Marcus Döller presents a working paper on ‚Action and Sociality: Model of Infortune‘

In chapter 20 of my PhD project I am going to conceptualize a processual understanding of subjectivity on the one side and social reproduction on the other side. In referring to Rosa I show that both accounts are interwoven with each other on a level of social constitution and reproduction. I take Rosa to radicalize how we can think of transformation in subjective and social conditions of modernity. My systematical starting point and end point as well is the concept of “practical capacities”. This is the theoretical framework in which I want to place what human action as capacity of the subject could be. My suggestion is to understand creative actions as actualization of what I call “incapacities internal to capacities”. The chapter articulates this dialectic on the level of subjective action and social structure. In developing three different models in subjectivity (i), social revolution (ii) and nature (iii) I show that transformation has to think about regressive moments as moments of standstill. The concept of standstill is crucial for my elaboration of transformative action as liberation because it helps me to think transformation as producing something that is as well a fundamental resistance against the social order and transformative potential within the social reproduction at the same time. In order to understand liberation – the overall topic of all of my chapters – we have to understand both moments.

Gabriel Malli is going to present a working paper on ‚Media – Subjectivities – Religion. Theoretical reflections on subjectivity discourses in religious media‘

The present paper proposes a basic conceptual framework for my thesis and can be considered a first draft for a theory part. In the first section, I review sociological approaches to media – mainly from the field of Cultural Studies –, focusing on the level of media text. In the second part, I deal with theoretical conceptions of subjectivities und subjectivation in (post-structuralist) cultural sociology and try to link them to the approaches reviewed in the first part. Drawing from praxeological concepts of religion, I deal with the construction of “subject models” – understood as templates for desirable and legitimate subjectivities – in religious (media) discourse in the final part.

Marcus Döller presents a working paper on ‚Freedom as Resistance – Two Forms of Non-Participation‘

n the paper Freedom as Resistance I am going to argue, that the form of normativity is its immediacy. In a reading of the Geist chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit I develop the conception of immediacy with regard to the structure of social normativity. In a first step I am going to show why there is a necessary split in the social within the greek ethical sphere. (I) In the second step I argue that Antigone is the name for a resistant subjectivity, which cannot be integrated within the social sphere, but is a product of the social reproduction in its very form. Here I compare two sophisticated actualisations by Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek in order to develop my own approach to a theory of subjectivation. (II) In a last step I am going to explain why radical resistance takes place internal to the form of the subject and how this is related to the form of the judgement in realising an internal suspension. (III)