Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, he worked at the Free University Berlin from 2007-2014. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and in the German Department at Yale University and visiting professor at various art academies in Europe and the US. Avanessian is editor at large at Merve Verlag Berlin. In 2012 he founded a bilingual research platform on Speculative Poetics, including a series of events, translations and publications. Postcontemporary Angst and Fear (lecture) The 21st century marks a new dimension of time itself. That the direction of time has changed is indicated by the prominence of various phenomena of preemption such as preemptive strikes, preemptive personalities, and preemptive policing. The media are increasingly occupied not with what happened or what is happening, but what could happen (premediation). This is a helpless symptom characterised by a general loss of a real, open future and present: we have lost the future as a political object. Avanessian argues that the systematic production of fear within neoliberal politics is symptomatic of the failure to grasp the speculative temporality arriving from the future. Instead of addressing our angst facing this new post-contemporary time-complex we stick to the increasingly regressive invention of feared objects. www.spekulative-poetik.de