Table of Contents

1. Introduction: All We Have Is Now 2. Looking Backward: Nonsynchronism in the Long Now of Capitalism 2.1 The Long Now, A Crisis of Capitalist Temporality 2.2 The Temporal Demos Undone 2.3 The Dialectic of Aesthetic Form and Anticipatory Consciousness 2.4 Nonsynchronism and the Distribution of Time 2.5 Bloch Now: Tracing Hope in a Time of Crisis 2.6 The Untimeliness of Bloch: Utopian Thought and Critical Theory 3. The New Paternalism: Anti-Capitalism and Right-Wing Nostalgia 3.1 Why Anti-Postmodernism Now? Angry Young Men and the Desire for Fathers 3.2 Sentimentalism for Men, the Musty New Scent by Contemporary Capitalism 3.3 Right-Wing Agitation, Anti-Postmodernism, and Anti-Marxism 4. Mystifications or, Lumberjacks Without Forests 4.1 Identitarian Attacks on Identity Politics: A Right-Wing Veil for Capitalism’s Contradictions 4.2 Fascism: Capitalist Crisis Management 4.3 Romantic Anti-Capitalism 4.4 Getting Back in Touch with the Homeland 5. Completing the Thought of the Past: Literature as Utopian Method 5.1 Hope: Material Hunger for What’s Missing 5.2 “To Speak of the Unspeakable”: The Novel as Utopian Thought 5.3 Occupy Dreaming: Decolonizing the Future

Promotional Information

Traces the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in contemporary right-wing populist nostalgia and center-populist futurism, and uses critical theory to present a counter-politics of hope.

About the Author

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).

Reviews

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.
*Stephen Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK*

This is a bold and brilliant analysis of recent reconfigurations of deeply conservative thinking in the present. In clear and precise prose Nilges offers new perspectives on the logic and expression of Right Wing culture. Arguing against the “long now” of contemporary capitalism and its apparent timelessness, Nilges elucidates vital interpretive lenses on the displacement of radical futurity alongside the Right’s nostalgic invocations of a stable past free from actual social, political, and economic change. By closely examining conservative race, gender, and class prerogatives in terms of temporal logic, Nilges provides a fresh and forthright understanding of where we are and glimpses of a utopianism that has not yet been allowed to be.
*Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, City University of New York, USA*