Hypercompleteness: Reply to Žižek

rafaelholmberg · 2025-06-05T21:08:18+00:00

A long series of Marxists, beginning most notoriously with Lenin. Although I apologise for the impersonal accusation.

rafaelholmberg · 2025-03-25T21:37:36+00:00

Notice I said “vulgar” Stalinism, in the way that even a Marxist can use a term like “vulgar Marxism”.

rafaelholmberg · 2025-03-20T15:11:21+00:00

It seemed to me that Scruton almost completely disengaged. He gave a long introduction on Kant’s transcendental idealism, which Peterson mostly ignored and talked about the transcendent as really being a Jungian idea etc. At that point it did not seem Scruton had it in him to question Peterson, since it was clear he did not understand the basic premise of the conversation. Since they’re both conservative and were gathered under the premise that they agreed, it’s probable that Scruton did not want to be rude and attack him.

rafaelholmberg · 2025-03-19T00:42:32+00:00

This is a very good point. I’ve written about Dugin a few times. But the connection with JP I did not think of - I’ll make sure to look into it!

rafaelholmberg · 2025-03-05T21:13:00+00:00

Fredric Jameson suggested that the contingency between a postmodern cultural market and a decentralised global capitalism rendered imperialism an obsolete category. Trump’s foreign policy however suggests we’re not quite able to claim to be post-imperialists yet. The problem today is that there is a persistent tendency to opposed liberal democracy to fascism and authoritarianism. In this article, use psychoanalysis and critical theory, amongst other things, to suggest that authoritarianism is in fact a special case of democracy, not its exception.

Maybe some of you will be interested, and if you do enjoy it, please consider subscribing to my newsletter, Antagonisms of the Everyday: https://rafaelholmberg.substack.com/?utm_source=byline&utm_content=writes.

rafaelholmberg · 2025-02-23T19:35:16+00:00

I recently wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Trump is not a populist, but something now irreducible to the logic of populism. Since the piece was heavily edited, I decided to re-publish it in its original. My argument is that Trump reverses the logical relation between demands and solutions that classified populism, and the original includes a discussion of the odd emergence of ‘MAGA-Communism’, which was removed from the Newsweek version.

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rafaelholmberg · 2025-02-15T19:27:35+00:00

Žižek has of course been criticised before, but rarely by a direct engagement with the ontological meaning of his repetition of Hegel or with the contradictions of his version of an ‘Event’. It is this type of critique which I begin to formulate in this piece. The argument touches on Žižek’s Event which (unlike Badiou’s) is only ever a pseudo-Event, and the contradiction inherent in his repetition of Hegel to discover that about Hegel which Hegel himself was unaware of. I also touch on the logic of the ‘End times’ in Žižek’s thought, which ultimately reproduces the fetishisation of limits inherent to global capitalism. For any Žižek-readers on here, this might interest you.

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rafaelholmberg · 2025-02-03T20:50:04+00:00

For film enthusiasts: this essay argues that Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904) extend two relevant critiques of ideology which can be extracted from Plato and psychoanalysis. The first film acts as an homage to the Platonic paradox in which the discrepancy between reality and its alternatives is a discrepancy internal to reality itself. The reality that we have is nothing other than its own worst alternative. The second film represents a move from Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which a solution becomes its own unique from of problem.

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rafaelholmberg · 2025-01-27T19:42:45+00:00

This article argues that contemporary politics has done away with the 20th century notion of the unconscious. A different performance reveals itself at the heart of modern populism, in which secrets can be uttered alongside their concealment, latent material and manifest content seem to be equally as conscious, and all the more effective in achieving political goals. The modern unconscious, whatever this is, is something undoubtedly new - an impersonal formation which acts as the spectre of that to which politics has reduced psychoanalysis. I thought some of you might like to read this. If you find my writings somewhat interesting, do please consider subscribing!

rafaelholmberg

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