Hope

Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities, Kingston University London, UK. He is author of Resistance and Psychoanalysis (2017), Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (2017), Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (2015), The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), The Derrida Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2010), Derrida: Writing Events (Bloomsbury, 2008), Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (2007), Counter-Institutions (2006) and Rethinking the University (2009)

• AcknowledgementsHope against hopeTwenty-two short essays on the politics of optimismImmanuel Kant, Choosing what is bestVoltaire, Bien (tout est)Arthur Schopenhauer, Eating the otherBenedict de Spinoza, Hope, faith and judgementFriedrich Nietzsche, Imperfect nihilism Maurice Blanchot, Hope and poetryJacques Derrida, Yes, yesEmmanuel Levinas, Sociality and solitudeSigmund Freud, ‘A time-consuming business’Melanie Klein, ‘Therapeutic pessimism’ in Kristeva’s viewJulia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis—a Counterdepressant’Walter Benjamin, ‘Pessimism all along the line’Theodor Adorno, ‘Hurrah-optimism’Hannah Arendt, ‘The right to expect miracles’Slavoj Žižek, Hopeless courage (with Hegel and Badiou)Franz Kafka, ‘Plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us’ (re-reading Walter Benjamin)Jacques Derrida, Hegel, Bataille, negativity and affirmationFrantz Fanon, Recognition and conflictHannah Arendt, Violence and powerÉtienne Balibar, Politics and psychoanalysisHans Kelsen, Politics and the ‘impolitical’Sigmund Freud, Super-ego politicsindex

Neo-liberalism’s savage hegemony shapes subjects and affects together:jaded, pessimistic, indifferent, or their twins, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, long-range, even “future-proof” subjects. Can we still hope—for forms of association, action, the distribution of resources and enjoyment, other than those marked and made by this hegemonic formation? What grounds are there for optimism? Simon Morgan Wortham makes from the materials of the Western Enlightenment a genealogy for a politics of optimism—substantially groundless, necessary. By showing that thought is never either “past-proof” or “future-proof”Hope: The Politics of Optimism rigorously and lucidly redefines politics for our torn present.