BOOKS & REVIEWS
PolemicsUnhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
Richard Seymour’s
staff writer
T
here are countless reasons why Christopher
Hitchens has been a figure of international
interest for decades, especially after
his death in 2011. His combination
of bafflingly eloquent prose with an
inexhaustible interest in politics laid the foundation
for an understanding of why his career in journalism
was so successful. Most consistent, however, may
have been Hitchens’ penchant for—and there is no
reason to be overly verbose about this—making many
people very angry for long periods of time. Enter
Richard Seymour and his ironically titled, if you
recognize the reference to one of his subject’s own
philippics, Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens.
Unhitched comes as a Counterblasts installment, part
of a series from Verso Books, a publication Hitchens
also frequented, aiming to revive a sort of polemical
pamphleteering tradition. Seymour’s argument is best
contextualized in terms of political spectra. Above all,
this is a row between two leftists, one of which insists on
disallowing his opponent from posthumous membership
on the left at all. Seymour wishes take the traditional view
of Hitchens as a figure who, although on the left for his
entire life on most issues, defied neat categorization and
instead insist that Hitchens fits a recognizable and common type: the apostate leftist.
Although surveying a vast array of his subject’s body
of work, Seymour’s analysis pivots on one issue: Iraq.
Hitchens followed the same basic pattern as many on
the left in the US. Unanimous support in the Senate of
the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 set the framework for a
collective understanding of Saddam Hussein as worse
than the run-of-the-mill dictator. It is a memory many
wish to repress, but a majority of Democratic senators
did indeed vote for the Authorization for Use of Military
Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.
Little needs to be said for what followed except for
the fact that, before admitting that he was mistaken on
Iraq and that the war was handled poorly—which he
eventually did, completing the cycle of so many of his
comrades—Christopher Hitchens became stuck. It was
within those few years that the situation in Iraq was
deteriorating and support for the war plummeting that
Hitchens dug in and lost so many friends on the left.
Although this period was bewildering to some followers
of Hitchens, it does not warrant Seymour’s obsession. He
speaks of Hitchens’ “decision to back Bush” as if agreeing
with him on the issue of Iraq implied a deep ideological
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connection between the two, which it never did.
“Unabashedly a prosecution,” Unhitched does little
to stray from the usual ad hominem critiques to which
Hitchens is usually subjected. There is a great deal of
irony in the progression of Seymour’s vitriol. He chose
the book’s subtitle in order to send the message that, by
the end of his life, Hitchens had become precisely what
he loathed (ironically, The Trial of Henry Kissinger is
one of the few works to elicit Seymour’s praise). There
are points throughout the book in which Seymour himself
appears to embody the type of hyperbolic and lazy prose
habits of which he accuses his subject. Ranging from a
deliberately straight-faced accusation of “concupiscence”
for Margaret Thatcher to repetitive usage of the “John
Bull” label, Seymour’s habit of lapsing into schoolyard
taunts gets old quickly enough. Referring to his subject’s
strong emotional reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
Seymour’s tasteless pun that Hitchens’ heart was “taking
wing like a passenger jet” speaks for itself.
There is one superb moment in Unhitched in which
Seymour pairs Hitchens’ admonitions in Letters to a
Young Contrarian with his own rhetoric regarding the
War on Terror merely a few years later. After having
warned his readers to distrust any speaker relying on
confident shouts of ‘we’ or ‘us’ and the bullish tones
that may settle alongside them, Hitchens did proceed to
employ these very rhetorical measures while defending
the War in Iraq. This is one of the rare cases in which
Seymour bases his critique on a change in argumentative
technique rather than viewpoint, and it is a shame that
those moments come so rarely in Unhitched.
It goes without saying that Christopher Hitchens
was a master of provocation. No one denies this, but the
reverberations can become troubling at times. It appears
as though Richard Seymour identified with Hitchens to a
certain extent. From an outside perspective, the two have
quite a lot in common. Perhaps his frustration derives
from this closeness; watching a kindred spirit go awry
can be painful. Iraq aside, however, if you were on the
political left you would still want Christopher Hitchens
at your side. He convinced all of us that there is an art
to prosecution. Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher
Hitchens is even more \