Kontrapunkt presents: A lecture by Isabell Lorey on the current practices and potentials of socialised care that can be the basis for a democracy in the present.

The present, which undoubtedly presents us with extreme conditions of precarity in work and life, also carries and opens a field in which a shared precariousness in mutual dependency can be preserved. A new conception of precariousness is based on the queer/black and ultimately bad debt, a debt to mutual dependency, in terms of endlessly indebted relations of care. Against the masculine, security inducing and future-driven dept that establishes fixed individualized subjectivities, one that does not exploit labour, but social relations and life, and which is based on the relationship borrower-lender, Isabell invokes queer debt as a means of dispersion of care and politics in the present.

After the lecture in English, in conversation with Artan Sadiku, a discussion surrounding the question of how to rid ourselves of the debt subjectivity position that the current system induces upon us and how to organize a dispersed socialized care in order to fight the temporal scarcity of the present follows.

Isabell Lorey is a political theorist and a Queer Studies Professor at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne and works for transversal texts (transversal.at), the publication platform of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp). She is the author of several books, including State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory.

In 2009 Isabell Lorey habilitated at the University of Vienna with a study on society formation and the consolidation of rule, published by Diaphanes in 2011 as Figuren des Immunen. Lorey is probably most well known for her book Die Regierung der Prekären, which has since been translated into five languages and for which Judith Butler wrote the foreword. In it, Lorey deals with the insecurity that is spreading through society, social uncertainty in the neo-liberal context, the associated gender politics, and the possibilities for change.

Lorey has served as a visiting professor at Berlin University of the Arts and Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as teaching at the universities of Basel, Vienna and Kassel where she taught social and cultural sciences, feminist and postcolonial theory.

Artan Sadiku is an anarchist activist and theorist from Skopje and his interests are theories of the subject, political economy, queer thinking and radical practices in politics and arts. He was a motivator of the social movement in Macedonia and initiated the School for politics and critique, and а founder of the Social Centre Dunja and Culture Club Syndicate and the activist movement Solidarnost. Currently he is organizing the KRIK festival for critical culture that takes place in Skopje.