Events

"Everybody wants to be a fascist": Media, Milieus, and Affect Politics through a Fascism-Critical Lens

Workshop, 10 June 2025 at Bauhaus University Weimar

Organized by: Jasmin Degeling & Elena Vogman

This meeting is less concerned with establishing a definitive definition of contemporary fascism. Rather, we aim to discuss its mechanisms and media from two perspectives. The first perspective draws on the concept of a “micropolitics of desire [désir]” developed by the schizoanalyst Félix Guattari. In a text of the same name, originally delivered as a lecture in 1973 at a conference on “Psychoanalysis and Politics” in Italy, Guattari outlines an “analytic-political” approach that refuses to separate individual from social problems. His hypothesis about a close connection between fascism and desire—positioned, for Guattari, at the center of the production of subjectivity—is tied to the assumption of new, mutating forms of fascism that continuously adapt desire to the logic of late capitalist profit economies. The second perspective focuses on the relationship between the current fascist turn in late capitalist political and social formations—particularly its manifestations in Germany—and (digital) mediation. How can we account for the fascistization of everyday media practices? What kinds of affective economies do these practices produce—and how? What might an affective politics of resistance—or a non-fascist desire—look like in response to the modalities and ethologies of digital fascism and its profit strategies? Why is it, above all, gender and queer media studies approaches that are able to adequately describe the media of the fascistization of life today?

Bichos. Animal Fantasies between Art and Madness

Symposium, 14 – 15 Jun 2023

Organized by Delfina Cabrera, Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman 

An ICI Berlin Event in cooperation with the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ (Volkswagen Stiftung/Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

First came the world of the living, then life and death, after the dead, after the bichos and the animals, you make yourself comfortable as a bichos and as an animal.

Stella do Patrocínio

From the late 1960s onwards, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) developed a series of unstable and manipulable sculptures that she named bichos — ‘beast’, ‘animal’, or ‘critter’. These unconventional objects constituted a turning point in Clark’s artistic trajectory as she progressively moved away from the Neo-Concrete Movement, shifting her focus towards the frontier between artistic and clinical practice. Already with the bichos, Clark thought about how spectators could transform and de-subjectivate themselves, perhaps becoming more than human by interacting with these abstract but nevertheless organic objects. Later, convinced that she could revitalize the field of art through psychotherapeutic techniques, Clark claimed that her work was ‘a state of art, without art’, where both art and the clinic could retrieve their critical potential vis-à-vis dominant modes of subjectivation.

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Reducing Climate

Symposium; 9 Jun 2022

Organized by Xenia Chiaramonte and Sarath Jakka

An ICI Event in cooperation with ‘Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ (Volkswagen Stiftung/ Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

The notion of reduction is central to the discourse on climate disaster and environmental collapse. A political understanding of climate has led to urgent calls for ever increasing measures aiming at reduction—for example reducing emissions or consumption. Such calls are based on the premise that there can be quantitative remedies to the current environmental disaster. However well-intentioned, earnest, and necessary such approaches are, this symposium would like to pose the provocative question whether the current will for quantitatively defined action against climate breakdown might actually be a symptom of—rather than a solution to—the problem at hand.