Fredric Jameson once confessed to a friend that he was a nihilist in his cups. Such confessions are probably more common among Marxists than their adversaries give them credit for. The New Left Review, to which the critic Francis Mulhern has been a prolific and incisive contributor for decades, has made no secret of its own uncertainties about the theory of which it nevertheless remains the foremost vehicle in the English-speaking world, in particular its lack of confidence in the revolutionary agency of the working class. A history of the journal published in 2006 already took as its central theme the editors’ “ill-concealed pessimism.”¹ The specter that has haunted NLR’s writers is a self-image in which they have abandoned the struggle to change the world, and settled instead for seeking lucidity about why the world is so hard to change.

It seems possible that Mulhern’s new collection of essays, most of which first appeared in NLR, is quietly aimed at the journal itself and its inability to banish its house specter. The title comes from the French phrase “au dessus de la mêlée,” means “above the fray,” with “mêlée” adding a hint of randomness and confusion that makes rising above it sound a bit more attractive. Mulhern, in a twist on the phrase, beckons his readers into the mêlée—into engaging in politics, however random and messy, rather than merely interpreting the world in various ways.

But what politics, exactly? Here it’s worth recalling the origins of the phrase Mulhern is riffing on. “Au dessus de la mêlée” is the title of a polemic published in 1914 by the French intellectual Romain Rolland, better known to Anglo readers as the original (pre-Gramsci) source of the much-repeated motto “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” The mêlée to which Rolland was referring would come to be called World War I, at the time of writing still in its early weeks and not yet a seemingly irrefutable argument against optimism of any sort. Rolland, an ardent admirer of Tagore and Gandhi, was calling for his fellow Europeans to rise above that political mess; he was protesting the war. Forty million casualties later—a figure that omits the victims of Nazism and another, even costlier war—his protest seems well founded. At the time, it got him multiple death threats.

Mulhern is one of the finest Marxist critics of his generation, known for the elegant rigor of his judgments on nationalism (here English, Irish, and Scottish) and on other cultural critics (here figures ranging from Orwell and Empson to Roberto Schwartz and Kristin Ross). Most recently, he consolidated his position as a spokesperson for the literary left by means of a prolonged duel with Stefan Collini, published by Verso as What Is Cultural Criticism? Given his proven political acumen, it’s not obvious why Mulhern should reverse the direction of Rolland’s phrase, summoning his readers into rather than out of the mêlée. Perhaps it is because where militarism is concerned, he now finds his liberal opponents on the other side. In a time of unspeakable military savagery, they are trying to mute anti-war voices, if not silence them completely.

Too many thinkers in our time, whether or not they make use of Rolland’s phrase, have surrendered to a desire to place themselves above or outside politics. But “there is in reality,” Mulhern declares, “no social location corresponding to this desire.” An intellectual who thinks he has the privilege to occupy such a location is obviously engaging in wish fulfillment. And yet the mistake is widespread and influential among people who should know better. I take the example of a social location I know something about. In academic institutions, resistance to BDS (the nonviolent initiative of Palestinian civil society asking for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel) has been determined, not to say pig-headed. Why? Because faculty are disposed to think their social location and the professional autonomy it confers place them au dessus de la mêlée, even when the mêlée takes the form of the copious slaughter of Palestinian women and children as well as their fellow educators (the preferred term is now scholasticide) and when their institutions are verifiably invested in facilitating that slaughter.

In reality, as administrators and trustees know very well, their institutions are not above politics in the slightest. The university serves the state, as it serves corporate profit, foreign policy and corporate profit cooperating, as it happens, in the American-Israeli massacre of the Palestinians. Yet the institution’s would-be defenders, feeling themselves ever more vulnerable to political attack, and correctly so, have so far proved unwilling to stage their defense on political grounds, where the battle (it is one) needs to be waged. Even Harvard University’s recent refusal of the Trump administration’s illegal demands carefully refrains from defending pro-Palestinian protesters or stating its case in political terms.

Opposition to war has to count as political. Indeed, unprecedented protest since October 2023 against US support for Israeli violence ought to bolster Mulhern’s case for a measured political optimism, or what Kristin Ross calls “designs on the future.” (One of his most intriguing diagnoses, in his surveys of the literature and criticism of our age, is a covert fatalism.) Still, Mulhern’s titular reversal of Rolland (into the mêlée) carries the implication, however faint, that something is missing from anti-war politics, and that implication is not irrelevant to the book’s underlying impulses. Anti-war politics is an example of cultural politics, at least in the sense that it is politics that does not put economic inequality or the agency of the working class front and center. And how to approach cultural politics, a question that has distressed Marxist critics forever, continues to animate most of the essays in this spirited and often dazzling collection.

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The years from 1974 to 1979, when Mulhern was writing his first and perhaps still his best-known book, The Moment of “Scrutiny” (1979), a PhD thesis supervised at Cambridge by Frank Kermode with acknowledgments to key members of NLR, were formative years for the New Left. One might think that, as a thinker formed in that period, Mulhern would be arguing that you can’t get outside or above politics because politics is everywhere—because the personal is political and so is everything else. On the contrary. Mulhern insists on a highly restrictive, un-Sixties sense of the political. As he writes in Culture/Metaculture (2000), politics is “never everything.” Properly speaking, it is “governed by the question, What is to be done?” “It wills, urges, dictates. Its aim is to secure assent . . . and, failing that, compliance.” The word’s watered-down overuse in the era of cultural studies, Mulhern argues with undisguised scorn, has turned it into an “expletive,” its effect merely “phatic.”

In this looser, more multicultural sense, politics generates plenty of free-floating touchiness, Mulhern suggests, but not enough moments of anchored, indispensable antagonism of the sort required by (my example) Israeli militarism. (And antagonism is required: as an effort to secure more equitable terms of collective existence, an effort that will involve taking from some and giving to others, politics cannot rule out coercion in the last instance.) Mulhern recognizes that there will likely be hostility to his more stringent understanding of the term. Take a political stand? Is that part of my job description? The record of university administrators taking a stand against the wishes of the military-industrial complex is not encouraging. In America during World War I, you could be jailed for encouraging draft resisters (as Eugene V. Debs was). At Columbia University, you could be fired for opposing US entry into the mêlée. At that moment, as under McCarthy in the 1950s, well-intentioned liberals asked to be judged by their good intentions, rather than by a principled resistance to authority, and so resistance largely didn’t happen. It seems likely not to happen again, as protesters are again at risk of being abducted and deported or sacked.

So, pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of and about intellectuals. Pessimism may be where intellect, left to its own devices, tends to gravitate. But in “Intellectual Identities,” a chapter in the new book, Mulhern sees pessimism as a professional deformation. Intellectuals idealize culture as something that they possess and as a possession that is all the more valuable to them because the society around them ignores it—and it is this self-serving idealization of culture that gives rise to pessimism. Flattering themselves simultaneously for their intimacy with culture and their alienation from their society, they are forever tempted to see that society as doomed to terminal decline. Here, as in Culture/Metaculture, Mulhern ties this syndrome to a tradition of Kulturkritik. The German term is needed, he proposes, because, unlike its English and French near-equivalents, it sets itself apart from civilization. Julien Benda, José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, F.R. Leavis (the subject of Mulhern’s first book), and Thomas Mann aligned themselves with culture, a “higher moral tribunal” that the masses were presumed incapable of accessing. This is the real force of “above” in “au dessus de la mêlée.” Mann was paradigmatic of the claim to transcend politics, envisioning a future in which “the authentically German intellectual would embody the ‘superpolitical, powerfully ethical moment’ of Kultur.” Mann, though enthusiastic, politically speaking, about the benefits of a German victory in World War I and the cleansing power of mass bloodshed along the way, gave this figure the name “the unpolitical man.”

Mulhern goes on to argue that the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, which also spoke in the name of culture, thereby giving rise to cultural studies and flipping, in their way, from pessimism to optimism, nevertheless ended up making the same fundamental error as Kulturkritik. For them too, culture was the highest tribunal, and judged by that standard, the actual collective agencies capable of doing political work, like unions and parties, seemed hopelessly compromised. But when proper politics drops out, so does the sole, indispensable means of substantiating optimism, or bringing optimistic conditions into being. One might say that optimism, while for Mulhern a good in itself, doesn’t carry enough of society along with it.

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It seems likely that American readers willing to dip into the work of a self-identified Marxist critic like Mulhern have had their curiosity aroused by the writings of the late Fredric Jameson or one of his talented students. Mulhern, like Jameson, is an accomplished stylist. Within their shared political commitment, however, the contrast in their critical styles is striking. Mulhern favors chiseled, sardonic understatement, especially with regard to nationalism, as when he writes that the Conservative Party sees “England as Sherwood Forest.” Or, on George Orwell and Orwell’s late-career turn to patriotism: “Eric Blair began by taking the name of England’s patron saint and ended up assuming the role.” This constitutional modesty is especially evident when read alongside Jameson’s brashly virtuosic performances of interpretation, in which he showed off a legendary ability to absorb seemingly antithetical systems of thought into a vision that takes a creatively Marxist shape. However principled, Jameson’s was a brand of Marxism well fitted to survive and thrive in the competitive, individualistic environment of the university.

Mulhern is too angry for that. Pleasurable and provocative as his writing is, he sounds more like someone who, without submitting to a party line, is trying to stay close to and consistent with collective indignation on extra-academic issues, decisions that might have to be made by a left-wing party or some other organized justice-oriented movement. This real-world orientation ought not to be shocking where Marxism is concerned; it’s an undeniable component of Marxism’s appeal. And yet like every other political commitment, Marxism has made its own compromises with the protocols of academic life. Mulhern has previously made those compromises too: he held a post as a Professor of Critical Studies at Middlesex University, but Into the Mêlée says only that he comes from Northern Ireland and is associate editor at New Left Review. Whatever his biographical trajectory, his criticism, while unusually erudite even by academic standards, also feels refreshingly independent of the academy. That independence further adds to his polemic about the proper meaning of politics.

At the center of Into the Mêlée is a fifty-page essay on Joseph Conrad—a short book in itself, and a showcase for Mulhern’s skills as a reader of literature. His theme, very much of our time, is the logic of everyday disavowal. Conrad’s “novels find their form in the struggle to contain an unbearable acknowledgement.” In Lord Jim, as in Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s mysterious loyalty to a fascinating but apparently undeserving figure can be explained by unacknowledged loyalty to, or fetishism of, the darkest side of Englishness, namely imperialism. This itself is a virtuoso critical performance, its virtuosity manifest in its sudden acrobatic comparisons. Who would have thought of making a detour from Conrad to his fellow Eastern European, the master of Yiddish Sholom Aleichem? Or, for that matter, comparing Conrad with the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby?

Here the essay makes another improbable leap, turning into an excursus on the status of commodity fetishism in Marx’s Capital. Perhaps provoked by what he’s discovered in the modernist novel, Mulhern proposes that, despite the overwhelming piety the concept attracts, fetishism contradicts Capital’s “general logic.” “There is no mention of fetishism, either before or after it, in the published work.” This argument leads to a new periodization and a new program of research. If fetishism is after all not the logic of capitalist society as a whole, but a phenomenon of transition, “a feature of its brilliant, bold, baffling emergence”; if once established, capitalism is drab, not fascinating; then the historian has to account for fetishism when and where it does show up. As it does in Conrad.

Around this not entirely literary center are arrayed review-essays on notable writer-intellectuals: Raymond Williams, William Empson, Edmund Burke, Eric Hobsbawm, among others. The most purely political piece is an account of Kristin Ross’s treatment of the Paris Commune and its revolutionary—and distinctly un-pessimistic—heritage. Elsewhere, pessimism returns as a disagreeable companion of nationalism: as the “fatalist tendency of the naturalist imagination” in Ireland discussed by Joseph Cleary, which Mulhern describes as “depressive complicity,” and as “the proposition that nationality is fate” in Tom Nairn’s Scottish nationalism. (As it happens, the idea of war as fate is one of Rolland’s explicit targets in Au Dessus de la Mêlée.) Cleary sees, as Nairn does not, the “social character” of nationality, constructed as it is out of contingent disparities of wealth and power. It would be a mistake to imagine that there is “a quasi-ontological mismatch between the Irish people and mere capitalism.” At the same time, it seems inevitable that some will fall into the trap of nationalism by innocently following in the tracks of working-class attachments.

The title “Into the Mêlée” surfaces in a long review-essay on Régis Debray’s Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (1979), translated as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities. Again the point of entry is the pessimism of the intellect, or of the intellectuals. For Mulhern Debray is a hero, one of the “few honorable survivors” of the political collapse of French intellectuals in the 1970s. Yet Debray shares with F.R. Leavis, one of the unreliable Kulturkritikers, “a tense combination of fatalism and defiance.” As Mulhern notes, Debray favors the formula “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” except that for him, writing at a moment of all-encompassing neoliberalism, optimism has been reduced to mere defiance. Mulhern invites the hypothesis that the same might be true for him, and for us. This is clearly not where he wants to end up: with “a cultural voluntarism armed only with its conscience and always already defeated, if its own strategic estimates are to be believed.”

It’s convenient enough to judge the present by the standard of culture and assume a response of reflexive pessimism. Lord knows there are plenty of grounds for it, from any number of terrible but warmly received movies to the catastrophic repression on campuses. But this culture-first logic allows intellectuals to avoid the responsibility of coming up with their own “strategic estimates” of the left’s prospects—that is, the responsibility of deciding how things stand in the world, how justified pessimism and optimism might actually be. The repression on campuses couldn’t be happening if there were not such formidable movements to repress.

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There is an idiosyncrasy of Mulhern’s perspective that helps keep the classy pessimism of Kulturkritik at bay. When he talks about intellectuals and critics, he never fails to notice the journals where their writing characteristically appeared: Scrutiny for F.R. Leavis, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement for Ferdinand Mount, the New Republic and the New Yorker for James Wood. These are big names and big places, but Mulhern is most interested in smaller publishing projects, like Partisan Review and (the subject of the volume’s second longest essay) n+1 itself. It’s as if, in compensation for the endemic self-aggrandizement of the intellectual species, Mulhern wanted to restore the value of the people who work in the shadows, carefully fact-checking the editorials that others put their names on, keeping a paradigmatic nonprofit enterprise going. For Mulhern, the little magazine is a site where, despite all obstacles, including financial ones, collective initiative continues to flourish, often with arguably significant progressive impact. It’s a kind of local politics.

It’s a little weird to be discussing Mulhern’s review of n+1 in n+1. On the other hand, the weirdness is not a sufficient reason for leaving n+1 out. In any case, I will not argue with Mulhern’s amiable enthusiasm for n+1’s first ten years, which has not dissipated in the chapter’s 2023 postscript. Mulhern is not enthusiastic about everything. He appreciates the journal’s record of political engagement, for example on Palestine and Occupy, but he finds it too soft on Obama and the New York Times. He judges the political style essayistic (not a bad thing), more cultural than it would be in an ideal world, and somewhat miscellaneous. The latter point is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that, unlike Partisan Review, n+1 no longer focuses politically on Lenin and the heritage of the Russian Revolution. Should it? That shift in focus cannot simply be lamented, given the way the veterans of Partisan Review moved to the right, as n+1 has not, despite the hard fact that “forty years later, [the conflict between communism and capitalism] has been concluded in the interests of capital.” Still, one pays a price for the dominance of “mobility and surprise” over program: “No political position is the worse for having been stated more than once; what counts is whether it is valid or not.”

It is tempting to imagine a full-scale comparison with the New Left Review, the journal where Mulhern is an editor, where his chapter on n+1 first appeared, and which might plausibly be taken as the standard by which he is measuring other journals. How much unsurprising repetition does the prose of NLR make room for? How do the political pieces published by NLR over the twenty years of n+1’s existence differ, if they do, from n+1’s? How does Nikil Saval’s generous 2009 appraisal of NLR in n+1 compare with Mulhern’s appraisal of n+1? If n+1 both has and is a “character,” as Mulhern magnanimously proposes, charmingly insecure despite its combativeness and perpetually youthful despite the rapidly accumulating successes of its writers and editors, what are the advantages and disadvantages of that collective fiction as opposed, say, to the almost godlike authority of a character like Perry Anderson? Given certain echoes of Anderson here, both in style and content—for example, on “the exceptional, constitutional quietism of the polity”—it seems possible once again to image that Mulhern’s au-dessus-de-la-mêlée polemic is quietly directed at NLR.

Gramsci criticized the trade union movement of his day for corporatism, meaning “collective self-assertion of a fundamentally defensive, particularist character,” as distinguished from the larger ambition to remake the social order as a whole. To criticize the intellectuals for corporatism, as Mulhern does, is different, for the particular interest intellectuals defend is, paradoxically, a claim to represent the general interest. Mulhern rejects that claim, French in origin as well as expression, as unjustified—as, again, a desire “to be or to rise au dessus de la mêlée.” But can such a claim only be hypocritical? One of the virtues of Marxism today, in and beyond the NLR, is its residual power to speak convincingly in the name of the common good. Would it be preferable for the intellectuals of the world to unite in pursuit of their narrow self-interest as a cultural elite? Why not, for example, take up Rolland’s original use of the phrase as a token of universalizing anti-militarism? That cause has lost none of its relevance. That anti-militarism, invited by these past months of Israeli-American violence, has been embraced both by little magazines and by big crowds. The unprecedented popular mobilization that greeted Israeli-American violence in 2023 is not grounds for optimism; it has saved no Palestinian lives. But it was a pleasant surprise, and it does help justify an editorial policy of openness to what history will bring.

1. Duncan Thompson, Pessimism of the Intellect? A History of the New Left Review. Nikil Saval’s review of Thompson in this magazine points out that NLR has attracted this kind of question from its beginnings. ↩

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