Contemporary fascism has a specific temporality. It thrives in the untimely, empty present. The very loss of a future horizon gives allure to the only offer fascism holds: to help, as Adorno and Horkheimer already put it "not people... but their urge for destruction". This urge is not just of our moment, it is deeply rooted in colonial modernity. To theorize it, we need to turn to the genealogy of modern property, the form of which shaped extracted resources just as much as individual subjectivity. At the threshold to climate breakdown and mass extinction, the pose of "if I can destroy it, it must have been mine" is more easily adopted than ever, and expands its threat to the entire planetary ecosystem. While fossil capitalist "normality" is sent into overdrive by an intentionally energy-hungry AI sector, only an appeal to death drives can secure ongoing ideological approval. Those without any material benefit from energy exertion are reached by its apocalyptic promise - right wingers "rage against the dying of the light". Destruction becomes the hyperbolic and hollow fulfillment of the possessive individual's drive for dominion. Nevertheless, it is a fleeting, self-defeating fulfillment. In this constellation, queer desire is a depropertizing force for life. But instead of directly turning to it, the talk examines Dylan Thomas lament about his dying father as an interesting oscillation between aggressively displaced mortality and the readiness to let go of energy: "Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay."
When: Friday, 29 May 2026, 17:30-19:00
Where: Sky Lounge, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna
Speaker: Eva von Redecker (HFBK Hamburg)
Moderation: Dorit Geva (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
The event is taking place as part of the workshop "Life After Death: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on the Global Now" organised by the research area of Gender and Politics and is part of the semester question of the University of Vienna in the summer term 2026: "Where is democracy heading?"
