from Team
"Trans-generationality. Designs and counter-designs for a mechanism of cultural transmission"
A workshop organised by Prof. Dr. Johann Kreuzer and Bianca Pick.
- with Dr Ulrike Jureit (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) and PD. Dr Christian Schneider (University of Kassel, Institute for Psychoanalysis)
- on 25 November 2015, 9:30-13:00 in room A3 1-109 (DFG-GRK "Selbst-Bildungen")
- Registration required with Bianca Pick (Bianca.Pick@uni-oldenburg.de)
"In the last ten years, generational research has been able to gain substance, above all through interdisciplinary exchange in theoretical and conceptual terms. Irrespective of serious differences between the disciplines, the concept of generation has become a basic scientific term that is frequently used despite a certain lack of clarity. In terms of basic theoretical assumptions, the idea of transgenerational processes and their transfer to other disciplines and research contexts is particularly relevant. Analytically, this was and is not only advantageous. The complexity of a transgenerational concept that identifies a conflictual generational entanglement with a compulsion to repeat itself in the "drama of Oedipus" regularly atrophies into a theory of imprinting that is also barely able to detach itself from its therapeutic setting. It is worth asking whether the difference between analysing parent-child interactions and a generation theory based on cultural history offers added value in terms of social theory, which would also be of interdisciplinary interest. The largely exhausted approaches to cultural memory theory and the intergenerational transmission of historical consciousness could also benefit from this. The question of why transgenerationality as a cultural transfer concept developed its enormous attractiveness, especially in the context of Holocaust research, also seems revealing."
Text basis (will be sent to all registered students by Bianca Pick)
Schneider, Christian (2004): The Holocaust as a generational object. Notes on a German identity problem from the perspective of generational history. Mittelweg 36(13), 56-73.
On the evening before the workshop, PD Dr Christian Schneider will give a lecture as part of the DFG-GRK's series of lectures on "Processes of Recognition".
LECTURE
"The living and the dead"
24.11.2015, 18:00 BIS-Saal
"The ideal of all recognition processes is a communicative symmetry based on complete reciprocity between the partners. I would like to focus on two asymmetrical communication processes that nevertheless cannot do without the aspect of reciprocity. Firstly, the dialogue between the adult and the child; secondly, I would like to explore the problem of whether a discourse of recognition sui generis is conceivable beyond the boundaries of life.
In psychoanalysis, mourning is conceived as an act of recognition of a loss. Mourning for a deceased person essentially consists of gradually withdrawing the occupation from him or her as a significant object and thus psychologically ratifying the loss. Freud bound this process into a tight corset of work ("mourning work") that largely ignores the dialogue side of this process.
In my contribution, I attempt to discuss the possibilities and aporias that arise when the communicative content of mourning is understood as a special form of a dialogical recognition process that detaches the problem of intersubjectivity from the paradigm of bodily living reciprocity."