The aim of the text is to investigate ways to provide an answer to the question ‘what is the disease of ageing’? This question is raised because of biogerontology’s endeavor of treating ageing. But also raised by many social scientific critiques of biogerontology. As will be demonstrated, much of this critique is directed to the ways that the ‘pathologization’ of ageing might affect the status of the elderly. My argument, however, is that to better understand what biogerontology’s ‘disease of ageing’ is, one needs to detach ageing from old age. In the end, two tentative answers to the question of the title are drafted.
Kategorie: Papers at the Max-Weber-Kolleg
Blaž Ploj is going to present a working paper on ‚Hyper-performativity, Metapoetics and the Carnivalesque Coronation of the Clever Slave‘
In the first part of this paper, the concept of hyper-performativity is being discussed. The second part focuses on the metapoetic use of rituals in the play Rudens. The third part is an attempt of describing the carnivalesque coronation of the clever slave in the Mostellaria (The Haunted House).
Nora Lafi presents a working paper on ‚Daily Life Spatialities of Religiosity in Ottoman Tunis: Reflections on the Complexity of Urban Religious Landscapes‘
On September 26, 1861, chronicler Ahmed Ibn Abî Dhiyâf reported, an angry crowd of protesters gathered inside the Ezzituna Mosque of Tunis. They were upset against the consequences of the modernizing reforms of the local government in this Ottoman province and of pressures by foreign consuls. The gathering then evolved into a street demonstration that took the direction of the Palace of the Bardo, the residence of the Bey outside of the city walls. What could be interpreted as the mere protest of a group of conservative religious notables against modernity and its ambiguities, in fact hides numerous layers of complexity that involve the relationship between space and religiosity. The demonstrators, indeed, did not directly walk to the Bardo. Before exiting the city walls, they stopped at a mausoleum dedicated to a local saint, Sidi Mahres (951-1022), patron of the city since the middle-ages. Passing through this place meant for the protesters that their demonstration had acquired a religious, but also civic, legitimacy and force. Demonstrators grabbed symbols of the saint, among which his banners, that they carried in the demonstration. After the failure of a negotiation in front of the palace, they broke the banners of the saint. It meant that a riot could start. It is the object of this presentation in the colloquium to investigate these dimensions of complexity in the relationship between space, society and religiosity. Using the concept of religious landscape and reflecting on methodology in urban history as well as on the notion of longue durée, Nora Lafi analyses how the spatiality and nature of everyday life popular religiosity in Tunis, that also included forms of devotion common to Jews and Muslims and had some specific feminine declensions, invites to nuance ideas of identity and religion as blocks. What this presentation suggests, with an attention to the inertia of deep forms of religiosity and to notions like negotiation, mediation and accommodation, is to revise the very definition of urbanity and to see logics of spatialization of the self as more complex than the mere projection onto the urban space of pre-defined identities.
Petra Gümplová presents a working paper on ‚Common Ownership of the Earth in the Anthropocene‘
This paper analyzes the conception of common ownership of the earth
(COE) and its recent appropriations in the theory of global distributive
justice. Taking Mathias Risse’s theory as the main reference point, the
paper asks whether COE provides a plausible starting point for thinking
about natural resource justice in the age of the Anthropocene.
After providing a brief summary of Risse’s argument, I focus on three
central aspects of Risse’s theory of COE: 1) the concept of ownership and
its underlying ontological assumptions, 2) the basic needs thesis, and 3)
the implications of common ownership for the climate justice. Concerning
the first, I argue that due to ontological assumptions built into
ownership’s structure and the corresponding relation to non-human
world it authorizes, it is problematic to meaningfully extend it to global
domain and utilize it to protect what I argue is better captured by the
term global commons. Concerning the basic needs thesis, I argue that
Risse relies on an implausibly specieist and anthropocentric notion of
basic needs which can no longer hold in the Anthropocene. I explore the
question whether the replacement of basic needs with human rights can
partially mitigate the basic needs thesis failures. Thirdly, I discuss Risse’s
view of intergenerational justice and the proposal of a fair distribution of
burdens of climate change mitigation. Here I argue for the framework of
global commons to be used instead of common ownership. Overall, I
argue that in the current environmental predicament, COE no longer
appears to be a meaningful conception to ground the morality of human
relationship to natural environment and provide plausible distributive or
other implications for the allocation of natural resources.
Fouad Gehad Marei presented a working paper on ‚From the Throes of Anguished Mourning: Shi‘i Ritual Lamentation and the Pious Publics of Lebanon‘
Drawing on an analysis of Shi‘i ritual lamentation in Lebanon, this article examines how religious actors and pious publics employ literary, recitational, theatrical and socio-technological methods to cultivate imaginal engagements with the other-worldly. These methods are analysed, demonstrating how they locate pious Shi‘is in religious metanarratives which transcend the linearity of time and take place in the Elsewhere and the here-and-now, simultaneously. I argue that this produces transposable and lasting dispositions which constitute the Shi‘i self, immerses subjects in this-worldly-oriented modes of religiosity and bestows upon Shi‘i politics and the imagined community a profound emotional legitimacy. I posit that cultivated engagements with the Elsewhere are constitutive experiences in modes of religiosity which emphasise the symbiosis between human action and metaphysical intervention, thus complicating the question of agency and intentional action.
Marcus Döller presents a working paper on ‚What does it mean to resist against the law as law?‘
In the 13. Chapter of the dissertation I am going to show in four steps why Hegel makes an internal connection between the logic of the negative-infinite judgement and the Philosophy of Law. My thesis is, that it is crucial to understand the internal connection between the negative-infinite judgement on the one side and the modern form of the law on the other side in order to think a radical form of non-legal resistance. With non-legal resistance I am going to conceptualise a resistance beyond the law. In this line of thought I distinguish resistance that cannot be punished and resistance that can be punished. The act of the hero cannot be punished because the hero creates a new law. To be a hero means to be a law-giver. Heroes are only possible in antiquity. The act of the criminal, in contrast, can be punished, because the criminal presupposes a law already running up.
Every hero in modernity is in the position of the criminal in transgressing the law. Starting from this distinction, I will show that we have to think non-legal resistance differently in order to understand liberation in social struggles. Because resistance in modernity can just reproduce an order of domination and injustice, if resistance is not able to found an autonomous order of equal participation within social practices. Non-legal resistance takes places if the subject is able to justify action guiding rules only by itself. But the very act of justification of action guiding rules presupposes law like rules and overcomes them at the same time. This conceptualisation allows me to think a non-legal resistance which not just reiterates an order of social domination in the very form of resistance.
Sisi Sung gives a working paper on ‚Breaking the glass ceiling? A cultural and socio-economic study of female managers in China’s modern labor market – A summary of recent fieldwork in China‘
The paper is a preliminary summary of the fieldwork conducted during summer of 2019 in four cities of China: Beijing, Shenzhen, Xi’an and Shanghai. Each of the cities has its historical, economic and social characters distinct from each other. The paper will go into detail of the fieldwork procedure and provide some observations from the interview results.
Michael Sauder presents a working paper on ‚A Sociology of Luck‘
Sociology has been curiously silent about the concept of luck. The present article argues that this omission is, in fact, an oversight: an explicit and systematic engagement with luck provides a more accurate portrayal of the social world, opens potentially rich veins of empirical and theoretical inquiry, and offers a compelling alternative for challenging dominant meritocratic frames about inequality and the distribution of rewards. This article develops a framework for studying luck, first by proposing a working definition of luck, examining why sociology has ignored luck in the past, and making the case for why it is valuable to include luck in sociology’s conceptual repertoire. The article then demonstrates the fertile research potential of studying luck by identifying a host of research questions and hypotheses pertaining to the social construction of luck, the real effects of luck, and theoretical interventions related to luck. It concludes by highlighting the distinctive contributions sociology can make to the growing interdisciplinary interest in this topic.
Tullio Viola presents a working paper on ‚The Logic of Historical Inquiry‘
Last semester, my colloquium text was the fifth chapter of my
forthcoming book, Peirce on the Uses of History (De Gruyter 2020).
Now I would like to discuss the seventh and last chapter. This is the only
chapter that is still in a “first draft” form and therefore needs a rather
substantial revision. This applies to both style and content, for both are
still a bit shaky (which I hope makes for a good colloquium text!). The
main idea is simple enough. While the book’s previous chapters deal
with Peirce’s conception of the relation between philosophy and history,
also taking into account his work as a historian of science and culture,
this chapter closes the book by looking at methodological issues about
historiography and about epistemological problems about the very status
of historical inquiry.
Ranjeeta Dutta is going to present a working paper on ‚‘Temple Town’ as a Typology for Understanding Religion and Urbanity: The Case of Srirangam in Early Modern South India‘
This paper will first discuss the category of ‘temple town’ and ‘temple
urbanism and temple urbanization’ in South India as presented in the historical research and try to understand the viability of such phrases/terms as typologies for understanding religion and urbanity. Secondly, it will explore the development of Srirangam as an urban centre around a single cultic focus of the Ranganathasvami temple. An attempt will be made to analyse the processes through which the temple became the centre of diffusion not only for religious ideas and Srivaishnava community identities, but also of societal and political aspects of urbanism and urbanity that influenced its character and settlement patterns in the early modern period, from the fourteenth to eighteenth century CE.