Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is a fi lm about a romantic relationship between a man and an operating system. Using a Lacanian and Žižekian psychoanalytic framework, we interpret this fi lm in the context of what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called "capitalist realism." Referring to the Lacanian thesis that "there is no sexual relationship," we discuss the fi lm's unique treatment of our enjoyment of digital technology and how it deals with the parallel deadlocks of the sexual relationship and the work relationship. We address these topics by looking at how Her deals with the sexual relationship, love, work, and fantasy. The premise of the fi lm is original-suited to the zeitgeist of the digital present-and we claim that it reveals important insights about processes of subjectivization. What is Spike Jonze's fi lm Her (2013) about? Is it concerned with the nefarious eff ects of technology, how we are infatuated with our gadgets, our devices, our Wi-Fi, and our technology? Or is it simply an old-fashioned love story, in which one of the lovers just happens to be a computer? These two possibilities suggest two ways we will discuss the fi lm in this article, albeit in very specifi c critical paradigms derived from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek: the infatuation, we argue, is a symptom of a kind of incommensurability, encapsulated in the Lacanian dictum that "there's no such thing as a sexual relation"; the love story, in turn, is a kind of fantasy, a necessary fantasy that we nonetheless must traverse or transcend.1 That is, fi rst of all, the logic of incommensurability derives precisely from a reading of our infatuation with technology, our "passionate attachments" to devices and connectivity.

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This article challenges the Foucauldian conception of the neoliberal subject by addressing self-promotion as a key feature of users' engagement with social media websites. The essay argues that the rational choice rhetoric of neoliberal entrepreneurialism involves a process of further objectivizing and reifying—rather than producing—the subject by increasingly commodifying the time spent outside of paid labor. The neoliberal idea of investing in one's human capital is compared to the Marxian category of the reproduction of labor-power, which, in the neoliberal context, is subdivided into the time spent on the promotion of the Self. Social media help to facilitate the latter by providing a material space for self-promotion and result in the expansion of working time into what Jonathan Crary calls “24/7 temporalities.” The arguments made here are aided by developing a neo-Lacanian conception—in opposition to the Foucauldian one—of neoliberal subjectivity.

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This article examines the rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president of the United States in the context of three overlapping contradictions: that of subversion in postmodern culture and politics, that between the democratic and commercial logics of the media, and that of the failure of the Left in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The article looks at the rise of “Trumpism” and the new brand of white nationalist and misogynistic culture of the so-called alt-right in its historical context to show how it is consistent with but also distinguished from previous right-wing ideologies. More generally, the three contradictions presented here are proposed as explanations for understanding the mainstreaming of the alt-right in contemporary politics and culture.