Down, Down, Deeper and Down…

Buried somewhere in my ‘future projects if it ever turns out that I am still capable of writing stuff’ list is writing a piece on ‘decadence as/and political theory’, developing various ideas that I’ve sketched out in some more general chapters and which underpin a hitherto-unsuccessful funding application for an interdisciplinary project. Partly, it will aim at taking the references to ‘decadence’ in contemporary right-wing rhetoric more seriously as a world view, and explore their wider intellectual context in more depth; partly, and more tenuously, it will attempt to support the claim that we can identify ‘decadent thinking’ even when the term itself isn’t used (because, until comparatively recently, it was generally felt to be too obviously polemical and rhetorical and hence not for serious analysis). There is a lot of this stuff about at the moment, across Europe and the United States. One of its striking features is that it is pretty well entirely right-wing and reactionary; at…