Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Perhaps it’s useful to remind ourselves here that social democracy has only become a resolved totality in retrospect; at the time, it was a compromise formation, which those on the left saw as a temporary bridgehead from which further gains could be won. It seems strange to have to argue that comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way, but such is the power of the dehistoricising pressures of populism and PR that the claim has to be explicitly made. Murdoch and the Mail crowed on about how the Savile revelations demonstrated the importance of press freedom – but the question that they neatly evaded was, where were their brave hacks? With the Mal projection vanquished and the dream-heist successfully completed, Cobb is finally able to return to the children from whom he has been separated.