Abstract
This article analyzes the emotions of alienation, estrangement, and nostalgia, and how they are central to the production of neo-emotions in contemporary society. Alienation is a product of the macro-social context of capitalist societies and contemporary neo-emotions are a response to this, addressing the current misalignment between people, their emotional experiences, and their dynamic environment. I consider how alienation affects those on the left of politics, including those involved in radical activism, and how neo-emotions are the creative practices that forge new identities and collectives for active resistance. Those struggling to create non-alienated societies always experienced conflicting emotions, like optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, but these can be synthesized into positive neo-emotions such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope.
… I look I only see what I don't know
All that was strong, invincible is slain
Takes more than sunshine to make everything fine
And I feel like I'm trapped in the middle of time
With this constant feeling of nostalgia for an age yet to come
Buzzcocks/Pete Shelley, Nostalgia. (United Artists Records, 1979)
Alienation usually is not thought of as an emotion. Yet central to alienation is the state of estrangement: individuals in their experience of alienation are estranged from the world in which they live and from each other. The experience of estrangement, while also perhaps not classified as an emotion, is certainly a felt experience. We feel estranged from the world in which we should belong, as well as from the others we should be related to. Around this feeling circle more clearly defined emotions, such as loneliness, isolation, and loss. It would be a stretch to argue that alienation and estrangement are neo-emotions, because Cottingham (2024) defines neo-emotions as new terms that express novel emotional experiences within contemporary neoliberal societies: alienation and estrangement are not novel terms or experiences. However, they have something in common with neo-emotions in that they occur within the macro-social context of capitalist society and also capture the affective experience of misalignment with one's dynamic environment. For example, it has been pointed out that right-wing populist movements crystalize emotions associated with alienation, transforming insecurities and worries into generalized anger and resentment (Nguyen et al., 2022). Estrangement and broken relationships, identification and misidentification, loneliness and longing for connection, loss and anger, despair and hope, are the emotional contradictions of alienation in the present juncture of capitalism.
Also central to the experience of alienation is the established emotion of nostalgia, the feeling of not being at home in the world that one should be at home in, accompanied by the longing to return to that home (Geniusas, 2025a). Nostalgia is often thought of as a desire to return to some longed-for golden age located in the past and so is associated with more reactionary political movements. Yet as we shall see here, nostalgia has a much more complex temporality than this and there can be neo-emotions associated with it, such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope for a better future—a nostalgia for an age yet to come, as suggested in the title of this piece. Because the complex temporality of nostalgia is just starting to be explored, much that has been written about emotions and politics has centered on how right-wing populism is exploiting feelings of alienation and nostalgia, but very little has been said about the political left and those engaged in radical politics. How do they (we) 1 experience alienation and what effect is this having on radical politics and activism? On the left, the world one wants to bring into being suggests a radical break from the past and present by creating a non-alienated society, involving a more meaningful, empowered, and inclusive way of life (Øversveen & Kelly, 2023). Longing for this world located in the future is not new and is perhaps common to all future-oriented forms of utopianism: however, I would argue that giving it a specific name related to contemporary forms of dislocation, such as nostalgia for an age yet to come or progressive nostalgia, allows us to think of this experience as a neo-emotion that calls for entry into the established emotional vocabulary. Also, a set of contradictory and combinatory emotions circle around nostalgia for an age yet to come, particularly hope and disappointment, optimism and pessimism. It is these things I want to focus on here, using the concept of neo-emotions to examine feelings such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope.
In assessing the value of neo-emotions as a concept useful for analyzing certain emotions related to alienation, I will begin by defining my use of the Marxian concept of alienation, applying this to emotional experience. I will then explore the complex temporality of the emotion of nostalgia and how it appeals in different ways to the left and the right, although this classification of political groupings needs greater exploration and investigation as the movement of people between them is fluid and complex. The meaning of left and right has also changed and has become more complex with the emergence of centrism as a political force in the 1990s, one that defined itself as a “third way” between left and right, yet often seems to be more aggressively hostile to the left (as in Britain, where centrist leaders of the Labour Party have sought to distance themselves from left-wing politics and purge the party of left-wing members). There are also common and overlapping ways in which people across the political spectrum will experience alienation, although I will go on to argue that there are particular neo-emotions that affect the left given their location in the contemporary social and political landscape.
Alienation, Emotion, and Neo-Emotions from a Marxian Perspective
Cottingham defines neo-emotions as “situated within macro-level change and salient cultural events, [they] are the constrained yet creative practices that social actors use to address the disconnect between one's emotional vocabulary…and the situations they encounter” (2024, p. 6). Also, they are “aimed at capturing a distinct affective experience of relative (mis)alignment with one's dynamic environment” (p. 7). Neo-emotions, then, expand the emotional vocabulary by creating new terms that describe novel practices; or they may share a family resemblance to established emotions, or involve a combination of these emotions. In this sense, alienation and estrangement cannot be defined as neo-emotions as they are not new terms in our lexicon and are not used in everyday practices to refer to common understandings of emotion. Instead, they are used to describe broken relationships; a feeling of distance to something that should be of importance. However, alienation bears some similarity to neo-emotions in that, in the Marxian sense of the term, it arises within the macro-level contexts of capitalism—its historical dynamics and contradictions—and it describes the experience of relative misalignment with one's dynamic environment, which I hope to show here has an affective dimension. Because of this, the contemporary changes and cultural developments in neoliberal capitalism are unique in producing a whole range of neo-emotions, because they are misaligning us with our dynamic environment in historically distinct ways that cannot be captured by our existing emotional vocabulary.
For me, though, emotions are not just cultural practices: they are cultural practices located within social relations, as all emotions involve a relationship to an object, event, to other people, and to social groups (Burkitt, 2014, 2018). As individuals we intersect these relationships from the perspective of our own biography and our own internalized beliefs and values, although these are always connected to the social groups and ideologies we identify or dis-identify with, rather than being purely individual, cognitive phenomena. As I shall argue here, alienation and estrangement involve broken and defective relationships and so generate particular feelings, emotions, and neo-emotions that express misalignment with our dynamic environment. However, this experience can lead to creative practices where people are forced to confront this misalignment and set about resolving the contradictions in contemporary capitalism, creating in the process new and more meaningful relationships and collective activities.
Obviously, in Marx's political economy the affective dimension of alienation is merely hinted at, and in his later works alienation is defined in economic terms as resulting from the exploitative nature of capitalist forms of production. Here, first of all, products are estranged from their producers by being appropriated as private property and, second, transformed into a social force over which the producers have little control and that works against their interests (Marx, 1973). For example, the logic of capital operates to maximize profit, and this can lead to a drive to lower the value of wages and/or to increase productivity by extracting more labor power from workers, often at the expense of their own well-being. In general terms, though, central to alienation in capitalism is estrangement: from what we produce and from the wealth and social power accumulated from labor. In his earlier writings, Marx (1844/1977) also noted how alienation in capitalism estranges people from each other. For Marx, human labor is a collective process, a social endeavor, and yet through the appropriation of the products of labor and the wealth that is derived from them, capitalist forms of production tend to isolate individuals from one another and appeal to individual interests. Under capitalism, the alienated person is an “abstraction”—a term Marx used to refer to any factor which appears isolated from the social whole of which it is a part, thus losing its sense and meaning. Society also becomes a “fixed abstraction” opposed to the individual (Marx, 1844/1977, p. 91), in that although society exists only because it is produced and reproduced through the activities of individuals who stand in relation to one another, it nevertheless comes to feel as though it is an alien or coercive power separate from us, over which we have little power or influence. Although Marx's work was not focused on emotion, he nevertheless makes it clear that estrangement, isolation, and atomization are the emotional tenor of capitalism.
When society appears as a fixed abstraction and the alienated individual also becomes an abstraction—as opposed to a concrete individual whose needs and capacities are developed through meaningful work and social interaction—humans can become estranged from the other things we produce, such as systems of government and institutions, including the realm of politics, sensing that they are a social force acting over and against us rather than something we have genuine democratic control over. As Bertell Ollman (1971) puts it, “parliaments, laws and the rest have assumed the guise of quasi-supreme beings to which their own creators are asked to pay obedience” (p. 216). This is especially the case in contemporary neoliberalism, where many are losing faith in democratic institutions because they feel politicians have prioritized the interests of global capital over the interests of their own populations. An example of this is the way many working class people feel that they have lost skilled, well-paid jobs through deindustrialization, after financial deregulation in the mid-1980s allowed large capital flows out of nation states to invest in production facilities in countries where labor was cheaper. This not only took away secure, well-paid employment, but it also destroyed entire communities, leaving them to precarious low-paid work, unemployment, the breakdown of relationships as family and friends moved away, signs of deprivation in local town centers, and the scourge of crime and addiction. Blustein et al. (2024) have documented the psychological damage created by precarious social and economic conditions, which create vulnerability, insecurity, lack of power and agency, and existential threat. Psychologically, this leads to feelings of alienation, anomie, and uncertainty, which cause anxiety, ill-health and addiction.
Alienation, then, signals the loss of a positive and meaningful relation to one's environment—the place we once thought of as home and which we feel has been damaged—as well to the other people who live, or once lived, within it. In Jaeggi's (2014) definition alienation is a relation of relationlessness, not in the sense of the absence of a relation but rather of a relation that is in some way deficient. There is a detachment or separation between people or things that in fact belong together, “the loss of a connection between two things that nevertheless stand in relation to one another” (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 25). For Marx, alienation is also referred to as “a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be” and as the “realm of estrangement” (in Ollman, 1971, p. 132). We may often refer to being estranged from something or someone, but we also feel that estrangement. Vocalizing estrangement or how one feels in a relation of relationlessness—in a state of separation between people or things that belong together, in that mistake or defect that is the realm of estrangement—is hard to do precisely, because, like neo-emotions, it is a complex state that is not readily within the established emotional vocabulary. So, we reach for words for those emotions that bear a family resemblance, such as loss, isolation, and loneliness. We do this when we talk about estrangement from family members or from friends, when we feel the loss of a broken or a defective relationship but one where there is still the sense of a connection (you are still my parent or friend despite our separation) and perhaps the possibility of reconciliation or realignment. Although an emotion such as loss closely approximates estrangement, it does not quite capture in language the feeling of a lost connection between entities that still stand in relation to one another.
However, another reason why it may be productive to think of alienation and estrangement as akin to neo-emotions is that the type of alienation Marx describes occurs within a macro-social and economic context, even though it has personal and interpersonal ramifications, and as such it can only be fully addressed at the macro-level. Any attempt to overcome alienation can only be done through collective action that is aimed at systemic change. On the macro-level, Marx's theory of alienation is rooted in his analysis of capitalism, in which he understands this mode of production and its social relations as defined by an internal contradiction between socialization
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and alienation (Øversveen, 2022). Capitalism involves the socialization of the mass of the population because it broke the feudal bonds of dependence between landowners and agricultural workers, in which tradition dictated people's roles and their place in society. In industrial capitalism, individuals became wage laborers who, on the surface, act as independent and formally equal agents, an appearance that obscures the fact that humans are objectively more interdependent than ever before. In the collective effort of large-scale production and in the life of large industrial cities, social relations are more expansive than at any other point in history and there is greater mutual identification between people. Capitalism is also a global enterprise, spreading its mode of production and social relations of production across the world. At the same time, …the progressive potential of capitalist development is subverted by a dialectic of alienation and socialization in which objective expansion in social power and interdependence are experienced as a corresponding increase in powerlessness and isolation. (Øversveen, 2022, p. 442)
The dialectic of socialization and alienation also creates the paradox of capitalism, in that it involves a huge expansion in social power and the potential of individuals to benefit from this, and yet people feel powerless and isolated to a greater degree. In contemporary society an example of this is social media, which, when it first appeared early in the new millennium, promised to connect people across the world like never before. It was seen as a tool for expanding social relations beyond national and cultural borders, breaking down barriers and uniting people. The potential for socialization and the creation of greater interdependence between people seemed huge, as did the empowerment of the people. However, because the social media companies are private enterprises that have at their heart the capitalist drive to maximize profit, data is mined and monetized from those using the platforms and advertising is targeted at specific individuals, bringing in huge revenues. Knowing that people stay online longer when they are feeling angry, algorithms are used to stoke conflict and outrage between users of social media (Munn, 2020) so that, as they remain online, they receive more advertising. What could have been a great expansion in socialization and a tool for empowering the majority, has ended up spreading and entrenching division and creating anger. A recent study has shown how messages expressing anger spread more broadly and deeply across user networks on social media than messages expressing other emotions, except when anxiety is combined with anger (Han et al., 2023). Additionally, in a world more connected than ever before there is a large rise in reports of loneliness, and this emotion has become a defining feature of contemporary societies (Alberti, 2019). Although this is not a direct product of social media, and some platforms seem to counteract loneliness, this only happens when people actively use them to strengthen and extend offline relationships: in contrast, compulsive use of social media and instances where people feel victimized online elevate feelings of loneliness and isolation (Matthews et al., 2025).
In instances where social media does create a sense of alienation, this is fertile ground for neo-emotions such as doomscrolling, where people spend excessive amounts of time online searching for news stories, especially negative stories that create a feeling of impending doom and hopelessness: a view that society is irreparably broken and there is little an isolated individual can do about it. As Sharma et al. (2022) have shown, doomscrolling often starts out as a desire to keep up with news stories one cares about, or searching for information in a crisis (such as during the COVID-19 pandemic), then turns into an obsessive and addictive compulsion linked to how global and local crises are presented on unending and targeted newsfeeds. Although Sharma et al. refer to doomscrolling as a habit rather than as a neo-emotion, there clearly are feelings associated with it, such as heightened feelings of anxiety. It can also be considered as a neo-emotion because of the way in which feelings of anxiety and crisis are combined in a new relation to the world mediated by mobile technologies, which keep us constantly in touch with unfolding stories and provide little respite from their impact.
In summary, despite the economic focus of Marx's later works, he never gave up on the concept of alienation and this always has a human dimension. Alienation and estrangement can be seen to have similarities to neo-emotions because, although they are not new experiences, they address the disconnect between people and their emotional vocabulary, on the one hand, and on the other the dynamic situations they encounter. Furthermore, estrangement is an embodied feeling that shares a family resemblance to other more clearly articulated and established emotions, such as loss, loneliness, and isolation. Although Marx appreciated the progressive side of capitalism, it must not be forgotten that he critiqued it for its ultimately destructive tendencies and perpetual crises, where gross inequality and placing the value of capital above the value of human life results in social fragmentation, deprivation, and poverty. This leads many to feel no longer at home in the world where they should belong, with a deep sense of nostalgia for that lost home. But nostalgia is a complex emotion that can give rise to a host of neo-emotional experiences.
Alienation and Nostalgia
Nostalgia is an established emotion that is central to the experience of alienation because in becoming estranged from the world in which one lives there is a sense of no longer being at home in the place where one should belong. Johannes Hofer introduced the term nostalgia into the medical vocabulary in 1866 to describe a state of grief experienced by those who are away from their home and desire to return to it. It is homesickness that combines the term Nosos, meaning return to the native land, with Algos, which means suffering and pain. As Geniusas (2025a) shows, the term was transformed by Kant and later by the Romantics to take on a temporal meaning, referring to a desired return to a longed-for past, or in the case of the Romantics to a past that was highly mythologized. In contrast to this, Geniusas takes a phenomenological approach to nostalgia, understanding it as a complex lived experience with diverse temporal structures. There can be not only nostalgia for the past but also nostalgia for the present, where one sees a valued world in which one currently lives disappearing before one's eyes; and there is nostalgia for the future, in the sense of an anticipated state one hopes to attain but is deprived of. Given this, the emotional responses to nostalgia are also complex and ambivalent, in that one can both love and hate aspects of the world one misses: one can mourn a longed-for future that is yet to come into being while at the same time taking joy in its anticipation (Geniusas, 2025b).
However, because nostalgia is such a complex experiential and emotional structure, the political responses to it are also highly complex. It is tempting to think of the right-wing response to alienation as a simple appeal to nostalgia for a lost past, as in Donald Trump's mantra in the United States to Make America Great Again. Yet as White (2025) points out, today's identitarian new-right are obsessed with the future possibilities that lie in store of what Guillaume Faye described as “the aftermath of the chaos.” The Silicon Valley tycoons, many of whom have embraced the far-right, have always celebrated disruption of the status quo as a means of accelerating toward the future, referring favorably to figures of the futurist movement like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who espoused an aesthetic attitude of hostility toward all existing codes and relentless fixation on the new. For the tycoons of Silicon Valley, the vision of the future appears to be a technologically based hypercapitalist society in which the democratic nation-state has been destroyed and replaced by a patchwork of authoritarian “network states” led by “techno-kings.” Despite this, the new-right's populist appeal does exploit nostalgia for the past; the tycoons’ vision of the future is not widely shared and instead popularity is gained by appealing to a neo-reactionary future where past industries and communities are restored, and dominant identities, hierarchies, and national boundaries are reasserted and strengthened. At work here is a complex temporal structure of the lived experience of nostalgia, drawing not only on a longing for an imagined lost world, but also on the hope of future revival. Once again, neo-emotions are important to help us understand this complex combination of alienated emotions: of loss and hope, and of anger alternating with joy at the prospect of renewal.
Nostalgia for the future has its own complex structure of lived experience and emotional resonance. Smith and Campbell (2017) have made a distinction between reactionary and progressive nostalgia (although the better term maybe “revolutionary nostalgia,” coined by Jameson (1971) after Walter Benjamin), the latter being a state where drawing on memories and memorialization of the past can develop sentiments and nurture the emotional commitment to social justice needed to build a better future. In their ethnographic studies of the industrial heritage movement, Smith and Campbell note how progressive nostalgia does not over-idealize the past, instead seeing it as hard, difficult, and inequitable. At the same time, aspects of the experience and social values of once industrialized communities are identified as worth remembering and reaffirming for both the present and the future, in particular the value of hard work, collective action, and radical politics. The complex and combined emotions evoked by this heritage involve feeling the loss of these communities, while this is simultaneously tempered with pride at what they achieved; feelings of gratitude at the heritage that has been left are combined with empathy toward the struggles of those who worked in those industries; and the sense of communal belonging and of place is celebrated but seen in the context of rapid deindustrialization and social change. The key message, though, in terms of going forward into the future is that community and camaraderie is the source of solidarity needed for renewed strategies for a more equitable future and the emotional strength to achieve this, despite setbacks. It reinforces the utility of organized political and social action for progressive change.
One could argue here that progressive nostalgia is a neo-emotion that is expressed in the creative practice of acknowledging the sadness at the loss of past industries and communities, yet taking their values of collective action and solidarity as sources of pride and joy, projecting these feelings onto a possible future as the basis of a non-alienated society. As Øversveen (2022) says, “capitalist alienation can be interpreted as simultaneously a progressive and contradictory feature of social development” (p. 448), because it leads a section of society to want to extend the socializing elements of capitalism while overcoming its alienating tendencies. This involves the desire to create a non-alienated society, one where our social potential can be fulfilled and directed toward goals of our own determination (Øversveen & Kelly, 2023). But progressive nostalgia is a complex neo-emotion because in the present moment those wanting radical change can feel they are trapped in the middle of time, with a longing that can only be described as nostalgia for an age yet to come.
Another part of the complexities of alienation and loss the left has to deal with is that in the changing political landscape of the last 25 years, a section of the working class that used to provide the backbone of the workforce in the industries Smith and Campbell are referring to, and that used to vote for liberal or left-leaning political parties like the Democrats in the United States and for the Labour Party in Britain, have shifted toward right-wing populism. As a recent study of the 2024 general election results in the United Kingdom has shown, Reform UK—the right-wing populist party—increased its vote primarily among older, white working-class populations, although many previous Conservative Party supporters also switched their vote to Reform (Heath et al., 2025). Similarly in the US election of 2024, although Donald Trump increased the diversity of his support, the core of this still remains among older white voters, a significant number of whom were less likely to have a 4-year college degree than those who voted for Kamala Harris (also, a higher number of those who identified as Christian voted for Trump; Hartig et al., 2025). This indicates that in both the United Kingdom and the United States, alongside traditional conservatives, a section of older, white working-class people have moved their support to the radical right over recent years. There are also regional elements involved in sections of the working class voting for the populist right, where the long-term economic and demographic decline of formerly prosperous places in rural areas or towns outside the big cities has led these populations to express anger at established parties and politicians at the ballot box (Rodríguez-Pose, 2020).
There is, then, an expression of alienation from, and anger toward, the established political system that is at the heart of many previously progressive voters turning to reactionary nostalgia. It must not be forgotten, though, the deep roots of racism in capitalist society that are lodged in it from its origins in imperialism and colonialism, which meant that the gains working class people in the West won from employers and the state in terms of higher wages and welfare benefits after 1945 were often paid for by the exploitation of workers in more peripheral countries (Kundnani, 2023). For Kundnani, this explains why working-class anger at the loss of these privileges under neoliberalism can easily turn to racism rather than class struggle, as anger is directed at immigrants and nonwhite minorities who are blamed for taking an undeserved share of wealth and resources.
But the main question I want to ask here is about alienation and those who have stayed committed to the left. Do they experience alienation in different ways and what do we mean by the contemporary left in the wake of this political polarization?
Marginalization and Alienation on the Left
In this article when I refer to those on the left of politics, I mean those who have kept their belief in socialist principles and have supported left-wing parties like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and La France Insoumise. I am also referring to activists in a range of different social movements, such as the environmental movement, the peace movement, and Black Lives Matter, who see their involvement as necessitating an anticapitalist stance. Although not everyone in these movements shares that position, there are many who see activism for these causes tied up with radical socialist beliefs. Certainly, those who were part of the “Occupy” movement after the financial crash of 2008 would fit that description, and many of those went on to support Bernie Saunders’ campaign for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. I do not include in this definition those who describe themselves as centrist and see themselves as neither left nor right, whether they are members of the Democratic Party or Labour Party, or those on the center-right in traditional conservative parties who have claimed the mantle of centrism.
The reason for this is that, as Elhefnawy (2024) points out, centrism historically shares deep philosophical roots with conservativism, with both believing in the complexity of the world and the irrationality and darkness of human nature. This leads to a fear of the masses taking control of politics and government (beyond voting in elections every 4 or 5 years), something which could unleash an evil that social institutions would find hard to contain. For conservatives, this meant initially defending the Old Regime of aristocratic institutions against democratic expansion and, lately, supporting without question the authoritarian wings of the state. In contrast, centrists favor managing the potentially dangerous masses through technocratic government overseeing a liberal, pluralistic state. Despite this difference, their common core means that centrism and the right recognize each other as part of the legitimate spectrum of political opinion, whereas this is not the case for the left. For centrists, left-wing views are outside this legitimate spectrum and are often stigmatized with the formula “communism = totalitarianism = fascism,” also expressed as the “horseshoe thesis” in that both far-left and far-right are said to converge at their extreme edges. The effect of this is to freeze the left out of the legitimate spectrum of political opinion as being extreme in all its forms.
This has especially been the case since Bill Clinton became the Democratic President of the United States in 1992 and accepted the basic tenets of Reagan's neoliberal economics, continuing with the policies of marketization, financialization, and privatization, turning against “New Dealism” which became akin to left-wing ideology. The then leader of the British Labour Party, Tony Blair, copied Clinton's brand of centrism and accepted neoliberalism without question or critique, while also adopting the new identity politics, introducing equality legislation covering gender and minority rights, albeit without a concern for economic justice. This kind of centrist politics then spread across Europe, so that most previously social democratic parties adopted a centrist approach that was often indistinguishable from center-right conservatism. But this alienated socialist supporters of these parties, including the sections of the working-class mentioned above. In the United Kingdom, after the 2019 general election defeat of the left wing, social democratic leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn—who was deemed an extremist and unelectable by the political mainstream and the media, including centrists in his own party—the centrist Keir Starmer won the leadership of Labour and began to purge the party of left-wing members and to adopt a moderate agenda. What this means is that, after winning the 2024 general election in the United Kingdom, the Starmer government has combined what Foster and el-Ojeili (2023) call “punitive neoliberalism” with “pragmatic neo-Keynesianism”: that is, on the one hand, they have attempted to implement punitive austerity cuts to public spending planned by the previous Conservative government in order to reassure financial markets, while at the same time injecting some neo-Keynesian stimulus into the economy to try to boost economic growth and save capitalism from itself. As Foster and el-Ojeili note, this is in response to what Gramsci (1971) called a “crisis of authority” (p. 210) or legitimation crisis—a crisis in ruling-class hegemony that has failed to contain structurally rooted, long-term failures in the capitalist economy. Because of this, there is a period of interregnum where the old is dying and the new cannot be born, accompanied by incoherence, confusion, and competition among ruling elites.
Currently, the far-right is exploiting this crisis of authority proposing new authoritarian structures of government while the left remains more fragmented, perhaps with the exception of France where the New Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties, was the largest group in the 2024 legislative election. Yet the ruling view in both politics and media still holds to the thesis that the left is an extremist force that must be kept from power, even as politics moves increasingly toward the right in Western countries and the far-right claims greater legitimacy by gaining core elements of public support and winning, or coming close to winning, elections across Europe and in the United States. In the immediate post-1945 period, the left had a voice in many European social democratic parties, yet since the turn of the millennium the left has increasingly been marginalized from mainstream politics and political debate. This has not only caused greater alienation on the left but also strengthened the resistance to the status quo. As we shall see, it has not only led to new forms of hope but also to neo-emotions peculiar to those who still occupy the space of left-wing politics.
Neo-Emotions and the Left
The feeling of alienation that accompanies being on the left of politics at the present time is experienced not only in terms of marginalization by political and media elites who are trying to keep the neoliberal system from collapsing, but also because many of the left's arguments have been coopted and distorted by the right-wing. As Naomi Klein (2023) has noted, gazing into the mirror world of right-wing social media, many far-right commentators adopt positions that on the surface appear similar to the left. Some, like Steve Bannon, adopt an anticorporate stance but instead of backing this with a critique of capitalism, which they wholeheartedly support, they veer off into conspiracy theories of various types. By doing this, the crises of capitalism are not traced back to the economic system that generates them but blamed on immigration or on a cabal of shady global liberal elites, explanations for which, as Kundnani (2023) points out, have a readymade audience in racially based capitalist systems. In addition, the right has coopted key left-wing terms like “the fight for freedom” and “liberation,” only this is freedom from pandemic lockdowns, vaccine programs, and government regulations, rather than freedom from alienation and exploitation. Klein reports how, peering into this topsy-turvy mirror world where one sees reflected back dark and distorted doppelganger figures, one is beset by feelings of vertigo at the strangeness confronted. In his novel Nausea, Sartre (1938/1965) records how his protagonist is overwhelmed by feelings of sickness and disorientation at confronting an alien world: a world that once was home but is now unrecognizable and uninhabitable.
For Klein (2023), an even more resonant term than nausea to capture this emotional experience is one coined by the Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga, which is the Spanish word zozobra. There is no exact term for this state of being in the English language, but Uranga calls zozobra the “bare skeleton” on which anxiety, angst, disquiet, fear, and unease can be hung. In this sense, zozobra is not so much an emotion as a back-and-forward rocking motion between conflicting emotions where there is no stable ground to underpin them. Thus, “zozobra is a ‘not knowing what to depend on,’ or… it is to simultaneously depend on both extremes… to hold on to both ends of the chain. The incessant rocking to and fro, the coming and going, has no end” (Uranga, 1952/2021, pp. 167–168). Following the Mexican poet López Velarde, who Uranga claims has best captured the feeling of zozobra, it reflects that our lives are pendulums, swinging this way and that way in terms of our emotional state. In this sense, the term zozobra could be thought of as a neo-emotion as it captures the feeling of groundlessness that is common in our contemporary alienated state, feeling homeless and that the world around us is strange and uncanny, not knowing on what to depend or exactly what to think or feel. In such a state, it is not uncommon to hold together two contradictory feelings at any one time, such as hope and hopelessness, joy and sadness, or not knowing whether to laugh or cry. On being faced with the latest conspiracy theory from the Make America Great Again movement one is often left with the feeling brilliantly captured by Philip Roth in his novel Operation Shylock, that “It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous” (in Klein, 2023, p. 10).
A key problem, though, with the notion of zozobra as Uranga has conceived of it is that at its heart there is an essential sadness, because we are “innately sad, by birth, and that is because we are originally a loss, penury, debt, and lack” (Uranga, 1952/2021, p. 174). Furthermore, it is this sadness and lack that leads us to come from solitude and form the social and communicative bonds that bind people into community. However, this is to understand zozobra as an ontological state that exist prior to society and to history, and therefore its zig-zagging movement is neither to be understood by formal logic or by dialectical thought. In contrast, a Marxian approach allows us to understand our feelings of zozobra as a neo-emotion that occurs precisely in the macro-context of our current historical juncture of neoliberalism, and how the oscillation of our emotions between emotional extremes is the result of the dialectic of socialization and alienation. On the side of socialization there is the progressive movement toward a more just society with its attendant emotions of joy, anticipation, and hope. On the side of alienation, however, we have isolation and the emotions of loss, loneliness, and nostalgia, all expressed as the neo-emotion of zozobra. But this can also be regarded as a neo-emotion in that, like progressive nostalgia, Klein's response to it is to urge people to get out from behind their keyboards in the culture wars and the attention economy, and to engage in the kind of creative, collective practices that can build a more reliable and secure world. Like those who escape feelings of isolation online, this can only be done by forging offline relations and confronting the real problems as they exist in the world.
Seeking solace in collective action with others is also central to the neo-emotion that Glen Albrecht (2005) has called “solastalgia.” He coined this term when working with the people of the Hunter Valley in New Zealand, who were seeing the destruction of their cherished environment because of the construction of a new power plant and felt unable to do anything about it, while at the same time suffering the distress of losing the place that was central to their self-identification. Related to the emotion of nostalgia, solastalgia is not a longing for a home one has been separated from and longs to return to, but instead is a feeling that occurs when one is still located in a place regarded as home and yet the environment of that place is being destroyed or degraded. Because of this difference, and the fact that those he was working with were struggling to express how they felt in the terms of the existing emotional vocabulary, Albrecht thought a new term was needed. The people I was concerned about were still ‘at home’, but felt a similar melancholia as that caused by nostalgia connected to the breakdown of the normal relationship between their psychic identity and their home. What these people lacked was solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’. In addition, they felt a profound sense of isolation about their inability to have a meaningful say and impact on the state of affairs that caused their distress. ‘Solastalgia’ was created to describe the specific form of melancholia connected to lack of solace and intense desolation. (Albrecht, 2005, p. 44)
This is something also evidenced in the neo-emotion of “Black joy,” which expresses itself as a creative practice in a similar way. For the activist and writer Kleaver Cruz (2017), Black joy is not meant to obscure the realities of the pain of racism but “It is about holding the pain and injustice we experience as Black folks around the world in tension with the joy we experience in the pain's midst.” Here we can see how, in the creative practice of Black joy that Cruz is advocating, joy and pain are not understood as mutually exclusive but they support each other in inspiring and giving strength to Black people to fight against the source of their injustice. In that sense, Black joy is a neo-emotion, not just because it is a new emotional expression, but because it combines emotions together that are normally thought to be opposites and does so in regard to a macro-social context of social and economic relations in which racism is embedded. It also creates a new identity for Black people around the shared sense of joy and pain that was evident in the Black Lives Matter protests that emerged in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by the police in the United States. Indeed, a target for many of these protests was militarized system of policing and the expansion of prisons in the United States aimed mainly at Black populations—what Kaba (2021) has called the “prison-industrial complex” and what Kundnani (2023) sees as central to the management of populations in neoliberalism. In opposition to this the idea of “Black joy” is the celebration of resistance, resilience, and reclaiming of black humanity, shifting the impact of negative narratives about Black people and their experiences to ones of collective and personal development, without ignoring the effects of violence and pain.
Neo-emotions, then, appear to be at the heart of many social movements that can be regarded broadly as forming part of left-wing and anticapitalist politics. They may signal the depth of the current crisis and its alienating features, as does zozobra, which expresses the sense of groundlessness in current social and personal life, and of swinging from one emotional pole to another. But more importantly neo-emotions form the creative practices that can act as the counterweight to feelings of alienation and zozobra, providing a sense of solace, empowerment, and joy when people join with others in collective actions to create non-alienated conditions of existence, in the process forging positive joint identities. At the present juncture, however, to paraphrase Gramsci, the old society appears to be dying and the new cannot yet be born, and so many feel they are trapped in the middle of time, with a longing that can be described as nostalgia for an age yet to come. Although alienation has many negative emotional connotations it also motivates individuals to collectively overcome existing social formations, transcending them in order to create something new. This leads to the constant conflict of emotions and the creation of new neo-emotions, as the left moves toward the future with a mixture of hope and despair.
Radical Hope or Tragic Hope?
One could say that the alternation of hope and despair has been a constant companion of those engaged in radical politics, whose social movements have faced defeats as well as victories, and thus had to balance feelings of optimism and pessimism, hope and realism. Perhaps the most famous expression of this in political writing is Antonio Gramsci's use of the phrase “pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will,” first coined by the French poet, novelist and dramatist Romain Rolland. In a letter written to his brother from prison in 1929, Gramsci took up this phrase to describe his own feelings. In telling his brother he was far from being discouraged and never despairs, Gramsci says he “never falls into those vulgar, banal moods pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesizes these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic but my will is optimistic”: and “Since I never build up illusions, I am seldom disappointed. I’ve always been armed with unlimited patience – not a passive, inert kind, but a patience allied with perseverance” (Gramsci, 1975, p. 159). We can then say that what I am calling “radical hope” is an attempt to synthesize and transcend pessimism and optimism, and imbues a feeling of patience allied with perseverance—a will to carry on the struggle for a non-alienated society in the face of difficult odds or a sense of the loss of the future or of the environment. More recently, Terry Eagleton (2019) has referred to this as “tragic hope,” in that there is a need for optimism but one tempered by an understanding of the barriers to progressive, transformative change. Yet, however we name this neo-emotion, whether as radical or tragic hope, the value of the concept of neo-emotions is that it can lead us beyond the understanding of single, discreet emotions already named and secured in our emotional vocabulary, into the territory of combined or seemingly contradictory feelings that can be felt together at any one time, or can be synthesized and transcended into something entirely new.
The term radical hope is given clearer definition in an article on the peace movement in Israel, written before the Hamas attack of October 2023 and the following war on Gaza, in which Halperin (2023) notes that many peace activists are motivated by “a radical, authentic and active form of hope” (p. 220). In the movement, hope is cultivated as a collective emotion that binds activists together, protects their identities, and motivates the activism that is necessary to achieve their goals. Interestingly, Halperin also notes that this hope has a nostalgic element to it, as it expresses “attachment to a political vision that was prevalent in the 1990s but [is] long gone, a ‘taken away’ dream of imminent peace” (p. 226). Many of the activists in Halperin's study recognize that peace is now a long way off, with one saying that she is not optimistic about the chance for it, but that it is still important for her to play her part in campaigning for what she believes in. Radical hope, then, is not a false or inauthentic hope, with activists believing that peace is just around the corner or easy to achieve: rather, it protects the activists from despair and resignation, instead continuing their activism in the face of the odds against them. As Halperin puts it, the radical, authentic, and active form of hope aims “to save what can be of a political vision, the shattered dream of peace, that is practically dead but remains central to the activists’ sense of identity and belonging” (p. 231).
The feelings of the peace activists are reminiscent of the neo-emotion of solastalgia, in that they are seeking solace in their collective movement in a world where the political environment is hostile and their dreams destroyed, yet they are also making practical attempts to salvage what they can of this and to work toward their idea of a better future. It is this practical element that is central to Levitas's (1990, 2007) definition of utopia, which for her is not an imagined perfect society nor a wishfully constructed place, but is the horizon of future possibilities embedded in the vast range human practice and culture as it presently exists. Utopians, then, are “looking for the blue” (Levitas, 2007)—the “blue horizon,” the “bright blue yonder”—from within their current societies and present realities, and thus must remain connected to this, so that utopianism becomes a method rather than simply a dream. It has to be put into practice and involves long-term thinking about the reconstruction of society. In emotional terms, Levitas (2007) looks at how in literature the color blue is associated with the emotional qualities of calmness and serenity, as well as being the color of hope and sadness. But the idea of hope as a method is extended in Kaba’s (2021) view of hope as a disciple. For her, hope is not an emotion and is not to be confused with optimism—a view similar to Gramsci's—but is a practice: something she has seen in her community organizing and is a “grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced all the time” (Kaba, 2021, p. 27).
It can be claimed, then, that radical hope is a neo-emotion that fuels creative practices where people come together to create a sense of shared identity and purpose. The key appears to be in abandoning false or naïve hopes and engaging in collective activity within the parameters of what is present and possible, maintaining hope as an emotion of future possibility (Wettergren, 2025) or as a horizon of relational possibility (Carlsen et al., 2011) rather than as a specific, imagined future society. Perhaps it is only on the horizons of relational possibility that alienation—which is a relation of relationlessness—can be partly overcome in the present, with the aim of eliminating it entirely in the future.
Conclusion
Neo-emotions are useful in understanding the emotions associated with alienation because they are described as the affective experience of misalignment with one's dynamic environment, and that precisely defines the condition of alienation. Furthermore, these situations are located in a wider macro-social context of alienation within capitalism and contain many of the contradictions that are found therein, which are experienced and expressed by individuals as emotional contradictions. For those on the left of politics at the present historical juncture, faced with the destructive forces of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of the new far-right with their capture and distortion of many left-wing positions, there is also the experience of new and sometimes confusing but uplifting neo-emotions such as zozobra, progressive nostalgia, solastalgia, Black joy, and radical hope. The oscillation of our feelings between emotional extremes is the result of the dialectic of socialization and alienation where, with the progressive force of socialization there is movement toward a more just society with its attendant emotions of joy, anticipation, and hope. Yet because of alienation, we also feel isolation and the emotions of loss, loneliness, and nostalgia, all expressed as the neo-emotion of zozobra.
However, neo-emotions do not describe all of the emotional experiences of alienation in our present circumstances, with the established emotions mentioned above having a key role. Within this, though, there are neo-emotions that play a central part in the experience of those on the left, or engaged in radical activism, such as progressive nostalgia or radical hope. Here, there is an attempt to synthesize the past, present, and future, as well as the emotions of pessimism and optimism to create something that transcends them. Such radical or tragic hope can be grasped through the concept of neo-emotions, which allows us to understand those emotions that circle around the edges of the field of articulation, within the reach of our emotional vocabulary but not fully expressed by it, being utterable only in new or combinatory emotional terms to capture the rupture between ourselves and our dynamic environment.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.