It is no longer time to defend victory or success, but to defend disappointment. Rather than attempting to regain the lost hope of the 20th century's progressive social movements, this book critiques the history and legacy of our success-oriented culture, and offers a radical alternative: the embracing of disappointment itself. Through a series of chapters critiquing our understanding of failure, the politics of feeling, and contemporary capitalist logic, the book tracks a history of disappointment and its political possibilities today; it places Marx, Schelling and Hegel into dialogue with Badiou, Lacan, Althusser and Jameson, among others, and raises a compelling argument for failure as containing the seeds of a new mode of public and private fulfilment.

With diverse references, from Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Ibsen's A Doll House, to the Occupy Movement and BLM, the book offers a persuasive analysis of widespread political apathy and how it might be transformed into a credible philosophical and political force. Via a comparative reading of political theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the book reconsiders the meaning and role of disappointment in contemporary politics, and how this prickly and undertheorized feeling can translate into real political force and even transformation.

Critiquing the very real structures that leave us constantly seeking more, yet remaining undernourished and dissatisfied, The Politics of Disappointment offers a roadmap out of failure and into the radical potential that lies dormant in everyday life.