Symptomatic materialism. Clinical reflections on revolutionary politics

Abstract

The writing tense the current clinical picture of apathy that left thinking has entered in recent decades - whose leitmotif seems to be reduced to the promotion of adaptable and healthy ways of life in an irrevocable capitalism - diverting its gaze towards the symptomatic or the sick of culture. The notion of symptomatic materialism is developed with the intention of crossing the limits that stopped the revolutionary impulses of the historical materialism of the early twentieth century (Marxism-Leninism) and the subsequent developments around biopolitics and the production of subjectivity of french thought (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari). Freely combining the reading of Santiago López Petit, Diego Stulwark, Peter Sloterdijk and Georges Bataille, symptomatic materialism is presented here as an ethical-political alternative that links the historical split between macropolitics and micropolitics with the intention of going beyond the conformisms in which it seems critical thinking has stagnated. Faced with the therapeutic and cosmetic materialism that abounds in intellectual agendas – dependent on self-care and an aesthetic of existence – symptomatic materialism gives rise to the anomalous as an attempt to revolt the established order.