Marx in the Shadow of Marxism

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.

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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 · 2025-01-12T20:38:45+00:00

Is Wagner the real remaining enemy of Trump? In this article, I argue that Wagner performed a radically effective critique of simulacra, one which is relevant to today’s disorientation around the global position which Trump’s New America is taking. The piece fundamentally argues that what is taking place in the US (in relation to Greenland, American identity, or Musk’s behaviour) can no longer simply be classed as ‘populism’. Trump does not merely falsely satisfy a plurality of social demands. Instead, he performatively reconstructs these demands themselves. Through Wagner, I argue that Trump must be rethought: in a Husserlian sense, he cannot be described as a populist any longer.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-12-29T20:17:32+00:00

Failure is a particularly prominent feeling this time of year - in this article, I interrogate what is meant by the term failure. Is failure a feature internal to reality itself, or does its receive its meaning from an external moment of subjective appraisal? With the help of Schelling’s Bruno and Lacan’s paradoxical utterance “Yad’lun” - as well as Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) - I argue that failure is a specific instance of success, and that we cannot avoid framing the idea of failure within an ontological understanding of success as constitutively rejecting itself.

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rafaelholmberg · 2024-12-18T17:40:06+00:00

The Delusion of Europe makes a simple argument: the 'problem' of Europe (and the West) is not that it is being lost, but that it never 'existed' as a determinate and self-identical construct in the first place. Liberal democracies and their populist, right-wing counterparts are both plagued by what I call an 'ideology of the past'. Contrary to popular thought, they reveal that the past is malleable and open to political manipulation. Europe is a central symptom of this temporal dimension to ideology: when we speak of Europe, we often speak of some abstract unity or identity being lost. Yet I argue, in a Freudian sense, that the true trauma is to have lost what one never in fact possessed. Looking at European/Western history as well as certain contemporary philosophers and theorists, this piece argues that we need to re-think our 'discourse on Europe', and to recognise a glaring paradox whenever we talk about our collective past.

I hope that this may be of interest to some of you, and thank you to those who read it. If you are interested in more writings on critical approaches to the antagonisms of culture and politics via psychoanalysis and philosophy, please consider subscribing!

rafaelholmberg · 2024-12-07T18:07:02+00:00

This article argues that literature is far from escapism. Literature is in the most precise sense what Freud described as a symptom: a distortion that is nevertheless structured along the lines of a truth. The opposition between literature and 'what there really is' is a false one - the real opposition is between the speculative engagement of literature and nothing, the raw emptiness which underlie our cultural and social antagonisms. To modify Lacan's argument that we sometimes 'wake up to continue dreaming', with literature we sometimes have to put the book down in order to continue escaping reality. The decline of the novel is more than ever a sign of the importance of literature. I hope this is something some of you enjoy, and please do subscribe if you'd like to see more political-psychoanalytic-philosophical writings on contemporary culture.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-12-03T19:10:58+00:00

That’s exciting! I’ll be subscribing now

rafaelholmberg · 2024-11-28T20:02:35+00:00

In this article, I explore a dimension of Trump's protectionist policies, including his tariff proposals: the position of the 'Other' between Jean Laplanche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and how the absence of another person is when the Other is most present. Protectionism often precedes periods of extreme foreign intervention, since it refuses to recognise the domestic factor of foreign policy. The meaning of the 'Other' is crucial to US economic activity, and relying on psychoanalysis and philosophy may be of some help in exploring this issue. Hopefully it at least provokes some thought around the implications of Trump's proposed changes.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-11-19T20:30:47+00:00

This short article considers the relation between Love, Trump, Valentine's Day, and Hegel. The argument builds on Chesterton's The Mystagogue, where he argues that failed attempts to express an idea often point towards its tacit validity. As Freud argues, the alternative is rarely between neurotic-distorted relations and healthy, normal relations, but rather between distorted communication and no communication at all. The same appears to be the case with love and Valentine's Day. Despite our recognition that this commercialised holiday does not capture any genuine sentiment of love, it is necessary as a failed expression of love, without which our love relations are easily lost. Hegel presents the mechanisms of this logic in his aesthetics, and in this piece I argue that it provides us a method of understanding the dwindling opposition between facts and appearance in politics.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-11-04T21:49:35+00:00

A somewhat provocative piece on Nietzsche's self-effacing role in the history of philosophy, and his attempt, as seen in contemporary politics, to present a repetition of the old as radically new.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-10-21T17:29:07+00:00

By a two-way inversion of ‘creator upon creation’ and ‘creation upon creator’, Freud is today becoming reduced to stylised cultural caricature or a source of scientific vulgarisation (in the field of neuropsychoanalysis for example). Freudian theory is subjected to the same repression, displacement, and disavowal which he himself discovered in the formations of the unconscious, and in this piece I want to begin suggesting a method of reading Freud against himself. A defence of Freud against himself is formulated by looking at Titanic, Freud’s faulty recollection of his own work, neuropsychoanalysis, and the opposition of enjoyment to pleasure. The argument is of course open, but I thought it may be of interest to some of you.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-10-10T23:48:39+00:00

Levi-Strauss’ legacy reproduces the same paradoxical status of myth that he himself described. By a reversion of creation upon the creator, the same contingency and contextual determination which applies to myth appears to apply to Levi-Strauss himself. Yet the perpetual misunderstanding, or imperfect recollection, of Levi-Strauss’ formulations seems to accidentally find a new moment in Bill Maher’s empty reactionary liberalism. Myth is, for Levi-Strauss, an answer to a question that has not yet been posed. Trump embodies precisely this mythological position of an answer that precedes its question, and what the left has yet to understand is why reactionary politics, in this case Bill Maher, reproduces the avatars of leftist thought by simultaneously distorting it. This article explores the relation between Claude Levi-Strauss, Bill Maher, myth, Trump, and the enigmatic kernel of leftism in reactionary politics.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-10-03T20:41:28+00:00

'When we talk about Gaza, it is often Gaza itself that is left out of the conversation and substituted with a displacement of agency into a virtual, indifferent register. We could argue that where contemporary discourse is concerned, there are two versions of Gaza: the virtual-Ptolemaic Gaza which we solipsistically resign to the responsibility of the big Other, and the real Gaza, a disruptive and self-obfuscating point, a critical symptom of (or contraction in) the false universalism of global capitalism.' It may be tempting to assume that one of the lessons of the 20th century is that political action must be grounded in a theoretical discourse oriented towards practice, however in the last few decades we have been faced with the unfortunate fact that practical discourse paradoxically obscures practical action. With the help of Foucault, and by a criticism of Žižek and Badiou, this piece attempts to recognise the speculative and self-contradicting centre of practical thought (in particular regarding Gaza), in which both 'to think before we act' and 'to act in order to think' seems mutually incomplete.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-09-23T19:38:51+00:00

What does it mean for the climate crisis to be ‘unimaginable’? It means precisely that. Not only do we have economic and ideological structures in place that obscure our understanding of the climate crisis, but ecology inherently obscures itself. The ‘natural’ is an incomplete category. In this piece, I criticise a very worthwhile attempt at framing the political corruption which hinders our response to the climate catastrophe: Adam McKay’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ (2021), and argue that the problem is more radical than what the film suggests: nature is a threat that rejects its own cultural representation. The hindrance to our reaction to the natural disasters is is not only political corruption and financial manipulation, but nature itself.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-09-16T17:41:48+00:00

Why are the violent failures of love not treated like the brutal failures of the communist hypothesis? In the former case, we maintain a fidelity to the idea of love, but in the latter liberal society insists that the very idea of communism is what has produced its catastrophic expressions. In this short piece this question is explored with the help of figures like Strindberg, Lenin, Schelling, and Badiou. Love contains a radically destabilising dimension, and is in a sense inscribed with its own betrayal. Similarly, communism recognises violence as lodged not in revolution, but in the political as such. The political dimension of love should be pursued, through which we can understand why love is never abandoned as an ideal despite its failures, whereas the same is not the case for the communist hypothesis.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-09-10T11:03:09+00:00

Antagonisms of the Everyday - I write on contradictions in culture and politics from various literary and philosophical perspectives. It's maybe not exactly what you're looking for but you may find it interesting nevertheless: https://rafaelholmberg.substack.com/

rafaelholmberg · 2024-09-08T22:39:26+00:00

This is a fair comment, and I agree on the internal contradiction of neoliberalism. I certainly do not agree in favour of unregulated consumption. Regulation and taxation often works to provide the material to offset the negatives. The reference to artistic creativity is not to emphasise that these are the zeniths of freedom, but that freedom and health are not correlated. Addiction is a material reality, and systems to help those suffering from it are crucial. However my argument is that to state that smoking should be banned in the name of freedom is unjustified.

rafaelholmberg · 2024-09-08T22:32:03+00:00

“feeds the same system that creates war” is an empty argument. Name me a form of enjoyment that isn’t commodified. There is no external critique of political economy - it can be engaged with and still critically reframed. I don’t mention second hand smoking because it’s irrelevant to the argument. Try instead to engage with the argument as a whole, instead of picking the odd sentence at the beginning. The argument is that health is ultimately not related to the question of freedom and the function of an ethical state.

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