Critical Theory

Critical Theory | 2020-2021

Benjamin

theorie

Outsourcing des Staates. Direkte Demokratie als permanente Mobilmachung (Vortrag von Clemens Nachtmann)

https://gesellschaftfuerorthodoxedogmatik.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/vortrag-mit-clemens-nachtmann-am-06-12/

Clemens Nachtmann - Outsourcing Des Staates(2013/12/06)

Studium Klavier in München, von Soziologie, Philosophie und Musikwissenschaft in Frankfurt/Main, Privatdozent am FB Gesellschaftwissenschaften der J.W.Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Lehrbeauftragter für Musikwissenschaft an der Hochschule für Musik, Frankfurt am Main, zahlreiche Publikationen zu ästhetischen, kultursoziologischen und musikwissenschaftlichen Fragen, ständiger Mitarbeiter der Zeitschrift „Musik und Ästhetik“, Buchpublikationen als Herausgeber: Komponisten im Exil (Berlin 2008), Materialität des Geistes – zur Sache Kultur (Weilerswist 2001), Bücher: Musikästhetik. Ein Konstruktionsprozeß (Hofheim i.T. 2017), Ästhetische Praxis. Zu einer Musiksoziologie nach Adorno (Frankfurt am Main 2017), in Arbeit: Ästhetik der neuen Musik (Hofheim i.T. 2018).

Vortrag im Café KoZ am 3.7.17 im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe „DON’T THINK POSITIVE – Zur Kritik des Positivismus in der Musikwissenschaft“; gefördert durch den AStA, den Projektrat sowie die Fachschaft Musikwissenschaft der Universität Frankfurt

F. Zehentreiter - Was mir die Natur erzählt. Die erfahrungswissenschaftliche Kritik am Positivismus

Exemplarische Anmerkungen zu Beethovens ‚Heiligem Dankgesang‘

In der gegenwärtigen Musikwissenschaft ist es ungewiß, in welchem Maße musikalische Erkenntnis noch ein bestimmender Antrieb wissenschaftlicher Methoden und Perspektiven ist. Ob ein emphatischer Erkenntnis-Begriff, insofern er überhaupt noch haltbar erscheint, die positivistische und historistische Mauer, die im akademischen Betrieb um ihn gelegt ist, durchbrechen kann, ist nicht absehbar. Daß der ästhetische Gegenstand es aber fordert, soll paradigmatisch am langsamen Satz aus Beethovens spätem a-moll- Quartett aufgezeigt werden, einer Komposition, die alle Immanenz verweigert.

Oliver Fürbeth, geboren 1969, studierte Musikwissenschaft, Philosophie und Germanistik in Frankfurt am Main. 1998 Promotion mit einer Arbeit über Mahlers Harmonik. Er unterrichtet Musikwissenschaft an der Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende ebd. und an der Musikakademie der Stadt Kassel „Louis Spohr“.

Vortrag im Café KoZ am 10.7.17 im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe „DON’T THINK POSITIVE – Zur Kritik des Positivismus in der Musikwissenschaft“; gefördert durch den AStA, den Projektrat sowie die Fachschaft Musikwissenschaft der Universität Frankfurt

Oliver Fürbeth - Musikalische Erkenntnis als grundlegende musikwissenschaftliche Kategorie

http://nichtidentisches.de

Felix Riedel - Wandlungsformen des Rassismus

In der zweiten Folge stehen DJ Lena Willikens und die Künstlerin Sarah Szczesny im Fokus. Die beiden Frauen lernten sich im Düsseldorfer Nachtleben kennen und beschlossen kurz danach auch miteinander zu arbeiten. Im Gespräch mit Podcast Host Jakob Thoene sprechen sie über ihr bisher größtes Projekt Phantom Kino Ballett – eine audiovisuelle DJ-Performance, die aus experimenteller Musik, Videocollagen, Malerei und clubkulturellen Referenzen besteht.

Lena Willikens und Sarah Szczesny beschreiben ihr Projekt selbst als “Kuriositätenkabinett”, das die Symbiose ihrer bisherigen Erfahrungen aus der internationalen Club-, Musik und Kunstszene darstellt. Die beiden sprechen über künstlerischen Freiraum und über ihr Publikum, dass sie mit ihrer Arbeit herausfordern möchten. Die beiden Frauen lieben die Konfrontation und testen gerne ihre Grenzen aus.

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Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny – Phantom Kino Ballett

Panelists from UC Berkeley, Laney College, and Cornell University will include Dan Blanton, Arturo Dávila Sánchez, Catherine Flynn, Robert Kaufman, Francine Masiello, Natalie Melas, Miryam Sas, and Nathaniel Wolfson.

This afternoon symposium and discussion—organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory—will feature two panels of literary and cultural critics who will reconsider surrealism: its histories, its afterlives, and its resonances in art and politics today. Participants will offer brief presentations that rethink the work of surrealist and surrealist-influenced art in Europe; in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas; and in North Africa. The symposium will also involve extensive discussion among the panelists and audience.

Presented by University of California, Berkeley’s Consortium on Surrealism @100 (organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory). This event is co-sponsored with City Lights Booksellers and Publishers and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

[Session 2] Surrealism Then, Now: Snapshots of Critically Engaged Art | Panel | 11/16/19

Etienne Balibar will reflect on his relationship to reading Marx, starting with Reading Capital, his early work co-written with Louis Althusser. He will seek to reconstruct his relation to Marx’s thought, communism, and engage the question of communism for the present and future.

Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet) (1965); The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and politics (1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? (2003) ; Equaliberty (2014); Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Being Communist, Becoming Other | Etienne Balibar | 11/25/19

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a talk by Howard Eiland, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically-oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English knew it until last year under the title The Origin of German Tragic Drama, but in fact the subject is something else: the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation and introduction (Harvard University Press, 2019), the first to appear since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.

Focusing on the extravagant and historical seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled, and no less susceptible to momentary apotheosis. History as trauerspiel—as shaped by the base machination of schemers—is in Benjamin’s account the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal, or ever-increasing, apparently incomprehensible, layers of depth, experience, and interpretive questions.

Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The book’s Prologue is one of Benjamin’s most important and difficult pieces of writing. It sets forth his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” (which would become crucial to thinkers across several generations of the Frankfurt School, as well to other critics, philosophers, theorists, and artists) as a key means of grasping the world, of constructing dynamic unities from the myriad bits of daily life and historical materials. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, Eilan’s rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

Eiland’s talk “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?” approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet—which deems the play a consummate trauerspiel—as a way into the thorny interior of the trauerspiel book itself.  Benjamin presents the theory of the trauerspiel as containing  “prolegomena” to the interpretation of Shakespearean “tragedy” (Benjamin faults critics for their “loose usage” of the term “tragedy”), and to the interpretation of Hamlet in particular. Eiland examines Benjamin’s claims for decisive historical and formal-stylistic differences between the genres of tragedy and trauerspiel—the former based in pagan myth and cult, the latter in Judeo-Christian history and spectacle; the former embedded in dialogue, the latter in the Dingwelt—and Eiland then briefly traces these distinctions back through the German critical-philological tradition, to Herder and A.W. Schlegel. Eiland focuses, first, on the philosophical-historical “antinomies of allegoresis” that structure the trauerspiel world, and then on Benjamin’s discussion of the enigmatic themes of “fate” and “play.” These issues are all reflected and crystallized in Hamlet‘s death scene, which Benjamin here presents—in its “vehement externality,” its crucial reliance on props and its profusion of corpses, as well as in its hint of apotheosis—as typical of the trauerspiel. All of which leads Benjamin to conclude that Hamlet’s death is definitely not tragic. Eiland takes issue with this last assessment, arguing for the prince as a tragic hero of recognition and remembrance.

Walter Benjamin on William Shakespeare: "Hamlet as Trauerspiel?" | Howard Eiland | 2/10/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a panel-and-audience discussion with Howard Eiland: “On Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel.”

A panel of UC Berkeley faculty including Catherine Flynn (English; Irish Studies; Critical Theory), Niklaus Largier (German; Comparative Literature; Critical Theory), and Jeffrey Knapp (English; Film and Media) will speak with Eiland about Benjamin’s book, including issues involving Eiland’s new translation of and introduction to the text, as well as those raised by Eiland’s Monday, February 10 talk, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”. The panel will then open things up by inviting questions and discussion from the audience.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press.  The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019).

On Walter Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel | Howard Eiland | 2/11/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, SF, Present a Seminar/Discussion with Howard Eiland on his recently published book: Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).

Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a virtouso close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments. These “notes” address a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works—elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland’s eloquent writing itself exemplifies this “aesthetic,” if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz.

Eiland will be joined in conversation by two jazz pianists and UC Berkeley literary critics: Michael Lucey (French; Comparative Literature; Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Program in Critical Theory) and Maya Kronfeld (Comparative Literature).

Eiland will read briefly from and discuss the book. For those wishing to attend the seminar/discussion, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu to receive excerpts from the book.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press. The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019). Eiland has also worked for decades as a critic writing on literature, film, and jazz; Notes contains a sampling from among the most acute of these critical pieces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.

Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz | Howard Eiland | 2/12/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.