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 develops a feminist intervention into contemporary metabolic rift theory, arguing that the gendered division of labor constitutes capitalism’s ur-separation, providing the template for treating all regenerative work as “nature's free gift.” While metabolic rift theory importantly identifies capitalism as the agent of ecological crisis, adding “nature” to historical materialism will not suffice: the crisis demands we be interrupted by forces exceeding the dialectical frame. “Mud epistemology” thinks from this interruption—where dialectical reason meets its limit in the irreducible alterity of metabolic processes, where social and ecological forces interpenetrate without synthesis. Drawing on struggles from La Via Campesina to Rojava, Majaca shows how “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.”
