Florian Maiwald
September 2026
ORDER FLORIAN’S EVERYDAY ANALYSIS PAMPHLET
The Regressive Illusion of Woke Capitalism
In this sense, Lanthimos’s film is concerned with nothing less than the question of political – or, more precisely, emancipatory – subjectivity, which can only fully emerge in moments of contingency, even if the outcome of the political act itself initially remains open.
Lanthimos’s film is primarily conceived as a dystopian future scenario in which single people are legally obliged to find a partner within forty-five days. If these attempts at matchmaking prove unsuccessful, the respective individuals are transformed into an animal of their choice.
At the center of the film is David (portrayed by Colin Farrell), who arrives at the hotel and whose matchmaking attempts ultimately all fail – attempts that consist primarily of absurd rituals and an obligation to social conformity. This eventually leads David to flee the hotel and join the “Loners” - a kind of revolutionary guerrilla group living in the forest and committed to radical individualism in order to rebel against the rigidly standardized world of the hotel.[i]
It soon becomes clear, however, that the “Loners” are characterized by tendencies that are just as repressive as those of the hotel world. Cristóbal Escobar expresses this very aptly as follows:
“The forest’s ideological mandate is therefore understood as an opposite repressive program to that of the film’s canonical society: if masturbation was prohibited in the hotel, such an act is now allowed; if the villa’s manager hosted ballroom dances to form couples, Loners will perform solitary dances with earphones in the woods; if the hotel’s administration rewarded and gave extra days to those who hunted Loners, Singles will party every time they conspire against couples. In short, if the issue back in the hotel was about an intimacy with the self, the problem in the forest is about an intimacy with the other. Taken to an extreme, this is also why Singles must dig their own graves and the reason why they receive cruel punishments for their romantic offences (e.g. the red kiss for flirting and, what is worse, the red intercourse for sex). David, once again, runs the risk of defying the norms of the new space: by desiring to match with someone he loves and whose astigmatism he perfectly matches, he decides to transgress the order-words of the forest where neither sex nor love-alliances are allowed.”[ii]
The most obvious reading to which Lanthimos’s film invites us at this point can also be found in numerous debates concerning the failure of revolutionary movements: as soon as the revolutionaries themselves come to power, the originally emancipatory impulse that was capable of driving them forward is exposed to its own negation. While repression in the hotel is directed against being single, it appears in the forest under reversed signs, where it is directed against the very fact of being a couple.
What is interesting, however, is that it is precisely after David has fled the hotel and joined the “Loners” that he falls in love with a woman who, like himself, suffers from astigmatism (played by Rachel Weisz). One could (under certain reservations) speak here of an “event” in the best Badiouian sense.
In this context, the emergence of the love relationship between David and the short-sighted woman in the forest can be understood as a form of resistance that mobilizes the principle of contingency against the teleological structures of normalization of both the hotel and the forest. Put differently: David and the short-sighted woman are the only authentic embodiments of emancipatory subjectivity.
It becomes particularly clear that both the forest and the world of the hotel are shaped by the principle of risk aversion: on the one hand, there is an aversion to the risk of solitary individuality, and on the other hand, an avoidance of the risk of togetherness.
What happens to David and the woman, however, is the contingent and unavoidable event of love itself - along with the risk that this form of event inevitably entails.
Similar to the structure of revolutionary transformations, the phenomenon of love is, according to Alain Badiou, marked by an unavoidable form of contingency. All the more tragic, according to Badiou, is the attempt to outsource this contingency together with the risk inherent in it.
In In Praise of Love - a wonderful volume of interviews in which Badiou reflects on the epistemic and political implications of the phenomenon of love - Badiou draws attention to several posters he once encountered in Paris:
“I could mention a number of slogans its hype uses. […] “Get love without chance!” And another says: “Be in love without falling in love!” No raptures, right? Then: “Get perfect love without suffering!” […] I believe this hype reflects a safety-first concept of “love””.[iii]
For Alain Badiou, however, safeguarding oneself against every form of risk also goes hand in hand with safeguarding oneself against every form of emancipatory change.
On this point, once again, Badiou writes:
“I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it's not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks.”[iv]
For Alain Badiou, falling in love in this context stands for the unpredictable and contingency-laden event that the encounter of two loving individuals inevitably entails. Both the forest and the hotel in Lanthimos’s film can therefore be understood as symbolically manifested forms of risk aversion – which is why the love between David and the short-sighted woman constitutes the only authentic act of emancipatory subjectivity capable of transcending the repressive structures of the hotel and the pseudo-revolutionary “Loners.”
The hotel thus represents a dystopian version of dating agencies that attempt to minimize the risk (in short: the fall) of love, while the “Loners” are driven by the same aspiration under different auspices. In this context, Slavoj Žižek, loosely building on Badiou, has likewise insightfully shown how these forms of risk aversion do not merely manifest themselves in the phenomenon of finding love, but constitute a more fundamental structure shaping contemporary liberal-capitalist societies.
Thus, the liberal-capitalist form of risk aversion manifests itself, according to Žižek, also at the level of consumption: people prefer beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine[v], or – with the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT– a subject without subjectivity (in other words: a human-like, consistently comforting form of communication without the “caffeinated” aspect of human existence in the form of humiliation, passive aggression, or simply harsh but well-intentioned criticism).[vi]
The acceptance of this risk ultimately represents, however, an indispensable precondition for being able to act as an emancipatory subject. For precisely this reason, the love between David and the short-sighted woman in Lanthimos’s film must be regarded as the only emancipatory act within a world full of post-emancipatory subjectivity, since their love emerges from a radical form of freedom.
The post-emancipatory logic of the hotel and the “Loners” manifests itself in a radical fear of precisely this failure: the hotel seeks to evade this failure through the logic of strictly regulated matchmaking rituals, while the pseudo-revolutionary “Loners” attempt to subject it to complete negation. Both sides, however, share the firm belief that contingency can be negated by means of a supposed telos.
In The Radicality of Love, Srećko Horvat insightfully points to the connection between love (as an event) and revolutionary dynamics. In this regard, it is worth quoting Horvat directly:
“A truly revolutionary moment is like love; it is a crack in the world, in the usual running of things, the dust that is layered all over in order to prevent anything New. It is a moment when air becomes thick and at the same time you can breathe more than ever.” [vii]
Similar to revolutionary events, the contingent character of love ensures that, in such moments, individuals come to understand themselves as emancipatory subjects by fully affirming the accidental nature of this event and accepting the risk that accompanies it in its full scope and gravity.
ENDNOTES
[i] Cf. Escobar, Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, 2023, https://necsus-ejms.org/surveillance-resistance-and-the-politics-of-love-on-yorgos-lanthimos-the-lobster
[ii] Ibid.
[iii][iii] Badiou, In Praise of Love, 2009, 5-6. https://www.amazon.de/Praise-Love-Alain-Badiou/dp/1846687799
[iv] Ibid, 8.
[v] Cf. Žižek, 2013, Love without the Fall (video), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9eyImD3i4
[vi] I elaborated on this aspect of Chatbots as “subjects without subjectivity” in my upcoming book – currently in the publication process and to be published end of this year– Outsourced Emancipation – How We Let Others Be Free For Us
[vii] Horvat, The Radicality of Love, 2016, 4. https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-radicality-of-love--9780745691145
AUTHOR
Florian Maiwald is a philosopher, political theorist, and author whose work explores critical theory, emancipatory subjectivity, and liberal socialism. His recent books include Regressive Illusions: Contemporary Reflections on Theory and Politics (iff Books, 2025) What Is Liberal Socialism? (with Matthew McManus and Paul Crider; Repeater Books, 2026) and Outsourced Emancipation (Zero books, forthcoming). He has published widely in both academic and public forums, with essays appearing in Jacobin, ABC Australia, The Philosophical Salon, and other outlets. He earned his PhD from the University of Bonn, where he also taught philosophy, and has served as a SPARC Research Fellow at IIT Kharagpur in India.