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16.07.2020
In a time when 'internationalization' and 'diversity' have become key areas universities are expected to excel in, it may seem an almost self-evident endeavor to install a memorial for a figure as influential and internationalist as Du Bois, whose connection to the Humboldt University outlasted two ideologically very different political systems. Planned to be positioned in the ground floor of the main building, the memorial, which will start production as soon as the last funding has been secured, reveals an image right at its center that "exist[s] in virtually every student's life and family album, and commonly serve[s] as vehicle[s] of recognition, remembrance and commemoration": the class photograph. What are the main considerations underlying the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial's concept and design? How has it evolved so far? And what can such a memorial realistically achieve?
17.08.2022
In early 1944, shortly after the liberation of Kyiv, the Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952) returned home from evacuation and was confronted firsthand with the horrors of the Holocaust. This encounter moved him to pen the passionate essay "Muzeyen fun shand" ("Museums of Shame"). [...] He suggested gathering pictures, documents, and tools of this terrible time that were to be displayed in so-called museums of shame in "every major city in the world and in every point of German population." [...] Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there were plans to fully open the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center by 2023 - though those plans have certainly been hindered by the latest war of aggression on the territory of Ukraine. [...] However, even prior to the Russian war against Ukraine, the Memorial Center was already shrouded in controversy. Some critics were wary that certain funders - Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin - would seek to turn the site into an outlet for Kremlin propaganda with an anti-Ukrainian bias that focused predominantly on Ukrainian collaborators. While a number of Ukrainians were indeed collaborators during the Holocaust, even more Ukrainians became victims of the Nazis. Other critics thus argue that a sober look at the crimes committed by Ukrainians as well as by the German occupiers is a sign of the mature civil society which has emerged in Ukraine.
07.03.2023
In the retrospect of almost a decade, the year 2015 seems to offer at least two openings which can help us better understand and localize the "end of theory" narratives that began to take hold sometime around the end of the millennium. Rita Felski's much-discussed and much-maligned 2015 book, "The Limits of Critique", construed the long history of "critique" as largely continuous with the more recent (postwar) idea of "theory," which allowed her to question the presupposed progressivity and utility of the dominant critical-theoretical discourses of late 20th-century North American academia. In the same year, Philipp Felsch's "Der lange Sommer der Theorie" (which was recently published in English as "The Summer of Theory") went so far as to assign specific dates, 1960–1990, and tended to define theory not as a purely academic product, but as a much wider cultural movement. Between the two books, questions of the difference between theory and critique, their specific institutional locus within and beyond academia, became objects of acute concern.
28.02.2023
In present-day Germany, research on postwar academia, up through the 1960s and beyond, requires no special justification. But from the North American side, the point of this scholarly activity - including the many new editions and a flood of archive-based publications - is much less obvious. For the most well-established figures of the period, the primary international canonizations were already part of the first waves of the reception, the theoretical tectonics established themselves accordingly, and the theories were established as theories - which are in many quarters presumed to be just as reliable today as they were decades ago. One might say that the international and North American reception of European theory has manifested an overall tendency toward sedimentation, while the dynamic of scholarly research about theory, including the archival unearthing of new sources, tends to complicate and undermine the established corpus of "primary texts."
09.10.2019
Like identical twins, philosophy and history seem to be tied together in an uneasy way. On the one hand, philosophy is very concerned to engage with the history of philosophy. There are not many other branches of knowledge so preoccupied with continually referring back to their own 'classics'. On the other hand, quite a few of these classical authors did not hold history in high esteem. Aristotle, as is well known, even preferred drama to history, arguing that the latter merely concerned contingent issues. The marriage between history and philosophy quite often results in monsters like Hegelian philosophy of history: grand narratives that are all too easy to criticize and to debunk. If we want to better understand this complex relationship between philosophy and history, it might be worth turning to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg.
22.11.2017
Das undatierte englischsprachige Manuskript von "Apocalypse and Politics" von Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) stammt vermutlich aus den späten 1960er Jahren. In diesem in seiner Originalfassung im ZfL Blog erstmals veröffentlichten Text stellt der Berliner Religionsphilosoph Überlegungen zur Vergleichbarkeit messianischer Kulte und der Entwicklung nationalistischer Befreiungsbewegungen in Afrika und Asien an und plädiert dabei für einen religionssoziologischen Ansatz.
29.06.2020
The resistance of aesthetics consists in the mode of experience that art affords, which promotes individual consciousness and political awareness by exploding the dualisms with which we tend to simplify things: centralization and decentralization, totality and fragmentation, communism and neoliberal capitalism, dictatorship and democracy. Although the formal complexity and ambiguous compositions met in works by the likes of Picasso, Woolf, and Schönberg most obviously support this sort of experience, it can be drawn out of all art to various degrees. Indeed, what distinguishes these modernists from the artists who came before and after them is how they set aesthetic experience as the aim of artistic production. But no work of art can be reduced either to the whole or to the sum of its parts; either to systematicity or to formlessness. Strictly speaking, the opposing ideals of classical and critical aesthetics are not two distinct aesthetic positions, but the theoretical limits between which art unfolds. By analogy, totalitarian governance and social atomism are not oppositional political materializations, but the two extremes at which politics ends.
15.02.2021
In the age of mechanical reproducibility, the 'aura' surrounding works of art undergoes a crisis. The contemporary relevance of Walter Benjamin's thesis - in its societal, aesthetic, and media-theoretical significance - is illustrated by former U.S. president Donald Trump's purported ownership of "Les deux soeurs" ("Two Sisters"), also known as "Sur la terrasse" ("On the Terrace"), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Journalist Mark Bowden, who caught a glimpse of the painting when he was invited to Trump's jet in 1997, describes the event in an article for Vanity Fair: "He showed off the gilded interior of his plane - calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see … what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. 'Worth $10 million,' he told me." Of course, this is the attitude that one might expect from a real-estate mogul turned art collector (although not from a future president). In ignorance of both form and content - to say nothing of their unity - the painting is reduced to its sheer exchange value, concentrated in the signature guaranteeing its authenticity.
07.05.2021
Rezension zu Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps. A Biography of Jacques Derrida", London / New York: Verso, 2020.
13.01.2020
Where Haas sees the narrative dividing into "Streberwitz" and "Kriegsdarstellung" I see something more like a division between 'Witz' and 'Krieg' per se. The point and the provocation of the novel, in my view, is that Kehlmann declines to bring these two strata together, or rather: that he first insists on bringing them together, by forcing Tyll and the Thirty Years War to inhabit the same work, and then refuses to synthesize them into anything like a higher unity. The irony of the fool, in Tyll, does not acquire gravity or depth by virtue of its relationship to a reality whose hidden truths it emphatically does not reveal; and the reality of war does not find redemption or sublimation in art.