This article argues that the contemporary crisis of the public sphere cannot be adequately understood as a crisis of communication alone. What is at stake is a contraction of the horizon of the possible: a narrowing of the conditions under which alternatives can be imagined. Drawing on the Frankfurt School tradition, it develops a concept of imagination as a critical faculty grounded in Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of it as the “awareness of the de-formations of the future,” and traces its erosion through Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensional society. The article proposes the model of Infrastructural Conditioning of Imagination (ICI), identifying three interdependent dynamics (filtering, familiarisation and anticipation) through which algorithmic systems pre-structure the field of the thinkable. Each dynamic bears on a distinct dimension of experience: filtering concerns the structure of access, familiarisation the structure of reception, and anticipation the structure of temporality. The article argues that this conditioning operates as a suppression of non-identity in Adorno’s sense, eroding the conditions of Erfahrung under which the preponderance of the object can function as a critical moment, at the level of the conditions through which subjectivity itself is formed.
This article offers a new reading of decadence in Nietzsche, not as a time of despair or sclerosis, but as one of individuality and freedom. It does so by focusing on decadence’s emancipatory potential for exceptional individuals. For Nietzsche, the best philosophers, artists, and heroes do not merely emerge despite, but thanks to, decadence. Decadent times come with the collapse of institutions, conventions, and values—a self-destructive milieu that proves catastrophic for the many, but offers the possibility of emancipation for the few. I then show that some of Nietzsche’s core concepts are tied to this account of decadence, and suggest that Nietzsche’s view can offer a counterpoint to competing accounts of decadence from reactionary critics of modernity.
This article traces a single, three-stage argument. It begins by documenting, with empirical precision, how digital platforms functioned as genuine instruments of horizontal mobilization during the North African uprisings of 2010–2012. It then analyses how those same platforms were rapidly incorporated into new and frequently more sophisticated architectures of social control, transforming what had been emancipatory tools into what Foucault would call dispositifs of docility. Finally, it asks what theoretical apparatus is adequate to comprehend this transition—and argues that the most productive framework is a deliberate synthesis of Foucault’s analytics of biopower and disciplinary normalization with Bauman’s diagnosis of liquid modernity. The contribution of Bauman is not merely decorative: his account of how solid disciplinary confinement mutates under liquid conditions into consensual, self-administered surveillance explains precisely why the digital panopticon is so much more difficult to resist than its institutional predecessors. The article also examines the epistemological dimensions of this subjection, attending to the structural marginalization of non-Western knowledge traditions through the normative alignment filters of Large Language Models. The argument is organized as a continuous analytical thread, not as a review of theoretical positions, and concludes with implications for decolonial critical theory.
This paper addresses the problem of sexual misrecognition: some groups are excluded from being seen as sexually desirable or are hypersexualised. This shapes their sexual subjectivity – how they understand themselves as sexual agents. Despite widespread initiatives calling for recognition in the domain of sexuality, the need for sexual recognition has remained undertheorised in recognition theory. Building on debates on the ambivalence of recognition, I argue that sexuality has a uniquely complex relationship to recognition. While sexual recognition is necessary for subjectivity, it also reinforces subjection to power structures. Moreover, sexuality continually transgresses sociality and subjectivity itself. Using Jeanette Chedda’s erotic story in Damn Horny as a case study, I demonstrate how sexual recognition transgresses ideals of mutuality and equality, and theorise transformative possibilities for cultivating sexual subjectivity differently.
Contemporary diagnoses of resurgent authoritarianism frequently attribute it to the political mobilization of fear, drawing on a long tradition that casts fear as the antithesis of freedom. This article argues that such a framework is conceptually inadequate in the face of climate breakdown. It critically engages scholarship that cautions against environmental fear and catastrophist discourse, identifying three key assumptions underpinning most of these critiques: that environmental fears are politically homologous to other historically theorized forms of fear; that fear directly fosters authoritarian tendencies at the individual level; and that fear consolidates reactionary power while weakening emancipatory movements at the collective level. Against this affective determinism and threat functionalism, the article draws on ecofeminist and anti-militarist thought to reconceptualize fear not as a regressive affect opposed to democratic agency, but as an ambivalent, critical orientation toward shared vulnerability. In this context, affective self-defense emerges as key: a mode of political praxis grounded in the open, collective acknowledgement and articulation of fear - rather than its suppression or instrumentalization - as a first step in the organization of resistance and care.
