Die Anmeldung beginnt erst am 02.10.2026 um 08:00 Uhr. Sie endet am 12.10.2026 um 23:59 Uhr

This seminar offers a cultural and theoretical analysis of fascism, situating it within broader debates on political order, crisis, and contemporary forms of populism. It challenges two dominant interpretations: first, the liberal view of fascism as a temporary deviation within the process of modernization; second, the vulgar Marxist view that reduces fascism to a mere instrument of capitalism. Instead, the seminar explores fascism as a complex political formation that reveals deeper tensions within modern social orders—tensions that are also visible in contemporary populist movements and their ambivalent character.
Building on the notion of homogeneity as developed in critical social theory, the course examines the sphere of commensurability, utility, production, and measurable value. In this perspective, bourgeois society appears as a homogeneous order structured by stable norms, functional identities, and forms of social regulation based on equivalence and economic rationality.
In contrast, heterogeneity designates everything that escapes this logic of equivalence. It includes sacred forces, taboo elements, affective intensities, excess, waste, violence, and social groups that cannot be fully integrated into the dominant order. This field of heterogeneity also encompasses excluded classes such as the proletariat and subproletariat. At the same time, it is precisely from this domain that certain political formations may draw their force.
The seminar pays particular attention to the way fascism emerges when the unstable relation between homogeneity and heterogeneity is articulated politically. Fascist movements and leaders often mobilize heterogeneous forces—violence, affect, excess, and forms of quasi-sacral authority—and reorganize them into new structures of political cohesion. In this process, fascism does not represent a rupture with capitalist structures, but rather a mode through which capitalist social relations are consolidated in forms increasingly shaped by hierarchical, patriarchal, and racial logics.
Overall, the seminar investigates the ambiguity of these dynamics in order to develop a critical framework for understanding fascism and its contemporary resonances, with the aim of enabling a radical critique of every fascistic political form.

The seminar familiarizes students with fundamental problems and debates in contemporary cultural studies. It introduces exemplary figures and positions in current cultural studies, as well as major currents in 20th-century philosophy and key modern classics. Another learning objective is to develop an awareness of the controversial and open-ended nature of cultural positions, in contrast to their canonical interpretation.

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