Research Topic 1
Truth by Astonishment
This research topic examines the use of wonder in discourses of knowledge, truth and authenticity. The topic can build upon research in the first Sinergia project, which, taking up other scholarship, managed to trace the trajectory of the Aristotelian understanding of astonishment as the beginning of philosophy and knowledge well into the 20th century, but also demonstrated that the influential (Platonic) concept of wonder as a means to glimpse into eternal ideas can be found in epistemic as well as religious and poetological discourses. Thus, on the one hand, the topic of truth by astonishment looks at the instrumentalization of wonder to gain and promote knowledge and to establish its pertinence. On the other hand, it examines truth-claims that consider wonder to be a naïve or an intuitive approach to the world that may however grant access to a higher truth. Depending on the various possible critical viewpoints, the latter understanding of wonder stands in contradiction to enlightened, cognitive, rational, or technocratic ways of dealing with the world. In this way, wonder connects cultural patterns, religious, scientific, or political interests and explanatory models to both an anthropological essence and a truth of experience, in a legitimizing and affirming way. While this concept of wonder is of special importance to the anti-Enlightenment movements, its relevance can also be shown for an earlier phase, namely political and social utopias of the 17th century.
SUBPROJECTS
Utopia Knowledge (Dissertation)
Henrike Gätjens
(Image: Visualization of Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619); engraved folded plate attached to the first edition. Artist unknown. (c) Getty Research Institute)
The project aims to elucidate the function of wonder in utopias of the seventeenth century. By linking German studies, the history of science and the history of architecture, this dissertation project is interested in forms of legitimization and hierarchization of knowledge and truth. To this end, the utopian texts are inquired as epistemological documents within the context of early modern experimental cultures. The role of wonder is of particular interest not only concerning the acquisition of knowledge, being depicted as a means of generating curiosity and an urge for insight, but also in regard to the materialization of wonder in the structuring of space and architecture envisioned in utopian texts. While the spatial structures both potentially overwhelm the subject and control perspectives, they are also designed to induce admiration for the well-organized utopian society. Against this background, this project will explore how wonder epistemologically and spatially shapes practices of representation and (de)legitimization of knowledge and power. One key question of the project is then: How do the utopian texts proceed in making truth claims about the good society, in defending or establishing certain values and in legitimizing the possibility of another marvelous reality?
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Mireille Schnyder, Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung)
Bio
Henrike Gätjens studied Philosophy, History, and Sociology in Freiburg and Paris. During her studies, she worked as a teaching assistant in both Philosophy and History and as a coordinator for the “Erasmus” mobility program. She held a scholarship of the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes”. In Freiburg, she organized lecture courses on the topics of identity, language as well as on the question of what philosophy is good for. Since May 2018, she is working on her dissertation within the framework of the SNF Sinergia project The Power of Wonder, and she is also a member of the doctoral program “Mediality – Historical Perspectives” at the University of Zurich. Publications: Günther Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie, München 2018 (co-ed. together with Christian Dries); Heidegger und Husserl, Husserl und Heidegger. Interpretationen einer Konstellation, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 121 (2014), pp. 333–350 (together with Tobias Keiling).
Publications
Utopische Kinder. Bildung und Staunen bei Campanella, Andreae und Comenius, in: Nicola Gess, Mireille Schnyder (eds.), Das Staunende Kind. Kulturelle Imaginationen von Kindheit, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2021, pp. 177-194.
Presentations
Utopian Wonder. An interdisciplinary approach to the function of an aesthetic emotion in utopias of (not only) the early modern period. Presentation in the framework of the conference "Disruption, Displacement, Disorder" of the Society for Utopian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, November 11th, 2018.
Utopisches Staunen? Campanellas Città del Sole (1602). Presentation in the framework of the "Forschungskolloquium Ältere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft" at the University of Zurich, May 29th, 2019.
Kreise, Reisen und Ketten. Wissenskonzepte in den Utopien von Campanella, Andreae und Major. Presentation in the framework of the joint "Medieval and Early Modern research Study Group" of the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Zurich at the Freie Universität Berlin, January 6th, 2020.
Science and Wonder in 17th Century Utopian Literature. Presentation in the framework of the "Reading and Research" graduate workshop hosted by Ann Blair at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, February 19th, 2021.
Varieties of Utopian Death and Dying in the 17th Century. Presentation in the framework of the graduate seminar "Death and the Body in the Age of Plague" led by Hannah Marcus at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, May 27th, 2021.
Quadratures of Amazement – Philosophies of Wonder in the Interwar Period (Dissertation)
Tim Hofmann
(Image: Montage from "Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt" (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) © picture-alliance/akg)
Against the background of "collapsed codes" (Gumbrecht) and ubiquitous crisis topics, an increased interest in astonishment can be observed in the interwar period, not only in everyday language and journalistic contexts, but also in philosophical writings of the time. The aim of this project is to systematize and contextualize the philosophical discourse of astonishment and related emotions in the interwar period, focusing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Bloch. Why is astonishment so appealing to philosophers in this period and in these contexts? In which ways can these philosophies of wonder be understood as reactions to the omnipresent crisis of the interwar period? The project proceeds in four steps. Firstly, a detailed presentation of the specific conceptualizations of astonishment in the work of the four philosophers will be developed in the context of their respective philosophical thinking. Secondly, the text corpora will be brought into dialogue to the long and differentiated tradition of poetological thought of astonishment by means of a rhetorical-stylistic analysis. The assumption here is that amazement is also reflected on a stylistic level – by linguistic depositions and processes of deautomation – so that theory and rhetoric of amazement complement each other. Thirdly, the theorems of amazement will be examined with regard to their ideological implementation, starting from the hypothesis that the formulated concepts of amazement entertain a close relationship to political concepts in the context of the interwar period. Fourthly, it is the aim of the project to show that the theorization of astonishment and related emotions in the philosophers’ works are also associated with practices of self-dramatization as well as an orientation towards a modern economy of attention.
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess, Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller)
Bio
Tim Hofmann studied German Language and Literature, Philosophy, and Political Sciences in Heidelberg and Freiburg. After successfully completing a compulsory educational intership, he attained his Master of Literary Studies degree from the University of Basel in 2017. Whilst engaging in several cultural fields of interest, he also worked as a bookseller and acted as elected board member for the German Bookstore Prize in 2015 and 2016. He has been a member of the doctoral program at the University of Basel since 2017 and was 2018 the PhD student representative on its managing board. As a doctoral candidate, he is a member of the SNF Sinergia project The Power of Wonder since May 2018.
Publications
Tim Hofmann, Kim Hagedorn, and Sarah Möller (eds.), Provozierte Bewunderung. Selbstinszenierung und Vergemeinschaftung, Paderborn: Fink/Brill (in print).
Provozierte Bewunderung. Eine Annäherung, in: Tim Hofmann, Kim Hagedorn, and Sarah Möller (eds.), Provozierte Bewunderung. Selbstinszenierung und Vergemeinschaftung, Paderborn: Fink/Brill (in print).
Infantilität und Staunen. Zu Wittgensteins Kindern, in: Nicola Gess and Mireille Schnyder (eds.), Das Staunende Kind. Kulturelle Imaginationen von Kindheit, Paderborn: Fink/Brill 2021, pp. 21-39.
Zwischen inventio und correctio. Mimetisches Schreiben und Kulturtechniken der Revision bei Robert Walser und anderen, in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik 1 (2018), pp. 149-152.
Presentations
"Aura, reloaded. Einführung" in the framework of the workshop "Aura, reloaded", University of Basel, December 11th, 2020.
"'Zurück auf rauhen Boden!' Zu Wittgensteins Kindern“ in the framework of the conference "The Wondering Child", University of Zurich, October 17th, 2020.
Staunen als (Lebens-)Form(-ung) – Überlegungen zu einer vernachlässigten Kategorie bei Ludwig Wittgenstein. Oder: „Zurück auf rauhen Boden!“. Presentation at the University of California, Berkley, August 2019.
Research Topic 2
Order by Admiration
This research topic examines how effects of wonder function in discourses and dispositives of power and order. It analyzes practices that produce admiration, sometimes verging toward awe, overpowerment or even stupefaction, in political and scientific fields. Three levels of observation are crucial to this topic. A first emphasis will lie on the interrelation between the aesthetics and rhetoric of admiration and the establishing of political power. A second emphasis will lie on the interrelation between the aesthetics and rhetoric of admiration and the evaluation and justification of scientists and scientific inventions, particularly technological artifacts. Thirdly, close attention will be paid to the diverse strategies of the economy of attention, our ways of promoting and advertising ideas, products and individuals (particularly in self-fashioning), and their medial, social, economic, artistic and not least linguistic means. At all three levels of observation, a special focus will lie on the ambivalence of admiration that, on the one hand, attracts people enthusiastically to the admired person/institution/object and, on the other hand, makes them feel small and disempowered in front of this unreachable greatness.
SUBPROJECTS
Ecologies of Mind and Behavior.
Discovering the Human Psyche in its Environment 1900 – 1960 (Dissertation)
Ole Bogner
This dissertation project aims at bringing together and analyze developments in early psychology that relate to a common theoretical and practical problem for the human being in the twentieth century: being in an environment. Modern psychology evolved out of different and sometimes contradictory scientific paradigms, such as Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism and Gestaltpsychology, each of which provides different answers to questions relating to the human psyche and behavior. Despite putting forward disparate approaches to an understanding of the human being, the role of the environment became a central problem for all these branches of psychology. Taking into account the decentration of subjectivity, this project will explore the question of how cognitive affects were not only involved in, but also shaped the psychological inquiry of this unexplored territory. In which ways did astonishment at the dynamic realities that were found beyond the concept of the superior, rational, and humanistic subject facilitate or even produce these scientific debates? Or did they, on the contrary, provoke narratives of shame and mortification by illustrating the ordinary status of human being? These questions become even more relevant for the era of cybernetics, when the original human properties of thinking and mind were definitely transposed into the technological environment of information processing and computing.
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckling, Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann)
Bio
Ole Bogner studied Sociology and Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (B.A.) and holds a Master’s degree in Sociology (from University of Freiburg). In 2016/17, he served as a Scientific Assistant (in the field of sociology of culture) at the University of Freiburg (in proxy) and, from 2017–2018 he was a researcher in the collaborative research project EVADEX at the Centre for Security and Society, University of Freiburg.
«Ach, welch eine furchtbare, eine ungeheure Gewalt muß es sein, der wir dahin gegeben sind, daß sie über uns verfügt».
Leadership and (gentle) Violence in the Works of Adalbert Stifter (Dissertation)
Benjamin Dinkel
The aim of the project is to investigate the connection between leadership (in this context, leadership is meant to include the ambiguity of the German word Führung) and violence (Gewalt) in Stifter’s literary works. Of particular interest are power constellations which depict techniques, practices, and strategies of Führung that are related to the use and exercise of different forms of Gewalt.
In order to analyse Stifter’s literary works, his models and ideas of Führung and Gewalt are first historically contextualised, discursified, and – as far as possible – systematised. On this basis, the main part of the work will then be devoted to an in-depth analysis of Stifter’s literary texts. The central focus lies on the question of how Stifter links, stages, and reflects on education and forms of Gewalt. Stifter, on the one hand, tries to counter his own fear of internal (mental) and external (social) decay in his literary texts with (authoritarian) educator figures and educational systems that help (or rather try to help) to create order. At the same time, he also stages and reflects on the problems arising from such systems of Führung. I propose that in Stifter’s prose Gewalt is deliberately embedded in a complex system of signs (both on a semantic and semiotic level) with the intent to conceal and yet articulate Gewalt – and (at least partially) also exercise it. Stifter’s style of writing often shows Gewalt only in an indirect manner, which is why I refer to this mode of writing as ‘poetics of gentle violence’ (Poetik der sanften Gewalt). The literary texts thus alternate between affirmation and criticism of (authoritarian) systems of Führung and Gewalt. It is precisely this tension which is of central interest for this project. Texts from Stifter’s early and middle creative phase (including Abdias, Die drey Schmiede ihres Schicksals, Der beschriebene Tännling, Bergmilch) serve as the basis for this research.
Image: Peacefully contemplating murder: The cheated Hanns in Stifter’s story Der beschriebene Tännling. Steel engraving by Josef Axmann (based on a sketch by Johann Nepomuk Geiger). Freely available on: europeana.eu/de. Link: https://www.europeana.eu/de/item/07101/G_8782
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess, Prof. Dr. Manfred Koch)
Bio
Benjamin Dinkel studied German Philology and History at the University of Basel and attained his Master's degree in May 2018. From January 2017 to May 2018, he worked as a student assistant to Prof. Dr. Alexander Honold. During his studies, he taught languages and history at various schools. Since June 2018, he is a PhD student in the SNF Sinergia project "The Power of Wonder" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme Literary Studies at the University of Basel.
Publications
Review of: Häge, Elisabeth: Dimensionen des Erhabenen bei Adalbert Stifter. In: Germanistik 60/3–4 (2019), pp. 925–926.
Review of: Begemann, Christian/Giuriato, Davide (Hg.): Stifter-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. In: Germanistik 60/3–4 (2019), pp. 926–927.
Will be released soon:
Review of: Becher, Peter: Adalbert Stifter. Sehnsucht nach Harmonie. Eine Biografie. In: Germanistik 61/1–2 (2020), p. 371.
“Lehr mich die Kunst”: The Formation of an Aesthetic Subject in Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus-Novel (Dissertation)
Sarah Möller
(Image: Hanna Villiger, Skulptural 1988/89)
The dissertation focuses on the formation of an aesthetic subject in the early modern period and examines how an individual develops its own way of perceiving, thinking, and acting by engaging with itself and the world, with persons and objects. Thereby, the project concentrates on Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's novel Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668), which, as a fictional autobiography, is particularly suitable for analyzing processes of subjectification that take place in a sensual, bodily, and/or imaginative register. The aim of the dissertation is to develop a differentiated terminology of description with the help of theories from sociology, philosophy, anthropology as well as narratology, which enables a precise understanding of aesthetic subjectification. Methodologically, the dissertation ties in with productive approaches of recent works, which, from the point of view of “different aesthetics”, also take a new look at the pre-modern period and do not understand it merely as a prehistory of philosophical aesthetics in the modern sense.
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Mireille Schnyder, Prof. Dr. Anita Traninger)
Bio
Sarah Möller recently received a Master’s degree in German Language and Literature and Film Studies. During her studies at the University of Zurich, she worked as a teaching assistant in German Literature. In 2018, she received a semester award for her MA thesis on the imagined artwork (‘Opus-Phantasie’) in Balzac’s novella Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and Rivette’s Film La belle noiseuse. She is a member of the doctoral program “Mediality – Historical Perspectives” and her research interests involve aspects of mediality, poetology, and self-staging as well as the relationship between literature and visual arts.
Publications
Sarah Möller, Kim Hagedorn, and Tim Hofmann (eds.): Provozierte Bewunderung. Selbstinszenierung und Vergemeinschaftung, Paderborn: Fink/Brill (in print).
Die Simplicianische Gaukeltasche: Zum bewunderten Buch in Grimmelshausens Springinsfeld“, in: Kim Hagedorn, Tim Hofmann, Sarah Möller (eds.): Provozierte Bewunderung. Padeborn: Fink 2021, pp. 135-149 (in print).
Zur Poetik des Gedankenstrichs, in: Rebecca Lötscher and Lukas Gloor (eds.), Goldenes Anfängliches. Neue Beträge zur Robert Walser-Forschung, München: Fink 2019, pp. 161-171.
Presentations
Grimmelshausens Leseszene: Schulung und Senibilisierung der Sinne. Presentation in the framework of the “Forschungskolloquium Ältere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft” at the University of Zurich, 2021.
Ästhetische Praktiken bei Grimmelshausen. Presentation in the framework of the "Forschungskolloquium von Prof. Dr. Anita Traninger" at Freie Universität Berlin, 2021.
“Ich heisse Bub": performing gender in Grimmelshausen's first-person-narratives. Presentation in the framework of the “German Studies Association’s annual conference”, Portland 2019.
Die Simplicianische Gaukeltasche: Zum bewunderten Buch in Grimmelshausens Springinsfeld. Presentation in the framework of the interdisciplinary conference "Provoked Admiration. Self-Fashioning and collective affectivity", Zürich 2019.
Simplicissimus von Anfang an. Presentation in the framework of the workshop “Politik am Text” at the University of Zurich, 2018.
Research Topic 3
Destabilization by surprise
The concept of surprise combines the idea of unexpectedness with that of a trap. To take an opponent by surprise, one has to control information (one’s knowledge, resources and actions are to be concealed) and time (one must outpace the adversary). Here, surprise is not only deployed as a weapon in itself: it reinforces other weapons, and serves as a major tool of discrimination because, once it is completed, it reveals who was best at anticipating and organizing the future. The surprise-maker manages to minimize the unexpectedness that could threaten his or her project, and to maximize the unforeseen for the opponent. Beyond its tactical uses, surprise has turned into an inevitable component of contemporary risk-societies, where the threat of incalculable catastrophes is ubiquitous. Security and ecological policies have to deal with “unknown unknowns” and to prepare for incidents that may occur at every moment but at the same time must be prevented by any means. Surprise is also a widespread aesthetic principle in modern arts, that use irritation, shock and enigma in order to breach familiar habits of perception.
Subprojects
Social Aspects of Nocturnal Dreaming (Dissertation)
Kim Hagedorn
(Image: "John Anster Fitzgerald, 'The stuff dreams are made of'" by sofi01. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)
Nocturnal dreaming has been a source of wonder since ancient time. From the time of early modern science, they appear as a doorway into the mechanisms of the human soul, consciousness, and unconsciousness. It is a decisive modern development that dreams become a representation of the subject’s inner truth. As a consequence, the hermeneutics of dreams and many ways to decode them (e.g. Psychoanalysis) go hand in hand with techniques to influence them (e.g. lucid dreaming). However, as dreams become the subject of techniques of manipulation, at the same time, they resist these fantasies of control. To some extent, they escape the rational approach and constitute an unpredictable and ungovernable realm. This interplay between prediction and uncertainty, control and surprise, continuously reinforces moments of wonder and new methods to rationalize the enigma of the nightly dream. The dissertation project is asking what the nocturnal dream means for a society and the subject acting in it, what expectations and invocations are addressed to it, depends on its values, norms and taboos, and vice versa, the dreams of individuals, but above all the handouts for dealing with them, give indications of precisely that specific social formation. Thus the question at the center of this cultural-sociological approach is: What can the dream, which varies from person to person from night to night, nevertheless say about the society in which it arises? What, then, is the social of nocturnal dreaming?
(Advisor: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckling)
Bio
Kim Hagedorn studied Sociology and Educational Science at the University of Hamburg from 2010–2013 (B. A.) and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Hamburg. She worked as a student assistant for Prof. Dr. Sina Farzin. From 2016–2019 she served as a scientific assistant at University of Freiburg (Cultural Sociology) for Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckling. Since summer 2019, she is a PhD student in the Sinergia project “The Power of Wonder”.
Publications
Strategies of the Everyday. Surprise in Balzac's Comédie humaine (Dissertation)
Alexandra Delcamp
(Image: Honoré Daumier, “Nous sommes tous d’honnêtes gens, embrassons-nous, et que ça finisse, lithography, 1834)
This research topic focuses on the instrumentalization of surprise in Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, from strategy to entropy. Balzac’s work stages a great range of tacticians whose the victims, in most of cases, are condemned to physical or psychical death by a process of exhaustion of energy in which surprise plays a key role. As tactics is an overarching theme in Balzac’s work – military metaphors are extended to numerous areas of social life (Frappier-Mazur 1976) – this research intends to focus first of all on the plots, the manipulations and the stratagems used by Balzac’s characters to surprise their victim and reach their goal. By paying close attention to the causes of exhaustion of energy in La Comédie humaine, one could notice that this dialogic order/disorder is systematically involved: the more disorder expands in the story, the more characters come closer to the irreversible exhaustion of their own energy (they die or go mad). As far as narratology is concerned, this research will focus on the ambivalence between predictability and unpredictability that surprise involves. Finally, since the author of La Comédie humaine adopts a medical approach of surprise (or at least physiological) that clearly appears in many digressions, and which is conceived as an energy expenditure, this research will rely on this fact to compare Balzac’s medical approach of the use of surprise – and the relation between order and disorder, human nature and action –, with his military approach.
(Advisors: Prof. Dr. Hugues Marchal, Prof. Dr. Caroline Arni)
Bio
Alexandra Delcamp is a researcher, translator, columnist and journalist. She studied at the University of Perpignan and the Paul Valéry University in Montpellier (France) and holds a Master's degree in Humanities (French Literature, Latin and Ancient Greek) as well as in Foreign Languages, Translation Studies and Modern Greek. In 2015, she also received a diploma in Modern Greek Language from Kapodistriako University in Athens (Greece). Since May 2018, she is a doctoral student in the SNF Signergia research project "The Power of Wonder" at the French Department of the University of Basel.
