Moderation: Ulrich Brand, University of Vienna

I take this venue as a ‘reflective intervention’, because we are compelled by the question about what strategies can be developed to counteract the rise of authoritarianism worldwide. What is it we need to reactivate in the ‘objectivity’ of our time to open up to a different future than the one the rising authoritarianism seems to be constructing from now? Let us think about the future in reverse. I believe that social justice is one of the elements that must be brought into play: social justice is a signifier that functions as an (unbearable) limit for the far-right. So, it could be reactivated to build an opposition that is not against the other, in this case the far-right, but against that form of identity that seeks to destroy the irreducible (or heterogeneous) through the configuration of inequality and segregation. It is not about inversely discriminating, segregating or even exterminating the other but about antagonising a position that prevents the existence of the other (the heterogeneous). In this way, social justice is attached to solidarity and care, to the construction of a bond with others, to all what is related to love. I content that these elements could be a brake on hatred that has a structuring function in the extreme right-wing expressions.