Política del malestar
Why on earth would the working class want to vote for a party that opposes public services?
Why do we choose to live in cities that offer us nothing but unstable employment and poor living conditions? More often than we’d like, our decisions make us unhappy or uncomfortable. This sort of behavior is usually attributed to logic and reason: consciousness and free will are at the center of the argument, and these contradictions are assumed to be the result of obligations, material conditions, or a given individual’s irrationality.
But Social Insecurity examines the issue through a different lens: psychoanalysis and the decentralization of reason and the ego. Alicia Valdés considers those elements outside of reason that make us politically (im)mobile and asks why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Emotions and the subconscious, so often written off by political pundits, take center stage in her explanation of the various paths that desire can take, split between the death drive and the possibility of envisioning different realities.