top of page
In Defence of Disappointment
Full text at Aeon-Psyche​
When political regimes fail us, don’t turn to optimism. It’s disappointment that holds the radical potential for change. We are all familiar with disappointment. We feel it towards personal enterprises, towards political projects, and in the face of wanting to effect social change. Even though we frequently meet with disappointment, things rarely end there. Disappointment might be the unwanted accomplice to everyday life, but the implications of disappointment are not obvious. Disappointment is not followed by a full stop, it is never just disappointment – it is, on the contrary, open-ended, socially situated and politically structured.
The Europe-Delusion: Mourning what Never Existed
Full text at Philosophy-World-Democracy
The true tragedy of modernity is very different from the usual lament recycled by the liberal West: that we are losing a once-great cultural richness, that Putin and the threat of nuclear war or the spread of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ (the malleable and irrational function of what Laclau calls an ‘empty signifier’) are pushing us towards the death of the Enlightenment ethics which shaped and unified Europe. What is being confronted is something far more devastating than this. As Freud came to recognise between 1905 (The Three Essays) and 1918 (The Wolfman Case), the original division of the subject – the point at which we truly come into social existence on the condition that we are irreconcilably alienated from ourselves – is when we lose something that never even existed to us...
What Psychoanalysis can Teach Us about the US Election
Full text at Everyday Analysis
Since Trump’s election victory, it is tempting to think that we need to understand politics ‘by itself’ - that is, without the mediation of any speculative explorations or the insights of other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology etc, which we often apply to politics to help us understand it. The situation in politics today, it seems, is critical enough to require us to get down to brass tacks, to focus on the facts of the election itself and avoid any complex or deviating multidisciplinary interpretations. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. What we can take away from the election is that politics cannot be understood by itself...
The Irrational Status of the Natural
Full text at American Philosophical Association Blog
One of the great antagonisms of the 21st century is that, as culture accelerates into increasingly artificial and commodified forms, manufacturing simulacral financial institutions and social structures mediated by advances in artificial intelligence (with even Facebook and Microsoft etc. adopting OpenAI systems) and by a globalized techno-capitalist economy—as humanity, in other words, adopts an increasingly universalized, late-stage culture—the fact of ‘nature’ exercises an increasingly brutal pressure. We may become more ‘cultured’ with every technological advancement, but each step away from whatever natural origins we had is marked by a simultaneous obverse: the violent re-integration of nature into everyday reality...
Marx Without Himself: Benefits of a Historically Indeterminate Materialism
Full text at Midwestern Marx Institute
Historical narratives are constituted by our capacity to suffuse them with an imaginary, un-real supplement: this was one of the great insights of modern historiography. It is never enough to recount the facts as they are – the brutal soberness of ‘facts’ are often in themselves coloured by inevitable distortions of a form of ideological appraisal. Neutral facts are, in other words, mostly impossible to present ‘by themselves’. To understand a historical period, one must necessarily understand its phantasmatic and imaginary aspects – one must engage with how a historically materialistic set of facts is retrospectively ‘filled in’ by a subjective construction of meaning. Ultimately, understanding any great juncture in history implies a recognition that the account of this juncture is often immediately formulated in retrospect by a certain supplementary, speculative historicization. The most radical of historical events are all too often forced to ‘make sense’ by being applied to a dogmatic set of presuppositions...
Utan Dig är Verkligheten Ofullständig [Without You, Reality is Incomplete]
Full text at Svensk Filosofi
bottom of page