Amador Fernández-Savater: "We are caught between market and technology"

Amador Fernández-Savater (Madrid, 1974) is a journalist, philosopher and author of Libidinal capitalism (NED Editions), a book in which he analyzes the relationship between capitalism and desire and addresses the malaise, precariousness, and acceleration of our times.

I'm so sorry about the phrase "I don't have time"...

— There's something of a protective lie about it, because we make time for what interests us. But it's interesting to listen to society's ills through language. I thought about that the other day when I heard the word satisfaction.

Because?

— Satis is enough. Face It comes from doing. That is, satisfaction comes from "doing enough." I think that's precisely what we don't have today.

Because?

— Because we never focus on our desire, and we try to fill this lack by racing through a million things. Until the moment of excess and saturation arrives.

Desire, what is it?

— It's not easy to define. But I think it's a kind of longing, to be in life doing what we feel, to be doing something that fulfills and satisfies us. And that's enough. It's not necessarily pleasurable, but that's what we're here for, not a thousand other things.

An example?

— Being a teacher in a school can have its complex moments, but you want to be there, and you find it fulfilling. I recently asked a friend: When was the last time you heard that you were where you were supposed to be? And she said: accompanying my father's death. So the desire can be painful, but it means being where you want to be and doing what you want to do.

What does capitalism do to desire?

— Desire is created by walking; it's something that must be constructed, invented. And capitalism tells you: you don't need to ask yourself what your desire is or build your own path; I'll show you what's available here. And it satisfies desire with established objects and paths. And this is new.

New respect for what?

— The capitalism our parents experienced during Franco's regime was repressive and told us: you have to renounce your body, your sexuality, you have to produce. But today it's inciting and accelerating. It seduces us with many things that make us not build our desire but buy its own.

What does it seduce us with?

— Objects and trips for happiness. Houses. And also with lifestyles: fulfillment, success. And I also believe there's a theft of the time that desire requires. I mean, everything is so fast and accelerated that we can't even ask ourselves where our desire is going.

The truth is that it seems that the tasks never end.

— Before, work had a time when it ended. Now we're on a conveyor belt where you finish one thing and you're already starting another. When do you ever get a break if it's always a good time to get something done? And I think this is worse in vocational jobs.

Because?

— The other day, a friend who had worked at McDonald's told me: I sometimes spit in the hamburger. I told him off, obviously. But the important thing is that there was a distance between him and his job. What happens when I am my job?

What's going on?

— Well, what we're passionate about is driven by a perverse mechanism: the market, which requires certain timescales, mandates certain results, and demands a bureaucracy that keeps us on this conveyor belt. And it hurts us more because we do something we love.

Bureaucracy…

— The great myth of neoliberalism was that it would free us from bureaucracy, a myth that Trump's ideologues continue to repeat. And in reality, neoliberalism is becoming the worst of bureaucracies, because there is an entire regime of subjection to the control of people's work through paperwork to fill out, evaluations, and self-evaluations to pass. Teachers, nurses, and university professors suffer from it. Many workers.

Is there a way out or are we lost?

— The problem with our desire isn't so much that we're deluded as that we're trapped in these market and technological mechanisms. I think the political work that needs to be done at the individual and collective levels is: how do we defend ourselves? And that's why the first question of the book is: at what point do life and the market cease to be one and the same?

The answer that women is quite terrible.

— It is, but I think they cease to be the same thing when discomfort appears. That is, discomfort challenges you about what life you're leading. And if you don't cover it up with pills or certain therapies, it gives you information. And in that sense, it is a disconnect between life and the market. You stop being on the conveyor belt because we have an underlying discomfort that's telling us there's only one life and we're damaging it. But it's essential, in that moment of interruption, to think, and not to dismiss it.

Does all this translate to politics?

— The other day I was asking a question to someone in politics. And he ended up admitting: we're just day-to-day. There's no time to think, there's no interruption in the machine. Politics is subject to these market dynamics, and then it adds worse ones.