We live in times of authoritarian capitalism, and anxiety—philosophical, political, and psychic—is its core symptom. This panel examines the affective landscapes and psychical mechanisms of authoritarianism and global capitalism through literature, film, and theory. As scholars such as Jorge Alemán, Colette Soler, Byung-Chul Han, and Brian Massumi argue, capitalism as a social form is built on anxiety, precarity, and burnout. Subjectivities are increasingly shaped by the intense anxiety that capitalist discourse generates, sustains, and monetizes, producing an anxious “affectariat” that is blamed for its own suffering. Contemporary literature and theory not only diagnose these conditions but also develop counter-discourses, forms of protest, withdrawal, and what Frank Ruda calls “audacious anxiety,” which destabilizes certainties and signals that the status quo could be otherwise.

Building on last year’s successful collaborative panel “Psycho-Philosophies of Anarchy,” this session addresses the political exigency of understanding anxiety as a central mechanism linking capitalism and authoritarianism.

Elisabeth Berman’s paper, “The Age of (Anti)Anxiety: MAHA contra Pharma and the Psychoanalytic Alternative,” examines Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, which proposed sending Americans taking psychopharmaceuticals to “wellness farms” to be “reparented.” This rhetoric, with its chilling historical precedents, draws on Nazi-inflected notions of health and nature. Liberal responses, by contrast, emphasize self-management and individual choice. Yet both frameworks pathologize anxiety. Berman argues that a Lacanian perspective offers a crucial alternative by centering anxiety in psychic life and refusing the logic of cure. Her paper asks how anxiety might become a site of interrogation rather than exploitation—one that exposes and counters attachments to both capitalism and authoritarianism.

Nicole Sütterlin’s presentation turns to Sibylle Berg’s dystopian novel "GRM: Brainfuck" to explore capitalist exploitation and what E. Ann Kaplan terms “pre-traumatic stress disorder (pre-TSD)” in climate anxiety. Set in an authoritarian 2020s England marked by war, unemployment, AI takeover, and climate catastrophe, Berg’s narrative formally performs the paralyzing effects of pre-TSD. Sütterlin argues that late capitalism not only produces this anticipatory anxiety but desires it, using paralysis to secure political and economic domination. Berg’s 600-page dystopia thus creates a “pre-TSD poetics” that reveals how anxiety becomes a tool of authoritarian control.

In “The Serial Capitalist: Masculine Anxiety from American Psycho to American Fascism,” Korine Powers analyzes the serial killer figure in "Natural Born Killers" and "American Psycho" as a product of late-capitalist masculine precarity. She situates these “culture monster” texts within a genealogy of American masculine genres—cowboys, detectives, killers—showing how each expresses psychic and economic instability through escalating violence against women and racial others. The genre hero’s nostalgic rage for an impossible patriarchal past and his paranoid perception of feminized social order anticipate the affective logic of the incel movement and the authoritarian right. Powers argues that because capitalism promises masculine exceptionalism while delivering market categorization, anxiety becomes chronic and structurally irresolvable. The serial killer thus emerges as a bridge between neoliberal precarity and fascist reaction.

Finally, Mason Wong’s “The Geopoliticization of Psychic Space in Contemporary Chinese Fiction” examines how global capitalism and authoritarian geopolitics shape psychic life in contemporary China. Through Ma Jian’s "China Dream," Stanley Qiufan Chen’s “The Year of the Rat,” and Hao Jingfang’s "Vagabonds," Wong analyzes characters’ inner lives, psychosexual anxieties, and identity conflicts within authoritarian political structures and global economic networks. He theorizes “the geopoliticization of psychic space” as a process through which authoritarian environments subsume interiority into geopolitical and economic logics, echoing Jake Werner’s account of China’s “return to nationalist assertion and state intervention in the economy.” Wong concludes by linking these dynamics to Anglophone works such as Trevor Paglen’s "Society of the Psyop" and Seth Harp’s "The Fort Bragg Cartel."

Together, these papers illuminate how capitalism and authoritarianism produce, weaponize, and depend upon anxiety—while also revealing how literature and theory imagine forms of resistance, exposure, and audacious reworking of subjectivity.