Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Populism and Global Economy, with the George L. Mosse Program in History.
Professor Johannes von Moltke’s (University of Michigan) lectures from Jerusalem to Madison this spring in a Lecture Series on “Metapolitics”: Acceleration, Appropriation, and Agitation in the New Right’s Culture Wars.
In this series of talks, Johannes von Moltke sheds light on the New Right’s mobilization of arts and ideas in today’s culture wars: its media strategies, its identity politics, its conspiracy theories, and its efforts to shift the very language of public discourse to the right – or what the New Right calls its “metapolitics.” Situated at one remove from the socio-political institutions and structures analyzed by the social sciences, the cultural formations of “metapolitics” call for humanities-based approaches that can supplement the important insights gleaned in political science and sociology. Drawing his guiding questions and methods from Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, von Moltke analyzes the New Right’s “metapolitical” maneuvers on both sides of the Atlantic to better understand the antidemocratic appeals made in the name of ethnonationalist, “identitarian” visions of the future.
- 02/25 at 4PM, Making the World Glow: Right-Wing “Metapolitics” and the Accelerationist Impulse – Johannes von Moltke’s will define the Right-Wing project of “metapolitics” and identifies its “accelerationist” dimensions.
- Chair: Ofer Ashkenazi
- 02/26 at 11:45AM, The Identitarian Reflex: “Metapolitical” Strategies of Appropriation and Projection – Johannes von Moltke’s will analyze the New Right’s pervasive conceptual poaching, or “appropriation” of progressive vocabularies.
- Chair: Mary Hennessy
- 02/27 at 4PM, Prophets of Deceit: Genealogies of Agitation and the Critical Theory of “Metapolitics” – Johannes von Moltke’s will trace the antecedents of right-wing “agitation” in earlier modes of fascist propaganda, drawing on its theorization by the Frankfurt School
- Chair: Brandon Bloch
Taking a cue from Theodor W. Adorno, who described fascism as the “wounds, or scars, of a democracy that until today fails to live up to its concept,” von Moltke hopes to contribute to our understanding of right-wing cultural politics as the scar tissue of an uncompleted democratic project.
This Event is part of the Mosse Annual Lecture Series.
Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and of Film, Television, and Media, at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (California, 2015), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (California, 2005), winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies. He has published articles in several journals, as well as in numerous edited volumes. Over the past few years, he has also devoted time to the English edition of the last letters exchanged in 1944/45 between his grandparents. He is currently the vice president of the American Friends of Marbach and a former president of the German Studies Association. In his most recent work, Professor von Moltke has been studying right wing media cultures. He has been following the media tactics of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic, with a particular focus on how “Cultural Marxism” has spun a conspiracy theory around the Frankfurt School.
