Public conference at the University of Oldenburg, 9-11 May 2019

"TO LOSE MYSELF / I AM THERE!"
ON SELF-LOSS AND WORLD EXPERIENCE IN THE MODERN AGE

Prof. Dr Thomas Alkemeyer: Self-education through self-loss? On resonance, (de)subjectivisation and power in social relations

The lecture will expand the active understanding of practice and self-education that predominates in sociology with a passive understanding that places the aspects of being touched, becoming involved and letting oneself be involved in the physically mediated social relationships of various cultural practices (games, rituals, political assemblies, etc.) at the centre. At the same time, this raises the - also politically important - question of the relationship between moments of de-subjectivising absorption in a (collective) event and subjectivation in this event, devotion to the event and self-formation in devotion.

Dr habil. Peter Braun"To lose myself / I am there!" On self-loss and world experience in the work of Ilse Schneider-Lengyel
Book presentation with lecture and discussion (Literaturhaus Wilhelm 13)
Moderation: Jan Gerstner

Prof. Dr Kathrin Busch: Loss of self as a form of knowledge. Aesthetics of radicalised sensibility

If you take a book like Chris Kraus' I love Dick, which bears witness to an almost painful embarrassment and demonstrates a shameful lack of sovereignty and self-deprecation, then you will find in it an aesthetic of "weak" self-loss. It is not the excessive transgression imagined by authors such as Nietzsche or Bataille that takes centre stage here, but rather a partial self-deprivation. It is determined by an unintentional exposure and an unchosen sensibility. Against the background of a knowledge of the arts, the lecture asks what this sensibility - upstream of sensory perception - can mean for aesthetic cognition.

Dr Rosa EidelpesOn ethnology and self-alienation

At the end of the 1970s, an "ethnological subculture" (Fritz Kramer) emerged on the fringes of the university, discussing an "alternative ethnology". It was not only scientific rationality that was criticised, but also Western subjectivity. More than anything else, "ethnology" was the heading for an endeavour of self-liberation: the cultural encounter with others in the context of the ethnological field trip was conceived as a medium of an experience of alienation - in contrast to capitalist alienation - that was consciously brought about. Against this background, can the project of "alternative ethnology" be interpreted as a cultural dimension of the preoccupation with "forms of relationship", as an expression of the contemporary "hunger for experience" (Michael Rutschky) for an epistemically non-fixable "completely other"?

Prof. Dr Joachim Fischer: Eccentric positionality: vita passiva, vita activa, vita contemplativa

In social and cultural science theory, the vita activa (working, producing, acting), the doing approach or social construction dominate as basic schemata for the elucidation of the socio-cultural lifeworld. This activity-theoretical presupposition possibly misses the vita passiva that is central to the constitution of the social, in which the intersubjectivities are unmistakably and unmistakably exposed to important moments of experience, to which they expose themselves in such a way that sociality is created through them.

Firstly, the article attempts a phenomenological collection of these passively tinted moments of the socio-cultural lifeworld, which participate in the basic trait of experience and yield to it in situations, cultivating it. These include, for example, breathing, sleeping, pain, being in tune; not to forget giving birth and being born or "laughing and crying" (Plessner); as well as erotic-ecstatic processes. The vita passiva obviously forms a constitutive part of the social world. Secondly, an anthropological social theory is proposed that clarifies the constitutive function of these passive moments for the lifeworld from a theory of "eccentric positionality".

Prof. Dr Volker Gottowik: Sexual transgression and loss of self: ethnological perspectives

Two examples from science and religion are used to thematise the methodically induced loss of self, which is intended to open up a different form of access to this world and the worlds beyond. This loss of self goes hand in hand with a mimetic assimilation to the foreign or divine, which requires transgression of rules, even to the point of sexual transgression. The transgression of boundaries and the violation of rules are aimed at experiences, which in both cases are regarded as a prerequisite for realisation or enlightenment.

PD Dr Mario Grizelj: "One speaks me." The overdetermination of self-loss in the possessed nuns of Loudun

The events surrounding the possessed Ursulines of Loudun in the 1630s are at the centre of the lecture. Sister Jeanne des Anges tells the exorcists "I am another" and "I am spoken to". By showing herself to be possessed not just by one devil, as was usual, but by seven, she radically complicates the exorcism procedure. The various devil names do not mark a multiplicity of subjects of speech, a multiplication of the self, "but rather the disappearance of the speaker" (Certeau), the loss of the self. In this way, the seven devil names overdetermine the loss of self of the superior, so that the expected discourse-stabilising effect of the proper name is undermined and the exorcism fails.

Héla Hecker, M.A.: Amor mundi. Hannah Arendt's answer to the loss of the world

Hannah Arendt became world-famous with her work Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism. In it, she described in detail how totalitarian state structures destroyed the world and the individual. In her main philosophical work, Vita activa or On the Active Life, the loss of the world and the loss of individuality due to social bureaucratisation are also a central theme. What is less well known, however, is that her dissertation, The Concept of Love in Augustine, was already dedicated to this fundamental problem and attributed to Christian love a power that destroys the world and relationships. The lecture will present Hannah Arendt's solution, the amor mundi, which makes it possible to regain the world and the person in certain human activities.

Dr des. Elisabeth Heyne: Being a shell. Experimental dissociation as a mode of cognition with Roger Caillois

Against the background of the experimental testing of dissociative (psychopathological) states, which the sociologist and writer Roger Caillois attempted to bring about in himself in the 1930s as a paradoxical active passivation and at the same time to explore, the lecture is dedicated to his late resumption of the topic: In a text from 1965, depersonalisation frees itself from optical perception, from the connection between body and image (Lacan, Vignon) and becomes independent in a fictional transformation into a mollusc. Caillois' late revision raises questions about the politically ambivalent legacy and the regressive dimension of scientific fantasies of dissolution as well as parasitic fiction as a mode of cognition of unthinkable subjective states.

Dr Sandra Janßen: "Selflessness" between mysticism, psychology and totalitarianism. On a figure of thought from the 1930s and 1940s

The history of modern psychology can be written as the history of ways in which the subject is not identical with itself, i.e. suffers a loss of self. The lecture focuses on the 1930s and 1940s and identifies as a central psychological figure of thought of this phase the assumption that the subject is a function of the social or existential "field" in which it is situated - i.e. a variable variable whose growth or disappearance can be consciously experienced at the same time. Using various literary examples, the thesis is pursued that this figure of thought at this time has an epistemic significance that extends to the political.

Dr Dr Ulrich van Loyen: The End/of all/ Ending. De Martino and shamanism

Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) has spelt out in several attempts how individual "presenza" as self-presence and agency is based on a passivity that itself must be produced: through rites and techniques that ultimately form the repository from which respective societies and their members are formed. But what form of activity is at the origin of this passivity, and what does the society whose beginnings are rites of de-individualisation consist of? The lecture will attempt to answer these questions with the early and the last De Martino, with Nietzsche's tragedy writing and Rohde's Psyche - and with the shamans that connect all three.

Martin Mettin, M.A.: On the dialectic of receptivity and spontaneity in Ulrich Sonnemann

The question of the relationship between loss of self and experience of the world in modernity is often thematised in Sonnemann's work, for example in his late investigations into the epistemological potentials of hearing. The lecture will refer in particular to Sonnemann's dialectical conception of openness to experience and spontaneity (passivity and activity) and will also outline the main features of his negative-anthropological approach. With a view to the discussion on the "death of modernity", which Sonnemann had with Dietmar Kamper, among others, cross-connections to the project of historical anthropology emerge.

Prof. Dr Thomas Reinhardt: How to become a cat. Morphology and (anti-)humanism in Claude Lévi-Strauss

Anti-humanist tendencies can be found in Claude Lévi-Strauss since the mid-1950s at the latest. In his endeavour to focus on the work of the mind itself and to trace the homologous relationships between social, narrative and natural phenomena, Lévi-Strauss increasingly deprives man of his special position in relation to the surrounding nature and allows him to appear simultaneously as the subject and object of all cognitive processes. At the same time, he expands the field of anthropological research far beyond the realm of the "human" and lays the foundation for what is now known as the "ontological turn".

Prof. Dr Erhard Schüttpelz: Trance and loss of self. Some theoretical considerations

The lecture is based on two classic texts on trance theory: I.M. Lewis' objection to typological exaggerations in his essay on the initiation of the shaman, and Jean Rouch's reflection on person configuration among the Songhay. What happens when one thinks of both conceptions together, and what becomes of the figure of self-loss in illness, possession and bewitchment? It is not just about a perspectivism of categorisation, because both texts discuss the necessity of recognising all positions of trance theory for oneself as an observer, and of seeking scientific or artistic design in the space of underdetermination.

Dr Martin Treml: Passio as suffering and passion. Aby Warburg's picture atlas

When Aby Warburg died in 1929, he left behind the so-called Bilderatlas, 63 plates with more than a thousand photographs. It is a collection of pathos formulas, gestures of deepest sorrow and highest triumph, a diachronic history of expression since antiquity. The picture atlas was a project and method in the last years of Warburg's life and is still inspiring today. In it, loss of self and gain of the world come into balance. It also proves to be a key element of successful self-therapy, as Warburg began working on it in the phases between delusion and depression during his five-year breakdown. In the end, he asked questions such as the replacement of the victims and what we call "biopolitics".