Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization

Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading.

The book we all needed. Disaster Nationalism is nothing less than the definitive reckoning with the globally ascendant vitality of today's nationalisms, where Seymour recognises these rejuvenated nationalisms as an explosive web of destructive and futile passions. This is a nationalism spanning so many different global contexts that resolves precious little but animates collective desire in dangerously seductive ways. For the Left to recover a 21st century thesis requires accordingly a resolute confrontation with this cacophonous nationalism, a nationalism that Seymour has mapped with such vivid and audacious verve.

Richard Seymour is one of the finest thinkers working today. In Disaster Nationalism he helps us re-see the psychosocial hallmarks of our contemporary political moment, offering the analysis we need now of new global fantasies of "violent restoration."

With astonishing global reach, and attention to simultaneous, interrelated degradations of information and climate ecologies and liberal-capitalist governance, Disaster Nationalism is the most comprehensive and insightful examination of the ascendancy of far-right politics across the contemporary world to date. A civically 'thick', politically capable fascist project may as yet be on hold, Seymour tells us, but its dark tribunes increasingly thrive in the interstices of our fragmented mediascape and apocalyptic social and planetary horizons. 'Incipient, or inchoate fascism,' Seymour writes, is here. Even when the center holds, the drab, unkept promise of the electoral cycle is unlikely to defuse its convulsive appeal.

Thrilling, clinical, and profound—a necessary account of the stupefying rise, and grotesque fantasies, of the new apocalyptic right. There is no better guide to this hellish ideological landscape or the social dysfunction which gave rise to it.

Disaster Nationalism describes with exemplary intellectual resourcefulness and precision the explosions of demonic energies around the world. Though rigorously political in its diagnosis of a global psychic disorder, it refuses to sacrifice lucidity to feel-good hope. Rather, it invites its readers to a deeper reckoning with the self than any account of our volatile era.

Frighteningly timely. Seymour pushes us to see how the authoritarians of our time play not only on our fears but also on our passions. Urgent reading for everyone dreaming of a world beyond fascism.

Richly psychoanalytic and rigorous, Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism is a crucial intervention into discourse on contemporary forces of reaction. Seymour forces us to think beyond tired narratives accounting for the far right's appeal. Disaster Nationalism is dazzling, if devastating, further proof that Seymour is an intellectual force invaluable to leftist thought.

Disaster Nationalism is a compelling, terrifying and extremely thorough account of the global rise of the far-right. With characteristic acuity, Seymour explores the psychological appeal of the messages of chaos, violence and destruction conveyed by far-right political movements, and how these visions both draw on and break with traditional fascist narratives, without ever posing a threat to capital accumulation. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand - and combat - the rise of the far-right.

A powerful repudiation ... and a passionate call for an urgent change of course.