Losers

by Josh Cohen

You are a loser. This isn't a personal slight, but an impersonal truth of the species, writes Josh Cohen in this essay about love, literature and politics. Today, no figure in more ridiculed and reviled than the loser. In the wake of recent political upsets, the bruised liberal dreams of winning it all back. Meanwhile a swollen self-help industry continues to grow with a single, seductive promise: read this, and join the ranks of the winners. But being a loser isn't a personal failing; it's an essential part of being human. In this remarkable essay, at once political, philosophical and very funny, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen teaches us to take pride in embracing our inner loser.

Genres: Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2021

About the author

Josh Cohen is a professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of many books, including The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cohen’s book illustrates the problems of successful people talking about failure.
Winners are the only people who talk, whether it’s about winning or losing.
Losers don’t talk because no-one’s interested. There isn’t a language of the loser because a language only exists with an audience.
Who’s reading this book? Well, it has endorsement quotes from other published authors, Adam Phillips and Deborah Levy.
In what language is it written? Cohen describes how reading Alice Munroe’s beautiful sentences make him want to give up writing. Cohen aspires to the language of the expert, the virtuoso, the super-hero, the authority. Cohen aspires to language that will get attention, that will impress.
If there were a language of the loser, it would be stupid, stumbling, stuttering, self-humiliating, self-defeating. It would impress no-one. It would be more than invisible. To look at it would draw you into uncomfortable feelings of pity and fear.
Think of a 'street performer' who plays music on an old cassette player. He sways and moves an old hand puppet around. This man never tries to get the attention of the people who, walking past carefully ignore him, as much out of respect and pity, as of fear. While he 'dances' he wills a kind of invisibility. His 'dance' is the same defeated spasm and is designed to not draw attention. It apologies for it's existence. The 'performance' is at once an act of courage and an act of masochistic self-immolation.
Cohen attempts to create a tradition of the loser with Kafka, Walser and Bernhard; and this is partly persuasive for me, but a loser tradition is an anti-author tradition. It is anti-literature. In the same way that Populism is anti-politics. Perhaps Trump’s meandering, unimpressive idiom is it’s own point.
Cohen seeks to extol the virtues of humility and losing, but he imagines humility expressed in beautiful, elegant prose. A contradiction in terms.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered English psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen at the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week, where he shared a panel with New York novelist Joshua Cohen, because they had the same name, both somewhat bemused by their pairing. They’re very different writers and searched a bit for a shared topic (apart from Israel and Palestine) , but the session was fast, witty and intriguing.

We checked out books by both Cohens in the Book Tent.

I found I couldn’t stick at Joshua Cohen’s ‘wildly exuberant’ novel The NetanyahusThe Netanyahus, though my partner really enjoyed it.

I was, however, stimulated by Josh’s How to Live. What To Do.: How great novels help us change, in which he ‘plots a course through the various stages of our lives, discovering in each the surprising and profound insights literature has to offer’, drawing examples from fictional characters to illustrate the ways in which people can respond to different life stages.

Next was Losers, title inspired by Donald Trump's favoured insult. I’m not familiar with much psychoanalytical theory, and I found this quite hard going but again it was stimulating and, this time, disturbing, as any attempt to understand the mind of Trump must take us into disturbing territory.

Josh Cohen’s website says this about LosersLosers:
You are a loser. For psychoanalysis, this isn’t a personal slight, but an impersonal truth. So why have we come to fear losing?
‘Loser’ was Donald Trump’s favourite insult within a hotly contested field. But while progressives disdain his divisive politics, they have mostly failed to challenge meritocratic values that divide society into winners and losers. How might we truly escape our toxic political culture?
In this powerful, wide-ranging essay, psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen suggests that the answer may lie in a notion of humility. Far from a sentimental moral virtue, humility many be the most elusive, precarious and indeed radical value of all, one which relies upon a full-hearted embrace of one’s inner loser. Enlisting the help of a cast of unlikely comrades – Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser – Cohen shows how we might move beyond a culture based on enforced positivity, resentment and humiliation.

Josh Cohen's most recent book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World focuses on anger.
The blurb:
'Anger is all around us, from divisive social media arguments and heightened political divides to road rage and personal spats; from Black Lives Matter and climate justice movements to Trump, incels and white supremacists. When it materialises, it seems to cry out for recognition and response. It affects our bodies and can transition into violence. It can be inherited through the generations; it can manifest in criminal acts. What should we do with it, and can it ever be put to good use?'

I hope his writings can help to reduce vitriol, abuse and anger, but it seems a pretty long call at this stage.

https://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/sho...
https://joshcohenwriter.co.uk/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

[Jeremy · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I first saw this book I thought, what a great idea for a book...how the concept of winners and losers is messed up: not good for society, and not even accurate. Unfortunately, this isn't really a discussion about losers and losing, like the book says it is about.

I hate to give a negative review, but this isn't what I thought I was getting. I'd say this book suffers from a lack of sticking to the subject matter, and lack of getting to a conclusion.

The best line of the book (paraphrasing here) is that meritocracy is bad for everyone involved - the winners are miserable because they're under pressure to keep winning, the losers feel terrible about themselves. This is what I thought I would be reading about. For there to be winners there needs to be losers. And why do we want to be surrounded by millions of people who consider themselves losers? Also, so many people in history spent their lives thinking they're losers and then posthumously being considered the biggest winners of all. For example, Van Gogh. Also, most of the great art and literature have come from suffering. Being a loser isn't even bad in many cases. We can all go on and on about why this is a good subject to talk about.

Instead of all that, this is what we get in this book (no spoilers, just general topics...so by all means read the book if these topics appeal to you): It starts off talking about Trump, then humblebragging, then moves onto Plato's ring of Gyges and ethics, then about debating not on merits, Levinas ethics, Adorno's violence hiding under positivity (nevermind that was during WWII, nevermind that it has nothing to do with the subject). Trump is clearly characterized by calling people losers, but that's not really a discussion with any substance, and the other topics just seem unrelated to me.

There is talk about Charlie Brown and Franz Kafka, both characterized by a lifetime of losing. But I missed any talk about the ironic positives that come from losing, for instance Charlie Brown's appeal to millions of people.

So if you read this, just be aware of what you're getting.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We hate losers because we are born to lose.” Josh Cohen’s acute essay Losers is a brief but far-reaching consideration on what it means to lose, to be a loser, to scorn losing/losers, to confront the fact that we are all losers, in such an abundance of ways, throughout our lives — right up to our final excursion to loserdom, in a hearse: “the horror of losing […] arises from the irredeemable certainty that we will all, […] lose the things we most want”. Cohen reflects so elegantly on the idea of losing, particularly through the useful idiot, the regrettable nexus that is Donald Trump, the man whose biggest insult — be it to opponents or dead veterans — was “loser”, an insult so grave his own election loss was simply impossible. Cohen’s critiques of Trump feel sharp and canny (surprising, to a degree, given the over-saturation following four years of exposure), and provide a strong lead-in to the rest of his essay — so too does his other ultimate loser, Charlie Brown: “It’s [his] very rage that conditions his unassuming gentleness; you cannot be humble before the world if you haven’t felt the wish to destroy it.” Through psychoanalysis and literary criticism, Cohen explores the intersection of losing and humility, of the necessity of becoming — not nothing, exactly, but less than (particularly in a populist culture that has gone to war with the very idea of a meritocracy). “Humility reminds us of the large portion of arbitrariness that determines any personal success or failure.”

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judiciously argued, Josh Cohen's book asks us to reconsider our obsession with winners and losers through the context of Trumpian politics, Freudian psychoanalysis and a miserable set of depressive writers which include Kafka. To Josh Cohen, we are all losers and avoiding this is to deny life itself - he also asks interesting questions about how we tackle disinformation.

This is a really good book but at times I think it is Cohen's desire to wed his theories with psychoanalysis can feel a bit ham-fisted. It really gets into its stride when it looks at outside Freud.

[Dirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice small psychoanalytical book about Trump, humility and literature.