So I went with some friends to the Hegelian e-girls’ VIP “symposium” last Saturday, August 3. It was held in the backdoor patio space of a Persian restaurant in Crown Heights, where they sometimes hold DSA meetings. The event attracted a strange mix of people. Everyone from Dimes Square bohemians to bookish members of the Platypus Affiliated Society, too-online theorycels to actual grad students excited that somebody was throwing an event on Hegel. Various online commenters and podcast hosts like Jamie Peck and Joshua Citarella were also in attendance. By far the most important organizational connection to the event, however, was that of the newfound American Communist Party (ACP), the so-called “MAGA communist” splinter from the old Stalinist US Communist Party (CP-USA). Later, I’ll briefly go over some of the major figures from that group. There were about 150 people total.

My friend Alex Gendler and I went on The Antifada pod to give a rundown of the event. What follows are some of my remarks from the episode, which I’ve transcribed and reworked in light of new material that’s become available. Before I proceed, though, I do want to defend the idea of being able to go to an event for the lulz or whatever. Or even just to look at it anthropologically, to see what kind of people would show up. You don’t have to “go native” like that dude Crumps has with the Dimes Square scene. (He was there, too, for anyone keeping count.) And I’m sure there were some who were genuinely curious to hear what the e-girls had to say for themselves and were interested in what sort of crowd would be there, though anyone who saw the way this event was advertised could have probably guessed. I don’t think the mere fact of showing up to something implies political agreement.

Serious criticisms can certainly be made of many of the groups and individuals who went to this symposium, as well as the e-girls themselves, and that’s precisely what I’m hoping to do. I get that some people might object: “Why are you giving this thing oxygen? It’s pure spectacle.” And I’d agree with them — but we live in a spectacular society, so here we are. I’m going to start by talking about the conciliar organization of the e-girls, and some of the drama that swirled around the event(s) they planned. Then I’m going to address what I took to be the philosophical content of their statements and try to locate their outlook within the history of Hegelianism more broadly. Finally, I’ll examine the politics behind the Hegelian e-girl council and speculate about what their concrete goals might be.

Council and controversy

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When I was first thinking about how to dissect this event, I thought one could maybe break it into two parts. They call themselves “Hegelian e-girls,” after all. So we could ask what it means to be an Hegelian, and what it means to be an e-girl. But thinking about it more, I realized there’s a third term. They’re not just “Hegelian e-girls”; they’re an “Hegelian e-girl council.” What does it mean that they’re in a “council”? Just how organized is this? I really thought we wouldn’t have to address this aspect of it, because the whole thing is just a silly internet phenomenon that these two e-girls — Nikki and Anna — were trying to parlay into a real-life meetup. A couple of them had met up in the preceding weeks and taken a selfie together, which they then posted with the caption “the Hegelian e-girl Enlightenment has arrived.” But it’s hard to know how seriously to take that.

Even a day after the event, though, there was a bunch of drama specifically surrounding the “council” part. It turns out there had been a third Hegelian e-girl. One of the former e-girls, Sanje Horah, who’d been in that photo announcing the arrival of the e-girl Enlightenment, publicly tweeted her misgivings about the direction of the project. She said she’d resigned from the Hegelian e-girl council a week or so before the party. This confused me, because to say that you resigned from something suggests that it had some sort of formal structure or sense of official membership. Does it just mean she left the groupchat? A groupchat had been mentioned by a number of Twitter users, especially after someone approvingly shared an image of Red Scare cohost Dasha Nekrasova aiming a gun at a racist effigy of an Islamic terrorist. Either way, it was hard for me to tell if everyone in the groupchat actually belonged to the council. The e-girls apparently have a Patreon, run by Nikki, so there’s that. However you cut it, a “council” with only two people is pretty small. Unless they plan on expanding.

Regardless, Sanje Horah voiced a few objections people on the outside had been making. In particular she felt like Anna, whom she’d been closest with, was being dishonest about what they hoped to achieve with this whole project. Sanje further alleged that Anna’s good standing largely stemmed from her incomprehensibility, because people don’t have a clue what this is actually all about. Possibly Anna doesn’t, either. There’s probably something to that. Fundamentally, though, Sanje thinks there is something deceptive about the way the e-girls have gone about this and the various milieux they’re trying to appeal to. Sanje self-identifies as a centrist, and was uncomfortable with how it seemed like the e-girls directed most of their ire against the left while remaining more or less silent about the right. Beyond her political concerns, she had philosophical worries as well. She thinks they have “a very vulgar understanding of dialectics” and that the project is “literally sub-Hegelian.” Looking back, Sanje said she regrets ever having been involved. Continue reading →