Fatalism and Redemption

By Malcolm James

Fascism is thanatological or death-oriented, says Alberto Toscano.¹ It is energised by popular appeal to crisis and submits to a common feeling of fatal decline (fatalism), from which a new political order is born. Sometimes mistakenly described as a revolution,² the emerging order is not actually new, but rather a more assertive zombie³ version of an old order stripped of prior civil, democratic, legal and ethical checks and balances. Across contemporary Europe and North America, we can see narratives of crisis, feelings of decline and projects of rebirth drawing diagonally⁴ from different ideological wells: liberal and neoliberal (individualism, narcissism and destruction of the social contract); conservative and religious (authority, piety and moralism); nationalist (exclusionary communitarianism⁵), and racist and patriarchal (reactionary and hierarchical order). 

Fatalism is part of fascism’s thanatological condition. At its extremes, it follows discourses of crisis concerning moral breakdown, female liberation, racial threat, trans-rights, the European Union, elites, immigration and, of course, climate science. These discourses give form to a fatalistic sense of decline, from which a project of rebirth can be mapped. Recently, we saw this in the Trump administration’s deportation-as-entertainment-videos, which play into a racialised crisis of social decay from which a white macho capitalist supremacy emerges. 

These discourses and projections are increasingly dominant, but they are not uncontested. Liberals, the social justice left and indeed many conservatives do not subscribe to them (or enough of them). They encounter active political resistance. But, at the same time, even those who resist, or do not accord with, these discourses and projections feel their fatalistic pull, not on the same terms as putative fascist sympathisers, but on account of their incremental presence in everyday life. I’m thinking here of the general sense of fatalism occasioned by exploitative working conditions, the erosion of democracy, genocide in Palestine, melting polar icecaps and the creeping militarisation of Europe. These fatalisms are part of an emergent structure of feeling. To understand the organic relationship between fatalism and fascism, the focus on extremes, the far right and their spectacles must be complemented by attention to the central and routine. 

To understand this common sense of fatalism, we need to go beyond its correlation with extreme political and ideological formations. In 2021, IPSOS MORI published a survey on climate change conducted in 27 countries. They found that 20% of young people think it is ‘too late to fix’ the climate crisis.⁶ A second survey, reported in the New Scientist, found that Gen Z, more than baby boomers, felt that climate collapse was unavoidable.⁷ A third and fourth survey, published by Focaldata⁸ and the University of Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, respectively, found that Gen Z respondents in the UK and the US felt that democratic politics were unable to resolve environmental or other dysfunctional social and economic issues.⁹ Affected by the climate crisis, war, democratic failure, the difficulty of forging a meaningful life in capitalism, and without the conviction of their grandparents that things will get better, younger people often experience the world as unavoidable decline. 

In his book, The Age of Disruption, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler addresses this disposition through the figure of Florian, a young man of 15 who does not see his future in terms of family and career because he believes he will be the last to live. Stiegler does not end his analysis there; Florian’s fatalism is also explained by the social disruption caused by media, information and entertainment systems. These ‘computational’ technologies have separated Florian from a shared experience of the present and a shared imagination of the future, even with those closest to him.¹⁰

Florian is, admittedly, a somewhat hackneyed European-Enlightenment figure. But he nonetheless allows us to understand how the fatalism reported by young people is related to the computational media and entertainment culture they inhabit. In her recent book, Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh elaborates on this, providing insight into how digital media culture is wound up with right-wing dispositions toward the world. She is interested in how intensified bursts of content light up pious social fractures for consumers; the dualistic and stark designations they generate; the blind adherence to flattened confections of inside and outside; the reduction of heterogeneous social relations to flashpoints of ressentiment, narcissism and sadism. As the flash bulb triggers, she says, “The gray falls away… everything flickers good or bad, relatable or hateable.”¹¹

According to a survey conducted in the UK by Ofcom in 2024, 93% of Gen Z watch streamed television every week.¹² And over the last seven or eight years, which roughly maps onto Trump’s first tenure as US president, there has been a discernible shift toward fatalistic programming. I’m not talking about the BBC’s Blue Planet, which juxtaposes 4k natural glamour with climate catastrophe, but the massively popular television series produced by high-grossing US media companies like HBO and Netflix. Succession (2018-2023) and The White Lotus (2021-2025) are good examples of this, although we could also include Baby Reindeer (2024), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-present) and The Last of Us (2023-present, also a computer game), as well as films like Triangle of Sadness (2022). 

Fatalism in drama is well established, but in Succession and The White Lotus, there is little civic or heroic resolution, as we might find in classical tragedy; rather, the narrative perpetuates cycles of dysfunction, lack of agency, social breakdown, decomposition, aggravation, and the futility of escape. In the first series of The White Lotus, hotel manager Armond’s self-destruction is the product of belittlement and failed grifting in the context of societal subordination. The actual, and aspiring, patriarchs and matriarchs of Succession’s Roy family (Logan, Kendall and Shiv) are irreparably damaged and pathologically cruel. ‘Ordinary’ middle-class characters, like Paula in season 1 of The White Lotus (Olivia’s less privileged, and less white friend), exhibit empathy with the waiting staff but are ultimately required to punch down. The working-class, black and female spa manager, Belinda, is excellent at her job but is continually gamed and exploited by the wealthy clientele. The exception is perhaps Tanya, Jennifer Coolidge’s character in the first and second series of The White Lotus, who provides some tragic enlivening. 

These series articulate and invigorate different sensibilities too, of course. Both are enjoyed as symbolically clever eat-the-rich offerings – smart satirical commentary on the deadly sins of the ultra-wealthy.¹³ But, we should not avoid the fact that what makes these series enjoyable is not principally their semiotic play or the catharsis of watching the elite suffer.¹⁴ Rather, fatalism in these dramas is pleasurable because it expunges a shared sense of negation felt by society; a form of ressentiment grounded in the overdeveloped world’s feeling of undeserved decline.¹⁵ The fatalism audiences enjoy is explained less by the catharsis of punching up, and more by their painful affinity with lost privilege. It is from there that pleasure in social violence and sociopathy flows. To be sure, these are not deportation videos, but the gratifications found in them are not as dissimilar as we might like to think.

The deployment of realism and kitsch, in Succession and The White Lotus, makes those gratifications all the more seductive. While dystopian and apocalyptic conventions for drama rely on real-world separation (The Handmaid’s Tale or The Last of Us), the realism of Succession makes fatalism intimate. Through a creative non-fiction plot based on the Murdoch family, fly-on-the-wall camera techniques and psychological character insights, Succession provides a simulation of reality which is attractive because it feels authentic and alive, and maybe more so than the sterile and unmoored experience of contemporary life. If realism in Succession generates a natural and tangible appeal for fatalism, the kitsch aesthetics of The White Lotus signal its artifice in bourgeois-cum-totalitarian historical form. Incrementally ubiquitous in the mass digital aesthetics of AI-generated visual content, kitsch communicates the unreality of pure capitalism; a sense of lost common feeling in which inorganic energy creates affective connections – as manifest in the interpersonal and topographic relationships of The White Lotus. Immaterial kitsch and pseudo-material realism are then well-suited to fascistic capture, if not the aesthetic register of contemporary fascism itself.

At the end of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon¹⁶ argues that in an age of environmental and social destruction, media saturation and short attention spans, writers, film-makers and artists should produce culture that makes destruction more obvious. However, the spectacles of destruction, in which we are saturated, have not resulted in the social justice common sense Nixon would have wanted. Seeping into every vestige of popular leftist writing, thinking and reading, they have rather become intertwined with a fateful condition, auspicious of the terrible bind of cultural politics; a “vacuous semblance of the tragic” – suffering as fate without sublime adversity.¹⁷

How decline is ideologically shaped is an important political and, above all, cultural question. The young people captured in the surveys above are not lacking in images of destruction, but they are struggling to critically address the world as it is, and to find a humanist and planetary plotline within it. To aid them, we might suggest a remedy of optimism – things will get better – but that would be palliative, has no critical scope, and would feel conjuncturally illiterate anyway. We might suggest a positive re-framing of the future without negative attention to destruction, but that is inherently compromised – the warning against undialectical positivity is provided in the 20^th-century politics of völkisch essence and myth projection. But there remains the option to address the moment through negatively assessing destruction, and from that same location to enliven fragmented alternatives, not as occult rebirth or spectacular symbolic resistance, but as historical and material stories of “transformation and regeneration”.¹⁸

Accounts of fatalism often make recourse to Freud’s analysis of mourning and melancholia. When healthy mourning is blocked, melancholia constitutes a destructive pathology that seeks redress for the object lost. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich developed this approach to understand the inability of Germans to mourn the Holocaust after the end of World War II. Paul Gilroy later explained how British melancholia is accounted for by the loss of former fantasies of greatness occasioned by national, colonial and white decline. The pathology of this fatalism is observable in the English “two world wars, one World Cup” chant, and the racist chauvinism that flows from that.¹⁹

But melancholia has other interpretations too. Walter Benjamin’s reverence for melancholy and sorrow was first presented in his failed Habilitationsschrift on German Baroque Trauerspiels (plays of sorrow),²⁰ and was continued in his writing on Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Karl Krauss, Klee and Goethe and in his autobiographical studies on feelings and memories in Berlin. The Trauerspiel, while historically specific to the German baroque world, allows for wider reflection on how the melancholic and saturnine, the ‘world-sadness’ of acedia in which the state of grace is renounced, achieves the truest depth and a special and progressive intensification.²¹ 

In Under the Sign of Saturn,²² Susan Sontag elaborates on this by introducing a portrait of Benjamin in thoughtful repose. She explores his veneration for the melancholic type: for apathy, indecision and slowness; dreamy recalcitrance, detachment; an unforgiving reflexivity always in arrears; attendant to memory as discontinuous and prophetic of multiple futures; capable of cheer, especially for the ironic.²³ These traits provide a corrective to the immediacy, consumer pleasures and ahistoricity found in capitalist societies but they are not a panacea for collective regeneration. The melancholic is always too solitary for that. Popular and aesthetic forms of melancholia and sorrow, however, overcome those limitations. And in the deadly crucible of COVID-19, a series of post-rave musics started to convey those sentiments. In the hands of Burial and Overmono, redemptive sorrow moved towards restoration, making the world yield to its scrutiny. 

Burial first came to attention in 2006 with a self-titled dubstep album. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher heard in it a decaying world haunted with trapped futural energy, in which “muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past”.²⁴ 15 years later, on his pandemic-era track ‘Dark Gethsemane’, released on the Power of Love EP, Burial reworks those spectres through a biblical story. Gethsemane, the garden outside Jerusalem that Jesus visited before he was killed, is re-rendered sonically and narratively to conjure our own capitalist garden, prefigured by destruction. The snippets of gospel that colour the music convey not the coming of the messiah, as might be imagined, but a secular channelling of survival and rebirth through rave and kinetic mutuality. Over three movements (in triptych), the track arrives at a looped preacher’s sample “we must shock this nation with the power of love”. Offset with garage breaks, moving to happy hardcore instrumentals, where time stretching is not modified in sampling, the absence of regimentation leans both towards the vinyl crackles of the past and the elastic time of the present, as the 808 State ‘Loon’ sample sounds an atheist’s hymn deep in the hours of the night. That sensual politics of secular anthems is extended in 2024 by Overmono and their remix of the Streets’ ‘Turn the Page’. In the duo’s hands, the Streets’ archetypal melancholic garage, with Mike Skinner’s first-person vocalisation of post-colonial wreckage and convivial hope,²⁵ comes of time on Britain’s dwindling dancefloors, where (as with Burial) the history of rave is traced and remade in sonic noir. Under the tactility of the human voice, deep basslines and pliable tempo, Old Testament transcendence traces patterns for longing and love into this cultural moment.²⁶

Burial’s ‘Dark Gethsemane’ ends with a vocal sample inspired by the Songs of Solomon, or Songs of Songs, “we must discover the power of love, for love it is strong as death.” Sorrowful and redemptive, these popular aesthetic forms inhabit destruction, but not on the fatalist terms of ressentiment and sadism. They lean into the gospel to find the lay language for sorrow and love; destruction and regeneration, melancholia and justice otherwise occluded from the mass aesthetic realm.

1. Alberto Toscano, “Notes on Late Fascism,” (2017). https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism. ↩︎
2. Enzo Traverso, Revolution: an intellectual history (London: Verso, 2021). ↩︎
3. See for discussion of Frankenstein’s neoliberalism Wendy Brown, Nihilistic times: thinking with Max Weber (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2023). ↩︎
4. For a well contextualised discussion of William Callison and Quinn Slobodian’s concept see Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world (UK: Penguin, 2023). ↩︎
5. Decline, melancholia and nationalism are well surveyed. See: Paul Gilroy, After empire: melancholia or convivial culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).; Sivamohan Valluvan, The clamour of nationalism: race and nation in twenty-first-century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). ↩︎
6. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/climate-fatalism-grips-young-people-worldwide-while-urgency-solution-oriented-media-grows ↩︎
7. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2290232-younger-generations-are-the-most-fatalistic-about-climate-change/ ↩︎
8. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/just-6-of-gen-z-not-over-half-actually-want-a-dictator-study-finds ↩︎
9. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/young-voters-have-growing-power-broken-politics-leave-them-fatalistic-studies-find ; https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/just-6-of-gen-z-not-over-half-actually-want-a-dictator-study-finds ↩︎
10. Bernard Stiegler, The age of disruption: technology and madness in computational capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). p.9-10. ↩︎
11. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, the style of too late capitalism (London: Verso, 2024). p.60. ↩︎
12. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/crg7d130ljpo ↩︎
13. In a University of Sussex seminar, researcher Chris Frantz explored how pride, greed, wrath, envy and lust are addressed in these series. ↩︎
14. This is Nietzsche’s original sense of Judaeo-Christian ressentiment for the powerful by the weak. See: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (UK: Penguin, 2013). ↩︎
15. Wendy Brown, In the ruins of neoliberalism: the rise of antidemocratic politics in the west (New York: Colombia University Press, 2019). ↩︎
16. Rob Nixon, Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). ↩︎
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997). p.61-3. ↩︎
18. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black reason (Durham and London: Duke, 2017). ↩︎
19. Gilroy, After empire: melancholia or convivial culture? ↩︎
20. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998). ↩︎
21. George Steiner, “Introduction,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, ed. Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1998), 7-24. ↩︎
22. Susan Sontag, “Under the sign of saturn,” in Under the sign of saturn, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Picador, 1980 [1972]), 109-34. ↩︎
23. Sontag, “Under the sign of saturn.”, p.114 ↩︎
24. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007666.html ↩︎
25. For discussion of The Streets see Gilroy, After empire: melancholia or convivial culture? and Ben Burbridge, Post-Rave Britain: history, culture and politics in a world which could be free (forthcoming). ↩︎
26. Paul Gilroy, The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). ↩︎