From the Angels of the Non-Left To The Death of the Internet

“Angelicism09 is a post-authorship project.... the author of the text has no name, merely a wandering internet-possessed ghost of the wired…”

There are now non-leftists, post-rightists. We can never really ascertain what these words mean; they sound more and more like mangled signifiers by washed-out New Yorkers with more (supposed) style than substance. (We are given to understand that this was the primary audience of the original Angelicism). We can hope, however, that there is more sense behind these two labels than one might think. We understand this injunction well: “The world does not need new ‘ideas’, it needs intelligent dialectics sensitive to the libidinal structures that comprise the social field.”¹

Some clutch their pearls when it comes to the newest memetic strategies of the twitterati, and there are others who would attempt to demolish the ideational content of both “non-leftism” and “post-rightism”, perhaps by calling upon a library of philosophical references, starting with Adorno and ending with Žižek. We will do neither, but we will make note of various impressions in our encounter with both figures. Unfortunately, the word “post-right” has not been given its determinate content yet (not publicly, as far as we can see), but Angelicism09, in a polemical essay, “The Left is Humiliated and Conquered by Hegelian E-Girls and Jesus Christ”² attempts to give the strange word “non-left” a new meaning.

That Angelicism09, or rather, the mysterious author behind it, is primarily concerned with “dialectics sensitive to … libidinal structures” rather than “new ideas” is obvious from the polemical stance that it takes. We will have to be lightly polemical in response, all as a matter of friendly rivalry, competition and agon. The Schopenhauer that our non-author has learned from is not the Schopenhauer from The World of Will and Representation but rather, The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument. This is why they deliberately leave aside the particular arguments (the “invigorating idea” that the essay mentions and leaves behind) involved—they have not come here to debate the leftists but to humiliate and conquer them.

We are therefore unsurprised by the liberal use of insults, clichés and stereotypes, with “balding adjunct professors”, “chattering fools”, “pure follower of the herd”, “fundamentally immature”. We can be certain that our non-author does not mean personal offence, especially to the leftists in the audience. They are not concerned here with setting up straw-men but of a powerful psychosocial portrait of the “Leftist”, with an undercurrent of the vitalism of “based” and “cringe”. None of the particular rhetorical weapons used against the Twitter Left are particularly original. Some of these stereotypes, like that of the Left Twitter denizen as someone who thinks it is very “important to figure out how to create socialism by synthesizing Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Althusser, and maybe psychoanalysis” originate from Left Twitter itself.

We might continue to ask, though, whether Angelicism09 doesn’t continue to be invested in Left Twitter and Leftism, by insulting it, attacking it, by being interested in its scandals and discourse. We cannot forget that the participants in the soi-disant e-girl controversy are themselves part of philosophy Twitter, with friends involved; we cannot forget that the non-author of Angelicism09 can scarcely have been exempt. It is this that we see Angelicism09’s brilliance; instead of simply holding themselves in opposition to Left Twitter (while continuing to be parasitic on it, under the cover of repressive investment), our non-author takes up the stakes of holding a determinate position which would be external to the Left itself. This is perhaps the necessity of Angelicism09 writing about the non-left and not the post-right; it is at this point that they fulfil their promise.

However, we find ourselves at an impasse: what is this non-left, how genuinely new can it be? How can we be sure that garden-variety edgy politics has not been laundered back to us? It has become cliché to throw the word “reactionary” at those who occupy positions like Angelicism09. Rarely does the word rise above the level of a schoolyard insult, rarely does it pack any level of insight behind it, and it is uncommon for it to be used with any seriousness whatsoever.

With all that holding, though, only one doubt remains for us: why is it that when we follow our apostle of the angels to the promised land of the non-left, we find the cold grin of Curtis Yarvin staring back at us?

We would like to set out a plane, place both the non-left and neo-reaction on it and see where they intersect, in what areas they coincide. We are not interested in clutching pearls, we are wholly uninterested in throwing out the word “reactionary!” like a grenade, or in beginning a witch-hunt. We are more interested in noting the cases of the not-exactly-new, we are simply responsible dialecticians (or should we say Hegelians?) who are concerned with lemons passing for cherries.

Both Angelicism09 and Moldbug agree on this singular thesis: that of the identity between Left and Empire, the Left as the Universal Class that lives in a network of “global governance institutions such as the UN, the IMF—universal public education—bureaucracies such as the FDA and EPA—civil rights law and diversity initiatives—institutes for corporate cooperation such as the World Economic Forum”. On one hand, the Cathedral, on the other, the New World Order. Yarvin will agree on the list of institutions here. Both find the origin of the conquest of the world by the Left in 1789, the French Revolution which allows us to use the philosophical pronoun “we”. And Leftism has won (paradoxically so, despite the constant miserablism of the Left about its losses.) And Leftists are those who despite their claim to be revolutionary, to be against Empire, even, continue to reproduce and intensify Empire, as the shock-troops of Empire. What is the meaning of their opposition, then, if they have won, what is the point of their rabble-rousing? in Scott Alexander’s words, they are like a Soviet dissident during the Stalinist era who says, “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”³ Fifty Stalins! Fifty Empires! “But no leftist demand to make Empire more tolerant or ecumenical through a strengthening of leftism can avoid the fact that this is a demand for Empire to radicalize its leadership and thus its imperative to rule.”

Of course, we have our regular reminder to the reader just how ineffectual Leftists are; after all, this is a psychosocial figure we are concerned with, we must remember after all that “leftists are fundamentally immature”, probably following in Marx's footsteps (“a man who was upset that he was barred from academic and bureaucratic positions after writing radical pamphlets”) motivated by poisonous resentments. It is astounding to note how much Yarvin would agree with this section (titled “From whence Leftism?”). We would perhaps like to annotate Angelicism09’s essay with chapter and verse references to Unqualified Reservations, but that is perhaps too much and would distract from the point, and after all, we too are only trying to create a psychosocial portrait (with the hopes of tending toward a conceptual persona, with which a true transcendental satire would be possible…). It does not matter to us one whit whether or not the author (or the non-author, whatever we say) of “The Left is Humiliated and Conquered by Hegelian E-Girls and Jesus Christ” had ever heard about Moldbug/Yarvin, let alone read a single word by him. As we are well aware, the author of the text has no name, merely a wandering internet-possessed ghost of the wire. Even if our author has never leafed through Unqualified Reservations or Gray Mirror we still find invariant this “objective” structure that is shared between them. We are less interested in the content of the position (rubbishing it as reactionary, fascist, etc) than we are in the particular meaning of this position in the world.

It is therefore with interest that we note Yarvin’s position vis-à-vis Empire. We do not see it discussed enough that (together with a white nationalist like Richard Spencer) Yarvin is one of the coterie of reactionaries and figures of the New Right who consistently vote Democratic. We will of course let the man speak in his own words.

As most longtime readers know, I have endorsed the Democratic candidate in every election since 2008, except 2016—when, for professional reasons, I was not writing. As a lifetime Democrat—and Foreign Service brat—and grandson of progressive Jewish activists from Brooklyn, I was using Tom’s of Maine toothpaste in the 80s—and in ‘84, I cried when Mondale lost. It should be little surprise that I ask my readers to follow me in endorsing, once again, President Biden. ⁴

What is the obscene obverse of the Democratic Party, the secret disavowed truth it can never face? It is not Communism, nor is it the bogeyman of “McGovernism”. It is certainly not “SJWs” or “Tumblrinas” or “neoliberalism”. It is Richard Spencer, but more than that it is Curtis Yarvin, and if we are to believe our eyes, Angelicism09, whether or not our charming non-author knows it. “Now, with a rejuvenated and upgraded President Biden, we will go to the stars! And we haven’t even talked about what the new Vice-President Harris will be capable of…” As Deleuze put it, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.

Why are we concerned with the Internet? We all know that the Internet is dead, that the Internet is full of demons. Literary modernism has always addressed itself to fragmentation, both in high and low guises. What distinguishes the fragmentation of modernism from today’s modernity? Is it the Internet? “The leftist philosopher simply does not yet have the grammar to speak to a fragmented world,” we are told (was Joyce not good enough? Proust? Burroughs? Ballard?) It is here that our non-author declares their nostalgia, their love for the left which will not survive and which must be mourned. Conveniently enough this “millennial leftism” is wide enough even to encompass utterances that lapse into “alt-right toxicity”. But what is the importance of this word, “millennial”?

Does it simply not act as a marker that the millennial was the first figure to be wholly online? This perhaps applies as well to Angelicism09 as it might apply to Yarvin (who we must recall was a computer programmer) and even Land (the cyber-culture of the Nineties). Angelicism09 declares that the Leftist philosopher does not understand the syntax of the Internet. We would like to ask instead, is the syntax of the modern Internet worth understanding?

It interests us that it is at that juncture that social media sites are dropping off, accelerating their decline into slop, that impressions are dropping, that people are leaving, that we encounter this project to understand the syntax of this Internet. Has the fragmentation of the Internet produced new forms in writing the same way that modernism produced new forms of literature? This is where Jacques Derrida and Angelicism09 differ; our non-author talks of writing and ecocide, but Derrida instead of literature and nuclear war in their meditations on the impossibility of writing. It is perhaps the figure of “literature” that secretly structures the agon between us and Angelicism09.

Where is this analysis of the grammar of the Internet going to lead us? This is why there is such a curious detachment in the way that Angelicism09 discusses the hobby horses of the Left; they have of course been liberated from any situations that they are involved in, from imperialism to eco-cide, except for the cautionary tale of the USSR. Our author is still uncertain; at the very last he invokes Christ and Hegel, a “class of Individuals, which we still do not know how to become, because we do not have the language”. But we never really get told where this differs from Leftism; we have to consider the possibility that our non-author can only speak of the Left only by taking a detour into neoreaction, and speaking of it in a different way. None of this, the mediation of the Universal and the Particular by means of the Individual is alien to the Left, it has always been a part of it, it has always been in Marx. But our author cannot commit here, can they, oscillating between a disavowed dream of the Left and the cold laughter of NRx.

Where has the syntax of the Internet led us? We can consider, if we would like, the oeuvre of our non-author. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, a principle not alien to Hegelianism⁵. We can go down this route, discussing the aura of politicians and rappers, “peaty” habits, various taxonomies of “based” and “cringe”, various psy-ops ranging from vaccines to Planned Parenthood, never articulated explicitly but hinted at obliquely in Tweets. Perhaps we will continue to invent newer and newer categories of “cuckolds” on the woke left, accuse group houses of being covers for trafficking rings, conspiracy theories and all sorts of paranoia-mongering about the Company and the glowies who hide out in the dark. As long as we aren't ineffectual and neurotic bourgeois professionals...

We have to admit that we are getting away with our diagram of a psychosocial type, but in all that we are playing the same game as our friend, and besides, it is like psychoanalysis, of which Adorno said that nothing is true except the exaggerations. Whether or not it is true of Freud and Lacan, it certainly applies to us here. This is because we refuse to address the Internet; we would rather address people (individuals), to address friends and acquaintances before we address the Internet.

We are still Leftists and deconstructionists, we believe that despite the humiliation of the Left by Hegelian e-girls and Jesus Christ Himself (we are not sure if we are Christians, but we are sure that we are God-fearers, all the more religiously inclined because of our atheism.) that there is fresh air to be breathed within it, that within our smelly vestibules we will find the miraculous transmutation of water to wine. And deconstruction—deconstruction will not be a celestial Empire but “a strictly horizontal republic of the living, in which nothing and nobody will ever be able to assume the exceptional position of the unscathed”⁶ It is this that we want to emphasize as the only reason for the Left above these vitalisms of based and cringe, humiliations and conquerings.