Features/Literature: Jean-Philippe Kindler: Just don’t breathe into the pain

Intellectual life is infinitely delicate in its beginnings,” an underestimated sentence from Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectics of Enlightenment,” which could be programmatic for Jean-Philippe Kindler’s new book “Screw Selflove, Give Me Class Struggle. A new critique of capitalism”, which was published by Rowohlt. Although it is polemical in some places, it is more of an expression of a deepening gaze into what is left of today’s broken life.

To say it at the beginning: Anyone who expects a truly “new” criticism of capitalism will not always be able to find something innovative in the book’s argument. The book attempts to repoliticize terms such as poverty, climate crisis, happiness, leftism and, above all, the good life within six chapters. By this, Kindler means to work out catchwords that he sees as threatened by depoliticization and the retreat into the individual self-efficacy of subjects for what they are: products of human work that have been removed from political accessibility.

Margaret Thatcher’s dogma that there is no society, only individuals, is the product of a deformation of individual life that takes place under capitalism. Kindler’s clever criticism can be found in our addiction to individualization and identity, which leads to depoliticization and thereby describes the common problem of the left, conservatives and the political center.

The book’s credo is clear in the introduction and is appropriately: “bringing capitalism from the unconscious into consciousness.” The path to this goal will seem particularly familiar to theory-heavy leftists. Andreas Reckwitz, Mark Fisher and Eva Illouz are cited, among others, and are then enriched with empirical data. Classics like Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno have become so much a part of people’s thinking that they can be noticed without a footnote.

The goal of bringing capitalism into consciousness and thus into a state in which it appears to be changeable through political interventions often leads to the use of theoretical derivations that are usually already known. Poverty is the consequence of an abstruse performance mindset and political ignorance, which is ideologically confirmed by a neoliberal state. And repoliticizing democracy means making people aware that the state can potentially be blackmailed through strikes in systemically relevant areas and that this can be used much more radically.

This book proves its strength in the places where the experience of suffering and despair are highlighted thematically. It is precisely where the author writes about the omnipresence of pain and social violence that one can find out what this text is actually about: Kindler speaks in detail about the fact that happiness and mental health are currently misunderstood because they are thought of as the work tasks of the optimizing individual . Happiness, the ability to enjoy one’s time, necessarily depends on social conditions and therefore on its objective possibility. For Kindler, retreating into individual happiness appears to be a problem because coping with suffering and pressure would become an optimization process for individuals. Regardless of exploitation or poverty, happiness appears to be attainable, which obscures its conditions. This opens the door to advice literature and the mental health seminars that are very popular with companies, which promote the belief that if you suffer from the deformation of life caused by capitalism, then you yourself would be able to remedy it through the right mindset create. Selflove, as a self-optimization ideology, is the counterpart to the cult of depoliticization, which responds as an ideological glue to the polycrises of political ignorance.

The criticism of the cult of individual optimization thus becomes a part of capitalist ideology, which repeatedly appears to be religiously colored in Kindler’s book. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin, capitalism is religion here, since on the one hand it hides its fabrication and – more importantly – it addresses worries, suffering and despair in the same way as the fantasy of an otherworldly paradise does.

It is precisely where Kindler points out that the promise of pain relief usually turns into a farce that the book proves to be a success. It implicitly expresses the desperate attitude of those suffering in circumstances where no one really listens. What is tender is that it makes clear what all reflection must be about: hearing the pain and despair of those who fall under the wheel – ultimately everyone.

That’s why the last chapter is the best. In defining love as an increasingly difficult experience to find, the author discovers the potential of a human practice that could counteract the circumstances. It is about the “feeling of collective security” as an intersubjective relationship of concern and responsibility that would be able to counteract social hardening, retreat into inwardness and depoliticization.

Despite all the anger at what is, which Kindler manages to deepen through intimate confessions of his own mental illness, there is still a flash of hope that something could change. The smooth transition between love as an epistemological and political force and the mention of loved ones in thanksgiving could hardly be explained in any other way. One or two sentences that sound suspiciously familiar are also forgotten.

Jean-Philippe Kindler: Screw selflove, give me class struggle. A new analysis of capitalism. Rowohlt, 160 p., hardcover, €12.