I. What is Austerity?In this article I want to explore the psycho-politics of austerity in the context of neoliberal capitalism with particular reference to the British case, which I take to be the home of early liberalism and industrial capitalism and the contemporary site of what I want to call neoliberal thanatonomics, or the approach to political economy that mixes unsustainable levels of austerity and poverty with similarly excessive forms of luxury and consumption.Although neoliberal capitalism is considered a political and economic form defined by its utilitarian rationality, pragmatism, and commitment to the bottom line, I want to suggest that this mode of capitalism is also organized around a kind of hyper-moralism, which is ultimately theological in origin and quasi-theological in practice.Given this cultural, quasi-theological, political economy, I suggest that Britain, Europe, and essentially capitalism more broadly, is in the process of sliding back towards a new Victorianism, defined by hyper-division and hyper-inequality.Under these conditions, my thesis is that the current post-crash settlement, which suggests that austerity and hyperinequality is a kind of temporary fix, will quickly become unsustainable.At this point, the neoliberal commitment to the realism of base materialism will begin to tip over in a new political idealism able to recognize the necessity of the social relationship between self and other and the ecological interdependence between self, other, and world that is currently prohibited by a combination of economic realism, post-political individualism, and a broader historical repression of the necessity of being together in the world.However, I suggest that in order to reach this point where the truth of what Gilbert Simondon (Combes, 2012) called trans-individualism can be realized, the left will need to confront and pass through what I explore through the idea of the resistance to social analysis that has resulted from the traumatic breaks of first, modern liberal, and second, post-modern neoliberal capitalism.In order to conclude I argue that this confrontation, and "working through," will ultimately be made possible by the contemporary thanatonomic model of economics which continues to produce unsustainable levels of inequality, austerity, poverty, luxury, and wealth.On this basis of the re-emergence of a new class politics based in a popular recognition of vast inequality and injustice my claim is that the current spirit of neoliberal capitalism that seeks to legitimate division on the basis of the moral superiority of the super-rich will eventually give way to its demonic other, the spectre of neoliberalism, that suggests the possibility of a general economics of social identity, trans-individualism, and what Georges Bataille (1991) wrote about in terms of continuous being.However, before exploring the psycho-politics of thanatonomics and moving beyond this to think through the possibilities of working through the repressive resistance to social analysis, I want to turn to the condition of austerity and then open out onto a broader exploration of the inequality and injustice of contemporary, or what we might correctly call, late capitalism.Like much of Europe, since 2008, and certainly since 2010, the British social, political, economic, and cultural landscape has been defined by the idea of austerity.In this context austerity refers to a material, economic, condition determined by the logic of the cut.According to this logic, which was the policy motor of the Cameron-Osborne

My objective in this piece is to use the Roman legal fiction of Lex Ruinae, which, simultaneously refers to the law of ruins and ruinous law, to try to understand the relationship between law and what we might call the contemporary poly- / perma-crisis. In this regard, the overall thesis of the piece is that we might understand the legal dimensions of the crisis that seems to be spatially expansive, in the sense that it takes on planetary scale, and temporally extensive, in respect of seeming to stretch out into an endless critical future, through a theory of spasm. Here, the ruinous law of late capitalism seeks to force ever more progress, modernity, and profitability, but prevailing global economic conditions mean that further development is impossible and, in this way, exert a kind of contractive counter-force upon the global system that expresses itself in a tendency towards collapse and ruin. On the basis of this thesis, my argument is that rather than continue to live through the ruinous law of the code of capital, we should engage in what I am calling crisis jurisprudence to think about how we might live in the age of ruins and what a law of ruins might involve. Following a discussion of Lex Ruinae in the context of Roman crisis, and the struggle between Cicero, Caesar, and Antony over the purpose of law, I develop my discussion through an exploration the modern crisis of sovereignty, decision, and power, before showing how the economic version of imperium that has developed over the course of the second half of the 20th and early 21st century has led to the point of global poly- / perma-crisis, where there is nowhere else to go but a world of ruin. Thus, we confront the problem of Lex Ruinae.

In this piece I outline the history of the university in terms of a shift from a place concerned with the contemplation of the unknowable and the infinite to a machine focused on instrumental rationality, calculation, and computation. Reading this history through Lyotard's work on the post-modern condition and the emergence of the knowledge economy, I consider the rise of the computational university and artificial intelligence in terms of the abolition of the foundational principle of the ancient university model concerned with the exploration of the unknown. In this regard, I examine the purpose of the university and higher education more widely in a technological system where calculation means that every question can be answered in advance. In this situation the closed feedback loop, computation, and certainty replace contemplation, the unknowable, and uncertainty as the key principles of the institution. Following this exploration of the history of the university, I turn to Bernard Stiegler's consideration of the negative impacts of this techno-scientific model on thought and the ways in which these undermine the human potential to imagine the future. Thus, exploring the state of contemporary humanity in an environment where outcomes are always-already decided in advance, I think through the relationship between technology, cybernetics, and pathologies of communication that undermine the potential of the university to serve as a place for making sense together with a view to imagining alternative futures. In conclusion, I consider this situation in the contemporary social and political context where possibility seems to have given way to apocalyptic visions and predictions of endings of various forms, and unpack Stiegler's theory of the neganthropocene to imagine a very different kind of university premised upon the protection of uncertainty, the unknowable, and alternative futures.

My key objective in this article is to explore the history of the concept of utopia and its application in really existing social, political, economic and cultural forms. Starting with a consideration of what I call the economy of utopia, I theorise the desire for the ideal society in terms of a deeply human drive to seek to overcome vulnerability, limitation and finitude that is set upon failure and the fall towards dystopia by virtue of the fact that it is this very lack that defines the being of the human animal. Following this section of the article, in the second part of my piece, I move on to trace the history of utopia from the visions of Ancients, through the idealism of the Moderns, up to the champions of the theory of the end of history and a utopian version of capitalism. Finally, in conclusion, I focus on the catastrophic impacts of this global utopia of capitalism realised in the form of the Anthropocene and imagine a truly human, tragic utopia founded upon a recognition of our constitutive lack, vulnerability and finitude.

What is viral law? In order to being my discussion, I note that the last two years have been extremely difficult to understand and that we, meaning those who have lived through the pandemic, have struggled to make sense. Thus, I make the argument that the virus has impacted upon not only the individual's ability to make sense in a world where every day routines have been upended, but also social and political structures that similarly rely on repetition to continue to function. According to this thesis, Covid-19 is more than simply a biological organism, but also a cultural virus that undermines the organisation of social, political, and economic systems and requires new ways of thinking about how we might move forward into a post-Covid world. In the name of beginning this project of making sense of Covid-19, I track back in history to the comparable reference point of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 and, in particular, a reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which the founder of psychoanalysis wrote in the shadow of the virus. In reading Freud's attempt to write a psychology of death in the context of this funereal period of history, I argue that he set out first, a mythological theory of viral law concerned with the death drive, before turning to second, a techno-scientific, biological theory of the same (viral) law characterised by microbial immortality. Beyond this exploration of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in the third part of the article I turn to a reading of Lacan's interpretation of Freud's work, where viral law becomes a story of cybernetics and nihilistic mechanisation. Here, perfect mechanisation, and the endless oscillation between message and noise, looks a lot like living death. Finally, I take up Derrida's critique of Jacob's molecular biology and, by extension, Freud's theory of microbial immorality, that he thinks privileges an idea of repetitive sameness and opens up a space for cultural politics concerned with immunity against otherness. Derrida's key point here is that this biological fantasy ignores the reality of viral sex that enables evolution to happen. What this means is that the other, even in its microbial form, is ever present, and that we must recognise the importance of difference to the possibility of social, political, and economic change.

Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre's Humanism with Heidegger's Anti-Humanism to frame his exploration of the limits of the human in contemporary social theory, we could easily locate the same concern with the human and its relationship to the nonhuman in Marx, Tarde, and centrally for the purposes of this article, the work of Georg Simmel. Expanding upon this insight concerning the relevance of Simmel's work for understanding our 'entangled present', the purpose of this article is to explore Simmel's work and recent interpretations of his sociology that seek to project Simmelian thought into the future in significantly different ways. To this end, the article critically engages with Pyyhtinen's recent reading of Simmel's work that focuses upon his legacy with a view of exploring his future through consideration of (1) Fitzi's exploration of Simmel's ethics of the individual, (2) Kemple's turn to Simmel's religiosity, and finally (3) Beer's reading of the late Simmel, who, I suggest might inform the emergence of a kind of non-human humanism capable of thinking beyond the mortal limits of the anthropocene that paradoxically imagines its own post-human immortality.

Little doubt exists among numerous cultural and political theorists and practitioners that the world has entered a new stage organized around a new system of meaning, where uncertainty and distance rule and the other is a figure of contagion: we will call this new stage “viral culture ” Predictions abound about the huge cultural and political influence of new viruses, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) that, like all viruses, is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism Traditional cultural institutions and lifestyles are experiencing rapid political transformation Concepts of protection and mobility, authoritarian populism, extermination, normality, operation, the city, biopolitics, language, life, the image, utopia, leisure, and even the idea of other people are just a few

Book Review| July 01 2020 The Utopianism of Luxury A Philosophy of Luxury, by Wiesing, Lambert, translated by Roth, Nancy Ann, London: Routledge, 2019, 172 pages, $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780367138417 Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University. He is author of Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Theory (2007) and Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Global Imaginary (2017) and editor of The Sociology of Debt (2019) and Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader (2019). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (2): 270–273. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233448 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Featherstone; The Utopianism of Luxury. Cultural Politics 1 July 2020; 16 (2): 270–273. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233448 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search In A Philosophy of Luxury, Lambert Wiesing, chair of Image Theory and Phenomenology at the Friedrich Schiller University, makes the case that luxury is what makes us human and that if we were to entirely abandon the world of the luxurious we would find ourselves cast into either a state of nature inhabited by beasts or a computational dystopia of hyper-rational barbarians. Starting with the work of Friedrich Schiller, Wiesing explains that there are moments when humans become acutely aware of their own humanity. He explains that Schiller links these moments of self-consciousness to play, which fuses the sensuality of the beast and the rationality of the barbarian in a third state that is more than either animality or computation, by virtue of the way in which it opens out onto the uncertainty of the future. In these moments of play, when instrumental action takes on a joyful symbolic... Issue Section: Book Review Essay You do not currently have access to this content.

In this chapter I begin by exploring the impact of Paul Virilio's thought upon British academia from the 1980s through the 1990s to the contemporary. Following this work, I move on to show how Virilio's dromology can shed light on the history and present of British society. In the first section of the chapter I focus specifically on Virilio's impact on the inter-disciplinary field of cultural studies, which fused a range of fields in an attempt to understand the changes taking place under conditions of globalisation. In the second section of the chapter I move on to explore the impact of his thought upon thinking about changes to British society in a high-speed world where structural limits were replaced by a logic of transgression and deterritorialisation.

Research Article| November 01 2020 On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art: Interview with Mehdi Saadeti Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the history of utopias and dystopias in philosophy, culture, and art. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between the Western idea of utopia, Asian thought, and art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (3): 322–339. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593522 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Featherstone; On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art: Interview with Mehdi Saadeti. Cultural Politics 1 November 2020; 16 (3): 322–339. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593522 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search In this interview emerging Iranian artist Mehdi Saadeti discusses his career and the existentialist themes present in his work. After discovering Saadeti’s work Metamorphosis in the summer of 2019, Mark Featherstone interviewed the artist in January 2020, exploring key themes relating to the experience of exile, the politics of art, and the Heideggerian philosophy of poetry and the revealing of being. Given the contemporary age characterized by mobility, homelessness, technological rationality, and increasingly desperate attempts to make sense of processes of globalization that seem to generate chaos, Saadeti’s work is important because it speaks to key concerns of cultural politics in the early twenty-first century by drawing on existential thought and the tradition of abstraction in art to try to imagine meaningful worlds.Mehdi Saadeti was born in 1981 in the Iranian city of Tabriz. Following his bachelor’s- and master’s-level education in the architecture... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Speed and Violence considers Paul Virilio’s theory of the accident and seeks to excavate his “originary scene,” the moment that produced the technology / accident economy discussed in his works The Museum of Accidents (1989), Politics of the Very Worst (1999), and The Information Bomb (2000a). In consideration of the possibility that Virilio’s thesis denies the idea of the originary position, I relate his technology / accident economy to Derrida’s deconstruction. In particular the essay examines how Virilio’s theory refers to the notion of différance. Beyond this examination of Virilio’s possible atemporalism, my analysis shifts towards a consideration of the effects of speed. Through a reading that grounds the technology / accident bind in time, the essay looks towards the Girardian concept of the victim in order to suggest that the anthropology implicit in Virilio’s dromology (theory of speed) affirms the centrality of the victimary position.