Previous Semesters

02.07.2024 – Freischwebende Intellektuelle und die Not der geistigen Arbeiter. Die ökonomischen Grundlagen von Kopfarbeit und die Soziologie der Zwischenkriegszeit - Monika Wulz

Lecture

Karl Mannheims Begriff der «freischwebenden Intellektuellen» zeichnete ein Bild von Intellektuellen, die aus einer distanzierten Position Kritik an Staat und Gesellschaft üben, und prägte damit die Intellektuellengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die Herkunft von Mannheims Konzept lässt sich in die Debatten um die «Not der geistigen Arbeiter» in der Zwischenkriegszeit verfolgen: Die Auswirkungen der Hyperinflation nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg entfachten damals eine politisch kontroverse Diskussion um die ökonomischen Grundlagen von Kopfarbeit. Der Vortrag behandelt die vergessenen Ökonomien in der (Wissens-)Soziologie der 1920er Jahre. 

Monika Wulz studierte Philosophie, Kunstgeschichte und Slawistik (Slowenisch) an der Universität Wien; Promotion in Philosophie mit einer Arbeit zur Epistemologie Gaston Bachelards. Ihr Forschungsprojekt „Phantasie, Utopien, Hypothesen, Abstraktion. Provisorisches Wissen in sozio-ökonomischen Verhältnissen ca. 1880–1930“ befasst sich mit der epistemologischen wie der sozialen Funktion provisorischen Wissens im Zeitalter energetischer Theorien; es fragt nach der Thematisierung epistemischer und sozialer Unverhältnisse innerhalb ökonomisch bedingter Denkprozesse sowie nach den Ideen ihrer Regulierung oder energetischen Selbstregulation. Seit April 2014 ist Monika Wulz wissenschaftliche Assistentin an der Professur für Wissenschaftsforschung der ETH Zürich. Zuvor war sie von 2008 bis 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin und 2011 bis 2012 als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Seminar für Philosophie der Technischen Universität Braunschweig. Zudem hatte sie Research Fellowships am IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Wien (2011) und am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Kolleg des Exzellenzclusters „Kulturelle Grundlagen von Integration“ der Universität Konstanz (2012–2013) inne, 2013/14 vertrat sie die Juniorprofessur für Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften an der Universität Konstanz. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in der französischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie und historischen Epistemologie sowie in der Geschichte sozialer und ökonomischer Wissenstheorien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.

Language: German.

Contact: Prof. Christina Wessely (christina.wessely@leuphana.de)

25.06.2024 – On the Madness of Dr. Hubert Dana Goodale: Animal Agriculture, Experimental Endocrinology, and the Industrial Ecology of Sex in Early 20th Century America - Gabriel N. Rosenberg.

Lecture

This talk explores the early career of the prolific poultry geneticist, Dr. Hubert Dana Goodale, and, in particular, experiments that he conducted in the 1910s in which he grafted hen ovaries into the bodies of castrated juvenile roosters to experimentally induce changes in the birds' secondary sex characteristics. Although these experiments were an important model for later human endocrinological inquiry, Goodale actually aimed to solve a notorious problem for commercial egg farmers: how to better detect and more quickly cull the half of all chicks that did not profitably contribute to egg production, the so-called “male chick problem.” Goodale’s experiments challenge how contemporary scholars narrate histories of sex, science, and agriculture, revealing an underlying transformation of an interspecies ecology of flesh that rippled through human and animal bodies alike across the 20th century.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University and a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is the author of The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural American (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and the co-author of Feed the People!: Democratizing Food Politics in a Warming World (Basic Books, Forthcoming). He is currently writing a history of livestock breeding’s entanglement with human race science, Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in Modern America, and, with his colleagues at the MPI-WG, editing a volume on animal mobilities in the history of science. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and he writes frequently on food politics for popular publications such as The New Republic, Vox.com, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He has held fellowships at Yale University, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, and the University of Pittsburgh.

This event is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the Gender and Diversity Research Network, and the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group.

Language: English

Organisation: Ben Trott (ben.trott@leuphana.de)
 

25.06.2024 – Trans Liminalities: Histories from Weimar and Nazi Germany - Zavier Nunn

Lecture

Focusing on trans women’s subjectivities, this talk explores the micro and macro registers of how everyday trans life was experienced, policed, and cut short across the Weimar and Nazi regimes, sometimes in surprising – but always uneven – ways.

Zavier Nunn will be a Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He was previously Postdoctoral Associated in “Histories of the Transgender Present” in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Department at Duke University. His first monography, Liminal Lives: Trans Feminine Histories from Weimar and Nazi Germany is under review at Duke University Press. He is currently working on a history of legal sex change and trans masculine lives under Nazism, as well as historicising ‘trans’ adjacent to fields of knowledge production in modern Europe. Across his research, Nunn uses micro-historical methods to unpick how macro systems are stitched together. He is published in Past & Present, Gender & History, and German History.

This event is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the Gender and Diversity Research Network, and the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group.

Language: English

Organisation: Ben Trott (ben.trott@leuphana.de) 
 

11.06.2024 – CCS Colloquium - Christoper Weikenmeier

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium takes place three times per semester and gives CCS members the opportunity to present and discuss ongoing research and writing projects.

In this session, Christopher Weikenmeier will hold give a talk with the following title: "Death is not Enough". Institutionality and Death in Contemporary Art.

"Drawing on recent work by artists Ima-Abasi Okon and Ligia Lewis, the presentation will consider aesthetic strategies of staging deadness and dying that are specific to and contingent upon the institution. As the continued use of the metaphor of the dead institution (most likely originating in G.W.F. Hegel's early theological writings) suggests, the institution and death rarely coincide; both the institution and death tend to survive themselves. While it is usually assumed that the deadness of an institution is nothing more than an index of its failure (as a crisis of its legitimacy), recent art practices of 'deadening' the institution point towards the institution as an advantageous site for engaging with the necropolitical perforation of contemporary life."

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Anne Gräfe. This session will take place in English.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/zentren/center-for-critical-studies/kolloquium.html

Kontakt: heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de

10.06.2024 – Governing Memory in the Aftermath of Far-Right Terrorism - Robert Nilsson Mohammadi

Lecture

Victims of far-right terrorism are often left to cope with their losses alone, sometimes in situations where institutional responses perpetuate the violence. Victims advocate for recognition, investigation, accountability, and remembrance. The reception of this type of memory activism typically involves cities. However, signs indicate that the relations between victim initiatives and municipal authorities do not always run smoothly. This presentation explores urban political administration as a site of memory production, where memory is both a subject to be governed and a means for governance. The exploration focuses on Malmö, Sweden, whose super-diverse and post-migratory population became the target of a lone wolf terrorist. Racial profiling by the police and journalists rendered the terrorist invisible, allowing him to operate undetected for seven years (2003–2010) while casting suspicion on his victims, their perceived groups, and multiculturalism as a way of life. After the killer was exposed, the police issued a warning to all those “looking non-Swedish.” Sweden’s Minister of Integration interpreted the deeds as a sign of failed migrant integration rather than racism. The judicial system failed to consider his political motives, despite clear evidence in the form of a manifesto. Unlike most acts of right-wing extremist political violence in Sweden, public memory has developed around the events in Malmö. Since 2020, the municipality has collaborated with a victim and survivor initiative to create an anti-racist monument, marking the memory of the lone wolf terrorist as one instance in an ongoing history of vulnerability and subjugation in Sweden’s racialized class-society. How was the issue embedded in the politico-administrative governance of Malmö? Which spaces for memories have been opened and closed during the process? How does the case enlighten other local cases of memory work, and memory-activism, in the aftermath of far-right terrorism?

Dr. Robert Nilsson Mohammadi is affiliated with Malmö University, Sweden. He has conducted research on the social movements of the 1960s and subsequently focused on urban history. Currently, he is researching participatory methods for exploring and writing history, especially practices guided by the concept of “sharing authority.” Since 2019, when Nilsson Mohammadi began working closely with a victim and survivor initiative in Malmö, he has studied the formation of memory following the activities of a lone wolf terrorist in Malmö, as well as memory in the aftermath of far-right terrorism from a translocal, comparative perspective.

Organisation: Prof. Monika Schoop (monika.schoop@leuphana.de) 

Language: English

This event is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
 

21.05.2024 – CCS Colloquium - Nicolas Schneider

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium takes place three times per semester and gives CCS members the opportunity to present and discuss ongoing research and writing projects.

In this session, Nicolas Schneider will hold give a talk with the following title: "The Political History of Diremption". This session will be held together with the colloquium of the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition.

"What role does negativity play in the constitution and reproduction of our contemporary predicament? How can the relation between creative destruction and a polycrisis with no way out be conceptualised? This talk explores Gillian Rose’s foray into a ‘political history of diremption’, according to which modern capitalist society emerged through and as a specific form of separation between ethics and law. To comprehend the spiralling dialectic that obtains in diremption, Rose proposes speculation on new beginnings."

Nicolas Schneider is research fellow at the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM).

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Anne Gräfe. This session will take place in English.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/zentren/center-for-critical-studies/kolloquium.html

Kontakt: heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

15.05.2024 – Krypto-Populismus: Modernisierungsversprechen und autoritäre Wiederverzauberung der Finanz in El Salvador - Tobias Boos

Lecture

„Disruption der globalen Finanzmärkte“, „Währungsrebellion von unten“, „technologische Revolution“. Mit diesen Verheißungen werden sogenannte Kryptowährungen und Blockchain-Technologien seit vielen Jahre angepriesen. Im Jahr 2021 machte dann das kleine zentralamerikanische Land El Salvador von sich reden. Präsident Nayib Bukele hatte verkündet Bitcoin zum gesetzlichen Zahlungsmittel des Landes zu machen. Aus Perspektive der Populismusforschung ist der Fall interessant. Große Teile der Forschung charakterisieren den Populismus als rückwärtsgewandte und nostalgisch. Bukeles „Krypto-Populismus“ stellt hingegen eine Innovation im Repertoire populistischer Führungsfiguren dar. Bukeles Populismus enthält klassische Entwicklungsversprechen. Gleichzeitig ermöglicht es ihm der Rekurs auf ‚Kryptowährungen‘, Blockchain und neue Finanztechnologien diese zu aktualisieren, und verbindet so Autoritarismus, Technologieglaube und futuristische Ästhetik zu einem Modernisierungsversprechen.  

Language of the event: German
Organization: Benjamin Opratko (ISKO)
Contact information: benjamin.opratko@leuphana.de
Weblink for further information: Tobias Boos will talk about his research project on "The Cultural Political Economy of Bitcoin in the Global South". Further information can be found at: bitelsa.univie.ac.at
 

08.05.2024 – Four Films - Ellie Epp

Screenings

Trapline, 1975, 16mm
current, Canada, 1982, 16mm
notes in origin, Canada, 1987, 16mm
bright and dark, Canada, 1996, 16mm

“What I like in film is precision, slightness, economy of means, delight, inference, and a kind of motion that can be followed but not tagged, and makes seeing intelligent.”
Ellie Epp grew up on a farm in northern Alberta, graduated from Queen’s University, Kingston with an honours BA in philosophy, psychology and English. She then went on to complete a post-graduate diploma in film studies from the Slade School of Art in London. Epp returned to Canada to edit her first 16mm film, Trapline. Other 16mm films made in the ‘70s and ‘80s include notes in origin, current and bright and dark. In her fifties she went back to school, looking for a new approach to the epistemology of perception and representation. She completed a PhD in Neurophilosophy in 2002. Her main theoretical work, Being about: perceiving, imagining, representing, and thinking, is online at www.ellieepp.com, along with a lifetime journal project and other work in photography, garden design and experimental writing.

Language: English
Info: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en/events/four-films-by-ellie-epp
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
 

24.04.2024 – CCS Colloquium - Heiko Stubenrauch (2024)

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium takes place three times per semester and gives CCS members the opportunity to present and discuss ongoing research and writing projects.

In this session, Heiko Stubenrauch will hold give a talk with the following title: "Wunsch und Natur: Verbundenheit und Trennung im Kapitalozän". This session will be held together with the colloquium of the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition.

"Der menschengemachte Klimawandel hat sich spätestens seit den 1990er Jahren zu einem zentralen Gegenstand der philosophischen Debatte entwickelt. So unterschiedlich die Positionen von Bruno Latour und der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, von Donna Haraway und den Neuen Materialist*innen, vom Care Collective und den öko-feministischen Sorge-Theoretiker*innen auch sein mögen, sie eint, dass sie die Moderne als affektive oder imaginäre Trennungsbewegung verstehen. Diese münde in eine dualistische Weltsicht (Subjekt-Objekt; Natur-Kultur) und stelle darin die Voraussetzung einer naturbeherrschenden und -zerstörenden Haltung dar. Um die ökologische Zerstörung zu stoppen, fordern all diese Positionen die Einsicht in eine – zumeist monistisch verstandene – Verbundenheit zwischen menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Wesen, die auf die eine oder andere Weise eine ökologische Ethik ermögliche. In meinem Vortrag will ich diesen Annahmen aus einer marxistisch-sozialpsychologischen Perspektive anzweifeln: Anstatt einer dualistischen Trennung scheint mir eine zwanghafte Verbundenheit an (Konsum-)Gegenstände und Arbeitsnetzwerke der Grund dafür zu sein, dass wir an der fortschreitenden ökologischen Verwüstung partizipieren. Werden wir doch aufgrund dieser – leidenschaftlichen, weil begehrenden und wünschenden – Verbundenheit in die ökologisch fatalen Verwertungskreisläufe des Kapitals integriert. Entsprechend bedarf es eines Moments der Trennung bzw. Distanzierung von Dingen und Menschen sowie der Transformation unserer Wünsche und Fantasien, um gegen die destruktiven Dynamiken des Kapitals angehen und andersartige Verbindungen knüpfen oder einfordern zu können."

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Anne Gräfe. This session will take place in German.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/zentren/center-for-critical-studies/kolloquium.html

Kontakt: heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

24.04.2024 – Good Neighbours – Harkeerat Mangat

Lecture

For his guest lecture and discussion with Bitsy Knox, Harkeerat Mangat will string together two strands of his most recent research: musical semiosis in the context in Indian classical music and specific approaches for ethnographic filmmaking. Drawing from the methods used by Aby Warburg in the MNEMOSYNE-ATLAS, Mangat will expand on his recent research interests and uncover how they came together in his most recent film project “Fürstenplatz” (2021). Over a span of three years, Mangat collaborated with residents of a park square in Düsseldorf, Germany, working together to create a film comprising thirty, one-minute scenes that provide an impression of their neighbourhood. One year later, Mangat premiered the film in a theater play, wherein a different group of residents from the same square critiqued the film before a live audience. His film, titled "Fürstenplatz", is a model of the world; a document of a specific time and place in Düsseldorf, Germany. In his guest lecture titled “Good Neighbours”, Mangat delves into the consequences of reintroducing this model into its original context. The lecture traces his project’s trajectory, shedding light on the dynamics that were at play when Mangat gave his immediate environment the control to shape the outcome of his work.

Harkeerat Mangat is an artist and Indian classical musician. Since 2009 he has received training in Dagarvani Dhrupad from Uday Bhawalkar. Mangat is a Meisterschuler from Prof. Christopher Williams’ photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. His works have been exhibited at the Stiftung Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss; K21 Kunstssammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; Simultanhalle, Cologne; and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. He has received several prizes for his work including the Stipendium Vordemberge Gildewart (2021), Peter-Mertes Stipendium (2021), and Kulturstiftung-Rheinland Föderpreis (2020). He is currently working on a dissertation in Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Language: English
Info: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en/events/harkeerat-mangat-good-neighbours
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
 

23.04.2024 – Vorzeitige Ruhestände. Zum Motiv des Rückzugs in der Nachgeschichte der Kritischen Theorie - Magnus Klaue

Vortrag

"Was als Wirkungsgeschichte der Kritischen Theorie erzählt wird, ist meistens die Wirkungsgeschichte Theodor W. Adornos, die zugleich (von Habermas über Honneth bis Lessenich) eine Zerfallsgeschichte ist. Indessen gehört zu ihr auch eine Geschichte der Nichtwirkung: die Geschichte dessen, was am Wege liegengelassen und nie wieder aufgenommen wurde. Es lassen sich gute Gründe für die Behauptung finden, daß die Wirkungsgeschichte der Kritischen Theorie wesentlich die Geschichte solchen Liegenlassens ist. Als Max Horkheimer in den frühen sechziger Jahren - Adorno stand erst am Beginn seiner rasanten akademischen Karriere in Frankfurt - seinen Lebensmittelpunkt nach Montagnola in der Schweiz verlagerte, bemühte er sich mehrfach vergeblich, jemanden zu finden, der seine Biographie schreibt. Einige seiner Notizen hierzu tragen die Überschrift: "Alles, was schwindet". Was schwindet, ist nicht verschwunden, sondern lebt weiter, jedoch als Residualform, im Zustand des Schwindens. Der Vortrag wird am Beispiel einiger Schüler Horkheimers Figurationen nachgehen, die dieses Schwinden nach Horkheimers Tod am 7. Juli 1973 angenommen hat: die des freiwilligen Vorruhestands bei Karl Heinz Haag; des dauerhaften Publikationsverzichts bei Peter Bulthaup; der Auswanderung aus der Universität ins Freimaurertum bei Alfred Schmidt; des katholischen Fundamentalismus bei Walter Hoeres. Die Rückwendung zu den theologischen Gruundlagen von Philosophie stellt sich dabei als Gemeinsamkeit heraus: als Erinnerung an die unbeliebte Tatsache, daß Kritische Theoretiker niemals Atheisten waren."

Magnus Klaue studierte Germanistik, Philosophie, Theater- und Filmwissenschaft an der Freien Universität Berlin, wo er 2001 seinen Magister Artium erhielt. Von 2003 bis 2008 war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Bereich Neuere deutsche Literatur bei Marlies Janz. 2008 wurde er mit der Dissertation Poetischer Enthusiasmus. Else Lasker-Schülers Ästhetik der Kolportage promoviert. Von 2008 bis 2015 arbeitete er als freier Autor, Lektor und Redakteur in Berlin. Von 2011 bis 2015 war er Redakteur im Dossier- und Lektoratsressort der Wochenzeitung Jungle World. Von 2015 bis 2020 war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Dubnow-Institut in Leipzig. Seit 2021 ist er assoziierter Forscher am Dubnow-Institut. Neben der Kritischen Theorie zählen zu seinen Arbeitsschwerpunkten die deutsch-jüdische und österreichische Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts sowie Sprachkritik und Satire in der Ästhetik der Moderne. Klaue arbeitet an einer Biographie über Max Horkheimer. Neben seiner wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit schreibt Klaue literatur- und kulturkritische Essays und Artikel für Zeitungen, Magazine und Zeitschriften wie die FAZ, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Sinn und Form und Soziopolis.

Language: German.

Contact: Prof. Christina Wessely (christina.wessely@leuphana.de).
 

17.04.2024 – "Liebesmühe" Lesung - Christina Wessely

Lecture

Christina Wessely wird aus ihrem neuen Buch Liebesmühe (Hanser, 2024) lesen. Prof. Wessely ist Mitglied des Center for Critical Studies (CCS) und des CCS Arbeitskreises „Care & Reproduction“.

„Wenn Freundinnen sie nach ihrem Befinden fragen, verstummt sie. Seit der Geburt ihres Sohnes fühlt sie sich verloren, radikal fremdbestimmt und abgeschnitten von der Welt und ihrem alten Leben. Das winzige Kind ein Fremder, den zu lieben ihr kaum gelingen will. Warum scheint plötzlich all das, wovon sie – als Wissenschaftlerin, als Feministin, als Frau – überzeugt war, nicht mehr gültig zu sein? Christina Wessely erzählt die berührende Geschichte einer Mutterwerdung und verbindet dabei eindrucksvoll persönliche und essayistische Erkundung. Mit Intelligenz und Zärtlichkeit umreißt sie ihr Selbstverständnis als emanzipierte Frau – in Kollision mit gängigen Vorstellungen von Mutterschaft, Weiblichkeit und Liebe.“ 

Language: German.
 

10.04.2024 – W’etter - Bitsy Knox

Performance

In her inaugural performance as guest lecturer this April and May at Kunstraum, Bitsy Knox will enter into a correspondence with the rain. As Knox´s prerecorded voice mixes with the amplified sound of rainwater being pumped into the Kunstraum, a subjectivity emerges that is indivisible from the ontogenesis of bodies and materials in the space. Unfolding along an indeterminate dramaturgy, Knox investigates the porosity of the authorial ‘I’ as it finds itself in a heightened state of attention, conditioned by its constructed environment. A large lump of locally-sourced clay becomes the medium through which a shared language of call and response emerges. Its changing shape over the next four weeks attests to a collective exchange between Knox, the students and the weather. 

Bitsy Knox is a trans-disciplinary artist, radio maker, and writer. In recent years, she has performed or exhibited work at n.b.k. (Berlin), Klosterruine (Berlin), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Kunstverein Bielefeld, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), TENT (Rotterdam), Exile Gallery (Vienna), Organhaus Art Centre (Chongqing), MACBA (Barcelona), and W139 (Amsterdam). Her writing has appeared in publications by e-flux, TABLOID Press, Pure Fyction, A Prior Magazine, and Sternberg Press, among others. Bitsy hosts theSomething Like on Cashmere Radio (Berlin) and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio. In recent years, she has worked with Performance Space New York, Kunstverein in Hamburg (with Montez Press Radio), Kölnischer Kunstverein, and Wellcome Trust/Mindscapes/Gropius Bau on radio programming. Bitsy Knox grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

Language: English
Info: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en/events/bitsy-knox-w-etter
Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
 

09.04.2024 – Seven New Books in Critical Studies and Digital Cultures

At the beginning of the 2024 summer semester, the Center for Critical Studies and the Center for Digital Cultures invite you to an event introducing seven new books written or edited by members of the two centers. Each work will be briefly introduced by authors and editors, providing a glimpse of the heterogeneity of the research and writing being carried out within and beyond the Leuphana University School of Culture and Society.

Contact: ben.trott@leuphana.de

***

Timon Beyes. 2024. Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social. Stanford University Press.

We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color's force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social. 

Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with color's allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe's chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers' moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard's films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl's Adorno's Grey.

Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization—a "chromatics of organizing"—that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
 

Christina Wessely. 2024. Liebesmühe. Hanser

Wenn Freundinnen sie nach ihrem Befinden fragen, verstummt sie. Seit der Geburt ihres Sohnes fühlt sie sich verloren, radikal fremdbestimmt und abgeschnitten von der Welt und ihrem alten Leben. Das winzige Kind ein Fremder, den zu lieben ihr kaum gelingen will. Warum scheint plötzlich all das, wovon sie – als Wissenschaftlerin, als Feministin, als Frau – überzeugt war, nicht mehr gültig zu sein? Christina Wessely erzählt die berührende Geschichte einer Mutterwerdung und verbindet dabei eindrucksvoll persönliche und essayistische Erkundung. Mit Intelligenz und Zärtlichkeit umreißt sie ihr Selbstverständnis als emanzipierte Frau – in Kollision mit gängigen Vorstellungen von Mutterschaft, Weiblichkeit und Liebe.
 

Anna Kipke, Mimmi Woisnitza u.a. (Hg.) 2023. Ins Bild kommen. Spielräume der Kunstkritik. Brill | Fink

Wie lassen sich die Vielfalt und Vielstimmigkeit der gegenwärtigen Kunstkritik erfassen? Der Band gibt Antworten in 35 paradigmatischen Kritiken. Die Autor:innen greifen die Stimmen, Perspektiven und Schreibweisen anderer prominenter Kritiker:innen auf und entfalten in kurzen experimentellen Formen die Potenziale der Kunstkritik. Wie würde der Aufklärer Denis Diderot über eine Ausstellung der Kunst des 21. Jahrhunderts schreiben? Wie könnte eine nie geschriebene Kritik von Caroline Schlegel zu Schillers Gedichten klingen? Was erfahren wir in einer Ausstellung Gauguins mit den Werken Franz Fanons im Gepäck? Der Band schafft in fiktionalen und transhistorischen Dialogen Spielräume, in denen sich das Schreiben performativ entfaltet, in denen Identitäten entstehen, ohne festgeschrieben zu werden, in denen Urteile gefunden und situiert werden. Weit davon entfernt, in eine angebliche Krise zu verfallen, zeigt sich, wie Kunstkritik Diskurse prägen und kritisch mitgestalten kann.
 

Andreas Bernard. 2024. Der Trost der Flipper. Klett-Cotta.

Funkelnde Flipperautomaten stehen im Mittelpunkt von Andreas Bernards autobiografischer Erzählung. Die Entdeckung der Geräte in der Kindheit. Die Streifzüge durch die Lokale des Viertels, in denen sich das Gespür für die Standorte der Maschinen ebenso herausprägt wie das innere Bild der Heimatstadt. Und das Flippern als Linderungsmittel gegen Einsamkeit und Langeweile und später als Vehikel einer ersten Liebe.

Flipperautomaten standen zwischen den 1960er und 1990er Jahren in fast jeder Kneipe, jeder Bar, jedem Spielsalon. In den Filmen der Nouvelle Vague und des neuen deutschen Kinos von Wenders und Fassbinder, in den frühen Romanen von Modiano, Murakami und Rainald Goetz hatten sie ihren festen Platz. Ausgehend von den Spielautomaten erzählt Andreas Bernard die Geschichte einer Jugend und einer Stadt im Wandel. Denn im Aussterben der Flipper Ende der neunziger Jahre spiegeln sich weitaus größere Veränderungen, die etwa die Gestalt der Städte betreffen und das Ende der Industriearbeit in Deutschland. Ähnlich wie sein Vorgängerbuch »Wir gingen raus und spielten Fußball« ist »Der Trost der Flipper« gleichermaßen zeitgeschichtlicher Kommentar und literarische Erinnerung.
 

Catharina Berents. 2023. Contessa di Castiglione. Die Femme Fatale des Second Empire. Schirmer/Mosel Verlag

Unter Napoleon III. (1808-1873), der sich 1851 per Staatsstreich zum Kaiser "von Volkes Gnaden" proklamierte, wurde die Photographie zum beliebten "Spielzeug" der Reichen, Schönen und Mächtigen. Sein Hof bediente sich systematisch des neuen Mediums, u.a. in Form von Sammelalben, und brachte zwei Persönlichkeiten hervor, die je auf ihre Art Photogeschichte schrieben. Catharina Berents und Wolfgang Kemp stellen diese beiden Protagonisten des Second Empire vor, eine photogene Femme fatale und einen begnadeten Amateur." La Castiglione" (1837-1899), eine umworbene Schönheit aus dem italienischen Hochadel, wurde berühmt als Modell, als Verkleidungskünstlerin im höfischen Festereigen und als Agentin mit dem geheimen Auftrag, den Kaiser zu verführen und für die italienische Unabhängigkeit zu gewinnen. Die Rollen zu wechseln wie ihre Roben war der Lebensinhalt der Contessa di Castiglione, die von 1856 bis 1857 tatsächlich die Geliebte Napoleons III. war. Über 400 selbst inszenierte Portraits ließ sie von Pierre-Louis Pierson anfertigen, dem Mitbesitzer des Ateliers Mayer & Pierson, das auch der Kaiser und der ganze Hof häufig frequentierten. Die berühmte Aufnahme der Contessa mit einem kleinen Bilderrahmen vor dem Gesicht sollte später zu einer feministischen Ikone werden.
 

Ben Trott und Mike Laufenberg (Hg.) 2023. Queer Studies. Schlüsseltexte. Surhkamp

Seit drei Jahrzehnten untersuchen Queer Studies die Macht geschlechtlicher und sexueller Normen – und wie diese infrage gestellt werden. Sie erforschen die komplexen Zusammenhänge von Sexualität, Geschlecht, Rassismus, Klasse und Nation. Dieser Band versammelt klassische und neuere Schlüsseltexte der anglophonen Queer Studies in deutscher Sprache, von Judith Butler und Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick bis Cathy Cohen und José Esteban Muñoz. Er führt in die wichtigsten theoretischen Positionen ein, macht mit den zentralen Entwicklungslinien des Diskurses vertraut und präsentiert wegweisende queere Analysen zu Kapitalismus, Migration, Geopolitik, Behinderung, Aktivismus, Kultur und Subkultur.
 

Andreas Bernard. 2023. Die Kette der Infektion. Zur Erzälbarkeit von Epidemien seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. S. Fischer Verlag

Ein völlig neuer Zugang, um u. a. die Corona-Pandemie besser zu verstehen: Der Wissenschaftshistoriker Andreas Bernard geht in seinem Buch »Die Kette der Infektionen« von der Hypothese aus, dass die Bekämpfbarkeit von Epidemien an ihre Erzählbarkeit gebunden ist. Neben dem dezidiert medizinischen Anteil am Kampf gegen Seuchen – der Entwicklung von Impfstoffen, der Erforschung von Immunität – erscheint die Frage, wie Epidemien und ihre Ausbrüche abgebildet werden, ob sie überhaupt abbildbar sind, für den Erfolg der Eindämmung zentral. Andreas Bernard macht diesen Zusammenhang, der im Hinblick auf die Corona-Pandemie seit dem Frühling 2020 immer wieder deutlich wurde, in seinen Studien zur Geschichte der Pocken, der Cholera, der Influenza, der Poliomyelitis oder der Frühzeit von Aids sichtbar. Er untersucht, inwiefern der Siegeszug der Bakteriologie im späten 19. Jahrhundert eine neue Darstellung der Ansteckungsprozesse durchgesetzt hat, deren Erzählformen und Sprachbilder heute noch gültig sind. Außerdem beschäftigt er sich mit dem Ursprung und dem Ende von Epidemien, als zwei neuralgischen Punkten der Seuchenerzählung, arbeitet die Begleitnarrative von »Immunität« seit dem 18. Jahrhundert heraus und analysiert die Bedeutung von Kommunikationsmedien wie dem Brief, dem Telegramm und den aktuellen Tracking-Apps, deren Nachrichten über die Epidemie in einen Wettlauf mit dem Voranschreiten der Krankheit treten. Andreas Bernards Buch »Die Kette der Infektionen« verbindet medizinhistorische und erzähltheoretische Forschung und schafft einen bislang kaum beachteten Zugang zur Geschichte der Epidemien, der auch einen neuen Blick auf die Corona-Pandemie der letzten Jahre ermöglicht. 
 

Anne Gräfe. 2024. Langeweiel aushalten. Kontingenzerfahrung in der Gegenwartskunst. Kulturveralg Kadmos

Spricht man über das Verhältnis von Publikumserwartung und Kunstwerk, zumal vor der Folie eines Wandels in der Zeit, berührt man immer wieder auch die Frage nach dem gesellschaftlichen Stand der Kunst. Mit welchen Erwartungen ist die Kunst seitens der Ausstellenden, der Betrachtenden, der Schaffenden selbst und der Gesellschaft im Ganzen konfrontiert? Soll Kunst unterhalten, kritisieren, die Welt erklären, das Subjekt sich selbst verstehen lassen? Wird Kunst als kollektives, kommunikatives und identitätsstiftendes Moment verstanden? Oder ist Kunst gar nur eine abgehobene Spielwiese und Distinktionsmerkmal der Reichen? Nicht zuletzt mit Theodor W. Adorno stellt die Kunst eine »gesellschaftliche Antithesis zur Gesellschaft« dar: Und das bedeutet, dass sich die Kunst sowohl aus der Gesellschaft zu ergeben, ihr dabei aber auch zu widersprechen habe. Die in diesem Buch besprochene, gegenwartspezifisch ästhetische Langeweile er­möglicht eine radikale Kontingenzerfahrung in der Gegenwartskunst. Radikal ist diese Erfahrung aufgrund des widerspenstigen, weil in sich gegenwendigen Charakters der Kunst: Hier zeigt sich, dass, wo eine andere Geschichte geschrieben, eine andere Ordnung imaginiert werden kann, auch eine andere Gegenwart und Zukunft möglich sind.

30.01.2024 – "Langeweile Aushalten": A Discussion with Heiner Goebbels and Anne Gräfe

Book presentation and discussion

"In ihrem Buch 'Langeweile Aushalten - Kontingenzerfahrung in der Gegenwartskunst' befragt Anne Gräfe die Kraft der ästhetischen Langeweile: Was können wir von der Langeweile erwarten? Wohin führt uns diese Stimmung als besondere ästhetische Erfahrung? In den genreübergreifenden künstlerischen Arbeiten von Heiner Goebbels lassen sich ästhetische, gesellschaftliche, philosophische und darin oftmals politische Motive dieses menschlichen Erfahrungsbereichs aufdecken, die in einem Plädoyer für das Aushalten einer radikalen Kontingenz münden. Im Gespräch zwischen Heiner Goebbels und Anne Gräfe wird im Kontext einiger künstlerischer Arbeiten von Heiner Goebbels die immanente Logik und Vorstellungen von Zeit als Behauptung einer disruptiven Erfahrung der Dialektik der ästhetischen Langeweile eröffnet und erfragt, welche Formen der Aufmerksamkeit die ästhetische Erfahrung der Langeweile bietet."

Professor Dr h.c. Heiner Goebbels is a composer and theatre maker, was Professor of Artistic Practice at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen from 1999 to 2018, was Director of the Ruhrtriennale - International Festival of the Arts from 2012-2014 and President of the Hessian Theatre Academy from 2006 to 2018. His artistic oeuvre includes scenic concerts, audio pieces, compositions for ensemble and large orchestra, as well as sound and video installations, which have been exhibited at the Documenta 1987 and 1997, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris 2000, in London 2012, Lyon 2014, Dresden 2016, Moscow 2017 and many other places. Goebbels' installation "Landscape 3" will be on show at the Kunstraum.

The event will be in German language. 
 

24.01.2024-25.01.2024 – Alienating Presents. Recovering Futures: On Futures Industries and the Political Imagination

Workshop

Organized by Liza Mattutat (Cultures of Critique) and Lukas Stolz (Cultures of Critique)

Panel discussion with Bahar Noorizadeh (London), Katia Schwerzmann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Richard Seymour (London) and Günseli Yalcinkaya (London)

Workshop contributions by Jandra Böttger (FU Berlin), Volha Davydzik (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Alan Diaz (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Laura Hille (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Liza Mattutat (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Donovan Stewart (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Lukas Stolz (Leuphana University Lüneburg) and Julian Volz (Leuphana University Lüneburg).

Talking about the future is not so easy today. It risks depoliticisation from two opposing sides. Our political imagination oscillates between feelings of hopelessness and fatalism on the one hand, and hollow stories of cruel optimism on the other. Both doom via irreversible climate catastrophe or AI and salvation via technology and green capitalism seem to be waiting just around the corner. All the while, the idea of progress lingers around like a ghost, clearly no longer alive, it refuses to disappear.

In order to avoid nostalgia and futile calls for utopias, the workshop "Alienating Presents, Recovering Futures" addresses questions of future(lessness) and the political imagination from a materialist perspective. We start from the assumption that power has always produced images of the future to program the present according to its interests. Today, this role has been taken over by "futures industries," a concept we borrow from cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. It allows us to ask how the current imaginative impasse is produced: How can we analyse the workings of today‘s futures industries and what are the material forces that shape our imaginative worlds? Which hegemonic projects compete for our imaginaries of the future, who's part of them and who benefits from them? Beyond a paranoid reading of the present, where can we find latent traces of the not-yet in existing contradictions? What are the terms, concepts, and images that could help us alienate ourselves from the present in order to recover (past) futures? In short: how can we move from the return of history to the return of the end of capitalism?

Download: Flyer & Poster. 

The workshop is a cooperation between the Cultures of Critique DFG Research Training Group and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
 

24.01.2024 – Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Asylum and Diaspora - B Camminga and Paul Onanuga

Lecture by B Camminga
This event will be introduced and feature a response by LIAS Fellow Paul A. Onanuga.

Recent years have seen increased scholarly and media interest in the cross-border movements of LGBT persons, particularly those seeking protection in the Global North. While this has helped focus attention on the plight of individuals fleeing homophobic or transphobic persecution, it has also reinvigorated racist tropes about the Global South. In the case of Africa, the expansion of anti-LGBT laws and the prevalence of hetero-patriarchal discourses are regularly cited as evidence of an inescapable savagery. The figure of the LGBT refugee – often portrayed as helplessly awaiting rescue – reinforces colonial notions about the continent and its peoples. Queer and Trans African Mobilities draws on diverse case studies from the length and breadth of Africa, offering the first in-depth investigation of LGBT migration on and from the continent. In this talk, I consider some of the drivers and impacts of displacement linked to sexual orientation or gender identity and challenges regarding why LGBT Africans move, where they are going and what they experience along the way.

B Camminga (they/them) is a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, and a research associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. They work on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent with a focus on transgender migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Their first monograph, Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa, received the 2023 South African Academy of Sciences Emerging Scholars book award, the 2019 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (with Aren Aizura) and honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology. B is co-editor of Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in Africa’s ‘Gay Capital’ (2019) with Zethu Matebeni, Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Diaspora, and Asylum (2022) with John Marnell and East African Queer and Trans Displacement (forthcoming) with John Marnell, Barbara Bompani and Kamau Wairuri.

This event is hosted by the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.
 

17.01.2024 – Workshop: Disruption, Conspiracy, Revolt

Workshop with Donatella di Cesare (Rome/Lüneburg), Christine Achinger (Warwick), Leo Roepert (Hamburg), Astrid Séville (Lüneburg)

The Disruptive Condition confronts us with a paradoxical entanglement of rupture and continuity. While figures of absolute rupture have long lost credibility, calls for a break with ways of life and referential systems for the benefit of the preservation and reproduction of existing economic orders enjoy great popularity. This disruptive dialectic of continuity and discontinuity creates increasing cognitive and emotional dissonances that give rise to resignation but also resentment, prejudice and acts of violence, which find their expression in political movements that take their cue from the fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Faced with the ever-increasing degree of organisation of the capitalist social formation and the decreasing scope for individuals to reconfigure their relations to the world, the return to traditional forms of domination and the schemes of identification they afford seems to offer consolation to many. In this, conspiracy theories play a key role. At the same time, we see a proliferation of insurrectionist movements that focus on a revolt against that which exists rather than on identifying allegedly all-powerful conspirators. How do these diverging forms of dissidence, of disruption, relate to each other? How are conspiracy theories and political action connected in attempts to deal with or change the Disruptive Condition? What is the role of conspiracy in the supposed resolution of the contradictions of contemporary societies?

Programme

14.00-15.00 Donatella di Cesare: Enframing of Power, Depoliticisation, Revolt
15.00-15.45 Astrid Séville: Micropolitics of Anticomplottism
15.45-16.15 Coffee break
16.15-17.00 Leo Roepert: The Conformist Revolt. On the Dialectic of Adaptation and Destructivity
17.00-17.45 Christine Achinger: Politics of Non-Identity?
17.45-18.00 Concluding discussion

Chair: Nicolas Schneider (Leuphana)

This workshop will be held in German

Speaker bios

Astrid Séville  is Professor of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Christine Achinger  is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick.

Donatella di Cesare  is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Sapienza University.

Leo Roepert  is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Hamburg.
 

17.01.2024 – Twice - Opening and presentation - Park McArthur

Opening and presentation

With Nina Bartnitzek, Leonie Dinkloh, Daniela Fernanda Oliva Garcia, Patricia Fritze, Paula Gottschalk, Smilla Grubert, Rachel Haidu, Madeleine Häusler, Esther Heltschl, Elaine Lillian Joseph, Ann-Charlott Junior, Annelie Kebschull, Jacqueline Klemm, Antonina Kovacevic, Sophie McCuen-Koytek, Annelie Lau, Jordan Lord, Jan Müggenburg, Mariia Rakhmanova, Lea Marie Schöpper, Lili Berenike Merit Schröder, Wilson Sherwin, Chiara Steinmann, Elizaveta Voronova, Christopher Weickenmeier, Chiara Welter

Park McArthur exhibition. January 18–February 11, 2024. Kunstraum.

The Kunstraum is pleased to present Twice, a project with artist Park McArthur and MA students at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. An October 2023 listening session of McArthur’s work at the Kunstraum launched the project, which continued into January 2024 with weekly hybrid seminar meetings. Guided by disabled artists’ ongoing experiments in description and by in-class guest lectures by historian and critic Rachel Haidu, audio describer and SoundScribe co-founder Elaine Lillian Joseph, and artist and writer Jordan Lord, the seminar studied creative practices of transcription, captioning, imagination, and distributed experience bound to the materiality of disability access (Geelia Ronkina “On Projects 195” The Contemporary Journal, 2020). Participants will draw Twice to a close by collectively producing audio descriptions in German and English. The recorded descriptions and transcripts will remain on the Kunstraum’s website following their public debut on January 17, 2024. This debut will include a student-led live tour in English. McArthur’s Kunstraum exhibition will be open to the public from January 18–February 11, 2024. For access and programming inquiries please write kunstraum@leuphana.de.
 

16.01.2024 – Donatella di Cesare: Democracy and Anarchy. At the Source of their Repressed Connection.

Lecture by Donatella di Cesare

There are at least two ways of thinking about democracy today: a moderate-liberal one that considers it as a system of rules and procedures to be constantly improved, and a radical one that seeks to recover its conflictual potential. Grasped at its root, democracy reveals its connection to anarchy. Since its emergence, democracy has put into question both the arché, a power that claims to be original, and the télos, the goal (as Reiner Schürmann had already suspected). What is key is the concept of kratos, capacity, the power of the people, which is necessarily an-archic.

Donatella di Cesare is professor of theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome. Recent publications include Conspiracy and Power (2023), The Time of Revolt (2021), The Political Vocation of Philosophy (2021) and Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration (2020). The lecture is based on her new book Democrazia e anarchia. Il potere nella polis, which will be published with Einaudi (Turin) in February 2024.

Lecture language: German
 

09.01.2024 – Nach Solingen. Politiken ungleicher Verletzbarkeit im Kontext rassistischer Gewalt - Çiğdem Inan

"Ausgehend von der Verleugnung von Rassismus und den Mechanismen der Opfer-Täter*innen-Umkehr, die bei rechten und rassistischen Anschlägen und so auch nach dem Solinger Brandanschlag zutage traten, verhandelt Çiğdem Inan in ihrem Vortrag die ungleiche Verteilung von Verletzbarkeit innerhalb migrationspolitischer Sicherheits- und Sorgediskurse. Aufgezeigt wird, wie Trauer und Angst den umkämpften Schauplatz bilden, auf dem die Verletzbarkeit von Personen, die von Rassismus betroffen sind, zugleich aberkannt, wieder angeeignet und ausgehandelt wird. Inwiefern kann aus Trauer-, Verlust- und Enteignungserfahrungen im Kontext rassistischer Gewalt eine politische Handlungsmacht hervorgehen, die kraft einer anderen sozialen Relationalität Aufteilungen in verletzbares und nicht-verletzbares Leben abzuschaffen vermag?"

Çiğdem Inan is a sociologist who lives and works in Berlin. Her teaching and research focus on affect theory, post-structuralism, critical sociology of migration, queer-feminist philosophy, racism studies and postcolonial social theory. She is currently working on the politics of negative affectivity, ontologies of dispossession and fugitive resistance in relation to racist violence, which she discusses in the context of right-wing and racist attacks in Germany, among other things. She is also working on a book on "Das Andere des Affektiven", in which she negotiates classical and non-classical philosophies of the affective together with critical theories of racism. She is part of the publishing collective b_books (Berlin) and editor of the publication series re fuse.

The event takes place in German language.

Hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) 
 

20.12.2023 – The Work of Drag - Olympia Bukkakis

Workshop

On December 20, the Kunstaum and the Center for Critical Studies are pleased to host a workshop, guided by drag artist and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis. The workshop will attend to the work that goes into drag and the material conditions of a performative practice that purposely blurs the site of its production, whether that's the stage aka the factory, gender or the scene. Haunted by the spectre of autonomy, drag like all art, "expels labour and declares a formal freedom from it while being just as subordinated to capital as any other form of social production" (Vishmidt and Stakemeier). The art of Bukkakis, in turn, insists on a formal nonseperability of the right lipstick, Marxism, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and her friends and collaborators, making her the perfect interlocutor for thinking about art's surpressed and/or neurotic relationship to theories and politics of labour. Internationalist Drag Union, when?!

The workshop will be structured around two short texts chosen by Bukkakis and circulated beforehand. To participate, please register by writing to kunstraum@leuphana.de by Friday 15 December.

Bio: Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. Since graduating from the SODA masters at the HZT she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress (2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), and replay (2023). Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. www.olympiabukkakis.com
 

19.12.2023 – Material Performance - Olympia Bukkakis with Dagat Mera

Performance

Drag queen and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis will present a version of "Material Performance". In this piece Olympia works with, against, for, and under 10 meters of red fabric. This time she is joined by artist and janitor Dagat Mera in a performative exploration of labour conditions, queer aesthetics and the search for leftist, materialist art.

A workshop with Olympia Bukkakis will be held the following day, Wednesday 20 December, at 10:15 am. See here. Both events will take place in English. They are organised by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) in cooperation with the Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Research Network.

Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. Since graduating from the SODA masters at the HZT she has premiered a number of new works including, Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress(2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021), and replay (2023). Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. Website: www.olympiabukkakis.com

Dagat Mera moved from Mainz to Hamburg after graduating from high school in 2021 and is active there both artistically and politically. His focus is storytelling through visual and time-based media. In addition, he gave various creative workshops and workshops on political education. Since 2022 he studies at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK).
 

12.12.2023 – CCS Kolloquium - Anna Kipke with Mimmi Woisnitza

Kolloqium

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.

This meeting of the colloquium will take place in German.
 

22.11.2023 – Bread and Rose Perfume: politics of abundance and pleasure against precarity - Wilson Sherwin 

Lecture

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the peak of the Vietnam war, poor Black welfare recipients across the United States organized to demand not only access to the welfare provisions to which they were already entitled, but the expansion of those benefits beyond simple needs. Examining unfinished project of the welfare rights movement and its remarkable antiwork politics, provides insights into how capaciously defined needs and desires may help usher us beyond capitalism and towards alternative social and economic arrangements.

Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin, PhD (she, her) has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, political economy, and public policy. Wilson is a research fellow at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society. 

A cooperation between Center for Critical Studies, Kunstraum and the Gender and Diversity Network
 

21.11.2023 – Linke Melancholie - Christian Voller

Kolloqium

"Was heißt linke Melancholie? Häufig wird damit der Zustand der gegenwärtigen Linken beschrieben, deren Enttäuschung über das Scheitern alternativer Gesellschaftsentwürfe in eine nachgerade ontologische Schwermut gekippt sei. Dagegen hielt bereits Walter Benjamin (auf den man sich gerne beruft) Melancholie eher für ein Symptom der Anpassung ans Bestehende. Christian Voller versucht, die kritischen Wurzeln des Begriffs freizulegen und dabei insbesondere die "Fähigkeit, sich zu ekeln" (W. Benjamin), gegen die Routine linker Trauerarbeit in Anschlag zu bringen."

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.

This meeting of the colloquium will take place in German.
 

14.11.2023 – Narzissmus im Postfordismus. Begriff und Gegenstand zwischen Individual- und Sozialpsychologie - Lutz Eichler

Lecture

As part of the "Lüneburger Arbeitsgespräche für Kritische Theorie", the social scientist and child therapist Lutz Eichler will give a lecture on narcissism in post-Fordism. Afterwards there will be time for extensive discussion on the topic.

"Der globale Zusammenhang war einerseits noch nie so dicht und der Einzelne so intensiv vergesellschaftet wie heute. Er ist durch und durch Produkt einer Weltwirtschaft und Weltkultur. Andererseits ist jeder ökonomisch vereinzelt und die Kultur ist in zentralen Dimensionen individualistisch. Sie betont und belohnt Einzigartigkeit, Genius, Kreativität – solange sie marktgängig sind.

Während der Grad der Vergesellschaftung und damit der Abhängigkeit vom System steigt, steigt das glatte Gegenteil, ein individualistisches Selbstideal ebenso. Kollektivierung und Individualisierung bilden zwei in sich vermittelte Gegenpole, die unreflektiert eine negative dialektische Dynamik aufrechterhalten und befeuern. Allerdings sind die beiden Pole nicht gleichberechtigt. Die Übermacht des Systems ist gewaltig. Jeder Einzelne ist demgegenüber ohnmächtig. Der subjektive Blick auf die soziale Objektivität ist von sozialer Angst gekennzeichnet: Die Angst „nicht voranzukommen“ oder nur geduldet, mitgeschleift oder gar exkludiert zu werden.

In dieser Situation greifen viele auf einen Modus der Konfliktverarbeitung zurück, den man narzisstisch, verstanden als normalpathologischen Idealtyp, nennen kann. Es ist eine Art Schiefheilung, ein verunglückter Reparationsversuch mit Krankheitsgewinn. Dieser Typus verdrängt die Angst und verleugnet seine naturale und/oder weltgesellschaftliche Embeddedness bei unbewusst fortbestehenden Symbiosewünschen. In einer Kompromissbildung zwischen Individualität und Kollektivität wählt er eine identitätsstützende exkludierende Wir-Gruppe-Identität (Ethnie, Nation, Religion).

Dieser Narzissmus ist zur Vergesellschaftung wahlverwandt. Charakteristisch für ihn ist die Gleichzeitigkeit einer Identifikation mit imaginären Kollektiven und einer idealisierten Selbstvorstellung, hinter der verdrängte Angst, Ohnmacht und Wut lauern. Narzissmus kann man so fassen als Karikatur von Autonomie, Nationalismus als Karikatur von Solidarität.

Im Vortrag soll der Begriff des Narzissmus umrissen und die Verbindung zum Autoritarismus diskutiert werden."

Organised by: Heiko Stubenrauch, Christian Voller
 

02.11.2023 – Researching Care: Biological, Social and Ecological Reproduction in Times of Crisis

Workshop

Organisation: Julia Böcker (ISKO) and Liza Mattutat (Cultures of Critique research training group)

At the Researching Care workshop, Leuphana scholars will meet to discuss their ongoing research projects on questions of biological, social and ecological reproduction. At the workshop, we will discuss the questions and motivations that guide our research on reproduction. We will discuss the questions and motivations that guide our research on reproduction, and reflect on the different theoretical approaches and methods we employ. In addition to collegial feedback, our goal is to identify connections between our projects that may be followed up by collaborations. With contributions by Julia Böcker, Volha Davydzik, Anne Gräfe, Laura Hille, Liza Mattutat, Heiko Stubenrauch and Christina Wessely.

The workshop is a collaboration between the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group, the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation, the Gender and Diversity Research Network and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).

Discussions will be held partly in English and partly in German.

A flyer with all information about the programme can be found here.
 

24.10.2023 – Sprechen, Schreiben, Lesen: Muttersprache und Chatbots – Marietta Kesting

Lecture

“Wer kann sprechen, schreiben und lesen lernen, so wie es Kindern in der Grundschule beigebracht wird? Und in welcher Sprache wird unterrichtet?  Ko-Schreiben mit Bots verändert Ideen von Autor:innenschaft, aber auch Modelle von Sprache und Lernprozessen. Heutzutage ist es schwierig zu beantworten, wie viele nicht-menschliche Nutzer:innen in sozialen Online-Medien agieren. Der Vortrag diskutiert unterschiedliche Inszenierungen von Autor:innenschaft im Digitalen, anhand von Beispielen aus der Medienkunst und Schreibexperimenten von menschlichen Autor:innen zusammen mit künstlichen Intelligenzen.”

Marietta Kesting ist Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin, sie unterrichtet derzeit an der Universität Potsdam und ist Forschungskoordinatorin am Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI Berlin. Zuvor war Kesting von 2016-22 Juniorprofessorin für Medien- und Kunsttheorie an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Kesting ist seit 2004 Teil des Verlagskollektivs b_books, Berlin. Zuletzt erschien Human After Man hg. mit S. Witzgall bei diaphanes.
 

17.10.2023 – Zoopolitics of Life and Death: Critical Animal Studies Graduate Conference

Conference

Organized by: The Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and Institute of Philosophy and Art History (IPK) conjointly with THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Ca’Foscari University of Venice.

This two-day international conference brings together graduate students and early scholars from the Humanities  and Social Sciences to critically address the multifaceted issue of politics of life and death of nonhuman animals.
The concepts of zoopolitics and biopolitics have traditionally been addressed separately, based respectively on a distinction of zoé and bios. These, as two different Greek terms for “life” have been used, in the first case, to merely refer to the lives of nonhuman animals, and the second to a distinctively human form of life. However, these terms need to be articulated together to address the multispecies composition of contemporary natureculture assemblages and their lively capital.

Following the principles of Critical Animal Studies, the conference thus adopt a holistic approach to confront oppressions, shared exploitation and vulnerability, but also to put liveability and flourishing according to a total liberation framework to the forefront.

Keynote Speaker: Benedetta Piazzesi. EHESS/Centre de recherches historiques, Paris

Biopolitics and Zootechnics: Historicising Power over Animals

Find the full program here and a the book of abstracts  here.

04.07.23 – ‘In Between Subjects’ – Amelia Jones

Lecture

“This presentation gives an overview of Jones’s book In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Subjects, with attention to deeper motivations behind its development, and tracks her thinking about the intersection of “queer” and “performance” or “performativity” since the book was published. Given the rise of anti-trans culture wars and legislation in the United States, for example, what does it mean to historicize this intersection? What aspects of the intersection can be revitalized to empower the struggles for trans existence and political rights today?”

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor at Roski School of Art & Design, University of Southern California. Publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012) and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver (2016). Her catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020) was listed among the “Best Art Books 2020” in the NY Times, and the curated show was listed among Top Ten 2021 exhibitions in Artforum (December 2021). Her book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance was published in 2021. Her current work addresses the structural racism and neoliberalism of the twenty-first century art world and university.

This lecture is organised by the Cultures of Critique DFG funded research training group, the Center for Critical Studies and the Gender and Diversity Research Network. It is organised in cooperation with the Collaborative Research Center "Intervening Arts", A06 "Artistic Life Practice as Intervention" and it will take place in English.

Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
 

21.06.23 – ‘A Philosophical Dissolution of History: The Myth of Year 1’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Susan Buck-Morss

Lecture

“Dissolving the history of “origin” stories means unravelling of modernity’s myth about itself. National/religious/cultural traditions are exclusionary histories. Against these conventions of the ownership of slices of historical time, I argue for a communist inheritance of the past.”

Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC, where she is a core faculty member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is Professor Emeritus in the Government Department of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. She is the author of numerous books including Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021), Revolution Today (2019), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (1977).

This event is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the CCS Working Group on the Disruptive Condition, and the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group. The event will take place in English.

Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
 

20.06.23 – ‘CCS Colloquium’ – Liza Mattutat

Colloquium

The Center for Critical Studies research colloquium takes place three times a semester, with CCS members invited to present their research in progress.

In this session, Liza Mattutat will present the following paper: “Care in Crisis: History and theory of experimental organisation of care work

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of crisis diagnoses that focus on the state of care work. Liza Mattutat's project Care in Crisis explores these diagnoses, their historical predecessors and the antidotes that the (early) history of feminism developed in response to such experiences of crisis. At the CCS Colloquium, she will tell us about her research trip to Los Angeles planned for August, during which she will focus on the utopian community of Llano del Rio (1914-1918). There, the architect Alice Constance Austin drew up plans for a ‘socialist city’  in which individualised domestic labour was to become obsolete.”

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat. The event will take place in German.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/colloquium.html

Contact: mattutat@leuphana.de or heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

14.06.23 – ‘Counter-Communities’ –Daniel Loick

Colloquium

Daniel Loick will present a chapter from his as yet unpublished book about “Counter-Communities” for discussion.

Daniel Loick is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His research focus lies in the fields of political philosophy, legal, cultural and social philosophy, social theory and political theory. He has published four books, Kritik der Souveränität (2012, an English translation was published in 2018 as A Critique of Sovereignty), Der Missbrauch des Eigentums (2016), Anarchismus zur Einführung (2017) most recently Juridismus. Konturen einer kritischen Theorie des Rechts (2017).

The event will take place in English.

Organisation: Colloquium PLG – Philosophie

Contact: heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

31.05.-28.06.23 – ‘DEADTIME (“Maggie’s Solo”) – Cally Spooner and Will Holder

Exhibition

“Maggie’s Solo” is a 44’16” audio recording of Maggie Segale dancing in “early 2020”. The piece by Cally Spooner was also filmed, but the film will not be shown.

I met Cally in 2014 which we both forgot. Will said he remembered me from Berlin, … Cally, Will, Maggie and I have never been in the same place. Cally and Will will come to Lüneburg on May 30, Maggie will be missing and we will miss her.

Starting tomorrow, Will and Cally will write for an hour a day, here, about, alongside and in assistance to “Maggie’s Solo”—a solo as much as a constellation. They will write for two weeks in advance of the opening and until two weeks before the end.

Once a week, usually Wednesdays, parts of this writing will also appear in and around the Kunstraum. As always, this will be a little too late, which incidentally has become our favorite time to meet.

For the opening on May 30, 6pm, Cally, Will and I will have a public conversation with the students enrolled in the seminar “Assisting and the Arts of Service”.

-- Christopher Weickenmeier, May 17, 2023

Will Holder is an English typographer based in Brussels. Holder explores the organisation of language around artworks through printed matter, live readings and dialogues with other artists. Particular attention is placed on an oral production of value and meaning around cultural objects, and how live, extra-informational qualities might be analysed, documented and scored. He is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts. Together with Alex Waterman, he edited and typeset operatic scores for Yes, But Is It Edible?, the music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices. In 2015 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. He is also the founder of the publishing imprint uh books.

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media — on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in recent group exhibitions at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; FRONT Cleveland Triennial; BY ART MAT- TERS, Hangzhou; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAMbo, Bologna; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slim Volume/ Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in 2012. She is currently a research fellow at Overgaden, Copenhagen, in association with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen (2021–24).

Thank you to Tamara Antonijevic, Nina Bartnitzek, Prof. Susanne Leeb, Team of O–Overgaden and Maggie Segale.

Kunstraum, Leuphana University of Lüneburg: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en/projects/deadtime-maggie-s-solo-mit-cally-spooner-und-will-holder

Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
 

10.05.23 – ‘Antonio Negri: A Philosophy of Subversion - From the Social Worker to Biopolitics’ – Serhat Karakayali and Roberto Nigro 

Lectures

“These lectures form part of a translocal series marking the 90th birthday of Antonio Negri: a key figure within Italian Operaismo, a participant in the Autonomia movements of the 1970s, and a political philosopher whose work has engaged the thought of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx and Foucault in order to comprehend transformations in capital, labour and revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By focusing on some of the most important political and philosophical notions Negri has elaborated since the 1970s, this event will explore their relevance for contemporary analyses and the critique of capitalistic relations of power.”

The two papers presented by Serhat Karakayali and Roberto Nigro will be in English. They will be streamed and audio archived along with others in this series at: https://transversal.at/

Roberto Nigro is professor of philosophy at Leuphana University. His book Antonio Negri: Une philosophie de la subversion was published in March 2023. Serhat Karakayali is professor of migration and mobility at Leuphana University. He is the co-editor of Empire und die biopolitische Wende: Die internationale Diskussion im Anschluss an Hardt und Negri (2007).

Hosted by the Center for Critical Studies.

Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
 

09.05.23 – ‘The Housewife and the Dragon: Visualizing Insubordination in Operaismo and Autonomia’ – Jacopo Galimberti

Lecture

“During the 1960s and 1970s, Operaismo and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents in Italy. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these social movements inspired many visual artists; in fact, Workerism and Autonomia also developed into complex cultural trends involving a plurality of aesthetic approaches, a distinctive iconography, an epistemology and a theory of culture. Based on extensive archival research, this talk will discuss two thematic threads of Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso, 2022): the political iconography of the worker as a monster and that of the housewife as an unruly subject unsettling both social reproduction and the principles of Marxism.”

Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor at IUAV (Venice). He is the author of Individuals against Individualism. Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969) (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Détournement & Kitsch. Die Postkarten von Hans Peter Zimmer/Les cartes postales de Hans Peter Zimmer (Les Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, 2021) and of Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso Books, 2022). He also co-edited several books including Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester, 2020) and the latest thematic issue of The Oxford Art Journal, which is devoted to the representation of social classes in contemporary art.

Contact: ccs@leuphana.de
 

03.05.23 – ‘Emergency Politics’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Jonathan White

Lecture

“From economics to international security, pandemics to climate change, we live in an age of emergency politics. Not only do governments make policy in the name of managing urgent threats, but opponents criticise them for missing the real threats and fighting the wrong emergency. This presentation will consider some of the distinctive problems this creates for democracy, whether emergency politics should be embraced by progressives nonetheless, and how democracy might adapt to these demanding conditions.”

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. He has held visiting positions at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard, Stanford, the Humboldt University, Hertie School, Sciences Po Paris, and the Australian National University. Books include Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Meaning of Partisanship (with Lea Ypi, Oxford University Press, 2016), and Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was awarded the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science.

This event is organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”.

For more information, please contact: nicolas.schneider@leuphana.de

27.04.23 – ‘weight, véhicules and telepathy, how la facultad feels at a distance’ – Catalina Insignares, Henrike Kohpeiß, Myriam Lefkowitz

Public Presentation, Kunstraum Leuphana University of Lüneburg

“Dedicated to exiled people and those who assist them, la facultad is a site where our dormant sensory faculties are exercised, so that we can hear, study and amplify them in collaborative situations. For the public talk on April 27, Lefkovitz and Insignares depart from written reflections on la facultad (and its different iterations since 2017), drawing out some of the ideas in dialogue with the philosopher Henrike Kohpeiß. The talk approaches an ongoing project at a distance.”

Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She studied dance in Canada and France, and completed a Master’s degree in Choreography and Performance at the University of Giessen, Germany. She’s interested in how to use the sensorial and fictional means of the body and of touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. Since 2015, she collaborates with Carolina Mendonça, maintaining a very close complicity in different manners of working together. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters. And since 2017, she has been working with Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer and also in a collaboration that seeks to infiltrate sensory practices from the social and political realities of exiled people (La facultad). From 2019 to 2022 Catalina developed her research as part of DAS THIRD in Amsterdam. Since 2019 she is a co-curator at the Gessnerallee in Zurich.

Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher from Berlin. She completed her PhD on “Bourgeois Coldness” in 2022 and works as a research assistant at the CRC Affective Societies at Free University, Berlin. Her work and teaching focuses on Critical Theory, Black Studies, Feminism and Affect Theory. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer.

An artist chore­og­ra­pher, since 2010 Myriam Lefkowitz’s research has focused on ques­tions of atten­tion and per­cep­tion, using dif­ferent immer­sive mech­a­nisms involving direct rela­tion­ships between spec­ta­tors and artists. Myriam Lefkowitz’s work was pre­sented at the 55th Venice bien­nale (“Oo”, Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion), the CAC Vilnius, Med15 (Medellin), the Garage (Moscow), the Creative Time Summit (Stockholm), Situations (Bristol), the Talbot Rice Gal¬lery (Edinburgh), the Kadist Foundation (Tokyo and San Francisco), the Kaaitheater (Brussels), the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, La Galerie (Noisy le sec), La Ferme du Buisson... After fol­lowing the SPEAP pro­gramme (master’s in art and polit­ical exper­i­men­ta­tion, Science Po, Paris founded by Bruno Latour) in 2011 she became a member of the pro­gramme’s teaching com­mittee for 2 con­sec­u­tive years. Deeply involved in teaching, she is reg­u­larly invited to con­duct work­shops (HEAD, ERG Brussels, Mejen in Stockholm, the Beaux-Arts in Reims, Besancon, Quimper, Angouleme, Bourges, as part of the master Ex.Erce, the dance depart­ment at Paris 8).

Website: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en

Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
 

26.04.23 – ‘Political and Moral Existentialism as a Heideggerianism: on Beavoir and Heideggerian Ontology’ – Manon Garcia

Colloquium

Manon Garcia is a Junior Professor of Practical Philosophy (tenure-track) at Freie Universität in Berlin. Her primary research is in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral philosophy. She also works on 20^th Century French philosophy and philosophy of social sciences, especially economics.

Organisation: PLG – Philosophy Colloquium

Contact: roberto.nigro@leuphana.de, heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

25.04.23 – ‘Der Riss in der Zeit, Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Lecture

“Koselleck outlined his theory of historical knowledge in ever new attempts throughout his life. Based on unpublished material from the estate, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann reconstructs Koselleck's intellectual biography and his unwritten book: his history. History happens in time. But how? As progress in the ascending line? Or as a cycle in the eternal return of the same? The historian Reinhart Koselleck has added a third to these two common notions: it is not history that repeats itself, but rather the conditions of possible histories. Only when we know what is repeated do we recognize the surprisingly new: the crack in time.”

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Professor of the History of European Late Modernism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017 he received the Guggenheim Foundation Prize.

Der Riss in der Zeit - Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik will be published on 17 April, 2023 with Suhrkamp.

Organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/working-group-disruptive-condition.html

Contact: anne.graefe@leuphana.de
 

18.04.23 – ‘CCS Colloquium’ – Heiko Stubenrauch

Colloquium

The Center for Critical Studies research colloquium takes place three times a semester, with CCS members invited to present their research in progress.

In this session, Heiko Stubenrauch will present the following paper: “Unbegrenzte Phantasien: Triebstruktur und neoliberale Gesellschaft

“In der Moderne wurde die Verinnerlichung von Begrenzungen und Normen oft als Schlüsselmoment beschrieben, wenn es um die Frage geht, wie Macht und Herrschaft unter Bedingungen formaler Freiheit Wirksamkeit erlangen. Einige zeitgenössische Machtformen hingegen scheinen einer anderen Logik zu folgen. Das Spezifische neoliberaler Subjektivierung scheint nicht in der Verinnerlichung von Begrenzungen oder Normen, sondern im Evozieren von Phantasien der Grenzenlosigkeit zu liegen, hinter denen tatsächlich bestehende Grenzen und Machtgefälle schwer greifbar und angreifbar werden: So wird postfordistische Arbeit häufig von Phantasien eines grenzenlosen Könnens oder Erfolgs angetrieben, mit denen in einer tendenziell von (sichtbaren) Hierarchien befreiten, dafür vermehrt von Wettbewerb durchsetzten Arbeitswelt die Flucht nach vorne angetreten wird. Darüber hinaus evoziert zeitgenössisches Marketing Phantasien eines grenzenlosen Genießens, in deren Schatten Mangel schwerer zu ertragen ist und zwanghaft durch den Konsum von vor allem kulturindustriellen Waren gestillt werden muss. In meinem Vortrag werde ich mich auf die Thesen konzentrieren, die postfordistische Arbeit betreffen.”

The Center for Critical Studies colloquium is organised by Heiko Stubenrauch and Liza Mattutat.

Website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/center-for-critical-studies/colloquium.html

For more information, please contact mattutat@leuphana.de or heiko.stubenrauch@leuphana.de
 

18.04.23 – ‘Is Bolsonarismo Over? Making Sense of the Far Right in Brazil and Globally’ – Rodrigo Nunes

Online Lecture

“After four years under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has voted to bring former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back into power. A tighter race than most expected and a series of increasingly daring protests afterwards suggest, however, that this electoral setback is not yet the end for the social and political force that Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign catalysed. Situating Bolsonarismo in the broader context of a resurgent far right, this talk will examine the conditions that made it possible in order to ask what its permanent defeat would entail – and what that means for the incoming Workers’ Party (PT) government.”

Rodrigo Nunes is a senior lecturer in political theory and organisation at the University of Essex. He is the author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021) and Do Transe à Vertigem: Ensaios sobre Bolsonarismo e um Mundo em Transição [From Trance to Vertigo: Essays on Bolsonarismo and a World in Transition] (Ubu, 2022), as well as articles in several international publications.

This event is organised by Ben Trott and Raphael Daibert. It is hosted by the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).
 

14.-15.04.23 – ‘Assistances (Working Title)’– Valentina Desideri, Stefano Harney, Jason Hirata, Will Holder, Annick Kleizen, Cally Spooner, Eric Golo Stone, Mathilde Supe, Terre Thaemlitz, Marina Vishmidt

Public Workshop, Kunstraum Leuphana University Lüneburg

“30 years after Andrea Frasers and Helmut Draxlers seminal project “Services” at Kunstraum Lüneburg, a two-day workshop returns to the matter of artistic labor. Only it doesn´t…directly at least. Haunting “Services” and rarely addressed, the workshop proposes to shift focus towards the one doing much of the work aka the assistant.

“Contemporary theater and art production, institutionalized or not, often rely on poorly paid assistants and usually unpaid interns in order to function smoothly, but to be an assistant never means the same. The assistant can be anyone and noone; they could be a 15th-century painting apprentice, dramaturge, director’s assistant, editor, stage and light technician, secretary, assistant designer, assistant conductor, production manager, production assistant, cleaning staff, student assistant, personal assistant, curatorial assistant, assistant curator, mother, emotional caretaker, professional caretaker, a friend - anyone whose job is to maintain, manage, advise and enable the work of the artist. It’s redundant to say that the line between those is never clear.

“In the art field, there are a great many maintainers of the work of others. When their work is adequately valued, a rarity still, it is usually because their necessity is articulated through a blurry framework of care and need, one that’s structurally distorted by the pervasive ableism of capitalist society. The economy of assistance is captured by a logic of exchange, and financial and personal debts are accumulated and inherited unevenly. Regardless of the type of production and conditions in which they work, the forever “young” assistant is usually expected to love their work, a work whose end takes place in the future. When that future arrives (it rarely does), the artist has to carve out and separate themselves from their (inner) assistant, a complicated psychosocial operation that often results in volatile divisions of labor. Meanwhile, the assistant is always available, flexible, ready to jump in for the sick, stressed and exhausted artist, gallerist, other assistant. It could be said that the assistant is in a constant training in the arts of service; to paraphrase Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, training becomes the discipline. If we were to acknowledge the so called Malerschwein (painter pig) in the room, then only to understand the assistant as a symptom of their historically contingent pathology.

“The assistant who doesn’t identify with their work is often a bringer of horrible mood, which is not to be underestimated. In fact, it can serve us as a methodology; if assisting is nothing but a job, the bubble of the seemingly natural flow of artistic creativity and genius bursts. In the end, all that genius is just material for the assistant to handle and maintain. If assisting is charged with the promise of the artistic future, autonomy, and proprietary authorship, what would it mean to do this work without it? And would this shift allow for a different response to the material conditions in which we find ourselves? Bringing together theorists, assistants, and artists, and drawing on concepts such as affordance, dependance, and deproduction, the workshop aims to dwell in a suspended moment in which there’s no art, in the broken promise of life in art, where there’s only a continuous flow of work.”

For more information on the participants, the schedule and matters of accessibility, please refer to the homepage.

Organized by Tamara Antonijevic and Christopher Weickenmeier

Student Assistants: Nina Bartnitzek, Manuel Clancett, Patricia Fritze

Website: https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/en

Contact: kunstraum@leuphana.de
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12.04.23 – ‘William James in the Anthropocene, Or: The Politics of Pragmatism in a New Climatic Regime’ (Lecture series on the Disruptive Condition) – Melanie Sehgal

Lecture

“In this talk, I propose to think with William James (1842-1910) in the face of today’s unfolding climate emergency, thereby putting James’ thought to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James today at a time marked by an unprecedented extent of ecological devastation? I will single out two dimensions of James’ work that seem particularly pertinent for thinking through the havoc that extractivist modes of production and habits of thought have wreaked: his notion of experience and the pragmatic method. In this way, I will outline the particular politics of James’ pragmatism and its relevance in and to a new climatic regime.”

Melanie Sehgal is Director of Research at the Institute for Basic Research into the History of Philosophy at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her work is situated at the crossroads of process philosophy, the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, aesthetics and the history and historiography of philosophy. She is the author of A Situated Metaphysics. Empiricism and Speculation in William James and Alfred North Whitehead, published by Konstanz University Press in 2016, and numerous articles on process philosophy, aesthetics and transdisciplinary practices. Currently, she is working on a book on “The Arts of a New Climatic Regime”.

Organised by the CCS research initiative “The Disruptive Condition”

Contact: anne.graefe@leuphana.de

16.–17.3.23: 3rd TUDiSC Conference: Disruptive Worldmaking: Technology, Design, Art

Technische Universität Dresden

The programme for the public part of the conference can be accessed here.
 

Winter Semester Pier Paolo Pasolini Film and Lecture Series

Five screenings and lectures marked what would have been the hundredth birthday of Pasolini. This included a screening of the director’s second film, Mamma Roma from 1962, followed by a lecture by Isabelle Chaplot on Pasolini’s Roman films, titled ‘Terrains vagues und Heteropien’ (03.11.22). Theresia Prammer spoke about Pasolini’s poetry as a language of love (15.11.22). Her lecture was accompanied by a screening of Pasolini’s documentary film, Das Gastmahl der Liebe, in which he interviewed young and old alike about their sexual lives. Tjark Kunstreich’s lecture, ‘Warum Sodom kein Heimatland ist’, addressed Pasolini’s meaning for the theory of same-sex desire (18.12.22). On 23.01.23, Pasolini’s 1968 film Edipo Re was screened, and the series closed on 31.01.23 with a lecture by Florian Huber on Pasolini’s Teorema.

The series was organised by Christoph Görlich.
 

Winter Semester Lecture Series – ‘Hauptwerke deutschsprachiger Erzählprosa seit 1989.’

Fourteen literature scholars each presented and discussed one work of German language prose, written after the political rupture of 1989. Each set out why that particular book should continue to be read, discussed, remembered and passed down. The series included the following presentations: Sven Kramer on Christa Wolf’s Was Bleibt, Florian Huber on Peter Waterhouse’s Krieg und Welt, Tanja van Hoorn on Brigitte Kronauer’s Teufelsbrück, Martin Scheirbaum on Wolfgang Hilbig’s Ich, Steffi Hobuß on Doron Rabinovici’s Suche Nach M., Silke Horstkotte on Shida Bazyar’s Drein Kamaradinnen, Ulrike Steierwald on Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, Axel Dunkber on Lutz Seiler’s Kruso, Matthias N. Lorenz on Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur, Inge Stephan on Eldriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten, Ulrike Vedder on Ursula Krechel’s Landgericht, Julia Patrut on Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel, Doerte Bischoff on Abbas Khider’s Der Falsche Inder, Sarah Schmidt on Felicitas Hoppe’s Hoppe.

The lecture series was organised by Sven Kramer.
 

31.01.23 – ‘The Wages for Housework Campaign: What Yesterday’s Struggles Mean for Today’. Workshop with Silvia Federici (Hofstra University, NYC)

Silvia Federici gave a lecture on the history of Wages for Housework, feminist movements of the 1970s and their reception today. This was followed by a critical discussion and reflection on the histories and presents of feminist organizing around social reproduction.

The event was a collaboration between the Research Training Group ‘Cultures of Critique’ and the Center for Critical Studies.
 

24.01.23 – CCS Colloquium: Christina Wessely and Chiara Stefanoni

Christina Wessely presented and discussed her forthcoming book, Liebesmühe, and Chiara Stefanoni presented and discussed a paper titled, ‘Conceptualising Animal Resistance: Questions and Approaches’.

For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
 

17.01.22 ‘Artistic Activism-Interventions and New Forms of Storytelling’ studio talk by Paula Hildebrandt and Kathrin Wildner

This open conversation with artistic research activists, authors and publishers Paula Hildebrandt and Kathrin Wildner explored the relationship between research, art and activism, and the narratives and modes of expression for this relationship.

This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
 

10.01.23 – CCS Colloquium: Ulrike Steierwald and Christoph Brunner

Ulrike Steierwald presented her project ‘Layers of Visibility: On Contemporary Aesthetics of Materiality in “Retinal” Fine Arts’ and Christoph Brunner presented a paper titled, ‘Infrastructures of Feeling: Power and (Non)-Sense in Far-Right Online Activism’.

For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
 

15.12.22 ‘Aesthetics of the (New) Right: Misogyny, Antigender and “Right” Feminism (in Germany)’ workshop with Sophia Bembeza, Julia Haas and Christoph Brunner

Part of a workshop series on the aesthetics and online practices of the ‘new right’. This session looked at the complex issues of misogyny, anti-feminism and right-wing feminism.

This event and the workshop series were organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
 

14.12.22 – ‘Geschichte und Geschehen’ lecture by Reinhard Blänkner

This lecture by the cultural historian Reinhard Blänkner (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder) outlined the problematic confusion of history, memory and happening and the related question of the availability or unavailability of history itself. Its argument thus aimed at a systematic distinction between history and happening as well as at the question of the historical conditions and conceptual possibilities of a ‘history’ (Historie) after ‘history’ (Geschichte).

The workshop was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.
 

13.12.22 - CCS Colloquium: Timon Beyes

Timon Beyes presented and discussed his forthcoming book, Organizing Colour: Toward a Chromatics of the Social.

For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
 

08.12.22 – 28.01.23 – ‘Unterwerfung’ exhibition by Philipp Gufler.

Solo exhibition, tracking the various ways in which Philipp Gufler stages archival queer material, seeking to escape the heteronormative capture of a resistant past.

The exhibition was accompanied by a lecture performance by Susanne Sachsee (Cheap Collective) (07.12.2022), screenings of films by Zoe Leonard and Catherine Saalfield, Philipp Gufler and Liane Klinger (08.12.2022), a presentation by Sunil Gupta (24.01.2023), and a panel event titled ‘A Trans Hirschfeld Renaissance’ with Leah Tigers, Dean Erdmann, Maxi Wallenhorst and Raimund Wolfert (25.01.2023).

The exhibition and accompanying program took place at the Kunstraum Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
 

01.12.22 – ‘Did You Know That “Dammit I’m Mad” Spelled Backwards Is “Dammit I’m Mad”?’ artist talk by Jana Vanecek

Artist, author and researcher Jana Vanecek’s lecture presented and discussed two works from her artistic research project on neurodiversity, mental health and co-authorship.

This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
 

29.11.22 – ‘Argentina’s Feminist Insurgency and Struggles over Social Reproduction’ lecture by Liz Mason-Deese

The researcher and translator, Liz Mason-Deese, a participant in feminist and workers’ movements in Argentina, addressed the massive, innovative and radical feminist movements that have emerged in Argentina and much of Latin America in recent years, both in opposition to gender-based violence and in demand of new rights – such as the right to abortion.

Organised by Ben Trott, hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network and Center for Critical Studies.
 

24.11.22 – ‘Yet We Laugh’ lecture performance by Gabriel Francisco Lemos

This speculative lecture performance by the composer, visual artist and researcher Gabriel Francisco Lemos explored some of the reasons why we become possessed by laughter.

This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
 

17.11.22 – ‘Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same’ talk by Edith Brunette and François Lemieux

The artists, authors and researchers Edith Brunette and François Lemieux presented their recent project, Going To, Making Do, Passing Just the Same made up of an installation, videos, performances and a book.

This event was organised and hosted by the ArchipelagoLab.
 

16.11.22 – ‘Im Schwindel der Unterbrechung: Bernard Stieglers Denken des komputationalen Nihilismus’, lecture by Erich Hörl

This lecture by Erich Hörl (Leuphana University) reconstructed Bernard Stiegler’s disruptive thinking. Stiegler has uncovered being-in-disruption as the key determinant of contemporary computational nihilism. This is the historical-theoretical core of his far-reaching philosophical-diagnostic effort. Hörl argued that Stigler’s thought proves itself to be an expression of the prevalent socio-historical experience that perceives our time as essentially crisis-like, interrupted, disturbed – and whose social constitution can be developed as ‘the disruptive condition’ to which we are subject.

The lecture was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.
 

08.11.22 – CCS Colloquium: Launch

CCS Colloquium Launch, with short talks by Christoph Brunner, Anna Kipke, Sven Kramer, Liza Mattutat, Roberto Nigro, Beate Söntgen, Heiko Stubenrauch, Ben Trott und Mimmi Woisnitza.

For more on the regular CCS Colloquium, click here.
 

7.-8.11.22 – ‘Geschichtstheoretische Konsultationen I: Zur Genese und Reichweite der Frage geschichtlicher Erfahrung’ – Workshop with Falko Schmieder and Christian Geulen

This workshop with the historians Falko Schmieder (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturfoschung) and Christian Geulen (Universität Koblenz, Landau) addressed the central historico-theoretical questions that have arisen in the course of conceptualizing ‘the disruptive condition’.

The workshop was organised by the research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’.