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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.