Albrecht KOSCHORKE, Professeur invité en septembre-octobre 2015
Albrecht Koschorke, théoricien de la culture, est professeur de lettres modernes à l’Université de Constance et professeur invité de l’Université de Chicago. Ses recherches portant sur la littérature allemande des 17e et 20e siècles, la théorie des médias et les sciences de la culture, ont été récompensées à plusieurs reprises. Die Heilige Familie und ihre Folgen (La Sainte Famille et son héritage) (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011) – ouvrage non traduit.
A. Koschorke est intervenu dans le cadre de la villa gillet en 2014 « Regarder l’horizon : une expérience métaphysique » « Tourner les yeux vers l’horizon : voilà une expérience très commune, mais aussi une invitation à la rêverie, voire au vertige métaphysique. Qu’y a-t-il au-delà du visible ? »
Un Dieu, un sens caché, ou tout simplement rien ? Et pourquoi l’horizon nous apparaît-il tantôt comme une ligne - avec une géométrie bien nette - et tantôt comme un brouillard, une nuée ou une tempête - c’est-à-dire une fantasmagorie ? En fait, il est possible de raconter toute l’histoire de la métaphysique occidentale à travers l’évolution des représentations de l’horizon en peinture. Histoire de l’horizon (Geschichte des Horizonts, Suhrkamp, 1990, non traduit).
Research Seminar‚ "Poetry and Dictatorship", ENS Lyon, September/October 2015
Course Description and Syllabus
1. The topic
In general opinion, politics and poetry have little in common. One would assume power and poetic arts to occupy separate worlds. Practicing the occasionally bloody business of governance implies keeping art at a distance, while a sense of poetic beauty thrives at the periphery rather than at the center of power.
All the more striking seems the phenomenon that it is precisely the despot who is often a great lover of art and even stages himself as artist. Among the various arts of power – painting, architecture, drama and song, to name only a few –, literary production plays a prominent role. Literature is well suited as a laboratory of political ideologies, all the more so as it has been a hatchery for the most powerful political force of modernity : nationalism. As part of a “poetic-military complex” (Slavoj Žižek), united with the exertion of executive power and amplified by mass media, literature is a decisive factor in the processes of disintegration or reformation of governmental structures. It is frequently in such situations of upheaval that a type of political activist enters the scene whose appetite encompasses both literature and violence. The ability to endow radical ideas with a political shape implies a poetic disposition, and thus tyrannical rule is often combined with an excessive lust for language. This holds especially true for cases of charismatic rule, where the linguistic powers of the leader constitute an essential and integrative bond between himself and the people.
Tyrants usually need to construct the political order that will center on their person under extremely instable conditions. Thus, the system they have established carries the traits of a fiction that originated in a void and was then released into reality. This enables the despot to imagine himself as the author of a gigantic work of art that has its source in himself. Paradoxically, this makes inhuman and brutal regimes in particular resemble aesthetically unreal creations. This allows us a glance at the abysmal kinship between the deed and the mind, political and artistic striving for form which, in civilized societies, every party involved – be it politicians, intellectuals or artists – refuses to acknowledge.
The seminar aims at analyzing this particular interference between poetry and dictatorship. The first three sessions in September, mainly consisting of lectures (in English), will lay the ground ; the following three sessions in October (in German) will be based on seminar-style close readings and discussions, with a particular focus on the „poetics“ of National Socialism (Hitler, Mein Kampf ; Goebbels, Michael).
Albrecht Koschorke intervient à la fois dans le cadre du séminaire doctoral de littérature comparée, département des Lettres Modernes et CERCC, et dans le cadre du département des langues de l’ENS ainsi que du CERPHI.
Les dates :
mercredi 16 septembre de 16h à 18h (contact Eric Dayre)
mardi 6 octobre, de 16-19h (contact : Mme le Professeur Anne Lagny), Salle 2 BUISSON
mercredi 7 octobre, de 16h-17h30 (contact : Mme le Professeur Anne Lagny), Salle 1 BUISSON
Ce séminaire est placé dans le cadre des collaborations soutenues en 2015 par la région Rhône-Alpes