"Verwahr' es wohl, es wird dir dereinst das Leben retten!" : Kleist und die Biopolitik

Michel Foucault zufolge ist die politische Moderne in spezifischer Weise von einer umfassenden Sorge um das physische Dasein des Menschen geprägt. Während sich das klassische Modell der pastoralen Regierungskunst durch das Recht des Souveräns über Leben und Tod von Untertanen definiert […], treibt »Biopolitik« im Übergang vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert ein neues Projekt voran: […] Medizin, Psychiatrie, Schule, Polizei sind die allgegenwärtigen Institutionen eines bevölkerungspolitischen Plans, der die Tatsache der biologischen Existenz adressiert und […] unter dem Vorzeichen von Normalisierung und Regulierung ins Zentrum des politischen Handelns rückt. […] Kleist ist persönlich in diese epochalen Umbrüche involviert. Mit der Anstellung im Preußischen Staatsdienst 1804/1805 unter dem Freiherrn von Stein lernt er die Reformen Hardenbergs aus nächster Nähe kennen und besucht an der Königsberger Universität Vorlesungen bei Christian Jacob Kraus, dem Theoretiker dieser verwaltungstechnischen Reorganisation. […] Diese Anfänge einer Politik des Lebens haben in Kleists literarischen Schriften noch wenig untersuchte Spuren hinterlassen. […] Dabei sollte nicht vergessen werden, dass Kleist den vormodernen Machttyp der Souveränität keineswegs aus den Augen verliert. Paradigmatisch hierfür kann die 1808/1810 erschienene Erzählung Michael Kohlhaas gelten

Kinder retten: Biopolitik in Stifters Erzählung Der Waldgänger

Published in 1846, Der Waldgänger is the text in Stifter's work that not only explores the figure of the child programmatically but does so with a deeply disturbing radicalness. This is nothing less than a key text, allowing an analytical approach to various aspects of the problematic of childhood. Up until now, it has not been taken into account that, with the motif of childlessness, Der Waldgänger relates to sociopolitical challenges of the time. In specific, the considerations of procreation and reproduction link into modern biopower discourse and practice (M. Foucault). Stifter thus champions a politics of saving children that had begun to emerge at the end of the 18th century

Stokes drift and impurity transport in a quantum fluid

Stokes drift is a classical fluid effect in which traveling waves transfer momentum to tracers of the fluid, resulting in a nonzero drift velocity in the direction of the incoming wave; this effect is the driving mechanism allowing particles, i.e., impurities, to be transported by the flow. In a classical (viscous) fluid this happens usually due to the presence of viscous drag forces; because of the eventual absence of viscosity in quantum fluids, impurities are driven by inertial effects and pressure gradients only. We present theoretical predictions of a Stokes drift analogous in quantum fluids finding that, at the leading order, the drift direction and amplitude depend on the initial impurity position with respect to the wave phase, and at the second order, our theoretical model recovers the classical Stokes drift but with a coefficient that depends on the relative particle-fluid density ratio. Our theoretical predictions are obtained for classical impurities using multitime analytical asymptotic expansions. Numerical simulations of a two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation coupled with a classical impurity corroborate our findings. Our findings are experimentally testable, for instance, using fluids of light obtained in photorefractive crystals

Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion

This roundtable discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and illustrate historiographical and methodological questions at a range of examples: Topics include the emergence of children’s rooms in US consumer magazines; research on the unborn in nineteenth century sciences of development; the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry; German literary discourses about the child’s initiation in scripture; and the socio-politics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly prone to interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the history of science part of a broader history of knowledge

Clustering and phase transitions in a 2D superfluid with immiscible active impurities

Phase transitions of a finite-size two-dimensional superfluid of bosons in presence of active impurities are studied by using the projected Gross–Pitaevskii model. Impurities are described with classical degrees of freedom. A spontaneous clustering of impurities during the thermalization is observed. Depending on the interaction among impurities, such clusters can break due to thermal fluctuations at temperatures where the condensed fraction is still significant. The emergence of clusters is found to increase the condensation transition temperature. The condensation and the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition temperatures, determined numerically, are found to strongly depend on the volume occupied by the impurities: a relative increase up to a 20% of their respective values is observed, whereas their ratio remains approximately constant