Our era is marked by frustrated attempts at social transformation. One of the main symptoms of “capitalist realism” is the rise of nostalgia and need to “return” (to traditional family forms, to narrow conceptions of the political subject or to essentialist conceptions of the nation). What is this need to go back a symptom of? This “structure of feeling” must be treated with utmost care to neutralize its reactionary framing and, at the same time, to illuminate another relationship with the past, with sufficient creativity and imagination to find the traces of other possibilities in popular culture and attend to the creative powers that beset us.

Germán Cano is a professor of Contemporary Thought at the Complutense University of Madrid. He is specialized in contemporary philosophy, and the themes and authors on which he has worked—Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Walter Benjamin, Peter Sloterdijk (some of whose works he has translated into Spanish), Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton—help him in particular to focus on the critical connection between political philosophy and new subjectivities. His latest publications include Mark Fisher: Los espectros del tardocapitalismo (Gedisa, 2023), Transición Nietzsche (Pre-Textos, 2020), Del desencanto al populismo. Encrucijadas de una época (NED ediciones, 2017) with Jorge Alemán, and Fuerzas de flaqueza. Nuevas gramáticas políticas: del 15M a Podemos (La Catarata, 2015). 

Antonio Gómez Villar is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB), co-director of the Barcelona Pensa Philosophy Festival and a member of the Institute of Cultural Studies and Social Change (IECCS). His main lines of research are the ways in which the conceptual field of class has been redefined in response to the transformation of subjectivities and new cultural and political relations, and the analysis of collective action repertoires from an antagonistic perspective. He is the author of books such as Los olvidados. Ficción de un proletariado reaccionario (Bellaterra, 2022) and Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe: hegemonía y populismo (Gedisa, 2021), and co-edited the books Maradona, un mito plebeyo (Ned, 2021) and Working Dead. Escenarios del postrabajo (La Virreina, 2019) with María Ruido and Marta Echaves.