The Critic in the Tower

Embedded Cultural Criticism

Photo by emrecan arık on Unsplash

The grand project for this newsletter sounds a bit distant, critical, and objective. We’re trying to look beneath the appearances of contemporary society to identify the underlying forces at work, particularly focusing on this idea of the “will to suicide” that Jacques Ellul describes. To recap, the will to suicide is the spirit of the world’s drive towards self destruction. Probably the most obvious example today would be something like climate change and environmental disasters. We’re engineering our own demise and it feels perfectly natural to go on consuming and producing as we have been for years.