The Demand of Solidarity



by Stefan Zweig

Die Forderung der Solidarität. First published in „Max Brod. Festschrift zum Fünfzigsten Geburtstag“, edited by Felix Weltsch, Mährisch-Ostrau 1934. Also published in „Das Geheimnis des künstlerischen Schaffens,“ Fischer Verlag 1993. Translated into English by Manuela Kölke

“One of the most difficult problems in the lives of writers and any creative person is their relationship to the community, their undeniable duty of solidarity. And here there is an inner conflict. “Ancient enmity,” as Rainer Maria Rilke unsurpassably says, “between life and great work.” The work they are supposed to create and the intellectual, the artistic expression they want to give to their work, actually condemn writers to seclusion. In order to concentrate, in order to grasp the problems of the time as clearly as possible, they would have to detach themselves completely from what is happening, to stand alone, to think for themselves.

To remain impartial, they would have to stay clear of all prejudices, outside any group, any community. But it is precisely the effect of their work that cancels this remoteness and brings them back into relation with the real world. Poets, artists, by expressing themselves in their work, address others and thereby give others a right, a right to themselves.  As they call upon the world to share their feelings and ideas with them, the world turns to them in the likeness of countless individuals who now demand compassion for their personal misery and fate. The fame accorded to writers and artists is nothing but the sum of a wealth of human trust they have earned, and this trust inevitably turns into a demand. Since people regard them as the ones who understand and know better, they rightly demand that they also be the ones who help. Since they perceive them to be leaders in spirit, they claim that they should support them at every opportunity, and therefore actually demand that they leave behind seclusion and solitude, and with it, however, the indispensable precondition for their work. They want them, who have a powerful command of the word, to speak out on every occasion that concerns them and to express the same solidarity that they feel towards them.

Stefan Zweig

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Theory of Nonconceptuality



The term “Unbegrifflichkeit” has initially sparked my interest due to my recent investment the notion nonconceptuality. I began to read the book with the same title by Hans Blumenberg, which has been published posthumously in 2007 with Suhrkamp. I started to translate some passages, which I consider key to his approach of the nonconceptual.

This is a first passage from p. 75-76 of “Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit” by Hans Blumenberg
Translated by Manuela Kölke

“The distant noise of a massive body, or the perception of a trace, allow for the possibilities (and alarm the corresponding precautious behaviors) that it might be a mammoth. Just as important as the admission of this possibility is the other moment that it can also be excluded, and thereby set off a consolidation of the situation or a change of attention. “It is not a mammoth” – that is, according to Kant, an infinite judgment, that is, a logically almost worthless one, because it has diminished the infinity of possibilities only by one; in the finite horizon of a situation, however, for the logic of the lifeworld, this exclusion may be of the highest value. In the ‘negation,’ the ‘decision of reality about the awareness of possibilities’ is taken note of and brought into knowledge. Freud once remarked that the dream-consciousness is a consciousness which knows no negation. (Interpretation of Dreams, 169 ff. Merleau-Ponty, Lectures I 80). Because it knows no concept. Awakening has the character of negation against the dream because it allows the concept again. The metaphoric, as well, does not know the negation, unless, in the conceptual statement [Feststellung] toward the context of the metaphoric, that one metaphor does not get along with another, that there is interference between them, and so on. The ‘concept’ allows us to recognize and introduce imaginatively what is not there, which is according to experience not present. The concept thus allows to identify ‘gaps in the context of experience’ because it is related to the absent – but not only to make it present but also to leave it absent. Again and again, it must be said that to speak about something, which is not perceived and given is the actual mental achievement.”

Superposing Ends – In Sight of Posthumanities



In the recent decades, digital technologies have not only brought about huge ruptures and disruptions in the field of digital commu­nication and information processing. They also have extended the repertoire of the methods of inquiry towards understanding human and non-human interaction. – I will here refer to ‘non-human entities’ mostly as technological/digital/discrete entities. – This shift has thus not only impacted our everyday lives, but all fields of research and education in the arts and sciences. In contrast to most STEM fields in which new technology is continuously incorporated and applied, the Digital Humanities have emerged as the description for those n­ew digital modes of research and education that have been introduced into the hu­manities discipline.
Recent debates focus on the emergence of the Digital Humanities as a discursive construct,1 on how digital technology is applied to various disciplines and their practices,2 on the implications of Big Data,3 on the materialist dimension of digital cultures4 and on their implicit political turn5 when it comes to accessibility and manipulation of data, in the media, for example.

In my presentation, however, I will focus briefly on the different ends between traditional and Digital Humanities, and on their superposition, that is, on how their tasks can be rethought, reoriented by fusing them together into a Posthumanities. I will also focus on the conditions of a posthuman inquiry and its implications for a posthuman science. Continue reading →

An Unoccupied and Unoccupiable Place



“Ein unbesetzter und unbesetzbarer Ort” by Nikolai Roskamm
Translated by Manuela Kölke

In La Revolution urbaine, a founding text of critical urban research, Henri Lefebvre describes the city as a “pseudo-concept” that no longer corresponds to “any societal object” (1990, 65). In the mid-1980s, Jürgen Habermas, in his essay “Modern and Postmodern Architecture” asks the question, whether the concept of the city is not outdated because it no longer keeps pace with the constant change of the urban form of life (1985, 24). At about the same time, the urban sociologist Peter Saunders speaks of the “sociological irrelevancy” of the city and its traditional determining factors (1987, 17, similarly Häußermann / Siebel 1978). The planning theorist John Friedmann formulates at the beginning of the millennium succinctly: “The city is dead” (2002, XI). Quite recently, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid – two prominent representatives of the critical urban studies – are writing in a programmatic text about their theory of planetary urbanization: “The category of the ‚city’ has today become obsolete as an analytical social science tool” (2014, 162).

The subject of my text is precisely this useless division, this inoperable and traditional concept of the city.

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TeleologiⒶ



Lecture by Catherine Malabou on “TeleologiⒶ”
Transcribed from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company recording from June 9, 2017

The topic of the conference is extremely interesting, and I want to congratulate you for that. And it gave me a lot to think about. So, in the beginning I thought, I just use and old talk from my drawers on Hegel, but in fact, I decided to write something completely new, which I hope will be the basis of future work.

Why not call things by their names? Why not state it radically? The absolute other of teleology is anarchy. There cannot be any sustainable intermediary position. As it seems, it is either teleology or anarchy. If we are to take seriously the lessons of postmodernity, which is all about the ends of the ends, if we are to take seriously the conclusions of the different deconstructions of metaphysics, if we acknowledge the collapse of socialism, if we refuse to define living beings as finalized organisms, if we accept to take for granted that there cannot exist something like a historical, moral, political or natural telos, we then need to identify the space opened by such a non-existence as that of anarchy. As French philosopher of anarchy, Vivian Garcia affirms in his book “For anarchists all teleology is vain.”
The three principle domains where teleology is supposed to or has been supposed to operate are ontology, politics, and biology. How is anarchy at work in these three domains secretly or overtly dismantling their orientations? This is what I intend to explore here. The immediate problem that such an exploration finds itself confronted with, is that first, after Nietzsche and even more with Heidegger who are the first philosophers to challenge the authority of ontological or metaphysical teleology, second, after the transition accomplished by libertarian radical political movements from traditional anarchism to what is now called post-anarchism, third, after the clear Darwinian affirmation of the biological real that natural selection is devoided of any goal or direction, that never was a coherent, consistent elaboration of the concept of anarchy able to hold these three dimensions together.
We are still currently in need of a rigorous determination first of the kind of ontology, second the kind of practical orientation, and third the kind of significant approach to life that would really allow us to genuinely to inhabit a world, to inhabit a non-teleological world. In other terms, anarchy however explicitly conceptually at work in the three domains, again, of philosophy, politics, and science, or biology is still in the shadow and this even in anarchism itself.
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