Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism

Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. He has co-edited the books Literary Materialisms (2013), Marxism and the Critique of Value (2014), The Contemporaneity of Modernism (2016), Literature and the Global Contemporary (2017), and Periodizing the Future: William Gibson, Genre, and Cultural History (2019).

• 1. Introduction: All We Have Is Now2. Looking Backward: Nonsynchronism in the Long Now of Capitalism2.1 The Long Now, A Crisis of Capitalist Temporality2.2 The Temporal Demos Undone2.3 The Dialectic of Aesthetic Form and Anticipatory Consciousness2.4 Nonsynchronism and the Distribution of Time2.5 Bloch Now: Tracing Hope in a Time of Crisis2.6 The Untimeliness of Bloch: Utopian Thought and Critical Theory3. The New Paternalism: Anti-Capitalism and Right-Wing Nostalgia3.1 Why Anti-Postmodernism Now? Angry Young Men and the Desire for Fathers3.2 Sentimentalism for Men, the Musty New Scent by Contemporary Capitalism3.3 Right-Wing Agitation, Anti-Postmodernism, and Anti-Marxism4. Mystifications or, Lumberjacks Without Forests4.1 Identitarian Attacks on Identity Politics: A Right-Wing Veil for Capitalism’s Contradictions4.2 Fascism: Capitalist Crisis Management4.3 Romantic Anti-Capitalism4.4 Getting Back in Touch with the Homeland5. Completing the Thought of the Past: Literature as Utopian Method5.1 Hope: Material Hunger for What’s Missing5.2 “To Speak of the Unspeakable”: The Novel as Utopian Thought5.3 Occupy Dreaming: Decolonizing the Future

Do we have Time for radical progressive change? Nilges charts the rise of “no future” sentiments within far right-wing nihilism and, surprisingly, also within the current Left. Interlacing Ernest Bloch’s writings on temporality with readings of contemporary culture, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism provides a sorely needed compass to help navigate today’s crisis.