The first title in the Wirklichkeit Books Pamphlet Series, this booklet brings together two sharp accounts on the current ideological shifts and the subsequent forms of violence they produce. The end of the world, as Ana Teixeira Pinto reminds us, is not just a story about scavenging and social breakdown, but also about opportunity: Apocalypse liberates from social and ethical constraints. This is where Silicon Valley enters, with its techno-masculinist vision of an elite untethered from democracy, equity, and embodied limitations. The spectacle of fascism’s resurgence is a theater of crisis in which male aggression accrues cultural capital and, by extension, economic value. Teixeira Pinto’s analysis is placed in conversation with Abeera Khan’s observation that today’s right-wing culture no longer relies on a veneer of inclusion to legitimize its violence. Now, Khan concludes, we live after homonationalism, where liberalism has served as fascism’s prefiguration.

The Wirklichkeit Books Pamphlet Series features agile and situative essays on pressing political and cultural topics. Participating in the world symposium that is our present, each issue includes two texts by two different authors in direct or loose dialog.

Abeera Khan is scholar of queer feminist critique and a lecturer at SOAS, University of London. 

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a cultural theorist and professor at Hochschule für Gestaltung Leipzig.