Claudia Leeb - Böcker

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

How do we become political subjects? Put another way, how do we become actors who have the power to instigate political change? These are questions that have long vexed political theorists, particularly feminist and critical race scholars who think about how to achieve real political transformation. According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to institutions and social norms. But if we are only political people insofar as we are subjects of existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. This issue is a particular problem for feminist scholars, who are frequently criticized for assuming that they can make broad claims for all women, while failing to acknowledge their own exclusive and powerful position (mostly white, Western, and bourgeois). Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by wishing away the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, Claudia Leeb argues that these are both failed ideas. She instead suggests a novel idea of a subject "in outline". As such, we are coherent political subjects, but we are always open, or in outline. It is this openness that both underscores the exclusionary character of political subjectivity and allows us to counter it. Leeb also argues that power structures that create political subjects are never all-powerful. While she rejects the idea of political autonomy, she shows that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Over the course of the book Leeb grounds this concept of the subject in outline in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx -- the very theorists who are often seen as denying the agency of the subject. Specifically, she takes a critical look at the way that Judith Butler treats the political subjectivity of women and the ways in which Marx and Adorno treat the liberation of working class women.

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

A philosophical investigation of dealing with guilt and its impact on democracy, in the case of Austrian NazisDrawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public controversies surrounding Austria's involvement in the Nazi atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public controversies surrounding Austria’s involvement in the Nazi atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes.