The Hegel Party

The Fyre Festival as a Hegel-themed downtown literary reading

One thing I like about my little niche is being posted up right at the staging area for flamboyant collective delusions. The stories seem to just gravitate toward me, I don’t really have to seek them out. Maybe that’s lazy of me, but I’m amused by how often it feels like reality is just an audition for this blog. Crazy people roll into town, look for this “downtown scene” they’ve heard so much about, get some attention, and get wrapped up with the other insane characters you readers already know and love/hate. My work is cut out for me.

I first ran into the Hegelian E-Girls at Sovereign House earlier this summer. It must have been at the Confessions readings that the other e-girl, Cassidy, hosts. They stopped me as I was leaving and introduced themselves. “We are the Hegelian E-Girls.” Their names were Anna and Sanje, and Anna was from Philadelphia and Sanje from Singapore. They seemed excited to meet me with a nerdy enthusiasm reminiscent of the Rationalist subculture. They asked if I was familiar with them. Yes, I had seen some of their tweets. They’re basically Leftbook posters and Instagram meme page admins who’d been going semi-viral on weird theory Twitter lately for jargony tweets that try to imitate Žižek. I mostly knew them through people making fun of them online, though that isn’t surprising for Sovereign House arrivistes. They said that they wanted to put on a play at Sovereign House about the master–slave dialectic. They said that there was another member of the “Hegelian E-Girl Council” from Canada named Nikki, and she would be in New York later in the summer. They promised me there would be big things happening, the Dialectic is in motion, the Absolute will be revealed. I said that sounds interesting, maybe I’d write about whatever they end up putting on, and then I went on my way.

Some time after that I got around to scrolling through Anna’s Twitter, since she seemed to be the ringleader of the group. Let’s get a brief taste of what the Hegelian E-Girls are all about. My impression: Lots of talk about Hegel and psychoanalysis—and this assumes a sort of Promethean mania, like they’ve discovered fire in “the memetic power of the e-girl” and desperately want to share it with the world. They’ve cracked the code. All contradictions will be annihilated by the relentless dialectical engine of Absolute Knowledge. The system of German Idealism will be completed. The left and the right will come together and create the revolutionary post-politics of the future. The incels will grasp “il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel” and finally get laid (from Twitter: “In a sense the Phenomenology of Spirit is a self-help guide for men teaching them feminine jouissance”). And it’ll be epic, just like The End of Evangelion.

There’s some western woo in it, a gnostic spiritual thread, a critique of the “utter conceptual bankruptcy of secular leftism,” talk of secret kinships between philosophers (“Benjamin, in a certain sense, is what you get when you have a Hegelianism at once theistic and Christ-denying. As such, he is an excellent bridge with the nihilists”), a “Christian supersessionism” (“I believe Jesus was both the Jewish messiah and the universal savior of humanity, but to properly understand Christian soteriology requires Jewish Kabbalah” … “I treat Christianity as the immanent disavowed truth of the rabbinical Jewish tradition itself”), a skepticism of wokeness and the gatekeeping leftist academic superego (“Leftists want me to be a crypto-fascist so bad, because the alternative, that I have good reasons to go “anti-woke” & got there starting from their own premises, is much scarier to them”), hints of groundbreaking future projects to come, and so on.

So, from Twitter I guess, Anna became friends with some of the downtown scenesters who are tolerant of this particular flavor of cyberschizomysticism, scenesters like Haela Hunt-Hendrix of the black metal band Liturgy and Max Realitygamer (aka “Realityspammer” aka “Realboy” aka “Real” aka “Harmless” and so on, author of the AI treatise Anti-Yudkowsky: Towards Harmony with Machines). With a few of the right friends you can make a grand entrance to Dimes Square. And what else is there to do but throw a party celebrating your megalomaniacal self-actualization? So that’s exactly what the Hegelian E-Girls were planning. In mid-July I got a text from Max asking if I’d like to be listed as a host for a party his friend was throwing. “It’s called the ‘Hegelian E-Girl Council,’” he told me, “they are trying to make it trendy for women to read Hegel.” I declined, because being listed as a host on party flyers is almost always more of a hassle than it’s worth. It’s really only worth “hosting” a party if some music industry bureaucrat wants you to promote a client’s album release and is offering a table and bottle service at the club. A strictly professional transaction with no surprises. By contrast, the DIY scenesters are always messy, and there’s a high likelihood of somehow being embarrassed by association, even if someone you like is asking.

Then the party flyer went viral. It was billed as the “Hegelian E-Girl Launch Party,” but it was unclear what was being launched, other than that it was “Introducing the Hegelian E-Girls.” The background image was a picture of Hegel photoshopped to have the gigachad meme jawline. Nestled between pictures of the cover of the Phenomenology of Spirit was the host list, a hodgepodge of Anna’s New York friends, hyper-niche downtown party people who would agree to host anything, random Twitter posters, former Angelicism muses, and the generic racist accelerationist Sonnenrad-meme poster “Beyond Woke and Problematic.”

The whole thing would’ve been unremarkable if it weren’t for the grandiosity of the Hegelian E-Girl social media performance around it, their commitment to “the bit,” which exceeded the usual grandiosity of the reactionary aesthete salonnières, and this gave the event the lolcow-cringe boost it needed to escape downtown memetic containment. Suddenly there were all these New York media people talking about the Hegelian E-Girl party, 700 people had RSVP’d to this strange novel thing—a Hegel party? the philosopher? oh my! oh goodness gracious!—they didn’t know what to make of it, respectable intellectuals, people who reply to Ryan Ruby on Twitter, people who wear baseball hats that say “Annie Ernaux” on them, professors of German Studies, “critics,” people who were devastated when Bookforum went away and overjoyed when it came back, people who wear glasses, literary sadgirls who write the same essay on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz over and over again, “editors,” people who have MFAs and “words” in prestige magazines and tell me my writing would improve if only I’d hang around more serious people, people of fine taste, people who have good politics, people I’m supposed to try to impress, people of principle, people who have their finger on the pulse of the culture—and all these people were like, “Wow, I can’t wait to read the piece in The Cut about this.”