Thrausma Interview
from the archive
Back in June 2025 I was interviewed by Spyridon St. Kogkas, the force behind Thrausma.com » an extraordinary resource, temporarily now unavailable, yet likely to return in some form or another. Here’s the text of that interview as it was posted on 19/06/25.
SK: Your work often navigates the tension between education as a form of liberation and education as a system of control. In your view, is it possible to truly “educate” without also disciplining?
AA: This idea that the role of education is to make people ‘free’ is a paradox built into the system itself. It is how post-enlightenment education is configured, as burdened, to satisfy these two irreconcilable aims. So here we have not so much an essential tension as a characterising problem of our time. And yes, it is something I have written about one way or another, both in the more straightforward forms of academic prose (the academic paper, the academic textbook), and in the dramatic forms of fiction or fictional scenarios. But always with a certain hesitation, for it is worth considering that all attempts to think through this dilemma, to even pose it as a problem, are further enactments. It is a problem that will turn us all into its fools.
SK: In Benign Violence and Cynicism, you interrogate the subtle forms of coercion embedded within our institutions. How do you personally negotiate your role as an academic within the very system you critique?
AA: With difficulty. It is a matter of persistent renegotiation and struggle, not so much for a sense of personal integrity (this would be, for me, a site of personal conceit). Rather, it is the struggle to sustain an approach, a ‘professional’ commitment (let’s reclaim the word), to the everyday activity of refusing to think as the institution would have you think. Which can mean, a commitment to think at your own expense, at least as you are within the system. This orientation to thought in its heterodox register is a liability the system either positions as insurrectional and dangerous (worthy to be punished), or as a nullity (and so ripe for erasure), more so with every passing academic semester. The university system has become authoritarian and is its own aggressor.
SK: You describe cynicism not only as a cultural condition but also as a mode of survival. Can cynicism ever be a productive cultural and civil stance, or does it ultimately risk becoming a form of resignation?
AA: Did I write that? I forget almost everything I write soon enough, and when I re-read my work, I surprise myself at times with what I have written. But yes, it could be described as a mode of survival. Clearly cynicism comes in many forms, but one of those forms might include the ability to remain off-set from dominant norms, inanities and systems, and hold them at a distance.
SK: Much of your writing seems haunted by a desire to uncover what lies beneath our surface commitments to progress, excellence, and merit. What are we most afraid to admit about ourselves when we speak of ‘success’?
AA: I have no idea. Or put another way, this is for individuals to answer. My work hardly deals with psychologies, or not in this way, and if there is psychological drama within my writing, it takes the form of scenarios I am acting or trying out, rather than specific diagnoses. And these scenarios are rarely between entities set up as if they were characters with fully-formed psychologies. I think I have only ever represented fragments of people. The only person thus far named in my fictions, the figure of Gordon (who appears in The Sick List and the unpublished novel Situations), is only named on the condition that his personhood is persistently placed in question. I am prepared to explore how and where systems are dangerous, what their inherent violences may be, including systems of ‘success’, but would not want to assume how an individual might wish to feel about them.
SK: You often write in a hybrid style part essay, part philosophical excavation, part fragment. What draws you to this form, and what does it allow that more conventional academic prose cannot?
AA: Most writing about philosophy and theory seems to me overly restrained by the desire not to come across as an idiot, not to have forgotten this relevant text, misread this passage, or neglected a salient point. By breaking with the position of the author as authority and the scholarly habit to identify the mind of the scholar with the content of their writing, a hybrid theoretical/fictional form allows problems to manifest and unfold, often by intuition, with an element of chance, and without the above restraints (or without giving them the same kind of sway over thought). Due diligence is certainly worthy in its own domain, but it cannot be the only way to think or be allowed to dominate the thinking process.
SK: In your critique of scholarly life, you’ve spoken of the ‘will to publish’ as a kind of pathology. How should we think about intellectual labor in an age of hyper-productivity and citation economies?
AA: Yes, it is a kind of pathology and it is driven by metrics in part. The dominant forms of writing also seem to me deleterious, or at least extraordinarily narrowing in what they permit. I am more interested in publishing as an act of necessity, a necessity which is attached to (or issues from) what is being dealt with in the published work, even if this felt necessity is still a form of insanity. Which is far from the typical drive to publish at regular intervals in the ‘right’ places because your institution, or CV, requires it.
SK: Can you connect the dots of the main influences that inspired your intellectual beginnings (authors, philosophers, books, artworks)?
AA: No, not even in private, that is to say, in the privacy of my own thinking, and I would prefer to think of ongoing provocations rather than beginnings anyway (which I could only ever fiction), and these would be the thinkers I’ve explicitly written about.
SK: What do you believe is the most dangerous myth still operating at the heart of postmodern education, and why does it persist so effectively?
AA: For a long time I sought to prod the fonder ideas the teaching profession still resources itself in (and so maintains a good conscience by) in a context of growing unease about what it is doing and whose ends it is servicing. I felt that these fond ideas (which go by old names like enlightenment and criticality and human flourishing, or newer names like autonomy and resilience and wellbeing) were serving to block a full reckoning with the system and its violences (which are attached to these fond ideas too). I still think there is work to be done here, but a growing problem, for me, is how educators survive a system they have come to acknowledge as utterly stifling. This survival attitude is not served by myth, or at least, it does not occupy the same kind of mythic space as was formerly occupied where a profession can still flatter itself with its noble aims. It is a much more debased yet strangely functional realm where it makes sense, for instance, to commit to greater efficiency, as if clearing one’s list of tasks, even clearing tasks not yet set but which are feared to be coming ‘down the line’, would clear space for ‘other things’, or not even that, as if clearing one’s desk might buy a little time to breathe. There are no noble aims being served or appealed to here, or noble aims are not needed, merely the desire to do less of what one hates and more of what one likes. Increasingly turbo-charged by this logic, efficient co-workers and advance-innovators, are their own (and others’) oppressors.
SK: You invite readers into a space of discomfort, philosophically, emotionally, even professionally. What, for you, is the ethical role of discomfort in thinking?
AA: Well, it cannot be its own rationale, or be for its own sake, and I have no appetite for writing which might wallow in, enjoy, or exploit the discomfort it creates or becomes a conduit for. Discomfort, in one form or another, nonetheless seems necessary in order to stage a confrontation with conventions of thinking and feeling and open out other ways of seeing, glimpsing other possibilities for organising our lives and outlooks.
SK: Share with us about your publishing project the “Erratum Press”. Which part of your creativity do you express through it and how far do you want to go this publishing experience?
AA: Erratum is an open-ended project, and though it rides on a few basic intuitions—literature has pretty much had it, cultural work has become a question of working through and with broken systems, etcetera—the press is developing and mutating through the work of those I’ve had the pleasure of working with. So, we’ll see where things go. I am grateful to all the authors I’ve had the opportunity of engaging with so far.
SK: Please let us know about your next plans.
AA: Well, there are several books in the pipeline at Erratum including your very own Hermeslang, and I have a couple I am working on too, otherwise I’ll be focused on how best to continue within the university system, so long as I can. It is extraordinarily sad to witness the disintegration. Certainly, these places cannot be relied upon (if they ever could) as a refuge for thinking otherwise.