Review Essay: Rethinking the Political During Bad Times: Davina Cooper’s Feeling Like a State and Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211012105
• Date: 01 February 2022
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Subject Matter: Review Essay

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 169 –176

© The Author(s) 2021

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Review Essay

Review Essay: Rethinking

the Political During Bad

Times: Davina Cooper’s

Feeling Like a State and

Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of

Breakdown

Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial and the Recasting of Authority, by Davina Cooper.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 258 pp.

Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, by Noëlle McAfee. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2019, 292 pp.

Reviewed by: James Martel, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State

University, San Francisco, CA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211012105

Between the pandemic, the rise of incipient fascism, a global climate crisis,

and so much else, these are desperate times that require new and original

thinking to guide us out of our current quagmire. Two recent books, Davina

Cooper’s Feeling Like a State and Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown, offer

just that. Both books contend with the current and wretched state of contem-

porary politics (Cooper’s book looks largely at the Anglosphere whereas

McAfee focuses more on the United States). Both books could be very

loosely associated with the recent movement of affect theory in that they deal

not just with institutions and rules but also with the affective dimensions of

political life. Where Cooper turns more directly to affect, and considers the

playful, erotic, and diverse elements of engaging with or even being part of

the state, McAfee turns to psychological theory to both explain and seek rem-

edies for the rise of incipient fascism in our times. Both books are excellent;

they are highly original, beautifully written, and extremely persuasive even

as they are also complicated and (as all great books must be) imperfect in

their scope and their applications. If they didn’t always offer this card-

carrying anarchist (minus the cards) the kind of far left radical solutions that

satisfy, they did force me to reconsider and rethink a lot of what I had felt was

long settled.

Turning first to Cooper’s Feeling Like a State, this book looks at a particu-

lar set of legal cases, all involving conservative Christians seeking to opt out

1012105PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211012105Political TheoryBook Review

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