Paper Short Abstract:

The paper outlines an anthropological approach to the concept of interregnum.

Paper Abstract:

A political anthropology of the present faces a situation when the neoliberal hegemony has declined but no alternative hegemony is taking shape. Based on his experiences in 1920s Italy, Antonio Gramsci has called such an in-between period “interregnum”. The paper seeks to align his description with anthropological concepts developed to study conditions of political turmoil, social disintegration, and individual insecurity. Support for democratic procedures had already been undermined by neoliberal depoliticization; now that neoliberalism is still “dominant but dead” (Gavin Smith), the economic realities of increasing class division has further delegitimized democracy as an elite project.

Among the “morbid symptoms” generated by the interregnum, according to Gramsci, the rise of an authoritarian counterpolitics is probably the most striking. For this reason, the paper sketches the tasks and pitfalls of a political anthropology of the present with regard to the rise of fascism in Germany.