If We Are Compelled to Suffer: A Nihilist Intervention for the Left and Cultural Studies

Zooey Sophia Pook

If We Are Compelled to Suffer: A Nihilist Intervention for the Left and Cultural Studies

Zooey Sophia Pook

Abstract

Abstract

Cultural studies need nihilism. The current canon of work (Butler, Foucault, Hooks, etc.) focuses too heavily on a political age and human condition that is rapidly being altered and replaced by the use of neoliberal technologies. A new understanding of ontology and politics is necessary to make sense of and challenge the changing technological orientation of human beings by what Deleuze has called a mutation of capital (Deleuze 2000: 90). It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet technologies. Neoliberal technologies include and appropriates all bodies and experiences via their reduction to data and network flow; difference is no longer a tool of resistance. This work will assert that a move to a nihilist reading of ontology is what is missing from the work of cultural scholars and from current political movements interested in challenging the power of capital in the present. This work will attempt to build through nihilism a lens and an orientation via psychoanalytic theory and the work of Slavoj Žižek that offers resistance to neoliberal governance.

Keywords

Žižek; Psychoanalysis; Neoliberalism; Nihilism; Algorithmic Literacy; Antinatalism; Suicide; Freud; Dean; Posthumanism

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