It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.

Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.

The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh.

The other side of my work is political disappointment - the realization that we are living in an unjust world. "Blood is being spilled in the merriest way, as if it was champagne," Dostoevsky says. That raises the problem of justice, what it might mean in an unjust world and whether there can be an ethics and a political practice that would be able to face and face down the injustice of the present. How might we begin to think about that?