The Crisis of Agency

On this episode of The Point Podcast, Jonny Thakkar talks to our resident anatomist of the global political zeitgeist: Anton Jäger, a historian of political thought at the Catholic University of Leuven. Anton joins us to discuss his essay for issue 29, “Everything Is Hyperpolitical,” an ambitious attempt at historicizing our hyperpolitical present, which he diagnoses as the culmination of a trajectory from mass politics to post-politics.

• Hyperpolitics beyond the intuitive definition (3:20)
• The relation between post-politics and technocracy (13:28)
• “I think I stumbled onto it, and not in a particularly elegant way”: inventing hyperpolitics and why we need it (17:20)
• The challenges of generalization, and how the U.S. ended up in a hyperpolitical predicament without a history of European-style mass politics (23:13)
• Is the phenomenology of hyperpolitics just the phenomenology of social media? (38:47)
• The division between politics and policy, and the difference between political will and political demands (47:11)
• International relations and alternative hyperpolitical paradigms (51:22)
• Culture as political unconscious: the benefits of the Adam Curtis approach (59:48)