The interview series poses questions concerning the role of affects and emotions in research practice and contemporary society to researchers on short-term visit and associate members of the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies.” Billy Holzberg is Assistant Professor in Social Justice at King’s College London. He is a sociologist and social theorist whose work interrogates how affect and emotion operate as central forces in nationalism, border regimes, and neo-fascist politics. His first monograph Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control investigates the emotional politics of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany and won the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the first best book in sociology. In May 2025, he contributed to our conference Mobilizing Affect – Affective Mobilization, at a panel discussion held together with Cesy Leonard and Sinthujan Varatharajah.
Which research question affects you at the moment? What is its social significance?
I am increasingly consumed by the question of why people attach themselves to growing right-wing authoritarianism and neo-fascism. What is the emotional appeal of a politics that not only relies on but cherishes the destruction of others? This question arises from my earlier work, in which I trace the emotional politics of migration and border politics in Germany – from cautious hope and empathy during the long summer of migration in 2015 to the growing resentment, anger, and shamelessness unleashed in its wake. In my first monograph, Affective Bordering, I argue that we can only really explain this development if we focus on the racial grammars of deservingness that determine who is positioned as the subject worthy of national affective concern and attention, and who as its object, relegated to spheres of abandonment, violence and destruction. Based on these insights, I am now trying to understand the contemporary moment through the concept of “fascist passions” as the affective forces that drive people to invest in authoritarian modes of action and thinking. What affects are productive of neo-fascist politics? What are their racial, gendered, and classed dynamics? And what might be ways to counter and undo them?
Can you think of an emotion whose relevance has recently surprised you?
One of the emotions that has recently surprised me and that I am trying to theorise as a key “fascist passion” is that of destructive pleasure. While negative affects like fear, anger, and resentment get a lot of attention, pleasure and joy are rarely considered a key part of the emotional arsenal of far-right politics. Yet, from politicians taking selfies in deportation camps, heads of state cheerfully swinging chainsaws, and anti-gender groups celebrating the erosion of trans rights, we can see the pleasure and indulgence in the destruction of others as a key and often undertheorized aspect of what makes far-right politics work. How do we make sense of this? I think that the pleasure of destruction can only be explained through extreme forms of demonisation, in which certain, usually already dehumanized, groups in society are no longer framed as merely expendable but as existentially dangerous. In current neo-fascist discourse, for instance, Great Replacement conspiracy theories play a key role in painting migrants as key actors in a wider plot to destroy the nation: occupiers coming to replace the local white population. Through these logics of existential threat, anti-migrant aggression can be framed as an act of protection, and the destruction of the other can be felt as joyful act of care for the nation. It is a violent affective logic of war that we can see gaining hold here, in various topics and spheres of society.
Do you perceive any affective driving force or affective barrier concerning your research work?
A feeling I could do without is a looming sense of anxiety and fear about the political situation we find ourselves in, as well as what effect it will have on the kind of work I am doing. Trained in critical sociology and gender studies, I have spent the last decade tracing the growth of transnational anti-gender politics – attacks on advances won by feminist, queer, and trans movements, but also on gender studies as a discipline and the people associated with it. The attacks on “gender” are key in creating new synergies between far-right and more centrist liberal and even leftist actors in society in a variety of locations. The academy is only one of the battlegrounds where these attacks occur, and my anxiety is nothing compared with the existential fear and horror experienced by those who are subjected to direct violence. But as critical knowledge production in fields like gender studies, critical race theory, and settler colonial studies is increasingly under pressure, I think it’s important to think about what this sense of creeping anxiety does and how it might be collectively pushed back against.
Which book has lately affected you the most?
The book that got me recently was Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism. His insistence on not thinking of fascism today as analogous to that of the 1930s broke an impasse in my own thinking about what fascism is or how useful the frame of fascism actually is for understanding the political present. It goes against endless comparisons of how and to what extent the present matches an earlier mould and instead focuses on how to understand and contest the late fascist dynamics we see emerging in politics today. I also like the way in which he centres the Black Radical tradition to think of fascism not as an antidote to liberalism but as a capacity inherent within liberalism. As Angela Davis and George Jackson already pointed out in the 1970s, for Black subjects imprisoned in the US, the experience of racial violence within liberal democracy is akin to that of fascism, and we can now see how such violence is spreading to wider parts of society. Toscano’s work also helps us conceptualise fascism in relation to colonialism and how it grows within and develops out of colonial violence. The book was a key inspiration for me to think more seriously about the work of “fascist passions” and updating classical work on the psychic and libidinal economy of fascism developed in the Frankfurt School, through the Black Radical Tradition, and contemporary Queer Feminist Affect Theory.
From which feelings or sentiments would you rather refrain at the moment?
A key affect I would like to refrain from is a feeling of despair, a sense of hopelessness that there is nothing to be done amidst the surge of far-right authoritarianism. It is easy to fall into such a sense of despair while researching the dynamics that enable violence and oppression to take hold. Fascism, after all, does not only work through racial terror, violence, and destruction but by shrinking the imagination of what is possible. We can see this clearly in the sphere of migration and border politics, where across Europe, any more radically progressive demands and proposals have largely disappeared from the public sphere, and even most liberal and left-wing parties are focusing on expanding border securitisation and deportation regimes. I think this is where the real danger lies: in the shrinking of alternatives, hopelessness, and dread. That’s why I am drawn to queer utopian, abolitionist, and speculative work that insists on more expansive desires and world-making practices. I think we need to hold on to the desire for other social and political worlds that Lola Olufemi (2021) in Experiments in Imagining Otherwise so beautifully describes as the “whisper [of] only one promise, to remain steadfast in the belief that this cannot be all there is” (p. 21).
