Staying with the Possibilities

Thanks, Tom Dumm, for organizing this panel and for your generous comments. Thanks, too, to Catherine Keller, Nidesh Lawtoo, Lars Tønder and Bonnie Honig. I appreciate their thoughts, even if they may exaggerate my virtues for the occasion.

Thinking is something you do with others. This crew embodies, to me, the highest virtues of intellectual life broadly speaking and of political theory more specifically. They stand today as witnesses: writing, teaching and posting about key issues during a dangerous time. Indeed, in the company of others, they allow their teaching, posting, essays, books and street protests to work back and forth on each other. That, indeed, is one reason that much of political theory is both well located within political science departments and a source of discomfort to some in those departments who do not want their work to spill into troublesome territory. The location speaks to the demand to address the most pressing issues of the day; the troubles arise when theorists brush against the grain of the latest method or speak about public issues in ways that incite repercussions from trustees, administrators, trollers and political authoritarians. Theorists in departments of political science are therefore also lucky to be in communion with people in several other subfields and disciplines.

This is a time of troubles. So I salute this crew, and the larger ensemble of theorists, theologians, earth scientists, journalists, and humanists who carry forward the struggle during an era when aspirational fascism has gained so much traction against democracy and public neglect of galloping climate change has become a generational crime.

A dark time calls for reflective modes of witnessing, analyzing, teaching and action, doing so while also showing how the long term sociocentrism of the humanities and the social sciences in the Euro-American academy has made its own contribution to planetary conditions multiple regions face in different ways and degrees today. We must simultaneously nourish each other, prod each other, and respond to the call of the critical intellectual enterprise. Sometimes these days I recall my early youth, warily gazing through the veil of childhood as my parents and their allies in the labor movement both struggled to negotiate the perils of McCarthyism and refused to tell their kids too much about them. If you were a child you examined furtive facial expressions, and you eavesdropped during quiet adult conversations. Many parents and teachers are negotiating a new version of this dilemma today, amidst an era of media saturation. Part of me is grateful for that saturation, however; outside of Fox News, Breitbart and the Russian media platform invasions, much of the media now stands taller than before and rises to the occasion.

If we broaden the lens, it is true that critiques of neoliberal capitalism need to be intensified and revamped in the face of racist intensity, growing class inequality, fascist danger, and galloping climate change. Extractive, neoliberal capitalism—through the insecurities and crises it foments—periodically spawns fascist movements.¹ But the intersections today between new fascist drives and climate denialism may also teach that a series of nineteenth and twentieth century ideals that heretofore contended against capitalism need to be rethought too. The danger of Fascism intensifies, perhaps, when a crisis of capitalism—today taking the form of disavowed doubts about the future the institutions of fossilized, neoliberal capitalism project forward—meets the concurrent disinvestment from several social alternatives historically posed against capitalism. A crisis of confidence in an institutionally enjoined future meets a deficit of faith in familiar challengers: for the major historical challengers have been organized themselves around alternative visions of economic growth, mastery of nature, and material abundance. Out of such historical binds fascist reactions periodically balloon.

How such binds take hold becomes an essential question of theory today. Since these very binds can intensify the affective powers of fascist contagion—the visceral dimension of politics many radical and liberal theories ignored or downplayed until recently—a related task is to examine the ubiquity of the visceral register of cultural life and the very different roles such a register plays in fascist movements and democratic practices. Here classic...