Publications

The living body and the capitalist thinking of the modern economy seem to be irreconcilable objects. Nevertheless, their history and perception have been inextricably linked, at least since the times of industrialization and capitalization in the 19th century. Our volume follows this entangled history and the various contradictions it develops.
Since Pierre Bourdieu, we known that the body forms an incorporated cultural and social capital. It is a commodity and means of production, a sign of belonging to a social class, a place where sex, gender and power relations are negotiated or a pretext for social exclusions and racism. The body is the object of punishments, sanctions and social control, a support for affects, obsessions and illnesses as well as a site of rebellion and resistance. The 19th century novels analyzed in the contributions to this volume tell all this. From the perspective of current body studies, we propose a new reading of the great stories from Balzac to Zola, via Mirbeau, Maupassant, Louise Michel, Georges Sand, Rachilde, Eugène Sue and Huysmans to demonstrate, through their texts, how the images of the body and the policies of capital are entangled and, thus, form a central part of the imagination and the memory of 19th century French (and Northern/Western) society.
Contributions in French and German.

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group’s identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study’s epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation.

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate.

Publication in the “Archivale des Monats” series of the Research Center for Eastern Europe Studies Bremen. Als Wien zum Zentrum des tschechoslowakischen Dissens‘ wurde. Bremen: Forschungsstelle Osteuropa. www.forschungsstelle.uni-bremen.de

Review of the edited volume Nationsbildung und Außenpolitik im Osten Europas. Nationsbildungsprozesse, Konstruktionen nationaler Identität und außenpolitische Positionierungen im 20. und 21. Jahr-hundert (ed. Bianka Pietrow-Ennker).

Der Fokus des Bandes liegt auf Widerspruch als Gegenstandsbereich, unter den sprachliche Ausdrucksformen von Entgegensetzung, Paradoxie, Lüge und Einspruch ebenso fallen wie linguistische Methoden des Umgangs mit Widerspruch und Widersprüchlichkeiten in der sprachwissenschaftlichen Disziplinengeschichte. Dabei stellt sich die Linguistik nicht als homogene, sondern vielmehr als eine heterogene, vielseitige Disziplin dar, die es erlaubt, den Forschungsgegenstand aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln zu betrachten; die Beitragenden präsentieren insofern verschiedene innerdisziplinäre Schwerpunkte von linguistischer Widerspruchsanalyse, darunter der Blick auf Sprachhandlungen zum Ausdruck von Widerspruch in wissenschaftlichen, historischen, (post)kolonialen, narrativen oder alltäglichen Diskursen. Es werden einzelsprachliche Untersuchungen nicht nur europäischer Sprachen vorgenommen, sondern auch die crosslinguistische Vielfalt von widerspruchsindizierenden Konstruktionen betrachtet.

The almost constantly recurring crises of the democratic order and relations between humans and nature in our age of the Capitalocene are currently reviving debates on economic models beyond the capitalist market economy.