Verso Book Club: Disaster Nationalism
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour is one of our Verso Book Club November reads.
Anyone familiar with his work knows that Richard Seymour is extraordinary. Not only startlingly prolific, he is the kind of thinker who leaves no topic unexamined—it is no exaggeration to say he is among Britain’s leading public intellectuals working today. I have had the blessing of a front row seat to Richard’s thinking for more than a decade now (since we met in 2013, we have been in constant, daily conversation in the form of a group chat—first iMessage, now Signal—that became the intellectual centre of Salvage, the magazine we edit together with the rest of the Salvage Collective). I have never ceased to be amazed at his appetite for studying—and I mean really studying—every question that arrests him. While the thinkers who have most shaped his thinking—Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, more recently David Bentley Hart—are evident in his work, it is less a school of thought than a disposition that, in my opinion, most aptly defines Richard’s thought and work. It is a steadfast, urgent commitment to tackling hard questions and avoiding easy answers. To refuse, as he puts it in the introduction to Disaster Nationalism, “to succumb to the compensation of feeling superior”.
Compensations of any kind are generally in short supply with Richard—he is not a writer interested in making you feel better. In Corbyn, he made clear that Jeremy’s victory had less to do with the Left’s strategy than it did the crisis of parliamentary democracy across Europe, his unflinching focus on the obstacles facing the left in the Labour Party once more provoking lamentations that he was too pessimistic. In The Twittering Machine, he laid bare how our understanding and theories of addiction are woefully inadequate to explain our behaviours, recasting social media into a story about desire, violence and writing. Disaster Nationalism is of course no exception. The topic is, after all, the seemingly unceasing rise of fascistic forces globally, and the falling away of the liberal order.
Unlike many recent books on the far-right, Disaster Nationalism is notably global—treating the examples of India, the Phillipines, Brazil and Israel in as much depth as the US. The book is a retort to reductive and simplistic economistic explanations of the rise of the right: “It isn’t the economy, stupid. It isn’t even physical survival … pogroms, death-squad populism, far-right militias and police and paramilitary violence are the driving force of nationalist success. They offer not growth, but the chance to destroy a neighbour. Isn’t this what happens as civilization falls away?” We are, Richard argues, “in the early days of a new fascism” that relies not on strongmen or military dictatorships but on the spread of fascistic ideas as if they were contagious, indicating that “the threshold for uptake of these ideas is lower than we might have assumed”.
It feels extremely appropriate that my final editor’s letter for Verso is about Richard. It was Richard who suggested to me, when I was completing my undergraduate degree in Sheffield and considering my next steps, that I apply to Verso’s internship program (RIP). And when Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015, Richard’s book explaining why and how it happened (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) was the first book I ever directly commissioned.
Attempting to summarise Richard’s work always feels like an exercise in futility that inevitably butchers the nuances of his thinking. But forced to try to distill Richard’s project, both in Disaster Nationalism and over the past decade, I would say that he is trying to understand the role played by passion and desire in shaping our actions and, by consequence, the social and material world. The question that drives Disaster Nationalism is: what is it that fascism offers to people who are materially comfortable, who after all make up the majority of its constituents? More broadly, we could rephrase that question: why are any of us willing to sacrifice our immediate interests in service of fantasies? That is to say, what role does the immaterial stuff of consciousness play in all of this?
Rosie Warren, Editor, Verso Books
London, October 2024
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour is one of our Verso Book Club November reads.
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