Hontology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life

by Mark Payne

Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. More particularly still, the book considers the loss of the New World as an horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own. Finally, the book discusses what might take the place of the New World now that its productive horizon of shame has receded from view.

80 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2018

Reviews

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating in some areas, if a bit masturbatory in others, but hey! This is a professor we are talking about, so go into it with realistic expectations of what the language looks like and you should be good. Payne talks about hontology as the longing and mourning for lost futures and the forms that mourning takes. Payne has some interesting, if a bit problematic and reductive, things to say about the experiences of Native American communities and white obsession with a return to nature after colonial exploitation of that same nature and the nostalgic loss of the “new world” fervor colonizers romanticize. Payne also puts a good amount of time into shame of our pasts as a means to access those lost futures and a coping mechanism for them as well. He also has a particularly interesting section on the weird tale and its obsession with the dangerous allure of nature, the concept of the centaur as man and nature, and the ways in which depression interacts with hontology and lost futures.