Narrating postmodern spaces in Thomas Pynchon’s novel(s)

Elektronische Version der gedr. Ausg. 199

Conjuring the spirit of multilateralism: Histories of crisis management during the ‘great credit crash’

In recent years critical scholars have emphasised how the recollection of past events as traumas can both constrain and widen the political possibilities of a present. This article builds on such research by suggesting that the management of contemporary financial crises is reliant on a ritual work of repetition, wherein prior ‘crisis’ episodes are called upon to identify and authorise specific sites and modes of crisis management. In order to develop this argument, I focus on how past crises figure within the public pronouncements of four key policymaking organisations during the financial instability of 2007-2009. I find that while the Great Depression does enable these organisations to reaffirm old ways of managing crises, both it and the more recent Asian crisis are also made to disclose new truths about the evolution of multilateralism as a form of governance. In so doing, I argue, these historical narratives reveal how the management of global financial crisis depends upon a kind of ‘magic trick’. Rather than a strictly rational, historical process of problem solving, contemporary crises are instead negotiated through a contingent and self-referential conjuring of crisis-histories

Ethology. Claims and Limits of a Lost Discipline

When the Werner Reimers Foundation organized a colloquium on Human Ethology in 1977, it was about Claims and Limits of a New Discipline as a bridge between biology and the social sciences and humanities. As a lost discipline, however, the interdisciplinary approach to ethology only takes shape in a dispersed dispositif. This is the framing argument, which derives from the nucleus of ethology, namely that the starting point of all knowledge is the body in its possibilities of movement in time and space to affect and be affected. In their essays (English or German), the contributors to this collection have worked through the heterogeneity of ethological thought – from Spinoza to Jakob von Uexküll, Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Philippe Descola, or Isabelle Stengers – and practice – as, for example in the works of Virginia Woolf or Marcel Beyer – and have taken it as an opportunity to relocate ethology, 1) as an “Immanent Ecology”, with essays by Kerstin Andermann, Hanjo Berressem, and Verena Andermatt Conley; 2) in the discussion of “Anthropological Contrasts”, with essays by Marc Rölli, Mirjam Schaub, and Stefan Rieger, and 3) in “Ethological Interferences and Practices,” with essays by Stephan Zandt, Anthony Uhlmann, and Adrian Robanus. A commentary by Sophia Gräfe concludes the volume

Die Sieben Todsünden

Weshalb faszinieren und inspirieren die Sieben Todsünden bis heute – auch und gerade obwohl theologische Kommentare längst an Verbindlichkeit eingebüßt haben? In exemplarischen Studien widmet sich der Sammelband der Wirkungsgeschichte der Sieben Todsünden in den unterschiedlichen Künsten: Literatur und bildende Kunst, Film und Fernsehen. Der Fokus liegt weniger auf einer Ideengeschichte der Todsünden als auf deren Formelhaftigkeit, die gerade im Verblassen der ursprünglichen Hintergründe ihre Wirkmacht in breiter diskursiver Streuung entfaltet. Dabei reichen die vielfältigen Fortschreibungen und Transformationen weit über das frühe Mittelalter und die klassische Theologie hinaus und zeigen in der Moderne und Postmoderne verstärkt nur noch Allusionen auf die ursprünglich religiöse Ordnungsphantasie. So werden die Todsünden zu einem intermedialen Fundus für ethische und politische Reflexionen, ästhetische Transformationen und künstlerische Experimente. Der Band versammelt Studien, die sich aus literatur-, medien- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive sowohl den einzelnen Todsünden superbia, invidia, ira, acedia, avaritia, gula, luxuria als auch dem Septenar insgesamt widmen