About Jeet Heer
The title of this newsletter is from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian journalist and political leader. While imprisoned by Mussolini in 1930, Gramsci wrote in his notebook, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. ” The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has rendered this sentence in looser and more suggestive phrasing: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. "
Gramsci’s words resonate now because we too are living in an interregnum, an in-between time where many of the older political certitudes are crumbling but the shape of the future is still murky. Amid the gridlock, paralysis and stodgy thinking that still dominates politics, we’re getting a glimmer of the very different future in rising social movements that are both hopeful (Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion) and scary (a revanchist authoritarianism that Gramsci would recognize, an emergent eco-fascism using climate change and pandemics as justification for ethno-nationalism).
The Time of Monsters will be a home to essays and podcasts that diagnose and chart the symptoms of our era, both the morbid ones but also signs of resilience, recovery, and robustness.