13 March 2026 07:00PM
Yes, it’s conversation week, and this vendredi, Henrike Kohpeiß and Jackqueline Frost will be at After 8 to discuss Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025), an examination of coldness as an affective condition that continues to shape the European subject.
Coldness produces, as the author puts it, “an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.”
In Kohpeiß’s essay, canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten, and proposes a critical approach as well as alternative paths and perspectives.
* Henrike Kohpeiß is a Berlin-based philosopher, working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Transformation Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series “Feelings at the end of the world” at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, published in German in 2023 (Bürgerliche Kälte, Campus Verlag). *
** Jackqueline Frost is a historian of twentieth-century political thought and a theorist working in the field of political aesthetics. She is also a poet, whose books in France – this one for instance – are published by Eric Pesty Éditeur. **
