The anger is wholly justified, but seems unable to find a positive form of political expression, with the result that it emerges dangerously in anti-politics: new populisms that exploit and manipulate it and use it to foment yet more division, and produce new figures of obscene master, thereby further deepening the antagonisms that gave rise to this situation in the first place. These are not individual or psychological feelings, but socially generated, socially conditioned affects, reactions to a multitude of accumulated antagonisms. They are not really opposites, however, but passive and active expressions of the same excess: depression might be understood as anger stuck in the throat, turned inward, paralysing and blocking while anger can be understood as helplessness turned outward, frantically searching for an outlet. Both have now reached the proportions of a pandemic more dangerous and widespread than Covid. It manifests itself in two seemingly opposite sets of reactions: an excess of tiredness, exhaustion and depression and an excess of anger, rage and fury. Decades of neoliberalism followed by two years of Covid have led to a massive accumulation of affective excess that makes itself seen and felt every single day.
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