Pleasure, and the Politics of Writing about It

Why is pleasure assumed to conflict with radical politics? Why does Roland Barthes’s grumbling remark—that the left obsesses over “knowledge, method, commitment, combat” while the right gets to enjoy “mere delectation”—remain so annoyingly resonant?¹ Only a few months ago the literary magazine The Point devoted a whole issue to this familiar conceit, proclaiming a new “aesthetic turn” characterized by an emergent “hunger for style, humor, and frivolity”—supposedly a reaction to the “feverish activist critique” of the Trump years.² An essay by one of the magazine’s editors, Anastasia Berg, a philosopher, criticizes politically engaged artwork that “ministers to its audience.”³ Berg echoes novelist Garth Greenwell, who complains that literature is “as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime,” and art critic Jason Farago, who recently panned an exhibit for rehashing “the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture” (the topic was Picasso’s womanizing and racial fixations).^4...