Public conference as part of the event programme of the DFG Research Training Group 1608/2 "Selbst-Bildungen. Practices of Subjectivation" at the University of Oldenburg (9-11 May 2019).

The rejection of the idea of the autonomous subject has become part of the tone of current theoretical work in the cultural and social sciences. An autonomy-sceptical perspective on execution now promises deeper insight into social behavioural flows, as the plaything of which the self bounces back and forth between empowerment and recognition. Under the paradigm of practice, however, phenomena are lost from view that approach the self not as an addressee or participant, but as a consciousness, as a consciousness whose intentionality and relationship to the world cannot be taken for granted. The idea of subjectivation as a relational event of external and self-determination also stops short of the extreme case of heteronomy: the self-cancellation, the loss of contour of the subject in experience.

An approach to understanding these dynamics of loss of contour or lack of contour is offered by the examination of various phenomena of passivity, as can be observed in phenomenological, cultural and literary research in recent years. There, a scepticism towards traditional forms of being active (ability, capacity, willpower, action, etc.) is articulated, whereby the meanings of passivity encompass a broad spectrum of different phenomena that blur the category of the self from different directions - from the inside out and from the outside in. The effects of these different modes of 'de-self-understanding' of the self and the world are to be analysed if the scope and limits of praxeological approaches are to be explored.

Just as passivity is difficult to grasp in terms of praxis - namely at best as an initiation moment of activity -, the loss of self - in the meanings emphasised here of a self that loses itself, a fraying of the edges of the self, but also a lack of difference before any self-perception - lies outside the focus on subjectivation. Idle running is hardly conceivable in the gears of practice. In order to deal with certain phenomena of the dissolution of subjectivity, a reconfiguration of the thinking apparatus is evidently required: a shift in the axis of vision from activity to passivity, from scenarios of doing to moments of suffering, from questions of recognition to phenomena of experience. Instead of continuing the analysis along the lines of action and behaviour, a change in the observer's attitude would be necessary, towards empathy with concrete experiences, an engagement with supposedly isolated, even alien worlds of experience: ethnological pragmatism instead of ethological interactionism.

The title of the conference takes up two verses by the poet Ilse Schneider-Lengyel: "To lose myself / I am there!" The tension between presence and self-loss expressed therein serves as a starting point for us to examine and discuss the different manifestations of disappearance. Self-loss - understood as a process - releases various and sometimes diametrically opposed dynamics, the spectrum of which ranges from the threatening relapse into nature to the dialectic of loss and re-appropriation to the idea of a unity with the world.

In this way, attention is drawn to phenomena in which the subject is deprived of safe ground: ritual trance, heteronomy through possession - by spirits, gods or (research) objects -, ecstatic and sacred experiences, self-loss and self-alienation in their various forms (dissociation, schizophrenia on the one hand, mimetic or assimilative behaviour on the other), as well as self-dissolution in the crowd, in the swarm or in the fascination that emanated from the masses and the death mystique in fascism.

The central problem here is the scientific approach: when does the understanding contemplation of the trance state turn into a 'self-less' engagement that resembles the very trance that we are investigating? Do we necessarily move away from conceptually rigorous analysis and into a mode of empathic hermeneutics or do we succeed in keeping the object of investigation sterile qua analytics? To what extent do the mode of cognition and the object of research correlate here? The tension between "identification and distance" or "empathy and science" are part of a "science of the foreign" that moves back and forth between a phenomenology of radical foreign experience and a fundamentally identity-logical hermeneutics and that confronts itself with different forms of self-loss at the level of the object and the method.

The contributions are based on case studies, concrete analyses and theoretical discussions. The subjects represented are literary studies, ethnology, sociology, philosophy, media studies and religious studies. In this way, the conference offers space for a transdisciplinary debate on experiences and concepts of self-loss.