Venue:Villa Tillmanns
Wächterstr. 30
04107 Leipzig
Speaker:
Katja Diefenbach, Christoph Menke, Dirk Quadflieg, Juliane Rebentisch, Marc Rölli, Kathrin Thiele
The event is public and free of costs.
How do situated and dialectical thinking differ?
In the field of art, approaches of situated thinking, which are prominently represented in contemporary outlines of decolonial and queer-feminist theory formation, have become more and more established in recent years. They always reflect on the particular situation of artistic practice, its individual or collective embedding in concrete infrastructural, social and economic conditions. In the presence of "capitalist ruins" (Haraway), it is a matter of telling new "cosmopolitan stories" (Stengers) in multispecies relationships that are no longer focused on humans alone, which can draw on earthbound or terrestrial ecologies rooted in indigenous traditions.
In philosophy, positions that invoke limited perspectives tend to be viewed critically. For example, shouldn't cultural particularities be able to be judged and legitimized in terms of general demands of reason - scientific or moral? Dialectical thought knows both the great 'occidental' narrative of human-historical liberation and the materialist critique of absolute spirit (Hegel, Marx). Perhaps in its adherence to an insurmountable "negativity" (Adorno) that opposes overly ambitious claims of successful syntheses and historical achievements (so-called progress), it approaches the self-understanding of situated thought. The workshop will seek to better understand how precisely - and by what philosophical, dialectical, or aesthetic means - our thinking and doing can be understood as situated.
One question is whether the quasi-animal or tentacular pluralism of situated perspectives emerges simultaneously with the abandonment of the exceptional position of the human being - as if from its shadow. Another one, how thinking can actually step out of itself when it undertakes to situate itself in relations that are prior to it? Does it step out of itself - or does it only think to step out of itself? Or does it behave in such a way that it has to think what it is not able to think? But how should that be possible?
