Claudia Breger

Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece Friedrich Kittler’s Philhellenic Fantasies

This article argues that the abundance of Greek figures and scenarios in Kittler’s recent work points to a shift in his oeuvre, which, however, does not represent a radical break with his ‘hardware studies’. At the turn of the 21st century, Kittler champions an emphatic notion of culture as a necessary supplement to science and technology. This conceptual marriage mediates grand historical narratives of cultural identity. Specifically, Kittler’s texts provide us with narratives of Greek origin which serve to re-capture collective identities in the age of globalization. On the explicit level, this identity is predominantly European, but the search has national components as well. With his turn to culture, the organizing trope of 19th-century German nationalism, Kittler has also embraced the legacy of German philhellenism, which articulated national identities through the theme of ‘elective affinity’. Kittler’s Greece occupies the very structural place it had in 19th-century German philhellenism: It stands in for both the foundation of European civilization and its virtual better self, a realm of sensual culture untainted by modern capitalism and Empire. Most of the figures inhabiting this realm are familiar from 19th-century discourse as well, but these discursive loops are fueled by contemporary feedback. Kittler’s Greek narratives have developed out of postwar academic discourses and connect to other post-unification Greek fantasies.

Mimikry als Grenzverwirrung. Parodistische Posen bei Yoko Tawada

„Border lives — the art of the present”: Folgt man der postkolonialen Theorie Homi Bhabhas, so kennzeichnet das Leben an der Grenze unser Fin de siecle in besonderem Mase; wir befinden uns „im Moment des Ubergangs, wo Raum und Zeit sich kreuzen und komplexe Figuren von Differenz und Identitat, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Innen und Ausen, Einschlus und Ausschlus erzeugen”.1 Globalisierung und Migration, die Erkundung virtueller Raume und die nicht zuletzt auf akademischer Ebene zu beobachtende Faszination durch sexuelle wie kulturelle Grenzuberschreitungen deuten darauf hin, das wir in Zeiten leben, in denen Konzepte homogener Identitat ausgedient haben.2 Ein Blick auf die politische Situation stimmt jedoch skeptisch, denn zugleich werden im Namen solch ,historisch uberholter’ Konzepte wie „nationale Kultur” wieder Befreiungskampfe gefuhrt und Genozide geplant. Die neunziger Jahre erscheinen so in doppelter Weise als Jahrzehnt des Grenzlebens: als Zeit des Zerfalls von Identitaten an politischen Realitaten, wissenschaftlichen Entwicklungen und (post)modernen Wahrnehmungsweisen einerseits, ihrer Wieder- und Neuerrichtung andererseits. Die in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften gefuhrten Debatten um die identitatsverunsichernden Modelle beispielsweise des „Postkolonialismus”, „dekonstruktiven Feminismus” oder der queerness greifen angesichts dieser Doppelgesichtigkeit der Gegenwart oft zu kurz. Zu fragen ware, wie die Gleichzeitigkeit und das Ineinander von Be- und Entgrenzungsprozessen in ihren verschiedenen politischen und kulturellen Formen analysiert und (um)gestaltet werden konnen.

Affect and Narratology

This chapter provides an overview of the different ways in which the category of affect has been used in narratological discourses and contextualizes these uses in relation to the broader contemporary field of affect studies. This overview uncovers a conceptual rift along with missed opportunities. While Deleuzian work in particular in affect theory and studies remains anti-narrative, current (dominantly cognitive) narratological work on emotion does not do justice to the conceptual promises of Deleuzian approaches to affect. In response to this situation, the later part of the chapter outlines a suggestion for a syncretic conceptualization, which combines impulses from Deleuzian, cognitive, and phenomenological approaches into a layered notion of affective narrative worldmaking assemblages.

Affects in Configuration: A New Approach to Narrative Worldmaking

ABSTRACT: In this essay, I propose a new model and methodology for investigating the productive, layered ways in which affects operate in and through narrative texts in the communicative loops of reading and writing. I delineate this model by way of a dialogue between different concepts of worlding, world-building, and worldmaking circulating in narrative and affect theory, which provide connecting points between the two fields as well as diverging (Deleuzian, neuroscientific, phenomenological) approaches to affect. In developing these connecting points, the proposed syncretic model addresses the shortcomings of current uses of affect, including the foreclosure of textuality and subjectivity in Deleuzian conceptualizations and the narrow emotion concepts and generalizing tendencies of neuroscientific approaches. In reconceptualizing narrative worldmaking as a multidimensional, ‘multivectoral’ assemblage of heterogeneous elements, I detail how the rhetorical processes of narration and reading engage affects, bodily memories, and associations in layered transactions between characters, narrators, implied and actual readers and authors. Probing the model’s productivity through a reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I spell out three sets of implications for narrative theory: I consider fictionality’s affective engagement in the world, the workings of distributed, nonsovereign agency in the loop of literary communication, and the potentials of reconfigurative reading as a methodology of ‘following’ affective complexity.

Precarious Identifications: The Aesthetic Management of Empathy in Schläfer (2005) and Paradise Now (2005)

Critically connecting cognitive with psychoanalytical approaches, this contribution investigates the cultural work performed by different forms of empathy and identification in a close reading of two recent films on terrorism. Whereas Schläfer remains sceptical vis-à-vis empathy, Paradise Now controversially embraces its power — not, however, without specifying its goals and limits.ZusammenfassungMithilfe einer kritischen Verknüpfung psychoanalytischer und kognitivistischer Ansätze untersucht dieser Beitrag die kulturelle Funktionsweise verschiedener Formen von Empathie und Identifizierung in der Lektüre zweier aktueller Terrorismus-Filme. Während Schläfer der Empathie gegenüber skeptisch bleibt, nutzt Paradise Now ihre Kraft auf kontroverse Weise — allerdings nicht, ohne ihre Ziele und Grenzen zu spezifizieren.