Lingerings. The Politics of Resentment, Residuals, and Repair. With Wendy Brown, Andreas Folkers and Eva von Redecker

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 Alongside, and often in alliance with, a veritable storm of disruptive technologies, ostensibly outdated forms of authoritarian politics and subjectivities are on the rise.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.