A bruising ideology: Posthumanity and the nostalgic drive

Lewis, Jac 2024. A bruising ideology: Posthumanity and the nostalgic drive. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

A Bruising Ideology is an alternative intellectual history of ideology theory through an emotion: nostalgia. I examine ideology and nostalgia as a comparative, double-helix movement of modernity that has deeply informed and affected post-Kantian continental philosophy, introducing for the first time a research project that has explored the mutual origins of ideology and nostalgia in early modern medicine, mental illness, false consciousness, capitalist subjectivity, and poetics. The thesis begins with the 17th century doctor Johannes Hofer’s coining of the phrase ‘nostalgia’ and his notion that what triggers the ‘wasting disease’ in the patient is what he calls an ‘afflicted imagination’. Though once a faculty of human experience which felt ‘at home’ with memory since antiquity, under Hofer’s clinical reading imagination and memory are fatefully decoupled; the former instead becomes parasitic on the memories of the nostalgic sufferer. It is the contention of my first chapter that this diagnosis had more far-reaching and mysterious consequences than simply outdated medical science, drawing a historical trajectory from medical theses of ‘afflicted imagination’ to the French Revolutionary progenitors of ideology, the Idéologues, as well as philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of alienation or ‘false consciousness’ from Hegel to Marx, and from Freud to Lacan. The ‘bruising’ in my title is a reference to the work of artist and art historian Carol Mavor who inspires the focus of the second chapter on contemporary ideology theory – chiefly, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ideology as a ‘sublime’ object. Drawing on the historical dialectic of nostalgia and ideology in the first chapter, the second contends that the ‘bruising passion’ of Mavor’s melancholic poetics can expose the affective dimension as well as philosophical limitations of Žižek’s ontological nostalgia and emotional account of ideology. Finally, my third chapter applies my previous theories of nostalgic drive and ideology to contemporary, anti-anthropocentric accounts of capitalist development and subjectivity. Shifting the perspective on the nostalgic drive as a crisis of humanism, I link the ontological nostalgia of ideology theory with the philosophical nihilism of accelerationist conceptions of posthuman subjectivity and desire.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
Funders:	James Pantyfedwen Foundation
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 April 2025
Last Modified:	08 Apr 2025 08:57
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177452

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