Was immer der »Motor« moderner Gesellschaften sein mag, fossile Brennstoffe sind ihr Treibstoff. Gegenwärtige Formen von Freiheit und Fortschritt, Krieg, Kolonialismus und Kapitalismus, linearer Zeit und globalem Raum sind kohlenstoffhaltig. Die Moderne ist immer schon fossil gewesen, darum sieht sie in Zeiten der Klimakrise ziemlich alt aus. Trotzdem tritt sie nicht einfach ab. Vielmehr führt sie in CO2, Plastikmüll und petrochemischen Rückständen ein desaströses Nachleben. »Fossile Moderne« ist also nicht nur die fossil befeuerte Hochmoderne, die zu Unrecht bisweilen schon als Vergangenheit erscheint, die wir aber auf alle Fälle hinter uns lassen wollen. »Fossile Moderne« – das ist auch die ökologische Zukunft, das, was erst noch bevorsteht, ob wir wollen oder nicht.

Das Buch verbindet alte und neue Materialismen für eine kritische Theorie der Gegenwart, die sich nicht länger ein Übergang in ein verheißungsvolles Morgen, sondern als materielle Überlagerung von Gewesenem und Kommenden darstellt. Es fragt: was tun mit einer Moderne, die zwar (nicht nur) ökologisch untragbar ist, aber nicht einfach entsorgt werden kann, weil ihre materiellen Hinterlassenschaften weitermachen?

Andreas Folkers wird das Buch vorstellen und gemeinsam mit Katharina Hoppe und Daniel Loick diskutieren.

Zur Verlagsseite.

Book presentation: Andreas Folkers, Fossil Modernity. A Natural History of the Present

Whatever the "engine" of modern societies may be, fossil fuels are their fuel. Contemporary forms of freedom and progress, war, colonialism and capitalism, linear time and global space are carbonaceous. Modernity has always already been fossil – which is why, in times of climate crisis, it looks rather worn. Yet it does not simply withdraw. Instead, it leads a disastrous afterlife in CO2, plastic waste, and petrochemical residues. "Fossil modernity" therefore not only circumscribes fossil-fueled high modernity that sometimes unjustly appears as the past, something we want to leave behind for good. "Fossil modernity" is also the ecological future, what lies ahead, whether we like it or not.

The book combines old and new materialisms for a critical theory of the present – one that no longer presents itself as a transition into a promising tomorrow, but as a material superposition of what has been and what is yet to come. It asks: what do we do with a modernity that is (not only) ecologically untenable, yet cannot simply be disposed of, because its material legacies keep going?

Andreas Folkers will present the book and discuss it together with Katharina Hoppe and Daniel Loick.

The past is now. Alongside, and often in alliance with, a veritable storm of disruptive technologies, ostensibly outdated forms of authoritarian politics and subjectivities are on the rise. The emerging new world order replays the patterns of old imperial geopolitics. And the changing climate is driven by the recalcitrance of the fossil past. The panel starts from the assumption that the troubling anachronisms of the present cannot be properly understood in terms of a regress of progress – as if the angel of history has a rewind and fast forward button. Rather, it turns to the pains of the perennial, to the resilience and resurgence of that which remains. »Lingerings« serves as an umbrella to shelter different attempts to theorize the ongoingness of pasts in the present: as »phantom possession« (von Redecker), the nihilist »ruins of neoliberalism« (Brown), »residual reification« (Folkers). The panel will analyse different, yet intersecting registers of lingerings – material and ideological, economic and political, affective and planetary. Given their inherent untimeliness, the impulse to ›move past‹ or ›leave behind‹ lingerings cannot break their spell. Instead, lingerings demand new forms of resistance and repair.

Energie gilt gemeinhin als Ressource – als Stoff, den wir aus der Natur entnehmen, umwandeln und verbrauchen. Daniela Russ stellt in ihrem Buch Working Nature. A Critical History of Energy diese scheinbar selbstverständliche Vorstellung grundlegend in Frage: Energie sei nicht primär eine physikalische Eigenschaft von Dingen, sondern ein soziales Verhältnis zur Natur, das über 200 Jahre kapitalistischer Industrialisierung geformt wurde. Ausgehend von dieser These untersucht Russ, wie Ingenieur:innen, Naturwissenschaftler:innen und Ökonom:innen die Produkte der Natur trotz sozialer und natürlicher Widerstände nutzbar machten und in die Zirkulation gebracht haben. Diese kritische Geschichte der Energie liefert damit zentrale Hintergründe, um gegenwärtige Debatten über Energiewende, Dekarbonisierung und die Transformation unserer Energiesysteme historisch und gesellschaftstheoretisch einzuordnen. Theoretisch bietet das Buch eine faszinierende Verbindung des westlichen Marxismus der Frankfurter Schule und Adornos Kritik der Naturbeherrschung mit dem osteuropäischen Marxismus Alexander Bogdanows.

Daniela Russ wird das Buch vorstellen, bevor Andreas Folkers und Doris Schweitzer mit Kommentaren in die Diskussion einführen.

Zur Verlagsseite.

Book Discussion: Daniela Russ, Working Nature. A Critical History of Energy

Energy is commonly understood as a resource – something extracted from nature, converted, and consumed. In Working Nature. A Critical History of Energy, Daniela Russ fundamentally challenges this assumption: energy, she argues, is not primarily a physical property of things but a social relation to nature forged over two centuries of capitalist industrialization. On this basis, the book traces how engineers, scientists, and economists harnessed and circulated the products of nature in the face of both social and natural resistance. This critical history of energy provides essential context for understanding present-day debates around the energy transition, decarbonization, and the transformation of our energy systems. Theoretically, the book provides a fascinating combination of the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt School and Adorno's critique of the domination of nature with the Eastern Marxism of Alexander Bogdanov.

Daniela Russ will present the book, followed by comments from Andreas Folkers and Doris Schweitzer, before opening into broader discussion.

Adorno-Vorlesungen 2026

18–20 November 2026, 6.30–8 pm

November 18th, 6.30 pm: Patrimonial Capitalism

November 19th, 6.30 pm: Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism

November 20th, 6.30 pm: Patriarchy Resurgent

Since 2002, the Institute for Social Research has organized in cooperation with Suhrkamp Verlag annual lectures commemorating Theodor W. Adorno that are held on three consecutive evenings. This year, the social and political theorist Melinda Cooper devotes her lectures, Anachronism in Our Times, to the revenants of three seemingly antiquated social practices we encounter in the present: The increasingly patrimonial style of high-tech capital, the rise of insurrectionist nativism and the crude reassertion of male power over women. Some interpret these developments as signs that we have entered a new era of feudalism or exited capitalism altogether, typically appealing to Marx as their standard of reference. Yet Marx’s understanding of capitalist temporality was more nuanced than this. Soon after The Communist Manifesto, Marx confronted the possibility that history could move backwards and revolution assume regressive forms. In this year’s lectures, Melinda Cooper takes inspiration from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to interrogate these key anachronisms of our time. Rather than interpreting these as residues of a past epoch, she regards them as a prompt for rethinking the temporality of capitalism itself.

The publicly traded corporation was once the undisputed focal point of American economic life. In recent years, however, private, founder or family-controlled corporations and investment funds have assumed new prominence. Tech founders such as Elon Musk exemplify a trend towards »patrimonial« capitalism, in which the boundaries between family wealth protection and entrepreneurial innovation are increasingly blurred. Often framed as a return to feudalism, these developments more accurately recall the American Gilded Age. In her opening lecture, Patrimonial Capitalism, Melinda Cooper asks: What have we failed to understand about capitalism such that we recurrently exceptionalize its lapses into extreme wealth concentration and patrimonial politics?

While contemporary political theorists struggle with the apparent anachronism of the term »fascism«, the generic term »revolutionary conservatism« may be a way of capturing the unity and plasticity of the far right across time and place. This term has the advantage of expanding our gaze beyond the experience of early twentieth-century Europe to encompass the uniquely anti-statist, libertarian impulses of the American far right. Whereas »fascism« implies centralized economic control, »revolutionary conservatism« encompasses a diversity of economic styles while also grasping the core dynamic of far-right politics: revolutionary insurrection in the pursuit of radical restoration. In the second lecture, Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism, Melinda Cooper examines the history of white-supremacist militias on the American far-right and asks what happens when a far-right government embraces the tradition of anti-government insurrection as its own.

Despite its proliferation in everyday discourse, the term »patriarchy« virtually disappeared from feminist theory sometime in the 1990s. Wielded by second-wave feminists in the wake of the sexual revolution, the concept was arguably anachronistic from the start. Yet the term captures an insight we cannot afford to lose: The persistence of male sexual violence against women defies rationalization within a liberal egalitarian perspective on gender relations. To make sense of it, we need to assume the existence of a shadow economy of reproduction and exchange which subjects women’s bodies to competing property interests on the part of men. How do we account for the survival of apparently »archaic« structures of sexual economy in modern times? In her closing lecture, Patriarchy Resurgent, Melinda Cooper unpacks the double logic of sexual property interest (fraternal rights of use versus paternal rights of reproduction), allowing her to illuminate the tensions between libertarianism and conservatism in light of this duality.

Melinda Cooper is professor at the School of Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the recent history of capitalism and its intersections with the politics of class, gender and race. She is the author of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024), Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Economy (together with Catherine Waldby, 2014) and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). The German translation of her monograph Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017) will be published as part of the IfS publication series Schriften this fall.

The lectures will be held in English

Adorno-Vorlesungen 2026

18–20 November 2026, 6.30–8 pm

November 18th, 6.30 pm: Patrimonial Capitalism

November 19th, 6.30 pm: Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism

November 20th, 6.30 pm: Patriarchy Resurgent

Since 2002, the Institute for Social Research has organized in cooperation with Suhrkamp Verlag annual lectures commemorating Theodor W. Adorno that are held on three consecutive evenings. This year, the social and political theorist Melinda Cooper devotes her lectures, Anachronism in Our Times, to the revenants of three seemingly antiquated social practices we encounter in the present: The increasingly patrimonial style of high-tech capital, the rise of insurrectionist nativism and the crude reassertion of male power over women. Some interpret these developments as signs that we have entered a new era of feudalism or exited capitalism altogether, typically appealing to Marx as their standard of reference. Yet Marx’s understanding of capitalist temporality was more nuanced than this. Soon after The Communist Manifesto, Marx confronted the possibility that history could move backwards and revolution assume regressive forms. In this year’s lectures, Melinda Cooper takes inspiration from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to interrogate these key anachronisms of our time. Rather than interpreting these as residues of a past epoch, she regards them as a prompt for rethinking the temporality of capitalism itself.

The publicly traded corporation was once the undisputed focal point of American economic life. In recent years, however, private, founder or family-controlled corporations and investment funds have assumed new prominence. Tech founders such as Elon Musk exemplify a trend towards »patrimonial« capitalism, in which the boundaries between family wealth protection and entrepreneurial innovation are increasingly blurred. Often framed as a return to feudalism, these developments more accurately recall the American Gilded Age. In her opening lecture, Patrimonial Capitalism, Melinda Cooper asks: What have we failed to understand about capitalism such that we recurrently exceptionalize its lapses into extreme wealth concentration and patrimonial politics?

While contemporary political theorists struggle with the apparent anachronism of the term »fascism«, the generic term »revolutionary conservatism« may be a way of capturing the unity and plasticity of the far right across time and place. This term has the advantage of expanding our gaze beyond the experience of early twentieth-century Europe to encompass the uniquely anti-statist, libertarian impulses of the American far right. Whereas »fascism« implies centralized economic control, »revolutionary conservatism« encompasses a diversity of economic styles while also grasping the core dynamic of far-right politics: revolutionary insurrection in the pursuit of radical restoration. In the second lecture, Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism, Melinda Cooper examines the history of white-supremacist militias on the American far-right and asks what happens when a far-right government embraces the tradition of anti-government insurrection as its own.

Despite its proliferation in everyday discourse, the term »patriarchy« virtually disappeared from feminist theory sometime in the 1990s. Wielded by second-wave feminists in the wake of the sexual revolution, the concept was arguably anachronistic from the start. Yet the term captures an insight we cannot afford to lose: The persistence of male sexual violence against women defies rationalization within a liberal egalitarian perspective on gender relations. To make sense of it, we need to assume the existence of a shadow economy of reproduction and exchange which subjects women’s bodies to competing property interests on the part of men. How do we account for the survival of apparently »archaic« structures of sexual economy in modern times? In her closing lecture, Patriarchy Resurgent, Melinda Cooper unpacks the double logic of sexual property interest (fraternal rights of use versus paternal rights of reproduction), allowing her to illuminate the tensions between libertarianism and conservatism in light of this duality.

Melinda Cooper is professor at the School of Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the recent history of capitalism and its intersections with the politics of class, gender and race. She is the author of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024), Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Economy (together with Catherine Waldby, 2014) and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). The German translation of her monograph Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017) will be published as part of the IfS publication series Schriften this fall.

The lectures will be held in English

Adorno-Vorlesungen 2026

18–20 November 2026, 6.30–8 pm

November 18th, 6.30 pm: Patrimonial Capitalism

November 19th, 6.30 pm: Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism

November 20th, 6.30 pm: Patriarchy Resurgent

Since 2002, the Institute for Social Research has organized in cooperation with Suhrkamp Verlag annual lectures commemorating Theodor W. Adorno that are held on three consecutive evenings. This year, the social and political theorist Melinda Cooper devotes her lectures, Anachronism in Our Times, to the revenants of three seemingly antiquated social practices we encounter in the present: The increasingly patrimonial style of high-tech capital, the rise of insurrectionist nativism and the crude reassertion of male power over women. Some interpret these developments as signs that we have entered a new era of feudalism or exited capitalism altogether, typically appealing to Marx as their standard of reference. Yet Marx’s understanding of capitalist temporality was more nuanced than this. Soon after The Communist Manifesto, Marx confronted the possibility that history could move backwards and revolution assume regressive forms. In this year’s lectures, Melinda Cooper takes inspiration from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to interrogate these key anachronisms of our time. Rather than interpreting these as residues of a past epoch, she regards them as a prompt for rethinking the temporality of capitalism itself.

The publicly traded corporation was once the undisputed focal point of American economic life. In recent years, however, private, founder or family-controlled corporations and investment funds have assumed new prominence. Tech founders such as Elon Musk exemplify a trend towards »patrimonial« capitalism, in which the boundaries between family wealth protection and entrepreneurial innovation are increasingly blurred. Often framed as a return to feudalism, these developments more accurately recall the American Gilded Age. In her opening lecture, Patrimonial Capitalism, Melinda Cooper asks: What have we failed to understand about capitalism such that we recurrently exceptionalize its lapses into extreme wealth concentration and patrimonial politics?

While contemporary political theorists struggle with the apparent anachronism of the term »fascism«, the generic term »revolutionary conservatism« may be a way of capturing the unity and plasticity of the far right across time and place. This term has the advantage of expanding our gaze beyond the experience of early twentieth-century Europe to encompass the uniquely anti-statist, libertarian impulses of the American far right. Whereas »fascism« implies centralized economic control, »revolutionary conservatism« encompasses a diversity of economic styles while also grasping the core dynamic of far-right politics: revolutionary insurrection in the pursuit of radical restoration. In the second lecture, Fascism as Revolutionary Conservatism, Melinda Cooper examines the history of white-supremacist militias on the American far-right and asks what happens when a far-right government embraces the tradition of anti-government insurrection as its own.

Despite its proliferation in everyday discourse, the term »patriarchy« virtually disappeared from feminist theory sometime in the 1990s. Wielded by second-wave feminists in the wake of the sexual revolution, the concept was arguably anachronistic from the start. Yet the term captures an insight we cannot afford to lose: The persistence of male sexual violence against women defies rationalization within a liberal egalitarian perspective on gender relations. To make sense of it, we need to assume the existence of a shadow economy of reproduction and exchange which subjects women’s bodies to competing property interests on the part of men. How do we account for the survival of apparently »archaic« structures of sexual economy in modern times? In her closing lecture, Patriarchy Resurgent, Melinda Cooper unpacks the double logic of sexual property interest (fraternal rights of use versus paternal rights of reproduction), allowing her to illuminate the tensions between libertarianism and conservatism in light of this duality.

Melinda Cooper is professor at the School of Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the recent history of capitalism and its intersections with the politics of class, gender and race. She is the author of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024), Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Economy (together with Catherine Waldby, 2014) and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). The German translation of her monograph Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017) will be published as part of the IfS publication series Schriften this fall.

The lectures will be held in English

Symposium im Rahmen der Reihe »Brüche«, einer Kooperation von Institut für Sozialforschung, Sigmund-Freud-Institut und der Oper Frankfurt