Nostalgia, Fantasy, and the Futures of Masculinity (2026) explores how nostalgia-driven fantasies shape contemporary masculinity and capitalist culture, and how these dynamics constrain our ability to imagine new futures. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and media studies, Timothy Richardson examines the ideological and affective structures that link masculinity to mythic pasts and deferred promises of progress.

Through case studies of music archives, fan cultures, and iconic films such as Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Ex Machina, the book reveals how popular media recycles familiar tropes to sustain capitalist discourse and masculine ideals. Richardson argues that these nostalgic scripts not only naturalize gender norms but also perpetuate cycles of consumption and stasis, even as they promise novelty.

Foregrounding Lacanian concepts of fantasy, desire, and the capitalist discourse, this monograph offers a critical intervention into debates on gender, temporality, and ideology. It combines rigorous theoretical analysis with accessible prose, making it essential reading for scholars and advanced students in psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and media studies.

Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric (2013) interrogates classical Greek and Christian understandings of rhetoric and writing via both antique Rabbinic Judaism’s insistence upon textuality as materiality and post-Freudian psychoanalytic insights into the nature and reception of the symbolic order. Or, as David Metzger’s introduction to the book offers:

Rhetoric is not in heaven, and—in this manner—[Richardson] reorients rhetoric’s ontological narrative (at least the one that begins with Plato and Aristotle) into an examination not of how rhetoric has been marginalized but how its apparently beleaguered state has functioned as a necessary gap/relationship between word and thing, fiction and reality, transcendence and immanence, religion and history, desire and jouissance, Judaism and Christianity. Not only is this gap necessary, it is so necessary that it takes on the characteristics of a relationship and, as such, reinvigorates the question, “What is the rhetorical subject?” And it prompts us to ask “What is the Other for rhetoric?”