Pre-orders will begin on January 26, 2023, and it will come out on February 16, 2023.
Queer Tolstoy is a multidimensional work combining psychoanalysis, political history, LGBTQ+ studies, sexology, ethics, and theology to explore the life and art of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.
Using a psychobiographical framework, Sethness Castro uncovers profoundly queer dimensions in Tolstoy’s life experiences and art. Deftly contributing to the progressive and radical analysis of gender and sexuality, this book examines how Tolstoy’s erotic dissidence informed his anarchist politics, anti-militarist ideals, and voluminous literary production. Sethness Castro analyzes the influence of Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Cervantes, Rousseau, Kant, Herzen, Proudhon, Chernyshevsky, and his mother Marya Volkonskaya on Tolstoy’s writings. Furthermore, he details the artist’s emblematic linking of LGBTQ+ desire with moral and erotic self-determination and resistance to Tsarist despotism—especially, in War and Peace.
This book is vital reading for those interested in the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, and Russian history.
1. Theoretical Preface on Queer Anarchism
2. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: A Queer, Christian-Anarchist Writer
3. The Life and Death of a “Holy Fool”
4. Humanism, Militarism, and Imperialism in The Cossacks
5. War and Peace: An Anarcho-Populist Verbal Icon
6. War and Peace, Book One: “Andrei Bolkonsky”
7. War and Peace, Book Two: “Natasha Rostova”
8. War and Peace, Book Three: “The Year 1812”
9. War and Peace, Book Four: “Pierre Bezukhov”
10. Conclusion: The Psychodynamics of Hierarchy
‘Sethness’s excellent book is a wide-ranging and erudite examination of Tolstoy through the lenses of queerness and anarchism, and what is remarkable is how many contradictions and mysteries in Tolstoy’s life and work get clarified by this double focus. It is as if he had suddenly popped into three dimensions. The close reading of War and Peace is full of startling new insights, and the study as a whole brings Tolstoy into our time in a new and important way. Wonderful to see!’
- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future, USA
‘This passionate, ground breaking study of Tolstoy’s bisexuality, politics and art offers fascinating new insights into our understanding of the Russian writer’s life. By detailing Tolstoy’s relationships, experiences and creative process, the author reveals Tolstoy’s far sighted literary support for what we would now call LGBT+ liberation, his resistance to war and oppression, and his support for egalitarian social change. Bravo!’
- Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner and Director, Peter Tatchell Foundation, UK
Available for pre-order in January 2023 here!
Please find links to the recordings of “Kronstadt as Revolutionary Utopia: 1921-2021 and Beyond” here (on the blog) or here (YouTube playlist).
These recordings include four panels, a video address by the historian Jaroslav Leontiev (and an interview with him), a discussion with the filmmakers of Maggots and Men, and the closing session with co-sponsors.
A link to The Commoner’s review of the conference can be found here.
Thank you.
On behalf of the organizing collective, I wish to invite you to an upcoming conference about history, politics, and current events: “Kronstadt as Revolutionary Utopia, 1921-2021,” which will be held online on March 20-21, 2021.
This is an internationally organized conference that aims to commemorate the momentous March 1921 uprising of the Kronstadt sailors, which was described by the scholar Orlando Figes as an “island version of the Paris Commune” within the Russian Revolution that began in February 1917. By bringing together historians, artists, freethinkers, anarchists, and syndicalists to share their perspectives about the past, present, and “living past” in relation to the Kronstadt Commune, we hope to celebrate People’s History by recalling the sailors’ courage in espousing a fresh “Third Revolution” against ossified Bolshevik rule.
We seek to explore how the tragic legacy of the Kronstadt Commune’s suppression lives on in the support provided of late by some self-styled leftists to the rehabilitation of authoritarian discourses and bloody counter-revolutions—in Syria, above all. We further aim to examine how the Kronstadters’ model of autonomous, anti-authoritarian joint struggle among workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors continues to be globally relevant in our own day.
The conference, which consists of 4 panels, 2 film screenings, 2 public readings, and a closing social event, will be streamed over Twitch, where we will take questions and comments for discussion with panelists and speakers. The full schedule is available here.
If you are interested in attending the conference, please register here.
The Twitch stream can be accessed here, and our Discord can be found here.
Thank you.
This is a video recording of my presentation at the “Life, Freedom, Ethics: Kropotkin Now!” conference on February 7, 2021. I take a biographical and historical approach to Pëtr Alexeevich Kropotkin’s revolutionary life and legacy. Thanks for watching!
Please find below an announcement of upcoming panels and a film screening I am helping to organize and will be participating in at the 2019 International Herbert Marcuse Society conference and the Left Coast Forum. Hope to see you at either conference, or both!
At the eighth biennial International Herbert Marcuse Society conference, “Critical Theory in Dark Times: The Prospects for Liberation in the Shadow of the Radical Right,” to be held at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB):
Syria, the Eros Effect, and Pseudo-Anti-Imperialism (Saturday, October 12, 2019, 8:30-10am)
Lara El Kateb, “Local Councils in Syria: Formations and Limitations”
Javier Sethness, “Eros and Thanatos in the Syrian Revolution”
Rohini Hensman, “Syria: Freedom and solidarity versus pseudo-anti-imperialism”
Terry Burke, “Syria Disinformation Targeting the Left”
Wagner, Bakunin, and Antisemitic Propaganda: Then and Now (Saturday, October 12, 2019, 2:45-4:15pm)
María Castro, “Feminism, Anti-Feminism, and Anti-Capitalism in Wagner’s Ring”
Javier Sethness, “Wagner and Bakunin’s ‘Dangerous Minds’ Amid Fascist Resurgence Today”
Bill Weinberg, “Ilhan Omar, Antisemitism and Propaganda”
Also, at the third annual Left Coast Forum, to be held at Occidental College in Los Angeles:
Sunday, 13 October 2019, 9:30 a.m.-12p.m. Film screening of No. 1 Chung Ying Street (2018).
This film compares the 1967 Hong Kong Leftist Riot with the ongoing the Mainland China-Hong Kong conflict. Discussion to follow with the director (to be confirmed)
And on Sunday, 13 October 2019, 1-2:15 p.m. Today’s Challenges for the Left: Stopping Fascism Globally and Standing against Authoritarian Regimes – Rocio Lopez and myself
In the current issue of CounterPunch magazine (volume 23, number 1 [March 2016]), I have an interview with radical sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and the author of more than twenty books, including the Mars trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, 2312, and Aurora. We discuss political philosophy, religion, history, existentialism, commitment, ecology, and nature, among other things. An excerpt follows below; the interview in full can be accessed by purchasing the issue or subscribing regularly to CounterPunch.
JSC: Many of your works deal centrally with history, whether actual, alternate, or speculative-futural. In The Years of Rice and Salt [2002], you present several different compelling interpretations of human and natural history: for example, the image of a rising gyre, “dharma history,” or “Burmese history”—“meaning any history that believed there was progress toward some goal making itself manifest in the world,” or “Bodhisattva history,” which “suggested that there were enlightened cultures that had sprung ahead somehow, and then gone back to the rest and worked to bring them forward—early China, Travancore, the Hodenosaunee, the Japanese diaspora, Iran—all these cultures had been proposed as possible examples of this pattern […].” In Aurora (2015), moreover, you mention the idea of history being parabolic, cyclical—as in Hindu cosmology—or as resembling a sine wave or an S-curve. It would seem to me that we are at the apex of the parabola, or just after it on the downward curve, such that we must somehow invert it, transforming it more into an S-curve shape. Which view(s) of history do you think best represent(s) the history of humanity?
KSR: I like thinking about historiography, and the various patterns or shapes that people have ascribed to history so far, but as we don’t have any counter-examples to what’s happened, and the entire sequence of world history seems quite contingent and non-repetitive, even non-patterned, I think we can only regard these theories as highly fanciful, and use them as ways to suggest how to act now.
I like Marx’s basic pattern or sequence of capital accumulation and class warfare, and Arrighi’s elaboration of it, describing capitalism’s expanse from Genoa to Holland to Britain to America. I also like Hayden White’s analysis suggesting that all theories of history fit with suspicious accuracy a few extremely basic narrative patterns from literature (going right back to oral storytelling of the paleolithic). This makes all historical patterns look suspect, as being stories we like to tell ourselves, and very simple stories at that.
Various trajectories of technology, culture, and the planet itself all mesh together into what we call history, so a shape for history itself is very hard to see. Still it is probably worth trying, as a way of organizing our political hopes and purposes. It could be said that the attempt to do history at all is itself a utopian project, as we try to organize our efforts in the present. One utopian shape to history is the rising gyre; things cycle, as with Arrighi’s capitalism, but at each turn of the cycle, it gets bigger or moves into in a different modality. Another is the logistic curve, the S curve, repeated upward in stepwise fashion as we marshall new abilities and get better at enacting global civilization. Often I think of history as a pursuit is just another kind of fiction, a genre — a good genre, including lots of summarization and analysis as compared to dramatization, an emphasis I like. More than most fiction, this genre makes an attempt to fit with what really happened in the past, which is hopeless in some ways, but valiant. Thus a kind of realism, and all realisms are always artificial, but interesting. So history is a great genre of literature, a cousin to novels.
JSC: There are also clear existential-psychological dimensions to your novels. In The Years of Rice and Salt, you portray Khalid and Iwang, the drivers of the Samarqand Awakening of science, arguing with the Sufi Bahram in the bardo, or the Tibetan vision of the afterlife, after they had been killed by a resurgent plague. Khalid channels Shakespeare’s Earl of Gloucester: he declares that the gods “kill us for sport” and impugns Bahram for the latter’s devotion to love amidst the power of a world-historical course so indifferent to human happiness, while Bahram in turn stresses that courage underpins love, hope, and the commitment to struggle. Perhaps the existential dimension is most present in Aurora, particularly once the surviving crew reaches Tau Ceti and realizes the dream of settling any of its planets to be illusory. Despair grips the survivors, and many turn to suicide. Thus a cruel fate confronts them: now what, if anything, they ask?
KSR: Existentialism is the best way to express all this. I take it this way: the universe is meaningless, but has cast up the human species by a kind of miraculous accident: here we are, brief dust devils of awareness. The only meaning this cosmic accident has is what we make up for it ourselves. If we can make a meaning, good. But inevitably it’s the creation of mortal and transient creatures, so it’s not easy to see how to make a truly hopeful and inspiring meaning. Trying for one can feel better than not trying; sometimes much better. Even very satisfying. Certainly history, which makes each of us part of a larger story that outlasts us as individuals, is one of these attempts at meaning — as are all the religions. But again, the creation of meaning is another work of fiction-making. Possibly a life of writing novels has made everything (philosophy, religion, history) look like literature to me. Sorry; my religion, I suppose.
This is a link to Ian Rappel’s report on “Capitalism and Species Extinction,” published in International Socialism 147 (June 2015). In this essay, Rappel provides a historical-geological analysis of environmental destruction and degradation, arguing that it was only the birth and coercive spread of global capitalism that caused humanity to threaten the cataclysmic sixth mass-extinction event in which we now find ourselves. Rappel thus argues against the misanthropy and conservatism evinced by sociobiologists, apologist “popular science” writers, and anti-civilization types (though he does not mention this last group by name) in their analyses of the causes of environmental destruction.
Below is reproduced a short excerpt from the article, together with corresponding graphs from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2014 Living Planet Index (LPI) which show a shocking decline in global biodiversity over the past generation.
Figure 1: Global living planet index (with confidence limits)
Source: WWF, 2014
“While the global LPI trends are alarming enough the disaggregated patterns are even more disturbing. The LPI for temperate latitudes, where environmental regulations are strongest, reveals a decline of 36 percent between 1970 and 2010. But the tropics fared worse with an LPI decline of 56 percent over the same period (figure 2).
Figure 2: Temperate and tropical living planet indexes (with confidence limits)
Source: WWF, 2014
At lower spatial scales, the declines are even more extreme. For freshwater habitats, the decline was recorded at 76 percent between 1970 and 2010. When broken down into biogeographical regions the steepest declines in LPI over the same period were in the neotropical region (South America) at 83 percent, and the Indo-Pacific region (South East Asia and Australasia) with a 67 percent decline.
In terms of direct causality the LPI programme reports 45 percent of the decline in biodiversity as a product of habitat degradation and loss, 37 percent as due to direct exploitation (hunting, fishing and harvesting), and the remaining 18 percent as resulting from climate change, pollution, invasive species and disease.”
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 