What is bourgeois coldness, and how does it preserve the colonial status quo? In this conversation, Henrike Kohpeiß and Fred Moten explore coldness as an affective, political and aesthetic strategy of bourgeois self-preservation. Together, they consider what Black Study and critical theory share, and where they diverge, in revealing the work of self-preservation performed by the bourgeois subject.

Henrike Kohpeiß is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Transformation Lab, studying affects of Transformation, the relationship between crises and transformation and the notion of Transformation Literacy. Henrike’s book Bourgeois Coldness was published in September 2025 by Divided Publishing.

Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory.