Simone White on Villainy

“If we are to start again,” White says, “renewed or better, Villainy insists, we’ll first suffer the pain of radical un-making. Willingness to suffer such pains, in, for example, the desire to be ‘flat’ (which would hurt) constitutes villainy while the world belongs to ‘1. CAPITALISM 2. THE STATE 3. COLONIALISM 4. NAZIS 5. RACISM 6. OPPRESSION.’ This is a text that performs the awful compression – squeezing – of our capacities collectively to deal with reckless disrespect for life not just under this government. This book is fire. But not to burn-it-down. To light my way to a friend.”

In Loser, Josef Kaplan parodies contemporary Leftist political dissidents who participate in bourgeois society. Identifying the voice revolutionary movements use to conceal their complicit behavior – specifically the pronoun “we” – Kaplan’s monologic tirade lambasts the performance revolutionary cadres must uphold if they mean to have their steak and critique it too. Loser redeploys the skepticism that propels works like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground while establishing a cadence that mimics George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous. The resulting comedy suggests admonition, defeat, and surrender may be positions where “victory might live in the slimmest margin of the possible.”