About

I am an author and philosopher writing about property, social change, and sometimes even life and death.

After growing up in the countryside (where I still prefer to live) I studied philosophy, history, and literature in many cities (Kiel, Tübingen, Berlin, Cambridge, Potsdam). I worked at Humboldt-University, Berlin, from 2009 to 2019. During that period, I also spent one semester in Cambridge UK (as visiting PhD student) and one in New York (as Heuss lecturer at the New School for Social Research). In 2020/2021 I held a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (PhantomAid) at Verona University in Italy.

My general audience book Revolution für das Leben came out with S.Fischer in September 2020. It was critically acclaimed as “the new bible of intellectual resistance” and is being translated into French, Korean, Spanish, Greek, and Czech. In my current writing, I explore the notion of freedom: how can we overcome its indifference in the face of unprecedented losses of livelihood?

Praxis und Revolution, the book based on my PhD, appeared in German in 2018; an English translation has come out with Columbia University Press. My work on the genealogy of property builds on an article that I published in Critical Times in 2020: “Ownership’s Shadow“. I also enjoy writing literary essays, like this “Brief aus dem Wald” in Le Monde diplomatique.

CV