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    • Category: Pick

    • Are open letters generally ineffective, and if so, why?

      Juliane Prade-Weiss: Open letters by academics on the Israel–Gaza conflict: pitfalls of urgent appeals, in: Critical Studies on Terrorism (2026)1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2026.2677270

      The Gaza conflict is also being played out in open letters: actors, international law experts, university professors in solidarity with Israel, Israeli intellectuals, ordinary citizens—they all bring their specialized expertise on the one hand, and their personal identity and reputation on the other, to bear in an effort to change the discourse and, perhaps, the facts. But are they successful in doing so? Juliane Prade-Weiss, a comparative literature scholar at LMU Munich, believes not, and seeks the reasons for this in the letters themselves. She analyzed 23 open letters written in the first months of the Gaza War—regardless of their content and intended purpose—focusing on their rhetoric and as speech acts, and found in them elements of analysis, judgment, appeal, and commitment which, she concludes, in their combination, undermine the letters’ effectiveness. Ultimately, Prade-Weiss argues, the subjectivity of open letters undermines their claim to insight as well as the authority of the signatories as experts. Furthermore, she contends that the open letters have intensified the very polarization they often sought to overcome.

      This is worth considering but it is also telling what Prade-Weiss explicitly excludes from the analysis: the factual, moral, and legal correctness of the letters and their demands; the positionality and ideology of the signatories; the power asymmetry not only between the warring parties but also among the writers; and foremost their substantive positions on the Gaza War. (At least we learn that, in the broadest sense, twelve of the letters were pro-Palestinian, four pro-Israeli, and the rest somewhere in between.) This almost complete decontextualization comes at a price. When, for example, Prade-Weiss suggests that the use of the term “genocide” in many of the letters served to emotionalize and politicize the issue, she not only overlooks the fact that this emotionalization often appears as an external attribution. She also fails to consider that today’s widespread recognition of the genocide accusation—which she acknowledges—may in fact be a result of precisely the open letters written, for example, by the genocide researchers. The claim that open letters are ineffective is not entirely plausible anyway. The open letter from May 2024, in which hundreds of Berlin-based and other faculty members protested the police eviction of a Palestine camp at the Free University of Berlin, led after all to the dismissal of a state secretary and the resignation of a minister; it significantly influenced reflection on the responsibility of university administrations and faculty, as well as politicians and the press. (And the founding of KriSol can also be traced back to this letter.)

      With its decontextualized focus on isolated texts, speech act analysis cannot explain discursive and political processes. Only in this way can Prade-Weiss ultimately lump pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli letters together. Nevertheless, there are some practical insights to be gained. Prade-Weiss’s skepticism toward statements that focus more on the signatories’ feelings than on the political situation itself is justified. (Of course, one should also ask to what extent the very accusation that the writers are concerned exclusively with their conscience and not with impact—the “do-gooder accusation”—is a speech act by the opposing side aimed at demotivation.) In fact, as the text encourages, open letters can be powerful when they plausibly translate the signatories’ expertise, position, and concern into concrete, concise, and precise demands directed at specifically named addressees. The number and diversity of the signatories (which Prade-Weiss does not address) demonstrate not only a letter’s ability to foster consensus. They also enable the collective assumption of responsibility on the one hand, and the creation of solidarity on the other. The fact that the “Staatsräson” fears precisely this is perhaps the best proof of the potential of this form of intervention.

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2026.2677270

    • Resistance to the Prison System

      Jewish Currents Podcast On the Nose: The Hill, Arielle Angel in conversation with Harriet Clark, May 7, 2026, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-hill.

      This episode of the On the Nose/Jewish Currents podcast grapples with the existential question of what remains to be done when one is at the mercy of the prison system. The ever-insightful Arielle Angel speaks with Harriet Clark about her recently published book “The Hill”: an autobiographical novel about a child who can only be with her mother during weekly prison visits. The child simply wants to see her mother and devotes her entire life to this—for 38 years. It wasn’t until 2019 that the mother was released. Harriet Clark’s mother is Judith Clark, a former member of Weather Underground and the communist organization May 19th in the U.S., sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981 for her participation in a robbery in which three people died. The grandparents who care for the child were also communists; within the family, revolutionary activism for a just world was passed down from generation to generation, with great harshness toward themselves and others.

      Harriet Clark recounts with incredible poignancy her insights into a prison system where the separation of children from their parents is systematic and the destruction of families is intentional. Family reunification, if at all, can only take place within the prison itself. She brings into sharp relief things we already know—such as how drastically this system has evolved and become dehumanizing since 2001. She connects the supposedly exceptional fate of imprisonment with the big questions of life and literature—for example, with death (her grandparents die). When a loved one dies and when a loved one goes to prison, a part of oneself goes with them. What helped me particularly was the thought that people always looked out for her—even strangers, even prison staff—and that her mother, too, looked out for others while in prison. They weren’t alone, even though they were, of course, completely alone. This child held the family together in the face of the repressive system, even though that was, of course, an overwhelming burden and actually impossible. There is a comforting yet inconsolable sense of belonging and solidarity—one that children experience in defiant social contexts and which might be absent in non-defiant social contexts. I also found it interesting how Arielle Angel compares the child’s persistence in returning to prison with the persistence of the Palestinian demand for return, and how the two discuss the radicalism and “derangedness” of such a desire to return home. And there is much more to be learned from this conversation.

      ↗ https://jewishcurrents.org/the-hill

    • University of Belgrade: Police in the Faculty of Philosophy

      Katarina Baletic: “Belgrade University Police Raid Triggers Protests and Clashes,” BalkanInsight, April 1, 2026, https://balkaninsight.com/2026/04/01/belgrade-university-police-raid-triggers-protests-and-clashes/bi/

      The pretext for the police raid is a tragedy that occurred a few days ago: a student fell from the faculty building and died. The government is now apparently using this case to continue its crackdown on universities and bring them even more firmly under control. The university rector was interrogated by the police for ten hours. He then gave a speech in which he explicitly called on other universities and European institutions to take a public stand:

      “Today, the police have entered the University of Belgrade. This has been broadcast live as a political spectacle. This is not an investigation. This is a repression against the freedom of thought.

      I appeal to universities across Europe, the European Commission, the European Parliament, and all who believe in academic freedom—please speak out. Today—it is Belgrade. Tomorrow—it may be any other university in Europe that dares to stand by its students.”

      ↗ https://balkaninsight.com/2026/04/01/belgrade-university-police-raid-triggers-protests-and-clashes/bi/)

    • The President of the German Association of University Presidents warns

      Nicola Kuhrt, Markus Weisskopf: Interview with Walter Rosenthal: “The science system is facing its greatest test since reunification,” Research.Table, February 4, 2026.

      Rosenthal’s interventions in this interview can be read as a warning based on institutional theory: In his role as president of the German Rectors’ Conference, he does not talk about science as a pure idea, but as infrastructure, as a structure of legal norms, financial flows, procedures, and self-governing bodies. His statement, “We must secure science in such a way that it can withstand illiberal times,” is programmatic and marks a shift: freedom does not appear here as a normative postulate, but as a construction task.

      When Rosenthal speaks of the “greatest stress test since reunification,” he is not referring to a singular conflict, but to the simultaneity of structural tensions: geopolitical shifts, growing authoritarian movements, and a growing discourse of mistrust toward expertise. In such a constellation, science is not only criticized but also politically instrumentalized. Its autonomy is not a matter of course but a contested status.

      Rosenthal’s reference to structural vulnerability is central. Academic freedom depends on concrete arrangements. Where funding is fragmented on a project basis, where planning horizons are shortened, where responsibilities remain diffuse, political dependence arises. Autonomy is then formally asserted, but materially relativized. In this sense, the demand for reliable basic funding is not a detailed budgetary issue, but a condition of epistemic sovereignty.

      At the same time, Rosenthal does not understand resilience as isolation. Science should not retreat into the role of a misunderstood collective of experts. It must explain itself, prove its ability to engage in discourse, and not allow itself to be reduced to populism. Trust is not created by gestures of authority, but by transparent procedures and comprehensible communication. This is precisely where the tension lies: science depends on the public, but must not become dependent on it.

      Essentially, Rosenthal advocates conscious institutional precaution. If illiberal dynamics operate not through abrupt breaks but through gradual shifts, then science does not need hectic alarmist rhetoric, but robust structures. In this context, safeguarding means a clear distribution of competences between the federal and state governments, strong self-administration, long-term financing, and international networking as a counterweight to national narrow-mindedness.

      Rosenthal’s position could therefore be read as a reaffirmation of democratic politics: Science does not stand outside society, but is part of the political order – and for this very reason it depends on specific protective mechanisms. In this understanding, freedom is not a state that is achieved once and then preserved. It is an ongoing institutional process. In a nutshell: science remains free only if its freedom is produced organizationally and desired politically – even and especially when political majorities change.

      ↗ https://table.media/research/analyse/walter-rosenthal-im-interview-wissenschaftssystem-steht-vor-groesster-belastungsprobe-seit-der-wende

    • Dishonest honesty law in North Rhine-Westphalia

      North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament, 18th legislative period: Draft bill of the state government. Law on the Strengthening of the University Landscape (University Strengthening Act), Publication 18/16798, November 25, 2025, https://www.landtag.nrw.de/home/dokumente/dokumentensuche/gesetzgebungsportal/aktuelle-gesetzgebungsverfahr/hochschulstarkungsgesetz.html.

      The draft bill, which was initiated by the CDU-led Ministry of Science and referred to the Science Committee after its first reading on December 18, 2025, remains a threat to academic freedom and freedom of expression at universities in North Rhine-Westphalia, even after revision. On the surface it seems harmless: it aims to reduce shortage of skilled workers “through an attractiveness campaign for the higher education sector,” to reform lifelong learning at universities, to foster digitalization, to introduce quarter parity in senates as a standard model, – and to create “instruments to protect university members from assaults and hostility, discrimination, and the abuse of positions of power within the framework of university self-administration.”

      Indeed, there is a pressing need to curb the abuse of power at universities. But this legitimate demand is being exploited to make it easier for the government to expel unwelcome students and sanction university faculty, staff, and leadership under the guise of protecting diversity at universities.

      The addition of a “security right” and “integrity right” or “honesty right” (Redlichkeitsrecht) to disciplinary law in academia opens the door to exploitation for political purposes. Political exploitation is very likely if the new regulations and contact persons are designed and operate in such a way that academic freedom and freedom of expression are not prioritized. Science Minister Ina Brandes (CDU) openly stated in the state parliament’s science committee on January 21 that she was “extremely frustrated” that her hands had been tied in dealing with uncooperative university administrations such as that of the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her hands might not be tied anymore with the amendment. It is imperative to recognize that the regulation excess of the new law, in those passages that do not concern abuse of power, is an attempt to interfere with university autonomy and academic freedom. Protection against abuse of power must be clearly separated from interference with fundamental freedoms.

      ↗ https://www.landtag.nrw.de/home/dokumente/dokumentensuche/gesetzgebungsportal/aktuelle-gesetzgebungsverfahr/hochschulstarkungsgesetz.html

    • Iran: Between Regime Massacres and US-Israeli Instrumentalization

      Tom Delgado, What is Happening in Iran w/ Historian Arang Keshavarzian, February 5, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBpyHx–Cs.

      In this interview by the Comedian and Tour Guide Tom Delgado, historian Arang Keshavarzian, a specialist on modern Iran and the Persian Gulf, sheds light on Iran’s current crisis. Although the protests from late December 2025 to mid-January 2026 fit within Iran’s long tradition of protest, the nature and dynamics of these protests, as well as the scale of violence used by the Iranian regime, are unprecedented.

      Keshavarzian highlights factors shaping Iran’s domestic and foreign predicament that are often overlooked in media coverage and Campist debates while avoiding definitive predictions on outcomes. These factors include:

      1. Iran’s 20+ year history of regional and nationwide protests feature diverse groups with varied demands. Key examples include the 2009 Green Movement over election fraud; 2017–2018 and 2019 uprisings against economic crisis, unemployment, high fuel prices, and Khamenei’s rule; and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests following the state murder of Kurdish Jina Mahsa Amini, demanding broader political change and an end to the regime beyond mandatory hijab.

      2. The ongoing impact of foreign interventions, from the US- and U.K.-backed 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought oil nationalization, through Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s repressive rule, and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, to today’s protests blending legitimate grievances and demands, likely CIA and Mossad involvements, and the regime‘s brutal crackdown. One example Keshavarzian cites to illustrate foreign powers’ co-creation of a regime-change narrative is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s New Year’s 2026 X post: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

      3. The Iranian regime’s eroding social base amid corruption, repression, sanctions, the June 2025 12-day war with Israel, and economic mismanagement.

      4. The information war, including diaspora media outlets like Iran International and Manoto, which foster US/Israeli intervention and promote Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah, as Iran’s sole political alternative to the Mullahs. While some Iranians chant for Pahlavi and a nostalgic return to monarchy, others inside Iran and in the diaspora, who were persecuted under his father’s rule and are aware of its repressive nature, oppose him. Reza Pahlavi is also highly exclusive and hostile toward Iran’s ethnic and political diversity, prioritizing US/Israeli ties.

      5. Prospects for the Iranian people, trapped between regime massacres and foreign powers like the US and Israel, that are exploiting the protests for their own political agendas.

      Keshavarzian notes that most key leaders and groups capable of forming a political opposition or alternative in Iran have been brutally crushed, imprisoned, or executed by the regime. Some opposition groups, he says, want new negotiations to address not just foreign policy but also domestic issues: ending repression and the highly securitized atmosphere, enabling press freedom and internationally supervised elections, and creating conditions for unions, feminists, workers, environmentalists, and academics to regroup and strengthen again.

      Keshavarzian adeptly analyzes this pivotal juncture by integrating political, economic, social, and geopolitical factors, amid current US-Israel-Iran tensions oscillating between negotiation and war rhetoric. Notably neglected in the interview, perhaps due to Keshavarzian’s academic framing, as he is pointing out himself, are the roles of workers’ unions, strikes, and struggles by ethnically marginalized groups in Iran (e.g., those of the Kurds and Baloch). Yet these efforts diversify Iranian perspectives on future governance.

      ↗ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBpyHx–Cs

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • Colonial versus anti-colonial transgressions of the civilian–combatant divide

      Nicola Perugini, “Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, November 2025, 1–14, doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214.

      Perugini highlights a major blind spot in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as to how it has recognised anti-colonial wars. Perugini points out that IHL’s limited recognition of anti-colonial violence – enshrined in the 1977 Additional Protocols which institutionalised the right to fight against colonial occupation through armed struggle – rests on a static state-centric framework where the civilian is imagined only as a passive, nonpartisan victim in need of protection, while it is the combatant who engages in violently dismantling colonial occupation and domination through anti-colonial resistance. However, historically we know that anti-colonial movements have challenged this IHL principle of distinction between civilians and combatants by blurring the line between the two in a collective struggle. Adopting the perspective of the colonized, Perugini thus calls for “decolonizing the civilian” in international law. To Perugini, this perspective “forces us to rethink the civilian as a figure of resistance rather than passivity” (p.2).

      In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the stakes around the distinction between civilians and combatants decide over life and death for most Gazans, and certainly for all males and even male children. As Perugini points out, Israel uses precisely this distinction to kill with impunity all those who dare to blur the line between civilians and combatants. The recent example of a local ZDF contractor also illustrates, how targetting of journalists is justified by Israel and German media by questioning the civilian status of journalists.

      More specifically, by drawing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Perugini highlights two dialectically entwined forms of transgression that are at odds with IHL. On the one hand, anticolonial forces merge the civilian and the combatant in their anticolonial struggle through, for instance, the network and infrastructure of tunnels which have a commercial and a military purpose. Through tunnelling, Palestinian resistance groups have undermined the distinction to be able to “challenge the asymmetry of the battlefield” through “subterranean warfare” (p.7). On the other hand, the state of Israel uses this very indistinction in order “to destroy the colonised people as people”. To Perugini, both transgressions of international law allow us to better grasp the limits of international law, as well as the relationship between colonial genocide and anticolonial resistance in settler-colonial contexts.

      Perugini’s call to decolonize the civilian in IHL thus allows us to better understand why anticolonial resistance necessitates the indistinction, and how IHL allows Israel to justify self-defence as a coloniser by denying the colonised their own right to self-defence. “This inversion of aggression and defence is central to the colonial logic of genocide.” (p. 10).

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214

    • Federal Ministry of Education and Research ignores expert opinions when awarding funding

      Stella Hesch: “Despite criticism: Ministry of Research funds controversial project against anti-Semitism”, Correctiv, October 30, 2025.

      Stella Hesch’s investigation at Correctiv reads like a political tragedy: The Federal Ministry of Research has awarded nearly nine million euros in funding to a project run by Ahmad Mansour’s company MIND, based on political considerations and without adhering to scientific standards and award criteria. This decision reveals a highly problematic understanding of academic research among the leadership of the responsible ministry and across all parties involved in the Bundestag committee’s decision. The fact that the funding decision was supported despite negative expert opinions from three science ministers from different parties—Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP), Cem Özdemir (Greens), and Dorothee Bär (CSU)—speaks to a broad cross-party consensus on circumventing quality standards in the allocation of funding.

      Mansour’s company was awarded extensive funding from the ministry, although the unanimous conclusion of the experts commissioned by the ministry was that Mansour’s project was “not eligible for funding”. This was explicitly communicated to the ministry in several negative expert reports, and both the experts and the ministry’s technical staff had expressed considerable doubts about the scientific quality and ethical implications of the project.

      The political awarding practices documented in the investigation are unworthy of a federal ministry. They ignore the peer review process necessary for quality assurance and violate the scientific standards inherent in the awarding of funding. This undermines confidence in good and ethical scientific practice and awarding procedures.

      Moreover, this approach is reminiscent of the funding scandal in the summer of 2024, when the then minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, had it examined whether funding could be withdrawn from undesirable scientists. Here, too, political positioning seemed to be more important to the ministry than scientific standards.

      ↗ https://correctiv.org/aktuelles/integration-gesellschaft/2025/10/30/antisemitismus-mansour-foerderprojekt/

    • Disgust and eroticism of the new fascist body

      Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper (The New Fascist Body), with an afterword by Alberto Toscano, (Wirklichkeit Books) 2025.

      “In a context in which propaganda is often no longer easily distinguishable from enlightenment, documentation, and serious research,” the debate about the authenticity of images showing hunger and starvation in Gaza reached its low point in the summer of 2025: Not only did journalist Tobias Huch deny that the images circulating at the time documenting the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli military, he used the case of the emaciated boy Mohammed Zakarias al-Mutawaq as an opportunity to accuse Palestinians of provoking genetic diseases and having low IQs due to their sexual behavior. Unimpressed by medical assessments that clearly identify signs of starvation despite the boy’s pre-existing condition, and indifferent to countless other images showing underweight children, Huch’s X-Post aimed to degrade the Palestinian population by establishing a link between disability and sexual morality.

      This very connection is at the heart of the new book by Holocaust researcher and gender studies scholar Dagmar Herzog. “Der neue faschistische Körper” (The New Fascist Body, 2025, Wirklichkeit Books) adds an important piece to the puzzle of current theories of fascism. The focus of what she calls postmodern fascism is on the “confusing connections between sexual and disability politics” (35), with the intersectional categories of gender, race, and class being supplemented by the important category of disability.

      Taking the success of the AfD as a starting point, Herzog discusses in the first chapter the extent to which anti-migrant racism is made “sexy” (9) by stirring up disgust for disabled bodies. Herzog traces the “fear-driven (…) devaluation of any vulnerability” (9), which is conveyed through the eroticization of (physical) superiority, for example in AfD election campaigns, using five scenes that, not coincidentally, also play on the keyboard of the German Staatsräson (raison d’état). Among other things, Herzog shows how the devaluation of the Arab-Palestinian body and intelligence goes hand in hand with German envy of alleged Jewish intelligence, infused with anti-Semitic motives. Based on a careful reading of statements by journalists such as Ulf Poschardt and Mathias Döpfner, she elaborates on how this affective coupling of disgust and envy is used, on the one hand, to court Jewish intellect for (reputational) economic gains and, on the other hand, to affectively forestall the potential immigration of Palestinians who have lost everything through genocide.

      In this sense, one could say that we are in a phase of preconditioning, which Herzog explains in the third chapter, drawing on George Mosse. Mosse had argued that the racist sensitization of Germans, who felt themselves to be a chosen people at the latest with the rise of the National Socialists, had already begun in the 1890s—along the “affective seam” (48) between the exterminatory hatred of disability and the sexual charge of “racial hygienic” procreation. Disgust and eroticism are the binding forces that work toward an ideal future, which is why Herzog speaks of “frontlash” (24) rather than backlash in relation to postmodern fascism: The attack anticipates and responds to a development such as the migration of Palestinians, which has neither begun nor is likely under the current political conditions of pacification of the “Middle East conflict.”

      Emotions are excellent tools for such a preemptive attack, which is why Herzog considers their activation to be the strongest link between postmodern fascism and National Socialism. Their stimulation, and the open rejection of their repression, directly indicates that we are in a phase of fascistization and can no longer speak only of authoritarianism. For the emotional attachment to National Socialism also presupposed having penetrated the intimate sphere and revealed “the innermost secrets of desire” (41), writes Herzog in the second chapter. Even today, by focusing on the pre-political sphere, on feelings and desires, fascism is being prepared in the subjects and our “mental attitude” (47) is affectively preconditioned.

      It is an important insight of Herzog’s that even historical fascism could not be reduced to a “biology-obsessed regime” (42), but was based on social constructivist theories of the mutability and malleability of desire. We have never been modern, not even in historical fascism; this is how Bruno Latour’s words could be interpreted in Herzog’s view. Even in National Socialism, there are signs of a concept of socially conditioned constructions of desire, as examined in postmodern theory. Postmodern fascism is therefore not a description of the present, but rather a kind of backward shock. Aimé Césaire coined the image of the shock triggered by the application of colonialist methods in Europe against white Europeans during National Socialism. Although transferring this image to the subject at hand is not without risks, it seems to me that the application of postmodern methods from the Nazi era is the shock of our present: The neo-fascist co-opting of the contestability of immutable truths (6), which is central to postmodern theory formation, represents a shock to postmodern theory formation as an echo of the past of National Socialism. Postmodern theory must recognize how its insights can be turned against itself.

       The good news about recognizing the changeability of our desires and the contestability of truth is that, as Alberto Toscano puts it in his afterword to Herzog’s book, following Walter Benjamin, we can make ourselves completely useless to fascism by orienting our desires toward accepting vulnerability and not repressing it through fitness-asketic self-optimization.