69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

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Stewart Home. 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

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69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS

Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962. When he was 16 he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he’d never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, Home switched his attention to the art world in the 1980s and now writes novels as well as cultural commentary.

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Alan criticised Fromm for understanding neither the historical genesis of the slogan ‘Long live death!’ nor its meaning. He pulled a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables from a shelf and showed me a passage where the crowds manning the Parisian barricades of 1832 are depicted shouting ‘Long live death!’ He made me look at Marx’s two texts about 1848, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. He stressed that the latter work begins with the famous observation that history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy, and according to Alan this is exactly what happened in Spain during the civil war. Then he picked up Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and drew my attention to a quote at the beginning of chapter 13 from Hegel’s Phenomenology concerning the master/slave dialectic. Alan muttered that even a right-wing cretin like Fukuyama had advanced further in his superficial reading of Hegel than Fromm.

Alan kicked several Fromm books across the room. Dismissing them and their author for ignoring the death of Socrates as an act of scapegoating that gave birth to Western philosophy. Alan insisted that any philosopher or occultist worth their salt could tell you that death is the supplement of life, just as life is the supplement of death, that we only start living in death. The ability to imagine our own death not only makes us human, it may yet make us divine. Fromm imagined he was a Marxist and yet he completely ignored what Hegel had to say about death. After observing that even Norman O. Brown was preferable to Fromm, Alan picked up his coat and suggested we went out and got something to eat.

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