Belated introductions

Allow me to voxplain mysel(f)/(ves)

It has been brought to my attention that my style of writing can be perceived by some, including my own blood relations, to be a little, shall we say, ésotérique.¹ So out of the goodness of my still-a-little-less-than-more-or-less-a-Christian heart², allow me to explicate a few things for our beloved brothers and sisters and other siblings who might be afflicted with human capital deficiency disorder (HCDD).

I’ll attempt to do it in a ludic manner, which is a pretentious way of saying I’m going try to make it fun. In an effort to make my writing more accessible, I will try refraining from the use of footnotes apart from the two that I have already used. But I can’t make any promises.

To keep me on track, I asked my sister-from-another-mister, the Sue to my Elisabeth [that is a reference to the 2024 film The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, which noted heterosexual male John Pistelli unjustly describes as “loathsome”]³, the one, the only, mary jane austen (no cap since 2024), to interview me as a special treat for my 9000 new Russian subscribers [I’m truly thrilled that people in that troubled nation are showing such a keen interest in the work of 20th century female moral philosophers!]

So without further ado, please enjoy this joint introduction!.

With love (always ambivalently),

M.J.E.

[Content warning: (internalised) anti-Semiticism, mild kinkshaming, strong psychoanalysis]

mary jane austen: thanks for hopping in the chat, mary jane eyre, if that is even your real name

Oh, honey, if only! It is what we in the business call a “pseudonym” from the Latin for “false name”.

why are you writing under a false name? do you have something to hide?

In the age of surveillance capitalism, we all have something to hide. In Jungian terms, my Substacking forms part of my shadow work. I lie about my identity in order to write more truthfully about my dark side.

are you actually a biological woman?

Well, it depends on what you mean by “are”, “you”, “actually”, “a”, “biological” and “woman”—opinions vary!) Most normies would identify me as a gay man, but you can call me whatever you like, babe, as long as it’s filthy!

I also happen to be what one might term a “transtextual”. Ever since I was a little seuntjie, I identified almost exclusively with female characters in literature (I was definitely Hermione) and I have been influenced more profoundly by women writers who can be described as honorary gay men (e.g. Weil, Murdoch, Lessing, Sontag, Paglia) than I have been by gay male writers.

is that why you chose a female false name?

The idea came to me in a vision. [My short-lived⁴ series The Iris Murdoch Book Club was not autofiction, but could perhaps be called autofiction adjacent.] In the vision, my daemon (or perhaps a spirit from further afield) revealed to me that I could overcome my decades-long writer’s block by approaching it like a drag performance: a common gay technique to give oneself permission to talk about things that society and one’s own super-ego labels as shameful.

Seeing as my vision had partly been sponsored by an ancient form of plant medicine, I decided to take part in the grand tradition of making one’s drag name a substance-use-related pun (e.g. Crystal Methyd, Acid Betty, Mary Jane Hoe [no relation], Coco Kane, Sharon Needles, Kita Mean etc.)

so mary jane is a reference to…

To put it bluntly: weed makes me slightly less autistic.⁵ Ask Brother Lin.

so it has nothing to do with jane eyre? have you even read the book?

Not until completion.

what are your politics?

I don’t have any political opinions, only metapolitical ones, as illustrated by this refined version of a diagram I had previously proposed:

The horizontal axis is inspired by Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle (a book I heartily recommend for those allergic to the very word “conservative”).

For Sowell, the constrained vision of human nature is best articulated in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):

Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.

To illustrate the unconstrained vision, Sowell turns to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1973), condemned to obscurity as a result of British reactions to the French Revolution. Sowell writes:

His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved. This was not meant as an empirical generalization about the way most people currently behaved. It was meant as a statement of the underlying nature of human potential.

The vertical axis is based in the idea that creativity (including, perhaps, creative destruction) drives progress.

To get a sense of each quadrant, a representative figure from each clockwise from the top-right corner might be: Nick Land, Garth Greenwell, Mark Fisher and John Pistelli.⁶

I know in whose quadrant I would like to be.

why are you so obsessed with john pistelli?

This blog, or whatever, really got going when I wrote what is still the first review of John’s novel Major Arcana (it was a Substack miracle!) As I mention in the review, John persuaded me that taking gender (and one might add other categories of self-ID) a little less seriously may sometimes be to the benefit of all involved. Adopting a more playful attitude to gender has, I believe, prevented me from going down a Wesley Yang-style rabbit hole (as has reading

Naomi Kanakia

and other trans writers on Substack).

what are your religious beliefs?

At this point in my spiritual journey, I identify as a non-denominational anti-gnostic.

Technically, I’m still a Protestant apostate, but one who often feels the need to out-Christian the Christians. The current American situation of an increasingly paganised Evangelical movement (as discussed by

Gnocchic Apocryphon

here and by Jonathan Rauch and David French on this recent podcast) is an interesting spin on the secularisation thesis underlying Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, but her advocacy for Christian ethics is as relevant as ever: even if some of the most pressing targets still go by that name.⁷

now for some lighter fare: what tik tok video best describes you psychoanalytically?

This song by

rayne fisher-quann

.

what mystifies you?

Why Substack doesn’t have a decent spellchecker.

why are you so angry?

Because the good suffer unjustly.

why are you so sad?

Ditto.

why do you have the irritating habit of pointlessly bursting out in a foreign language? who do you think you are, tolstoy? this is america!

I’m not American — and neither are you.

i meant spiritually

Touché! Alors c’est pour épater les bourgeois.

i don’t get it

Look it up. It’s French.

1. One of the most intriguing discoveries of the freshman year of the Invisible College was the unexpected affinities between Simone Weil and Ezra Pound, beyond the certainty that if either one had been blogging in the 2000s, (s)he would have been slamming those triple parentheses. Who knows what the sophomore year will have to offer?

2. Isn’t life ultimately a sadomasochistic struggle between man and god?

But what about the women and children?

Exactly.

3. See, no footnote!

4. Have faith and it might one day return!

5. Hey, I said slightly!

6. Working against my proposed typology it the fact that John appears to have a particular aversion to Adam Smith, even if he is quite well disposed to Anglo liberalism in general. A case of narcissism of small differences?

7. Believe it or not, Simone Weil of all people was at pains to stress the pitfalls of changing religion:

A writer whose language is poor, difficult to manage and not very well known in the world is very strongly tempted to adopt another language. There have been some cases of brilliant success, such as Conrad, but they are very rare. Apart from exceptions, such a change is harmful, degrading the thought and the style. The writer remains mediocre and ill at ease in the adopted language.

A change in religion is for the soul like a change of language for the writer. Not every religion, it is true, is equally apt for the correct recitation of the name of the Lord. Certain ones, without a doubt, are very imperfect intermediaries. The religion of Israel, for example, must have truly been a very imperfect intermediary for having crucified Christ. The Roman religion scarcely even deserves the name of religion.