Conference Organization by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
"Philosophies of Nostalgia," April 12th at Universität Wien (Hörsaal 3C) with Giacomo Croci, Mich... more "Philosophies of Nostalgia," April 12th at Universität Wien (Hörsaal 3C) with Giacomo Croci, Michela Summa, Tobias Becker, Christina Schües, and Manu Sharma. Funded by FWF and City of Vienna. Schedule to follow shortly. All welcome!
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Programme
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Acad... more Programme
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
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18/08/2023, University of Vienna
Translation is usually understood as a linguistic practice o... more 18/08/2023, University of Vienna
Translation is usually understood as a linguistic practice of reconstituting sense. Following such a definition, the sense of an original text or language should be neatly transferred to a second. Thus, the aim of such practice is usually defined in terms of closeness and sameness of the first and the secondary textual material. In this workshop, we would like to shift the focus to the temporal and lived dimension of translation as well as to the ethical and political effects of the latter: instead of reducing translation to acts of textual preservation of sense, it should additionally be conceived as transformative practices of translations between various lived worlds and temporalities. Given that the conditions of translation are often determined by existing inequalities between cultural and historical contexts, the act of translation takes on a political dimension. Rather than preserving textual sense, translation can, in its social and political dimension, imply necessary acts of resistance against personal, collective and historical hegemonic erasure. In addition, such acts of translation can be a matter of survival, as practical contexts of exile and/or trauma make clear. Surviving Translation not only points to the work of preventing other worlds, languages and temporalities from disappearing but also includes the risk of a loss of such worlds, languages and temporalities through translation. For this workshop, we intend to invite a set of inter and trans disciplinary researchers with a multiplicity of languages, worlds, histories and lived realities to discuss these questions in relation to their research as well as their experiences of conducting translational work in an academic context. Hence, given the limitations to polyphonic theorising in academia, this event aims at reflecting on the creative processes of coming to live, think, and theorise while moving between and being entangled with different worlds – both in the geographical and the existential and social sense of the term. In fact, working between borders and at the margins of fixed categories and material realities, we would like to collectively discuss questions such as: what does conducting translational work imply? What can we learn from each other's practices? To what extent does translation foster the survival of our various worlds? And finally, how to survive the loss of parts of our lived worlds, languages and temporalities, a loss that is a necessary part of translational work?
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Critical Temporalities Online Event
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritz... more Critical Temporalities Online Event
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.
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Le colloque est conçu dans le but d'interroger la notion du corps, en particulier dans le context... more Le colloque est conçu dans le but d'interroger la notion du corps, en particulier dans le contexte des épreuves d'un sujet en souffrance. Nous partirons du constat que, dans la souffrance et l'impossibilité́ de sa médiation complète à travers le langage, les liaisons étroites entre corps et langage se dévoilent, rendant nécessaire de les penser ensemble. Afin de réfléchir sur ce champ thématique, nous inviterons de jeunes (post)doctorant.e.s en philosophie, psychanalyse, science politique et sociale ainsi que des artistes, à un atelier de deux jours à l'École normale supérieure (Paris). L'événement aura lieu le 1er et le 2 octobre 2021.
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
reconstruire.workshop@gmail.com
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May 20th, 2022, Freud Museum: Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Organized by: L... more May 20th, 2022, Freud Museum: Nostalgia Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Organized by: Leyla Sophie Gleissner (Husserl Archives-ENS Paris/University of Vienna) & Dylan Trigg (University of Vienna)
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
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Conference Presentations by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
Phenomenology and Critique. Loyola-Marquette University Phenomenology Conference
Phenomenolo... more Phenomenology and Critique. Loyola-Marquette University Phenomenology Conference
Phenomenology offers specific methods that disclose transcendental structures of experience which, in our everyday experience, are overlooked and presupposed. As such, it is understood to be a critical enterprise. Yet in recent years, there has been a ‘critical turn’ in phenomenology: phenomenology is also increasingly understood as a form of social critique capable of engaging, analyzing, and illuminating contemporary socio-political phenomena. Proponents of this critical turn emphasize that, in addition to clarifying the character of constituting consciousness, subjectivity, the lifeworld, and intersubjectivity, phenomenology can also thematize ethical and political experience, as well as shed light on the diverse experiences of marginalized subjects. This new understanding of phenomenology stems from the diagnosis that traditional phenomenologists have overlooked aspects of lived experience and embodiment, such as the subject’s gendered and racialized inscription in the world.
The aim of this conference is to explore the possibilities and opportunities for phenomenology today, following this critical turn. The questions and topics we would like to explore include, for example, the following:
-Is phenomenology a critical enterprise? What makes it critical and what is ‘critique’?
-Can phenomenology play a role in contributing to social and political change?
-What is critical phenomenology? Is it a continuation of classical phenomenology, or is it something that has surpassed it and is now distinct from classical phenomenology?
-Can phenomenology critique cultural, ethical, and political norms? If so, how?
-Can phenomenology analyze sexual, racial, and gender oppression? If so, how?
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05 Oct 2018: Chair étrange, chair traumatisée - une perspective phénoménologique responsive
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Papers by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
Schauplätze der Verletzbarkeit. Kritische Perspektiven aus den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2024
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Puncta. Journal for Critical Phenomenology, 2023
In this paper, I investigate whether phenomenological description can help in transforming an unj... more In this paper, I investigate whether phenomenological description can help in transforming an unjust or violent situation. If one can agree that describing the situation of a group of marginalised subjects is necessary in order to define what is going wrong, then the question of whether the method can help change these states, remains unanswered. With this in mind, I then suggest that phenomenological description can only serve critical causes, under the condition that it takes the transformative power of language into account: by describing our experiences we already transform them. To this end, I draw on deconstructivist approaches, which focus on language as a social act of addressing oneself to others. I conclude by arguing that description can itself be a transformative tool – if we stress how it takes place under conditions of address that necessarily shape the experience to be described.
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This paper offers an introduction to the conceptual relationship between silence and survival. Fo... more This paper offers an introduction to the conceptual relationship between silence and survival. Following deconstructivist approaches, both notions are considered from an ethical perspective, thereby asking what role silence plays in the practical survival of others. In answering this question, this paper differentiates between types of silence in order to examine their potential to either foster or prevent the other's survival. Accordingly, silence is not understood as the opposite of speech, per se. On the contrary, I will argue that first, a particular type of silence is vital. Second, that it can be found in poetry as a practice of listening.
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Conference Organization by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
Translation is usually understood as a linguistic practice of reconstituting sense. Following such a definition, the sense of an original text or language should be neatly transferred to a second. Thus, the aim of such practice is usually defined in terms of closeness and sameness of the first and the secondary textual material. In this workshop, we would like to shift the focus to the temporal and lived dimension of translation as well as to the ethical and political effects of the latter: instead of reducing translation to acts of textual preservation of sense, it should additionally be conceived as transformative practices of translations between various lived worlds and temporalities. Given that the conditions of translation are often determined by existing inequalities between cultural and historical contexts, the act of translation takes on a political dimension. Rather than preserving textual sense, translation can, in its social and political dimension, imply necessary acts of resistance against personal, collective and historical hegemonic erasure. In addition, such acts of translation can be a matter of survival, as practical contexts of exile and/or trauma make clear. Surviving Translation not only points to the work of preventing other worlds, languages and temporalities from disappearing but also includes the risk of a loss of such worlds, languages and temporalities through translation. For this workshop, we intend to invite a set of inter and trans disciplinary researchers with a multiplicity of languages, worlds, histories and lived realities to discuss these questions in relation to their research as well as their experiences of conducting translational work in an academic context. Hence, given the limitations to polyphonic theorising in academia, this event aims at reflecting on the creative processes of coming to live, think, and theorise while moving between and being entangled with different worlds – both in the geographical and the existential and social sense of the term. In fact, working between borders and at the margins of fixed categories and material realities, we would like to collectively discuss questions such as: what does conducting translational work imply? What can we learn from each other's practices? To what extent does translation foster the survival of our various worlds? And finally, how to survive the loss of parts of our lived worlds, languages and temporalities, a loss that is a necessary part of translational work?
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
reconstruire.workshop@gmail.com
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
Conference Presentations by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
Phenomenology offers specific methods that disclose transcendental structures of experience which, in our everyday experience, are overlooked and presupposed. As such, it is understood to be a critical enterprise. Yet in recent years, there has been a ‘critical turn’ in phenomenology: phenomenology is also increasingly understood as a form of social critique capable of engaging, analyzing, and illuminating contemporary socio-political phenomena. Proponents of this critical turn emphasize that, in addition to clarifying the character of constituting consciousness, subjectivity, the lifeworld, and intersubjectivity, phenomenology can also thematize ethical and political experience, as well as shed light on the diverse experiences of marginalized subjects. This new understanding of phenomenology stems from the diagnosis that traditional phenomenologists have overlooked aspects of lived experience and embodiment, such as the subject’s gendered and racialized inscription in the world.
The aim of this conference is to explore the possibilities and opportunities for phenomenology today, following this critical turn. The questions and topics we would like to explore include, for example, the following:
-Is phenomenology a critical enterprise? What makes it critical and what is ‘critique’?
-Can phenomenology play a role in contributing to social and political change?
-What is critical phenomenology? Is it a continuation of classical phenomenology, or is it something that has surpassed it and is now distinct from classical phenomenology?
-Can phenomenology critique cultural, ethical, and political norms? If so, how?
-Can phenomenology analyze sexual, racial, and gender oppression? If so, how?
Papers by Leyla Sophie Gleissner
10.00 am - 10.15 am Welcome
10.15 am - 11.15 am Judith-Frederike Popp (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
– Mourning as Method and Subject. Philosophizing About Art From a Nostalgic Point of View
11.30 am - 12.30 pm Tobias Becker (FU Berlin)
– Retro : Aesthetics and Temporalities
01.30 pm - 2.30 pm Michaela Bstieler/Stephanie Graf (University of Innsbruck)
– Angels of Nostalgia. Walter Benjamin's Images of Homecoming
02.30 pm - 3.30 pm Hans Bernhard Schmid (University of Vienna)
– Construction and Ruination
03.45 pm - 4.45 pm Zoltán Somhegyi (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary)
– From Nostalgic Ruins to Challenging Monuments
04.45 pm - 5.00 pm Conclusion
Translation is usually understood as a linguistic practice of reconstituting sense. Following such a definition, the sense of an original text or language should be neatly transferred to a second. Thus, the aim of such practice is usually defined in terms of closeness and sameness of the first and the secondary textual material. In this workshop, we would like to shift the focus to the temporal and lived dimension of translation as well as to the ethical and political effects of the latter: instead of reducing translation to acts of textual preservation of sense, it should additionally be conceived as transformative practices of translations between various lived worlds and temporalities. Given that the conditions of translation are often determined by existing inequalities between cultural and historical contexts, the act of translation takes on a political dimension. Rather than preserving textual sense, translation can, in its social and political dimension, imply necessary acts of resistance against personal, collective and historical hegemonic erasure. In addition, such acts of translation can be a matter of survival, as practical contexts of exile and/or trauma make clear. Surviving Translation not only points to the work of preventing other worlds, languages and temporalities from disappearing but also includes the risk of a loss of such worlds, languages and temporalities through translation. For this workshop, we intend to invite a set of inter and trans disciplinary researchers with a multiplicity of languages, worlds, histories and lived realities to discuss these questions in relation to their research as well as their experiences of conducting translational work in an academic context. Hence, given the limitations to polyphonic theorising in academia, this event aims at reflecting on the creative processes of coming to live, think, and theorise while moving between and being entangled with different worlds – both in the geographical and the existential and social sense of the term. In fact, working between borders and at the margins of fixed categories and material realities, we would like to collectively discuss questions such as: what does conducting translational work imply? What can we learn from each other's practices? To what extent does translation foster the survival of our various worlds? And finally, how to survive the loss of parts of our lived worlds, languages and temporalities, a loss that is a necessary part of translational work?
Speakers: Alia Al-Saji, Flora Löffelmann, Paul*A Helfritzsch, Johanna Oksala
This event invites interested researchers to collectively reflect on the relationship between critique and time. Special attention shall be paid to current critical phenomenological approaches. We are particularly interested in fostering international dialogue around the following questions:
- Can an investigation of time and temporality offer tools for formulating pertinent critique?
- What tools does critical phenomenology have to offer for investigating time and temporality?
- How can we conceive of the past in a critical way?
- What role can decolonial approaches play for such reflective work?
- What is the temporality of critique itself?
- Is critical thinking set in the present only, describing a problematic status quo, or is it apt to foster a better future?
- How and to what extent can temporality be thought of in plural terms, and what implications follow from this conceptualisation?
- Following the last question, what different modes of perception of time and temporality need articulation, specifically when considering categories such as class, gender and race?
- What makes the time we live in a critical time and what conceptual and political tasks follow from this?
- Finally, what is the relationship between affect, repetition and transformation? Links to themes such as trauma and nostalgia are more than welcome.
La problématique en jeu est précisément explicitée dans le titre de l'évènement :
Corps à (re)construire implique, dans un premier temps, que le corps qui est en jeu ici reste à bâtir. Il est pris à la fois comme fragmentaire, un corps souffrant morcelé par les épreuves qu'il a dû traverser, et conçu, précisément en raison de son caractère ouvert, comme lieu d’une potentielle transformation.
Corps à (re)construire fait référence au passé, notamment à ce qui s'est inscrit en lui : il évoque une matière temporelle. Néanmoins, cela ne veut pas dire que nous intégrions cette dimension temporelle du corps comme une simple donnée.
Car le corps à (re)construire nous amène à questionner l'idée d'un corps accessible de façon immédiate. A l'inverse, nous nous intéressons à une conceptualisation du corps dans laquelle il est considéré comme une altérité structurée et médiatisée par le langage.
Ces trois perspectives de recherche permettront de déplier la richesse du terme construction, et d’ainsi déconstruire la possibilité-même d’une reconstruction complète qui viendrait réparer les possibles destructions subies par le corps souffrant : face à l’altérité émergeant du langage, le sujet souffrant échouera dans la tentative de décrire son état présent ou passé, corporel ou psychique de manière adéquate. Cette incapacité d’une description complète et immédiate, ou encore d’une narration linéaire des épreuves d’un corps singulier nous permettra d’ouvrir notre champ de recherche éthique et sociale, en prenant cette impossibilité-même comme point de départ : elle ouvre au corps qui reste à construire la voie à sa propre configuration.
Nous nous demanderons notamment : comment le corps peut-il parler de sa souffrance ? Quelles modalités du langage sont aptes à témoigner des épreuves du corps ? Quelles transformations subit la souffrance du fait de sa mise en mots ? Quels récits du corps subsistent et se transmettent à travers le temps ? Lesquels sont oubliés ? Quelles sont les structures sociales et politiques qui se cachent derrière cet oubli ?
ORGANISATION
Leyla Sophie Gleissner (ENS Paris et Université de Vienne) et Flora Löffelmann (Université de Vienne)
CONTACT
reconstruire.workshop@gmail.com
This workshop is part of the FWF-project P33428 "A Phenomenology of Nostalgia", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna (2020-2024)
The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis via the theme of nostalgia. While there has been a modest but steady pool of research on nostalgia from a phenomenological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis—especially within the context of Freud—and nostalgia remains more ambiguous. In the work of Freud himself, the term “nostalgia” appears only once and even then only in passing in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passing mention to nostalgia is all the more striking given Freud’s concern with the archaeology of meaning, the function of fixation, and the different modalities of memory conceived in his work. This workshop proceeds from the point of view that the theme of nostalgia provides an opportunity for dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In particular, the workshop posits that nostalgia can provide a space of possible encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis across several key themes and questions.
1. Temporality: what is the temporality of nostalgia? Contemporary understanding tends to treat nostalgia as a mode of reminiscence, in which we “travel” back to the past, as though the past were a discrete zone of time behind us. But nostalgia’s temporality is more complex than this; if the past is involved in nostalgia, then it is not clear what type of pastness is implicated. Moreover, nostalgia not only involves the past as a dimension of time, but also the present and the future as determining structures of nostalgia. How can phenomenology and psychoanalysis help us understand these complex relations (especially in terms of concepts such as retention and protention as well as psychoanalytical concepts such as repetition, fixation as well as Nachträglichkeit)?
2. Affectivity: the history of nostalgia is a history of transformation. During its inception, nostalgia was understood as a deadly disease; today, by contrast, it is understood as a benign pastime. What is the affective status of nostalgia and how can we think of the emotion outside of the binary between disease and well-being? What role do other emotions such as anxiety, melancholia, and shame play in the formation of nostalgia as a mood? What exactly is the affective tonality of nostalgia and what role can Freud’s notion of the uncanny play here?
3. Subjectivity: much of the contemporary research on nostalgia maintains that the emotion bolsters and fortifies a sense of self, acting as a form of self-help therapy in moments of distress. Yet convictions such as these tend to overlook the structure of subjectivity at work in nostalgia. Here questions such as what role nostalgia plays in generating an impression of unity (or otherwise disclosing the fragmented foundations upon which subjectivity is grounded) are critical. Furthermore, one could ask if this impression of unity points to the embodied experience of nostalgia, e.g. as identification with a totality outside of one's body?
4. Unconsciousness: what role do unconscious mechanisms play in nostalgic desire? How do the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness differ from one another and what conception of the unconscious is suited best to conceptualise nostalgia? Can phenomenological notions such as operative and latent intentionality play a beneficial role in enriching the psychoanalytical notion of Unconsciousness?
5. Intentionality: what is it that we are nostalgic for? Historically, the answer to this question has been home, where home has been understood in geographical terms. Over the last century, the emphasis has shifted from spatiality to temporality. Yet things—objects—remain critical to the advent of nostalgic desire. Nostalgic desire is not an abstract longing nor is it a pure mode of recollection, but instead a desire that is given expression through particular things (including other people), whether they be real or phantasy. Here, questions emerge about what role intentional states such as memory, imagination, and reverie play in the formation of nostalgia and in the transformation of the past into a nostalgic object.
Phenomenology offers specific methods that disclose transcendental structures of experience which, in our everyday experience, are overlooked and presupposed. As such, it is understood to be a critical enterprise. Yet in recent years, there has been a ‘critical turn’ in phenomenology: phenomenology is also increasingly understood as a form of social critique capable of engaging, analyzing, and illuminating contemporary socio-political phenomena. Proponents of this critical turn emphasize that, in addition to clarifying the character of constituting consciousness, subjectivity, the lifeworld, and intersubjectivity, phenomenology can also thematize ethical and political experience, as well as shed light on the diverse experiences of marginalized subjects. This new understanding of phenomenology stems from the diagnosis that traditional phenomenologists have overlooked aspects of lived experience and embodiment, such as the subject’s gendered and racialized inscription in the world.
The aim of this conference is to explore the possibilities and opportunities for phenomenology today, following this critical turn. The questions and topics we would like to explore include, for example, the following:
-Is phenomenology a critical enterprise? What makes it critical and what is ‘critique’?
-Can phenomenology play a role in contributing to social and political change?
-What is critical phenomenology? Is it a continuation of classical phenomenology, or is it something that has surpassed it and is now distinct from classical phenomenology?
-Can phenomenology critique cultural, ethical, and political norms? If so, how?
-Can phenomenology analyze sexual, racial, and gender oppression? If so, how?