Indiana the sansculotte

[...] Indiana’s work suggests a spiritual ambivalence that sees love as tethered to the brutalizing character of our society yet holding out some twinkling promise: a “mortal illness,” yes, but also a “rescuer’s flashlight.” He would object to the comparison (Indiana’s is a fitful radicalism, always wriggling out of ideology’s drab uniform), but his orientation to love resembles Marx’s critique of religious faith: love devolves into an opiate of the masses. Religion dreams of utopias, grasps at transcendence, dignifies our slogging trials — and is fastened to the notion, however distant, of redemption. Might the desire for love, too, be an “expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering?” Might love be “the heart of a heartless world,” “the soul of soulless conditions” — or, in Marx’s most swooning, sympathetic formulation, the “sigh of the oppressed creature”?

The horror has passed, and what remains is the slow, lingering bathos as people shuffle into the future.

Bathos flutters over this later novel like a pennant: tragedy has been abolished.

A former pornographer, he would transform himself into a Marxist saboteur and an AIDS activist, made and remade by the exigencies of each successive decade.

A line from a recent interview in the White Review might explain this strange aporia