It’s “unlikely that Donald Trump has read Burke”, Fintan O’Toole quipped before arguing that the incoming US President does seem, however, to have summoned a potent form of aestheticized politics which draws on Burke’s categories of terror and pleasure.
As the audience poured in to hear O’Toole’s talk on ‘Terror and Self-Pity: The Reactionary Sublime’, he said that “we find ourselves at a moment when, not only politics but, the whole public realm is thoroughly aestheticised.”
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, introduced the 2024 Annual lecture by underlining the importance of the journalistic profession and “the fourth estate”, a term, she said, which was attributed to the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. She said the “journalist is still at the cornerstone of a functioning, pluralist democracy” as she praised Fintan O’Toole’s distinctive style and “his attention to language, nuance, metaphor and rhetoric.”
Turning to language and rhetoric he did, as he engaged in a wide-ranging discussion invoking Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, George Orwell, Aristotle and of course Edmund Burke. O’Toole, said that “one of the paradoxes of our time is that image-making has been radically democratized but the effect is not good for democracy.”
What we see in the US, he said, is “a reactionary discourse” where “what you think you saw did not happen, it was all an act; everything is art.” Whether Trump conjures up “child actors” on the Mexican Border or immigrants eating pets, “seeing is disbelieving”, noted O’Toole, everything is inverted.
Climate change is appearing before us in real time, he said, but we are asked to suspend our recognition of that fact. He described how we have moved from the epoch of the Anthropocene to the “aesthetocene.” Through social media, O’Toole described how we project ourselves “into the world” in a new form of “curation” where “the self is a gallery with ever changing exhibitions”.
Turning to Burke, O’Toole said that his writings on aesthetics in his 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (much of which he wrote while a student at Trinity College Dublin) might be more relevant now than ever and provide some insights into Trump’s politics.
Burke’s great insight, he suggested, was that there is a “sadomasochistic delight in certain types of art”, and if we ask why we subject ourselves to horror films or gruesome scenes, the answer for Burke is because pleasure is not a steady state of bliss but is experienced most intensely as “pain avoidance”.
What is true of Brexit is also true of Trump, O’Toole asserted: “contemporary reactionary politics is a politics of pain.” “Trump’s power is a modification of the sublime”, said he observed, as he described the era of American political rhetoric before the President as one of “uplift”. In his campaigns, Trump was “aggressively confronting” that narrative, as “he created a vision of America as a hellhole”, “a place on the verge of obliteration.” Whether asserting that China would one day own the United States, or when describing the “monstrous Harris”, Trump was invoking fear and terror.
“Trump doesn’t merely terrorize his audience, he does exactly what Burke recognises as the sublime: terror is a passion which produces delight when it does not press too close.”
About Fintan O'Toole
Fintan O'Toole is an author and columnist. His books include We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize for political writing. He has held several international posts, including Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University.
About the Annual Edmund Burke Lectures
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1748. As a student he founded what would later become the College Historical Society, the oldest student society in the world. Burke entered Parliament in 1765 and quickly became a champion for political emancipation. After 1789, he directed his attention to the French Revolution and its immediate ramifications for political stability in England. To mark the university’s deep and lasting connection, and to express the inspiration his life and work as a public intellectual offer to us, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute has instituted a prestigious annual Edmund Burke lecture, delivered by a leading public intellectual of our time on a topic that engages with the challenges facing us today.
Previous lectures in the series were delivered by renowned historian Professor Joanna Bourke; historian and author Professor Michael Ignatieff; former President of Ireland, Professor Mary McAleese; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon; distinguished historian Margaret MacMillan; award winning writer and journalist, Robert Fisk; Professor Roy Foster, Chair of Irish History, University of Oxford and Baroness Onora O’Neill, former chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.
The lecture series is supported by the Fallon family in honour of Trinity graduate Padraic Fallon (1946-2012).