Just out with Divided, Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness stages an encounter between critical theory and Black studies to offer a diagnosis of an affective condition and social technique that, she argues, structures and sustains the still-colonial present. Bourgeois coldness names an affective attachment to both a state of things and certain modes of reasoning; it is a learned and actively practiced strategy that protects the white European subject from actually witnessing the violence of a world made in its image. It produces, as Kohpeiß writes, an “an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning” (4).
Crucially, bourgeois coldness shields not only from the pain of others but also from the experience of one’s own shame, given our unavoidable complicity in maintaining the conditions for that suffering. Though the term bourgeois might suggest a narrowly defined social class, Kohpeiß treats coldness as endemic to the European subject itself, imagined as self-possessing and self-determining. This subject binds itself to a form of reason (inherited from the Enlightenment) that is colonial in its operation—everywhere drawing boundaries between self and other, and aiming above all at self-preservation. One of the book’s central aims is to show how reason and coldness “collude” to propagate an order that divides along lines of race, class, gender, and able-bodiedness.
Kohpeiß borrows her descriptor from Theodor W. Adorno, one of her principal interlocutors. For the Adorno of Negative Dialectics and “Education after Auschwitz,” coldness is both the constitutive affect of the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the psychic infrastructure that sustains life in its aftermath: “Coldness appears in Adorno’s work when the only alternative left is bottomless sorrow” (127).
Across roughly 250 pages, Kohpeiß traces the workings of coldness in diverse sites—from Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) to state bureaucracy and contemporary practices of sea rescue in the Mediterranean. Her analysis of the 2019 Sea-Watch 3 case is emblematic. When the ship’s captain, Carola Rackete, defied Italian authorities to dock in Lampedusa with fifty-three rescued people in urgent need of medical attention, German media and the public swiftly celebrated her as a humanitarian hero. Kohpeiß asks what allows the European public to endure the suffering enacted at its borders without moving to end it. The answer, she suggests, lies in a formation of reason realized as coldness: “The apparent contradiction of ignorance towards those imperilled on the one hand, and the moral exaltation of rescue on the other, are expressions of a subjectivity that can integrate both” (51).
Warmth, the assumed, “natural” antidote to coldness, can itself be cold from this perspective. The humanitarian moral framework depends on a long-established affective economy that individualizes suffering, transforming systemic violence into occasions for empathy and self-affirmation. Compassion, in this sense, sustains Europeans’ self-image of innocence. “Ahistorical compassion,” Kohpeiß writes, prepares the affective ground that allows coldness to persist unchallenged (57). The heroization of Rackete allows Europe to see itself as moral even as its borders remain lethal.
This attention to the ambivalence of coldness and warmth is one of Kohpeiß’s sharpest interventions. Bourgeois coldness doesn’t always look like indifference; it often appears as care, generosity, or liberal self-critique. Diversity and equity programs, she argues, exemplify the bourgeois knack for turning self-criticism into self-preservation. “Self-criticism is the bourgeois subject’s cunning in remaining what it is,” she writes, “while credibly conveying what it willingly wants to become: a better human being according to its own image” (91-92). Institutions cool their own discomfort through ethical displays that stabilize rather than transform. Coldness, in this sense, is a technology of endurance: it conceals fear, insecurity, and “political unimaginativeness” (122) beneath the polished surface of moral conviction.
Importantly, coldness is not one thing. Outside of its bourgeois articulation, coldness can serve as a strategy of survival for those navigating a world not made for them. Kohpeiß—thinking here with Fred Moten—recognizes that “coldness is sometimes coolness, like jazz” (126). For those complicit in the violence of institutions such as the university, meeting the cold institution with coldness while making use of the resources at hand can be a tactic of defense, especially as social justice movements are appropriated. Coldness, in this alternative register, may conserve possibilities of resistance rather than foreclose them.
To critique bourgeois coldness, Kohpeiß insists, is not to moralize against it but to name its strategies and limits. Her aim is, in her own words, “to achieve a perspective on bourgeois subjectivity that prefers its overcoming to its optimisation,” one concerned “with the world and no longer with ourselves” (98).
Part III, “The Atlantic” (following “The Aegean” and “The Mediterranean”), extends this inquiry through Black studies, tracing (with Saidiya Hartman) how Blackness and “slave agency” expose the limits of the bourgeois concept of the subject. The book thus doubles as a theory of the subject. The history of the enslaved—denied self-possession and legal personhood—and of those “burdened” individualities of freedom that came after becomes a counterpoint to the European fantasy of autonomy. While acknowledging the myriad ways Black people have been destined to social and political death, she refuses to repeat this violence, seeking instead everyday moments of resistance and modes of sociality that emerge from within the hold. Reading with Hartman, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney, among others, Kohpeiß looks to the social rather than the political—the “undercommons,” in Harney and Moten’s sense—as a site of possibilities for relation that, against the bourgeois drive toward self-preservation, refuse the primacy of the self.
At times, the book’s rhetorical power comes at the expense of nuance. In adopting a Middle Passage epistemology, Kohpeiß challenges the buoyant narratives of democracy and freedom internal to European modernity but risks excluding interpellations of Blackness that do not fit neatly within that trajectory. As Joseph Winters, following Michelle Williams, reminds us: “There is no primal, determinable cause that brings blackness into existence; there is no ur-event (like the Middle Passage) that provides one reliable knot for the different strands of blackness….relationships across blackness are complex, mobile, and unpredictable” (43). Winters’s insight underscores that theoretical configurations of Blackness are similarly diverse, sometimes in subtle ways. Moten’s theorization of Blackness as generative fugitivity, in texts such as “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh,” positions “blackness as ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence” (739), countering both traditional metaphysics and the informal theoretical current of Afropessimism. This approach, however, relies on a paraontological distinction between Blackness and Black beings, avoiding the trap of ontologizing Black life. Bourgeois Coldness navigates a space between Moten’s Black optimism and the Afropessimism of thinkers like Frank Wilderson, who sees Black existence as negatively determined by anti-Blackness. However, it does not fully engage these positions in dialogue, leaving the potential value of its own middle-ground position ambiguous.
A certain flattening of complexity also occurs in the book’s reliance on Adorno and Horkheimer’s treatment of Odysseus as a proto-bourgeois, European subject—explicitly positioned in a lineage with Columbus. While the Odyssey’s epistemic structure of exploration, mastery, naming, and homecoming does provide a mythic substrate for later European narratives, colonialism is a specifically modern formation that the Homeric world, in all its specificity, fragmented and mythic, does not straightforwardly share. By repeating Adorno and Horkheimer’s gesture, Kohpeiß inadvertently reproduces a familiar Eurocentric genealogy that claims ancient Greece—produced through encounters with the East and South—as the origin of Western civilization. The uses of the Odyssey in the works of Black writers and artists such as Derek Walcott, Ralph Ellison, and Romare Bearden, for instance, suggest alternative engagements that complicate this genealogy. Likewise, while examining contemporary Europe—“speaking with one voice” through the European Union (43)—Kohpeiß acknowledges that entry through identification is “tied to criteria of belonging” (47). Yet more attention could be paid to intra-European hierarchies, including the racialization of southern and eastern populations, the “PIGS” stereotype being one semi-recent manifestation.
These are less failings than invitations for extension. (No book can do it all!) Bourgeois Coldness is a bracing, sensitive work of diagnosis—particularly useful in a time broken apart by the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Though Kohpeiß does not employ this concept, her analysis demonstrates how “necro-being” (life within a death-making order) affects all subjects, intact and fragmented, albeit in different ways. Her question is how survival might remain possible without reproducing the world that necessitates coldness. The book—which is also about what it means to do philosophy after the critique of reason and in a broken world—does not offer solutions. Its purpose, Kohpeiß insists, is to map rather than to resolve. Yet it clearly aligns itself with an abolitionist horizon. Attempts to rescue this world by improving it are, in Kohpeiß’s view, destined to inherit its limits. Even as she traces the pervasiveness of bourgeois coldness, Kohpeiß leaves open a minimal hope: “The moments that activate coldness should be understood as conservation efforts. Coldness distances to secure something that has begun to teeter. The chance that it may fall remains” (123).
