Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

My 2025 pick for summer beach reading!!!

Are you an anxious person? Do you ever find yourself shifting from worrying about some possible future conflict to imagining a person in that conflict saying something shitty so that you can spend the next hour feeling genuinely angry at them, only to at some point sheepishly realizing that you’re making this up because your brain would rather aggressively react to something fake than sit in with the discomfort of uncertainty and anticipation?

You don’t? Me neither. But I imagine there are other people who do stuff like that, and I thought about, uh, them, when reading Richard Seymour’s Early in the book, Seymour asks why, at a moment when civilization is in crisis, there are “so many working to hasten the end?” He finds answers in the intersections of a decaying global neoliberal order, a societal mental health crisis fueled by a breathtakingly irresponsible tech industry, and the unfortunate capacities for violence and hatred that live inside us all.

All this combines to produce a politics that seeks to replace the very real and scary dangers of our time with imagined dangers that conveniently take the form of vulnerable scapegoats who are easier to go to war against.