About me
I am Felix, a philosopher/indisciplinary humanities researcher from Hong Kong. Writing and teaching philosophy has become my aesthetic practice - my means to address trauma and loss while connecting with the world.
My PhD research (graduated December 2025) examined the neoliberal capitalist world through psychoanalytic and psychosocial lenses, and explored ways to collectively transcend it. Neoliberalism burdens the subject with the task of chasing ever-receding goals and perfecting their performance. This creates significant anxieties and insecurities for everyone, providing them no time to grieve their losses. The anxieties and unmourned losses then receive social expression through culturally-sanctioned manic hyperactivity, chronic, individualized depression, and paranoid politics. Among the three symptoms, the first two serve to individualize issues, whereas the last symptom fails to address the root causes of structural problems of capitalism. This means that transcending and collectively opposing neoliberalism requires us to look beyond these symptoms. My suggestion is that true transcendence of such a social order would require not only changes in institutions or social arrangements, but a change in one's psychosocial make-up made possible only by collective mourning.
This thesis is available at the Essex research repository, and I have published a related article in Constellations on paranoid politics and EJST on socialisation under late-neoliberal precarity. More publications on the topic is coming, so stay tuned!
In addition to my interest in critical and psychoanalytic theory, I also research machine ethics and the social theory of the digital age. I have published papers (with Song Fei at NUS) on the skilful expert model of machine virtues (e.g. on American Philosophical Quarterly) and a pluralist hybrid model of moral AIs. And I am currently working on projects concerning the intersections of Confucian philosophy and AI, and on a Foucaultian analysis of the digital political economies.
I am teach and lecture in Hong Kong. I have developed and lectured in Cultural Studies and psychoanalytic theory courses at the College of International Education, HKBU and Hong Kong School of Creativity. I have also tutored courses ranging from political philosophy and philosophy of A.I. to logic and critical thinking at HKU.
For my brief bio, current projects and publications, see RESEARCH.
