Capitalist Realism
The apocalypse in Severance suggests it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of this economic system
What is capitalism? (Mark Fisher)
The narrator’s boredom, irritation, and envy in My Year of Rest and Relaxation exemplify these politically ambiguous affects
What are ugly feelings? (Sianne Ngai)
Office surveillance and psychiatric authority in the novels show power operating through normalization rather than force — a key insight of this thinker
Who is Michel Foucault?
The Protagonist's year-long sleep experiment resists this demand of late capitalism for nonstop availability
What is 24/7 productivity? (Jonathan Crary)
Candace’s position within global production networks reflects this theorist’s analysis of racialized alienation under colonial capitalism
Who is Frantz Fanon?
Candace’s Bible production job exemplifies this type of white-collar employment that feels socially meaningless
What is a bullshit job? (David Graeber)
Freud would describe the narrator’s stuck attachment to loss and emptiness as this condition, distinct from mourning
What is melancholia? (Sigmund Freud)
The performance of “productive worker” or “functional woman” reflects this theory that identity is constituted through repeated acts
What is performativity? (Judith Butler)
The pharmaceutical management of the narrator’s depression reflects capitalism’s tendency to individualize this broader structural condition
What is depression under capitalism? (Mark Fisher)
The lingering imperial and racial structures shaping global capitalism in Severance resonate with this theorist’s idea of postcolonial melancholia
Who is Paul Gilroy?
Even after Shen Fever devastates New York in Severance, Candace keeps going to work, showing her attachment to fantasies of stability and success that no longer sustain her
What is cruel optimism? (Lauren Berlant)
Office monitoring and psychiatric control in the novels show power working not through violence but through this system of normalization and surveillance
What is discipline? (Michel Foucault)
Candace’s Instagram in Severance constructs her sense of self through storytelling, illustrating this concept
What is narrative identity? (Paul Ricoeur)
Shen Fever’s gradual spread models this slow, often invisible form of destruction
What is slow violence? (Rob Nixon)
Candace’s outsourced Bible production connects New York publishing to factories in this country central to global supply chains in the novel
What is China?
The emotional flatness and depthlessness in both novels reflect this cultural condition of late capitalism
What is the waning of affect? (Fredric Jameson)
Both novels depict a suspended, stalled way of living in which characters cannot imagine structural change — a state of impasse described by this theorist of capitalist realism
Who is Mark Fisher?
The shared millennial malaise in both novels exemplifies this historically specific collective affect
What is a structure of feeling? (Raymond Williams)
The post-apocalyptic landscape of Severance can be read as capitalism’s ruins, a key idea in the work of this anthropologist
Who is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing?
Both novels show how class privilege shields characters differently from precarity, especially in the narrator’s ability to do this for a year without working
What is withdrawal from labor / sleep?
The narrators’ oscillation between irony and sincerity reflects this post-postmodern literary mode
What is new sincerity? (Adam Kelly)
The combination of boredom and overwhelming scale in these novels reflects this hybrid feeling (stupid + sublime)
What is stupliminity? (Sianne Ngai)
The flat, ambient emotional tone of corporate life in Severance reflects this scholar’s emphasis on mood and atmosphere shaping subjectivity
Who is James Currie?
The haunting presence of futures that never arrive in both novels reflects this ghostly temporal concept
What is hauntology? (Jacques Derrida)
Even after catastrophe, characters measure survival through productivity and market value, showing capitalism functioning as this totalizing system
What is cultural logic? (Fredric Jameson)