Amia Srinivasan Is The Modern Philosopher The Exchange

TITLE: Amia Srinivasan is the modern philosopher | The Exchange CHANNEL: The New Society DATE: 2026-03-18 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Sex is both highly personal, intimate, private, and squarely political and public. And that is the dilemma of sex and sexuality. I’m actually allergic to the thought that all philosophy needs to be accessible or have impact or that everyone needs to be a quote unquote public philosopher. I [music] don’t want to live in a world where everything is instrumentalized. And that’s a world without art. That’s a world without literature. It’s a world without music.

When you think of an Oxford philosopher, you probably have a certain idea or image in mind. I tend to think of the classic sketch from the 1960s in which Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller pose as two Oxford philosophy dons obsessing over the word slab with increasing pedentry and absurdity. Joining me today is an Oxford philosopher who feels quite different from the longestablished stereotype. She is the Chichi Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College Oxford, a position famously held by Sir Isaiah Berlin. She writes about topics of immense public interest and even controversy. Subjects like pornography, incelss, sexual desire, or topics you don’t expect philosophers to be getting into like shark attacks and surfing. Her recent LRB lecture at Senate House sold out almost instantaneously. I couldn’t get a ticket. Luckily though, Amy Vasan joined me, Tangel Rashid, shortly afterwards on the exchange. Amia, what is a philosopher? [sighs and gasps] It’s a tough one, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, I I would like to answer that question in the widest, most generous way possible. I think the a philosopher is someone who asks questions without end. someone who I mean the way I I talk about it to my first year undergraduates is is philosophy in a in a sense is is an illness right and everyone has at least a little bit of it um every child asks questions but it’s the child who then turns into the adult who never really stops asking those questions especially the questions that seem impossible to a answer questions like what is the relationship between mind and world or how do I know anything exists or what’s the fundamental point of existence it’s that kind of person who is so virilently affect infected with this disease that that they are a philosopher it’s interesting that you dwell on the questioning aspect as opposed to the answering aspect I mean other academic disciplines you might say are about offering answers but you say philosophy is somehow a bit different from them. I do think so. I mean, one way of it’s a slightly it’s it’s a slightly rudimentary and simplistic way of thinking about it, but it’s nonetheless useful uh is to think of philosophy as this sort of discipline that then produces these other disciplines. Um once we create systematic methods for answering questions, then that that set of methods get siphoned off and into a discipline. Right? So you know historically there was no distinction between philosophy and natural philosophy the natural sciences but once you get a regimented set of methods for answering questions about the natural world then we can distinguish the natural sciences from philosophy. And philosophy in a way is that residual discipline. It’s the discipline that houses all of those questions which in a sense the we don’t even yet know how to go about answering. M um so philosophy is kind of the the discipline that makes all the other disciplines possible. Well that is a very controversial view. It’s a view I think I hold. There is something I think quite fundamental about philosophy because it interrogates things like the very conditions of meaning and existence and the rest of the disciplines presuppose for example that language is meaningful or that we can know something or that the external world exists that there are other subjects apart from ourselves. And philosophy is that discipline which is willing to interrogate the very basic presuppositions of all of the other disciplines. Uh but there you know but that doesn’t mean necessarily that um so there’s there’s a kind of fundamentality about philosophy but that doesn’t mean that philosophy always gets the last laugh right there’s a view on which uh philosophy has to be very responsive to developments in the natural sciences say and I certainly think philosophy needs to be responsive to discoveries in history and anthropology and sociology and precisely how you do that um how you bring these different disciplines together I think is itself a major philosophical question. I mean that all sounds I mean listening to you now that uh that all sounds very abstract uh to me and I suppose philosophy has always been about abstraction to a degree and getting away from uh the personal but I’m very interested in what it’s like to be uh a philosopher as an individual as a person. I mean there’s a very famous paper, you know, um, what is it like to be a bat? I mean, what is it what is it like to be a philosopher? How does it feel being a philosopher? [laughter] I don’t know if there’s a single answer to that question. I think different philosophers go different way. How does it feel to me? I think what it feels like for me and has always felt like is a yearning to kind of go deeper and more fundamental. I I think part of what happened just you know to explain how my personal biography relates to this is I moved around a lot as a child and so I think I was quite aware of the way in which the specificities and particularities of culture and language and family upbringing. I was raised by immigrant parents uh from India in various western and other Asian and in fact middle eastern countries. And so I had a kind of um early awareness of the cultural, historical, religious, familial specificity of one’s beliefs, values, language, way of thinking and so on. And I think a question I was always drawn to which was well given the localess, the perspectal, the contingency that shapes my world view, how do I know something like the objective truth? How do I transcend these these um these particularities to to get uh what Thomas Nagel calls a view from nowhere? And is that even possible? So I think that in my case, and I think this is actually true of just about all philosophers, there is something very very very intimate and personal that stands at the bottom of my philosophical instincts and the way I think about philosophy and how I would even describe it as an enterprise. That’s very interesting. And I’m I’m glad you um you’ve started to talk about your very interesting um uh background and how that started to shape you as a philosopher. I mean you were born in Bahrain. I was um to Indian parents and you also still describe yourself as Indian. Yes. Um but you were raised in places like Singapore, Taiwan. Um, I mean, how is that some that experience of so many different places part of philosophy? Hm. You know, it’s it’s a great question because one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently are um you know, the ancient Greek philosophers of of the sixth sixth and uh fifth centuries uh before Plato. And it was a very very fertile philosophical moment. And part of what I think produced all these extraordinary philosophical uh arguments and forms of exploration was travel. So it was there I mean Greece was an empire and uh there was you know in fact the most interesting bits of philosophy were actually coming from the outer reaches of the Greek empire these colonies in um in you know modern day Turkey and there was a huge amount of exchange with the near east uh and then as far as India uh and so I think you know I think on one hand one can of course just sit in the same town forever and do philosophy. But so I don’t think there’s something essential about travel. But I do think that for me the experience of dislocation and having to adjust and also the feelings of alienation that come with the experience of travel and being an immigrant did produce a kind of um a certain set of philosophical preoccupations. M and it seems to me that you’re suggesting that um it’s not just people who move and travel, but ideas move and travel with them and that’s how you get new ideas and and new philosophies. Is that is that kind of what you’re suggesting? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, you cannot tell the history of quote unquote western philosophy without thinking about cross-cultural engagement uh well beyond the quote unquote West. and intellectual exchange has always been really important to the history of philosophy. The connections between Arabic philosophy, Western philosophy, Indian philosophy, um or oral of of ex, you know, extraordinary moments and and part of the reason it’s it’s important is, you know, philosophy aspires to think in ways that aren’t parochial. that aspires to not just rep reproduce inherited ideas and patterns of thinking but to as philosophers would expl say explore the the whole of possibility space. So everything that’s possible that’s logically possible we try and think about uh [snorts] including far off remote uh possibilities but in fact we are all ourselves creatures of habit of culture of of convention of particular languages and frameworks and so sometimes it’s very useful in fact it’s often very useful to be brought up short by uh meeting someone from another culture another background of course that’s in a sense less and less possible today because we have an increasingly globalized and homogeneous culture. But one way we can replicate that experience today is through the study of history, which is part of why the study of history is so important for philosophy. Even though lots of contemporary philosophers wouldn’t agree with that, a lot of contemporary philosophers would like to think of philosophy as akin to something like physics where, you know, the history of physics is extremely interesting, but to be an excellent contemporary physicist, arguably you don’t need to know anything about the history of physics. It’s that’s mere biographical detail as it were of the discipline. So you think of philosophy as more anchored in um human contingency and you think of philosophy as a as a very much a social science. Yes. I I think I mean the phrase used by the Oxford philosopher Bernard Williams was humanistic discipline. Philosophy is a humanistic discipline. Um and you know it’s a it’s a rich phrase and exactly what we mean by that is is complicated. I I’m someone who doesn’t like to police the boundaries of philosophy very much. So, I’m very open to a style of philosophy that’s more akin to [snorts] a science that is very formal, very analytic, uh really about creating a a you know, a system. But I also would be very sad if philosophy didn’t wrestle with the contingencies of human life, wasn’t engaged with history, sociology, anthropology, wasn’t thinking seriously about literature. Philosophy as it at its best takes in takes in everything. Philosophy at its best is about everything. And could you tell us a little about your journey to becoming, you know, such a well-known philosopher? Um, where you studied, um, how you ended up eventually holding this chichle chair at Oxford. Well, it’s a story full of contingency and luck. Lots and lots of good luck and many many things could have gone differently and I would not be where I am. I wouldn’t even be an academic. Um, I was an undergraduate at Yale in the US, which was really wonderful. And I did, you know, major in philosophy, but because it was the American university system, I took a whole range of courses and in literature and history and the sciences. And I loved doing all all of that. And but the truth is, I didn’t I didn’t think I was going to be an academic. And it’s not because I didn’t want to be. It seemed to me when looking at my professors that if you could get a job at a university, it was the best job in the world. I wanted to stand up there. I wanted to lecture. I wanted to be able to read text for the rest of my life. For some reason, I did not see myself as an academic. And that’s despite having done extremely well as a student. I think I had something to do with gender. I think it was I had extremely encouraging professors, but at the same time, I think I had this image in my mind of what an academic looked like. And I had all of these peers who were also philosophy majors who were young men. They were extremely bookish. They wore tweed and they couldn’t imagine themselves doing anything apart from entering the academy. And it felt like they couldn’t survive outside the academy. And I never felt that way. I was very involved in politics. I was interested in the law. It seemed to me that there were many things I might be um interested in doing and so it didn’t feel like a vocational calling. And are you saying that you didn’t think of yourself as a philosopher yet because the world thinks of philosophers as being men? Is that partly what you’re suggesting? I think that’s that’s that’s partly what I’m suggesting, but I really I want yeah, it’s complicated because I want to qualify that because I was I had a hu the the the in a way the power of the image of the academic or the philosopher as this kind of male-coded figure is so is is is strong that despite the fact that I had a professor after professor who was extraordinarily supportive of me and who never gave me a moment’s doubt that I was excellent at what I did and I couldn’t could do this. Nonetheless, I thought it wasn’t quite for me. And then I got very lucky and I got a scholarship to Oxford. So, ended up at Oxford and did um what’s known as the BIL in philosophy, which uh is in fact an MIL um a master’s degree. And that was an extraordinary experience. And so it put me on the path to becoming an academic philosopher. And then eventually you take the famous all souls prize fellowship exam which is this exam um you know famously taken by your predecessor Isaiah Berlin where you are asked to answer sort of fishly difficult questions sometimes questions that have just a single word and you’re meant to respond to to that. Could you tell us a bit about that? It is a delightfully idiosyncratic exam. um you take it across well in my day you took it across three days. Uh you took a set of papers that are in your specialist subject in my case philosophy and then also everyone who sits the exam takes a set of general papers on sort of general questions about arts, politics, culture, sport and so on. And then in my day, although this is no longer true, there was uh one three-hour exam that had a single word as a question. And my word was reproduction. How telling. I mean, this was just a a complete coincidence that the word happened to be something that you were so engaged with. You know, that’s so interesting. So I’ll tell you a bit of inside all souls gossip which is that when the exam setters you know the whole college kind of comes together to to talk about what you know what the the questions on the exam should be and someone had originally floated the idea that the word should be sex and then uh I think the counterp proposal was well we can’t say sex so let’s say reproduction and the original proposer pointed out that those actually don’t mean the same thing but reproduction was left to stand. I actually wasn’t that interested in feminism at that point. Right. Yeah. I had never taken a single course on feminist theory when I was an undergraduate. I certainly hadn’t done any of that when I was doing a BEL in Oxford. My BEL training was all in analytic epistemology and metaphysics and some Vickenstein. Uh so the feminism came later. And and when did it come? I mean, I’m interested in the fact that when you um a couple of years ago were appointed the Chuchi chair at Whole Souls, a lot of the media coverage was interested in the fact that you were the first woman to hold the position, the first person of color to hold the position, also the youngest um incumbent. Um you know, how do you feel? How did you feel about that kind of commentary? I mean, was was it at some level a little sexist and based on the idea that obviously it should typically only be a man who could have such a job or I mean, you know, what was your reaction to that? No, I don’t think it was sexist or or or racist to point out um those those those frankly culturally and socially salient features uh of me. I mean, look, I I think that uh talking about people’s race or or sex is only would only be problematic in a a longed for a future in which there wasn’t any kind of discrimination structural or interpersonal along racial or or gendered or indeed class or other lines. Um, now if people said that I got it only because I was a woman or, you know, because I was a woman of color, I think those would be racialized and and and and sexist comments. What about things like, you know, the observer calling you philosophy’s hottest property and and things like that? Did they call me that? [laughter] And uh, you know, you know, you were featured in Vogue and and that kind of thing. I mean, um, do do you I mean, what do you make of that kind of thing? Do you find it a bit tiresome or do you not mind? Well, I loved being in Vogue. That was great. Um, uh, I I I love clothes and I think that much of what’s in Vogue is just absolutely delightful and artistically interesting. and um and uh my interviewer was absolutely fantastic and we had a really rich and challenging and productive conversation and so I felt taken extremely seriously and I think British Vogue is particularly fantastic at doing that under Edward Enil. Um I didn’t know about the hottest property. I’m going to have to look that up. Um but partly I think the um the interest um that the media has shown in your work is because you’ve shown an interest in uh topics of public interest um like sexuality and and politics and race and gender. Um what got you interested in these topics? So, I think I’ I’ve always been interested in politics since I was extremely young. And I remember watching the first Gulf War, the first televised war on on TV and asking my father the obvious kind of four-year-old question, you know, um who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? And my father’s response was they’re all everyone’s a bad guy. And that was just really powerful. And it was an introduction into to political and complex thinking. Um and and when I was undergraduate at Yale, I was very involved in labor politics, union politics, local elections, things like that. Um I got interested in feminism in particular as a body of theory only when I was in graduate school and it was an extracurricular thing. So it was something I was sort of doing in secret away from my dissertation which was you know very squarely in an analytic epistemology thinking about the nature of knowledge. Um and I started reading first by myself and then put together just invited other graduate students who might be interested in reading feminist theory and we got together and read it and I found it so rich. I found it like I found it like reading Plato. I I found reading someone like Schulamoth Firestone or Adren Rich or Sylvia Federici as exciting as reading Plato or Russo or Hobbes. And in terms of its textual complexity and richness and theoretical ambition and of course I also thought that what they were politically arguing, the particular political interventions they were trying to make were important. um and valuable even if you know I didn’t agree with all of the details of the particular vision for which they were arguing. But it was also what what was really compelling for me was that there’s just this huge literature that we don’t really take we don’t many people in the academy certainly in philosophy departments haven’t historically taken seriously as theory or as philosophy. And when you actually attend to this literature, it’s so not just politically and personally but intellectually powerful. And that’s what got me interested in it. And so I started teaching it. And in a way, it was teaching initially at UCL uh feminist theory uh that really brought me to it, made me ultimately write the right to sex. And the right to sex um was uh an essay that you wrote in the LB which then became the title of your of your of your first book. I mean how did other philosophers take to you um getting involved in sexual controversies basically? I mean I mean what was the response like? Were you conscious of doing something quite radical and new? No, I don’t I, you know, I I don’t think I I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it is I’m doing. I mean, I think about the thing itself. So, I think about what it is I’m writing. I think about an idea that I’m trying to elaborate. I very, very rarely take up the perspective from the outside and think about how it looks from the outside. I’m just I’m just always led by what’s interesting to me. And most importantly, is there something that I feel like no one else is saying that needs to be said? That’s for me the question. Um, I think if I were to take up that outside perspective, I would find it a bit debilitating. I I don’t think it’s it would be healthy for me. I’m sure there’s some people who are very good at seeing themselves from the outside. And uh, but you must see yourself from the outside to a degree in that your work is so much more relatable and readable. um from the perspective of outsiders compared to other philosophers. That is to say um you know ordinary people can read your essays and and reckon with something there in a way that not many other philosophers uh do that. Um yeah, I think that’s right. But there’s also a tradition of people of of philosophers in fact you know um some of the most famous white male philosophers writing in a kind of public medium. I mean, you know, you mentioned Isaiah Berlin, Brennan Williams’s essays in the LRB are another example. Derek Parett even has some things that um are more accessible, Thomas Nagel. And I love that tradition. I mean I think I love the tradition of philosophers and it was particularly a strong tradition in this country and very much tied up with uh British you know television and radio historically um the tradition of philosophers speaking on on matters of public import. And so I I I suppose I don’t actually feel like what I was doing was trailblazing so much as you know continue make continuing and making a tradition my own. But your your style as a philosopher is also quite interesting in that you’ve you’ve drawn on that tradition but you’ve taken it seemingly to a new level. I mean, you know, you write essays with titles like talking to my students about porn or on not sleeping with your students and and you know, you use words like fuckability in essays which which I don’t think many philosophers have done until now. So there clearly something there that you’ve you’ve done that’s quite different from what’s been done before. Yes, I won’t deny that. I mean, I don’t I I doubt Bernard Williams or Isaiah Berlin would use fuckability in in an essay. Um, I think that comes from my feminism. So, when you one thing that’s quite extraordinary about feminist writing is its willingness to speak openly and candidly about things that are often thought of as private, but in fact are deeply political. um and to be creative with language and sometimes provocative with language. And so I do think you’re right um in that I’m drawing on maybe a different tradition and bringing these traditions together in ways that I imagine from the outside could be surprising. Uh you just mentioned um the fact that in your view things that we think of as being private are actually quite political and this is essentially what you think about sexual desire that it’s uh a political phenomenon. You say that it’s something squarely within the bounds of social um critique. Could you tell us a bit more about why you think of sex in this way? [snorts] So I think the thing I would want to say is that sex is both highly personal, intimate, private and squarely political and public. And that is the dilemma of sex and sexuality, right? Um so I think we’re all familiar with the first half of that equation. uh you know the why sex is something that we think of as personal that why it should exist in a um quite robust sphere of privacy although that of course itself is a pretty late historical and political achievement and certainly not one hard one around um the world. [gasps] Why is it political? Well, if you look at actual patterns of and expressions of sexual desire or maybe put better um people’s expressions of sexual status, right? Uh how the sexual marketplace is constructed and figured, you will see that the huge influence of politics, right? So to take a really concrete example, you take a dating app, whether it’s a straight or gay dating app, and you’ll find that the number of, you know, swipes or likes or messages that someone gets is, you know, can be just very easily predicted off of their uh their race, for example. That’s a huge determinant. Um their, you know, their disability status. uh you know if we’re talking about gay men uh whether they are coded as you know feminine or masculine and you know one way of thinking about all of this is well people just like what they like. Sure. But it’s not just the case that people like what they like. It’s obviously the case that [snorts] um our politics, our highly non ideal politics, a politics that’s riven with racist prejudice, class prejudice, um abbleism, prejudice about uh pre prejudice against women, which is then um transmuted into a prejudice against, you know, feminine gay men. [snorts] uh has a huge impact on who is considered desirable um or or not. And so that’s the kind of dilemma, right? So on one hand, we need to treat people’s sexual preferences as theirs, right? Not to be intervened with. Um you know, we know or we should know all of the ugly things that follow from trying to intervene in people’s sexual preferences. They think about the long history of of attempts at conversion therapy of of gay men and you know gay men and women. But on the other hand, it’s just clearly the case that the sexual marketplace like all marketplaces is one shaped by uh quite ugly political forces. So here’s the more controversial implication of your argument that actually there might be you say a duty to transfigure as best as we can our desires. um which is basically suggesting that there might be legitimate interventions to be made whether personal or social about changing your desires and changing essentially who you find desirable and you know who you’re into. Um can I stop you there? So there’s a difference between saying this is just a little this is a case where a little philosophical distinction is really important. So there’s a distinction between saying that and I and I don’t actually say you do have the duty. I I query I asked the question um but there’s a duty a difference between saying that there may be or that even say that one has a duty to transfigure one’s own desires and saying that someone has the right to transfigure or attempt to transfigure someone else’s desires. Right? So it may for example be the case that each of us has some sort of are under some kind of moral pressure to interrogate ask questions about why we desire what we desire who we desire whether we could open up that desire. That’s one question. And that’s very different from saying that we should um that we have a right to question other people much less that the state has some right to get involved. Although I mean one thing to think about is um you know when you’re doing something like sex education for students um [snorts] you know sexual racism might be something you talk about right I mean along with thinking about you know something like pornographic literacy. How do you understand um that what is presented on the pornography screen is not a you know realistic representation of you know the kind of sex most people have or should have. There are places where you might think or you might think about questions about representation in magazines like Vogue or um or on in advertising or in films, you know, because all obviously the media plays an enormous role in shaping what we think of as beautiful or desirable. So then could the flip side actually be legitimate then? I mean, if if um as you’re saying, society uh through things like the media um can unduly and and negatively influence people’s desires, should society and the media and so on also be harnessed to positively influence people’s desires. Is that something that you might think actually quite reasonable? Look, I mean, maybe maybe if we got to a situation where we had a properly funded NHS social welfare system, where, you know, there wasn’t a genocide being committed in in in in Gaza, where, you know, we we had addressed the ravages of global capitalism and climate crisis. I mean, you know, so it’s quite a it’s quite a utopian thought at this point. I mean, and so it is a bit of a utopian thought experiment that that essay. uh but what it is trying to do is is is bring to light and this is often what philosophers try to do. This is bringing us back to you know the way in which this is a recognizable bit of philosophy. um you know trying to bring into light a kind of dilemma that hasn’t really been recognized but I do think that at the personal level one should in many cases maybe not all maybe not where you already have a committed life partner right but should think about um why it is that you find yourself only ever dating I don’t know white people uh you know what’s going on there. Is it just pre quote unquote preference, fixed preference, or is it because there is um a little voice in your head that is telling you that’s what a high status person looks like? Um, and what would it and here’s here’s something that I that I think is really important about that I tried to bring out in the essay, which is that most of us have the experience of desiring something that politics says we shouldn’t desire, right? Lots of that’s an extremely familiar experience. So, it’s obviously very familiar to queer people, but it’s also, I think, very familiar to straight people. And it might not just be in romance or sex, might also be in friendship, right? having wanting a friendship that cuts along lines of class or race, right, in a in a very classridden or racist society or even being attracted to music or food that is coded as undesirable or you know uh inappropriate for you. We all have those experiences. And what would it be? I want to ask to listen to those experiences more because there I do think there’s a kind of utopian a little like whisper of a utopian political possibility there. Very interesting. Um I think that’s a good uh place to take a break. We’ll be back after this. Welcome back to the New Statesman podcast. I’m Tangel Rashid and I’m here with my guest Amy Surini Vasan who has just given the LRB lecture in London. Um and that was about psychoanalysis and I presume your interest in psychoanalysis is connected somehow to your interest in sexuality and feminism but you have been applying psychoanalysis to politics. How does that work? Right. So I come at psychoanalysis from multiple different uh origin points. So one as you say is is feminism. So um feminists have have a very vexed and ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis and that’s been true since you know the very early development of of Freud’s uh theories and you know that some of some of the the greatest living um feminists you know in in in this country people like Jaclyn Rose and and Juliet Mitchell are uh not just you know committed not just you know committed psychoanalytic theorists and feminists uh but really see a psychoanalytic framework as absolutely essential to having a a really complex and in fact humanistic um feminism. A feminism that doesn’t just trade in simple dichotoies of good and evil and you know oppressor and victim. On the other hand, lots of feminists have historically been very skeptical of notions like penis envy or uh they read Freud as offering a kind of normative endorsement of of traditional femininity and and the patriarchal family. So there’s a huge feminist imperative um or there’s there’s a huge feminist discourse on psychoanalysis which is very rich and fascinating. That’s one reason I’m I’m drawn to psychonalysis. But another reason has to do with the thing we were talking about earlier, which is um the way in which the contingencies of um history and culture and family uh shape how we view the world. And there’s a way of thinking about the psychoanalytic project as a whole as as as an elaborate one elaboration of that idea. Right? So it’s it’s a kind of origin tracing. You are tra you you’re tracing the deep origin of human neurosis and human behavior, right? By thinking of it as coming from the repression from the conscious self into the unconscious of some kind of unthinkable idea. And then the idea is that you excavate and unear that deep thought and bring it to consciousness. You go deep into the imagination. Yeah. [clears throat] And you can do that with politics, you’re saying as well. I mean, Freud studied sexuality with reference to things like the f uh fantasy, libido, you know, the death drive, um, and things like that. Um, how do they help us interpret politics? Well, what’s so interesting is that Freud’s immediate students um at the very beginning of the 20th century were intensely interested in uh especially after World War I in combining radical politics with Freudian psychoanalysis. So people like Ottophenol, Wilham Reich, Helena Deutsch, I mean they were most of them were uh committed Marxists or socialists. Freud was a liberal. they were further left of him and they wanted to bring together their radical you know politics that very much focused on you know the working class with psychoanalysis both theoretically so how do you combine Marx’s historical materialism with this theory that’s all about the unconscious something that’s not in a sense very material but also practically so they were interested in how do you actually put psychoanalysis at the use of the working pass and one [snorts] answer to that was through the creation of free clinics which were all over Europe in the postworld war moment destroyed by the Nazis but there was this kind of utopian moment in places like Berlin and Budapest and Vienna where and in London where you had psychoanalytic clinics that served poor and workingclass people um and in you know and uh William Reich uh is a very famous uh uh figure at this moment. And he ultimately he’s someone who uh on one hand uh was very involved in in in the free clinic movement and actually had um an an a clinic that a mobile clinic that he would take around and use to speak to um young working-class people about psychoan psychoanalysis but also contraception and premarital sex and Marxist instruction. Um and then ultimately he’s also he ends up writing you know a book on the mass psychology of fascism. So all of these figures are also very interested increasingly in the 30s and 40s in trying to understand not just fascism and European fascism but the appeal of European fascism to the working classes of Europe. Why is it that the eur Europe’s working classes are drawn to fascism? And they think that psychoanalytic notions like the ones you were talking about are absolutely crucial for understanding that. And of course, you know, you might think a similar thing today as many theorists do. So, let’s get into that because you talk about the mass psychology of fascism and um whether or not we think fascism uh is on the rise today. Certainly that there is a rise in the far right. Yes. Um whether in this country, America or you know AC across the world. um what is the psychology of that? I mean what what does psychoan psychoanalysis reveal um about this phenomenon? Well, psychoanalytic thinkers have a range of different answers and I don’t want to pin my colors to any mast. Um but I’ll tell you some different ideas which and you can tell me if any of them sort of ring true or or appeal to you. So, you know, Reich’s original idea, Wilham Reich’s original idea was that there’s something about the family, the the patriarchal family, the family that is nuclear, that’s dominated by a father, um that is socially conservative, that’s sexually repressive, ensures that the children um you know conform with um you know, heteronormative uh uh sexual morality, no premarital sex, etc., no homosexuality. Uh it it creates it because it suppresses sort of sexual desire. It makes ordinary people then have these kind of longings that are then very easily channeled by authoritarian strong men and blood and soil mysticism, blood and soil nivism, mysticism and so on. I’m not particularly attracted to that thought. I think another kind of way of thinking about um uh you know bringing together psychoanalysis with the appeal of the far right is thinking about quite an understandable in I would say innate um ubiquitous human drive for safety and security. Right? So psychoanalysis thinks of each of us as no matter how outwardly rational and adult and mature as fundamentally a kind of helpless terrified infant. And that terrified infant wants security and safety and in fact wants homogeneity, right? Wants a kind of oneness with a mother or or original caretaker, typically a mother. Um, and it’s very easy to tap into that thought and then redirect it at um, you know, an anxiety about immigrants and other forms of infiltration. That’s quite a disturbing thought because those desires uh, the desires of a child for comfort and safety are quite innate and it would then follow that these um, at a political level they might also be somewhat innate. I mean, is that is that an implication there? Yeah, it’s a great question. And so this is a matter of huge debate when people bring together psychoanalysis and politics is the upshot of all of this a kind of con fundamentally conservative thought, right? The thought that well there’s just certain natural human tendencies, right? And it places a limit on political possibilities. So it’s a kind of anti-utopian thought, right? There’s always going to be a hostility towards others. There’s always going to be desire to police boundaries and so on. and and but you don’t have to I think have that view because you can think well we can grow up in certain ways. You can teach people that there are forms of safety and security to which they are entitled, right? Like every person should be entitled to walk down the street without fear of bodily harm from other people, from the state. Um and then there are forms of safety and security that we have to give up as we get older, right? So for example, we all die and safety and security from our death is not something possible even though increasingly billionaires really think it should be for them, right? Like longevity projects, bunkers in New Zealand, I mean the anxiety about finitude and human frailty um is just is so intense and there are people who literally are hoping to buy their way out of it. And so I would hope that thinking about these things that are innate does not mean thinking about them as fixed. Um what you can have is and and and I think this is true of of Freud even though there are certainly certainly conservative impulses in there. He does think that coming to have this better self-standing does can give you more freedom in relation to those ideas. But in so far as you keep these ideas repressed, in so far as you don’t think about them, that’s when they have control. That’s when um they place a real limit on human behavior. M and you mentioned uh a few moments ago um the idea of strong men and we are living in a in a period when politically there are instances of strong men um and there’s a certain kind of cod fraudian way of interpreting that of you know maybe whole societies having daddy issues of some kind um I mean is is there something to that I think there is something to that I do think that you know for example Donald Trump is promising the kind of restoration of of fathers um and a certain kind of father. The father uh you know coded as white and middle class and um and a straight of course and a father who rules over a particular kind of family, a highly normative family. Um and I think that is I think that’s the appeal. And by the way, the appeal is not one that is just exercised over men. although Trump does better with men than women, but also many many women. Um, and the So, I I think yeah, there’s there’s a in a sense a a cod way of putting that, but I also think that’s on to something something real. Um, you also mentioned earlier um or you alluded earlier to, you know, the genocide in um in Gaza. um how does psychoanalysis help explain or understand you know you know something like that I mean is is it relevant I think it’s absolutely relevant I mean so Jacqueline Rose whom I mentioned earlier has a wonderful book that’s that’s you know now published many years ago called um the question of Zion and she’s not the only one to to argue along along these lines someone like Jake Rom in this magazine called paraprais has um put forward similar arguments more recently in the context of the Gaza genocide. Um where there is something about the extraordinary trauma of the Nazi Holocaust that when unprocessed collectively when that trauma is not addressed and worked through to use a Freudian notion can then be violently redirected against other people. um in this case Palestinians and not just in this case I mean you know since since uh the founding and indeed beforehand of Israel and it’s very and psychoanalysis is very good at at um dissolving the dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed or oppressor and victim and so it’s very good at seeing the way in which all of us can be both and also the way in which um it’s very easy to switch from one to the other so it doesn’t venerate the victim And it also doesn’t um in a sense, you know, it does it doesn’t make the the oppressor in into just a into a monster. It actually sees this as a kind of, you know, continuous and ambivalent uh set of positions that you can switch back and forth. I think one thing I would add to that story about the unprocessed trauma of the Holocaust um which you know in the lecture I said in a way the the mandate of um never again then gets inverted into the commission of genocide right not at the conscious level although sometimes and that has been one of the features that’s been very disturbing about recent events in Gaza it has been explicit but it gets inverted into yes again genocide but not against us we are now going to be the um the deliverers of this violence as a way of compensating for the fact that we were subject to it. And they would say in order to prevent a genocide of their of of themselves, right? And I think this is always the question. I mean, is that right? I mean, that’s what they would say is that was was I mean, it seems to me just absolutely absurd to think that what was required to uh ensure um the lack of a genocide against the Israeli people was the wholesale destruction of Gaza. Um and I think if you listen carefully to what people actually say, um that that isn’t what they’re really really saying. There’s there’s a deeper wish at work there. What responsibility do philosophers have to this situation, this genocide in Gaza? I mean, does it not sometimes feel so pointless to be engaging in these abstract questions at all souls when something as calamitous as as Gaza is happening? I mean a philosopher you’ll know the one once said um you know poetry is is no longer possible after awitz um is philosopher sorry is philosophy possible after Gaza [sighs and gasps] I don’t I mean is anything possible it’s you know I I certainly feel um in a I I I feel that as a as a as a lived issue. I also think though that dwelling on it is a bit narcissistic. So I think the real question is what power do you have and what do you do with it? And you have to use whatever means you have at your disposal um to uh you know address and and and fight and advocate against injustice and oppression uh as you where where you find it. And you’ve been quite unusual among philosophers in being involved with things like teachings and you know you’ve written about this in in the context of other um student movements and protests. Um um I was also quite involved with the student protest around Gaza in Oxford. Um they did a remarkable job. It’s you know that those encampments weren’t easy to manage and I think the students who were involved in them learned a huge amount about the difficulty of of mass politics as it were. Um and yeah, sorry. Is that what philosophers need to be doing? Like taking the the you know, taking the ideas to to the streets uh at some level? So I don’t think that anyone’s required qua philosopher to do it. I think as a human, you know, I I I I’m not that interested in the particular duties a philosopher may have or may not have. I think as a human being, especially if you’re a human with some influence, if if people will listen to you, then yes, I think um moral outrage um has to be responded to. Whether philosophy always needs to be taken out into the streets, I think the answer is no. I I’m actually and maybe this would come as a surprise given everything I’ve said or if people know anything about my work. I I I’m actually allergic to the thought that all philosophy needs to be accessible or have impact or that everyone needs to be a quote unquote public philosopher. I think the university [gasps] has to have space, lots of space for people just thinking wacky ideas that are really hard to understand and that don’t speak to contemporary politics. Um, I don’t want to live in a world where everything is instrumentalized. And that’s a world without art. That’s a world without literature. It’s a world without music. It’s a it’s also a world without without philosophy. Are you working on any wacky ideas at the [laughter] moment? I mean, what’s your next book going to be about? Well, I’m well, so I I’m working on um a very academic book on uh genealogy, which is a notion that comes from nature, the 19th century German philosopher, um which is precisely about this theme we’ve skirted around of tracing the origins of our beliefs and values and frameworks and what implications uh they might have. I don’t know if the book is wacky, but it’s certainly boring in large parts. [laughter] Uh, so it’s not that’s a very bold confession to make. Well, no, but it’s kind of proudly boring. I mean, you know, it begins with 40,000 words on on Greek philosophy and, you know, um and I do think that the academy needs room for that for for scholarship in terms of wacky ideas though. So, I do have the idea for to make an argument that um and I won’t say too much about it, but that everything is equal. So not just all humans, not just all um humans and animals, not just all living creatures, everything including rocks and stones and trees. Right. Okay. Wow. That is that is wacky, I suppose. Um well, Amy Vasson, u it’s been a real pleasure to have you on the podcast and um I look forward to hearing more about that. Um and yes, uh thank you for joining us. Thank you so much.