Abstractabstract:The concept of “boring dystopia,” a term coined by Mark Fisher, describes the banal and mildly coercive signs that are prevalent in contemporary neoliberal society. It is characterized by a pervasive sense of boredom, banality, and total alienation, which arises from the depletion of social connections caused by free-market fundamentalism and consumer culture. For the author, Edward Hopper’s paintings embody this sense of dystopia, as they depict deserted cityscapes and isolated figures, creating a vision of a society where human connection (...) and interaction have broken down. The COVID-19 pandemic response has further highlighted the erosion of empathy and compassion under neoliberal capitalism, making Fisher’s call for collective action and the creation of new forms of community and solidarity even more urgent. Edward Hopper’s haunting art reminds us that we are already living in a dystopia, and that it is crucial to confront this dystopian reality and imagine new possibilities for the future. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic (...) biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present. (shrink)

This article reviews Bülent Diken’s recent book, Nihilism. In so doing, it focuses especially on the disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism and radical nihilism. Finally, the article claims that Diken’s project is to resuscitate the idea of revolution, to reinvent the revolutionary politics.