What is missing in the histories of German Jewish thought and of Critical Theory is a sustained account of their relations to European imperialism and colonialism. This workshop asks how apparently non-systematic references irritate established meanings, allowing the Global South to penetrate into European philosophical modernity.
In the history of German Jewish thought, Critical Theory emerges as a secondary moment in the longer line of questions concerning rational religion, tradition and modernity, and political-economic emancipation that were first posed by Mendelssohn and later reframed by Marx and others. Histories of Critical Theory, by contrast, situate the legacy of German Jewish philosophy as one empirical instance of the problem of religion and myth in general and generally framed by Protestant theology. Meanwhile, what is missing in the histories of both is a sustained account of their relations to European imperialism and colonialism. Yet the first decades of the 20th century were arguably the most consequential decades of German colonialism, German Jewish philosophical modernism, and German critical social theory. What happens when we take seriously this mutual irritation of discourses, whose figures and source texts nevertheless aggregate into a barely conspicuous network of shared references and biographical data, not as a historical anomaly but as a negative space from which systematic and methodological insights might emerge? Combining presentations and textual close readings, this workshop asks how apparently non-systematic references irritate established meanings, allowing the Global South to penetrate into European philosophical modernity.
Prof. Julia Ng
Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) | History of Philosophy, German and Comparative Literature
E-mail: julia.ng@college-uaruhr.de
Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and Founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Her work has explored the links between modern mathematics and political thought, modern German-Jewish philosophy, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin.
Julia Ng's investigation of the history of Critical Theory is based principally on archival research: as seen, for instance, in her co-edition of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School: Special Issue of the Modern Language Notes 127.3 (2012), and (with Peter Fenves) of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence and associated fragments (2021), which also contains her new translation and critical annotations on Benjamin's essay. She is also the co-editor of Werner Hamacher's writings on Friedrich Hölderlin (2020) and contributes more broadly to literary and Critical Theory with work on Derrida, Agamben, Kant, Descartes, Shakespeare, Sappho, Sterne, Kraus, Baudelaire, and figures of reversibility, undecidability, singularity, and the philosophical archive.
Julia Ng is currently completing a book on Daoism and capitalism based around Benjamin’s and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern, which has received support from a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (New York City, USA), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
Website
https://www.gold.ac.uk/music-english-theatre/people/ng-julia/
©
© Damian Gorczany
Prof. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Ruhr-University Bochum | Media Studies / Gender Studies
E-mail: astrid.deuber-mankowsky@rub.de
©
© Damian Gorczany
Prof. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Ruhr-University Bochum | Media Studies / Gender Studies
E-mail: astrid.deuber-mankowsky@rub.de
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. Before joining Ruhr University Bochum, she taught at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft at Humboldt-Universität Berlin from 1996 to 2004. She is co-founder and was editor of the journal Die Philosophin. Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie from 1990 to 2004. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, USA (2007), visiting professor at the Centre d’études du vivant, Université Paris VII – Diderot, France (2010), senior fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany (2013), and Max Kade Professor at Columbia University (2012 and 2017), UC Berkeley (2022), Northwestern University (2023), Johns Hopkins University (2024) and Yale University, USA (2024). She is associate member of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), and spokesperson of the scientific board of the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist and queer theory, media philosophy and epistemology, temporality and media aesthetics, media anthropology and theories of play, as well as Jewish philosophy.
Website