Dr. Sebastian Althoff

The interwoven research projects I currently work on deal with the notion of 'survival' on the one hand, and the condemnation of hate and the delegitimization of social media on the other. Both projects respond to crises that democracies face today. 'Survival' increasingly circulates as a term in contexts such as climate activism, flight/refuge, Black Lives Matter, or trade union movements. However, different meanings are attached to the term, which can have different consequences in the political orientation towards survival. The project examines different scenes of survival to tease out these different meanings—conservative-preservative, transformative, exotic, everyday—and their effects. The approach allows us to confront philosophical and sociological texts on a politics of survival and anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist, and queer survival guides with media objects that explore survival as a digital afterlife, in disaster, zombie, or horror films, in jungle (game) shows, or in computer games.

The project on the condemnation of hate is similarly committed to this approach of evolving political theory through the consideration of media objects. This project sets out to rethink the relationship between hate and democracy by speculating that hate may be an appropriate response to the various, current crises and to the injuries they entail. To this end, it refers, for example, to hatred of the police or of politicians responsible for the EU border regime. The affective and discursive boundaries that are performatively created through a condemnation of hate seem, in contrast, too limiting to express the violence of the status quo. In this regard, the association of hate and social media predestines the latter as an object through which to examine the exclusive positing of dialogue as a democratic tool par excellence. While the trans activist Eric Stanley criticizes dialogue as a "liberal technique of liquidation," social media are considered inferior precisely because they do not promote a deliberative process. Radical democratic theories, on the other hand, provide means to describe processes such as the distinction between 'we'/'you'—based on Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction—as essential to democratic struggles and to critically examine charges that on social media 'anyone' can say 'anything'.

Political Theory

Media Studies

Democratic and Affect Theory

Queer Theory