Issue 157

Now it is October 2025 and well over sixty-six thousand Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. At times, the ravenous persistence and openness of such brutality appears to taunt the rest of the world with the State of Israel’s free rein, its seemingly infinite license to disregard international law and the opposition of governments and people, enabled most directly by the US. The message becomes clear that, as scholar Eman Abdelhadi has remarked, what’s even worse than no one caring about Gaza being starved and destroyed is that hundreds of millions of people around the world do in fact care, and yet are powerless to stop it. There will certainly be a long and heavy cost for such unfathomable military and humanitarian violence, but the added cost of the affront to hundreds of millions of people around the world will likely become its own kind of cancer.

In 1934, a year after Hitler became chancellor and then dictator of Germany, Walter Benjamin published a short article responding to the inflationary and revisionist methods by which his contemporaries staged a transition into fascist aesthetics. For this issue, Hunter Bolin translates Benjamin’s little-known article “The Dipped Magic Wand” for the first time. Bolin also contributes a companion essay on the article, unpacking Benjamin’s brittle prose to reveal the complex moves being made in the 1930s to place the entirety of German intellectual and cultural history in the service of a timeless, heroic German age that was more fantasy than form. Perhaps Benjamin sensed his own impotence in writing about aesthetics at a time when Nazi rule was already complete, but it is also in his subtlety and sensitivity that Bolin observes Benjamin insisting on an internal resistance to fascism occurring within forms themselves. Aided by theories of “polarity” and plays of opposites, Benjamin looks to humor and theories of color for their fundamental openness, even their plastic and “deflationary” resistance to the heroic and idealistic hardening of history to serve the ethno-nationalism of Nazi ascendancy.

Also in this issue, Angela Anderson and Silvia Federici discuss the political and existential stakes of resource extraction and the channels through which ecological violence becomes gender violence. From Standing Rock in North Dakota to Kurdish democratic experiments in Rojava in North and East Syria to rural Nigeria, the techniques of systematic desertion and dispossession used by corporations are remarkably consistent, even when resistance to them is effective and total. Commenting on Anderson’s film on the subject, Federici emphasizes a shift in the concept of wealth away from the production of scarcity and into powerful relationships between people that enable bonds of trust and cooperation to withstand a common enemy. 

Maya Livio looks at a hidden real estate venture to maintain the empty views around Walter De Maria’s land art sculpture The Lightning Field, four hundred steel poles in the New Mexico desert. To keep the views around the sculpture devoid of human-made structures, the Dia Art Foundation has amassed eighteen thousand acres of desert and created conservation easements that have inadvertently turned land protection into artwork. This move is an inventive way to wield bureaucratic tools toward conservation, but what if it were used for community environmental benefit rather than for an artist’s colonial fantasies of wilderness?

Antonia Majaca goes back to a letter Marx received in 1881 probing why peasants or other working subjects outside of the factory couldn’t be agents of revolution. Vera Zasulich’s letter caught him at a good time, as he was immersed in anthropological writings about resistance to settler colonialism across the globe. Tracing Marx’s notes, Majaca celebrates the fact that ecological Marxist thinkers have since advanced beyond teleological theories of revolutionary history, but also pushes such thinkers toward the mud, noting that “revolutionary transformation will emerge not from solid ground but from patient work with unstable substrates.”

In an excerpt from her small book The New Fascist Body, Dagmar Herzog examines the “sexy racism” running through German political projects from the Nazis to the contemporary far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Analyzing the AfD’s libidinally charged messaging reveals techniques of stirring fear while conveying a thrilling domination, echoing Nazi-era propaganda that used lurid imagery to stimulate both arousal and moral superiority. This strategy, Herzog argues, is paired with an obsessive hostility toward disability that is made most apparent in AfD’s campaign to keep children with disabilities out of mainstream schools. For Herzog, fascism’s secret memo to its audience is not repression but rather permission and impunity—a message that reverberates across right-wing movements from AfD to Trumpism.

Sven Lütticken continues his investigations into the political aesthetics of contemporary fascist forces as well as revolutionary, philosophical, and artistic counterproposals, beginning from the idea that the proposition may have suffered a similar fate to that of performativity. But rather than cease proposing and just give up, Lütticken invites us to investigate how political, aesthetic, social proposals perform in the world. From early conceptual art to proposals for anti-fascist living to clashes at the barricade, “The question is what propositional statements might be able to do, or not do, in the vastly different contexts of the political arena and the aesthetic sphere.” 

—Editors

Sven Lütticken—Propositional Politics
Part of the intoxicating proposition of fascism, then as now, is that power and epistemic or physical violence creates alternative “facts”: Haitians eat cats and dogs, Israeli football hooligans in Amsterdam were helpless Jews subjected to a pogrom, and Hitler was of course not a fascist but a socialist. While the propositional lure of the far right is steeped in claims that do not withstand a fact check, such fact-checking has shown itself to be fairly powerless as long as it remains within the framework of an eroding liberal consensus.

Walter Benjamin—The Dipped Magic Wand: On Max Kommerell’s “Jean Paul”
And indeed, the intuition of fantasy—the antithesis of all formative imagination—is at home in the world of color. For every form, every contour perceived by man, there corresponds in him a capacity to produce it. The body in dance, the hand in its gestures, mimics it and appropriates it. But this ability reaches its limit in color; the human body cannot generate color. Color does not correspond to the human body creatively, but only receptively: in the colorfully shimmering eye. Pure color is the medium of fantasy, not the strict canon of the shaping artist. Its cloudy home, in which forms do not so much take shape but rather disfigure, is the realm of change. 

Hunter Bolin—The Hero and the Magician: Walter Benjamin’s Jean Paul
At stake in the debate between these right-wing thinkers and their German-Jewish counterparts are two distinct modes of subjectivity. The first is heroic and sublime, the second creaturely and profane. If the first aims to embody ideal figures and forms, the second is plastic and deflationary. If the former seeks to reject all limits, the latter embraces them. Yet the emphasis in this study is not on these subject types themselves, but rather on how they differ in confronting contradiction, lack, and privation.

Maya Livio—Conservation Is the Work of Art: How The Lightning Field Made Land Art
By now, it seems clear that this space, where contextual details deemed superfluous have been plastered over or encased in wooden boxes, where laminated didactics abound, and where a docent suggests the right modes of experiencing the art, is not so far from the museum and gallery institutions that De Maria claimed to reject. This was not the rejection of the white cube; it was land made white cube.

Antonia Majaca—Mud Epistemology: Gender, Metabolism, and Marx’s Unfinished Revolution
Mud epistemology refuses both eco-fascist nostalgia for pure “blood and soil” and new materialist attributions of agency to matter itself. Instead, it insists on the historicity of material practices and recognizes that those whose hands work the mud already know what metabolic theory struggles to articulate: that “human” and “nature” were never nouns but verbs, naming different moments in ongoing processes of mutual transformation. While capitalism deploys both solidification and liquefaction—fixing categories to enable extraction while dissolving social bonds that resist commodification—mud epistemology tracks the specific practices that maintain different metabolic relations despite these twin operations of capital.

Angela Anderson and Silvia Federici—Ecologies of Care: A Conversation
The film raises the question: What is wealth? I think that the desire for commodities is the consequence of a big material and social impoverishment—a long process whereby people have been divided from each other. We are isolated, living separately, with anxiety about the future and our survival. Life is impoverished, so we acquire things to fill the vacuum. When people have powerful relationships, they do not need things in such a way. The successful struggles are those in which people create affective relations and forms of cooperation between themselves. 

Dagmar Herzog—The New Fascist Body
One significant part of AfD’s success involves its “family values” posturing—even as it also, in only seeming contradiction, luxuriates provocatively in deliberate sexiness. The deliberate contradictoriness, moreover, is itself highly functional, as it expands potential audiences, keeps opponents guessing, entertains with shrewd humor, and provides ready deniability in case of critical rebuke.