Luke Lehner

NOW: Barely 50 years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work has not lost its relevance according to the Norwegian magazine AGORA's new theme issue. Anti-Oedipus has rather proved to be a prophetic and highly applicable conceptual toolbox for the examination of a financial and information capitalist contemporary. In this essay, reference is also made to the book's claim that there is no economy or politics that is not permeated to the highest degree by desire. And what about the fascist where someone is led to desire their own oppression as if it meant salvation?

TECHNOLOGY: What can we say about the ever-increasing technological and state-of-the-art sphere we live in? Animations and simulations appear more and more as "living organisms", while biological life has increasingly become "artificial".

INTERNET: In 2017, two-thirds of Americans received large portions of their daily news dose via social media. The coincidence of financial capitalism and information technologies creates, according to Joseph Vogl, "resentment-driven echo chambers."

TRAUMA: The biography of the Judeo-Hungarian philosopher and author Susan Taubes depicts life, thought and work intricately intertwined with the historical trauma of the 20th century – and experiences of rootlessness.

TOWEL: An eternal relationship of tension between the individual and the community. With age, has Peter Handke gradually given up on rage?

PHILOSOPHY: Oskar Negt asks how the modern political citizen came into being in the wake of the French Revolution. When it comes to political terror, he is clear – it is not political.

Criticism of modernity: The neoliberal "happiness dispositive's" imperative of happiness regards pain as a failure, a weakness. The pain has become dumb, and consequently speechless and meaningless. But is the consequence that the neoliberal paradigm of freedom is disintegrating?