Exposure and Losers
An essay on the anxiety epidemic, autofiction and internet feminism; and an essay about politics, humility, and loss.
Drawing on Sudjic’s experience of anxiety – as well as the work of Elena Ferrante, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk and others – Exposure examines the damaging assumptions that attend female artists, indeed any woman who risks exposure, as well as the strategies by which one might escape them.
Far from a sentimental moral virtue, humility may well be the most elusive, precarious, and indeed radical value of all, one which relies upon a full-hearted embrace of one’s inner loser. Enlisting the help of a cast of unlikely comrades – Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser – psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen shows in Loser how we might move beyond a culture based on enforced positivity, resentment, and humiliation.
Published with Peninsula Press
Illustration by Jonathan Hodgson