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, where I investigated the connection between authoritarianism and possessive individualism.

My first 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, Croatian and Czech. In my forthcoming monograph Bleibefreiheit, I develop an ecofeminist concept of freedom that seeks freedom in time rather than space.

Praxis und Revolution, the book based on my PhD, appeared in German in 2018; an English version has come out with Columbia University Press, a translation into Farsi is underway. 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.