- American Literature, American Studies, American Culture, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics and Politics, Aesthetics, and 19 morePolitical Philosophy, Populism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, American Transcendentalists, Stanley Cavell, 19th-Century American Literature, American Philosophy, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 20th Century American Literature, Nineteenth Century Literature, Nineteenth Century Studies, North American Studies, Risk and Vulnerability, Jazz History, Jazz Studies, History of Political Thought, John Dewey, and American Pragmatismedit
- I'm a professor of American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. I currently work on a book on the aesth... moreI'm a professor of American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany.
I currently work on a book on the aesthetics of populism as well as on a book on the structural transformations of privacy and contemporary American literature. I also work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture in relation to democracy and aesthetics.edit
Table of Contents and front matter of my book The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018). See the section "Papers" for a pdf of the introduction. Link to publisher website:... more
Table of Contents and front matter of my book The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018).
See the section "Papers" for a pdf of the introduction.
Link to publisher website:
http://www.cambridge.org/9781108418768
Link to video of book launch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyjQeSmAFmQ
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.
Reviews & endorsements
'The Poetics of Insecurity is an impressive and accomplished work that analyzes a range of American narratives from the early Republic to our present moment to show how an interest in and exploration of 'security' has been central to American literature and culture. Voelz makes contributions to multiple fields, including not only American literature broadly construed, but also narrative theory; it also joins a growing body of work exploring the intersections of the literary with non-literary conceptions of security, and contributes to recent work focused on chance and/or accident in American literary history.' Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania
'The strength of Voelz's readings lies in their attentiveness to the ambivalent affective dimensions of insecurity, the intermingling of fear and desire that accompanies the contemplation of an uncertain future.' Deborah Thurman, The Review of English Studies
See the section "Papers" for a pdf of the introduction.
Link to publisher website:
http://www.cambridge.org/9781108418768
Link to video of book launch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyjQeSmAFmQ
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.
Reviews & endorsements
'The Poetics of Insecurity is an impressive and accomplished work that analyzes a range of American narratives from the early Republic to our present moment to show how an interest in and exploration of 'security' has been central to American literature and culture. Voelz makes contributions to multiple fields, including not only American literature broadly construed, but also narrative theory; it also joins a growing body of work exploring the intersections of the literary with non-literary conceptions of security, and contributes to recent work focused on chance and/or accident in American literary history.' Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania
'The strength of Voelz's readings lies in their attentiveness to the ambivalent affective dimensions of insecurity, the intermingling of fear and desire that accompanies the contemplation of an uncertain future.' Deborah Thurman, The Review of English Studies
Research Interests:
Johannes Voelz offers a critique of the New Americanists through a stimulating and original reexamination of the iconic figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Voelz argues against the prevailing tendency among Americanists to see Emerson as the... more
Johannes Voelz offers a critique of the New Americanists through a stimulating and original reexamination of the iconic figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Voelz argues against the prevailing tendency among Americanists to see Emerson as the product of an “all-pervasive scope of cultural power.” Instead he shows Emerson’s philosophy to be a deft response to the requirements of lecturing professionally at the newly built lyceums around the country. Voelz brings to light a fascinating organic relationship between Emerson’s dynamic style of thinking and the uplifting experience demanded by his public. This need for an audience-directed philosophy, the author argues, reveals the function of Emerson’s infamous inconsistencies on such issues as representation, identity, and nation. It also poses a major counter-argument to the New Americanists’ dim view of Emerson’s individualism and his vision of the private man in public. Challenging the fundamental premises of the New Americanists, this study is an important, even pathbreaking guide to the future of American studies.
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A study of the American imaginary in transnational America The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of... more
A study of the American imaginary in transnational America
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism.
The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction • LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf • Russia’s Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific - Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama’s Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism.
The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction • LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf • Russia’s Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific - Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama’s Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index
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This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and... more
This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and literature. The emphasis is put on Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” and the question in how far his study of the European process of state formation and the correlative psycho-social changes is relevant to the analysis of the development of the American nation-state and the habitus of Americans. Leading scholars from the field of figurational sociology team up with an international cast of renowned Americanists to shed new light on a variety of issues from the domains of social theory, cultural history, and literary criticism. With Elias as a guide, drinking and democracy in the early republic, nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools, the fear of slave insurrections, and the modern-day black ghetto appear as steps in an open-ended and non-teleological civilizing process that weaves together changes in habitus and social structure. Without stumbling into the pitfalls of an ideology of “American exceptionalism,” the figurational approach to American studies allows the contributors of this pioneering collection to give new answers to the tenacious question of the United States’ peculiar characteristics. Adapting Elias’s analyses to US-American conditions, the authors provide fresh impulses for theorizing civilizing and decivilizing processes, thus transforming the field of both American studies and figurational sociology. The contributors are Jesse F. Battan, Christa Buschendorf, Rachel Hope Cleves, Winfried Fluck, Astrid Franke, Mary O. Furner, Günter Leypoldt, Stephen Mennell, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Kirsten Twelbeck, Johannes Voelz, Loïc Wacquant, and Cas Wouters.
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‘Romance with America?’ is a collection of twenty-one essays by one of today’s most important American Studies scholars. The selection assembled here pays tribute to the immense scope of Winfried Fluck’s intellectual pursuits. It traces... more
‘Romance with America?’ is a collection of twenty-one essays by one of today’s most important American Studies scholars. The selection assembled here pays tribute to the immense scope of Winfried Fluck’s intellectual pursuits. It traces nearly four decades of continuous engagement with a set of key problems, among them the cultural functions of fiction and the imaginary, their manifestations in different periods of American literary and cultural history, the role of aesthetic experience in the construction of national and individual identities, as well as the state of American Studies and its competing narratives about America. Throughout these essays, several of them previously unpublished or not yet published in English, the author unfolds a comprehensive cultural theory that reaches well beyond the study of ‘America.’
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Demokratie ist mehr als eine Regierungsform. Mit dem US-amerikanischen Dichter Walt Whitman lässt sie sich als eine offene Lebensform begreifen: vielfältig, unvorhersehbar und angewiesen auf Impulse aus den Künsten.
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This essay reviews Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (2019), a collection of essays by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Written during... more
This essay reviews Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (2019), a collection of essays by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Written during the last three decades of Koselleck’s life and drawn from three German-language books of essays that came out in the new millennium, Sediments of Time introduces English-language readers to Koselleck’s historical anthropology—a central dimension of his oeuvre so far largely unavailable in translation. This essay argues that Koselleck’s historical anthropology is always also an aesthetic anthropology, which helps explain Koselleck’s recurring engagement with literary writers such as Shakespeare, Kleist, and Melville. At the core of Koselleck’s work lies an argument about the mutual interdependence of history and fiction. Herein resides Koselleck’s provocation for literary studies: if, for the historian, fiction provides insights into historical experi...
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My contribution to Frank Kelleter's and Alexander Starre's 2022 volume "Culture2: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century."
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My contribution to "The Present Function of American Literary History," a special issue of American Literary History.
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My contribution to Kevin McNamara's collection The City in American Literature and Culture. The essay explores the theory of security implied in "Arthur Mervyn," Charles Brockden Brown's novel of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793... more
My contribution to Kevin McNamara's collection The City in American Literature and Culture. The essay explores the theory of security implied in "Arthur Mervyn," Charles Brockden Brown's novel of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (published in 1799/1800) and compares it to the biopolitical security theories of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.
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A theorization of the aesthetics of populism with the help of Bourdieu and Elias. Key to the essay is Elias's (and Cas Wouters') concept of informalization, which I develop as a lens for understanding populism's tension between... more
A theorization of the aesthetics of populism with the help of Bourdieu and Elias. Key to the essay is Elias's (and Cas Wouters') concept of informalization, which I develop as a lens for understanding populism's tension between democratization and de-democratization.
Research Interests:
My contribution to the DeGruyter Handbook to American Romanticism, edited by Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr,, and Jan Stievermann. Though helping to usher in nineteenth-century nationalism, romanticism was a literary and philosophical... more
My contribution to the DeGruyter Handbook to American Romanticism, edited by Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr,, and Jan Stievermann.
Though helping to usher in nineteenth-century nationalism, romanticism was a literary and philosophical movement that was transnational in scope. This chapter provides an overview of four different transnational dimensions of romanticism. It explores the idea of "world literature" as it was conceptualized by nineteenth-century writers in Germany, Britain, and the US. Secondly, it offers an introduction to the paradigm of influence studies that for a long time has dominated the study of transatlantic romanticism. As a case study of this approach, the chapter focuses on the transatlantic transmission of the twin concepts of reason and understanding. Thirdly, the essay surveys transnational romanticism from the perspective of transatlantic print culture and publishing networks. The final section examines transnational romanticism in its political dimension and demonstrates the close connections between romantic thought and literature and the revolutionary and reform movements of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world
Though helping to usher in nineteenth-century nationalism, romanticism was a literary and philosophical movement that was transnational in scope. This chapter provides an overview of four different transnational dimensions of romanticism. It explores the idea of "world literature" as it was conceptualized by nineteenth-century writers in Germany, Britain, and the US. Secondly, it offers an introduction to the paradigm of influence studies that for a long time has dominated the study of transatlantic romanticism. As a case study of this approach, the chapter focuses on the transatlantic transmission of the twin concepts of reason and understanding. Thirdly, the essay surveys transnational romanticism from the perspective of transatlantic print culture and publishing networks. The final section examines transnational romanticism in its political dimension and demonstrates the close connections between romantic thought and literature and the revolutionary and reform movements of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world
Research Interests:
Understood as a modern institution, literature is historically bound to the extension of market rationality. The commodification of literature since the late eighteenth century has changed the ways in which we handle literary works:... more
Understood as a modern institution, literature is historically bound to the extension of market rationality. The commodification of literature since the late eighteenth century has changed the ways in which we handle literary works: rather than just perused by individual readers, books are promoted, traded, consumed, and legally protected.
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On the aesthetics of populism, through the lens of George Wallace
WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 18. Jg., Heft 1, 2021: 141–151, DOI 10.12907/WE202101141
WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 18. Jg., Heft 1, 2021: 141–151, DOI 10.12907/WE202101141
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Introduction to special issue, "How to Read the Literary Market," ZAA 2021; 69(1): 3–8. Ed. Dustin Breitenwischer, Philipp Loeffler, Johannes Voelz
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Demokratie in den USA Das Zeitalter der Hyperpolitisierung https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2020-11/demokratie-usa-donald-trump-stephen-colbert-politisierung-unterhaltung Die letzten vier Jahre haben gezeigt, dass Politik und Unterhaltung in... more
Demokratie in den USA
Das Zeitalter der Hyperpolitisierung
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2020-11/demokratie-usa-donald-trump-stephen-colbert-politisierung-unterhaltung
Die letzten vier Jahre haben gezeigt, dass Politik und Unterhaltung in den USA eine toxische Verbindung eingegangen sind. Die wird nicht mit Donald Trump verschwinden.
Ein Essay von Johannes Völz
Das Zeitalter der Hyperpolitisierung
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2020-11/demokratie-usa-donald-trump-stephen-colbert-politisierung-unterhaltung
Die letzten vier Jahre haben gezeigt, dass Politik und Unterhaltung in den USA eine toxische Verbindung eingegangen sind. Die wird nicht mit Donald Trump verschwinden.
Ein Essay von Johannes Völz
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This is the introduction (with notes, plus front matter) of my book The Poetics of Insecurity (Cambridge UP, 2018). Marketing blurb: The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than... more
This is the introduction (with notes, plus front matter) of my book The Poetics of Insecurity (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Marketing blurb:
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.
Marketing blurb:
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.
Research Interests:
Introduction to The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies, Vol. 35 of REAL (REAL), Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (2019), ed. by Winfried Fluck, Rieke Jordan, and Johannes Voelz ISSN: 0723-0338 (Print)... more
Introduction to The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies, Vol. 35 of REAL (REAL), Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (2019), ed. by Winfried Fluck, Rieke Jordan, and Johannes Voelz
ISSN: 0723-0338 (Print)
ISSN: (E-Journal) Verlag: Gunter Narr Verlag
Publisher's website of this volume:
https://elibrary.narr.digital/journal/real/35/1
Most of the papers collected in the collection emerged from the conference „The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies,“ held at Goethe-University Frankfurt in November 2018.
In the introduction, I stake out various competing returns to the aesthetic currently present in the field of American literature and American Studies, and I suggest that acts of recovering questions of the aesthetic today must be conceptualized in the context of processes of social aestheticization.
ISSN: 0723-0338 (Print)
ISSN: (E-Journal) Verlag: Gunter Narr Verlag
Publisher's website of this volume:
https://elibrary.narr.digital/journal/real/35/1
Most of the papers collected in the collection emerged from the conference „The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies,“ held at Goethe-University Frankfurt in November 2018.
In the introduction, I stake out various competing returns to the aesthetic currently present in the field of American literature and American Studies, and I suggest that acts of recovering questions of the aesthetic today must be conceptualized in the context of processes of social aestheticization.
Research Interests:
In this essay, I continue my study of the aesthetics of populism against the backdrop of the larger politico-cultural process of polarization. I argue that in the U.S. of the last four decades, polarization has produced two complementary... more
In this essay, I continue my study of the aesthetics of populism against the backdrop of the larger politico-cultural process of polarization. I argue that in the U.S. of the last four decades, polarization has produced two complementary sets of affects and aesthetics. On the one hand, liberal culture is expressive of a position of superiority, not because it is elitist, but because it is committed to defending institutions and standards. Its paradigmatic form of expression is the „superiority humor“ found in the satirical repertoires of late-night talk shows. On the other side of the divide, populist culture inhabits a position of inferiority. Its aesthetics of resentment—which I analyze as an „aesthetics of the middle finger“—is driven by the desire to level the playing field and to topple the established order. Paradigmatic examples include both the rallies of Donald Trump and the standup comedy of Nick DiPaolo. In the final analysis, then, this article argues that populism cannot be understood as an isolated phenomenon. It only becomes meaningful within the bigger picture of a politically, culturally — and hence aesthetically — polarized society.
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The first of a two-part exploration of the aesthetics of populism. In it, I ask: Can Trump rallies be understood as an instance of what Hannah Arendt called the "space of appearance"? How does the political performance of the rally create... more
The first of a two-part exploration of the aesthetics of populism. In it, I ask: Can Trump rallies be understood as an instance of what Hannah Arendt called the "space of appearance"? How does the political performance of the rally create the experience of belonging to the authentic part of the American people? What, in other words, are the performative aesthetics of populism?
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Der Beitrag fragt danach, wie die für Trumps Politik konstitutive Dimension des Ästhetischen genauer zu konzeptualisieren und zu analysieren ist. Trumps Auftritte, so der Autor, schaffen einen politischen Erscheinungsraum... more
Der Beitrag fragt danach, wie die für Trumps Politik konstitutive Dimension des Ästhetischen genauer zu konzeptualisieren und zu analysieren ist. Trumps Auftritte, so der Autor, schaffen einen politischen Erscheinungsraum rechtspopulistischer Massenmobilisierung, der von Fernsehkameras und anderen Medienarrangements abgebildet und in den Diskursraum eingespeist werden soll. Der Beitrag verdeutlicht, dass der rechtsgerichtete US-amerikanische Populismus insbesondere auf dem Rally-Format beruht, das den Unterschied zwischen den Repräsentierten und dem Repräsentanten zu eliminieren und den Eindruck einer Unmittelbarkeit zwischen beiden Seiten, mithin zwischen Redner und Publikum, herzustellen sucht. Die aufwendig inszenierten Rallies zielen demnach darauf ab, eine Gemeinschaft abbildbar zu machen, die die Anhänger*innen und den Redner Trump umfasst und aus einer fein abgestimmten Choreographie von medientechnischen Manövern und populistischer Rede hervorgeht.
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Security, a growing number of critical theorists maintains, is a political idea whose current prevalence we owe to liberalism. Against the views of liberals themselves, who tend to describe liberalism as espousing values such as... more
Security, a growing number of critical theorists maintains, is a political idea whose current prevalence we owe to liberalism. Against the views of liberals themselves, who tend to describe liberalism as espousing values such as individual freedom, toleration, pluralism, and the rule of law, critics of liberalism—and particularly those writing in the wake of Michel Foucault—have emphasized that security constitutes both liberalism's ultimate legitimization of power and a distinctly liberal technology of rule.
In this article, I provide an alternative understanding of liberal political thought that demonstrates liberalism's appreciation of, and dependence on, persisting insecurity. I focus on crucial moments from the canon of liberal political thought, particularly from the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and Tocqueville.
In this article, I provide an alternative understanding of liberal political thought that demonstrates liberalism's appreciation of, and dependence on, persisting insecurity. I focus on crucial moments from the canon of liberal political thought, particularly from the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and Tocqueville.
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When critically examining American exceptionalism of the cold war period, American studies scholars have frequently focused on the anticommunist left. The reasons for this focus now appear rather obvious: cold war liberalism, as... more
When critically examining American exceptionalism of the cold war period, American studies scholars have frequently focused on the anticommunist left. The reasons for this focus now appear rather obvious: cold war liberalism, as articulated by a wide range of writers, intellectuals, and politicians from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, seems to offer the prime example of what Donald Pease has called the "Janus-faced" structure of American exceptionalism: conceived within the coordinates of the liberal worldview, the United States appeared as exceptionally committed to freedom and democracy. In light of what was seen as the expansive will of the totalitarian other, the U.S. appeared as the only hope. The rituals of consent to a set of "American" values that liberals not only enacted but morally coerced simultaneously created the space for the U.S. state to systematically act out imperial violence that grossly contradicted what America purportedly stood for. 1 Recently, scholars have come up with an explanation for how Americans managed to live with the contradictions arising from American exceptional-ism's two faces: the magical resolution was provided by "national security"-a rhetoric and a logic of action which was articulated at the very moment the cold war became an entrenched bipolar world order. Based on the redefi-nition of aggression as the defense of freedom, "national security" provided a legitimation for state violence and thus made exceptionalism's two faces appear indistinguishable. A closer look at postwar liberalism's theory of security, however, reveals that American exceptionalism did not amount to a seamless and unified system of thought or belief, but was instead marked by contradictions. These contradictions did not primarily inhabit the place that ideology critique appoints to them. Rather than operating beneath the level of intelligibility, coming to the fore merely as symptoms, the contradictions that run through cold war liberalism's approach to security constitute liberalism's critical impetus. Indeed, I will show that liberal intellectuals tended to be conflicted about "security" because the concept in its primary denotation stood for an excess of rationality that was seen as a threat to the virtues enshrined in civilization.
In this response to the special _Security Studies and American Literary History_ (ed. David Watson), published in American Literary History, I identify common positions, threads of argument, and limitations of the articles assembled by... more
In this response to the special _Security Studies and American Literary History_ (ed. David Watson), published in American Literary History, I identify common positions, threads of argument, and limitations of the articles assembled by Watson. I argue that most of the special issue's authors are committed to what I call "security realism": they approach literature as a mimetic representation of the technologies of securitization. Literature, for these scholars, thus serves to confirm insights gained by various critical branches of security studies. I suggest, by contrast, that what literary studies has to offer security studies is an insight into the different ways in which security has been imagined in (American) literature. To reconstruct these diverging and alternative understandings of security, scholars need to leave behind mimetic security realism and instead focus on analyses of the literary texts' aesthetic properties and strategies.
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David Watson responds to my response to his ALH special issue, "Security Studies and American Literary History"
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This is the introduction to a special issue on "Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature" I edited for the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies in 2015. The contributors to the special issue... more
This is the introduction to a special issue on "Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature" I edited for the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies in 2015.
The contributors to the special issue conceptualize 'uncertainty' as embedded in the transformations that make up modernity. From the vantage point explored here, ‘uncertainty’ is principally Janus-faced: it deprives individuals and collectives of stable frames of meaning and existence, but it also restructures the future as a matter of human concern. While the uncertainties of modernity inscribe the future in the domain of contingency, they also make it accessible to human efforts of regulating it. To be more precise, in this special issue uncertainty is considered a social and philosophical condition of modernity that has brought forth the categories of chance, risk, and security, each of which aims to get a handle on uncertainty.
The contributors to the special issue conceptualize 'uncertainty' as embedded in the transformations that make up modernity. From the vantage point explored here, ‘uncertainty’ is principally Janus-faced: it deprives individuals and collectives of stable frames of meaning and existence, but it also restructures the future as a matter of human concern. While the uncertainties of modernity inscribe the future in the domain of contingency, they also make it accessible to human efforts of regulating it. To be more precise, in this special issue uncertainty is considered a social and philosophical condition of modernity that has brought forth the categories of chance, risk, and security, each of which aims to get a handle on uncertainty.
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This essay aims to come to terms with the cultural power of security, which—so this article contends—is better understood as a fascination with insecurity. The essay focuses on Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis in order to show that this novel... more
This essay aims to come to terms with the cultural power of security, which—so this article contends—is better understood as a fascination with insecurity. The essay focuses on Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis in order to show that this novel stages the appeal of (in)security as resting on its promise to offer an alternative to the future-fixation of the risk regime of financial capitalism. In DeLillo’s homecoming tale of a mega-rich currency trader, financial risk and the contemporary cult of security come together as the novel’s two thematic axes. The future-mindedness of financial risk management is counteracted by the lethal threat constructions that drive the concern with security and that emphasize finitude and mortality. The preoccupation with security enables a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. Yet, DeLillo’s novel isn’t a fantasy of some simple return to the real and authentic. Ultimately, DeLillo suggests, in a financialized world like ours there is no direct exit out of the temporality of risk, and security certainly does not provide it. But the focus of security on vulnerability does offer a way of perverting the contingency management of finance capitalism: It is security’s fascination with mortality that can transform finance capitalism’s business with the future into what DeLillo calls “the business of living,” i.e., a life lived in the awareness of contingency and the certainty of death. Security thus promises a revitalization of life itself. The paradox is that, seen from a different angle, security’s recovery of the business of living appears as enamored with death itself, as is attested by the violence committed in its name.
Research Interests:
This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of... more
This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo's novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.
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Henry David Thoreau's nature writings have mostly been analyzed as separate from his political writings. In this essay I suggest that Thoreau's political concerns are integrated in his concern with nature, and vice versa. Thoreauvian... more
Henry David Thoreau's nature writings have mostly been analyzed as separate from his political writings. In this essay I suggest that Thoreau's political concerns are integrated in his concern with nature, and vice versa. Thoreauvian democracy extends to life with non-human neighbors. At its core lies the idea that a democratic community builds on relations figured by his game with the loon (in Walden): the democratic way of life consists of playful interaction and the recognition of unbridgeable distance.
Research Interests:
A chapter from Branka Arsic's edited collection in honor of Sharon Cameron, American Impersonal: Essay with Sharon Cameron (Bloomsbury, 2014). In the article, I engage Cameron's writings on Emerson, particularly her article "The Way of... more
A chapter from Branka Arsic's edited collection in honor of Sharon Cameron, American Impersonal: Essay with Sharon Cameron (Bloomsbury, 2014). In the article, I engage Cameron's writings on Emerson, particularly her article "The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson's Impersonal."
The impersonal, I argue, does not merely lead “to the social in its highest form,” as Cameron phrases it (WoL 85), but is itself accessed in and through sociality. This idea forms the basis of what can legitimately be called Emerson’s theory of recognition, though, importantly, recognition here looks differently from the way it does in established theories of recognition, for it radically prioritizes change and transformation over identity and self-sameness. Further, I read Cameron’s essay as hinting at the suggestion that Emerson does not merely theorize a communicative approach to the impersonal, but, by using “style … as a validation of propositions in lieu of logic or as a supplement to logic,” devises literary means of enacting it (WoL 91). But if Emerson’s theory of recognition is also a performance of recognition, the criteria for evaluating his writing fundamentally change. What Cameron critiques as a deficiency in the representation of the impersonal appears as a condition for its successful achievement from the perspective of the performative. But the person (and the particular, and the differential) does not therefore disappear in Emerson: It rather becomes an obstinate presence to the self as the result of the failure of acknowledgment or recognition derived from the other. Communicative self-transformation having failed, the transformative becomes transferred to the relation of the self to the person—a relation characterized by a destructive transformation of self-sameness that can be called masochistic, and that constitutes the experience of a painful self. If Emerson cannot recognize the person, he makes it a sufferable presence to the self by describing it as the result of failed recognition.
The impersonal, I argue, does not merely lead “to the social in its highest form,” as Cameron phrases it (WoL 85), but is itself accessed in and through sociality. This idea forms the basis of what can legitimately be called Emerson’s theory of recognition, though, importantly, recognition here looks differently from the way it does in established theories of recognition, for it radically prioritizes change and transformation over identity and self-sameness. Further, I read Cameron’s essay as hinting at the suggestion that Emerson does not merely theorize a communicative approach to the impersonal, but, by using “style … as a validation of propositions in lieu of logic or as a supplement to logic,” devises literary means of enacting it (WoL 91). But if Emerson’s theory of recognition is also a performance of recognition, the criteria for evaluating his writing fundamentally change. What Cameron critiques as a deficiency in the representation of the impersonal appears as a condition for its successful achievement from the perspective of the performative. But the person (and the particular, and the differential) does not therefore disappear in Emerson: It rather becomes an obstinate presence to the self as the result of the failure of acknowledgment or recognition derived from the other. Communicative self-transformation having failed, the transformative becomes transferred to the relation of the self to the person—a relation characterized by a destructive transformation of self-sameness that can be called masochistic, and that constitutes the experience of a painful self. If Emerson cannot recognize the person, he makes it a sufferable presence to the self by describing it as the result of failed recognition.
Research Interests:
Combining an historical with a theoretical perspective, this essay begins by reconstructing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s evolving theory of recognition and the central role it played for his concept of ‘self-reliance.’ Initially having adopted... more
Combining an historical with a theoretical perspective, this essay begins by reconstructing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s evolving theory of recognition and the central role it played for his concept of ‘self-reliance.’ Initially having adopted the theorizations of recognition developed by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, Emerson came to articulate the idea of self-reliance by way of developing an alternative approach to recognition, in which the source allocating recognition is neither society nor an inborn moral sense but rather the transcendentally conceptualized self. Emerson’s shift towards self-recognition poses questions seldom asked in the contemporary debate on recognition. Moving beyond a reconstructive aim, one such question is considered in the article’s second part: what role does recognition come to play in the act of reading? Taking Emerson’s own essays as a case in point, I argue that the aesthetic experience afforded by non-fictional texts can be understood as a facilitator of self-recognition, understood as a continuous process of imaginarily experiencing the enlargement of the self. This process intersects with dynamics of social recognition, producing a ‘dual economy of recognition.’ The article concludes by challenging the assumption found in currently dominant paradigms of recognition which assumes that recognition can come to successful completion. Conceived as a dual economy, the article argues, recognition is to the contrary constitutively open-ended.
Research Interests:
Representation and its politics have been key interests in the critical work of New Americanists. This article scrutinizes the theories of representation that underlie the writings of three influential critics associated more or less... more
Representation and its politics have been key interests in the critical work of New Americanists. This article scrutinizes the theories of representation that underlie the writings of three influential critics associated more or less closely with the New Americanists – Carolyn Porter, John Carlos Rowe, and Donald E. Pease – through the lens of their contributions to Emerson criticism. After tracing their theoretical roots in various schools of Western Marxism, the article takes issue with the totalizing view of representation at which all three critics arrive one way or another. It then suggests an alternative view of representation contained in Emerson’s writings, which focuses on the dynamics that take place inside the act of representation. Such a dynamic concept re-conceptualizes the political in representation by focusing on the fissures between reception and expression, both individually and socially. This internal dynamic, the article claims, has become nearly opaque from New Americanist perspectives on representation.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A contribution to the study of the political emotion of rage and its historical role in the years leading up to the Civil War, theorized through Norbert Elias's Civilizing (and Decivilizing) Process. Four years after the publication of... more
A contribution to the study of the political emotion of rage and its historical role in the years leading up to the Civil War, theorized through Norbert Elias's Civilizing (and Decivilizing) Process.
Four years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Although a bestseller praised by the likes of George Eliot, Dred was quickly forgotten and has only recently begun to garner critical attention. In this novel, Stowe takes the unexpected step of putting a black revolutionary at the center. Dred, the fictive son of Denmark Vesey and stand-in for Nat Turner, leads a maroon community in the swamps of North Carolina and prepares for a slave insurrection – which, however, never comes to pass, as Dred is shot before he can carry it out. Stowe’s narrative construction interprets Dred and his plans for rebellion in the context of the barbarizing forces of slavery. As the system of slavery spreads, and as white Southerners (both slave owners and “white trash”) become increasingly brutal, a violent slave revolt seems to become virtually inevitable.
In this essay, I pursue two levels of analysis – an account of Stowe’s America based on Elias's theory of the civilizing process (and decivilizing dynamics), and an analysis of Stowe’s participation, via literature, in the political debates of her time. I bring these two levels of analysis together in asking to what degree the style of Stowe’s discursive contribution is to be explained by the American civilizing process shortly before the Civil War.
Four years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Although a bestseller praised by the likes of George Eliot, Dred was quickly forgotten and has only recently begun to garner critical attention. In this novel, Stowe takes the unexpected step of putting a black revolutionary at the center. Dred, the fictive son of Denmark Vesey and stand-in for Nat Turner, leads a maroon community in the swamps of North Carolina and prepares for a slave insurrection – which, however, never comes to pass, as Dred is shot before he can carry it out. Stowe’s narrative construction interprets Dred and his plans for rebellion in the context of the barbarizing forces of slavery. As the system of slavery spreads, and as white Southerners (both slave owners and “white trash”) become increasingly brutal, a violent slave revolt seems to become virtually inevitable.
In this essay, I pursue two levels of analysis – an account of Stowe’s America based on Elias's theory of the civilizing process (and decivilizing dynamics), and an analysis of Stowe’s participation, via literature, in the political debates of her time. I bring these two levels of analysis together in asking to what degree the style of Stowe’s discursive contribution is to be explained by the American civilizing process shortly before the Civil War.
Research Interests:
In the early 1950s, American jazz entered a phase of artistic blossoming that was accompanied by widespread popularity and unprecedented cultural influence. By the late 1960s, however, this “second jazz age” had come to an end. This... more
In the early 1950s, American jazz entered a phase of artistic blossoming that was accompanied by widespread popularity and unprecedented cultural influence. By the late 1960s, however, this “second jazz age” had come to an end. This article draws on two approaches within cultural sociology to explain the historically specific cultural force of jazz: it follows American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s method of reconstructing “art worlds,” i.e., the networks of cooperation that include the institutional structures of marketing and distribution. In the jazz art world, the article suggests, sound becomes intermedially embedded in visual culture and textual repertoires. The essay also follows German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, whose history of creativity allows for interpreting the impact of the jazz art world as a chapter in the rise of a creativity dispositif. In particular, this essay focuses on the photographic and illustrative work artists like William Claxton and Andy Warhol created for the newly emerging format of the record cover. The visual art of jazz helps account for jazz’s ability to transport artistic hipness from the enclave of modernist art into the everyday.
Research Interests:
This is the draft of my contribution—"Transnational Dimensions of Romanticism"—to the forthcoming DeGruyter Handbook to American Romanticism, edited by Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr,, and Jan Stievermann. Though helping to usher in... more
This is the draft of my contribution—"Transnational Dimensions of Romanticism"—to the forthcoming DeGruyter Handbook to American Romanticism, edited by Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr,, and Jan Stievermann.
Though helping to usher in nineteenth-century nationalism, romanticism was a literary and philosophical movement that was transnational in scope. This chapter provides an overview of four different transnational dimensions of romanticism. It explores the idea of "world literature" as it was conceptualized by nineteenth-century writers in Germany, Britain, and the US. Secondly, it offers an introduction to the paradigm of influence studies that for a long time has dominated the study of transatlantic romanticism. As a case study of this approach, the chapter focuses on the transatlantic transmission of the twin concepts of reason and understanding. Thirdly, the essay surveys transnational romanticism from the perspective of transatlantic print culture and publishing networks. The final section examines transnational romanticism in its political dimension and demonstrates the close connections between romantic thought and literature and the revolutionary and reform movements of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
Though helping to usher in nineteenth-century nationalism, romanticism was a literary and philosophical movement that was transnational in scope. This chapter provides an overview of four different transnational dimensions of romanticism. It explores the idea of "world literature" as it was conceptualized by nineteenth-century writers in Germany, Britain, and the US. Secondly, it offers an introduction to the paradigm of influence studies that for a long time has dominated the study of transatlantic romanticism. As a case study of this approach, the chapter focuses on the transatlantic transmission of the twin concepts of reason and understanding. Thirdly, the essay surveys transnational romanticism from the perspective of transatlantic print culture and publishing networks. The final section examines transnational romanticism in its political dimension and demonstrates the close connections between romantic thought and literature and the revolutionary and reform movements of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
Research Interests:
Essay draft for a collection edited by Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre, provisionally titled "Culture Squared: Key Works of the 21st Century." My essay explores Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016). I argue... more
Essay draft for a collection edited by Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre, provisionally titled "Culture Squared: Key Works of the 21st Century."
My essay explores Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016). I argue that her hopes in empathy as a way out of the political polarization in the U.S. are misplaced. The argument developed here will figure more extensively in my book-in-progress on the aesthetics of populism (and polarization).
My essay explores Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (2016). I argue that her hopes in empathy as a way out of the political polarization in the U.S. are misplaced. The argument developed here will figure more extensively in my book-in-progress on the aesthetics of populism (and polarization).
Research Interests:
https://youtu.be/EmrGLMhpCxg
conversation filmed during the conference "The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies," November 29-Dec 1, 2018, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
conversation filmed during the conference "The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies," November 29-Dec 1, 2018, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
Research Interests:
https://youtu.be/iyjQeSmAFmQ Video of book launch panel discussion of Johannes Voelz, The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018). Panelists: Susan Araujo (Center for Comparative Studies,... more
https://youtu.be/iyjQeSmAFmQ
Video of book launch panel discussion of Johannes Voelz, The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Panelists:
Susan Araujo (Center for Comparative Studies, Lisbon)
Astrid Erll (English and Anglophone Literatures, Frankfurt)
Andreas Fahrmeir (Modern History, Frankfurt)
Johannes Voelz (American Studies, Frankfurt)
Michael C. Williams (Public and International Affairs, Ottawa)
May 4, 2018, University of Frankfurt
Video of book launch panel discussion of Johannes Voelz, The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Panelists:
Susan Araujo (Center for Comparative Studies, Lisbon)
Astrid Erll (English and Anglophone Literatures, Frankfurt)
Andreas Fahrmeir (Modern History, Frankfurt)
Johannes Voelz (American Studies, Frankfurt)
Michael C. Williams (Public and International Affairs, Ottawa)
May 4, 2018, University of Frankfurt
Research Interests:
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/89942438/Johannes_Völz_zu_Donald_Trump_Politisches_Erdbeben.mp4 Interview on 3sat Kulturzeit (program on culture on German public television) on Nov 10, 2016 - on whether Trump the president would be as off... more
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/89942438/Johannes_Völz_zu_Donald_Trump_Politisches_Erdbeben.mp4
Interview on 3sat Kulturzeit (program on culture on German public television) on Nov 10, 2016 - on whether Trump the president would be as off the charts as Trump the candidate.
Interview on 3sat Kulturzeit (program on culture on German public television) on Nov 10, 2016 - on whether Trump the president would be as off the charts as Trump the candidate.
Research Interests:
Sianne Ngai (Chicago) @ Dagmar Westberg Lectures 2021, Goethe University Frankfurt. June 14, 15, 17, 2021. 19.00 CET. On Zoom. Register here: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/Dagmar-Westberg-Stiftungsgastprofessur
Research Interests:
"Democratic Vistas" at The Night of Philosophy in Israel, June 10, 21.00 CET (22.00 Israel time). Panel discussion: "Do Democracies Need the Non-Political?" With Aliénor Ballangé, Sophie Loidolt, Martin Saar, Johannes Voelz
Research Interests:
Launching event of new research focus, "Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World," at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg. Public Panel discussion - via Zoom - on February 18, 2021, at 17.00 Central European Time... more
Launching event of new research focus, "Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World," at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg.
Public Panel discussion - via Zoom - on February 18, 2021, at 17.00 Central European Time (CET).
Event co-organized by Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg, and Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna
Please register by email at anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de. We will send you the Zoom link a couple of days before the event.
Panelists:
Masha Gessen
Distinguished Writer in Residence, Bard College; Staff Writer, The New Yorker, author of Surviving Autocracy (Granta 2020)
Shalini Randeria
Rector, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna; Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute Geneva
Sławomir Sierakowski
Founding Director of Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Warsaw; author of numerous articles on the protest movement in Belarus, e.g. in The New York Review of Books and Project Syndicate
Chair: Johannes Völz
Heisenberg-Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt; Board Member, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg
http://www.forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de/index.php/archive/events/863?view=item
Public Panel discussion - via Zoom - on February 18, 2021, at 17.00 Central European Time (CET).
Event co-organized by Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg, and Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna
Please register by email at anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de. We will send you the Zoom link a couple of days before the event.
Panelists:
Masha Gessen
Distinguished Writer in Residence, Bard College; Staff Writer, The New Yorker, author of Surviving Autocracy (Granta 2020)
Shalini Randeria
Rector, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna; Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute Geneva
Sławomir Sierakowski
Founding Director of Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Warsaw; author of numerous articles on the protest movement in Belarus, e.g. in The New York Review of Books and Project Syndicate
Chair: Johannes Völz
Heisenberg-Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt; Board Member, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg
http://www.forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de/index.php/archive/events/863?view=item
Research Interests:
Europa. USA. Geteilte Zukunft? Transatlantic Futures. Shared or Divided? Die Frage nach der Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen steht im Zentrum der vierten Bad Homburg Conference. Über Jahrzehnte verbanden intensive politische... more
Europa. USA. Geteilte Zukunft? Transatlantic Futures. Shared or Divided?
Die Frage nach der Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen steht im Zentrum der vierten Bad Homburg Conference. Über Jahrzehnte verbanden intensive politische Beziehungen und gemeinsame Werte die USA und Europa, die auch in geo- politisch unruhigen Zeiten Stabilität und Sicherheit garantierten. Doch dieses enge Verhältnis, das durch die Mitwirkung der USA an der Gestaltung der modernen europäischen Demokratien fest verwurzelt schien, ist in eine Krise geraten. Die außen-, sicherheits- und handelspolitischen Kehrtwenden der USA in den letzten Jahren lösen auf politischer Ebene zunehmend Irritationen aus. Gleichzeitig müssen wir beobachten, wie die demokratische Kultur und gemeinsame politische Werte in den USA durch soziale und politische Polarisierung erodieren – eine Entwicklung, die sich auch in europäischen Staaten abzeichnet. Diese Belastungen der trans- atlantischen Beziehung wiegen umso schwerer, da sich die geopolitische Machtbalance zwischen den USA, China und Russland verschiebt. Besonders Europa muss sich daher der Aufgabe stellen, nach der Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen und Bündnisse zu fragen. Können wir uns weiterhin da- rauf verlassen, dass die USA auf der Seite Europas stehen? Gehen die Interessen und Werte womöglich so weit auseinander, dass beide unterschiedliche Wege gehen werden? Was würde eine Trennung für Europa bedeuten? Ein Ziel der Konferenz ist dabei, nach politischen und kulturellen Initiativen zu fragen, die eine Wiederbelebung der transatlantischen Beziehungen möglich machen könnten.
Die Frage nach der Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen steht im Zentrum der vierten Bad Homburg Conference. Über Jahrzehnte verbanden intensive politische Beziehungen und gemeinsame Werte die USA und Europa, die auch in geo- politisch unruhigen Zeiten Stabilität und Sicherheit garantierten. Doch dieses enge Verhältnis, das durch die Mitwirkung der USA an der Gestaltung der modernen europäischen Demokratien fest verwurzelt schien, ist in eine Krise geraten. Die außen-, sicherheits- und handelspolitischen Kehrtwenden der USA in den letzten Jahren lösen auf politischer Ebene zunehmend Irritationen aus. Gleichzeitig müssen wir beobachten, wie die demokratische Kultur und gemeinsame politische Werte in den USA durch soziale und politische Polarisierung erodieren – eine Entwicklung, die sich auch in europäischen Staaten abzeichnet. Diese Belastungen der trans- atlantischen Beziehung wiegen umso schwerer, da sich die geopolitische Machtbalance zwischen den USA, China und Russland verschiebt. Besonders Europa muss sich daher der Aufgabe stellen, nach der Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen und Bündnisse zu fragen. Können wir uns weiterhin da- rauf verlassen, dass die USA auf der Seite Europas stehen? Gehen die Interessen und Werte womöglich so weit auseinander, dass beide unterschiedliche Wege gehen werden? Was würde eine Trennung für Europa bedeuten? Ein Ziel der Konferenz ist dabei, nach politischen und kulturellen Initiativen zu fragen, die eine Wiederbelebung der transatlantischen Beziehungen möglich machen könnten.