Adrian Otto and Lisa Pfeifer: Reassessing Authoritarian Syndromes in the Context of Digital Media

About this event

This talk is part of the series 'Wie es kommen musste. Aspekte des neune Autoritarismus', a collaboration between the Institute for Social Research and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. Adrian Otto and Lisa Pfeifer, researhers at the IfS, draw on the project 'Destruktivität im zeitgenössischen Autoritarismus' to explore how the boundary between inside and outside becomes a central feature of authoritarian syndromes. They examine how fantasies of purity and narratives of threat are intertwined individually and collectively, and how digital media play into authoritarian interpretations of the world, especially in crisis situations. Through case studies, the talk reconstructs how projective mechanisms of boundary-drawing stabilize fragile subjectivity and promise destructive-authoritarian re-sovereignty.