On the Edge | The Affect Antifa

"Better than being moved is to be moved." So says Bertolt Brecht's "Aufbaulied," but this is where the GDR failed: It was unable to break the bourgeois separation of production and reproduction, of head and hand. It was unable to tenderly nurture the desires and longings of its children as progressive driving forces for the constant communist renewal of the project. Suffering and passions were repressed after 1945, even in "good" Germany; this laid the foundation for repression practices in families and cemented an anxious unease towards everything physical. This also suited the restoration of capitalism. Universities became the new factories; the exploitation of brains, neural networks, art, and immaterial labor was the consequence of new capitalist land grabs. The result is exhausted people—too exhausted to be empathetic?

Trauma and emotional damage remained a private matter in German families after National Socialism. Subsequent generations continue to suffer from the violence of this political art of repression—and act it out even more intensely themselves. A phenomenon that has repeated itself in the east of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany after the loss of the GDR. Older generations not only left emotional garbage to younger generations, but also ceded longing and desire to the fascists. Left-wing analyses, too, all too often lack a body and thus exert no transformative power: empty words that have lost their precision because they neither suffer, shit, nor love. The right wing easily exploits these neglected, repressed emotional worlds. The German left is too fearful and too male-dominated to accept these neglected affects as a battleground, to make them the starting point for subversion and resistance.

Historian Patrice Poutrus recently reiterated in the "Heimatisierung" series at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) that we should be more concerned with the question of survival under fascism instead of wasting our energy trying to categorize everything theoretically. Beneath people's interests lie their passions! Leftists must get their hands dirty: Anger, hatred, disgust, and fear should not be left to the right either.

In "nichtmuedewerden," the artist Fatima Çalişkan advocates the principle of joy: "as a dusty dream, unsexy as a piece of wood floating on water, it is the ideal term to summarize an attitude to life, an artistic stance, and a political practice (all simultaneously!), in which market logic only mutters 'yuck' and yawns in boredom." The social question of the present requires antidepressant work—this is how the writer Paula Fürstenberg describes the connection between politics and emotions. Tenderly and joyfully defying the harmonizing love of unity, the performance-fetishistic self-optimization: with such means, the left can counter the right's refusal of empathy and the rise of fascism.