Forms of Strife

In catastrophic times, at drawn-out moments of accelerating disaster, arcane concepts either fade into the distance or reassert themselves with anachronic urgency. With the concept of “forms of life,” it has been the latter. In German philosophical discourse, the term Lebensform (plural Lebensformen) had its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s. Internationally (in Italian, English, French) it resurfaced in the 1990s and early 2000s with a habit of reappearing across the dividing lines that separate certain arcane subsects of theory. On a larger scale, the notion also spans different fields of knowledge: aesthetics, life sciences, and political theory.

In aesthetics, Schiller’s articulation of the complex relation between “the art of the beautiful” and “the still more difficult art of living” set the stage for discussions of the form of social life.1 If, in Rancière’s words, “art’s singularity stems from an identification of its own autonomous forms with forms of life and with political possibilities,” nonartistic forms likewise demanded attention, and were explored for their aesthetic as well as political potential—communal life-forms or workers’ councils, for example.2 Meanwhile, in nineteenth-century European humanities, “living things” became the center of attention, as Helmuth Plessner once phrased it: the humanities dealt with what was neither purely with res cogitans nor res extensa, neither pure spirit or pure reason nor external things. This is where an idealist Geisteswissenschaft needed to become a Kulturwissenschaft, attentive to culture as embodied and embedded, as social practice.

Around 1900, the impact of modern biology as translated into the register of vitalist philosophies (Lebensfilosofie) exacerbated this tendency: far from autonomous, the forms of art were seen as constituting a vital biological necessity. That such vitalism could easily pull or push its adherents into a dubious political direction is all too evident—and there is no shortage of 1930s and 1940s ramblings on deutsche Lebensformen or the jüdische Lebensform. The reclamation of the Lebensform concept since the late 1990s—part of what Nitzan Lebovic has termed “the curious revival of the biopolitical philosophy of the German 1920s at the heart of contemporary political philosophy”—suggests that the critical use-value of the notion became newly evident in the wake of Foucault’s historical theorization of modern biopolitics.3 It is in the wake of this inquiry into modern politics as fundamentally engaged in the Gestaltung of life and into which lives are worth living that Lebensform returned to the fore. If the notion had always involved a dialectic of artistic form and social form, the biological dimension—which had previously mostly been filtered through vitalist rhetoric—now came into view more clearly. Nazi eugenics, to give a stark example, was a perverted aesthetic ideal of racial purity and physical perfection that was politically implemented in the forms of necropolitical programs.

If “we cannot survive the current form of life,” as Richard Gilman-Opalsky has put it, the dominant form of life of ever later capitalism is also actively waging war on alternative, divergent Lebensformen. Today’s so-called culture wars are not wars on “culture” in a merely superstructural sense, as an ideological surplus that one could isolate from the material base. Rather, and much more dangerously, the culture wars are biopolitical and necropolitical; they are wars on cultures as forms of life. Adopting this perspective emphasizes the need to think of art and politics as critically practiced forms of life in alliance with those lives that are under pressure, delegitimized, criminalized, subjected to the genocidal logic of what Germans know as Staatsräson.

From Art Nouveau Salons to the Communist Party

As is well known, the Situationist International’s view of transformative aesthetic practice was inspired by the conservative Dutch cultural historian and theorist Johan Huizinga and his account of Homo ludens (the play instinct in society). Via Constant, this Situationist interpretation of Homo ludens would also inform the Dutch Provo movement. Another notion employed by Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages, precisely that of Lebensform, was not picked up by the Situationists—though Debord, for one, was certainly familiar with Huizinga’s monumental study, and the concept could conceivably have entered into a productive relation with the Situationist trope of the constructed situation. It was for a slightly later generation, including the Debordian that is Giorgio Agamben, to bring about this missed encounter.

Amédée Lynen, poster for the exhibition “Les Primitifs Flamands à Bruges,” 1902.

The subtitle of The Waning of the Middle Ages stresses that this is a book about the “forms of life and thought” of the period.4 Published in 1919 but crucially shaped by Huizinga’s visit to the influential 1902 exhibition of the art of the “Flemish Primitives” in Bruges, Waning has one foot firmly in late nineteenth-century aestheticism. The exhibition interspersed paintings with other artifacts, and the poster (designed by Amédée Lynen) showed a painter in highly impractical but elegant robes at work in a Van Eyck–like architectural setting, with a townscape in the background. Here, painting is anchored in a wider material culture and the “art of living.” In the opening lines of Waning, Huizinga claims that when the world was five centuries younger, all forms of life were much more clearly delineated. Life was form, style, art: “All these beautifully stylized life-forms [levensvormen; Huizinga uses the Dutch version of the German term], which were meant to transcend raw reality into a sphere of higher harmony, were part of the great art of life [levenskunst], without immediately registering as art in the narrow sense.”5 It is only after the Renaissance—here Huizinga invokes Burckhardt—that art and life became separated, and social life became increasingly formless and unaesthetic.

Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth have traced the concept of Lebensform back to the early nineteenth century, arguing that it

bears an inheritance from Kant and Goethe (though this exact word was used by neither) in which form is aesthetic, self-determining, and teleological, as well as (generously assuming sufficient knowledge of the mechanism of its formation) deductively predictable (even if the favored apprehensional approach was often a combination of the intuitive and empirical).6

Tracing the concept’s transformations, Helmreich and Roosth map a shift from deductive to inductive reasoning in the course of the nineteenth century, and argue that since Humboldt, Lebensform was often seen as emerging “from organisms’ habits and habitation.”7 This facilitated the concept’s “social turn” in the early twentieth century, which Huizinga’s use reflects. By that time, the term was as ubiquitous and quietly hegemonic as “discourse” and “biopolitics” are in numerous academic contexts today. The term “Lebensform” graces the titles of serious philosophical tomes and books on etiquette alike.

One boundary-crossing, popular, and influential volume is W. Fred’s Lebensformen: Anmerkungen über die Technik des Gesellschaftlichen Lebens (1911), which is something of an etiquette book. The pseudonym of Alfred Wechsler, an art and cultural critic, W. Fred took cues from Castiglione’s I Coregiono (Book of the Courtier, 1518). As is the case for Huizinga, Fred is clearly marked by Jacob Burckhardt’s Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, in which Burckhardt analyzes the city-states of Renaissance Italy as artworks in and of themselves created by despots. In his earlier book Modernes Kunstgewerbe (1901), Fred notes that “what Jacob Burkhardt said in his book about Renaissance culture, that the state must become a work of art, has been modified in our day: We want everyone’s life to be a work of art! And making it so can be a work of interior art.”8 In Modernes Kunstgewerbe, Fred discusses the likes of Hermann Obrist, Henry van de Velde, and Otto Wagner—and art nouveau and Jugendstil inform his concept of forms of life.

In Lebensformen, Castiglione becomes a mediator between Burckhardt’s notion of the Italian Renaissance city-state as artwork and individual life-forms.9 Fred argues that since the Italian states were so small, and since their leaders could only survive if they were strong and resourceful personalities, they were interested in attracting “hervorragend gebildete Kräfte” (well-trained/developed employees) to their courts—and Castiglione sought to produce (or refine) such “vollendete Menschen” (accomplished/perfected people), or at least perfectly formed courtiers.10 Taking it upon himself to become the Castiglione of a vastly different society (the urbanized nation-state of industrial capitalism), Fred insists on a difference between the individual Lebensform and social Lebensformen that individuals cannot control.11 Coming to terms with these socially binding forms (through clothing, customs, conversational skills) requires Lebenstechnik. Such a technique of life involves the mastery of forms that are so many languages: Alle Formen sind Sprachen.12

Rather than simply adopting preexisting forms, individuals adapt and modify these forms in mastering them, thus perfecting themselves qua individuals and becoming living artworks rather than merely biological life-forms: “For since we must say that man, as we see and feel him, is not a clear result of nature, but an artistic product of culture, let us also decide to make the following demand: Man must be a works of art that we want to shape as perfectly as our powers permit.”13 Here, Lebensform takes on overtones of Lebensreform, but not in the guise of a “return to nature”—rather in that of an aestheticist “turn to art.”14 If the past is only a “building site” while “the future is the realm of infinite possibility,” Fred sought to update a historical example to shape the future.15 The new Castiglione, however, seems to have disregarded the social realities of the early twentieth century, marked by industrialization and the rise of mass movements; his future remained anchored in an idealized past.

Published in the same year as Fred’s Lebensformen, Georg Lukács’s Soul and Form predated the latter’s political turn, offering an idealist take on form as mediating between life and the Platonic realm of the soul: “Forms sets limits round a substance which otherwise would dissolve like air in the All.”16 In this collection of essays, the young Lukács reflects on the essay form itself as an artistic genre that can deal with art but also with “the form of life”: “Poetry takes its motifs from life (and art); the essay has its models in art (and life).”17 In an essay on Kierkegaard with the title “The Foundering of Form against Life,” he argues that “Kierkegaard’s heroism was that he wanted to create forms from life” and that he “did achieve a noble and rigorous life-system,” but at great cost, and he “had to conquer the aesthete, the poet in himself.”18 Another essay approaches the issue of “art for art’s sake” not through canonical aesthetes such as Flaubert but through the German writers Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller. Here, the compatibility of bourgeois life and (a certain version of) art for art’s sake comes into view. For these writers, a bourgeois profession was not just an occupation but a life-form (Lebensform); it signified the primacy of ethics. Lukács thus engages with the social life of art through a focus on bourgeois habitus and mentality, as articulated by a few authors.

Sandor Garbai and Bela Kun, leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1919. License: Public domain.

In The Theory of the Novel (1920), Lukács focuses more narrowly on artistic form, though artistic form as informed by the experience of modernity. The novel as genre is always in the process of becoming, being historical and therefore contingent to the core: “Art always says ‘And yet!” to life. The creation of forms is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance. But in all other genres …, this affirmation of a dissonance precedes the act of form-giving, whereas in the novel it is the form itself.”19 In History and Class Consciousness (1923), written after Lukács’s involvement in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the notion of Lebensform is reimagined and dialectically transformed in a Marxian framework. Noting that the still unconquered power of capitalist forms of life infect the proletariat itself, Lukacs posits that a lengthy and difficult process of self-education is necessary to create the right revolutionary consciousness. This process must find its organizational support in the party form:

The weak point of all the non-Russian radical groups in the International lay in the fact that while their revolutionary positions diverged from the opportunism of the open Revisionists and the Centre they were neither able nor willing to give them any concrete organisational form … Really active participation in every event, really practical involvement of all the members of an organisation can only be achieved by engaging the whole personality. Only when action within a community becomes the central personal concern of everyone involved will it be possible to abolish the split between rights and duties, the organisational form of man’s separation from his own socialisation and his fragmentation at the hands of the social forces that control him.20

The question of the pervasiveness of the capitalist form of life (the dominance of the value form and of wage labor, with its accompanying institutions and habits) and of the difficulty of creating communist Lebensformen under capitalist conditions is the central problem of prefigurative practice. Otto Neurath, for one, discussed the problem in those terms.21 This is one indication that the notion of the term “Lebensform” always held critical potential; while it would come to be identified with conservative authors such as Eduard Spranger, and while it was fatally open to crude biologicism and racialization, there are countervailing genealogies available to us.22 Fred’s Lebensformen is a likely source of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the concept, possibly mediated through a review by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.23

Wittgenstein used the notion in conjunction with that of Sprachspiele or “language games” in order to indicate that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”24 Lebensform thus marks the performative, relational, situational turn in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. The Wittgensteinian pairing returned in the work of Paolo Virno, who defined “the contemporary multitude” in terms of “its forms of life and its linguistic games,” going so far as to state that the multitude is a concept that unifies the two Wittgensteinian terms: “In order to name with a unifying term the forms of life and the linguistic games which characterize our era, I have used the notion of ‘multitude.’”25

Around 2005, Virno and Agamben were both involved with the Italian journal Forme de vita.26 As an archaeologist of Lebensform, Agamben is connected to the early twentieth-century discourse in manifold ways, for instance as a reader of Huizinga and of Carl Schmitt (the latter did not use the term extensively, but he did review Rudolf Kjellen’s book Der Staat als Lebensform).27 There are also more obscure sources, such the vitalist Jungian biologist Adolf Portmann.28 With Agamben, it is less clear than with Virno that the Lebensformen refer to the demotic practices of the multitude in “our era.” It is well known that a key problem for Agamben is the reduction of life to bare life (or naked life) in modern biopolitics—and particularly in the concentration/extermination camp. This is life reduced to a (barely) biological remainder. On the other hand, there is the promise of “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”29

While Agambian form of life is temporally unmoored, a matter of potentiality more than actuality, to some extent Agamben sees its promise fulfilled in the monastic life of the Middle Ages. In modernity, it is questionable whether any endeavor to merge life with its form would be tenable. The apotheosis of the law in its suspension (the state of exception) generates an indistinguishability of law and life. The forms of life corresponding to the abstract, formal rule of law (the Kantian “pure form of law”) are impossible forms. In Agamben’s millenarian terms, any form of prefigurative practice remains a matter of potentiality, of preferring-not-to, of siding with the potential to not-be.30 This is where it is necessary to go beyond Agamben, specifically his account of habit.

Habit Maketh Praxis, Praxis Unmaketh Habit

If we look at the process during which Agamben developed his understanding of forms of life, from the essay “Form-of-Life” (1993) and Homo Sacer (1995) to The Highest Poverty (2011) and “What is a Destituent Power?” (2014), the concept of “habit” comes to the fore in the later writings as a crucial qualifier and conceptual mediator.31 In contrast to a life submitted to the law—a law that can be abrogated by the law’s sovereign self-suspension in the state of exception—the Christian monastic orders such as that of Saint Francis shaped life though rules. The regula vitae generates the forma vivendi of common habits and common use.32

Noting that “the context of the monastic life, the term habitus—which originally signified ‘a way of being or acting’ and, among the Stoics, became synonymous with virtue … seems more and more to designate the way of dressing,” Agamben contends that monasticism “transformed clothing into a habitus, rendering it indiscernible from a way of life.”33 Agamben argues at length that monasticism is marked by a systemic conflation of life and rule (norm) that breeds form, that generates habitus: “The decisive core of the monastic condition is not a substance or content, but a habitus or a form. Understanding that condition will require us to turn toward the task of confronting of the problem of ‘habit’ and form of life.”34

Here, one can speak of a missed encounter between Agamben and Pierre Bourdieu. The latter based his notion of habitus indirectly on medieval sources—and more directly on Erwin Panofsky’s reading of those sources in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, which Bourdieu translated into French in 1967.35 While the notion of habitus had been used in sociology by Marcel Mauss, Bourdieu took cues from Panofsky’s attempt to demonstrate “a connection between Gothic art and Scholasticism which is more concrete than a mere ‘parallelism’ and yet more general than those individual (and very important) ‘influences’ which are inevitably exerted on painters, sculptors or architects by learned advisors.”36 For Panofsky, what he calls mental habit is both diffuse and pervasive:

In contrast to mere parallelism, the connection which I have in mind is a genuine cause-and-effect relation; but in contrast to an individual influence, this cause-and-effect relation comes about by diffusion rather than by direct impact. It comes about by the spreading of what may be called, for want of a better term, a mental habit—reducing this overworked cliché to its precise Scholastic sense as a “principle that regulates the act,” principium importans ordimen ad actum.37

While Bourdieu would become more critical of Panofsky over time, in his 1967 postscript he praises the art historian for going beyond intuitive analogies to demonstrate that both scholastic philosophy and gothic architecture follow the same structural logic.38 Later, habitus would be defined by Bourdieu as the “structuring structure” that is “necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions.” Not being limited to specific cases, it serves as “a general, transposable disposition” that informs “beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt.”39 As a conserving, conservative force, habitus “produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle.”40 Of course, we may well wish to defend a concept and a practice of practice that goes beyond reproduction—a critical practice, perhaps along the lines of Andrea Fraser’s conception of artistic practice:

Artistic practice resists, or aims to resist, functioning as the representative culture of a particular group—whether the makers, lookers, and buyers of art or any new or previously unserved community. It resists, or aims to resist, serving as the means of reproduction of particular competencies or dispositions. Instead, it functions, or aims to function, as analytical and interventionary.41

Thus understood, practice always involves moments of dishabituation.

In her account of the “habitual new media” of the twenty-first century media landscape, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun performs a tour d’horizon of theories of habit, including Bourriaud’s and Agamben’s. Noting that in neoliberalism, “individuals’ habits—their ability to quickly use freely available information—allegedly separates the winners from the losers,” Chun asks whether such individual habits are what remains when, as per Thatcher’s dictum, there is “no such thing as society.”42 However, surely such individual habits, for instance those of a successful entrepreneurial subject, are themselves socially (re)produced and socially valorized. A critique of habit—and this would not be news to Chun, of course—must address individuation as a social process, and the homologies between precious and precarious subjects. (“Yes, we are all individuals”: we saw the consequences of “herd individualism” in Western societies during the Covid crisis.)

Further pointers toward a critique of habit(us) are provided by Rahel Jaeggi in her Critique of Life-Forms. Taking cues from Max Horkheimer’s assertion that “the critical theory of society … has for its object men as producers of their own historical form of life in its totality,” Jaeggi engages with forms of life as “always at once given and made.”43 Situating life-forms in the Hegelian sphere of objective spirit (the cultural and social reproduction of life), Jaeggi likewise takes on board Bourdieu, Agamben, as well as Arendt, and makes an inventory of a whole set of categories that all have a bearing on Lebensform, without being in themselves sufficient, such as rules and norms, homing in on “Customs as a Mixture of Prescriptions and Rules.”44 As for habit, the individual overtones of this concept are once more emphasized:

Discourse about habits of life [Lebensgewohnheit] also comes very close to the concept of forms of life. It has connotations of regularity, stability, and self-evidence that are also characteristic of forms of life. Nevertheless, with “habits” we tend to associate isolated practices, whereas the concept of a form of life refers to clusters, or even a coherent ensemble, of practices. If one of my habits of life is to work at desk number 48 in the reading room of the Berlin State Library, this alone does not constitute a form of life.45

However, Jaeggi also acknowledges that practices (and hence life-forms) have a habitual nature and discusses “Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the habitus” as “the internalization of objective living conditions.”46 This leads her to a discussion of professional ethos, discussed in the Hegelian terms of practices that “do not correspond to their concept.” Thus, what forms of life—as reproduced and enacted by habitus—require is an immanent critique. Such a critique is evidently not the application of external norms to a phenomenon, but neither is it merely about the contradiction between self-proclaimed norms and lived reality. The latter approach, internal critique, accepts these norms, whereas immanent critique can also contextualize and critique the norms themselves, deriving its always situational criteria from engaging with the inner contradictions of both norms and the “patterns of movement exhibited by reality itself.”47

If forms of life are problem-solving entities, then the question is: When do they themselves become a problem, to the point of becoming unlivable?48 Jaeggi discusses this in relation to the family as form, but the same question can be applied to institutional life-forms, habits, and practices in art and academia. In these and other contexts, what Fraser calls a reflexive methodology requires “the full objectification, not only of an object, but of one’s relation to an object,” and becoming conscious of “the social fields in which we exist and the internalized schemes of perception and appreciation, classification and hierarchization, interest and practice produced in those very fields, which [Bourdieu] called habitus.”49 How do we, in our daily practice, enact our (psychological, social, economic) investments? The question has, if anything, become even more pressing as the economic, social, and ideological constraints for practice become yet more suffocating. Teargas in the postcolonial colony, teargas on campus, students facing expulsion and deportation for siding with the subaltern. What is at stake here and there is the survival of forms of life—those that are forced to become forms of strife in order to continue to able to reproduce their social and even biological fabric.

Latter-day critical theory has long oscillated between Habermas’s residually social-democratic liberalism—with its investment in the public sphere of deliberative democracy—and reengagements with the Marxism that had been occluded during the Cold War.50 The former results in an identification with the institutions of “liberal democracy” that is ultimately predicated on the viability of these institutions and their life-forms. Even when rejecting liberal idealism in favor of a more materialist and rigorous understanding of the capitalist nation-state and its institutions, immanent critique is ultimately a reformist project that seeks to improve these institutions from within, though “transformative immanence,” thus making them live up to their norms. This strategy has failed rather dramatically, making propositions such as that of Moten and Harney’s undercommons all the more alluring; when transformative immanence is a pipe dream, what’s left is the forming of maroon communities—immanent desertion rather than immanent critique.

Yet we are in a position where a tactical and disabused defense of certain infrastructures is more necessary than ever—in the face of concerted attacks on dissent and on various (overlapping) communities within academia, ranging from Palestinians and other racialized groups to leftists and LGBTQ+ students. More generally, the neoliberal attack on the humanities in countries such as the UK and the Netherlands makes universities increasingly inhospitable to heterodox forms of life, of intellectual praxis and critical inquiry.51 Under the circumstances, it is vital that existing institutional forms and habits are supplemented and challenged by forms of self-organization whose autonomy often comes at the cost of extreme precarity.52 In line with Daniel Loick’s recent theorization of counter-communities—in dialogue with both Jaeggi’s forms of life and Moten and Harney’s undercommons—we must develop the art of concatenating forms of life and forms of resistance inside and outside established institutions.53

Non-Fascist Life-Forms against Ecocide and Genocide

Building on Foucault and Agamben, among others, Achille Mbembe has theorized a colonial continuum of necropolitics:

The colonial process always revolved around a genocidal drive. In many cases, this drive never materialized. But it was always there, in a latent state. It reached its maximal point of incandescence in times of war—of conquest, occupation, or counterinsurgency. This genocidal drive proceeded in molecular fashion. For the most part simmering, it crystalized from time to time by shedding blood (slaughters, massacres, repressions), events that continually recurred. Its point of paroxysm was war.54

Cases abound, from Indonesia to Vietnam, from Algeria to the Congo to Namibia to South Africa—not forgetting the Americas. In the contemporary context, it may be Palestine that offers the most striking example of “late modern colonial occupation [as] a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical,” but precisely insofar as Palestine functions as a model and a laboratory.55

Left: Poster announcing the event “Conditions of Life Calculated to Destroy” at Freie Universität Berlin, 2025. Right: Carla Arcos, foldout cover from the volume Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care, published by the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest and WdKA Research Center, 2024.

In Israeli operations in Gaza, backed by the US and EU, genocidal and ecocidal logic are closely interlinked. In fact, one could argue that genocide and ecocide here show themselves to be two sides of the same coin, and that the overall target of necropolitics is precisely constituted by forms of life in their most encompassing sense. While Agamben insists that human social/cultural life, or bios, can be clearly demarcated from purely biological life, or zoe, these terms appear to be much more synonymous in Aristotle (his source).56 What is under attack in Palestine—and in many other parts of the Global South and the Global North—are human forms of life as embedded in a network of nonhuman life-forms, as manifested in forms of pastoralism and the foraging of plants. Forensic Architecture’s “Cartography of Genocide” online platform and accompanying report stresses that “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is organized, systematic, and intended to destroy conditions of life and life-sustaining infrastructure”—and even before the recent war in Gaza, Forensic Architecture had long investigated Israel’s weaponization of “nature” against indigenous populations.57

Slated for February 19, a group of professors at Berlin’s Freie Universität planned a program with UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese and Eyal Weizman with the title “Conditions of Life Calculated to Destroy.”58 After initially signing off on the event, the university’s dean then caved to pressure and cancelled it a few days before it was supposed to take place. A different event with Albanese and Weizman, as well as other participants, was to take place at the venue Kühlhaus Berlin on February 18; the venue likewise cancelled the event at the last moment. In the end, the left-wing newspaper Junge Welt agreed to host this gathering, in a much smaller space that also had to accommodate five uniformed police offers and their own interpreter, while some twenty police vans were parked outside. Thankfully livestreamed, the program contained a few digs at the “not so free university.” The next morning, the cancelled event at said university took place after all, in a bizarre form: a discussion between Albanese, Weizman, and Robin Celikates at yet another venue (bUm – Raum für solidarisches Miteinander), which was livestreamed in a lecture room at the Freie Universität. Police materialized in both locations, and the livestream at the Freie Universität was only allowed to proceed after complex negotiations.59

There is, of course, a vast qualitative difference between the exterminatory violence to which Palestinians are subjected and the “first-world problems” of academics in Berlin; yet the two are profoundly interrelated. As with previous teach-ins and related gatherings, quite a few of those who were present at the Junge Welt event would have been precarious and racialized members of the Berlin academic community (students, PhD candidates) who could face politically motivated expulsions or even deportations. In alternative venues such as Junge Welt’s small storefront space, a displacement of the university and its Lebensform occurs—enacted by the marginal minority of Berlin-based academics and activists, including members of the Palestinian diaspora.

University life will continue its business as usual, just as the next Documenta will continue regardless of Germany’s repression of dissent in the name of a white supremacism disguised as “anti-anti-Semitism.” The people that insist on gathering against genocidal Staatsräson, both on and off campus, do between forms of life. These life-forms may be surviving or collapsing in various ways, forced to adapt or reaching critical points of decomposition. It is against the generative potential of such encounters—the potential of forms of life coming together, blending, and morphing into new formations—that fascist politics today is ultimately aimed.