Library Talk: Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method

Dr. Leon Brenner and Dr. Joel Crombez on "Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method."

Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method plots two complementary narratives as a cartography for a revitalized critical social science. In the first, Crombez presents a historical analysis of the political economic and technological forces that gave shape to modern society. In the second, he offers an analysis of the unifying and evolving method of critical theory that emerged at key moments of this spatiotemporal trajectory. Throughout these narratives, Crombez argues that anxiety functions as a contradictory affect—both motivational and destructive—which unites the critical project through the development and deployment of diagnostic psychosocial symptoms such as alienation, anomie, the Protestant ethic, and repression. To confront these symptoms, he provides an interdisciplinary roadmap for talk therapy to diagnose and treat anxiety—a practice he calls critical socioanalysis—which accounts for the psychosocial complexity of its production and the dark futures modernity is constructing at the cost of life itself.

Dr. Joel Crombez (Ph.D. University of Tennessee) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kennesaw State University. He works on critical, social, and psychoanalytic theory at the intersection of political economy, technology, and mental health. He has lived for various periods of time across seven countries and six states in the US. He is a passionate educator, working closely with undergraduate students to mentor their research skills and cultivate their professional aspirations. Recent publications include “Shaped by the AI: Planning for a Future With or Without Us?” for the JRC EU Commissioned Report HumAI, “Critical Socioanalysis and the Critique of Religion, or, Why I Read Theory” in Current Perspectives of Social Theory as a contribution to the Planetary Sociology agenda, and “Why Positive Thought Must Be Negated in the Analytic Session” as a book chapter in Negativity and Psychoanalysis (edited by Duane Rousselle and Gerard Murphy).

Dr. Leon S. Brenner is a lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin. He is a member of the APPI, LOB, and a founder of Lacanian Affinities Berlin (laLAB) and Unconscious Berlin. His latest book on the subject of the psychoanalysis of autism is called The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, where he presents a novel account of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective.