西方现代性批判系列讲座预告

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Governing us as neuro-chemical selves: a Foucault-inspired critique of our psychiatric present

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In Western countries, it has become statistically normal to meet at least one psychiatric diagnosis during one’s lifetime; and psychiatric diagnostic language has spread to lots of areas of life (the law, welfare, schools/universities, etc.) and become part of people’s identities – in sum, we live in a psychiatric present. Drawing on Foucault’s account of power, I critically discuss this development, disclosing the often invisible way psychiatrization has come to structure our fields of action.

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Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism develops a novel type of critique according to which capitalism expropriates or consumes the very conditions that make it possible. In short: capitalism is a ‘cannibal’ system. But what are cannibal systems? And how should we best understand their inner logic? In this presentation, I show how an illuminating account of the logic of cannibal systems can be reconstructed from some writings of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. On the analysis that emerges, cannibal systems are (i) self-concealing; (ii) self-consuming; and (iii) self-replicating. I show how, while Kierkegaard’s proximal concern in his own use of cannibalism imagery was his contemporary Danish religious establishment, he also applies the core analysis to Western modernity far more widely.  I also draw out three lessons from Kierkegaard’s analysis: that cannibal systems need to be unmasked as such; that they cannot be relied upon to bring about their own demise; and that resisting their logic requires finding ways to (re)appropriate that which they expropriate.

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Why workplace democracy? Comments on Axel Honneth’s The Working Sovereign

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In this talk, I evaluate Axel Honneth’s argument for workplace democracy in his recent book, The Working Sovereign(2025). Honneth discusses three criticisms of labour relations based on estrangement (or alienation), autonomy, and democracy, and argues that the democracy argument is the most compelling. On this basis, he argues that there is a strong normative case for introducing democracy in the workplace. While I am sympathetic to this argument, I suggest an alternative justification that is closer in spirit to the critique of labour relations found in Marx’s work and in Frankfurt School critical theory. I call this approach “democracy against alien power.” Its basic idea is that the impetus for the democratic organisation of work comes from the joint activity of working together and the challenges that this activity poses. It arises as a reaction to negative experiences of heteronomy, powerlessness, and a loss of comprehension and meaning.

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This presentation argues that any critique of capitalism must take account of markets. It responds to Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism and a more general tendency in Marxist theorising to treat the market as a mere surface phenomenon and to locate the wrongs of capitalism primarily in realms beyond it. In my critique of market, I highlight the social effects of market competition. This is especially crucial in light of the neoliberal turn in economic thought and policy. I argue that market competition produces inequality, fosters individualism, and pits people against each other. In short, market competition erodes community – and, thereby, a condition of its possibility. I turn to ordoliberal theorists who recognised the destructive potential of competition and proposed to supplement competitive markets with traditional village communities. I challenge this proposal and, in closing, point to the promise of an alternative conception of community that emerges out of a market based cooperative economy.