Review: ‘Disappointment is Not Just a Feeling – It’s a Political Force’

Maria Ibrahim

24 June 2025

In his recent article, ‘Disappointment is not just a feeling – it’s a political force,’ Rafael Holmberg presents a striking account of disappointment as a politically charged and structurally revealing affect, building his argument through a critique of stoic optimism and an insistence on the co-implication of subjective experience and objective systemic failure. His approach is, as always, sharply reasoned and intellectually provocative, inviting agreement as well as deeper reflection, shaped by the clarity of his analysis and the familiarity cultivated through an ongoing dialogue.

What follows is not so much a rebuttal as a continuation – albeit along a slightly different axis. While his reading foregrounds disappointment as a structurally revelatory affect, one that registers the objective failure of the political systems, I want to explore what emerges when we reframe the same terrain through the psychoanalytic dynamic of hysterical externalisation and melancholic internalisation/incorporation. These two defences, far from being mere emotional reactions, structure the subject’s relation to loss, repetition, and political entrapment. In doing so, I aim to extend and gently test Holmberg’s assumptions by situating disappointment not only as a critical awareness, but also as a symptom shaped by (and potentially complicit with) the very structures it seeks to challenge.

Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, I suggest that the subject’s (and by extension, the collective’s) oscillation between hysteric and melancholic positions operates less as a rupture than as a recursive symptom. ‘Discontinuities’ that promise radical change, may unconsciously repeat prior forms (e.g. the hysteric rejects the father only to seek his gaze; the melancholic internalises the loss of a failed ideal, preserving its meaning and nostalgia, without pushing beyond it). In this view, disappointment does not merely expose contradictions but also risks becoming the very terrain through which contradiction is perpetually repeated. What appears as disruption may, in fact, be precisely scripted, or at least absorbed within the system’s capacity to neutralise disruption. Discontinuity, in this sense, becomes less a break from ‘the order of things’ and more a feedback mechanism (or a mechanism for its own containment, where critique is processed and re-integrated). While Holmberg insists on disappointment as a site of critical political awareness, I ask what happens when even that awareness becomes routinised?

The call to defend a ‘politics of disappointment’ offers a compelling reframing of affect as politically structured rather than primitively endured. In this, I am in strong agreement with the author – disappointment is not a deviation from political life, but one of its structuring affects. This is reminiscent of a melancholic logic, one where loss, rendered unresolvable, is not overcome, but sustained. Indeed, if melancholia entails the internalisation of an ‘impossible’ loss, not to resolve but to preserve its ‘ungrievability’/impossibility of resolution, then disappointment operates not as an obstacle to action, but as its psychic pre-condition.

However, this is where I would like to push further: I suggest that disappointment is neither a stable nor a singular affect, but rather a form of a ‘threshold condition’ (denoting a site where disparate psychic trajectories become a possibility). Rather than viewing disappointment as inherently radical or sustaining, it is critical to attend to the divergent responses it can produce: melancholic internalisation (introjection, self-reproach, political stagnation) or hysterical externalisation (conversion, reactionary symptoms, public outcry, resistance). These are certainly not mere emotions, but structured psychic responses, conditioned by symbolic possibility, or more accurately, in this context – they both operate in accordance with a structured script (one must not choose between them but rather uncover the very truth of their inevitability).

The Lacanian joke (‘can you make me suffer?’ the masochist asks, to which the sadist replies, ‘no’), as Holmberg suggests, elegantly captures the paradoxical structure of desire/demands – where disappointment reverses into a form of enjoyment, where failure is folded into the logic of satisfaction. I agree that this paradox does not merely operate in the subjective realm but also characterises the political realm. To say that disappointment satisfies is not wrong, but it risks reducing political impasse to a kind of structural inevitability (the loop as both ‘prison’ and ‘pleasure’). Yet this loop can only function because the terrain it circulates on is already ‘mapped’. Thus, the very conditions that allow disappointment to emerge, reverse and sustain enjoyment are pre-structured. The drive toward transformation often loops back into its own failure, sustaining a jouissance of endless deferral.

Here, the risk in framing disappointment as paradoxically productive is that we may become attached to its repetition, to the feeling of being let down, instead of using it (disappointment) to open up critique, or push toward change – we may treat political failure not as something ‘to rupture,’ but something to enjoy. Such a framework presumes that the demands being disappointed are ‘always-already’ (from Heidegger; implies pre-structured conditions) present within the symbolic field. My concern is precisely what cannot be disappointed (experienced as disappointment) as it could never be imagined, verbalised or desired in the first place. I would like to emphasise the ontological violence of pre-emption – the way in which power structures not only decide what the subject can enjoy but what the subject can desire at all.

Disappointment itself may enter a loop – but what of that which never enters it? The oscillation between fulfilment and disappointment, between melancholic withdrawal and hysterical outcry, might at a first glance appear dynamic, but in reality, both operate within a pre-structured terrain. This movement is not a mapping but a tracing, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation in A Thousand Plateaus. Much like classical psychoanalysis, which routes psychic phenomena through pre-determined interpretative channels (e.g. the Oedipal conflict), our socio-political affective responses to failure and crisis may be similarly pre-conditioned.

If disappointment is readily convertible into enjoyment, then the political sphere of affect becomes by default closed, recursive. What if the most transformative possibilities lie outside that very loop? Not rooted in the reversibility of failure/disappointment and satisfaction, but in a form of affective or symbolic unreadability – something being foreclosed before it can even disappoint. The key would then become not to loop but to refuse the map entirely – it is not the sadist saying ‘no,’ nor the masochist enjoying that refusal, but the collapse of the coordinates where such an interaction constitutes a possibility.

Furthermore, Holmberg draws on Østenberg’s reflections on power to examine political ruptures – such as the GameStop frenzy – that appear, at first as discontinuations, yet ultimately reinforce the very system they disrupt. What appears as rupture, is often already structured within the logic of systemic resilience, producing not transformation but repetition. This dynamic resonates with Lacan’s insights that demands tend to serve what they oppose (an endless negation that paradoxically confirms the status quo). However, this framework risks naturalising a looped/oscillatory system of negation and disappointment as the horizon of political possibility. In this light, the politics of disappointment may not open a critical space so much as reiterate symbolic closure, foreclosing what has not yet been symbolised or conceptualised. Holmberg insightfully notes that ruptures may paradoxically serve to reinforce the status quo, as with the GameStop example. This is reminiscent of Freud’s allegory of the father (in Totem and Taboo), in which the old order is symbolically ‘killed’ only to be reinstated in a new form: ‘There was one factor in the state of affairs produced by the elimination of the father which was bound in the course of time to cause an enormous increase in the longing felt for him [or in this context, the ‘longing’ felt for the previous order].’

But while Holmberg suggests that disappointment is not simply a negative affect but a generative condition (‘a new opening’), through which one becomes ‘better equipped to critically assess the same system that led to disappointment’ – I question whether this ‘opening’ always represents a break with the symbolic field, or rather a recalibration within it? If the structures of response are already pre-coded as seen in the repetition of the father figure post-revolution, or the reabsorption of ruptures like GameStop into the financial status quo – then disappointment may not equip us for critique so much as reveal the limits of critique itself. The possibility of rupture is acknowledged, but only insofar as it can be reintegrated into what Lacan might call the logic of the Other. Nevertheless, Holmberg’s insistence on disappointment as politically situated affect (and not simply a subjective sentiment) is a powerful corrective to both neoliberal narratives of resilience (e.g. the Greek debt crisis where the narrative read: ‘Greeks lived beyond their means,’ dismissing the mass disappointment of Greek people as necessary discipline) and reformist teleologies demanding (or perhaps even imposing) optimism at any cost (e.g. Starmer’s promise to voters: ‘I will relight the fire of optimism’ in Britain; potentially turning emotions into obligations).

He writes: ‘disappointment of a failed negation is a feature of various political events… Yet with each such failure… a new form of criticism becomes possible. Disappointment is inevitably critical… not limited to a subjective emotional experience… disappointment has an “objective” value.’ This resonates with my proposed typology of structured disappointment, which distinguishes between hysterical rebellion (discontinuity) and melancholic reconstruction. These are not merely psychological dispositions but political formations, or in other words, affective modes through which subjects become tethered to the very systems they seek to resist. Hysteria demands recognition from the symbolic order it ostensibly rejects while melancholia internalises loss and attempts to restore meaning through repetition. In both cases, the political structure remains intact. I suggest that the collective oscillation between these two responses to disappointment reveals the extent to which such reactions are already inscribed within the system itself, as Holmberg says: ‘though of course disappointment is a subjective feeling, it also registers a very real inconsistency in the world itself.’ The proposed psychoanalytic counterpart to this statement could be that: any trace of real alternative has already been foreclosed – not after its emergence, but before we could even conceive of its possibility, which extends Holmberg’s notion of structural failure.

Thus, not only is the system itself disappointing, but it is also self-protective to the point of erasing even the mere possibility of imagining a different structure. Now, disappointment is not just a response to (perceived) injustice, it may also be a structural outcome of a system that erases the very terms by which genuine alternatives could emerge (disappointment no longer simply reveals an inconsistency within the system but suggests that the inconsistency itself is orchestrated; therefore, the system simultaneously fails and scripts its failures in ways that ultimately sustain it).

To continue, Holmberg stages optimism and nihilism as parallel forms of avoidance (a kind of symmetrical forms of disavowal of systemic contradiction, one through denial: ‘just change your mind’; ‘an easy way out,’ while the other through despair, as he implies that full-blown nihilism, while tempting, is dangerous). Thus stoic optimism appears to disavow crisis by psychologising it while nihilism risks abandoning the subject’s right to ‘critique’ by surrendering to it. As a consequence, (in place of stoicism/optimism or nihilism), Holmberg suggests a space for disappointment, not one framed as pathology (disappointment is not a personal failure or weakness), but as a site of political legibility, hinting that it is a symptom of something larger, precisely a sign that there is an objective political/systemic contradiction.

Yet, while I share the urgency of rescuing disappointment from resignation, I want to ask what happens when even disappointment is anticipated, absorbed and nullified by the very thing it opposes? If disappointment is ‘always-already’ expected, if, for example, it is engraved within the patterns of capitalist democracy, then even this critical stance might serve to sustain the very conditions it reacts against (as Holmberg notes: ‘insisting on the need for optimism only reproduces the dire conditions in which optimism is required’). Here, I suggest a further distinction: between melancholic disappointment, which like optimism, internalises and absorbs loss without closure and remains structurally faithful to the lost object/cause of disappointment, and hysteric disruption, which insists on the un-liveability of the present and seeks to expose its contradictions. If disappointment risks being absorbed into a melancholic mode, one that mourns within the terms of the system, then the goal may be to reinvest in hysteric disruption: a refusal to reconcile, that resists closure and keeps the wound politically open.

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References:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Freud, S. (1913) "Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913 [1912-13])". The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 13: vii-162.

Holmberg, R. (2025, February 13). Disappointment is not just a feeling – it’s a political force. Psyche. https://psyche.co/ideas/disappointment-is-not-just-a-feeling-its-a-political-force.

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Maria Ibrahim is a doctoral candidate at UCL, conducting conceptual research at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Her work explores degrees of intentionality, mechanisms of psychic exclusion, masochism, and repetition compulsion – particularly in relation to trauma. Her work connects Pierre Janet’s clinical insights to psychoanalytic examinations of automatism. Her research draws primarily on Freudian and Lacanian frameworks, while also engaging with Sartrean and Deleuzian philosophy. She is particularly interested in the broader applications of psychoanalysis across disciplines, including literature and contemporary socio-politics.

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