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[...] Refracting this politics of indifference through the nihilistic disintegration of a social compact and through lost faith in capacities to control human powers and arrangements takes us beyond Hochschild’s inclination to root this sentiment in her subjects’ experience of social and political …

And yet there is an important aspect of the neoliberalization of everyday life that salts this wound: the deep inequality of access and hierarchies of status organizing every part of commerce and what remains of public life. As works such as Michael J. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy argue, today the…

Finally, there is Marcuse’s account of the role of the market in intensifying the nihilism theorized by Nietzsche. Writing well before the neoliberal revolution, Marcuse argues that the market has become both reality principle and moral truth: “The people are led to find in the productive apparatus…

Not quite a century after Nietzsche wrote, Herbert Marcuse considered desublimation from a different angle to theorize the nonliberatory release of instinctual energies in postwar capitalism. What Marcuse famously termed “repressive desublimation” occurs within an order of capitalist domination, ex…

There is more. The economizing side of neoliberalism added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it, first in leaving nothing untouched by entrepreneurialization and monetization and then, with financialization, submitting every aspect of human existence to investor calculations about…