Amia Srinivasan is the modern philosopher

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0:30The New Statesman.

0:35When 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 poses two Oxford philosophy dons obsessing over the word slab with increasing pedantry and absurdity. Joining me today is an Oxford philosopher who feels quite different from the long-established stereotype. She is the Ciceli 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, incels, sexual desire, or topics you don't expect philosophers to be getting into, like shark attacks and surfing.

1:26Her recent LRB lecture at Senate House sold out almost instantaneously. I couldn't get a ticket. Luckily, though, Amiya Srinivasan joined me, Tanjul Rashid, shortly afterwards on The Exchange. Amiya, welcome. Thank you so much. Amiya, what is a philosopher? It's a tough one, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I would like to answer that question in the widest, most generous way possible. I think a philosopher is someone who asks questions without end. Someone who, I mean, the way I talk about it to my first year undergraduates is philosophy in a sense is an illness, right? And everyone has at least a little bit of it.

2:18Every 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 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 virulently infected with this disease 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.

3:01but you say philosophy is somehow a bit different from them. I do think so. I mean, one way of, it's a slightly rudimentary and simplistic way of thinking about it, but it's nonetheless useful, is to think of philosophy as this sort of ur-discipline that then produces these other disciplines. Once we create systematic methods for answering questions, then that set of methods gets 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.

3:44And philosophy, in a way, is that residual discipline. It's the discipline that houses all of those questions, which, in a sense, we don't even yet know how to go about answering. So philosophy is kind of 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.

4:29And philosophy is that discipline which is willing to interrogate the very basic presuppositions of all of the other disciplines. But that doesn't mean necessarily that... So 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 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 how you bring these different disciplines together I think is itself a major philosophical question.

5:13I mean that all sounds I mean listening to you now that that all sounds very abstract to me and I suppose philosophy has always been about abstraction to a degree and getting away from the personal. But I'm very interested in what it's like to be a philosopher as an individual, as a person. I mean, there's a very famous paper, you know, 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?

5:45I don't know if there's a single answer to that question. I think different philosophers How does it feel for you? 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 think part of what happened, just 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 from India in various Western and other Asian and, in fact, Middle Eastern countries.

6:31And so I had a kind of 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 was, well, given the localness, the perspectivalness, the contingency that shapes my worldview, how do I know something like the objective truth? How do I transcend these particularities to get 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.

7:34That's very interesting. And I'm glad you you've started to talk about your very interesting background and how that started to shape you as a philosopher. I mean, you were born in Bahrain. I was. To Indian parents. Yes. And you also still describe yourself as Indian. Yes. But you were raised in places like Singapore, Taiwan. I mean, is that experience of so many different places part of philosophy?

8:09You know, it's a great question because one thing I've been thinking about a lot recently are, you know, the ancient Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries before Plato. And it was a very, very fertile philosophical moment. and part of what I think produced all these extraordinary philosophical arguments and forms of exploration was travel. So it was, I mean, Greece was an empire and 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, you know, modern day Turkey. And there was a huge amount of exchange with the Near East and then as far as India.

9:00And 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 a certain set of philosophical preoccupations. And it seems to me that you're suggesting that 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 new philosophies.

9:46Is 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 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, are all of extraordinary moments. And part of the reason it's important is, you know, philosophy aspires to think in ways that aren't parochial. It aspires to not just reproduce inherited ideas and patterns of thinking, but to, as philosophers would say, explore the whole of possibility space.

10:36So everything that's possible, that's logically possible, we try and think about, including far off remote possibilities. But in fact, we are all ourselves creatures of habit, of culture, 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 meeting someone from another culture, another background. And of course, that's in a sense less and less possible today because we have an increasingly globalized and homogenous 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.

11:21A 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. That's mere biographical detail, as it were, of the discipline. So you think of philosophy as more anchored in human contingency, and you think of philosophy as very much a social science. Yes. I think, I mean, the phrase used by the Oxford philosopher Brennan Williams was humanistic discipline. Philosophy is a humanistic discipline.

11:58And, you know, it's a rich phrase and exactly what we mean by that is complicated. 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 a science that is very formal, very analytic, really about creating 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 at its best 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 where you studied how you ended up eventually holding this chicheli 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.

13:06I wouldn't even be an academic. I was an undergraduate at Yale in the US, which was really wonderful. And I did major in philosophy, but because it was the American university system, I took a whole range of courses in literature and history and the sciences. And I love doing all of that. But the truth is, 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 texts for the rest of my life.

13:45For some reason, I did not see myself as an academic. And that's despite having done extremely well as a student. I think it had something to do with gender. I think 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.

14:25I was interested in the law it seemed to me that there were many things I might be 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 partly what I'm suggesting but I really, yeah it's complicated because I want to qualify that because I was, in a way, the power of the image of the academic or the philosopher as this kind of male-coded figure is so 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 could do this, nonetheless, I thought it wasn't quite for me.

15:22and then I got very lucky and I got a scholarship to Oxford so ended up at Oxford and did what's known as the BPhil in philosophy which is in fact an MPhil, 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, you know, famously taken by your predecessor, Isaiah Berlin, where you are asked to answer sort of fiendishly difficult questions, sometimes questions that have just a single word and you're meant to respond to that. Could you tell us a bit about that?

16:06It is a delightfully idiosyncratic exam. You take it across, well, in my day, you took it across three days, 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 one three-hour exam that had a single word as a question. My word was reproduction. section. How telling. I mean, this was just a complete coincidence that the word happened to be something that you were so engaged with.

16:49You 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 talk about what, you know, what the questions on the exam should be. And someone had originally floated the idea that the word should be sex. And then I think the counterproposal 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.

17:26I'd 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 B-FIL in Oxford. My B-FIL training was all in analytic epistemology and metaphysics and some Wittgenstein. So the feminism came later. And when did it come? I mean, I'm interested in the fact that when you, a couple of years ago, were appointed the Ciceli 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 colour to hold the position also the youngest incumbent. How do you feel?

18:10How did you feel about that kind of commentary? I mean, 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, what, you know, what was your reaction to that? No, I don't think it was a sexist or racist to point out those frankly culturally and socially salient features of me. I mean, look, I think that talking about people's race or sex would only be problematic in a longed-for future in which there wasn't any kind of discrimination, structural or interpersonal, along racial or gendered or or other lines.

18:57Now, 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 sexist comments. What about things like, you know, the Observer calling you philosophy's hottest property and things like that? Did they call me that? And, you know, you were featured in Vogue and that kind of thing. I mean, 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 I love clothes and I think that much of what's in Vogue is just absolutely delightful and artistically interesting and

19:47and 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 Ennefill. I didn't know about the hottest property I'm gonna have to look that up. But partly I think the interest that the media has shown in your work is because you've shown an interest in topics of public interest, like sexuality and politics and race and gender. What got you interested in these topics? So I think I've always been interested in politics since I was extremely young.

20:32And I remember watching the first Gulf War, the first televised war on TV and asking my father the obvious kind of four-year-old question, you know, 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 political and complex thinking.

21:00And when I was an undergraduate at Yale, I was very involved in labor politics, union politics, local elections, things like that. 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 analytic systemology, thinking about the nature of knowledge. 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.

21:37And I found it so rich. I found it like, I found it like reading Plato. I found reading someone like Shulamith Firestone or Adrian Rich or Silvia Federici as exciting as reading Plato or Rousseau 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 and valuable, even if, you know, I didn't agree with all the details of the particular vision for which they were arguing. But it was also what was really compelling for me was that there's just this huge literature that we don't really take.

22:26We 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 feminist theory that really brought me to it, made me ultimately write The Right to Sex. And The Right to Sex was an essay that you wrote in the LRB, which then became the title of your first book. I mean, how did other philosophers take to you getting involved in sexual controversies, basically?

23:16I mean, what was the response like? Were you conscious of doing something quite radical and new? No, I don't, you know, I don't think 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 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.

23:56I think if I were to take up that outside perspective, I would find it a bit debilitating. I don't think it would be healthy for me. I'm sure there's some people who are very good at seeing themselves from the outside. But you must see yourself from the outside to a degree in that your work is so much more relatable and readable from the perspective of outsiders compared to other philosophers. That is to say, you know, ordinary people can read your essays and reckon with something there in a way that not many other philosophers do that. Yeah, I think that's right. But there's also a tradition of people, of philosophers, in fact, you know, some of the most famous white male philosophers writing in a kind of public medium.

24:44I mean, you know, you mentioned Isaiah Berlin. Brennan Williams's essays in the LRB are another example. Derek Parfit even has some things that 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 British television and radio historically, the tradition of philosophers speaking on matters of public import. and so 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.

25:46And, you know, you use words like fuckability in essays, which I don't think many philosophers have done until now. So there's clearly something there that you've done that's quite different from what's been done before. Yes, I won't deny that. I mean, I doubt Brennan Williams or Isaiah Berlin would use fuckability in an essay. I think that comes from my feminism. So 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. And to be creative with language and sometimes provocative with language.

26:39And so I do think you're right 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. You just mentioned 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 a political phenomenon, you say, that it's something squarely within the bounds of social critique. Could you tell us a bit more about why you think of sex in this way? So I think the thing I would want to say is that sex is both highly personal, intimate, private, and squarely political and public.

27:27And that is the dilemma of sex and sexuality, right? So I think we're all familiar with the first half of that equation, you know, why sex is something that we think of as personal, that why it should exist in a 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 the world. Why is it political? Well, if you look at actual patterns and expressions of sexual desire or maybe put better, people's expressions of sexual status, right, how the sexual marketplace is constructed and figured, you will see that the huge influence of politics, right?

28:25So 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 race, for example. That's a huge determinant. Their disability status, if we're talking about gay men, whether they are coded as feminine or masculine. And 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 our politics, our highly non-ideal politics, a politics that's riven with racist prejudice, class prejudice, ableism, prejudice against women, which is then transmuted into a prejudice against feminine gay men, has a huge impact on who is considered desirable or not.

29:35And 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. You know, we know or we should know all of the ugly things that follow from trying to intervene in people's sexual preferences. So think about the long history of attempts at conversion therapy 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 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 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 can i stop you there so there's a difference between saying this is just 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 ask the question.

30:56But there's a difference between saying that there may be, or 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 or 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 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 you know when you're doing something like sex education for students you know sexual racism might be something you talk about right I mean along with thinking about something like pornographic literacy.

32:01How do you understand that what is presented on the pornography screen is not a realistic representation of 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 in advertising or in films, you know, because 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, as you say, society through things like the media can unduly and negatively influence people's desires, should society and the media and so on also be harnessed to positively influence people's is that something that you might think actually quite reasonable?

32:57Look, I mean, 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 Gaza, where, you know, we had addressed the ravages of global capitalism and climate crisis. I mean, you know. So it's quite a utopian thought at this point. And so it is a bit of a utopian thought experiment, that essay. But what it is trying to do is bring to light. And this is often what philosophers try to do. This is bringing us back to the way in which this is a recognizable bit of philosophy. You know, trying to bring into light a kind of dilemma that hasn't really been recognized.

33:40But 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 why it is that you find yourself only ever dating, I don't know, white people. you know what's going on there is it just quote-unquote preference fixed preference or is it because there is a little voice in your head that is telling you that's what a high status person looks like 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?

34:34That'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, it might also be in friendship, right? Wanting a friendship that cuts along the lines of class or race, right? In a very class-ridden or racist society, or even being attracted to music or food that is coded as undesirable or, you know, 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.

35:15Very interesting. I think that's a good place to take a break. We'll be back after this.

35:44and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. This message is brought to you by Cologuard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to screen for colon cancer. The Cologuard test is non-invasive, requires no special prep or time off, and you start screening right from your home. It's just three simple steps, set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, Ask your doctor about the Cologuard test. Available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at Cologuard.com slash podcast.

36:25Welcome back to the New Statesman podcast. I'm Tanjal Rashid and I'm here with my guest Amir Srinivasan, who has just given the LRB lecture in London. 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 origin points. So one, as you say, is feminism. So feminists have a very vexed and ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis. And that's been true since, you know, the very early development of Freud's theories.

37:16And, you know, some of the greatest living feminists in this country, people like Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell are not just, you know, committed, not just, you know, committed psychoanalytic theorists and feminists, but really see a psychoanalytic framework as absolutely essential to having a really complex and in fact humanistic feminism, a feminism that doesn't just trade in simple dichotomies of good and evil and oppressor and victim. On the other hand, lots of feminists have historically been very skeptical of notions like penis envy or they read Freud as offering a kind of normative endorsement of traditional femininity and the patriarchal family.

38:06So there's a huge feminist discourse on psychoanalysis, which is very rich and fascinating. So that's one reason I'm drawn to psychoanalysis. But another reason has to do with the thing we were talking about earlier, which is the way in which the contingencies of history and culture and family shape how we view the world. And there's a way of thinking about the psychoanalytic project as a whole as one elaboration of that idea, right? So it's a kind of origin tracing. You're tracing the deep origin of human neurosis and human behavior by thinking of it as coming from the repression from the conscious self into the unconscious of some kind of unthinkable idea.

39:10And then the idea is that you excavate and unearth that deep thought and bring it to consciousness. You go deep into the imagination. Yeah. And you can do that with politics, you're saying as well. I mean, Freud studied sexuality with reference to things like the fantasy, libido, you know, the death drive, things like that. How do they help us interpret politics? Well, what's so interesting is that Freud's immediate students at the very beginning of the 20th century were intensely interested in, especially after World War I, in combining radical politics with Freudian psychoanalysis. So people like Otto Fenegel, Wilhelm Reich, Helena Deutsch.

39:58I mean, most of them were committed Marxists or socialists. Freud was a liberal. They were for the left of him. And they wanted to bring together their radical politics that very much focused on 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 class? And one answer to that was through the creation of free clinics, which were all over Europe in the post-World War moment, destroyed by the Nazis.

40:42But there was this kind of utopian moment in places like Berlin and Budapest and Vienna and in London where you had psychoanalytic clinics that served poor and working class people. and Wilhelm Reich is a very famous figure at this moment and he ultimately, he's someone who on one hand was very involved in the free clinic movement and actually had a clinic, a mobile clinic that he would take around and use to speak to young working class people about psychoanalysis, but also contraception and premarital sex and Marxist instruction. And then ultimately, he ends up writing a book on the mass psychology of fascism.

41:37So 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 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 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 whether or not we think fascism is on the rise today.

42:16Certainly there is a rise in the far right. Yes. Whether in this country, America or, you know, across the world. What is the psychology of that? I mean, what does psychoanalysis reveal about this phenomenon? Well, psychoanalytic thinkers have a range of different answers, and I don't want to pin my colors to any mast. But I'll tell you some different ideas, which, and you can tell me if any of them sort of ring true or appeal to you. So, you know, Reich's original idea, Wilhelm Reich's original idea was that there's something about the family, the patriarchal family, a family that is nuclear, that's dominated by a father, that is socially conservative, that's sexually repressive, ensures that the children conform with heteronormative sexual morality, no premarital sex, etc., no homosexuality.

43:20It creates – 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 strongmen and blood and soil mysticism, blood and soil nativism, mysticism, and so on. I'm not particularly attracted to that thought. I think another kind of way of thinking about, you know, bringing together psychoanalysis with the appeal of the far right is thinking about quite an understandable, I would say, innate, 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.

44:17And that terrified infant wants security and safety and in fact wants homogeneity, wants a kind of oneness with a mother or an original caretaker, typically a mother. And it's very easy to tap into that thought and then redirect it at, you know, an anxiety about immigrants and other forms of infiltration. That's quite a disturbing thought because those desires, the desires of a child for comfort and safety are quite innate. And it would then follow that these, at a political level, they might also be somewhat innate. I mean, 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.

45:03Is the upshot of all of this a kind of 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 a desire to police boundaries and so on. 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.

45:50and 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 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. what you can have is and and and I think this is true of Freud even though there's certainly certainly conservative impulses in there he does think that coming to have this better self-understanding does can give you more freedom in relation to those ideas but insofar as you keep these ideas repressed insofar as you don't think about them that's when they have control that's when they place a real limit on human behavior.

46:59And you mentioned a few moments ago, the idea of strongmen. And we are living in a period when politically, there are instances of strongmen. And there's a certain kind of Cod Freudian way of interpreting that of, you know, maybe whole societies having daddy issues of some kind. I mean, 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 fathers and a certain kind of father, the father, you know, coded as white and middle class and a straight, of course, and a father who rules over a particular kind of family, a highly normative family.

47:52And 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 women. And so I think, yeah, there's in a sense a cod way of putting that. But I also think that's on to something, something real. You also mentioned earlier, or you alluded earlier to, you know, the genocide in, in Gaza. How does psychoanalysis help explain or understand, you know, you know, something like that? I mean, is it relevant? I think it's absolutely relevant. I mean, so Jacqueline Rose, whom I mentioned earlier, has a wonderful book that's now published many years ago called The Question of Zion.

48:45And she's not the only one to argue along these lines. Someone like Jake Rom in this magazine called Parapraxis has put forward similar arguments more recently in the context of the Gaza genocide, 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. In this case, Palestinians, and not just in this case, I mean, you know, since the founding and indeed beforehand of Israel. And psychoanalysis is very good at dissolving the dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed or oppressor and victim.

49:40And so it's very good at seeing the way in which all of us can be both and also the way in which it's very easy to switch from one to the other. So it doesn't venerate the victim. And it also doesn't, in a sense, you know, it doesn't make the oppressor into just into a monster. It actually sees this as a kind of, you know, continuous and ambivalent 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, which, you know, in the lecture I said, in a way that the mandate of never again then gets inverted into the commission of genocide, right?

50:26Not 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 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 themselves. Right. And I think this is always the question. I mean, is that right? I mean, that's what they would say. I mean, it seems to me just absolutely absurd to think that what was required to ensure the lack of a genocide against the Israeli people was the wholesale destruction of Gaza.

51:15And I think if you listen carefully to what people actually say, that isn't what they're really, really saying. 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 Gaza is happening? I mean, a philosopher, you'll know the one once said, you know, poetry is no longer possible after Auschwitz. Is philosopher, sorry, is philosophy possible after Gaza? Hmm. I don't. I mean, is anything possible? I, you know, I, I certainly feel, you know, I feel that as a as a as a lived issue.

52:25I 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 to, you know, address and fight and advocate against injustice and oppression as you where you find it. And you've been quite unusual among philosophers in being involved with things like teach-ins and, you know, you've written about this in the context of other student movements and protests. I was also quite involved with the student protests around Gaza in Oxford. They did a remarkable job.

53:11It'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 mass politics, as it were. and yeah sorry. Is that what philosophers need to be doing like taking the the you know taking the ideas to to the streets at some level? So I don't think that anyone's required qual philosopher to do it I think as a human you know 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 people will listen to you, then yes, I think moral outrage has to be responded to.

53:58Whether philosophy always needs to be taken out into the streets, I think the answer is no. 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'm actually allergic to the thought that 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 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. I don't want to live in a world where everything is instrumentalized.

54:40And that's a world without art. That's a world without literature. It's a world without music. It's also a world without philosophy. Are you working on any wacky ideas at the moment? I mean, what's your next book going to be about? Well, so I'm working on a very academic book on genealogy, which is a notion that comes from Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, which is precisely about this theme we've skirted around of tracing the origins of our beliefs and values and frameworks. and what implications they might have. I don't know if the book is wacky, but it's certainly boring in large parts.

55:21So it's not the... 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 Greek philosophy. And, you know, and I do think that the Academy needs room for that, for scholarship. In terms of wacky ideas, though, so I do have the idea to make an argument that, and I won't say too much about it, but that everything is equal. So not just all humans, not just all humans and animals, not just all living creatures, everything. Including? Rocks and stones and trees. Right. Okay. Wow. That is wacky, I suppose. Well, Amir Serenivasan, it's been a real pleasure to have you on the podcast and I look forward to hearing more about that.

56:09And yes, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Tanjil Rashid, and my guest, Amir Srinivasan. You can find the link to her recent lecture via the link in the show notes. The podcast will be back next week.

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