Organized by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) and Chiara Bottici (New School)
What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brought together scholars from across disciplines to debate these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop took place on February 21st 2019; it was part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and was organized jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London.
In the second panel, speakers explored the contemporary intersections of populist politics and finance. Nancy Fraser (New School) discussed the role of ‘crisis’ in the structural operation of financialization, offering insights on the opportunities for experimentation contained in the political spaces of ‘populist withdrawal’ from the promise of neoliberalism. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) offered a conceptualization of the ‘speculative imagination’ as an emerging dominant mode of contemporary social and political/economic ordering under conditions of radical uncertainty, demonstrating it through a discussion of the ‘paradoxical’ convergence between global finance and nationalist politics.
