History as Porn

First an emphatic denial that this is an attempt to get more readers.

Continuing with the themes of Agamben, Stalin, and well, porn. This from 3am magazine:


<>"If pornography is the most political form of fiction because it deals with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way then a pure, modern politics would also be pornographic. It would contain no mystical smokescreens such as "rights of man" nor would it attempt to place a new perspective on man, nature, history and ultimate destiny. It would be as purely atheistic as an advertising agency, as a beach, as 18-35 package holidays. The outer world, along with Freud's inner, becomes eroticised and quantified, then disappears into a mass communication fantasy. The only struggle left is to struggle to run your own fantasy and not have others run you into theirs. All other angsts are hangovers from a way of life from years ago. The deep, centred nineteenth-century worries about personal integrity are as relevant now as questions about the existence of God."



HISTORY AS PORN

"Barber writes history in the carnage-infected prose of a novelist cranking up to the heights of Sade's One Hundred and Twenty days Of Sodom, but without the desolating coldness and boredom of that book."

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's _Annihilation Zones_