Organised by Susanne Strätling, project Circulating Theory, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies", in cooperation with Henrike Schmidt, Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature.

Theories do not travel in text capsules through space and time, isolated and detached from their original contexts, in order to be ultimately adopted and adapted in new, previously hardly anticipated contexts. Rather, they often move with people, unfolding their creative impact in concrete spatiotemporal encounters. Frequently, this happens in the context of public seminars and conferences but also quite commonly in informal, semi-private gatherings or alternative, dissident subcultures, creating a space of intensified dialogue for a limited time and opening a door of theory transfer for a condensed moment, which can be very lasting in its effect. In the sense of this temporary opening of theory transaction spaces, we speak exploratively of "Pop-Up Theory". On the basis of prototypical case studies, we would like to discuss this thesis that the global transfer of knowledge is largely a matter of an apparatus - institutional as well as informal - that moves subjects along with texts in space and draws them together in different constellations for a certain moment in time. This is especially intriguing for theory transits that had to cross a border that was as difficult to overcome as the one between East and West.

Programme

10:00 | Welcome

Panel I (Moderation: Susanne Strätling)

10:15 | Elene Ladaria (Ilia State University, Tbilisi): Disputed Territory of the Unconscious: Uznadze's Set Theory and Psychoanalysis

11:15 | Giorgi Kobakhidze (Université Toulouse-2/Ca’ Foscari Venezia): An Outsider's Perspective: on Merab Mamardashvili’s "La responsabilité européenne"

12:15 | Lunch

Panel II (Moderation: Michael Gamper)

14:00 | Matthias Schwartz (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin): Productive Misunderstandings: Stanisław Lem Discusses AI, Moral Imperatives, and Posthuman Worlds with Western Information Theoreticians (West Berlin, Freie Universität, September 1981)

15:00 | Anna Förster (University of Erfurt): Travel and (Non)Translation: Jacques Derrida in Prag (and in Bratislava)

16:00 | Coffee break

Panel III (Moderation: Henrike Schmidt)

16:30 | Kamelia Spassova (St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia): Julia Kristeva Reading Bakhtin in Barthes' Seminar (1966): Transposition and Carnivalesque Subversion

17:30 | Vladimir Biti (University of Vienna): In Defense of 'True Humanness': On the Insularity of the Praxis School

18:30 | Final discussion

Time & Location

Jun 12, 2024

Freie Universität Berlin
Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature
Room JK 28/208
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14195 Berlin

Further Information

Henrike Schmidt, schmidth@zedat.fu-berlin.de and Susanne Strätling, susastra@zedat.fu-berlin.de.