Why does mass violence barely disrupt everyday life in Europe? As atrocities unfold in Gaza, and Europe’s border regime continues to produce mass death in the Mediterranean, Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness arrives to assist in answering this question. Published in 2025 by Divided Publishing, in an English translation by Grace Nissan, the book diagnoses how European societies have developed a “bourgeois coldness.” This affective regime is understood not as the absence of feeling, but as an emotional technology that allows mass death to be processed without fundamentally disturbing the social order, or the self-image of those within it. Think of it as “air conditioning,” Kohpeiß explains. “A complex system that keeps the inside cool and comfortable, while outside, it is burning.”
The book draws on two intellectual traditions that share a common interest in how historical catastrophes shape human consciousness: the Frankfurt School of critical theory, which grew out of reflections on the Holocaust and fascism, and Black studies, which centers the experience of slavery and its afterlives. By bringing these into direct dialogue, including ideas of thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kohpeiß attempts to address one of the Frankfurt School’s major grey areas, its neglect of colonialism and chattel slavery as constitutive of European modernity, and to develop a more encompassing ontology.
She borrows the term “bourgeois coldness” from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who used it to describe the emotional indifference produced under capitalism, emphasizing self-interest above all else. Kohpeiß takes the concept much further: for her, “bourgeois” does not refer simply to a class position but to an attachment to Enlightenment rationality, morality, and legal institutions. This allows her to show how coldness operates as a broad affective habit across European societies, binding together those who have internalized this affect, while othering those who do not.
Dense in references and built up through conceptual and poetical relations rather than linear connections, Bourgeois Coldness is organized into three sections named after bodies of water: the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic, each serving as a geographical site as well as a symbolic anchor to trace how European identity has been shaped through colonial history. The main image is that of disposability rhymes across myth and history: racialized bodies surrendered to the sea. These are crew members sacrificed so that Odysseus might gain knowledge, enslaved Africans lost to the Middle Passage, and migrants drowned by the externalization of Europe's borders into the Mediterranean. The book argues that bourgeois coldness creates a series of reflecting surfaces, like the sea, on which the image and interiority of the European subject can mirror itself without going uncomfortably deep.
Operating as a genealogy of the bourgeois subject, the Aegean section opens with Kohpeiß’s reading of the famous episode in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus ties himself to the mast to hear the Sirens’ perilous song. Gifted with cunning intelligence, Odysseus hears the music but is not endangered by it. He protects himself by controlling his own exposure to experience. He feels the music but remains safe from it, while his crew, with ears plugged, feels nothing at all. Odysseus is then seen as the prototype for subjects who gain self-knowledge by maintaining distance from what threatens them, all at the cost of the experience of those around him. Beginning with this reading of the myth, Kohpeiß identifies three interlocking mechanisms that produce and maintain bourgeois subjectivity: self-criticism, bureaucracy, and self-possession. These conspire to neutralize ethical responsibility.
Self-criticism turns moral energy inward, toward personal refinement rather than structural change; bureaucracy dissolves accountability by converting human suffering into procedure. The Enlightenment notion of the self as property—which historically enabled the dispossession of enslaved Africans—constitutes the European subject through exclusion, not merely coeval with it. Together, these mechanisms form a closed loop: a subject that constantly reassures itself of its own moral standing, that absorbs ethical challenges by directing them inward, and that reproduces the conditions of colonial violence precisely through the habits it mistakes for conscience. Coldness is the emotional temperature this loop requires and produces, not numbness, but a consciously regulated distance that keeps the self aloof while others drown.
Moving to events closer to the present, the Mediterranean section delivers one of the book’s sharpest insights: empathy, compassion, and humanitarianism are not the opposite of coldness but one of its forms. The empathy felt toward refugees drowning at sea arrives as a warming device: it soothes the moral position of those who feel it without touching the structures that produce the drowning. Kohpeiß reads the case of Carola Rackete, the sea captain who defied Italian authorities to bring rescued migrants to shore, with characteristic precision. She does not dismiss Rackete’s courage, but asks what her intervention leaves intact: a moral framework in which Europeans can affirm their own goodness through humanitarian feeling while the policies and institutions that fill the sea with bodies go unquestioned. The accumulation of goodwill surrounding the Mediterranean generates a dynamic of constant mutual moral confirmation and results in a collective affect of self-affirming warmth. It keeps the emotional temperature comfortable on the inside.
The Atlantic section—the book’s most philosophically ambitious—turns to Black thinkers to sketch a different conception of subjectivity and sociality. The contrast to the bourgeois project becomes explicit. Bourgeois selfhood is self-sealing: it defines, preserves, and improves itself at the expense of the collective while striving toward completion. Blackness, in Moten’s framework, operates on entirely different terms. “Blackness” appears as a word that constantly extends its meaning, holds and moves through “irreducible difference,” and pushes for another, unknown material reality. Rather than a project of self-completion, it is what Édouard Glissant calls “consent not to be a single being”—a refusal to be bounded, definable, and self-possessing. This is not a lack or a wound but a mode of being that colonial reason cannot capture—precisely because it refuses to present itself for capture. Open-ended and relational, it refuses in ways the bourgeois subject cannot access or understand. It is not cold, but as Moten describes, “cool like jazz.”
The book examines the clash between the Frankfurt School and Black intellectual traditions by highlighting the case of Hannah Arendt to illustrate what happens when this bourgeois blindness meets a concrete historical moment. When nine Black children integrated into a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, amid violent white resistance in 1957, Arendt published an essay that stunned many readers. Rather than reckoning with the lived experience of racism, she analyzed whether desegregation was strategically sound, denying the children their experience and their agency. Kohpeiß argues this is not a personal failing but a structural one: Arendt’s commitment to her own intelligence fails to acknowledge its own limitations and makes it impossible to recognize forms of knowledge that fall outside of the European Enlightenment notion of rational categories. This becomes especially clear in her reading of a photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students walking toward the school surrounded by police and a jeering white crowd. Arendt sees only a scared child sent to martyrdom by inconsiderate Black parents. But Eckford’s composed, distant appearance is not reflective of passivity. It is, in Moten’s terms, a “nonperformance, which bears the story, the ongoing history, of an already existing alternative.” She refuses to be legible on bourgeois terms. And it is precisely that refusal which Arendt’s analysis cannot see, exposing the blindness and intrinsic anti-blackness at the heart of bourgeois clarity.
How do you feel now?
It’s chilling to read Bourgeois Coldness during a time of genocides. In the book’s introduction, Kohpeiß places Gaza within the same historical lineage as the catastrophes that shaped modernity: possible, then as now, because of coldness. Coldness explains why violence against racialized bodies does not alarm those who don't experience it directly, and why those within the bourgeois order assume it will never reach them.
The ongoing destruction of Gaza has been filmed, streamed, posted, and documented in real time, yet European governments have predominantly continued their diplomatic, economic, and military relationships of support with Israel largely unchanged. The “good ones” appealed to international law to hold their governments accountable—falling into exactly the trap Kohpeiß identifies: confusing legality with legitimacy. Less edifyingly, others demanded that Palestinians perform an idealized form of victimhood before extending them basic human recognition, refusing to acknowledge their right to resist an almost century-long occupation. Far-right parties have entered or approached power across the European continent, fed largely by racism and border militarization. The EU's border regime has tightened further in response. The machinery of coldness is not malfunctioning. It is working exactly as designed.
By showing that coldness is not a natural state but a technology produced and reproduced by habits, institutions, and cultural norms, Kohpeiß opens new avenues for understanding why legal reform and moral education often fail to dislodge complicity with racial and colonial violence. The book’s most pressing practical questions—such as which relationships should be developed within and towards bourgeois institutions, law, and self-criticism to move beyond coldness—are deliberately left open. Kohpeiß’s reluctance to prescribe is philosophically defensible, and her essayistic style, moving between theoretical analysis, political commentary, and something closer to philosophical poetry, rewards patient reading.
Bourgeois Coldness does not always make its path clear, and one might say that it is better at diagnosing the cold than at pointing toward its relief. But maybe that’s what Kohpeiß is asking of the reader: to shut off the thermostat and start to feel like burning.
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Book cover, Henrike Kohpeiß (trans. Grace Nissan), Bourgeois Coldness, Divided Publishing 2025
