When: June 13, 2025, 3:30 pm.
Where: Studierraum, Japanese Studies Department, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna

Nostalgia for better days seems widespread and even quite commonsensical even for progressives at our current political moment. It is difficult to argue for a positive trajectory for either democracy or equality to come. Recent interventions have described a foreclosure of even conceiving of a democratic future in our society due to a constant focus on the immanent end of democracy by the hands of its foes or a total planetary collapse (White 2024). Anton Jäger has defined the concept of hyperpolitics to conceive correlating dominant political practices. In his eyes, everything has turned political, polarized, and deemed highly important. Yet, attention moves quickly from one issue, social media post, or scandal to the next (Jäger 2023). Importantly, this type of politics functions according to the logics of the attention economy, thereby evading institutional work and the building of sustainable change (Cicerchia 2025), leading to a simulative type of democratic politics not rooted in meaningful action (Blühdorn 2013). Debates of post-truth echo many of these observations and problems (Newman, Conrad 2024; Galanopoulos, Stavrakakis 2022). Among this seeming helplessness of progressive politics, specters of the past march on. Historically committed atrocities and their underlying beliefs become less stigmatized, and reminders of the past evaporate unfelt. The question emerging out of this description of the present is: What role can historical memory play in hyperpolitical times for progressive imaginaries of the future and successful warnings against repeating the mistakes of the past?

More information here: (Un)Democratic Pasts: A Pre-Conference Workshop – VSJF 2025