Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

Join us for a discussion of how to maintain hope in the face of despair, with Hannah Proctor and Sarah Jaffe.

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? In her new book Burnout, Hannah Proctor answers that question by drawing on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

Burnout considers despairing former Communards exiled to a penal colony in the South Pacific; exhausted Bolsheviks recuperating in sanatoria in the aftermath of the October Revolution; an ex-militant on the analyst’s couch relating dreams of ruined landscapes; and many more. Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward—neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organize at once, and to do both without compromise.

For this launch event, Proctor will be joined by Sarah Jaffe, whose forthcoming book From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire takes up a similar subject.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on July 25, 2024.***

Speakers:

Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome Trust University Award at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author of two books: Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History (published in the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Mental Health in Historical Perspective' in 2020) and Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024). She's a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, is a contributing editor at Parapraxis Mag and is web/reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.

Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and the forthcoming From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a contributing writer at In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Verso Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN5_vl2S2N0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org