The Afterlife of Property and the New Fascism – an Interview with Eva von Redecker
We talk to the German philosopher Eva von Redecker about how to understand contemporary fascism, how to use the concept of property to overcome the impasses of the leftist theorizing, and how to rethink the category of freedom in the Anthropocene – beyond its narrow, liberal meaning. You can find Polish translation of this conversation under this LINK.
Machina Myśli (Teresa Fazan & Nadia Janiczak): Let us start with your most recent book, which is currently being translated into Polish. In Dieser Drang nach Härte: Über den neuen Faschismus (2026; forthcoming in English as The New Fascism: Entitlement and the Urge to Destroy) you propose a unique take on fascism. Where does your interest in this topic come from: is it a nascent curiosity connected to widespread attempts to understand fascism in a global context, or is it a natural continuation of your previous theoretical work?
Eva von Redecker: I think this interest has three sources. And indeed, one is that I have, for an absurdly long time now, at least ten years, been really fascinated by what one can theoretically do when one digs into the genealogy of property. I am always stunned how much there is to learn and how it allows us to move beyond certain impasses in left theorizing, such as the conflict between identity politics and a materialist critique of political economy. I started using the term phantom possession to try to understand a particular group of ideologies. Initially, I used it to talk about authoritarianism, and then it took me further. In philosophy, if you are honest, you never know the outcome: you start playing with an idea, and then you have to see how far it carries. And when it stops working. So at one point, I realised that the concept of phantom possession alone did not cover a more extreme form of political violence, which was on the rise.
Secondly, there is just that: the witnessing of political shifts. I think what convinced me that I should also talk about fascism is that for years I have been in conversation with colleagues who are in different places around the globe – India, Argentina, Turkey… – and in our various contexts, we observed fairly similar logics. It made me confident that this crazy grand gesture that philosophers tend to do to sort of name something very abstractly was not so premature, and that one really needed to group those phenomena together.
And then there is the third thing: I was educated in the Frankfurt School tradition, I have worked on Hannah Arendt and in some sense I have never in my life done anything but try to understand the theories that attempt to grasp fascism. So it was very natural for me to eventually take my own terminology onto that terrain.
MM: In your response, you used a term which is central to your theorizing which might not be familiar to our readers. Could you elaborate on the concept of phantom possession?
EvR: I will start from the observation that when you look closely, a lot of things – social relations, identities, and the violence around them – have a property rhetoric to them, or a property dynamic or logic. And yet, no actual property relations are present. Of course, there are some feminist theorists like Catharine MacKinnon for instance, who would say that men factually own women. But that is not actually true in most cases; we have liberal emancipation, men never own women fully, as you would understand owning in the case of enslavement. Similarly, there is a strand of Afropessimist thought which posits a continuity of social death for Black people from under the real property form to the present day, after emancipation. And although this thinking has a very convincing phenomenology, it does not seem to be factual either.
If like me, you come from the Frankfurt School, you are always thinking in terms of ideology. So, I would say that in those cases, there are no real property relations, but what survived is property ideology. And this ideology is very differential: it makes some people into subjects that are quasi-owners, and other people or parts of nature into quasi-things that can be appropriated and owned. This is not only imaginary, it is more – it is embodied and has massive material consequences. It is also an ideology in the sense that it makes this society hold and continue to work in its capitalist rendition, which itself is an economy that rests on the objectification and commodification of life. I started calling this phantom possession because I think of it in analogy to phantom pain, it is an impulse to control an empty…
MM: …domain?
EvR: Yes, domain is, I think, the best word. In a certain past, there would have been an actual property entitlement, and now all that is left is this embodied impulse, a disposition to have that control or to be controlled in that way. It is an afterlife of property in the affects and in the dispositions. And in habits that then form material arrangements. So, it is phantom in the sense of phantom pain, and it is also phantom in the sense that it is not real property, there are no real things, it is just a kind of proxy property.
This concept allows us to talk about intersectional forms of domination from a materialist perspective. It also allows you to explain how this pseudo-property can compensate people who are constantly told in a liberal society that they should be owners. That is how we are free: as owners of ourselves. And that is how we are equal, as potential owners. But actually, all we experience most of the time is precarity and uncertainty and even real loss or the imminent fear of loss. Being given this type of claim to full sovereignty in a certain area is tempting. It is a really potent co-optation mechanism.
MM: But it is also precarious in how illusory or how vulnerable to reality it is, right?
EvR: Of course. Phantom possession almost feels more like owning something than any real ownership, because in a mature, liberal society, most actual material ownership has lots of limits to it. If you own a building, there are regulations: you need to be able to pay the mortgage, you need to pay the insurance, you do not even know whether the property will survive the next flood. Or you have immaterial assets that are anyway completely devoid of a concrete experience of control. I think in a society where property is more and more volatile, this urge to have some domains where you really cement the ownership claim – I can do what I want, I can control it, this is mine – becomes more and more necessary. And it can travel through different areas: it can be my car, it can be my family.
The concept also allows you to distinguish between less reifying references to the same thing. In a world where nothing else is based on solidarity and care, of course people would want to defend their families. But if you look at the rhetoric of the right, they defend the family as if it was a thing. As if it was something you could put a wall around, something you need to defend against intruders. And there is always this idea of mastery, that you can do whatever you want with what you own.
MM: Could you provide us with one or two concrete examples of such phantom possession that are currently used in the fascist narrative?
EvR: Right-wing politics generally mobilize around phantom possession, and I would only call it fascist if there is an invocation of a state of emergency where you supposedly need to resort to self-defence to protect those objects against an imagined intruder. Globally, we are currently seeing this logic at work in quite a long list of demands. It is part of why the right is so strong: they have this common denominator where they can slot in a lot of different objects. For instance, when you look at India, then it is about religion: a completely new way in which [the prime minister Narendra] Modi has codified and reified Hinduism into a kind of national dogma. There is of course a Christian evangelical fundamentalist equivalent to that in the USA. There is a certain idea of the cishet family – fed by Russian propaganda – that is mobilized in a kind of crusade against queer and feminist identities.
We also see it in the domain of climate politics, that is faltering because there is an invocation of “my car as my freedom” logic. In Germany, we had this absurd debate about subsidies for the heat pumps to replace oil heating. It got completely derailed the moment that the tabloids portrayed it as if the Green Party was intruding into people’s cellars. What they actually wanted to do was to give people money to buy new heaters but in propaganda they became the thieves.
MM: Could you elaborate a little bit more on the anti-feminist or rather the anti-women backlash?
EvR: This is quite an important element of the new right-wing rhetoric, a particular type of misogyny that functions not by wanting to go back to actual traditional divisions of labour, but that wants to go forward to a particular fetishized control over female bodies and their images. Including all kinds of sexual commodification that somebody like Andrew Tate promotes and practices, this idea that the boyfriends should have access to their women’s bodies. Think of the whole incel culture… This is really an example of men starting to see their access to female bodies in terms of property rights. And when this is threatened, then there is an immediate resort to violence. To bring it home: you have this victimhood position of lost object-control on the side of privilege. And then there is an attack on the abject that you believe endangers your restoration of the lost object.
MM: So there you have victimization turning into defence, which becomes in fact an attack on someone innocent?
EvR: Yes. I would say it has three variables. One, the subject that imagines itself as an endangered owner, so, as you say, first there is the process of self-victimization. Second, you have the object, this thing that is not a thing. And then third, you have – I call it the abject – the thief, intruder, attacker. This is the logic of fascism: the object needs to be enclosed, and the abject needs to be eliminated. This process can play out both on the individual and on the collective level. In the neoliberal world, it primarily relates to individual renderings of freedom: for example, a certain understanding of freedom of speech where the only free speech is the one that hurts someone else, this logic of “I have this right to abuse,” which is a very privatized idea of having an opinion. Historically, in Germany for instance, the object of collective phantom possession was the fatherland [Heimat] that had shrunk after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and then it blew up into the idea of ownership of the whole territory of Eastern Europe. The politics of blood and soil [Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie], where you have a collective body imagined to be an owner in an unbounded sense: not just of the national territory, but of the entire Lebensraum. That is a very extreme example, but if you look at Hitler’s Mein Kampf, it is full of this ownership rhetoric. This is why he would say we have to become a People, a Volk, so that we have a claim to own other lands. He made a comparison to the English ownership of their colonies – to be sovereign, you have to be cleansed through the fantasy of racial purification.
MM: It just came to my mind that Poland is a good example of how much phantom this right-wing idea of ownership can be. I read some propaganda of the Maritime and Colonial League [Liga Morska i Kolonialna] not only from before the Second World War, but also from the 1950s, saying that every mature nation has to have colonial ambitions. Due to the very recent German occupation, it would say “maybe not as genocidal as German’s”. Therefore, according to some nationalists, Poland, in the process of restoring its independence, needed this claim to a right to own land that is not yet ours.
EvR: Then Poland would finally become a fully European, mature nation, right?
MM: Obviously, it never happened, these colonial ambitions were never realized, but this was a very strong imaginary project. This idea that ownership over foreign lands is the step we need to take in order to be a fully-fledged nation.
EvR: This logic really haunts modern nation states: instead of seeing their identity in internal democratic negotiations, self-legislation, the question of how do we live, how do we govern ourselves?, they revert to a preoccupation with: do we really own this land and who should own it? Again, we see how nationalism is all about phantom possession. It is no accident that this ideology kicks in a historical era when most people have been driven off the land and do not own anything anymore. Suddenly, there is this tempting idea that somehow you are the nation that can own.
MM: We want to ask you how you understand and propose to analyze the relationship between fascism and fossil fuels, or so called stock energy, to pick up on Andreas Malm’s analysis from Fossil Capital (2016)?
EvR: I would analyze this in two ways. Firstly, I think what makes stock energy such a good object for fascism is that it is much more easily privatizable than flow energy – you can parcel it, draw a line around it, and transport it. So, it lends itself much more to the imaginary of something that one can own. I think that is something that Malm teaches us brilliantly. Additionally, unlike with the flow energy – the wind goes on, and the river flows further – stock energy is something you can really consume, so it is not just something you own but something you can also destroy. Once the combustion is done, one can even feel a transfer of potency from the machine, like you are gaining its mechanical power: when you fuel the machine, you also own the potency of destroying the fuel. I think that mirrors a lot of this owner-like sovereignty. The second point about energy takes us further into the continuities between the liberal order and the fascist order. They are not the same, but you need to see how one tips into the other. One feature of liberalism is this inbuilt claim of sovereignty, this fantasy of being an individual because of being a self-owner. But the other aspect that is less talked about is that liberalism is a time-blind imaginary. It operates with a geometric spatial imaginary: when you imagine your freedom, it is like a playing field where you draw a line around your sphere of agency and your property, and then there is the other’s sphere, and you have to get out of their way. Freedom is imagined as mobility in those spheres, it is defined in negative terms as unhindered movement. That you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want. It is not so much about “Can I realize my dreams?”, or “Can I live a good life?” The point is that you can do whatever you want.
MM: And the idea of owning stock energy plays into that?
EvR: Yes: liberalism has this expansionist urge built in that if you could go further, if there were not all those annoying people in the way, if your sphere was bigger – perhaps all the way to Mars – you would be freer. And what energy grants you is mobility. There is no point to space if you cannot traverse it, but if you have a kind of fuel that allows you to traverse it, you get to feel your freedom. This is the horror of our present time: the acute knowledge that such fossil combustion will bring about the end of many species’ lives on this planet. When you have only this spatial imaginary, you do not think about the next day or the next 50 years. You only think: where can I go NOW? This is freedom: not having to ask how my life story will go on over the decades.
MM: And then freedom is a zero-sum game. Because other people’s freedom can hinder my hope of moving. This is a good moment to talk about Bleibefreiheit (2023; Eng. The Freedom to Stay) – your previous book, which is also being translated into Polish. Could you elaborate on that concept?
EvR: I think that in the Anthropocene we need a really different understanding of freedom. I do not think we can repair this broken liberal imaginary by simply saying, “Oh, don’t move, you’re destroying other people’s lives.” Because honestly, there is so little space left in which you can do whatever you want, a lot of people are just not going to care about limits altogether. I think we can only reimagine freedom as something that is also connected to transcendence and infinity, something we can desire if we open up the imaginary from this time-blind perspective to a temporal dimension. When we think of freedom not so much as movement in space, but also as meaningfulness and fulfillment in time: being free means having free and fulfilled time. And if you think about it that way, then other people and creatures are not just obstacles in your way. They could help you have a good time, they could feed you. So your freedom depends on how you organize your relations. I call this the freedom to stay [Bleibefreiheit].
MM: Is such freedom to stay opposed to moving?
EvR: Of course, if you think from the point of mobility, it sounds really boring. But staying actually means that you can go on living. It is the freedom to stay and of course to stay free. When you have to stay in prison, you are not free. But if it is the freedom to stay free in our world where the habitable zones are shrinking, where we have genocides and deportation, then being allowed, being guaranteed the ability to stay actually has many more underlying requirements. And then, of course, you are only really free if you can also leave. Moving and staying mutually depend on each other. But I think we should, for the time being, prioritize the aspect of staying.
It is also about a certain faithfulness to this planet: staying with all the life that is here, with all these species, not going to Mars, not just caring about humanity, but staying with everything that is alive now and fighting for its right to stay. To stay in connection to the land that we are connected to, in conditions that are good enough despite the fact that they can shift due to climate change, due to wars… What matters is the regeneration of these conditions by taking care of nature, the land, and each other, so that we can stay together.
MM: You mentioned staying in connection to the land. Is it similar to the right to a certain land, as in nationalism?
EvR: So there is this chapter on soil in Bleibefreiheit and some people get really nervous about that, because soil [Boden] is a Nazi term. But of course, it all depends on what you think and say about it. If you think of soil not as a propertizable territory or entity, but – and that is what I am trying to do in that chapter – as itself made of time, soil is an ensemble of lots of different temporal metabolic cycles.
MM: Lots of creatures are living in the soil. They are actively making the soil, therefore soil itself is a process of becoming soil.
EvR: Soil is a lot of processes, you know, it is that this little microbe and that little microbe and this leaf rotting and that earthworm… The ecosystems that function are ones where all those metabolic cycles – I call them tides – feed into each other and the whole thing gets regenerated. There is a lot of freedom in that overlapping density: if there is less going on, then you can grow much less, you have far fewer choices.
The last part of the book tries to think about what it would mean to have ecological freedom. And for us humans, this would mean something different, but for other living creatures, there is a freedom just in being allowed to run through their cycles, their tides, in an uncoerced way. In meat production, when you just feed, and feed, and feed the animals so that everything is sped up, or when you deplete the soil, nature cannot go through all its cycles in its own time. This is also true for humans. The cruelty of not being able to go to the toilet as you wish in a warehouse is a limitation on your freedom – you cannot regenerate. And it is important to remember that your tides are synchronized or in connection with agencies that are not yours.
MM: I feel like this is a very demanding idea of freedom because it entails responsibility and patience?
EvR: Well, I hope the argument about time allows one to see that responsibility and patience are not cumbersome demands but real powers. Freedom would be narrow and rather pathetic if you lose sight of all but the most immediate effects of your actions. And most people yearn for having more time. A lot of impatience is capitalism-induced stress. At the same time, I hope the dimension of time makes the concept of freedom abstract enough to not prescribe a certain form of the good life. The point of talking of freedom and not just about territorial groundedness is to have the claim that it should be there for all, that it should be general. But I would even go one step further and say – as one does in the dialectical tradition – that even the people who happen to have access to good quality meat as the chosen few, are not as free as they could be. There is an unfreedom of the master. Just because you are privileged does not mean you are free: you still depend on your curated luxury choices and you depend on the violence that keeps up the oppression and exploitation of a lot of other creatures.
MM: Since abundance depends on exploitation in today’s world, what is this new understanding of freedom’s relation with violence and non-violence? What is the meaning we can find for ourselves in practicing such freedom?
EvR: This is the point at which we have to speak more narrowly about humans, and about spontaneity. Can you make new beginnings freely? If you have to uphold a whole extractivist violent system, you cannot start anew easily. As soon as you drop the violence, you are toppled. The left sometimes falls into the a conversation of privileges which sounds as if the better off live a good life. But it is also an alienated and rotten life. There is deep unhappiness there. Of course, other people die younger. Of course, we might think it is better to be a millionaire on a yacht. But I think there is strength in saying that those are really deficient lives. They are luxurious, they are rich, they live longer and they are safer. But is that time fulfilled? I do not think so. I think in our social movements there is more fulfilled time. I think aiming at toppling those billionaires is more fulfilling than being a billionaire. I mean, we are meaning-making, sense-seeking creatures. To have a life of production and combustion and burning everything up is to have a hollow and stupid life.
MM: Let us go back one more time to the analysis of property. We have been talking about property being central to today’s fascism. How would you say these phenomena of modern property and propertization that you develop in your texts are central to the theoretical endeavour of understanding fascism? What do these terms mean and how can they help us understand and ultimately fight against fascism today?
EvR: That is a very important question. Modern property is a bundle of rights and it is quite specific. One important characterization is exclusive control over objects owned. Another is the right to abuse. Another one is the right to alienate – to sell property or transfer it to someone else. And there is the right to accumulate. The Marxist 19th century paradigm was very invested in fossil driven progress: socialism also required accumulation, the production of wealth, just with different distribution than under capitalism. Focusing on those other aspects of property allows you to see how much debris and destruction comes with the production of wealth. For things to be made into commodities, they first need to be propertized, which is always a violent process because it takes things out of their context, out of their regenerative milieu. And it makes them destructible in a radical way because it puts them at the mercy of whoever is the owner. And that also goes for collective ownership: in really existing instances of socialism, it was collectivized but the right to abuse remained in the hands of authority, so instead of the factory owner, now the state could destroy nature – therefore, the idea of mastery was not questioned at all.
MM: What about the right to alienate?
EvR: It means that you can just discard whatever you see as valueless. It is a really weird thing. For example, let us imagine we live together in a shared apartment and I leave my filthy old T-shirt on your sofa and you are like, Eva, can you clean up your mess? And I say, oh no, that is a gift, it is your t-shirt now. You would say, are you kidding me? But that is how our economy runs: you have emissions and all the depleted extraction sites, you have burnt-out bodies, lots of poisonous substances going into the rivers… You can summarize a lot of violence that happens in the everyday functioning of capitalism via the property form as a means of analysis. And I think once we understand that, it becomes easier to see that this is repeated in social relations.
MM: For instance under fascism?
EvR: Yes, I think what fascism does is to mimic propertized violence within social relations. They say they model society on nature but what they mean is a brutalized nature or propertized nature. So what they really do is they model social relations using the template of property. They also say that between humans we can distinguish between those who are worth something and those who should disappear. According to fascists, there is a distinction in human relations between those who have mastery and those who are objects to be abused, with whom you can do whatever you want. And even on the political level there is this idea that ruling, governance, leadership is the same as an owners’ control over their belongings. It is not just a kind of Führer cult going back to old fascism. If you read someone like Curtis Yarvin, for instance, one of the so-called neo-reactionary thinkers, he really says that he thinks the US or a particular city should be ruled by an owner. He actually says that the problem with America is that we do not know who owns it! Or that somebody apparently owns it but they can not even sack their own employees… He essentially says, “I would like to see what would happen if somebody really owned the US, meaning that all options would be on the table, including liquidation.” There you have this idea that somebody is only a ruler if they can destroy the whole thing they rule. This is exactly the property fantasy at the heart of fascism.
MM: What is striking here is the absolute irrationality of certain decisions made by the owner. Like Trump stopping the building of the offshore wind park, which was a huge waste of resources. I thought about it also in the context of slavery: for a long time it was continued even though it stopped being profitable. It would be more profitable to actually have paid workers, not people whose bodies are being destroyed. But there was this affect driving the order of owning other people and land. It did not make any sense or profit, however, it was often explained in such a way – we do it because it is more profitable, more rational, it is just business – but in fact that was far from being true.
EvR: This all falls into place once you start seeing modernity as a project that always accumulates profit and authority in parallel. I think standard left theorizing often tries to reduce everything to the rational profit interests of the powerful. But today when we are partly immersed in this end-times atmosphere, you can really see that you do not understand the business models of the big tech companies if you think they simply want to make money, because they do not. Also, they have so much money, money does not mean anything anymore. What they are doing is they are accumulating authority, they are accumulating power, sovereign power.
MM: And data.
EvR: Yeah, which is also a control capacity. And all those privatized fantasies of reducing humanity, those eugenics fantasies of colonizing Mars by the chosen, it constitutes an accumulation of sovereignty, not just of profit. It is a different rationality. And I think it is something that is much more familiar to people who are aware of the colonial experience.
MM: We would like to finish on a more positive note. We have been talking about fascism all this time, how we should understand it. We have also talked about how unhappy fascists are, which is already positive. But let us try to think of the hopes we can hold on to in our times. How can we hold on to them? How can we engage in fighting for a different world to come, while using the analyses that we have been talking about?
EvR: I am going to get to the positive turn, but I still want to say first that I am uneasy with the category of hope. I either think it is a quasi-religious concept that somehow you have or you do not, which means it is radically uncertain. And in politics it degenerates into a kind of predicting: you are betting on different horses and you hope one will win. I actually think we have something better on the left. What we should focus on is understanding that what we do is meaningful. The beauty of our struggles is that we can look back – even at the ones that were lost! – and think, oh, I would rather be on the side of the Paris Commune than the French soldiers; I would rather be on the side of Rosa Luxemburg than the Freikorps. What those people did made sense. Would it not have been great to live in the Paris Commune, even for two weeks? I mean, you would have had a life!
There is an existentialist in me who wants to remind people that we die anyway. And when you look back, a lot of the profit and the sovereignty you accumulated is gone. But did you occasionally have the chance to do something that made sense? Can you tell a story that is meaningful enough that you feel you actually have lived? What fuels social struggles is that they are full of really meaningful activities. There is this German word Zuversicht that I would propose which is a bit different from hope, it is more like a positive outlook or a sense of trust.
MM: And what do you think we have actually learned from past struggles?
EvR: For instance, there is a strong feminist component that is realistic about the reproductive needs of the movement; we have less of the kind of one-man militant heroism. That is a good thing, because it means that we can sustain and nurture each other in struggles. And of course, that it is infinitely counteracted by all the splits and all the infights within the movement. But there is also a shared awareness of what we are up against – the ecological disasters, geopolitical emergencies, genocide – and we are somehow remembering that we are creatures that can cooperate. When you are an ecological thinker – even though it is so heartbreaking how much of nature ends and will end – to see that there is still so much beauty around us and know that a lot of stuff works quite well for us by just doing its thing – it is reassuring. The earthworm does not work, it is just living its life, and thanks to that you have better soil, and the rock filters the water, and that is just happening. At every moment there is a coalition of almost everything that lives to try to counter the utter exhaustion of life. And if you realize that, then even sleeping makes you part of this struggle against the death cult. That makes me quite calm: nature and life continues and sometimes we learn something. We have learned a lot. And often what we need to find is a collective context to practice what has been learned, rather than just explain it. We have also learned that change will not happen on its own.
MM: Honestly, I also have a problematic relationship with the term hope. And I would rather say that we just have to keep doing things. It is a kind of ethical imperative that says we have to do this, we have to change the world, no matter if it is possible or not. No matter if we believe that a different world is possible, that we can achieve it in our lifetime or whatever. We just have to keep doing it in our everyday lives. Whatever it brings for us now.
EvR: That is beautiful. I think we should end here.