Lea Kuhar: Left melancholia as an alternative to capitalist realism

Lea Kuhar has a PhD in Philosophy. Between 2016 and 2020 she worked as a young researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). In 2020, she completed her PhD thesis at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School. In her research, she focuses on Marxism, epistemology and contemporary political philosophy. She is a member of the Programme Board of the Institute for Labour Studies, editor of the journal Borec and author of several scientific articles published in national and international journals.

In her lecture, Lea Kuhar will talk about the melancholy of the left and ressentiment as an alternative to capitalist realism: Mark Fisher regards capitalist realism as the widespread feeling that the capitalist mode of production is the best of all possible worlds, which, by its specific economic-political mode of operation, makes it impossible for potential opponents to try to conceive of an alternative to it. In this lecture we will analyse two affects of the left positions which we will argue are dominant today, namely melancholy and ressentiment. Because of their specific modus operandi, left-wing melancholy and ressentiment seem at first sight to be anti-social, reactionary and even apolitical, which is why they are not usually considered as progressive or revolutionary. To counter this understanding, we will argue that melancholy and ressentiment can also be understood as the beginnings of the possibility of the emergence of an alternative to capitalist realism.