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Jac Lewis

Dr Jac Lewis

(he/him)

Overview

In 2025 I completed my PhD in philosophy from Cardiff University with a thesis entitled A Bruising Ideology: Posthumanity and the Nostalgic Drive. My research project critically examines ideology theory through a cultural and intellectual history of the nostalgic disease.  

Research Themes:

  • Ideology Critique and Theory
  • Politics and Philosophy of Nostalgia
  • Continental Philosophy 
  • Contemporary Ideologies and Affect
  • How Film and Visual Culture address these issues

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any queries or are interested in my research

Publication

2024

Thesis

Research

Thesis

A Bruising Ideology: Posthumanity and The Nostalgic Drive

My thesis is an alternative intellectual history of ideology theory through an emotion; nostalgia. I examine ideology and nostalgia as a comparative, double-helix movement of capitalist modernity that has deeply informed as well as affected post-Kantian continental philosophy, from nostalgia's "afflicted imagination" to ideology's "false consciousness". Drawing on this historical dialectic of ideology and nostalgia, I critique certain romantic limitations of Slavoj Žižek's theory of ideology as a sublime object as well as the ontological nostalgia and melancholia of his philosophy as a whole.

My research more broadly focusses on the history of ideas and critical theory, ideology theory, theoretical psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, political philosophy, film, as well as the affective contours of contemporary ideologies (Left and Right accelerationism, effective altruism, neo- and postfascism). I am especially interested in the question of nostalgia as an ontological and romantic characteristic of the experience of modernity and how far this idea has, consciously or unconsciously, informed contemporary psychoanalytic theories of "false consciousness".   

 

 

Thesis

Funding sources

Funding from James Pantyfedwen Foundation 2020 - 2023

Teaching

- 2021 Autumn Semester: Seminar Tutor of the ENCAP module "Philosophy Through Fiction and Film" 

- 2022 Spring Semester: Seminar Tutor of the ENCAP module "Debates in the History of Philosophy"

Biography

Published Articles

Forthcoming. "A Bruising Ideology" in "And so on..." How to make sense of Slavoj Žižek"

2025. “Before it was ‘bittersweet’, nostalgia was seen as a parasite” Aeon and Psyche. 

2024. “Acid Fascism: Nostalgia, Psychedelia and Radical Right Masculinity” Journal of Bodies, Sexualities and Masculinities. vol. 5, no.1, pp. 81-99

2021. “Futurism in Nostalgic Wales”. Wales Arts Review. 

Speaking Engagements

2025. “A Bruising Ideology”. “And so on…”: How to make sense of Slavoj Žižek Conference. Goethe Institute. Prague.

2025. "Fashwave to AI: Hauntology and Hegemony of the Late Capitalist Far-Right" Haunted Futures Conference. University College Cork. Cork. (Chair).

2024. “Nostalgia: From Afflicted Imagination to False Consciousness”. Workshop of Memory and Emotions. University of Cambridge. Cambridge.

2023. “Nostalgia as Apocalypse: Russian Cosmism and American Neo-Reaction” Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements Conference. Manchester Imperial War Museum. Manchester.

2023. “Acid Fascism: Psychedelic Consciousness and Nostalgic Imagination” Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research on Antifascism and the Far-Right Conference. Cardiff University. Cardiff.

2022. “Nostalgia: From Afflicted Imagination to False Consciousness”. AHVC Research Seminars. University of Exeter. Exeter.

2021. “A Bruising Ideology: Posthumanity and The Nostalgic Drive”. ENCAPsulate Conference. Cardiff University. Cardiff. (Chair) 

2020. “Acid Fascism: Decoding the New Man from the Lyman Family to the Alt-Right”. Viral Masculinities Conference. University of Exeter. Exeter. 

 

Supervisors

Fabio Vighi

Fabio Vighi

Professor of Italian and Critical Theory

Contact Details

Email [email protected]