Uneasiness in contemporary culture. On three recently published essays in the Spanish-speaking world

Abstract

Following the covid-19 pandemic, three essays that address the current emergence of mental health problems have been published in the Spanish-speaking context: Frágiles (2021), by Remedios Zafra, Malestamos (2022), by Javier Padilla and Marta Carmona, and El murmullo (2023), by Belén Gopegui. Despite the disciplinary and methodological disparity of their authors, their similarities are meaningful; first and foremost, they consider these «uneasiness» regarding their structural triggers. On the one hand, they see this distinctive suffering of our time as linked to neoliberal narratives of life and as a «functional dysfunctionality» of the productive logics of contemporary capitalism. On the other hand, they offer reasons for hope, all of which involve a collective search for the conditions and possibilities of transforming the present.