Papers at the Max-Weber-Kolleg – Seite 13

David Palme gives a working paper on ‚Speaking about “forms of life” ‚

My second contributon focuses on the term “form of life”
in the title of my project. It tries to synthesize my
preliminary results and put them into the context of the
overall project. It claims that there can two strands
identied how the term “form of life” is used. These two
usages do have diferent implicatons on normative theory
but are not handled with sufcient care. I try to object both
of these strands with my own interpretaton of
Witgenstein.

Jana Ilnicka presents a working paper on ‚Augustine in the Wartburg manuscript‘

In the newly discovered Wartburg manuscript (Ms Eisenach
1361) small texts are collected, which Franz Pfeiffer
classified in his edition of the works of Meister Eckhart as
„Proverbs“. These „sayings“ have so far been predominantly
inauthentic and inspired by Meister Eckhart. The latest
research into the content of the manuscript has shown that
these texts must have been written by Meister Eckhart
himself. It is often quoted in Augustine, and the analysis of
these citations shows that they correspond to the manner of
the citation in Meister Eckhart and can be included in the
index Auctorum Patristicorum.

Simone Wagner gave a working paper on ‚Authority and gender. Abbesses and priors of collegiate churches in South-Western Germany (15th/16th century)‘

Abbesses and priors of collegiate churches („Stifte“) faced similar conditions of theiroffice. Despite comparable evidence they were treated very differently by academia. Inorder to overcome this deficit this dissertation project takes a comparative approach andfocuses on the authority of abbesses and priors of civic collegiate churches in SouthWestern Germany (15th/16th century). It explores how different agents i.e. the cities,bishops and the chapters helped shaping and dismantle religious authority. Thus,primarily sources produced by conflicts between abbesses or priors and these agents areused. The project’s aim is to show that intersectionality was very important for religioussuperior’s authority. Religious lifestyle, status, gender and civic discourses all played arole in constructing authority

Martin Fuchs is going to present a working paper on ‚Precarious Belonging: Religious Options and Engagements with the World in a Metropolitan Context. The case of Dalits in Dharavi (Mumbai)‘

More than half of the population of metropolitan cities like Mumbai lives in spaces categorized as “slums”. Social marginalization can be seen as being overdetermined by territorial stigmatization. The fact that most of the urban subalterns, who represent the relatively largest share of the population, have largely to fend for themselves, and the general “informality” of the economy, find their parallel in the structures of local governance and in the social and religious fields. To a large extent (larger than among residents of middle-class suburbs) slum residents operate their religious lives and religious institutions on their own, make their own choices and maintain their own translocal networks. Taking the case of Dharavi, long labelled the largest slum of Asia, with a population of 1 million people on a little more than 2 square kilometres at the heart of Mumbai, the paper discusses the specific take of members of this widely neglected section of the populace, especially of Dalits, on questions of religion as well as urbanity. It offers an entry-point into the spectrum of options, preferences as well as modes of appropriation within the dense and diversified religious field of Dharavi (Mumbai) from the perspectives of both individuals as well as communities, or caste groups. It finally points to the little acknowledged difficulties scholarship has of understanding the perspectives and the position, and the implied relationship to the urban, of people whose life is shared between city and village, a very common practice among people connected to places like Dharavi.

Felipe Torres Navarro is going to present a working paper on ‚Technologies of Time‘

“Technologies are artificial, but… artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.” (Ong 2002:81) Following the same spirit that encourages all our research, we will address in this section the question, ‘How is time produced?’ in order to explore the new experiences and concepts of time generated by the interaction with digital technology. A virtual dimension that encompasses several spaces at the same time has overtaken space; the users are localized and reterritorialized by the technology in a temporal frame of simultaneity. Meanwhile, the expansion of the network transforms temporality, as a condensed flow, into an ever-expanding network and a unity of connected yet geographically dispersed movements in the present. Electronic communication has made it possible for simultaneous experiences. This has awakened not only economic interest in products and the sale of mass technologies, but also awareness of its potential political power.

Enno Friedrich gives a working paper on ‚Ven. Fort. carm. 9, 15 – an interpretative commentary. Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry and the decoding of poetry as a sphere of resonance‘

The paper consists of two parts: an interpretative commentary of carm. 9, 15 and a short sketch of a modell for ‘The decoding of poems as a sphere of resonance’. In the commentary of the poem the different intertexts, all leading back to one major hypotext, define the significance of the poem. In the modell I have tried to describe decoding poetry as a social practice on the basis of Michael Riffaterre’s modell of decoding poetry and Hartmut Rosa’s modell of the sphere of resonance.

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli presented a working paper on ‚An Archetypal Blasé? Justin Martyr and the Segmentation of Christians’ Urban Life‘

When Georg Simmel authored The Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903, urbanization was spurred by fossils fuels and metropolises were about to become one of the most prominent man-made features of the planet. The relationship between metropolis and modernity was such that the former was seen and the crucial ‘site of intensification’ of the former. Nevertheless, this paper sets out to show that the general question posed by Simmel’s famous Dresden lecture, that is, ‘how the personality’ of a city-dweller ‘accommodates itself in the adjustments to [the] external forces’ of a vast and dense city-space, can be profitably referred back onto the life of some urban populations of past agrarian societies. More specifically, the paper argues that, unlike small towns and more radically than other large centers, the megacity of imperial Rome was liable to produce what Simmel calls the ‘psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality’ and relates to the massive ‘intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’. The paper aims to sketchily investigate the ‘amount of consciousness’ that the imperial city of Rome required from a Christ-believing intellectual, Justin of Neapolis, who settled in Rome by the mid-2nd century and mainly dedicated himself to teaching classes of Christian doctrine and mapping other Christians’ misbelieves and misdeeds: lecturing on truth and cataloguing heresies. How did Justin psychically and behaviorallyreact to metropolitan phenomena such as the serial accumulation and spatial distribution of religious knowledge, dissemination of religious freelancing, multiplication and scattering of religiously motivated meetings, overstimulation from claims, messages, and experiences-deemed-religious? Following Simmel’s heuristic track, the paper examines the way Justin’s ‘personality’ made it to accommodate to the ‘external forces’ of the city of Rome. More specifically, it looks at how this ‘intellectually sophisticated’ personality ‘branche[d]’ out in three intertwined directions, namely that of a (1) Christ believer, (2) a teacher, and a (3) ‘heresiologist,’ and coped with a city which was replete with Christ groups, supplied a multitude of potential students, and sprouted several heresies-to-be. In the conclusion I will push my arguments to the very limits of the sociological imagination of Justin’s metropolitan psychic life and urban experience.

Kai Brodersen has given a working paper on ‚Resonant /loci/? Vertical and (very) horizontal resonances in AD 333‘

In AD 333 an anonymous traveller crossed the Roman Empire from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and back. The journey took almost a year, and included „pagan“, Jewish and Christian /loci/ (sites) which the author referred to by alluding to /loci/ in the oral or written tradition. But which /loci/ resonate as /lieux de mémoire/ with the author and her or his audience? How does this resonate with applying „resonance theory“? And can this method help us to solve the puzzle of the religious identity, and the gender, of the traveller?

Christoph Henning gave a working paper on ‚Politics of Nature, left and right: Comparing the Ontologies of Georg Lukács and Bruno Latour‘

The text compares the ontologies of Latour and Lukács, with a focus on questions of nature. I argue that Lukács is to be preferred to Latour both in terms of philosophical consistency and political viability.