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Jack de Toilette and the Descent into Despair

🕑 Added 2025-09-08 14:12:42 +0000 UTC

Comments

Jade Diaz

I recently finished reading Kaveh Akbar’s novel _Martyr!_ and he addresses the romanticism of suffering and death for a cause brilliantly, through the lens of a (queer) Persian immigrant poet/professional grad student who seems to actively have a death wish but wants his end to somehow have meaning.

Cracked Ivory

There's definitely some valorisation of martyrdom across many cultures, including non-Christian ones, though it is of course Christian-flavoured in the West. IME what's more common to the Western variety is elevation of personal feeling above material consequence, meaning it is more important to feel like you're a martyr for a good cause than actually being one, or even having a cause. Which leads to a feeling of existential threat and inadequacy when encountering someone who has a kind of "better claim" to martyrdom than you. It's a very ghoulish way to think about it, but you can easily trace how this kind of cultural milleu paralyses attempts at resistance movements or any coordinated effort, turning all struggles inward, which therefore makes it very productive for any regime to try to instill and uphold -- Emma

Anathemic

So, I think that the whole weird idealization of suffering that happens in the west is a fundamentally very catholic impulse. Like, even when you're talking countries like the US or Britain where the more prevalent religion is some kind of offshoot like protestantism or evangelicalism, those still carry a lot of the same core moral philosophies. Like, the whole concept of the martyr is just the idealization and moralization of suffering. The whole suffering is righteous shtick gets real uncomfortable when you remember that some of those fuckin martyrs were children though. I don't know, I'm just some dumbass tbh