D (3:22)

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on this podcast. And, yeah, I'm just gonna try and start to tell you why maybe I wrote this book or where the idea came from. So, I'm a philosopher. I'm trained in philosophy, and critical theory has always been, I guess, my main interest. And also the method that I'm most familiar with. And then during, I guess, my master's, and then increasingly during my PhD, I also got deeply into affect theory and affect studies from a philosophical point of view, but also in terms of social theory and critical theory and also just emotion research. And also I had initial encounters with, I guess, the canon of Black studies when I was studying at an art school in Vienna for a semester on an exchange. And I think this book came about or like it's. It's based on my PhD. Large parts of it are really like my PhD thesis, but the English version is. Is shorter than that. Yeah. And I think I. I just noticed some similarities between early Frankfurt School critical theory and Black studies in terms of the methodology that is used in both of these traditions of thought. And I was just curious to explore that and to think about negativity from these perspectives. And I guess this is how I developed my PhD project as a very scholarly engagement, I guess, initially with the kinds or the forms of thinking that arise from certain historical moments of catastrophe. And I think, yeah, I stuck with that for a long time, and maybe until today.

B (5:26)

Excellent. We can definitely see the relevance of catastrophe, I think, right now, especially for the American audiences. So I think this is a really powerful concept that you're proposing, but if you could just tell our audience a little bit, what exactly is bourgeois coldness and how exactly does it contribute to our understanding of affect, social theory, and kind of a global society.

D (5:56)

Yes. So, yeah, as a philosopher and also like a scholar of concept, I don't want to hide the fact that this is not my concept, but bourgeois coldness is a concept that Adorno and Horkheimer use in the dialectics of Enlightenment. And I think that. I mean, I wrote a book about it because they haven't necessarily developed that concept. They. They use it also to describe a certain effective disposition that they see in place in bourgeois democracies and bourgeois capitalism. And that to them is very tied to, I guess, technology and its place in modernity. And I think especially Adorno has, you know, a lot of, I guess, you know, bad feelings about technology and how it shapes and governs people's lives. And he thinks that this kind of technological power that he sees at the rise in the 20th century in Germany is very tied to forms of violence and also how violence can be ignored and how people become indifferent to social relations and become hard and just turn away from one another. So this is, I guess, a very sentimental account, but I just want to say it so people know where this concept comes from. And then actually there is another book called Burgerliche Kelte, which is the German title that is from a more pedagogical context. Or it engages with this concept as one that can explain institutional constellations of coldness and the ways in which people behave when they are governed through certain institutions. But my interest in it, and now I'm actually only coming to what is. What is in the book that I wrote about it, is that I think bourgeois coldness aptly describes an effective social technique that helps bourgeois subjects to shield themselves from the violence that they themselves enact. That's also a sentence that is in the book. So there's like self relation going on with bourgeois coldness. And I guess my, my assumption or my analysis of power that is the basis of this claim is that bourgeois society, bourgeois capitalist society, rests on a lot of violence, colonial violence, and then also the violence of exploitation and wars, et cetera. You know, like, I think we're living in a time when this is increasingly obvious. And I was wondering with that concept, how do bourgeois subjects manage to live under these conditions while still thinking of themselves as moral subjects and while still thinking of themselves as the peak of Enlightenment philosophy, essentially. And I do think that bourgeois coldness might be, you know, one of the answers or like a way to. To respond to that question. And this is, I guess, the, the base structure of this concept. And then maybe two more smaller points about that. One aspect of bourgeois coldness is that it's not a she, like a total shielding. That would be something like pure indifference. But I think that there's a virtuosity to bourgeois coldness that consists in exactly claiming morality and Also demonstrating it in certain ways and being able to demonstrate very singular, very, very isolated forms of empathy in order to stabilize the self image that goes along with it. And, and this is really, this is really crucial in order to understand how it works and especially how it works maybe in Europe or like with regards to European Union. And then one last thing, I also think of bourgeois coldness as an effective residue of colonialism. So there's also something about this concept that helps me, and I hope others also to understand. I mean, colonialism obviously lives on in many different ways and also reinstated in many different ways. But I do think that it also lives on in feelings and affects and like social effective constellations, namely in the ways in which investments and white supremacy are very palpable. And they might not always be explicit, but when we look at certain social constellations we can see in how far there is an attachment to imperial forms of domination that are claimed to be, I guess, phenomena of the past, but they are not actually when we try to analyze the feelings that go along with them.

B (11:26)

Thank you. That really ties it all together. Could you talk a little bit about the methods you use for the research for this book? I love to hear about the research that authors do, but particularly people that are theorizing. It can be slightly a different process. Can you talk a little bit about gathering materials and doing the research that went into this?

D (11:52)

Yes, I actually love to talk about methods because they, I think they are sometimes such a contested thing in philosophy because I think many philosophers think of themselves as not having any method beyond thought, you know, just like pure thinking. And I also know that the way that I write and think and you know, and also how this book is constructed is maybe not a very conventional way to work in philosophy and also not in critical theory. So I can try to name and identify some of the things that I do because obviously, obviously it's also intuitive when I do it, but, but I think, you know, it, it comes from my training, the things that I'm more interested in doing than others, et cetera. So I think, I mean a lot of the book is obviously a lot of close breathing and exegesis of, yeah, traditional text and critical theory. I think the Dialectics of Enlightenment might be the most prominent one. And I'm really going into the Odysseus chapter of the Dialectics of Enlightenment and the entire first part of the book really in depth. And I'm doing a lot of conceptual work there and try to re situate that chapter and the analysis that Adon and Horkheimer are offering there in our shared present. And it's. It's interesting with that book. I mean, the Dialectics of Enlightenment is such a broadly read book in critical theory, it's such a canonical work. And nevertheless, I'm just, you know, astonished every time I read it how much more there is, because it's incredibly complex. And so I think that it's always worthwhile to go into it in that way. But then I also engage with some, I guess, less philosophical methods in the second part of the book. I do a lot of media and discourse analysis of German and European media at the time to understand what, I guess the political vibe is at a given moment. And this relates to events such as sea rescue in the Mediterranean that I analyzed in the book and how it is being talked about in Europe at the time. It also relates to the George Floyd up rising in 2020 and how it appears in media. So there are many different things that I think are, you know, that can be traced through looking at media discourses. And these are very important to me. Then I guess, you know, genealogy broadly construed as a method that this book is deeply invested in. So I'm always trying to find out where do these concepts come from? Where does especially the German concept of Burgerlichkeit come from, which is slightly different than bourgeois, and also coldness and property. All of these very important concepts that are, you know, that I need to understand bourgeois subjectivity are being traced in this way. And then I guess, I mean, people have pointed that out, but it's also clear to me that I try to offer some more poetical methods in this book as well. So there are some important images that I work with. The engagement with the Odyssey by Humay is not a coincidence. And I'm really trying to understand how do these images of a heroic Odysseus as the explorer, how does that correspond, for example, to transatlantic explorers and the heroic images that we connect to them? So what are the colonial resonances of the Odyssey? Even though this is not done in a manner in which I guess a literary historian would do it, but it helps me to think through certain things. And then I think, I mean, but this is maybe the most. The method that is closest to me, but also the one that I made up, is something that I would call materialist affects inquiry. You know, that I. I'm engaging with a form of affect theory and just like analysis of affect and emotion that is always trying to push against the naturalization of feelings. And that is of course, also very close to certain theorists of affect, like Lauren Berland or Sara Ahmed, who have shown that, you know, feelings are never natural, but they are created in certain. Under certain conditions. And these conditions are always political and material. And I think this is maybe the most. I guess, you know, like, this is the spirit of this book to understand how is bourgeois subjectivity something like a constellation of feelings that is the result of certain economic, social and historical conditions. So I think this is maybe the method that I'm working with the most.

B (17:17)

That's really. I loved hearing that. I really appreciated particularly the media and discourse analysis. The way that you've kind of grounded this and so many different things, I think, is one of the ways that the book really fleshes out this kind of conceptual framework really well. And I do love the idea of kind of creating your own method. Maybe you can write something or publish about that. Because I would love to hear more about this kind of material affect interplay. I think that's really fascinating. One important point that you make in the book is that there seems to be kind of a missed potential for conversation and collaboration between the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and Black Studies. You kind of mentioned in the beginning they have similar sort of goals and interests, broadly speaking, questions about liberation, justice, power, analysis. But can you talk a little bit more about this kind of like missed potential or misalignment, how it relates to the overall theme of the book. But also if you have any thoughts on what this has meant for kind of the contemporary canonization or, like, how we think about critical theory?

D (18:41)

Yeah, I mean, I think at this point there's more and more work on especially this relationship between the black radical tradition and Frankfurt School critical theory. Because I think, you know, many scholars have noticed that there's a lot of potential to think about these two traditions together. And then there's. I mean, in terms of encounters, there's some, you know, anecdotal aspects that can be mentioned. One is that James and Adorno once met in New York, but apparently nothing came of that, or they weren't really clicking, I guess, or we can just speculate on the reasons for that. But I think this. I mean, just the fact that there has been some historical contact makes me think about the reasons why did this not resonate more than we know, or that we've. That we see. And the other important, more anecdotal, but also, I guess, more crucial encounter is Angela Davis presence in Frankfurt. She studied with Adorno for two years, and then she returned to the U.S. and I think this is maybe in terms of the work that came out of it, the more impactful encounter, as also in her ongoing collaboration with Herbert Marcuse, there are some very clear traces of them actually being in a continuous conversation and influencing each other's work in more historically impactful ways. But I think for my book, there are different ways to think about this. I think the two. Like one very. I mean, an aspect that I find obvious, that might not be as obvious to the readers or like everyone else, is that the black radical tradition, when we think of the more Afro pessimist chapter of it, thinks through the history of race and capitalism and the history of dominance, the histories of domination and violence, from a specific historical event, which is the Middle Passage and the transatlantic slave trade. And there's really this marker in time in order to understand how history unfolds after this, and also how certain social relations are being organized as a result of this event. And in a similar vein, at least Adorno sings from the Shoah and from the extermination of the European Jews and has, like, a similarly violent historical event in mind in order to understand how does thinking, speaking and social relations work in Europe and particularly in Germany after this? And I guess this can be, you know, blurred to say, okay, there's just, you know, a shared investment and negativity, but it is actually a quite remarkable, you know, parallel way of working that I think, you know, should not go unexplored. And at this point, there's also no way to say that it's unexplored. Many people have written about this and. But I think for me, this is just like a theme, you know, like that. That I like to keep in mind when I think about these things. But what is maybe more important and also more productive to think about in order not to make such a definitive historical statement about what each of this. Each of these traditions are invested in is to say. I mean, both of them are very invested in a critique of modernity, like, at large, you know, and to understand how do social relations change with different variations of capitalism. And then, of course, the black radical tradition thinks about black and racialized social positions within that constellation. And therefore racial capitalism is. Is the term that is, that is being used in order to unfold this. Whereas in the Frankfurt School, and I guess especially in Adonis and Horkheimer's analysis of capitalism, they are more invested in the forms of alienation of social relations and the forms of exploitation that are taking place. And I do think that it makes a lot of sense to combine these analyses is in order to get a fuller picture. Because you can also argue that colonialism is really the blind spot of the, of the Frankfurt School. Whereas they've thought about gender a little bit, you know, they've thought about different things, but they really do not engage with colonialism at large. You know, and I think this is maybe the, again, very scholarly goal of this book, to see what happens when we think these things together and also in order to see certain limitations of these very canonized thinkers of the Frankfurt School who enjoy a position of, I guess, unanimous praise and to see where does this actually end? Yeah.

B (24:39)

Thank you. Yeah. So a lot of the examples that you have in the book kind of run the gamut from like historical to contemporary media, cultural given, you know, kind of like where we're at in this moment. There's always a little bit of a lag between when you publish something and what's going on in the world. Do you think there are some examples of these phenomena that you're seeing in our current situation, whether it's, you know, in relation to more global phenomena, Europe or the United States?

D (25:18)

Yeah, I mean, obviously there are still a lot of them. And I think the most pronounced one at the moment is the genocide of the Palestinian people and the forms of anti Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and all these ways in which the Palestinian position is being taken out of the frame somehow that I think are really being enacted through certain forms of bourgeois coldness or that really helps to make this an efficient endeavor. So I do think that Palestinians occupy the position of the negative in political discourse at the moment. They are something like the constitutive other to some continuation of the Western liberal self conception. And they are, and you know, Palestine is basically the most crucial questioning of this moral self image of, of Western democracies at the moment. And I do think that this is a very, very stark contradiction. Maybe, you know, the, the strongest one that I've ever experienced, you know, and that of course has to do with the fact that the movement for Palestine is also, is also very strong. And I think that this can be analyzed in some of the terms that I'm proposing. But as you said, you know, there's always this gap between when I'm. When you're writing a book and then when it comes how the world changes. And I also think that this is a necessity and that, you know, I wouldn't strive for some kind of universal analysis because we have to, you know, go along with history. And there may be some things that I find very interesting with this particular gap, because I wrote this book roughly between 2018 and 2021, and it came out in German in 2023. And you know, the things that happened during that time, they would definitely not painting a pretty picture, but they are very different from what we're experiencing today. So the George Floyd uprising, for example, was also an occasion to reinvest in certain forms of politics that had yet that seemed lost before. And we experienced the pandemic as another intervention into the political setup, I guess, of the Western world. And these are the things that I think are more present in the book that you can feel that they were happening. But I do think, and now we're in a moment in which certain currents of fascism are becoming so much more explicit and also they are so much less hidden. And I think my analysis of bourgeois coldness is also a way to reveal certain things that no longer have to be revealed right now because they are increasingly obvious. But I find it interesting to think about this book right now as one that can explain some of the conditions of what is happening today. You know, this moment is not one that is surprising, but it has been prepared over years. And bourgeois society is one way to prepare, you know, to. To kind of to just like, you know, bracket violence in a different way until maybe it can have more explicit expressions again. So, yeah, you know, I think. I really think about it in. In this way as like a pre. History to the current moment, but also as, you know, a proposition not to forget that we have to look at these forms of violence that are maybe less obvious or that have to be analyzed a little bit more in order to, you know, not. Not to be mistaken for like, peace or like, in order not to be mistaken for some kind of. Yeah, democracy that has some flaws but can recover, you know, but to actually see the systemic violence and. And which form it takes.

B (30:01)

Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think those were all examples that. That came to mind. I. I mean, especially being in this period of democratic backsliding, the rise of fascist regimes. I really reading the book, I got a sense of, as you said, the kind of. The types of conditions that make. Make a public kind of unfeeling towards violence and how that can. Can really escalate into these more notorious, more overt form. So, yeah, I think that definitely comes across for sure.

D (30:39)

Yeah, I just, just like one more thing maybe I just find it interesting to think about, you know, these different forms of like, how are. How are these feelings being regulated, you know, and how. And do different forms of politics and effective politics offer different forms of. Of like, regulation and moderation of effective expressions. And then I think bourgeois coldness is one form that has such virtuosity because it really, like, there's a lot to balance, you know, and it's very much about appearance. It's very much about how do you position yourself through an effective and intellectual superiority in order to maintain power and. And to see how. For how long this has worked quite well for, I think, especially maybe member states of the European Union and like, you know, of course, Germany at the. At the front runner of. As the front runner of this kind of disposition. And it's just really interesting to see. And also the. The. I guess what I'm thinking about now is also the helplessness of this effective strategy in the face of maybe more brute and more. More kind of unconstrained forms of the expression of violence, you know, and they really don't know how to respond to that. They're really overwhelmed, you know, and this is very interesting.

B (32:16)

Yeah, absolutely. No, I think what you're saying is really putting a lot of things in context in terms of, as you said, the ineffective sort of ability to respond or even to try to stabilize things, because I think part of what you're talking about is kind of how there's a certain stability that is kind of faulty but is constantly performed. Yeah, absolutely. So I know a lot of your work is very grounded in sort of the European Union and the European history, obviously the Frankfurt School, coming from a very specific history, cultural, geographic context. But I was curious what you thought in terms of how this effective disposition translates across different cultural and national contexts. So as I was reading, I was thinking, like, is this specific, you think, to colonial metropoles or even does it manifest differently in, let's say, the United States, where there's maybe parallels, but differences in comparison to Germany or kind of the overall kind of European Union context.

D (33:36)

Right. I think this is a super interesting question, and I've actually talked about this with many people in the past, so I do think that there's a basic structure to this type of coldness that I'm describing, or just dialectics of displaying certain forms of composure while also being engaged in structures of violence. And, you know, implicated subject might be a, you know, a way to describe this. You know, like there's a. I think, you know, like the implicated subject is just like another way to consider the structure, like, in a broader way by Michael Rothberg. Sorry. But I think that there are also some cultural aspects to this constellation that are actually important. So I do think that this is a quiet European, maybe way of behaving and also a very German way of behaving when it comes to these values and virtues of containment and emotional rigidity, et cetera, et cetera. I think these are like, very cultural aspects. And I've heard from a lot of Scandinavians that this analysis is quite applicable to. To their experiences as well. So, you know, like, there's something, I guess, northern European about, yeah, I guess emotional withdrawal and things like this. And then I do not necessarily have enough experiences with other regimes of emotional behavior in order to really say, like, where is it applicable and in which ways. But I do think that there might be other manifestations or just like, slight differences in other countries that, that should be studied in these very specific ways. You know, just like. Because I feel like the. This. This basic task of regulating aggressive feelings, for example, socially, you know, and like, violence, like, how. How are feelings for. Towards violence being regulated socially? This is a universal structure and it's just like a question of, I guess, yeah, culture and society, how it comes out. But I also want to say that maybe given Germany's current position and geopolitics and also, like, in relation to Israel, these German specifics might be worth studying nevertheless, you know, because I think there is something really to be understood that goes beyond like, just an anecdotal, you know, fun story, you know, like, about how Germany tries to gain or like, blackmail moral authority through like, its own histories of genocide in order to then executed in current geopolitics, you know, like, and I think this. This is not. This is not something that is singular to Germany, but I do think that we can, and we should think about other historical examples for this. So maybe, yeah, that's the only way in which I can answer this. But I'm just like, always curious about people applying this analysis to their own experiences where. Wherever they live.

B (37:14)

Yeah, yeah. No, your answer definitely has me thinking a lot as an American. And also reading the book had me thinking a lot just given sort of the present situation in the United States, the ineffectiveness which with certain sort of capitalist, like liberal politics have really kind of failed because of not having this kind of ability to be universal in its feeling or its empathy because of these kind of feeling rules. So there's definitely, I think, something there. Any listeners that are critical scholars, critical theorists that do work in the United States, we hope that you pick up the mantle and think about how this would manifest in this context. Because I do think, yes, this is definitely a concept that I feel like can travel, but with some nuances, like you said. So. Yes, absolutely. And then along those lines, I thought this would be the perfect segue to talking about how your work has recently been translated. I think the English version is just coming out this year. Right. So what was it like to be part of that process of translating your work from German to English? I know that you worked with a translator, but given, you know, how culturally specific but also some of the quirks of language, I was just wondering what were some of those challenges of the translation? What was the process like, and how. How has it felt to be reaching a new audience as well?

D (39:00)

Yeah, I just want to start by highlighting the incredible work of my translator, Grace Nissan. It's been absolutely, like, amazing to me, and I've been astonished so many times with how much precision and sensitivity they have taken on this task of translating my, admittedly very complicated German into a version of English that does not obliterate, you know, the specificity of the language that I'm using. And also, you know, I think a lot of the ways in which I'm writing are indebted to me. Reading a lot of. I don't know, I think mainly, but, you know, just. I do appreciate German syntax very much, and that's not always easy to transfer to the English language. But not only that, I mean, I think Grace and I have really spent a lot of time together working on this book. I've also spent some time in New York earlier this year, and so we. We could just be in the same room and talk about things, which was incredibly helpful. But I think what was so special about this translation process is that Grace could also. Because, I mean, they know the material very well, and they are also very familiar with the discourses that I'm, you know, bring together in the book. They could very much help me to think about the German text in the context of, for example, American political discourse, you know, and how things would resonate differently in English. And so we made some changes also as. As a result of that, to make it accessible to an audience that is not German, you know, and that is also, you know, familiar with different things. And another, I guess, challenge maybe was that in German, like, when I wrote the book and when I wrote my PhD thesis, a lot of the work that I did was to introduce the literature of black studies to a German audience because very little of it is translated, almost nothing. So there's not a lot of familiarity. And this challenge includes to, you know, introduce a discourse to German social philosophy and critical Theory that is very tied to, you know, Frankfurt School critical theory. But, you know, and there are, of course, some people who have done that before me, like Vanessa Thompson or Daniel. People have worked with this kind of literature, but it's not around so much. So there was a lot of just, you know, trying to find a language for these things that didn't necessarily exist in German before. And then in the translation, we kind of removed a lot of that again, you know, because there's a lot more, you know, we can assume a lot more familiarity of American and British theory readers with that book than we could in Germany. And, yeah, it's coming out. I mean, it's been out in the UK and in the rest of Europe, then end of September, and then I think the US publication date is beginning of January 26th. So then it will be available in the US as well. And, yeah, I mean, it has opened up so many new audiences for this book. And that's been a really generous experience. I mean, it's amazing. People are very. People are very generous, I think, in general. And it's touching. And it feels so good to see how people want to engage with thinking and how many ideas they bring and how much there is that, you know, people want to talk about. And I think, you know, I guess many people who write books have this experience that, you know, public space can actually be something very warm and amazing. And I think I've been amazed by that in a similar way.

B (43:37)

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. No, I thought the translation was great. Just in terms of the voice that I can tell you have that's pretty unique, is still captured, which I would imagine was a real challenge.

D (43:54)

Yeah, I mean, Grace is a poet. Everyone should check out their poetry as well. Grace in the sense, poetic work. And there was, of course, a very different process than working with an academic translator who would probably be much more technical, especially about the more scholarly parts of the work. But Grace has really, like, engaged with how I write, not only what I write.

B (44:19)

Yeah, I definitely. I think especially for a book that's communicating about affect and about a feeling. Yeah, I think that more poetic and less kind of dry approach, it does so well for that. So, yeah, shout out to Grace for their translation skills. Okay, so my final question, and I think this has been kind of a through line of our conversation, is we've talked about kind of possible applications. We've talked about things that are going on. What is it that you hope that readers will get out of this book in the present? Sort of political and social moment that we're in.

D (45:02)

Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, I want them to get out of the book whatever they feel drawn to, obviously I want them to read it in any way imaginable and to start wherever they want and to start wherever they want. Or maybe just read the epigraphs or just. I don't know. But I think in terms of applicability to this moment, I do think that maybe there's something to understand about what bourgeois democracies are made above. And also that might help to be a bit less surprised or to be less stuck on these effects of surprise and shock that I think can also stop us from doing things that are very present right now. You know, that's against something that I hear in the German media a lot, you know, that there's just this continuous series of how can this be? You know, and, and, and to not be so surprised all the time might be a good way to start in order to regroup and then respond to what is going on. And I think that there's also something to get out of the book when it comes to the power of effective politics, you know, and how affect is a big part of politics that cannot be ignored, you know, and that we cannot assume a rational, merely language based subject that will make the correct decisions, but that we have to see the ways in which people are suffering and we have to see in how far political resistance is also taking place in these registers. And again, that's also something that we should not be surprised by what we have to measure, I guess, these affects and we have to take them into account in order to make political offers, I guess. Yeah, political offers have to come with an offer of a feeling, I'm sorry to say, but I think that is the case. And maybe, I don't know, maybe the last thing this is the more scholarly thing or one that is about the question of philosophy in these times, because this is a question that I'm asking myself a lot, like what can we actually do? Or why would we now spend our time theorizing about what's going on? And I do think that right now there is a need for some methodological experimentation in critical theory or it's not enough to rely on the methods that we already have because there is so much going on and I do not think that we know everything about it yet. And we have to find ways to. Yeah. To encounter what's ahead in theory and not to shy away from it, I guess.

B (48:08)

Excellent. Well, yeah, I think there's so much to get out of this. This has been a really wonderful conversation. You know, I found myself having to hold back from not wanting to, like, dig into some of these things deeper. So hopefully we can touch base again in the future, talk a bit more. But once again, the book is Bourgeois Coldness. Henrika Copais, thank you so much for joining me. The book, as you mentioned in the US Is out in January. It's already out in the uk Obviously it's been out for a while in German. So I want to encourage readers to go ahead and check that out, or listeners. But thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

D (48:57)

Thank you so much, Michael. This was really fun.