W. J. T. Mitchell Trevor Paglen’s art has provided some of the deepest insights into world of contemporary technologies of spectacle and surveillance known to me. His large-format telephotographs of secret black sites have rendered these sinister locations in pictures that resemble abstract paintings, and his I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World…

W. J. T. Mitchell Trevor Paglen’s art has provided some of the deepest insights into world of contemporary technologies of spectacle and surveillance known to me. His large-format telephotographs of secret black sites have rendered these sinister locations in pictures that resemble abstract paintings, and his I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World…

Rula Shahwan During my years as an archivist at the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, I worked closely with researchers, filmmakers, and students searching for archival materials on Palestinian history. I became accustomed to requests for photographs, films, and documents that were often impossible to provide, not because they had never existed, but because many had been looted, destroyed, remained inaccessible, or hidden in Israeli archives.

Simon Wortham 1. Manic “Change Round” In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic is in want of an object, never knowing exactly what they may have lost. Melancholy transforms the object-loss of mourning into an ego-loss; consequently, psychic conflict is internalized in the form of a splitting of the ego against itself, one part representing the lost object, the other seeking—however destructively—to end its reign over the self.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi 1. Gethsemane Even if it is not reducible to humanism, the Christian cultural sphere—in all the contradictory complexity of its history—is the space in which the ethical and ontological autonomy of human action could be conceived. I am not a believer, yet there is a moment when I feel so close to Jesus that I am compelled to call myself a Christian.

Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics originated as a panel put together for a conference by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) on authoritarian imaginaries. Part of a broader project entitled A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, the themes of the November 2025 conference derived from the understanding that building an effective counter-imaginary requires addressing the formidable challenges to it.

William Mazzarella I might as well begin with two servings of fascist potatoes. The first comes from Wilhelm Reich, the great renegade psychoanalyst, who observed in 1934 that“Hitler’s gift of a sack of potatoes to every worker was ninety-nine percent ideology and only one percent practical value.” The second is from just a few years later, 1941, and appears in…

Jason Frank Leading activists and intellectuals of the American far right have in recent years abandoned the language of conservatism for that of counterrevolution. There is agreement for many within the MAGA movement, as the title of an essay in the Claremont Review has it, that “‘conservatism’ is no longer enough.” “The urgent task for the political Right today,” …

Lisa Wedeen While the bulk of my empirical work has focused on authoritarian imaginaries in Syria and Yemen, here I want to take what I have learned in the Middle East analytically and use it to reverse relations and provincialize the United States.[1] No more in the US than elsewhere does it pay to ignore ideological investments and libidinal satisfactions when trying to understand what binds authoritarian-minded followers to their leaders.

Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics originated as a panel put together for a conference by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) on authoritarian imaginaries. Part of a broader project entitled A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, the themes of the November 2025 conference derived from the understanding that building an effective counter-imaginary requires addressing the formidable challenges to it.