Donderdag 19 december 2024 om 20.00 uur
Prof. em. Dr. Sigrid Weigel - Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
Lezing in het Engels. Lezing in lokaal R.013, Rodestraat 14, Antwerpen.
Lezing in het kader van het Network for European Philosophy and the Jewish Tradition.
Deze lezing sluit de lezingenreeks van het eerste semester af en zal gevolgd worden door een receptie.
Deelname is gratis. Aanmelden per e-mail: ijs@uantwerpen.be.
This lecture explores a fascinating intellectual movement that emerged around 1900, involving notable scholars such as Freud, Warburg, Simmel, and Benjamin, among others. Although these thinkers did not form a cohesive group and operated in diverse geographical and professional contexts, their works reveal striking similarities in theoretical perspectives, modes of thought, and an engagement with interdisciplinary and cross-cultural concepts. The lecture examines how their thoughts on space and time diverged from conventional knowledge frameworks and historical narratives centered on chronology and progress and how this reorientation emerged from Jewish secularization.
Predominantly hailing from the German-speaking assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie, many of these scholars shared a common interest in the afterlife (Nachleben) of mythical, religious, and cultic practices in the modern era, as well as the pagan and polytheistic heritage of European antiquity. Operating from positions on the periphery or outside the established academic system—less constrained by the usual disciplinary habits and categorical boundaries—they developed a mode of thinking that navigates transitions and the interstices of multiple cultural landscapes. This approach holds significant epistemological potential, remaining highly relevant to the challenges we face today.
Sigrid Weigel is former director of the Research Center for Literature and Culture (ZfL Berlin), prior professor at Hamburg, Zürich, TU Berlin, Princeton, and director of the Einstein Forum; honorary doctorates from Leuven, Buenos Aires, Tbilisi, Basel; honorary member of MLA, honorary president of the International Walter Benjamin Society; awardee of Aby-Warburg-Preis (2016). She published on Heine, Warburg, Freud, Benjamin, Scholem, Arendt, Susan Taubes, Bachmann, cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft), memory/ psychoanalysis, generation/genealogy, and cultures of sciences. Books in English: Body- and Image Space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (1996); “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933 (Ed. 2012); Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturely, the Holy (2008/ English 2013); Empathy. Epistemic Problems and Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Ed. 2017); Testimony/ Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (Ed. 2017); Grammatology of Images (2015/ English 2022); Transnational Foreign Policy – Beyond National Culture (2019).