Dr. Oxana Timofeeva:
Emigration as the School of Dialectics

This talk examines the relevance of Bertolt Brecht’s exile in a new era where the old patriotic machine converts the concept of home into a mobilization for slaughter. Brecht called exile “the best possible school for dialectics." To enter this school today is to learn how to survive the collapse of one's world by transforming the trauma of flight into a tool for resistance. As Brecht writes in his poem Concerning the Label Emigrant: "Yes, we ourselves / Are almost like rumors of crimes, which escaped / Over the frontier." Following Mladen Dolar’s recent philosophy of rumors, with references to my personal experience, I try to discuss exile as a voice without a subject, a persistent leak in the ideological facade of the nation-state. Isn't this "rumor" the form in which truth can survive when the homeland has been hijacked by fascism?

Oxana Timofeeva is a researcher at the Universität der Künste Berlin, a member of the artistic collective Chto Delat, and the author of books Freud’s Beasty Boys (2025), Solar Politics (2022), How to Love a Homeland (2020), History of Animals (Bloomsbury 2018), This is not That (2022), and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009). Her new book On the Soul is forthcoming in 2026.