Desire and Violence

Interview with Carolin Emcke by Berta Ares Yánez

Carolin Emcke, one of the leading voices on the European intellectual and cultural scene, will be reflecting, in conversation with journalist Berta Ares Yáñez, on such urgent political challenges as the drift to authoritarianism, human rights and the climate emergency. 

Confronted with the advance of authoritarianism, Carolin Emcke calls for imagination and the language of utopia, together with the fashioning of policies to help reduce inequality and defend different ways of expressing sexuality and desire. 

For this thinker and journalist, a curator for several theatres in Germany and author of two landmark books, Gegen den Hass (Against Hate) and Wie wir begehren (How We Desire), it is essential to use irony and “poetic dissidence” against any kind of appeal to purity. In her political thinking, Emcke uses desire and violence as the central planks of her analysis, with all the semantic complexity that these two concepts involve.