Neoliberalism is not a monolithic shock doctrine. It is an anxious form of crisis management, which evolves through its failed attempts to conceal a repressed truth.
When confronted with the question of how much killing is enough the answer is always more (c.f. Blair’s calls for the west to enter the Syrian civil war). If a strategic sufficiency of death were realisable, killing would not stop. It would not even stop if one side exterminated the other.
If it did not sound too eccentric or polemical, then, I would go as far as singing the praises of a politics of anxiety, i.e. a politics preserving the limits and enigmatic essence of social life.
The attempts to escape the nightmare of Stalinism provoke false fantasy alternatives, of vacuous democratic participation or individual freedom. NSK works through elements of the revolution betrayed, and in the process, instills anxiety about what is real, and about what must be given up.
Brazil is indeed stuck in the past. However, this temporal disjunction is less the outcome of being economically or institutionally backward, but more of an insistence on resorting to violence as a mean of managing political anxiety.
Human rights violations in immigration enforcement at the external borders of the EU are almost a daily phenomenon. Yet, they have been treated as ‘exceptional’. What can we learn from looking at the case of Greek security professionals?
What are we meant to conclude from the ‘rise of the far-right’? The narrative tells us that being objective, moderate and ‘technical’ rather than factionalist is what is needed in ‘times of anxiety’.
This week we provide a snapshot of the issues and problems to be discussed at the conference, Politics in Times of Anxiety to be held at the University of Manchester between June 9 – 11, 2014.
Europeans, like most other inhabitants of the planet, are currently facing the crisis of ’politics as we know it’ – a state of “interregnum”, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci described a time in which the old is already dead or dying, but the new has not yet been born.
