All the Rage: An Interview with Josh Cohen

Rage: It’s an emotional experience we all know with intimate familiarity, whether the first thought that comes to mind is our own anger or someone else’s. It can be a blinding emotion—an overpowering, all-consuming emotion. Its potency can be matched only, perhaps, by its inexplicability. “Rage always looks and sounds absurd from the safe distance of the uninvolved,” writes author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen in his book All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (Granta, 2024).

Drawing from examples in literature, current events, his own analysis practice and personal history, Cohen deconstructs rage into four main types: righteous rage, failed rage, cynical rage, and usable rage. His discussion draws connections and contexts between these differing expressions to help us understand the common ground of a complex emotional landscape. Ultimately, it becomes clear that rage is one of our most powerful shared substrates. In this interview, we speak about rage as an emotion and a feeling, the dangers when it remains unexpressed, and what happens when rage works in concert with other emotions.

 

This book draws from a wide-ranging field of examples of rage, from the biblical God to the Incredible Hulk, from Greta Thunberg to Donald Trump. For something so universal, it seems we are really ill-equipped in our understanding and expression of anger. Why do you think that is?

That’s a very good place to start. At the heart of the book is this distinction between anger and aggression. Once I set it out, it seemed to me to be almost embarrassingly obvious, and yet it wasn’t until I set it out that I had any kind of clarity about what distinguishes feeling angry from being angry or acting angry (or aggression). And if I am not alone in that confusion – if, in other words, to feel angry is to be immediately bounced into acting in the external world – then I think that’s where the difficulty lies with making our anger intelligible and articulate. There is this sense that anger is not something you can simply bear and experience internally, but that it needs to be directed outwards.

So, we’ve got these two problems: We don’t know how to make it intelligible and articulate to the outside world, but we also don’t know how to bear it and process it internally.

What do you think sets anger apart as an emotion, both just in general and at this particular moment in time?

First, I think the distinction between feelings and emotions is quite important. Feelings, they get a certain kind of airtime in contemporary culture. We talk about “being in touch with our feelings,” or the healthy condition of “letting our feelings be known”, but none of this touches a basic reality of the feeling experience, which is that feelings are frequently uncomfortable. We spend a lot of time trying to smooth them out to a kind of degree zero, even if we’re not aware of it. We have a very ambivalent relationship to our feelings, even joy and pleasure. I think people don’t talk enough about how certain kinds of pleasure can be excruciating or can feel like too much. I don’t just mean sexual pleasure, that’s the obvious example where there’s more of a vocabulary for the difficulty of bearing it, but all kinds of pleasure like praise, for example, which is excruciating precisely because it’s pleasurable. [Cohen points out my own grimaced expression when he praised my book during our conversation prior to the interview. Very well, point taken.]

I mean, there’s a certain gratification in having something you’ve made being praised, and at the same time, I immediately react, not in spite of my enjoying it, but because I’m enjoying it—maybe I wish they would shut up. I can’t really explain that except that something about it feels intensely exposing, as though you’re going to catch me enjoying your praise and then what are you going to do to me? I mean, you’re really going to hate me then! I think there’s something very primitive, very atavistic about that sort of troubled relationship to being appreciated.

So, coming back to your question about the importance in general: In spite of there being this apparent openness to the life of feeling, I think the openness masks intense anxiety about what feelings really are and how difficult and complex our relationship is to them. To speak about this particular moment, because anger just feels like the dominant color and flavor and aroma of the world we’re in, it feels very hard to move mentally or physically without coming into contact with anger, at one or another remove. And because it’s all around us, it’s also inside us all the time. In other words, I think we’re constant recipients of angry projections. All of us. Anybody who has a phone or a TV, anyone who lives in anything like a built-up area, is just constantly on the receiving end of that enervated, excited hostility and dissatisfaction that seems to be a kind of communicative go-to. These days, it seems like the passage to anger gets shorter and shorter. I feel we’re at a point where there’s a readiness to take immediate recourse to anger, where the passage between feeling angry and discharging in aggression is just short-circuiting.

Let’s first go back to what you said about the difference between feeling and emotion. In the book, you write that feeling “is a way of finding something to do with our emotions rather than simply acting on them” and that the aim of psychoanalysis is “to start feeling angry rather than merely being angry.” How would you describe the difference between the emotion of anger, feeling angry and being angry?

Emotion, as I’m defining it, is something closer to stimulus response. It’s the way that the nervous system responds and signals to us spontaneously in the wake of any particular provocational stimulus.

Let’s take a different example than anger: You see a beautiful sunset and the emotional response is to smile or be beguiled, perhaps to experience a wave of joy. The feeling response is not the immediate interface between what you’ve seen and the effect it’s had on you, it’s what happens when it enters the universe of your experience. So, the sunset then is allowed to signify in the terms of your broader history and experience, and then it might come into contact with other emotions, other moments in your life that layer and complicate the immediate response. It might make you feel sad, wistful, nostalgic. So, feeling is what happens when added to the immediate effect of a stimulus. That might not be in hyper-conscious, explicit terms. You’re not saying to yourself, by and large, “I am feeling this.” But there is a process, a kind of whirring and clicking behind the scenes, that is doing something with the immediate response.

What I think is striking about the feeling life is that once it passes a certain threshold, which of course is different in each of us, it becomes difficult. It becomes a kind of a burden on the mind and the body that we have to work out what we are to do with it. That becomes almost a conundrum: “I’m lumbered with this. It makes me feel too much.” And there’s something about that “feeling too much” which makes one feel vulnerable, even sometimes humiliated. I think of the taciturn man, who immediately feels the burden of strong feeling as a kind of assault, as though sadness or even joy or a certain kind of anger is a kind of foreign body intruding into the organism. And, at that point, the reason anger needs to be discharged in action is that the alternative would be to carry it—to actually feel it. So that the paradox of being angry is that it isn’t just an alternative, it’s a kind of solution to feeling angry. We are angry so that we don’t have to feel it.

Let’s add into the mix the concept of a drive. What’s the relationship between the emotion and the drive behind anger?

The drive in psychoanalytic theory is a pressure right at the frontier of the mind and the body to achieve a certain kind of aim. If I am hungry, I must find a way to eat. There are drives for needs and there are drives for desires. The most obvious in psychoanalytic terms being sexuality, but for any drive, their purpose is to achieve an aim. Now, that would seem to be straightforward until you think about needs and desires. Because, well, hunger is a need and sexuality is a desire. On the other hand, sexuality is a need and hunger is a desire, right? In other words, we try to keep these entities discrete, but actually from the very first, the satisfaction of hunger is a complex feeling event which is overflowing with emotional communication.

Bees need nectar, but they don’t puzzle over whether they need nectar or would like something else, because the biological instinct impels them towards that one aim. The strangeness of being human is that there are different things we can do with our drives, so that when we face that daily event of what to do with our hunger, there are so many answers to it. We can indulge it luxuriantly. We can disrespect it. We can treat it with a kind of functional contempt.

So, once you introduce the drive, you’re introducing an experience of dissatisfaction. In turn, dissatisfaction induces a whole repertory of feelings. Negative feelings, first of all, like anger and sadness and loss, but also they make possible positive feelings. It’s because we can be dissatisfied, I think, that we can also experience intense levels of joy and pleasure without that kind of looming possibility of being disappointed or frustrated. Those possibilities really heighten the temporary pleasure of feeling you have what you want, at a kind of meeting between desire and satisfaction, even if it’s temporary. That’s what the drive brings to the life of feeling: the variegation and the unpredictability; the sense that the feeling life is always on the move.

Because you also point out that a drive can never be sated. It’s unsatisfiable and indefatigable.

Exactly, and that indefatigability expresses itself above all in feelings. Feelings are, if you like, the way we bear the burden of this insatiability of the drive, in the form of desire but also often in the form of anger.

Anger is so often about the injury of not getting what we want—often in very disturbing ways. In the book, one of the phenomena I talk about is that of the incel, where the non-satisfaction or the dissatisfaction of a drive becomes the basis for a kind of underground political movement driven by shame and humiliation and rage. It comes together in an explosive, insatiable protest, which I’m incredibly disturbed by but also can’t help finding kind of fascinating. Because, well, what is being protested by the incel, really? I mean, how do you protest no one responding to your desire? I think that’s what makes this movement so prone to explosion and to a very visceral violence: there’s an absence of anyone or anything to whom they can address their anger, so it expresses itself instead as a kind of an assault on the world, concentrated in these random, multiple targets. I don’t mean to make it too ponderous of a question—it feels like an urgent and troubling question. You know, when one of those incel serial killers goes on the rampage, who does he think he’s killing, really? What does he fantasize he’s getting rid of or what injustice does he believe he’s answering?

 

This makes a great segue to talk about male rage in particular. There seems nowadays to be a popular myth of masculinity that the only emotion men are allowed is anger. And even better if they can express that through violence, thereby bypassing the emotion altogether. Where does this lead?

It leads to a very truncated, impoverished relational life, inner life, and creative life. It’s a real privation. But we don’t seem to be very good as a society or a culture at nurturing male curiosity about the inner life.

The MAGA movement in the U.S. now seems culturally to be inducing a return of a fantastical primordial gender split. You have these web cultures now of the tradwife female, who makes a very ostentatious exhibition of her own submission and renunciation of her selfhood and her ambition, in favor of the privilege of serving men. This seems to run alongside this massively resentful, entitled manosphere. They are interlocking parts of a whole. My sense is that we’re now in the realm of almost a psychotic delusion, a world of what in psychoanalytic terms you’d call “pure splitting”, in which you sort of willfully define yourself in terms of your absolute opposition to your counterpart. These parallel realms – the manosphere and what I guess they’re now calling the womanosphere – are meant, I think, to merge harmoniously, but they’re going to induce massive tension and mutual resentment because I think that self-assertion by women of their own renunciation is a paradox. Its proper logical end would be to efface itself—to disappear. But of course, if it disappears, so does the message. You’ve got these women who amass 4 million followers alongside the message of saying, “I have no personal ambitions.” I think that kind of performative contradiction will be a permanent provocation to the manosphere.

One of the interesting things about the manosphere is how little it can tolerate. It has so intensely constricted its ability to bear other feelings—in a way, the existence of other internal lives. I write in the book about a certain manosphere hero of many incels, who, when they reached out to him in solidarity, was actually violently disparaging of whining men and doesn’t want to hear about any of their revolting, pathetic complaints about what losers they are. It seems to me that this culture of rage is implosive, in that sense. Rage that circulates as a kind of binding for a community is bound to turn in on itself, eat itself up. Because central to the rage is that it can’t bear itself. When it’s spoken about in these forums, the response is only hostility.

For a thought like, “I find it unbearable that no woman will talk to me or touch me,” the type of space where that could really be heard is almost the inverse of the manosphere, right? They’re looking to a rhetoric, a community, almost a program of action, however incoherent, to relieve them of this burden of feeling shamed and humiliated. But, you know, they try to address it and some guy humiliates them.

 

What comes to mind is another part of your book, in which you’re talking about dictators and the strategy to resolve internal disputes by “exporting the chaos”. They’re externalizing their own internal conflict.

Yes, that’s from Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s long-time chief “political technologist”. His point is that one of the most fundamental political technologies is that if you see a conflict bubbling up that threatens the integrity and the stability of the regime, then what you have to do is displace that conflict somewhere else in a way that unites the parties that would otherwise be in conflict. That’s what he says war is there to do, really. The cynicism of it is based in the idea that people don’t want to feel their dissatisfactions – they want to be relieved of their dissatisfactions – so give them something else to hate more.

When writing about the MAGA movement, you quote Andrew Marantz’s description of the overall character being “mirth with a base note of rage.” For me, that description brings to mind the emergence of popular characters like Deadpool, and a whole string of antiheroes that act with extraordinary violence while never emoting except for some punchline, sarcastic one-liner, or joke. There’s this paradox of wanting to act upon your rage in the form of vengeance while at the same time holding as an ideal that you do not feel the rage. In contrast to that, you also write about the Incredible Hulk, whose pure emotion seems absolutely histrionic in that context. What do our pop culture champions say about where we are as a culture?

I see what you’re saying. I’m thinking about somebody who is probably suspended in between: the Clint Eastwood of the Dirty Harry movies, who, rather than “mirth with the base note of rage”, was something like “rage with a base note of mirth”. He walked around with a sort of smoldering resentment and a grimace against the world itself. Eyes perpetually narrowed. You get the sense that his muscles were perpetually coiled, his facial muscles always tight. But then he would dispatch somebody with a funny line, like that famous, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was mirth as a release valve for a very palpable rage. Whereas “mirth with a base note of rage” is mirth being employed, almost exploited, to distract everyone, including the hero himself, from their own rage. As though it would be humiliating, at this point in time, to be even Clint Eastwood—that angry guy! It’s not the guiding mood.

With Deadpool and that tradition of gleeful violence, the gleefulness has to do with disavowal, I think. A refusal, as we would say, to “own” the rage. Whereas the Hulk is an avatar of absolutely pure feeling. He’s feeling anthropomorphized: This is what a feeling would look like if it were a living, acting being. That’s really what the story is trying to do. Though Hulk also isn’t talking about ownership of feelings, it’s a kind of exorcism of feelings. What would it be to subcontract my feeling state to someone else so that I wouldn’t have to bear it? Because one of the things that’s interesting about Hulk, of course, is that Banner disappears. He’s absorbed invisibly into this new being, and not only does the humiliation of his own rage not need to be seen and heard by others, it doesn’t need to be seen and heard by himself. When he comes to, he doesn’t really know what he’s done or what’s happened. And that’s often what happens in classic stories of doubles: Behind our backs, our double goes and does what we can’t bear to admit we want to do.

 

We’ve already touched on this a bit, but what are the stakes involved when we don’t allow ourselves to feel anger?

A number of different things can happen. One is that our anger lives in us in a state of perpetual denial, suppression, disavowal. This form of being perpetually refused expression means that it migrates to other regions of ourselves, most obviously into the body. Somatic illnesses, I think, have often a lot to do with suppressed anger, particularly the tendency to headaches, which are, of course, accumulations of tension in the musculoskeletal system. So, the body takes the burden of the feeling. And because the body often has to be the subcontractor for this burden of feeling that the mind feels it can’t have anything to do with, that can express itself also in forms of addiction, compulsive violence, eating disorders, or insomnia. There’s obviously a bit of a cliched status to the idea that a denied anger is bad for your health, but I think we’re also absolutely all familiar with the reality of that.

The other way that I talk about it coming out is in the form of passive aggression. This is really anger expressed through its apparent inversion—a form that allows for plausible deniability. Passive aggression takes the form of “just asking”, or an apparently innocuous, descriptive neutral comment, which is always anything but. It’s an attack that, if it’s successfully performed, is ambiguous enough to be denied. Like, “That was a surprisingly good piece you wrote.”

In the course of writing this book, a few people said to me, “You know, it’s funny, I almost never feel angry”. And that’s interesting to me because it’s so telling. I could of course just say, “Oh, yeah, right!” but I tend to think they’re probably telling me something which feels very true. They’re likely hitting the point when they say “I don’t often feel angry,” because saying to somebody who is writing a book on anger, “I don’t feel angry very often”, is an interestingly passive aggressive communication. It’s effectively saying to somebody, “Is it possible your book is bullshit? Because to me it doesn’t seem that important. Maybe I’m wrong, of course, but….”

There are a lot of people who seem not to like the idea of anger as part of the texture of everyday life. They want to believe that it’s a discrete, isolable feeling that one occasionally skims across in oneself or in someone else, but that can be put aside. Or that it’s just part of a repertory and you don’t have to go there if you don’t want to. To my mind, the driver of positive thinking is that anger is like a consumer choice of the inner life. If you don’t like it, you can just shop somewhere else, you know?

 

Your book breaks down anger into four essential types: Righteous Rage, Failed Rage, Cynical Rage, and Usable Rage. Why do you think anger materializes as one form over another? If you find yourself in one state of unusable rage, can you (or should you) convert that emotion to a usable rage?

Its materialization in one form rather than another is down to more than one thing. Some element is undoubtedly evolutionary; Darwin sees anger as a kind of residue or “fossil” of predatory aggression, the feeling minus the action, which is why the angry face looks like it’s about to attack an enemy. We have a hard-wired impulse to discharge our aggression before we can feel it, because feeling it is dangerous – literally, in evolutionary terms, the enemy will have killed us while we’re mulling over how we’re feeling – but even when the danger isn’t so concrete, it feels dangerous to expose oneself to one’s own vulnerability and humiliation. That’s why we cling so tenaciously to the feeling of being right, even or especially when we sense some chinks in the armor of our rightness.

That feeling of my absolute rightness is what you’re calling unusable rage. Can it be rendered usable? Yes, I think so, but it’s never guaranteed and it takes an awful lot of work which some of us just might not be willing to do. Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) may be the ultimate instance of this, a painstaking process of registering the long history of systemic cruelty and violence, of working through the bottomless sources of anger so as to be able to get beyond retaliation and into reconciliation. In other words, it takes a lot more than counting to ten.

 

Let’s talk about the gap between “your anger” and “my anger.” You write in the book that “Rage always looks and sounds absurd from the safe distance of the uninvolved,” and ask, “But how reasonable is it to think of other people’s rage as delusionality and one’s own as entirely consistent and justified?”

In his essay on the unconscious, Freud says that we’re very skilled at recognizing the unconscious reasons of other people, but not so much our own. This might appear on the face of it to be an inversion of identification gap, because we’re very understanding of our own rage but not of other people’s, but I think actually it’s entirely consistent with what he’s saying. That is, I understand what’s going on with you. You’re just playing up. You’re lacking in self-awareness and you don’t realize how ridiculous your rage is, because if you could see the whole picture, you could see how partial and subjective and inappropriate this response is. But my rage, because I inhabit it, fosters the illusion that I’m responding to the whole.  My narcissistic vantage point nurtures the idea that my response is all-encompassing, that I’ve comprehended everything and it’s because I’ve comprehended everything that I’m so furious. That’s really the difference: we accuse the other of having comprehended only partially and only on his side because of his narcissism, whereas our own rage is fully justified because we’ve taken everything into account.

 

Next to that, you also describe the way that rage is such an intense emotion that it behaves rather like pain in its overwhelm. In our current culture, it seems we, as individuals but also as a collective, really enjoy getting drunk on our own outrage. There must be a kind of pleasure there, though I doubt people would call it that. What do you think we gain through that abandonment to outrage?

The word that comes to my mind is: Addictive. There’s something addictive about this sustained emission of our own rage. I think it does give you the gift of mutual recognition, which takes us back to the incel “community”, so-called. The condition of being an incel is defined by the sense of isolation, of being entirely on your own with your own predicament. So, there is something about finding others who bear the discomfort and pain and shame of these feelings that I think has a kind of ecstatic quality about it. So much of the anger is about not being seen, so when it’s expressed in concert, it’s as though all of these fragments of anger are seeing each other and coalescing into a whole.

Even if you’re stewing alone, thinking about how furious you are, that sense of internal company and support in your rage feeds itself and becomes quite addictive. It justifies the consumption of more provocations to your rage. You read more and more stuff to feed the rage and bring that back to the collective. Whereas I think if we really had to be on our own with our rage, unless somebody has a very singular kind of pathology, I can’t imagine that ever being pleasurable or intoxicating or addictive.

 

There’s the community aspect of rage. Let’s talk then about collective anger. You write in the book about some types of anger that are experienced emotionally by the individual but are effectively systemic, like Black anger and maternal rage.

From the beginning, one of the questions I was grappling with was what to make of the overlaps in the affective structure of anger in very different groups. For example, the rage among the January 6th insurrectionists must have felt similar to the rage on the Black Lives Matter marches. Despite their vast differences, the same feelings of solidarity and shared purpose would have animated the sense of cause and meaningfulness of what they were doing. These are two examples of anger that are apparently so similar in form and so opposed in content.

There’s a quote from James Baldwin that really informed my thinking, where he says, “White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and that sad songs are sad.” It’s this sort of funny observation and of course deliberately unfair, I mean, I’m pretty sure he knows very well there’s more to it, but he really awoke in me a key idea, which is this: There is a certain kind of emotional culture where anger (or any other emotion) is expressed in isolation from its neighboring emotions, and when that happens, it has very profound political entailments. If you can keep your anger away from your sadness and your humiliation, then it assumes a kind of pure and violent righteous quality that never has to doubt itself and that in fact can lord itself over others. So, you get a slogan like “fuck your feelings”, which is very much about having triumphed over the humiliations of feeling life. Of course, “fuck your feelings” is said feelingly, right? It’s an expression of anger and hostility. But it’s an anger that has purged itself of neighboring emotions of anything like pity or sadness or empathy. It stands triumphantly alone atop a kind of mound of dead emotional bodies. Whereas, however you feel about Black Lives Matter, it’s inconceivable that they could come up with a slogan like “fuck your feelings” because their anger is born out of grief and loss. And, very importantly, love as well. Baldwin’s writing always makes the point that Black Americans have an ambivalent but deep love for America, and that their protest is a form of love.

So, this book isn’t to get into the weeds of any particular political movement, but I was interested in the way that it’s possible for a political movement to mobilize one emotion in a way that uses its relationship to other emotions. Anger could be put in an explicit relationship to feel fear and humiliation and grief and joy. It’s true that MAGA may use a strain of humor, but again, it’s triumphal humor. It’s humor that celebrates its defeat of its object. It laughs at rather than laughs with—always.

 

How can we address the addictive aspect of the high that people get from feeding their community anger? If the whole of society seems to participate, is this something for the individual or the society to address?

Certainly it’s good for individuals to address this, to find their own ways to distance themselves from the frenzy of excitable rage that drives their social media feeds and the collective atmosphere. But the malaise is ultimately a social one. Right populism takes real political and economic grievances and exploits them as an endless reserve of political capital. One can see the outline of a left populism that acknowledges those grievances and tries to find more real and constructive ways to address them. The problem is that this also means renouncing the magic bullet rage fed by Trump and Farage – the gratification that comes with “knowing” the real enemy (immigrants, the deep state, leftists) rather than doing the tedious, demanding graft of changing our social and economic structures.

 

In the book, you write about a patient “grabbing at irritants to make sense of a fury that’s there from the moment he wakes up.” I love this description because it portrays a difficult modern conundrum: there’s no shortage of very valid things to be angry about in the world, but does that mean we should be angry about them? Is there such a thing as “valid” anger?

One of the interesting difficulties I had this with book was precisely this one: I’m convinced, as I think are most of us, that there are valid forms of anger, but how does one define them in advance without falling into a massive deficit of self-awareness and humility? It led me to realise that one can’t argue for validity on the basis of content, at least not without great hubris. How can one arrogate to oneself the right to determine what is and isn’t a valid reason to be angry? My head, heart and gut may tell me that it makes more sense to feel angry at the government rather than desperate and impoverished immigrants for the spreading poverty and inequality in our country. But to try to install that as an objective truth is the height of liberal complacency and self-satisfaction.

So one needs a different basis for validation than the content or object of anger. The question for me is not what are you angry about, but what is your relation to your anger? Are you able to bear it, to be curious about it, to interrogate its origins, to think about what else you might be feeling (sadness, humiliation, confusion)? Or do you persist in portraying yourself as righteous victim against an unrelievedly evil opponent?

 

How did it feel to write a book about rage?

In a very specific way, this is the most personal book I’ve written. Not in the sense that it’s confessional or self-revealing, but that it started by way of a process of ordinary self-observation. So much of what I’ve tried to say about how it feels to be in that state comes from really trying to get close to what that feeling state is like, where it is in the body, what thoughts and associations flood the mind when in it.

For example, I write about my feeling of road rage at being cut up by the younger guy in the groovier car, and the immediate emotional impulse to scream and discharge my rage in an action. Immediately, I’m made aware of what it is I’m evading when I do that – not wanting to feel that moment of humiliation at being bested by somebody who at least in that moment feels more alpha and bolder and stronger than me. So, I started to ask myself would it have been like if I didn’t yell into an empty car, but actually just let myself stay with how it felt to be cut up like that. It shocked me a bit how awful it would be to have no outlet at that moment, not to be able to kind of get the better of the shame by shouting it out. It felt like getting closer to how my mind and body work in concert. It was an exercise in daily self-awareness.

I don’t particularly want to think or talk about anger now, but given that the world is where it currently is, people are now reaching out because they’re curious about how to marshal or mobilize these feelings that we’ve felt we’ve had to put aside for so long.

 

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Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst and writer whose previous books include Not Working (2019), How to Read Freud (2005), and The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (2013). All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World is available from publisher Granta.