Mark Featherstone | Keele University (original) (raw)

Papers by Mark Featherstone

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 2022

Starting from an exploration of Freud’s notion of the Death Drive and applying it to our times (s... more Starting from an exploration of Freud’s notion of the Death Drive and applying it to our times (said to have arrived at the End of History) this contribution argues that our contemporary thanatological
moment does still offer, against all odds, the possibility of the invention of new way of living. Deploying and assembling insights from authors such as Lacan, Derrida and Stiegler, it may indeed be argued that history is over, and that, thanatologically speaking, our ever-destructive way of late
capitalist life has been running on memory and repetition since the late 1980s. We are living in the end times. However, it is in facing up to this painful truth, mourning the past, and recognising that we are now, more than ever before, caught in the primal death drive, that we will discover a
better, more humble future. What is proposed here is a return to the idea that what we need to do to escape from the fatal circularity of death drive capitalism is to lean on psychoanalysis and the theory that recognition, realisation, and a coming to terms with our situation will open up a minimal distance from the necessity of the inertia of natural being and enable us to establish a new minor (non)humanism characterised by an understanding and acceptance of the constitutive nature of lack, vulnerability, and finitude.

Negativity in Psychoanalysis, 2023

In this short chapter I seek to explore the contemporary post-historical moment through the lens ... more In this short chapter I seek to explore the contemporary post-historical moment through the lens of Freudian theory. Starting with Frances Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I move on to trace the breakdown of the American empire through a series of epochal events (9/11; the global financial crash; Covid-19; the failure of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan; and now return of war in Europe) in order to make the case that the contemporary social, political, economic, and psychological moment might be understood through the idea of the (un)mourning of the end of history. In this context my key point is that following the collapse of Soviet Union and the end of bi-polar balance of power that led Fukuyama to declare the end of history, the idea of negativity and otherness was consigned to the history books. As Jean Baudrillard explained in key works, there was no negativity in post-modern America. Instead, America represented a kind of pure positivity, what he calls a utopia realised. However, from the very moment of its foundation, the pure positivity of the new American-led process of globalisation was haunted by its other, the specter of negativity, which it has consistently sought to deny, resulting in its transformation into a kind of monstrous perversion or Freudian uncanny.

By explaining how this specter of negativity returned through key events over the course of the 21st century, my argument is that we now find ourselves in a position where we must mourn Fukuyama’s end of history and the American-led global empire, forget about its utopian pretensions to endless growth and so on, and learn to live with history once more. Against a tendency towards what Laurence Rickels calls unmourning or aberrant mourning and Alexander Etkind writes about in terms of warped mourning, learning to live with history means accepting loss, understanding change, and coming to terms with negativity and centrally vulnerability. After setting out this thesis, I turn back towards Freud in order to explain the European pre-history of the American empire, which, I suggest, explains how we might come to terms with the end of the end of history through the turn to a negative, socio-political version of psychoanalytic thought. Starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was written in the wake of World War I, and in the teeth of the Spanish Flu pandemic that gripped Europe one hundred years ago, and referencing Freud’s own struggles to accept loss and transience, I conclude with a reading of his Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud shows how civilisation itself is necessarily bound up with a recognition of limitation, otherness, and negativity. The alternative in Freud’s view, a world of pure positivity, would be a world marked by death, disaster, and destruction – a utopia realised in the form of a catastrophic dystopia. This is, in my conclusion, a world we must escape through the embrace of negativity.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2024

Routledge eBooks, Aug 8, 2019

Ctheory, Jan 29, 2003

Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University o... more Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Ctheory, 2003

Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University o... more Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2013

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot o... more And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die—the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live in miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris’ Bull! (Thomas Carlyle 1843=2011, 261–262)

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2010

It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large par... more It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terrorism and its global media coverage which has, we argue, resulted in a politics of fear that acts to legitimate ever-increasing legislative controls. In an attempt to reveal how discourse works to support such regulation, in the second part of this article we offer a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles from the UK about acts of terrorism that have taken place since the suicide bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005. Together with an analysis of the political speeches of Bush and Blair, we examine how far these discourses c...

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2020

Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories ... more 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 int...

Cultural Politics, 2021

In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a p... more In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic ruin caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrasting this community of spirit to the Chinese Communist Party's Foucauldian response to the outbreak of the virus, Žižek suggests a turn away from Prometheanism and the logic of domination toward a new posthuman humanitarianism based on a recognition of human weakness, vulnerability, and fragility. In Žižek's view, this turn toward a new form of humility would emerge from the final disenchantment of the spirit of capitalism and a recognition of the difference between human work, which cont...

The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’... more The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’s ideal society is designed to protect this freedom. However, within Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation, Featherstone argues that capitalist utopian vision, which is most clearly expressed in theories of global finance, is no longer sustainable today. This book concerns the status of utopian thinking in contemporary global society and the possibility of imagining alternative ways of living outside of capitalism. Using a range of sociological and philosophical theories to write the first intellectual history of the capitalist utopia in English, Featherstone provokes the reader into thinking about ways of moving beyond this model of organising social life through sociological modes of thought. Indeed, this enlightening volume seeks to show how utopian thinking about the way people should live has been progressively captured by capitalism with the result that it is difficult to ...

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2022

What is viral law? In order to being my discussion, I note that the last two years have been extr... more 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 Sociological Review, Dec 4, 2016

Ctheory, 2016

Consider the scene: following his victory in the American presidential election Donald Trump begi... more Consider the scene: following his victory in the American presidential election Donald Trump begins to call foreign leaders. Where the ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain is concerned, one would imagine his first meeting would be with Prime Minister Theresa May, but this is not what happens. Instead, Trump meets the on / off leader of British populists UKIP (UK Independence Party), Nigel Farage, who has recently led Britain out of the EU, or was at least a key figure in the Leave campaign. The photograph of the pair, smiling in front of a golden elevator in Trump Tower, comes to represent the possible future of the special relationship, a possible future that fills the politicians of the British mainstream with dread, because what it symbolises is the turn to the extreme right and the collapse of the post-World War II consensus which has sustained Britain economically since the Thatcher period.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2021

In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the s... more In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of commodification, proletarianization, devaluation, alienation, disenchantment and, what Bernard Stiegler calls, disbelief and discredit. From this point of view the future of the British university looks bleak and yet we must consider the pharmacological possibilities that might arise from this dark situation. After explaining the history of the neoliberalization of British HE through the lens of Stiegler's work in the first part of the article, and then exploring the history of the university in the second part of the paper, in the concluding section I seek to consider ways in which it might be possible to use the crisis to escape the grip of ever-increasing technological nihilism and invent a new model of HE beyond the disenchanted university.

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 2022

Starting from an exploration of Freud’s notion of the Death Drive and applying it to our times (s... more Starting from an exploration of Freud’s notion of the Death Drive and applying it to our times (said to have arrived at the End of History) this contribution argues that our contemporary thanatological
moment does still offer, against all odds, the possibility of the invention of new way of living. Deploying and assembling insights from authors such as Lacan, Derrida and Stiegler, it may indeed be argued that history is over, and that, thanatologically speaking, our ever-destructive way of late
capitalist life has been running on memory and repetition since the late 1980s. We are living in the end times. However, it is in facing up to this painful truth, mourning the past, and recognising that we are now, more than ever before, caught in the primal death drive, that we will discover a
better, more humble future. What is proposed here is a return to the idea that what we need to do to escape from the fatal circularity of death drive capitalism is to lean on psychoanalysis and the theory that recognition, realisation, and a coming to terms with our situation will open up a minimal distance from the necessity of the inertia of natural being and enable us to establish a new minor (non)humanism characterised by an understanding and acceptance of the constitutive nature of lack, vulnerability, and finitude.

Negativity in Psychoanalysis, 2023

In this short chapter I seek to explore the contemporary post-historical moment through the lens ... more In this short chapter I seek to explore the contemporary post-historical moment through the lens of Freudian theory. Starting with Frances Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I move on to trace the breakdown of the American empire through a series of epochal events (9/11; the global financial crash; Covid-19; the failure of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan; and now return of war in Europe) in order to make the case that the contemporary social, political, economic, and psychological moment might be understood through the idea of the (un)mourning of the end of history. In this context my key point is that following the collapse of Soviet Union and the end of bi-polar balance of power that led Fukuyama to declare the end of history, the idea of negativity and otherness was consigned to the history books. As Jean Baudrillard explained in key works, there was no negativity in post-modern America. Instead, America represented a kind of pure positivity, what he calls a utopia realised. However, from the very moment of its foundation, the pure positivity of the new American-led process of globalisation was haunted by its other, the specter of negativity, which it has consistently sought to deny, resulting in its transformation into a kind of monstrous perversion or Freudian uncanny.

By explaining how this specter of negativity returned through key events over the course of the 21st century, my argument is that we now find ourselves in a position where we must mourn Fukuyama’s end of history and the American-led global empire, forget about its utopian pretensions to endless growth and so on, and learn to live with history once more. Against a tendency towards what Laurence Rickels calls unmourning or aberrant mourning and Alexander Etkind writes about in terms of warped mourning, learning to live with history means accepting loss, understanding change, and coming to terms with negativity and centrally vulnerability. After setting out this thesis, I turn back towards Freud in order to explain the European pre-history of the American empire, which, I suggest, explains how we might come to terms with the end of the end of history through the turn to a negative, socio-political version of psychoanalytic thought. Starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was written in the wake of World War I, and in the teeth of the Spanish Flu pandemic that gripped Europe one hundred years ago, and referencing Freud’s own struggles to accept loss and transience, I conclude with a reading of his Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud shows how civilisation itself is necessarily bound up with a recognition of limitation, otherness, and negativity. The alternative in Freud’s view, a world of pure positivity, would be a world marked by death, disaster, and destruction – a utopia realised in the form of a catastrophic dystopia. This is, in my conclusion, a world we must escape through the embrace of negativity.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2024

Routledge eBooks, Aug 8, 2019

Ctheory, Jan 29, 2003

Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University o... more Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Ctheory, 2003

Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University o... more Nazi Psychoanalysis: Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War. Laurence A. Rickels. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2013

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot o... more And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die—the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live in miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris’ Bull! (Thomas Carlyle 1843=2011, 261–262)

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2010

It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large par... more It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terrorism and its global media coverage which has, we argue, resulted in a politics of fear that acts to legitimate ever-increasing legislative controls. In an attempt to reveal how discourse works to support such regulation, in the second part of this article we offer a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles from the UK about acts of terrorism that have taken place since the suicide bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005. Together with an analysis of the political speeches of Bush and Blair, we examine how far these discourses c...

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2020

Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories ... more 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 int...

Cultural Politics, 2021

In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a p... more In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic ruin caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrasting this community of spirit to the Chinese Communist Party's Foucauldian response to the outbreak of the virus, Žižek suggests a turn away from Prometheanism and the logic of domination toward a new posthuman humanitarianism based on a recognition of human weakness, vulnerability, and fragility. In Žižek's view, this turn toward a new form of humility would emerge from the final disenchantment of the spirit of capitalism and a recognition of the difference between human work, which cont...

The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’... more The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’s ideal society is designed to protect this freedom. However, within Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation, Featherstone argues that capitalist utopian vision, which is most clearly expressed in theories of global finance, is no longer sustainable today. This book concerns the status of utopian thinking in contemporary global society and the possibility of imagining alternative ways of living outside of capitalism. Using a range of sociological and philosophical theories to write the first intellectual history of the capitalist utopia in English, Featherstone provokes the reader into thinking about ways of moving beyond this model of organising social life through sociological modes of thought. Indeed, this enlightening volume seeks to show how utopian thinking about the way people should live has been progressively captured by capitalism with the result that it is difficult to ...

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2022

What is viral law? In order to being my discussion, I note that the last two years have been extr... more 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 Sociological Review, Dec 4, 2016

Ctheory, 2016

Consider the scene: following his victory in the American presidential election Donald Trump begi... more Consider the scene: following his victory in the American presidential election Donald Trump begins to call foreign leaders. Where the ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain is concerned, one would imagine his first meeting would be with Prime Minister Theresa May, but this is not what happens. Instead, Trump meets the on / off leader of British populists UKIP (UK Independence Party), Nigel Farage, who has recently led Britain out of the EU, or was at least a key figure in the Leave campaign. The photograph of the pair, smiling in front of a golden elevator in Trump Tower, comes to represent the possible future of the special relationship, a possible future that fills the politicians of the British mainstream with dread, because what it symbolises is the turn to the extreme right and the collapse of the post-World War II consensus which has sustained Britain economically since the Thatcher period.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2021

In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the s... more In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of commodification, proletarianization, devaluation, alienation, disenchantment and, what Bernard Stiegler calls, disbelief and discredit. From this point of view the future of the British university looks bleak and yet we must consider the pharmacological possibilities that might arise from this dark situation. After explaining the history of the neoliberalization of British HE through the lens of Stiegler's work in the first part of the article, and then exploring the history of the university in the second part of the paper, in the concluding section I seek to consider ways in which it might be possible to use the crisis to escape the grip of ever-increasing technological nihilism and invent a new model of HE beyond the disenchanted university.

Writing the Body Politic, 2019

This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a soci... more This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness. The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstract processes of financialisation taking place globally. It also provides a more holistic perspective, with accounts that span sociological, cultural, and economic forms of analysis.

Law, Cinema, and the Ill City: Imagining Justice and Order in Real and Fictional Cities, 2019

Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Explorations in Visual Criminology, 2019

Acting Bodies and Social Networks, 2009

Chapter in Parker and Parish's Age of Anxiety, 2001

Sociology-the Journal of The British Sociological Association, 2010

Sociological Review, 2008

Contemporary Sociology-a Journal of Reviews, 2008

... Franklin's teaching on time and money. In 1996, paremiologist Kimberly Lau showed that &... more ... Franklin's teaching on time and money. In 1996, paremiologist Kimberly Lau showed that "time is money" is one of the five most common proverbs in American newspapers, magazines, Page 24. xxii Hegemony of Common Sense ...

Sociological Review, 2002

Book reviewed in this article:Empire M. Hardt and A. NegriA Phenomenology of Working Class Experi... more Book reviewed in this article:Empire M. Hardt and A. NegriA Phenomenology of Working Class Experience Simon J. CharlesworthOrganizational Culture and Identity Martin ParkerOrganising Bodies: Policy, Institutions and Work Linda Mckie and Nick Watson (eds.)

Sociology-the Journal of The British Sociological Association, 2001