6-8pm, 27th February

RHB137a, Goldsmiths

Josh Cohen and Will Davies in discussion on the topics of their recent books, Not Working and Nervous States

In his new book, Nervous States, Will Davies addresses how and why the paranoid psycho-somatic condition of the ‘state of nature’ has woven its way into everyday life, as a result of technologies and ideologies of ‘real-time’ reactivity. Politics has become literally and figuratively neuro-logical, inasmuch as we rely on immediate reaction to navigate the digital public sphere and space, bypassing thought in the process.

Josh Cohen’s Not Working intervenes in this contemporary neurasthenic condition, exploring the different ways in which it might be challenged and escaped through art, psychoanalysis, philosophy and practices of everyday life. A contemporary politics, he suggests, must be a defence of the spaces where nothing much happens.

Will and Josh will be in conversation on the different dimensions of our state of anxiety and its relationship to our experience of time.

You can listen to a recording of this event below