Fever Pitch: On Bourgeois Coldness by Henrike Kohpeiß

Detail of the cover of Bourgeois Coldness (2025).

Adorno and Horkheimer said that the bourgeois subject has three historical forms: the slave owner, the free entrepreneur, and the bureaucrat.1 Understood chronologically, this schema moves through phases of colonial expansion and free-market capitalism, before winding up in what the critical theorists called the “totally administered world.” Yet to what extent has chattel slavery become a thing of the past? The bestowal of liberal rights upon formerly enslaved persons in the United States, for instance, did not eradicate the antebellum system of racial exploitation. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman insisted, it only delivered former slaves into new modes of servitude like sharecropping and debt peonage.2 Forged in the crucible of transatlantic slavery, the bourgeois subject depends on the continuing existence of racializing practices it claims to have abolished. As Henrike Kohpeiß argues in her new book, coldness is one of the affective strategies that reproduces and conceals this colonial order. 

The book begins by revisiting the primal scene of bourgeois subjectivity: the sirens episode from Homer’s Odyssey. Returning from his journey to the underworld, Odysseus is warned of the dangers awaiting him on the Isle of the Sirens, whose song is said to be so intoxicating as to spellbind anyone who hears it. The jutting rocks are strewn with a reminder of what happens to those who are unable to resist: “heaps of corpses, / rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones.”3 Following the advice of Circe, Odysseus orders his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and to fix him tight to the mast, thereby exposing him to the music’s charm without the risk of extinction. In this way, the hero finds a loophole in his contract with the gods. Although he abandons himself to the power of myth, he is assured of his escape in advance, indemnifying his renunciation with the knowledge that he is protected from harm. Submitting through withdrawal, and obeying without surrendering autonomy, Odysseus becomes a “subject” in the Roman juristic sense of the term, distinct from servitude proper (servus) but also subordinate (subditus) to the law.4

The cunning of Odysseus is a means of exchange: he cheats the gods by fulfilling his contract, throws himself away to win himself back, adapts to reason by succumbing to myth. To this extent, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, Odysseus “is already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble.”5 And yet, by the time of his homecoming, the hero has lost all of his crew, who have perished in order that he might survive. As Kohpeiß points out, the escape of Odysseus is the vanishing point of the narrative, which relies on the principle of the disposability of life.6 This image of death at sea is the red thread running through Bourgeois Coldness, weaving together the sacrifice of Odysseus’s crew in the Aegean (Part I), the struggles of migrants in the Mediterranean basin (Part II), and the afterlives of enslaved Africans in the Black Atlantic (Part III).

An important argument in the book’s reinterpretation of Homer is that Odysseus’s encounter with the sirens is a proto-aesthetic experience.7 Through his exploits, the hero achieves a self-unity that is denied to the members of his crew. The disintegrating power of the sirens’ song threatens to dissolve this hard-won subjectivity by tempting him back into premodern myth—a Nietzschean invitation to take joy in one’s own annihilation, to sacrifice the principio individuationis to the promise of eternal life.8 But although he is enraptured by the sweet pitch of the sirens’ song, Odysseus is lashed to the mast and so unable to submit to it. The music is hereby transformed into an object of contemplation, something to be individually appreciated but held at a distance, anticipating the modern work of art. This situation places Odysseus in a state of feverishness: a will to coldness in the face of burning heat, an attempt to wrest self-possession from the maw of extinction. As Kohpeiß will go on to argue, Blackness functions in a similar way, threatening the bourgeois subject with its own abolition.

The second part of the book considers an incident from 2019 in which a Sea-Watch rescue vessel carrying refugees from Libya was refused entry into Italian territorial waters. When the ship’s captain defied the authorities by proceeding to dock anyway, she was lionized by the liberal press for her righteous rebellion, with one commentator even likening her decision to the transgressive act of Antigone.9 Such cases are the direct result of the European Union’s punitive border policy, but instead of changing this closed-door approach, it prefers to apply humanitarian measures as a remedy for crises it has created. The episode illustrates a dynamic that is central to the book’s analysis of bourgeois coldness: a coexistence of blindness and sanctimony, buttressed by the fiction of inculpability. By celebrating acts of defiance, subjects ignore the structural logics that have brought them into being. These self-congratulatory affirmations of moral rectitude reconcile Europe’s conception of itself as an agent of peace with the violent situations occurring at its borders.

Coldness stabilizes in the face of excitation and neutralizes the existence of threat. It thrives in withdrawal and founders in vulnerability, binding subjects to institutions in ways that facilitate the ethical neglect of others. Yet coldness can also be used in counter-hegemonic ways that resist its bourgeois appropriation. As an example, Kohpeiß takes the social justice hires rolled out in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, in which institutions scrambled to partake in the affective intensity of the moment.10 Liberal expressions of humanistic empathy were deployed as a way of co-opting the radical energies unleashed by the protests. In this context, coldness emerges as a “bridge affect,” providing the subject with an island of detachment on which they can recharge and take stock. “When we reverse engineered the movement,” runs a line from one of Fred Moten’s poems, “we found that the moment it became a movement was the moment we stopped moving.”11 Because of its entropic tendency toward administered stasis, coldness may nurture collectivization, but only if it serves as a prelude to continued struggle. In this way, the book avoids static binaries: coldness is not always undesirable, and warmth may also deceive.

In a radio lecture given in the mid-1960s, Adorno described the affective constellation of bourgeois society as one of the enabling conditions of the Shoah. He defines coldness as social indifference shaped by the pursuit of self-interest, denying the possibility of love before giving it a chance to evolve.12 Despite its complicity with fascist terror, Adorno believed that bourgeois reason could be used as a corrective to the violence it had created. He identifies changes to education, for example, as a key resource for ensuring that Auschwitz does not happen again. Yet as Kohpeiß argues, this solution is consistent with the principle of accountability by self-critique, which is one of the pillars of bourgeois society itself.13 Although Adorno’s reflections on damaged life tarried with the phenomenon of fascist terror, his critique was articulated from the standpoint of the bourgeois subject, whose decay he had understood, but from whose limits he was unable to extricate himself. Hans-Jürgen Krahl was one of the first to recognize the contradiction: “Adorno’s cutting critique of the bourgeois individual irresistibly trapped him in its ruin.”14

Unable to see beyond his own class formation, Adorno struggled to translate his private compassion for the wretched of the earth into a practical solidarity with the liberation of the oppressed. The original contribution of Bourgeois Coldness is to seek a remedy for the shortcomings of critical theory in the fugitive movement of Blackness, which is presented as a transformative force that eludes intellectual control. As Laura Harris writes, Blackness “designates irreducible difference, a mode of being that the modern bourgeois subject, conceived in and by European thought … cannot accommodate.”15 In the coda to the book, this recalcitrant negativity is brought to bear on Adorno’s philosophy of nonidentity, which insists on the restlessness of dialectical thought. What Adorno called the preponderance of the object is unveiled as the resistance of the enslaved, while the history of racial expropriation is shown to be the substrate of negative dialectics.16 The purpose of such reparative gestures is to make the Frankfurt School look feverish: insisting on coldness while running a temperature, mired in detachment but entangled with race, beholden to reason yet prey to its opposite.

A consequence of the book’s identification of Odysseus with the bourgeois subject is that Blackness is likened to the song of the sirens. This chain of equivalence reactivates a politics of the sublime, in which the individual feels threatened by an object over which it has mastery. As Kant said, sublime phenomena like thunderclaps and sea storms are attractive insofar as they instil fear. Their awe-inspiring vitality is underwritten by the safety of the beholder, who is edified by this threat to their self-control. The result is a “vibration” in the individual’s consciousness, “a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object.”17 But in order for the sublime to appear, humans must have triumphed over nature, freeing them to take pleasure in the servitude from which they have escaped. Far from a timeless quality, the beauty of such phenomena can only emerge under conditions of rational domination. Adorno liked to quote a line from Paul Verlaine that he thought illustrated this point rather well: “La mer est plus belle que les cathédrales” (The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals).18

Blackness is the sublime object of Bourgeois Coldness: it is both fugitive and restrained, outside reason yet under social control, before the law but identical to its operations. This oscillation derives, as Lilly Markaki has argued, from the book’s “middle-ground position” in the field of Black studies, suspended between Black optimism and Afropessimism.19 At times, Kohpeiß claims that Blackness “can be shaped by the ruling powers in any way they choose.”20 Elsewhere, she invokes a politics of the undercommons “against the conceptual immobilization of fugitive movements.”21 The effect of this alternation is to open a set of questions that remain unresolved. Does Blackness ensue from sovereign power, or is it ontologically prior to the founding of the law? Is it given in the strategies that police it, or does it antecede the violence of the norm? Are we dealing, in Moten’s terms, with “criticism” of the generative unfolding of Blackness, or with a “critique” of that generation’s regulation and policing?22 But the strength of this ambivalence is to have expanded the pathways of future research, demonstrating the continued relevance of thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, without glossing over their blind spots and inconsistencies.