Crisis is a term increasingly heard these days – climate crisis, migration crisis, crisis of representation, identity, masculinity… Contemporary societies often react to crises by installing mechanisms of classification and order. Identitarian communities perceive themselves as an antidote to personal and social crises. On 14 and 15 November 2019, the symposium «Crisis and Communitas. Performative […]

Rassistisch motivierte, rechtsterroristische Anschläge wie in Hanau im Februar 2020 kommen vermehrt in die Öffentlichkeit, doch eine gründliche Aufklärung hinkt meist noch – der Fall NSU ist hier bestes Beispiel für die Verharmlosung rechter Gewalt und Ideologie. Die Hanauer antirassistische Aktivistin Newroz Duman stellt sich die Frage, wie Trauer und Wut umgewandelt werden können, um rassistischem Gedankengut entgegenwirken zu können. Der Schmerz soll dabei als Anfang dienen, um ein gegenseitiges Kennenlernen über alle gesellschaftlichen Unterschiede hinweg zu initiieren.

In his online-lecture for the Public Program of The Diasporic Schools, organised by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts Bruxelles, Achille Mbembe shares some of his thoughts about reparative globalism and the possibility of thinking about a common world in the anthropogenic age. Grounding his reflection in the African diasporic experience and its “fundamental precariousness”, he invites to “rethink […]

Common is a double-sided term: As the philosopher and sinologue François Jullien argues, it is both inclusive and exclusive. It can both open and close, oppose its own and identify with it. It is opposed to the universal because it is not enacted as a necessary law, upstream of any experience, but on the contrary […]