In this episode, the HBS crew welcomes Carlos Amador—Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University at Buffalo SUNY—for a raw and wide-ranging conversation about lo jodido: the aesthetic, political, and material condition of being well and truly fucked. Drawing on Latin American literature and film, Amador introduces lo jodido not just as a descriptor for individual suffering, but as a cross-cultural, translatable, and recognizable structure of feeling rooted in precarity, immobility, and disillusionment with liberal democratic promises. Alongside lo jodido, he introduces two other categories—el roto and lo huachafo—to map a terrain of contemporary exhaustion and survival.

Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s articulation of “the wretched of the earth,” we dig into how “the fucked” functions not merely as a subject position, but also a way of seeing, feeling, and naming what seems unlivable. Topics include cruel optimism, abjection, the cultural logic of fascism, and whether political possibility requires hope at all. In the end, we ask: what does it mean to live with no outside to capital? And can the category of the fucked help us understand not only where we are, but what might still be possible?

References:

• Carlos Amador, Faculty Profile – University at Buffalo, SUNY

• Carlos Amador, Culture and Politics in the Films of Fernando Solanas: Transnational Latin American Cinema (2019)

• Carlos Amador, “Post-Neoliberal Exhaustion and the Violence of Form” (2022)

• Roy Ayers, You Send Me (1978)

• Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)

• Tina Chanter, The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference (2008)

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (2004)

• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1990)

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1987)

• Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982)

• Pablo Larraín, Tony Manero (Film, 2008)

• Pablo Larraín, El Conde (Film, 2023)

• Pablo Larraín, Jackie (Film, 2016)

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974)

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1999)

• Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1968)

• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)

• Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito (2005)

• Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! (2011)

• Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1977)

• Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)