Leah Feldman | Exhausting Internationalism

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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. It explores the waning of affective attachments to the idea of a Soviet “good life,” including Soviet multinationalism and socialist anticolonial internationalism, as well as attendant commitments to a socialist world cultural commons. Taking up minor emergent mediums from the late 1980s through the early 2000s—from video art to performance from the Caucasus and Central Asia—it recenters accounts of the collapse that have been marginalized by a focus on the metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad.

This talk 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.

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Recorded February 5, 2026. All rights to the words and ideas expressed in this video are retained exclusively by their authors. If you would like to reuse a segment of this video, please contact the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory to request permission.