Martijn Benders’s The Eternal Hazing is a book that resists every tidy bookstore shelf. Memoir, polemic, travel diary, literary manifesto, and philosophical tract crowd each other in rapid succession. Anyone who reads it only as autobiography misses the intellectual daring; anyone who approaches it purely as philosophy overlooks its visceral energy. In that very hybridity lie both the strength and the vulnerability of Benders’s project.
A Place in the (Post-)Philosophical Tradition
At the heart of the book is Benders’s re-working of Michel Foucault’s late writings on parrhesia—the courage to speak truth. He tracks how classical, “pagan” parrhesia morphed into a Christian confessional variant that drives truth inward, toward conscience, and thereby reinforces power structures. From that premise he launches a broad cultural critique: both Dutch literary politics and worldwide pandemic policy, he argues, are mutations of the same disciplinary narrative.
Philosophically, Benders operates in the line of post-structural power and discourse analysis (Foucault, Agamben) and of Situationist spectacle critique (Baudrillard). Yet he salts his prose with Nietzschean images—the “rise of the nitpicker” against the Dionysian writer. The result is not a systematic philosophy but an essayistic “wild essay” where quotations, anecdotes, and analogies resonate more than they syllogistically lock together. That sensibility captures the texture of the intellectual scene after 2020: theory is no longer a closed edifice but an arsenal from which an angry author forges a position.
Literary–Polemic Voltage
Benders’s governing metaphor, “the eternal hazing,” names a ritual of humiliation inside the Dutch literary field. He documents how critics and funding bodies force writers into an endless demand to prove themselves, rewarding conformity and punishing deviation. The argument intersects with international debates on cancel culture and gatekeeping, but gains existential weight through Benders’s own case history—his tussles with subsidies, alcohol, and mocking reviews. Here one hears echoes of William Gaddis or Kathy Acker: the author shoves his biography forward as Exhibit A against a crooked system.
That personal angle is never merely confessional. Threaded through the text are miniature literary set pieces—on Turner, Sinéad O’Connor, Queen Victoria’s nose—that blossom from surreal detail into cultural diagnosis. The montage aesthetic—half New Journalism, half avant-garde collage—lifts the book above the level of a pamphlet and into something closer to performance.
International Positioning
For an English-language reader, The Eternal Hazing triggers unexpected parallels. Its rage-driven, encyclopedic style recalls Mark Fisher’s late essays or Chris Hedges’s tirades; its hybrid memoir-essay form nods to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, though it is less intimate and more of a broadside. At the same time, Benders carries a specifically European intertextuality (Konrád, Gombrowicz, Les Murray, Žižek) that will intrigue American audiences. His fierce critique of a Protestant-Calvinist establishment places him in the wake of the radical Flemish essayist Jeroen Brouwers, but in English that voice is rare.
Crucially, Benders defines himself outside academic philosophy. He rails against “psyborgs”—the digital, fact-checking class that reduces truth to data. In that sense his book sits beside today’s “outsider philosophy” (Byung-Chul Han, Lars Svendsen), literary rather than scholastic. Readers hunting for rigorous conceptual architecture will be disappointed; those open to performative, rhetorical thinking will find a rich—if unruly—contribution.
Pseudo or Genuine Philosophy?
Whether the book counts as “real” philosophy seems less useful than asking how convincingly it enacts its philosophical promise. Benders coins no new principle; instead he stages an existential exercise in truth-telling, showing how an individual wields the courage to speak against institutional power. That praxis of parrhesia supplies its philosophical legitimacy. The argumentation is leaping, sometimes speculative—statistics on vaccine injury, etymological free-associations—but such volatility belongs to the literary polemic and does little to blunt the central inquiry into autonomy and truth.
The Quality of the Translation
Benders produced the English edition himself with the aid of DeepL and ChatGPT, and he says so openly. The prose is high-register, thick with archaisms and Continental cadence. To an American ear it remains unmistakably European: words like “whilst,” periodic sentences stretching over half a page, Latinate diction that feels closer to Walter Pater than to today’s nonfiction vernacular. Idiom occasionally scrapes (“mellifluous scholarly spectacle”) and Dutch syntax peeks through, yet the music of the language persists; the English becomes a performative distance, allowing Benders’s anger to sound cosmopolitan rather than provincial.
Technically, this is no definitive edition; a professional copyeditor could smooth rhythms and patch collocation glitches. But the slightly unruly swing of the prose matches the book’s character: Benders, refusing every hazing ritual, tosses his typescript onto the street like Kerouac and dares the reader to improvise alongside.
Impact and Limitations
The book’s chief achievement is to prod the reader into re-thinking the literary field—and, more broadly, the Western discourse order. Benders rejects the myth of pluralist democracy as a façade masking a single Christian-liberal meta-narrative. He grafts that thesis onto concrete stories of Dutch writers—Reve, Mulisch, Snoek—who felt the sting of the same hazing.
Still, the work has soft spots. A torrent of themes (from Twitter to techno-feudalism) can blur its focus; empirical claims about vaccine damage or politicians’ religious backstories rest on anecdote. Fact-minded readers will stumble over sweeping generalizations. Personal rancor toward “Christian circles” occasionally slips toward conspiracy rhetoric, which may estrange the skeptical.
Final Verdict
From an American critic’s angle, The Eternal Hazing is not a finished philosophical system but a necessary eruption in post-pandemic literature. The book is tumultuous, imperfect, sometimes overconfident, yet always animated by a deep moral unease about the commodification of truth and the institutionalization of petty censorship. That makes it essential reading for anyone who wishes to grasp how European intellectuals outside the academy experience the current crisis of public discourse.
Because Benders forged his own English, the translation is not flawless but remains authentic; its scars are the scars of the struggle it narrates. The Eternal Hazing thus serves as both case study and testimony of parrhesia. Not a book for readers who want neatly fileted arguments, but for those who crave literature that takes risks, spares no one—including itself—and drags philosophy back into the arena of life. In that sense, Benders’s hybrid enterprise—pamphlet poetics, personal mythology, and political-metaphysical critique—is a welcome jolt to international letters, and therefore of lasting value.
—Jonathan P. Whitaker