![]() ![]() Post-2008 financial crash, and particularly since 2016 with the seismic rupture of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, not to mention the ongoing aftershocks of anti-Semitic resurgence and the rise of the far right across Europe the liberal optimism that fuelled mainstream political opinion for so long has been dealt a severe blow. ![]() Self-indulgent posturing this may seem, but it feels like wherever you look in these strange and febrile times, a cynical and doomy pessimism holds sway. Talking on the matter of optimism and pessimism, and ‘half-full glasses’ versus ‘half-empty glasses’, said friend sighed, “let’s be honest, the glass is fucking smashed already, isn’t it?” I still consider it one of the more bluntly pessimistic things I’ve heard someone say with apparent spontaneity, and it’s only a couple of pages in to his book that Thacker addresses the same cliché with his preferred joke, ‘the glass is half-full, but of poison’. On receiving Eugene Thacker’s latest book Infinite Resignation in the post, I called to mind something a friend of mine said once on a walk through a wood. ![]()
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