Becca Rothfeld’s official bio describes her as the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a lapsed academic philosopher. She is also a staunch defender of the importance of all that is beautiful and erotic in life. Her debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, was officially released on April 2, 2024. I interviewed her over the course of two hours in an increasingly crowded café in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2024.
ADV: I’m trying to figure out where to start. Which I’m realizing I should have figured out before. Um… Well, I guess one… So, you start here, which is… One thing that’s different about your… Or that you seem to insist on a lot in your practice is the idea of paying attention to aesthetic principles or paying attention to… or special attention to aesthetic principles and elaborating them and defending them. What do you consider your… First of all, actually, what are aesthetic principles? Whether that’s examples or just a category definition, but…
BR: So, I think that I would say that I’m a defender of the aesthetic. A defender of the idea that aesthetic value matters, but I think that it’s quite hard to articulate aesthetic principles and I think that that’s not accidental.
I am somebody who is very influenced by Kant’s theory of aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment, and so I’m always positioning myself in relation to Kant. One of the things that Kant says that I think is true, although I think he says many that are not true, is that there are no aesthetic concepts. He’s famously obsessed with thinking of concepts as they pertain to metaphysics, but he thinks that there are basically no rules for when something is aesthetically good or bad.
He has a theory of what an aesthetic judgment is and the conditions under which you can make an aesthetic judgment and so on, but he doesn’t have aesthetic principles. And I’m sort of still agnostic about this.
Interestingly, I think you can operate as a critic without having a clear idea of whether you think that there are aesthetic principles or not, but I’m inclined to think that there are not aesthetic principles. One can have a theory about what aesthetic judgment is and how it differs from other kinds, but I think that that’s distinct from saying, “here are the qualities that all good works of art have.”
ADV: And do you think that’s because each work of art, for the critic, brings its own criteria to the table?
BR: I think a little bit. Of course it’s the case that every critic has their own aesthetic sensibility,, but I do think part of good criticism is trying to take a work on its own terms insofar as that’s possible. One way that a book can fail is that it sets terms and then fails to satisfy the standards that it is calling into being; another way is that the standards that it’s invoking are bad standards.
ADV: And so then just another way of asking the same question is what are the standards, or how do you measure the failure of those standards if you think that they’re bad?
BR: That is a good question, and also something that one would think that you would need to know how to do that in order to do criticism, but one thing that exposes the poverty of philosophy, I guess, is that without having a great answer, I find myself able to do criticism. I think anything sort of general that you could say about how you select standards would sound really facile. You know, you want to say, books should be nuanced and there shouldn’t be characters who are sort of unequivocally good or bad. And these are all truisms.
I guess it is a little easier when you’re reviewing nonfiction, which is not always a matter of aesthetic judgment. You’re often just asking: are the arguments in this book true? Do the arguments make sense? And when I’m doing more of that, I can say, “I think Josh Hawley’s book is bad for lots of reasons—too many to enumerate—but one of them is that he just has an incorrect theory of the world,” so that’s a bad standard and it’s easy to articulate why. But I think it’s harder to make general claims about which standards are better or worse in the case of art.
ADV: You seem interested in the mismatch between an aesthetic on the surface and what it might be betraying or concealing. Does beauty contain a truth? When you see in the world that those things are divergent, how do you make moves to reconcile them?
BR: I think that increasingly I have been moving towards a view on which there’s not much of a distinction between surfaces and interiors. There’s a short aphoristic bit in The Gay Science where [Nietzche] says something like, “I love surfaces, I don’t love depths” and I think increasingly I tend towards that philosophy or I tend towards thinking that surfaces produce depths.
Currently I’m trying to start my second book before this book comes out so that I can be a little bit less anxious about the reception of this book, and my second book will be about personal beauty. I’m trying to argue that we construct our lives the way that we might construct works of art and that what it is to be a beautiful person is to construct your life in that way. And so I think in that case the aesthetic qualities of a person’s life might bring about other qualities, like they might bring about the moral qualities, the way that they aestheticize their lives might make them into a certain kind of person.
So I guess there’s lots of contexts and lots of ways that you could approach the question of “what’s the relationship between beauty and truth or aesthetic value and epistemic value,” as a silly philosopher would say.
ADV: So then what’s the importance of an audience, if there is this analogy between a work of art and a personality? Is there a difference between what the personality is for the person constructing it and for the person perceiving it?
BR: I think that that’s probably often the case, and I think that that is true in any performance. I mean definitely writing is a performance, maybe living is a performance, probably gender is a performance. And it seems like in any performance, there’s always the possibility that what you are imagining yourself to be is not what you’re being perceived as. I think that’s often why books fail. Books are often bad because they set standards for themselves: they’re performing that they belong to a certain genre or that they are succeeding in a certain way and then fail.
ADV: Do we then have a responsibility to style our personalities with consideration for those who will experience our personalities?
BR: Maybe responsibility is strong because it implies obligation. I might not go so far as to say responsibility, although that would sound good. I think that you have lots of reasons to try to be beautiful, or to try to make your life and your personality aesthetically interesting artifacts. I don’t think you have a moral obligation to do that, but maybe you have an aesthetic obligation to do that insofar as beauty is valuable, and the more beauty there is, the better the world is. You probably also have moral obligations—I’m not saying that you don’t.
ADV: But beauty is not in itself morally valuable.
BR: I think I’m more sympathetic to the arguments that have been made that there is a relationship between aesthetic value and moral value than some people are. I think there’s lots of ways that you can cash it out. In the only academic paper that I wrote in graduate school and maybe the only academic paper that I’ll ever write, I argued that sometimes aesthetic value is morally valuable. Often people say the opposite, that “moral value grounds aesthetic value” is the way that philosophers would put it, and I reverse that, saying that sometimes aesthetic value can ground moral value. The example in the paper was, because Madame Bovary is such a sensitively sketched book, and because it’s so attentive to the minute details of Madame Bovary’s life, that’s what makes it an ethical book. If it were written in a more garish or sensationalist fashion, it would be an exploitative and possibly sexist book.
ADV: But this is all about individual prescriptions, right? We want everyone to be a good reader. We want everyone to be literary. We want everyone to whatever. But we can’t. That’s not praxis. So what is your theory of changing the world in the ways that you would want to see it change?
BR: That is also a difficult question to answer. I mean, I guess my answer is sort of the non-answer that I don’t necessarily think it’s my job as a critic or a writer to have a theory of how.
I guess there’s sort of sub-questions too. I’m sorry, I’m such an analytic philosopher by temperament that my tendency is just to disaggregate questions into sub-questions. One question is what is the ideal political situation for the production of art and for the cultivation of good taste?
And then another question is, how concretely should we go about bringing that about? What should you do in your life to bring about the Rawlsian or Marxist utopia or whatever? I’m much more comfortable in the abstract realm.
In the concrete realm, I have no idea how to make the various changes that I want come into being or come into reality, and I don’t have a great theory. I think people should unionize their workplaces because I’ve seen it work in practice. I mean, I think that clearly writers need to have some measure of material security in order to produce good work that isn’t pandering to the market. And clearly, people need to have rigorous aesthetic educations in order to even have a chance of having good taste. Both of these things seem like they would come about in a social democracy, but how to make America a social democracy, I do not know.
ADV: That seems almost to be at odds with something you say in your Cronenberg/body horror essay: the notion that we have to be open to encounters that can change us in ways that we don’t consent to. You argue that the experience of transformation is valuable in itself. How do you square the version of you that looks forward, saying “what’s the end?” and the version of you that says let’s go through the thick of it because that’s what’s valuable.
BR: The way that I would put this question is: “why don’t I think that some of the values that I hold in the erotic or aesthetic domain apply to the political domain?” Something I find frustrating about a lot of public discourse is that it runs a lot of these domains together.
A lot of things are called political. There’s not a lot of clarity about what is meant by politics. So a lot of things that I think should be transformational and unruly and unpredictable might be political in some broader everyday sense, like things involving sex and gender. Those are political in some sense, obviously. But in terms of state formation, which is a really stodgy way to think about what politics is, but that was what was meant by politics in the kind of political philosophy I was reading about in graduate school, it’s just a different thing altogether.
Maybe one way of bridging my interest in ideal theory and political philosophy and my interest in transformation in the personal and social domain is that I think that [John] Rawls sees the ideal political community that he envisions not as a blueprint that we’re supposed to enact precisely, but as something that we approach forever asymptotically. These are just the values towards which we’re orienting ourselves. But I have to reflect on that, and maybe I should be more into unruly transformation on a political level.
It just seems like that could be frightening if the state were like, well, we don’t know what the outcome of this policy is going to be at all. That seems worse, I think, than going to a movie without knowing what’s going to happen. So it’s a question of states.
ADV: What was the process like for All Things Are Too Small? Were you collecting, or were you writing with the collection in mind?
BR: Initially, I just began to notice that I was talking about the same thing in lots of things that I was writing, as any person with interests and tendencies will do. Then I realized I wanted to write an essay collection about it, and then I wrote some new essays after I’d gotten the book deal.
The new essays completely changed it. One process that I feel very comfortable saying is transformative, in [Yale philosophy professor] L.A. Paul’s sense of transformation is writing, because this book is totally different from what the proposal was. I had a lot of time and space to write really long essays, so there’s a 20,000-word essay in the book, which is way longer than anything I’ve ever written.
ADV: You use this formulation, “reality is less real than” in a few places. Reality is less real than fiction, reality is less real than the internet. Why do you say that? What is reality, and how is it possible to have something that exceeds its own standards?
BR: That’s the kind of thing that your psychoanalyst would notice that you keep saying in sessions. Well, I guess there’s two things. One is that sometimes I just think that reality is boring and uninteresting and art is a more interesting alternative to reality, and so that’s what I mean. Not that it’s more real than reality per se, but that it’s something we should care about more than we care about reality. But the other thing, I’m very interested in drag, for example, and one of the reasons is because I think that via the performance of these personas, drag queens bring the persona into being. And so that’s what I mean by more real than reality.
It’s not a precise phrase. If I were writing a philosophy paper, that’s not what I would say, because really what’s happening is that they are doing something performative, bringing something into being, and then it becomes real. But it’s a better reality than the unperformed, unembellished reality.
ADV: Is that something that’s liberatory to you? What’s the potential in that?
BR: I think it is. I’m beginning to see things that I wouldn’t have said before this conversation, but maybe one way to create the world that we want is just to perform it. We can’t just act as if there aren’t fascists, or there aren’t people who hate Drag Queen Story Hour, and then expect that bigots will cease to exist. But it does seem like there is something powerful about certain kinds of performance, at least some of which are able to bring new realities into being. It at least seems like a necessary prelude to any kind of transformation, because it does seem like it helps us envision what the transformation would be like.
There’s a chapter in my book about Bakhtin and carnival, where I argue something similar about erotic life. Roughly, people in the Middle Ages had these festivals where peasants would dress up like noblemen, and noblemen would dress up like peasants. These practices gave people a taste of inverted hierarchies, or it gave people a taste of what things would be like when there were no more hierarchies. I think that erotic life can give us a taste of a different world.
ADV: How far do you have the audience in mind when you’re writing?
BR: I think you definitely do have a responsibility to your audience, and I think the primary responsibility you have is not to condescend to them. So I think that, as I say in the Yale Review piece [“In the Shallows”], even if you have reason to suspect that they aren’t intelligent people—I will not say whether I ever do have reason to suspect that—you should act as if they are, because I think that writing in a infantilizing tone is the worst thing that you can do as a public intellectual. It turns people away from what you’re reading. Maybe this is another performative gesture, that you write for the audience that you want to bring about, and you are contributing to bringing about that audience, if you have a large enough platform, because you are introducing people to the kind of text that you think that they should read.
I’ve been happy to discover time and time again that the audience exists. And even in something like the Washington Post, where you might have thought that the readership is just obsessed with politics, and they don’t care about Flaubert’s letters, for example, I’ve gotten more emails about my piece about Flaubert’s letters, my piece about Guy Davenport than a lot of others, because there are people who love these things, and that is wonderful to remember. But I try to think that I’m writing for just somebody who’s really smart, who might not have read the particular thing that I’m talking about.
ADV: At the end of “Against Interpretation,” Sontag writes that super famous line, in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art. What’s your reaction to that, as someone who is both invested in the erotic and totally obsessed with interpretation?
BR: I think that’s a really nice line. I like the way that it sounds and I think about it a lot. Although my favorite Sontag line is that “intelligence is taste in ideas.” But I guess I just don’t think that there needs to be a dichotomy between the hermeneutic and the erotic. I find hermeneutics erotic and I find erotics hermeneutic. One reason I write so many essays about sex and the erotic is that I don’t think that interpretation needs to dismantle the power of erotic experience. In fact, I think hermeneutics can enhance sex.
I suppose it keeps coming back to this question of how we bring things into being by performing them or aestheticizing them. I think that very few interpretations or only the most flat-footed interpretations are not means of aestheticizing something in their own right. That’s why I think criticism is not just a mute recapitulation of the arguments of a book or something. It’s always an embellishment of some kind, maybe a worse embellishment if you’re a bad critic. Interpretation is always a way of inventing something or bringing something into being. Because I think of erotics as transformative, there’s a clear relationship between those two activities in my view.
ADV: I like that one. That was good.
BR: I’m glad. I’m just making stuff up as I go along.
ADV: No, it’s good because for some reason, I guess it’s that time in undergrad, everyone has just read this and is talking about it.
BR: Has just read Sontag. I mean, she’s great.
ADV: Well, here’s where I’ll go with it. The Sontag Simone Weil essay. You reference, talk about, write about Simone Weil, quote her a lot.
BR: Yes, I think about her a lot.
ADV: Where does that come from?
BR: That’s a good question. She has a real hold on me even though I’m irritated with her. It almost feels like she’s my sister or something. The way that you love your family members but find them really irritating.
Maybe I’m becoming disenchanted with her after years of enchantment with her because I love her writings on aesthetics. Her essay about wanting to eat beauty is just stunning. I think that it is a really good counterpoint to Kant.
I guess I have, as everybody does, a personal canon. I’m always in conversation with all these people in my head. I said that one point of huge influence for me is Kant’s theory of aesthetics just because that’s the most defining strand in aesthetics and philosophy now. You have to be familiar with the Third Critique and its reception. It continues to be enormously influential. One thing that I think Kant is wrong about, I earlier mentioned something I think he’s right about, but I think that he’s wrong that the attitude that is a hallmark of aesthetic judgment is disinterested pleasure. That’s his view. To judge something beautiful is to confront it and experience, in the face of it, disinterested pleasure.
Simone Weil, on the other hand, says that beautiful things incite appetite in us. They make us want to eat them. We can’t eat them, but that’s the hallmark of an aesthetic experience for her. She’s not as systematic as Kant. That’s just something that she says. Elsewhere she says things that might contradict it. But that way of thinking about beauty, I love.
I kind of love her mystical writings. I think that they’re beautiful and I value them for their beauty, although she’s such a fetishist of self-effacement that it’s beginning to frustrate me. But I really don’t like her writings on politics at all. The more I’ve had to grapple with her writings on politics and see how there might be a connection between those and her other work, the more disenchanted with her I’ve become. But I’m still captivated by her extremity. It’s enticing, even though I think she’s so insane about political questions.
ADV: She’s so extreme—is there a value to struggle or self-denial or other things we see as saintly or virtuous? Where does it come from? Why do we care?
BR: I suppose I think that Simone Weil is aesthetically captivating, which is kind of what Sontag says about her, too. You don’t read her because you think her ideas are true: she’s just appealingly crazy. I certainly think that there is nothing virtuous about, for example, starving yourself to death while you have a terrible disease in solidarity with your compatriots in France. But it certainly has an aesthetic merit in that it’s difficult to look away from something that’s just so maximalist in its minimalism.
So that maximalism is something that appeals to me about the suffering of saintly types. There might also be other things that are valuable about it. It might afford people pleasure. There might be a masochistic gratification in it. And I do understand the appeal of effacing yourself so as to become part of something larger. The mystical line is that they’re not just invested in self-denial for the sake of it, they’re invested in self-denial so that they can merge with God. And that’s an appealing vision.
Some interpreters gloss Kantian disinterest as you ooze yourself in your absorption in artwork. That’s like Schopenhauer’s gloss on disinterest, for example, and that kind of appeals to me. I don’t see the appeal in literally starving yourself to death, though.
ADV: How do you think about your relationship to a literary or intellectual tradition? What is the role of tradition behind you?
BR: That’s a good question. I don’t know that I think about it that much. I guess I think about trying to understand certain literatures that I’m interested in. I just filed an essay about E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic writer. I’m pretty invested in Romanticism. I’ve read a lot of stuff by the Romantics. Before the piece, I read all Hoffmann’s stuff. He writes something called Kunstmärchen, which translates literally to Art Fairy Tales, which was a popular micro-genre at the time. So I read some of the other genres that I hadn’t read before.
Rather than thinking that there is one tradition that I’m a part of, I suppose I have a more granular relationship to traditions in that I just try to immerse myself in a tradition that’s relevant to a particular piece. Surely I am part of a tradition. There must be a contemporary tradition calcifying around me, but I don’t know that I have the perspective on it to know exactly what it is.
ADV: Do you think that strains of criticism emerge from public criticism? What’s the real question? What’s the tension between the kind of academic version of criticism that produces schools or ways of thinking about things? Do you see that kind of thing as possibly emerging from public criticism? The idea of new criticism or reader response or something like that?
BR: It used to happen more than it does now. The Partisan Review people had a shared sensibility. But there used to be groups of writers who would explicitly name themselves or think of themselves as making up schools. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of that now. You don’t have people saying “we’re the symbolists!” or anything. Obviously not all of those groups were self-named, but some of them were. I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t be more of that now, though.
I think in a way there kind of are unnamed divisions within public criticism. There are more political or sociological critics, some of whom think that everybody should be doing criticism that way. There’s more aestheticist critics who kind of think that everybody should be doing things that way. They’re associated with particular magazines. But they’re not named. It’s maybe more porous than in academic schools.
But I don’t think that schools need be unique to the academy. There are probably broader questions about the relationship between academic literary criticism and popular literary criticism in general, but those are other cans of worms.
ADV: It’s interesting that you say that because in that Oyler piece there’s this sense of referencing ideas without naming them or without documenting them or detailing them. What is this phenomenon of having differences without naming them, without setting up a school? What is that indicative of?
BR: I don’t know if I think those are the same phenomenon. I think one reason that people don’t want to identify themselves with a school is probably just not to cordon themselves off from discourse with other people. I think that some people, for example, associate The Point, the magazine that I edit, with anti-political, aestheticist, decontextualized critique.
The Point doesn’t want to be branded that way. We resent that we sometimes are because, in fact, we invite a variety of approaches. We’re probably more open to people who work in analytic philosophy who have a more ahistorical approach than Jacobin, but we also welcome Marxist writing or whatever. I think that the motivation behind not labeling yourself is probably just allowing yourself to move between different approaches more easily and more fluidly.
My principle in general is to only say really mean things about particular people who are alive in print because then I have the space and time to substantiate what I’m saying with quotes. It feels a little unfair to be talking about people when I don’t have the book at my disposal to point to things, but because I wrote about it at some length, I will say what I find frustrating about the Oyler book is that it feels performative in a bad way. Not performative in a generative sense. It’s not performing something that it then brings into being. It seems like it’s gesturing out a lot of things that it doesn’t actually say.
First of all, I don’t think the book actually says that much. It doesn’t contain that many arguments that I find persuasive because it doesn’t contain that many arguments at all. But I thought the posture of the book was the posture of a person who’s very urbane and very well-read and very invested in aesthetics and very invested in particular artworks but then the book itself contains no in-depth discussion of particular artworks, no in-depth discussion of aesthetics even. I’m sure some people think that the autofiction essay in that book is an in-depth discussion of particular artworks and aesthetics but for reasons that I could better articulate with the book in front of me, I did not find it to be so. So that seems to be a case of posturing as opposed to performing.
ADV: If performing is a generative thing that brings things into being, posturing is a pretext. And posturing is when an aesthetic or a surface doesn’t produce its own depth.
BR: Yes, that is a great way of putting it. I wrote something—not to be just absolutely horrible to poor Lauren Oyler and compare her to Jordan Peterson—but I wrote something a while ago on my Substack and I hope to develop it eventually into a longer essay about what I called the “aesthetics of rationality.” The idea was that Jordan Peterson acts as if he’s saying really rational things and he dresses like a really rational person. He clearly is striving to embody the layperson’s idea of a professor. He wears a tweed jacket or his ugly suit and then he says things in this very rational tone of voice, but the things that he says are not rational.
I don’t think Lauren Oyler is as bad as Jordan Peterson by any means but I think that there’s a similar phenomenon at work in the book. A costume is being donned and a particular posture is being adopted, but then none of the substance backs the veneer.
ADV: How do you see your Substack in relation to your other venues?
BR: I think editing is so important. Even if your editor doesn’t touch anything, even if they don’t edit very much. I think writing with a particular discerning reader in mind, knowing that your editor is going to read it, is helpful, at least for me. I guess often I’ve been very lucky to have smart editors. As I said before, when I write I try to imagine somebody who’s very smart and might not have read the book, and that often is just the literal person who’s editing the piece. My editor right now is so smart! I trust him absolutely, so just knowing that he’s going to read it means that I write it with an eye to his judgment. Whereas writing a Substack post at least for me feels like dashing off a tweet or dashing off an Instagram post. There are people who write great essays on Substack and they edit them but I am just unable to make myself take it seriously as a forum. It’s a place where I kind of throw out half-baked ideas but it’s not a place where I have written anything that I think is good.
ADV: Is it a source of income for you in a real way?
BR: No. At one point I was going to do a close reading of the book After Virtue by Alastair McIntyre and I was going to charge people for it because I was going to work hard on it and then I just didn’t do that.
I got it mostly because I deleted Twitter, and I wanted to make sure that I could send out information to people who like my writing, just to tell them when I have a piece that’s published. Occasionally when I’m just really annoyed with something and I don’t think it merits an actual essay but I want to vent by arguing with it, I’ll just dash off an angry post.
ADV: How do you think your gender affects the way that you engage in public criticism or public intellectualism? Is that something…I guess I’ll stop there while you talk.
BR: I don’t know exactly. I don’t know if this is a question of gender or a question of sexism. I’ve just never felt strongly that I have gender of any kind. I’m not coming out as non-binary in this interview or something but I just have never felt like being a female person matters for me at all. I have a pretty masculine temperament. I’m fine with the body that I have but I feel that one of the most consistently frustrating experiences of my life is that people expect me to have a feminine temperament or feminine proclivities because I’m a short female-presenting person and I don’t at all.
And so that has led me to feel frustration with the need that people have to impose templates on everything as a way of containing it. Maybe that’s another way of making all things too small: trying to compress people into how you would expect them to behave on the basis of their gender. That’s probably a pretty standard story. I’m really just describing sexism, but I don’t experience sexism as most injurious when people assume that I’m bad at things because I’m female. I find it equally offensive, if not more so, when people assume that I’m any particular way at all because I’m biologically female.
ADV: Do you think womanhood is a relevant category to you in thinking about writing or history of writing or contemporary literature? Is that something that you think about as a relevant aesthetic criterion?
BR: I’m sort of torn on this question because for many years I think I would have said no. I think I would have said that femininity interests me insofar as it is a series of constraints imposed on female-presenting people and insofar as people who are female-presenting writers are reacting against the same constraints.
One author that I love is Colette. She’s one of my favorite writers ever. And she has this amazing line in The Pure and the Impure where she says something like, “all the best minds are mentally hermaphroditic.” And that’s a line that I’ve always strongly identified with. I feel mentally hermaphroditic. But of late, after I read an amazing piece in the New York Review of Books by Namwali Serpell about gender and style, I’ve been reflecting on whether there’s any value in femininity as a style, as an aesthetic genre. And perhaps there is. I’m not sure yet.
I think if I were to value womanhood at all, aside from thinking that it’s an important category because people who have been classed as women have been oppressed in similar ways, it would be because I value the genre of the feminine. I love drag in part because it does seem to be—well, some drag is post-gender insanity, and I love that—but some drag is an elaborate performance of the feminine. And so maybe there is something valuable in that. Well, there certainly is something valuable in drag. Certainly many things are valuable about it. But possibly the transformation of femininity into an artistic genre is part of what I love about it so much.
ADV: We talked a little bit about Simone Weil wanting to eat beauty, wanting to eat art, right? How do you understand obsession as a force that drives you or interests you? And its cousin, hunger?
BR: I’m very interested in hunger and obsession and I’m very hungry and obsessed. I’m not sure if I have anything more interesting to say than that. I mean, certainly the way that I operate is I become obsessed with something and then I write about it until I’m not obsessed with it anymore. Sometimes I remain obsessed with it forever, as I am with Simone Weil, as you note, and I return to it over and over and over again. I think writing is a way of satisfying a certain kind of hunger.
I think all the time about the Simone Weil line about how you want to do something with beauty, but you can’t do it. You want to eat it, but you can’t eat it. And so the only thing that you can do to it instead is write criticism about it. And so that’s often why I write criticism. I want to eat David Cronenberg’s movies, but I can’t. The only thing I can do is write about them.
The only way that I can stop feeling almost painfully obsessed with them is to get something down on paper about them. I don’t know that I have any philosophical thoughts about obsession in general, though. Oh, there’s a dog in here.
ADV: That’s great.
BR: I’m so happy. What a cutie. I love dogs.
ADV: So it’s kind of like a metabolism?
BR: Yes. Yes. I think criticism is the way of eating, because it’s the best we can do.
ADV: Your dog is named Kafka.
BR: Yes, I love my dog. His name is Kafka. He’s the best dog.
ADV: What kind of dog is he?
BR: He’s an English Shepherd, which is similar to a Border Collie.
He’s very energetic, and he’s not Kafkaesque at all. He’s really happy, really healthy. He’s always smiling. He’s blonde. He’s a blonde dog. I’m happy to answer more questions about Kafka. I want Kafka to become a celebrity. He’s sort of more mine than my husband’s, because my husband had a dog before I did.
My husband had a dog when I met him, and I really liked his dog, but his dog is always going to like him a little more than the dog likes me. It’s a problem. I love the dog, but it’s not cool if the dog loves him more than me. So I was like, I want a dog that loves me the most, and I got one. And he does love me the most.
ADV: So now you have two dogs?
BR: Yes. Theo’s more Zach’s, and Kafka’s more mine, but they’re obviously both ours. And they’re both good boys, but Kafka is a slightly better boy.
ADV: Of course. Is that true, or is that just a beautiful statement?
BR: Theo’s a pandemic dog, so he’s actually quite unfriendly to everyone besides me and Zach, and Kafka, I mean, he’s actually much truer to the spirit of Kafka-the-writer than Kafka-the-dog, who is really friendly and loves everybody and is really happy. Theo is a curmudgeonly dog.
ADV: You’re very frank about your sex and your erotic life in writing, in public writing. What does that take from you? How do you feel about putting that in the hands of strangers?
BR: Maybe I should feel worse about it, but I guess the way I’ve always felt is that the most intimate activity is writing, because that’s the place where I become what I am. I often feel that I don’t know what I think about something until I arrange my thoughts into an essay about it. If I want to understand something, the only way that I feel that I can do that is to write about it. I think that’s why I’m so hungry to write about things that interest me, because that’s the only way that I can tame them. And so, it has always seemed to me that the most private things that matter to me the most are in my writing.
One of the reasons I do not like conversation, I don’t like talking, is because I think that there’s lots of incentives to say things you don’t mean. Someone might say, oh, I like how you write these books, and you want to be polite, so you say, great, they’re fine. But you might actually think the books are terrible. Conversation is not a place where you’re going to be perfectly honest about everything.
Writing is a place where you can be honest about everything, and it’s always the place where I felt that I can be more honest than I can in any other area of my life, so it feels perfectly natural to me, I suppose, to expose my intimacies in writing, because writing already feels like an intimate activity to me.
ADV: How do you work out cases like what you describe as good debater syndrome in your Yale Review piece on high school debate? Something like the halo effect, where the aesthetic glamor masks moral deficit? If that’s undesirable, what’s the way to construct ourselves or construct our world that avoids that problem?
BR: Yeah, I mean I want to believe—but I probably can’t entirely believe—that many of the people who are glamorous but evil might not be as aesthetically good as they might initially appear. I think that there’s something seductive about a lot of people who are actually horrible people, but they might not actually be beautiful people or fundamentally aesthetically interesting people. Still, probably some of them are. I think that the only thing you can say about, like, Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint or any of these other characters who are horrible people but are interesting precisely because they’re horrible people is just that there isn’t a perfect correlation between aesthetic interest and moral value. It could be true that having good taste in literature or film makes you a better person in one dimension but it’s still overwhelmed by all of your vices along every other axis.
ADV: This question is partly about Sally Rooney, whom you’ve written about. That’s someone who is so different as a novelist and an essayist—I’d like to hear you talk about how you feel about what those different genres can do and why you dwell so much in the essay rather than in fiction writing?
BR: That’s a good question. I haven’t read that many of Rooney’s essays, so I don’t have a super strong opinion on that. I’ve read her essay about Ulysses, which was a lecture.
ADV: And you’ve read the debate one.
BR: And I’ve read the debate one. I actually think the debate essay is quite good. I think it’s the best thing that I’ve ever read of Rooney’s. I think I write essays because argument is a mood that I’m comfortable in. I like making arguments, and I’m not sure that I would be great with dialogue or characters, but I do eventually hope to at least try my hand at fiction. Historically when critics try to write fiction, it goes really badly for them. Susan Sontag is not good at writing fiction.
ADV: Elizabeth Hardwick is not bad.
BR: She’s not bad. There are exceptions. Baldwin writes really good essays and really good fiction, and that’s hard. That’s what we’re trying to get. That’s the standard. Yeah, I want to be like Baldwin. There are some people, but then you have Susan Sontag or Lionel Trilling. I haven’t actually read Lionel Trilling’s novel, so it could be really good.
I know someone who really likes it, but I love his criticism so much that I’m not prepared for the novel to be terrible, and I’ve been told by other people that it is. I will read it eventually. I guess I try to think about the form that an idea demands to be expressed in, and that hasn’t been fiction yet. Most of the ideas I have are philosophical, or their origin is in a philosophical question, and so it seems like an essay is just the most appropriate form for them. Rooney’s essay was not philosophical, though. It was more of a personal essay, which is fine.
Some people hate first personal experiential essays, and I’m not one of them. I think they can be good. I don’t think that her essay was advancing an argument so much as just capturing a particular kind of experience with all its ambivalences intact, and I think she did that really effectively. I think that that is what good fiction does too, so I think if her fiction were more like that essay, I would like it more. I think that the fiction seems much neater, much more massaged. The endings are much more conclusive. What’s great, I think, about the debate essay is that really none of the ambivalences are resolved. You think over the course of the essay that she’s going to end up repudiating debate and saying that it was a stupid thing to care about, and then in the last line of the essay, which packs such a punch, she says exactly the opposite.
ADV: That she’s still the best.
BR: Yes. Not only is that a sort of ruthlessness that I admire and find more interesting than the sort of soft tenderness of a lot of her characters, but I think that the ambiguity of the whole thing is more pleasing than the neat moral resolutions that you find in the novels and books I’ve read. But I haven’t read anything since Conversations with Friends. No, I’ve read, obviously, Normal People, but since Normal People, I haven’t read Beautiful World, Where Are You? I kind of decided I had enough Rooney. People were always talking to me about Rooney, and I was like, I said my say.
ADV:I guess you haven’t experienced this, but what do you think is the kind of idea that would demand itself be expressed in fiction? That I guess is an idea you haven’t had demand itself yet.
BR: I wrote a novel that I ultimately concluded was bad, and I put it away, and maybe I will return to it in five years or something. I think a lot of my essays want to understand what something is, like what eroticism is, or what is wrong with fragment novels, or what is bad about mindfulness, or what public intellectualism is or should be.
Not that novels cannot ask questions about what things are—[Sheila Heti’s] How Should a Person Be? is a novel that I like, and that explicitly asks such a question. But I think I would turn to fiction if I felt that there was an experiential quality that I wanted to pin down or capture, or the dynamics of a relationship that I wanted to explore as opposed to a question that I wanted to answer. But I think that that’s personal. I think that there are, of course, philosophical novels, not just How Should a Person Be? Lots of other philosophical novels that are asking questions. Like, The Line of Beauty, arguably, is a book in part about what beauty is, although also about lots of other things. And there’s lots of books like that, and there’s lots of essays that aim to capture interpersonal dynamics or experiences. That’s just maybe my relationship to the form.
ADV: But another one that you’re always in on is Blue. Is Blue? Right.
The Gasset? Not the Gasset, the Gass, sorry. There’s too many people whose names start with G-A-S-S.
ADV: Yeah.
BR: On Being Blue is the Blue Gass.
ADV: Right, okay, yeah.
BR: The Dehumanization of Art is Ortega y Gasset. Similar names, distressing.
ADV: He has that riff you talk about, about a fuck vs a fick or a fock or a fack, about the insufficiency of language. When do you find yourself needing new words? When you do, like, what do you do? Is there a way to write around that? Or do you not run into that problem?
BR: I tend to like a lot of authors who seem to feel that they have that problem. Another person that I love is Heidegger. And Heidegger is an infamously terrible, some say terrible, some say innovative writer. But he had a justification for writing maybe terribly, maybe innovatively, which was that he was trying to describe something for which no language existed. And German really lends itself to that because it lends itself to smushing words together and amputating words and so on and recombining them. I think that I feel that all of writing is an antidote to feeling that the existing words are inadequate.
I feel uncomfortable in language all the time. I feel uncomfortable in spoken language precisely because it feels so miserably inadequate to me. And so whenever I’m writing something, in a way, it’s because words are not obviously adequate and I want to overcome their seeming inadequacies. So I think my response to realizing that there is not a word for something is to write something essay-length about it.
ADV: I really want to ask about influence, both as something that acts on you but also as something that you as a critic have to pull out or identify. How do you go about thinking about how someone is influenced and where that appears?
BR: I think those are probably two very different things. When you are looking at a book and trying to extract its influences, you’re not trying to identify the things that the author actually had in mind; you’re trying to identify the things that have an affinity with the book or that share a sensibility with the book or that are like the book in some way whether or not the author has ever even heard of them. In fact, it seems to me like a lot of the fragment novels that I dislike, the problem is precisely that they’re not in conversation with an earlier tradition of fragment in writing that they should be in conversation with, namely the German Romantic tradition of fragment essays.
It’s probably not my job to identify my own influences. I’m not capable of and not always interested in thinking about how my writing relates to everything that’s out there, everything that has been written. From my perspective, I’m just having constant arguments with lines in my head—or not arguments, also sometimes appreciations of certain things that people have said.
ADV: Influence is then both the people that you agree with and the people that you disagree with.
BR: Yes, but you can disagree with things by just thinking that they’re terrible and stupid and I think those things tend to have less of an influence than things that are powerful but you feel some ambivalence about them. Simone Weil is someone that I’m really drawn to but also really repulsed by and so she’s an enormous influence on me, maybe more so than people I disagree with passionately. Things that I don’t fully understand, I think, are the things that keep me in there for all the longest.
ADV: Which is kind of the thrust of the stalking piece.
BR: Yes, exactly.
ADV: Which I understand, as you can maybe tell.
BR: You did a great preparation for this interview.
ADV: Actually, I’m interested in that too. What’s it like being a public figure? What is your relationship to your social media presence? Is that something that you have to think that you do think about a lot or not?
BR: Yeah, I think it is. Because I’m about to enter into this promotional cycle for the book.
And, of course, I’m so lucky. I have a really good publisher. It’s great that the publisher is doing things to promote the book and I want people to read the book. But it just feels really jarring because so much writing is solitary. Well, it’s not exactly that writing is solitary, because you’re always writing in the company of people that you’re thinking about. You’re writing in the company of your mental chorus of influences. You’re writing in the company of Simone Weil. You’re writing in anticipation of your editor reading something. You’re sending it to your friends. So it’s not exactly that writing is solitary. But writing is not public. The process of sitting down and writing something is not public. And the way in which you have contact with the public is through the lens of your words.
And so it just feels really jarring to suddenly be expected to do this completely different thing when the skill that I’ve cultivated for my entire adult life is sitting by myself in a room and tapping away at something without interacting with anybody. So now that I have to go on a book tour and interact with people and be personable, it seems completely different. It seems like something that I’m not skilled in at all. Similarly with social media, I feel like I’m used to just having followers who are only people that I know. I can post something nasty about some author whose book I finished with no consequences. And so having to reconsider that as a kind of branding exercise has been frustrating and strange.
And I think I’m bad at it. Particularly because at The Post, they have social media policies. There’s things that I’m not allowed to post about. Because a critic is considered a journalist by the Post bureaucracy—I don’t think that a critic and a journalist are the same, but because I’m not in the opinion section, I’m technically categorized as a journalist—I can’t post controversial political opinions. I’m not allowed to go to a protest either. So it’s made me very conscious of myself as a social media figure as opposed to just a person reading something and being like, this sentence is terrible. I’m going to send it to all my followers.
ADV: Do you feel like you’re being followed through your career by the way that the high school policy debate social world was constructed? In this kind of small way where you can’t say things about XYZ because someone will hear it? Is that something that you’ve felt like you continue to encounter?
BR: I think I’ve become more circumspect about it. I didn’t used to have this policy that I would only write (and not say) mean things about people who were alive because nobody would ever interview me. I would never go on a podcast. The only opportunity I would have to say that I hate some living author would be at drinks with somebody. I think it has just been sort of shocking to me that growing up, wanting to be a writer for my whole life, the only part that I prepared for mentally was the writing part. It wasn’t the “having a public persona” part. So I feel untutored and afraid.
ADV: But despite it all, we still have bodies.
BR: Yes, we still have bodies, and we have to live with that.
ADV: You have this thing in your writing, I guess it’s probably true to life, that everyone is always smoking a cigarette. What does that do for you? What does that do for your writing?
BR: I think that that is probably just an artifact of how I used to date. And actually, I’m now married to the kind of lanky academic man who smokes cigarettes. And I write about men that I’ve had romantic relationships with a lot. I hope to move away from that because that seems to me a frustrating cliché, and one I’m not happy with. My husband has stopped smoking cigarettes at my request. Now he smokes a pipe occasionally. So that’s at least a more unexpected image.
ADV: Well, it’s got more gravitas.
BR: Yes. But it’s actually equally carcinogenic. So I wish he would stop.
ADV: There’s another disconnect between your aesthetic and your lungs.
BR: Yes, true. I do think smoking is beautiful. I love the movie Gilda. Have you seen Gilda? It’s a film noir with Rita Hayworth. And she’s beautiful. But there’s one scene where someone is totally in the dark and you can only see their shadow. And they light a cigarette. And they smoke it. And you can see just the tip of the cigarette lighting up. And it’s so beautiful. But it really does make you want to smoke. But I do not want to get cancer.
ADV: So are you a big film noir lover?
BR: I love film noir. Yeah, I do. I don’t write that much about film. But I do sometimes. Maybe I’ll write about film noir. Film more. Write about film noir more.
ADV: Where does that come from? Film noir? Where does it come from?
BR: Partially because I just grew up watching it. And so the aesthetic is really comforting to me. Also because I think so much of it is so painterly to look at. I guess I’m really interested in the contrast between the painterly imagery of film noir which is so chiaroscuro and so beautifully and carefully constructed with the hard-boiled, pulpy content. There seems to be a really interesting and moving clash between those things. The characters in these movies seem so… distorted by pop culture and yet the imagery in which they move is almost classical.
ADV: Yeah. They almost don’t make sense as detective stories.
BR: No, not at all. There’s an essay in the book actually that was previously in the Hedgehog Review about serial killer things.
ADV: Those are the ones I didn’t read.
BR: I’m absolutely not faulting you for not reading. You don’t need to read everything I’ve written. A lot of it’s bad.
ADV: Because the paywalls in Hedgehog Review are hard to get around.
BR: There is the paywall but also a lot of my juvenilia is just bad.
ADV: Also the Dartmouth links are down.
BR: I’m so glad because they’re all anti-frat columns and I do think that frats are bad so I’m glad that I said those things but I don’t think that the writing was beautiful by any measure. But the piece about serial killers is also kind of about why I like Film Noir. I think serial killer TV shows—which I love—and Film Noir satisfy a similar desire which is for stories that kind of don’t end, unlike detective stories that have a neat resolution. Film Noir doesn’t have a neat resolution. It’s kind of like a rebuke to traditional whodunit mysteries, and serial killer stories are too. You know who the serial killer is, but what you don’t understand is why would they do this.
ADV: You’ll never answer that question.
BR: Exactly.
ADV: What’s the relationship between your practice of criticism and psychoanalysis like analyzing someone’s text? Before the interview you were talking about reading Lacan in the college library. Have you studied that tradition? What do you think of it as practice, as theory?
BR: I haven’t studied it that much. I’m really interested in the philosopher Stanley Cavell and he’s much more psychoanalytic and more invested in the psychoanalytic tradition than I am. But he says…well, he’s someone who’s very hard to understand. That might be why I love him and why he’s such a towering figure in my personal canon because I think I’ll never understand exactly what he’s saying. But he does at points seem to be hinting at a theory of what the critic is doing. He seems to be suggesting that the critic is doing something akin to psychoanalytic therapy, or akin to Wittgensteinian therapy, where the idea is that instead of answering a question or solving a problem, the critic is talking about something in a way that makes the problem dissolve.
The problem no longer seems like a problem to you, or they’re coaxing you into a different form of life or a different world where things show up differently for you. And this is, I think, similar to what Cavell thinks is happening in psychoanalysis, that problems are not solved, but you’re sort of initiated into a different frame of reference within which the problems no longer look like problems to you. I’m not sure that that is a theory of criticism that I accept, but I’m grappling with whether I like it, because it’s intriguing and possibly right. I’m not sure.
ADV: But it seems to imply a distance, or maybe the new frame of reference is distance from the problem.
BR: Yeah, and I certainly have no distance from the problem, so maybe my criticism is therapy for me. It certainly sounds like it at other points in this interview, where I say (or confess) that I’m trying to satisfy myself by making my hunger for an answer or some kind of solution go away. Even though I rarely answer questions, I often end up in a place of confusion, but confusion that has been exercised satisfactorily.
I think Cavell’s thought is that, because one needs to see an artwork or experience an artwork in order to make an aesthetic judgment of it, what the critic must be doing is putting you in a position to see it differently. So the critic can’t just be making arguments the way that they would if they wanted you to accept a proposition. They have to be inducing you to have a kind of affective response to something, and the way to do that is via something like a therapeutic practice.
ADV: Right. Do you see that? Is that right?
BR: Maybe. It’s certainly more right, I think, than people who think that criticism is just making arguments for you to accept a conclusion about the value of a book. That’s certainly wrong, I think.
ADV: So criticism is not about, for you, whether this book is good or bad.
BR: Well, I think it might be about whether the book is good or bad, but that’s not the end of it. Certainly it’s not the end of it, but this will take us far afield. I’m writing a paper about this now, so I have too many thoughts about it. But I think that aesthetic judgment has a closer connection with experience than it does with belief. And I think in philosophy, generally, people think of aesthetic judgment as a belief. Like, I believe that this painting is good, or I believe that this book is good. But then there’s a familiar puzzle in the history of aesthetics, which is, why can’t you accept somebody’s testimony about the value of a book or painting? There’s something wrong, or so philosophers think, and I also think, with saying, Lolita is beautiful, but I haven’t read Lolita. It seems like you need to have a direct encounter with Lolita in order to judge it beautiful, and then the question is why.
One answer to that question would be that aesthetic judgment has a basis in experience. Like a Kantian account, on which you have to experience pleasure of a certain kind, disinterested pleasure. That’s one explanation for why you can’t make an aesthetic judgment on the basis of someone else’s testimony, because you have to be in front of something in order to experience the appropriate emotions in front of it.
So I think if this is true, then there’s a question, which is, what is criticism doing? If criticism is not just trying to make arguments for you to accept a proposition, if it’s trying to help you make an aesthetic judgment, but an aesthetic judgment is not a proposition, it’s somehow bound up with an experience of some kind, then what is criticism doing? This is the series of questions that I’m thinking about right now, and I have not yet answered, but it seems like Cavell is a useful resource.
ADV: Has anyone answered the question, what are they writing all this criticism for?
BR: No one knows. No one knows why they’re writing criticism. No one knows what criticism is for, at least of all me.
ADV: Where do you start when you start thinking about a history of the beautiful?
BR: I mean, I know more about Western philosophy than I know about other traditions, because that’s the one that I got my PhD in. So I start with Greek philosophy. I should probably get more into the pre-Socratic than I am. I’ve dabbled, but I’m not deep in the pre-Socratic.
For me, the symposium is probably the earliest text about the beautiful that I’ve thought about a lot. I love the symposium. I think it’s really great. I think it’s wrong, maybe, but it’s good.
ADV: Maybe there could be a chronological start, and then a central hub, which are not necessarily the same thing.
BR: Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, I think Plato is central. Not all of Plato—I haven’t read every Platonic dialogue. I’m not a Plato expert. But the symposium, like Kant and like Simone de Beauvoir, is a text that I just think about a lot when I think about beauty.
It also happens to be, chronologically, the earliest text about beauty that I’ve thought about very carefully. Maybe my first foray into being interested in the question of what beauty is was reading Rilke. I got really into Rilke in high school, and he says, “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” And I was like, I don’t know what that means, but that sounds true somehow. And no one knows what it means, that beauty is the beginning of terror, but we all know it’s true.
ADV: Maybe knowing what it means is overrated.
BR: Yeah.
ADV: One of the lines I’ve been thinking about is from Janet Malcolm. She says, no writing is produced in a state of desirelessness.
BR: Correct.
ADV: Which is great.
BR: Yes.
ADV: Do you think that there’s such a thing as desire without an object? I don’t know, this desire is for writing or for processing or for metabolism seems like a particularly strange kind of desire.
BR: I don’t know if I want to take a stance on whether there’s ever desire without an object. Certainly people can have desires without knowing what the object of their desire is, but it might, in fact, have an object that’s inaccessible to them. But I do think that when I write, I always have an object of desire, but it’s an object of desire with respect to which no consummation is possible, and that is why criticism is the next best thing. It goes back to the Simone Weil line that you want to eat beauty, you want to do something to beauty, you don’t know what you want to do to beauty, and this is what you can do to it.
This might be why I was irritated with Lauren Oyler’s book, is that for me, criticism comes from an intense, almost sexual desire for objects of beauty, books of beauty, whatever. Whereas her book seems completely divorced from a desire for objects. Yes. Which is, again, this kind of accumulationist approach. Yes, you’ve got to have more, but you can never get anything, so…
ADV: I’ll make this the last question: what’s the role of beauty or the desire for it or the pursuit of it? Is it an antidote to Is there something about our particular moment that makes you more interested in beauty or more interested in pursuing it?
BR: I think that if there were more beauty and more emphasis on its pursuit, things would be better. But I don’t think that beauty is an antidote to anything, in the sense that I think that everybody always sort of wants to pursue beauty, because that’s just an innate appetite. We have an innate appetite for beauty, it seems to me. But it seems to me that one reason why this appetite might be being extinguished right now is that so many things are instrumentalized. Another thing that Kant says that I think about all the time that I think is true is that beauty involves valuing an object in itself, not as a means to the end of anything else.
That’s what he means by disinterest, maybe. It’s an object of some controversy what he means by disinterest and I don’t fully understand it. But one interpretation of what he means is that the object that you are assessing aesthetically as opposed to in some other mode is not instrumental. It’s not for anything besides itself. And I think that many judgments that we make in our extremely instrumentalizing culture induce us to extract value from things or even to see things only as means to ends, whereas beauty is an end in and of itself. So beauty might be an antidote to relentlessly utilitarian logic.
Even though it induces appetite and it maybe never satisfies our appetite because we can never have enough of it or we can never consume it as fully as we would like to, it doesn’t make us want something else. It’s not something that you pass through on your way to something else. It’s something that you stop and marvel at.
