An interview with Laura Llevadot, associate professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Barcelona and writer

Laura Llevadot: “People ‘find fulfilment’ in work — or so they believe”

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Andreu Navarra

Laura Llevadot is Associate Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. In 2022, she published Mi herida existía antes que yo. Feminismo y crítica de la diferencia sexual. She has just released Quatre mil dos-cents vint-i-set suïcidis no exemplars. Desig i melancolia en el capitalisme neoliberal (HyO), an essay that strikes a curious balance between unity and multiplicity.

Let me start by asking about the cover of your book, which I find fascinating. What is this blue, hybrid beast — part raven, part dog — that appears to be falling?

That image has a story behind it. It’s a work by Miriam Cahn, a Swiss artist I discovered at an exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Her work left a deep impression on me, especially her paintings of falling bodies. She has several that depict human figures in free fall — some of which take on animal features. Some are set against blue-toned backgrounds; others show bodies in more earthy shades. Among them, you can make out women, and also children.

On one level, they are desolate — you see them as bodies overcome by violence, as forms that have collapsed. But at the same time, there is something in the very act of falling into the void — and in the blue of the background, which often suggests water, the sea, the possibility of floating — that introduces another layer of meaning. It brings to mind Kieślowski’s Blue, which I discuss in the book in connection with melancholy and mourning.

I chose the image of this dog-raven, rather than one with human silhouettes, because honestly, the latter seemed too harrowing and also too literal. There’s a line by Adorno that says, “Against nihilism, the simple wag of a dog’s tail suffices” — and that may be true, but in this case, it doesn’t apply. We do not know whether the dog fell or was thrown, but we know with certainty it did not jump of its own accord. The fact that it has a beak, though no wings, might make us imagine that at some archaic point it had learned to fly but has since forgotten. A dog falls — likely as a result of human violence. Yet someone witnesses this, is moved by it, and paints it. That someone is Miriam Cahn, but it could be anyone. It has no tail to wag, but there are hands that paint. That, in itself, means nihilism has not entirely triumphed. There is still someone who watches, who grieves, and who creates. And that is no small thing.

What strikes me most is that, after writing the book and selecting the cover, I came across a text by Rita Segato in which she reflects on Cahn’s work, on the patriarchal violence it depicts, and on bodies that nonetheless resist. It was a coincidence — but surely not just that. When I mentioned it to her, she observed that, despite everything, she sees a story of resistance in Cahn’s paintings. I’m not so sure. To me, resistance lies in sustaining a watchful gaze — in being able to paint what many would prefer not to see, often because it is the direct consequence of their own actions.

“Four thousand two hundred and twenty-seven is the number of suicides officially recorded in Spain in the most recent year for which we have verified data (2022)”. This is how your book begins.

Yes. The book is part of HyO’s Numérika collection, which is defined by the inclusion of a number in each title. I felt compelled to write about our present — about the melancholy and depression that shape it, and about the alarming rise in suicides we are currently witnessing.

The number, while it inevitably reduces the singularity of each case — which is always unique and irreducible — nonetheless points to something structural: the conditions of life under neoliberal capitalism, which for many have become unbearable. That was my point of departure.

Why did Mark Fisher take his own life?

Only he knows that. But we do know that he suffered from depression, and we also know his theoretical and political work. Fisher possessed a remarkable capacity to diagnose our times — particularly the emergence of the neoliberal phase he famously termed “capitalist realism”.

At the heart of capitalist realism lies its defining ideology: the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. It’s encapsulated in the often-cited phrase, attributed to Jameson and Žižek, that today “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Fisher set out to rupture this seemingly inescapable worldview. He exposed the many fractures running through capitalism: the exploitation of the planet and the climate crisis; the escalating mental health emergency; the pervasive precarity and the totalising presence of labour in our lives — a condition which, rather than reducing working hours as once envisioned by trade unions, now encroaches upon our weekends and even our inner lives; and the Stalinist bureaucratisation of both institutions and markets, which, under the guise of corporate management, impose an endless regime of assessment and evaluation.

Within this landscape, Fisher tried to imagine an exit — a way out, one he likely longed for himself but ultimately could not reach. Not for himself, at least. Yet he left behind a body of work that continues to help us think — and feel — our way towards that possibility.

I find it deeply poignant that his final lecture, delivered just days before his death, centred on a text by Lyotard, in which the latter asserts that “there is no outside to capital”. Perhaps it was precisely this sentiment — the absence of an outside — that proved unbearable. That recognition can be suffocating. And yet, even in the face of that absence, Fisher opened a path that remains open. One we can still walk.

“There are far too many successful writers, artists, politicians who leave corpses in their wake. This has a name: patriarchy”

What shall we say about Ted Hughes?

Phew… He is a towering literary figure. A member of the Order of Merit. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, among many others. A full-blown success story. Except it can hardly be a coincidence that his wife, Sylvia Plath, died by suicide; that his lover did as well — along with his daughter by her; and finally, that his son followed the same path. Two women, two children — that we know of. This is not about “cancelling” him, certainly not about ceasing to read his work — quite the opposite. But to change reality we must begin by naming things truthfully. There are far too many successful writers, artists, politicians who leave a trail of bodies behind. This has a name: patriarchy. Society has enabled and even honoured such men. It’s revolting. Behind every great man, there is not always a great woman. Often, there are victims — plural — whose lives were consumed to fuel his rise.

“Democracy is hauntological, inhospitable, because it will always haunt established politics, which is totalitarian in so far as it deems itself present and complete…”. Could you expand on this?

This is an idea I take from Derrida. The point is that democracy — precisely because it defines itself as an open system, receptive to critique and responsive to demands — is never complete. It is always haunted by calls for justice that exceed its existing legal and institutional frameworks. These calls come not only from the past, where justice was denied, but also from the future — from possibilities not yet realised.

The problem arises when parliamentary politics shields itself behind the authority of constitutions and the rule of law, presenting itself as definitive, finished. In doing so, it risks becoming totalitarian — not in the conventional authoritarian sense, but in its self-conception as whole, as already just. A democracy that refuses to transform, to open itself to what it has excluded or not yet imagined, ceases to be a democracy in any meaningful sense.

And yet, even the most rigid political form cannot fully silence these demands. However closed or self-assured a democracy may appear, it will always be haunted by the spectres of justice and freedom. This is its inescapable ghost. That’s precisely what “hauntological” means: that the ghosts of freedom — of unrealised, denied, or deferred justice — inhabit democracy, whether it welcomes them or not.

On the same page, we read: “Trapped in cycles of manic hyperactivity and depressive plunges into one’s own personal hell, the neoliberal individual feeds capital while simultaneously sinking into the misery of a life devoid of meaning”.

Life under neoliberal capitalism is relentlessly exhausting. It is no longer merely a matter of selling your labour for a set number of hours each day; it has become about transforming your entire life into capital — a capital you must continually invest in. Having surrendered public services like healthcare, education, pensions, and so on, to the forces of capital, the individual is now expected to provide for themselves all the things the state once guaranteed.

To do this, one must remain in a state of constant activity. This is not confined to the workplace; it extends into the realm of social media, where one is compelled to present an image of happiness, preparedness, and success — all because you can never know when the next job opportunity will arise.

“Depression, anxiety, mental distress are the immediate effects of a life no longer lived, because it has been mistaken for productivity”

You must also cultivate your erotic capital, a part of what you put on the market to validate yourself as a successful individual. And in doing so, you feed the cyber-capital with your data. Everyone knows how repugnant this is. And the fact that none of this has anything to do with who you really are, or how you truly feel, plunges you into your own personal inferno. Depression, anxiety, mental distress are the immediate effects of a life no longer lived, because it has been confused with productivity.

Is desire the fuel of capital?

The question is: why have we accepted this way of life? Lyotard and Baudrillard were among the first to analyse the link between capital and desire. Later, Nick Land — with whom Mark Fisher collaborated at the CCRU — understood that the failure of the Left stemmed from its inability to grasp how capitalism was capable of exciting individual desire. Marcuse, for his part, believed that desire would always exceed labour. But neoliberal reality has proven the opposite; it has refuted Marcuse’s thesis. People now claim to “find fulfilment” in work — or at least they believe so — even at the cost of the anxiety, anguish and depression that haunt them day after day. Neoliberal capitalism has triumphed over leftist thought — despite the entire cycle of struggles in the 1970s — because desire is far more seductive than justice. As sad as that may be, it’s the truth.

“We are a culture of premature ejaculation”, you quote Baudrillard as saying…

Exactly. Discharge is the order of the day. We desire and then we discharge.

What is “neoliberal desire” and what is “post-capitalist desire”?

Some analyses claim that capitalism has captured desire. Amador Fernández-Savater compiles several such arguments in his book Capitalismo libidinal (NED). But the thesis of my book is different. It’s not that neoliberalism has succeeded because it managed to capture individuals’ desires — as though desire were some ahistorical, transcendental category. Rather, desire itself has become the apparatus of capture.

Following Foucault, I argue that from the nineteenth century onwards, the “subject of desire” emerged. That is, the idea that we understand ourselves, essentially, as desiring individuals — something that wasn’t the case before, and which only became possible with the rise of the dispositif of sexuality. Neoliberal desire — the way capitalism feeds off our desires, not just through pornography but also through work — has only been possible because we’ve come to believe that our anthropological essence is to desire.

This is why melancholy and depression — which represent a lack of desire and a withdrawal from productivity — now embody the truth beneath the official narrative. They reflect what is not being acknowledged in the dominant discourse.

“Melancholy and depression — which entail an absence of desire and a disinterest in productivity — today represent the truth behind the official discourse”

Post-capitalist desire, a term coined by Fisher, refers to the desire to escape this trap — this system that feeds on our longing for recognition, validation, and fulfilment. But precisely for this reason, my thesis is that post-capitalism cannot be a project driven by desire. It requires a critique of desire itself. If we ever manage to break free from capitalism, it will be because we have finally put an end to this endless cycle of desiring — a cycle that leads nowhere.

“No anger, no job insecurity — only success and work”

I draw a comparison between Rosalía’s song Candy and Archangel by Burial. Both are great tracks, but whereas Burial opts for anonymity, crackling sounds, spectral atmospheres, and the raw materiality of the recording, Rosalía offers us a polished, luminous piece, accompanied by countless reels in which she showcases her personal success — and those reels are also a form of work. Rosalía works 24/7; she says she “doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t consume, and flaunts it”. Whether or not that’s true, she embodies the success model of the neoliberal individual — a model that has little to do with the countercultural stance once represented by Burial’s dubstep.

That said, I do embrace the shift towards the Latin world that urban music has brought about. I think it delivers a healthy kick against the pretentious Eurocentric and Anglo-Saxon gaze — though we’ll have to see just how subversive that turn can really be. That’s why, in the book, I align myself more with Yung Beef, who strikes me as far more coherent in this context.

“Within the apparatus of neoliberal bureaucracy, we have become this stupid”. What can we do? Is there hope? How can we reclaim the future — and the right to loss?

If we have accepted the exponential increase in meta-work — that is, all the bureaucratic tasks consisting of producing reports, evaluations, self-assessments, memoranda, protocols… instead of actually working — it is because, within this data production, we find validation. We want to be assessed, and that in itself is absurd. Workplaces now resemble social media: likes are no different from positive evaluations or goal achievements in companies. Many people enjoy complaining about being overworked because it generates empathy, but deep down they love being employee of the month and having “objective data” speak on their behalf. That is how desire is satisfied — but only to start all over again the following month.

Some people seem like they came straight out of convent schools where well-behaved children were rewarded. But this, I believe, is exactly the kind of subject neoliberalism has built itself upon: disciplined and desiring, and now equipped with a mechanism for validation.

“You don’t need to believe in the future to know that you don’t want the domination or the sorrow that pervades our lives”

Is there hope? Honestly, I don’t particularly like that word. It’s deeply Christian in its connotations, and with it comes the spectre of despair. Only those who are hopeful can fall into despair. I believe it’s possible to live without hope — and without a future. One doesn’t need to imagine a better future in order to act on principles like justice, anti-authoritarianism, or anti-fascism. You don’t need to believe in the future to know that you don’t want the domination or sorrow that pervade our lives. What I think we’ve lost is exactly that: the struggle against a way of life that suffocates us and leaves no space for the experience of loss — a life that forces us, at all costs, to keep desiring.

How can we stop being idiots?

I don’t have any formulas, but I believe the first step is to recognise the kind of world we’re living in and how we got here. To stop being neoliberal individuals obsessed with likes, goals, professional success, erotic success… To stop capitalising on our relationships, to stop interpreting everything we do in terms of profit, without ever looking back at the trail of bodies we leave behind — that would be the first step. But beyond that, there must also be some form of collective action capable of saying “enough” to this hyper-accelerated way of life and to the direction in which capital continues to push us.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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