Video is now available from our February 5, 2026, Theorizing the Present event with Leah Feldman, Exhausting Internationalism.
Why did most ’90s eulogies to the “end of history” not see the returns of the global new right coming? Feldman’s book in-progress, Feeling Collapse, looks beyond the geopolitical analysis of the dissolution of the Soviet Union that fueled the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, to instead read the collapse through shifting attachments that shaped the dissolution of the Soviet empire and rise of ethno-nationalisms.
In this talk, Feldman draws on Kira Muratova’s 1989 Asthenic Syndrome, one of the last films banned by Soviet authorities, alongside Sergei Parajanov’s filmic collages produced during his incarceration, to understand the exhaustion of socialist humanist internationalism as it bears on our authoritarian present. Retracing the collapse of the Soviet Union today does more than simply expose the new right’s ascent—an echo to Fukuyama that resounds as the “ends of liberalism.” While often marked by failure, exhaustion, stasis, and death, these works also attempted to reorganize rhythms of desire to explore alternative senses of being together in time amid this transitional moment.
