Bernd A. Laska

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Bernd A. Laska (born August 4, 1943 in Berlin ) is a German philosophical writer , editor , translator and publisher .

Career

Laska studied at the Technical University of Munich and graduated in 1969 with the degree of Dipl.-Ing. from. After stays abroad and various activities, he began writing in the non-technical field. He translated Wilhelm Reich's writings from English into German and in 1975 founded the Wilhelm-Reich-Blätter , an alternative journal as an organ of an informal study group. In 1981 Laska published the Rowohlt monograph on Wilhelm Reich.

Laska then wrote a Rowohlt monograph on Max Stirner , which, however, did not go to print even after lengthy disputes with the publisher. Laska considered these differences with Rowohlt's editing to be symptomatic of Stirner's reception. The dispute caused him to deal more intensively with the Stirner reception. He has published the results of his research since the mid-1980s in a series of articles and the book series Stirner Studies.

In the 1980s, Laska discovered the French philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) for himself. Since La Mettrie only had his font L'homme machine in German translation ( Man as Machine ), he brought out a four-volume German edition with new or first translations of La Mettrie's fonts in the LSR Verlag, founded in 1985. At the same time, he conceived the so-called LSR project, which he outlined in the introduction to volume 1 of the La Mettrie work edition.

Laska asserts that the choice and “yoke” of these three historically marginal authors did not happen arbitrarily, but is due to a new perspective on the history of the modern Enlightenment: This new perspective takes into account what those three otherwise isolated, in each case around unites the thinkers who were active in the middle of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries: in terms of content and impact. A first attempt to uncover the “common core of ideas” of the three authors is presented in three monographic articles: The negation of the irrational superego in La Mettrie / ... in Max Stirner / ... in Wilhelm Reich . The majority of the work so far, however, relates to the defense and repression of this core of ideas by the mainstream of the Enlightenment, in Laska's words: the history of re (pulsion and de) reception.

Laska explains that with his LSR project he is pursuing the goal of eliminating their “paralysis” since the middle of the 20th century by uncovering the multiple “wrong decisions” and “ Pyrrhic victories ” in the course of the modern Enlightenment; that he wants to counter the defeatist interpretation of Horkheimer's and Adorno's ( dialectic of the Enlightenment ) with a potentially future-oriented one.

The LSR project

The LSR project is an idea history project that Laska launched in 1985. The letters L, S, R stand for La Mettrie, Stirner, Reich. At the same time, the LSR-Verlag was founded, in which initially a four-volume German edition of works on La Mettrie (mostly first translations), then a collection of Stirner's smaller writings (Parerga, reviews, replicas) and finally a series of Stirner studies (so far three volumes of Laska) appeared.

Since 1975 Laska had mainly published on Wilhelm Reich . With the Wilhelm Reich sheets he published , he wanted to counter three tendencies at the time: the forgetting of Reich on the part of the left; the appropriation of the late empire - the orgone researcher - by the booming esotericism ; the commercialization of Reich therapy technology . Laska endeavors to work out a more general meaning of Reich, which one could call “philosophical”, and to bring it to the fore. In doing so, he first tries to prove that Reich was a student of Freud, but above all the (enlightening) antipode of this last great enlightener.

Both Freud and Reich did not see themselves as philosophers, despite the immense influence of psychoanalysis on the history of ideas. But not only for this reason, but also for reasons related to the matter, Laska characterized his LSR project as “paraphilosophical”.

The LSR project developed following the theoretical discussions of the 1968s about a merging of the great Enlightenment theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in so-called Freudo Marxism . This merger was started in the 1920s mainly by Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957). In “ 1968 ” it was modified and revived mainly by Herbert Marcuse . In the 1970s, broad interest in Freudo Marxist theory waned. Instead, Jacques Lacan's “new reading” of Freud and Louis Althusser's “new reading” of Marx gained influence. Michel Foucault's novel view quickly attracted a lot of attention. What these new theories had in common was that they had tacitly broken with the Freudo-Marxist tradition. These and some other developments in political philosophy after 1945 - key words: postmodernism ; Habermas ' "new confusion" etc. - led Laska to the assumption that the great enlightenment impetus of the original Freudo Marxism had been buried, even "suppressed", through this complex and chaotic process.

“Displacement” is a central term in the studies of reception history that have so far largely been carried out in the context of the LSR project. First of all, it is about proving that something has actually been suppressed, then about opening up the idea that has been suppressed. The studies on Wilhelm Reich were later followed by others on Max Stirner (1806-1856) and finally Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) and their respective entourage. The name LSR-Projekt was formed as an acronym for the names of the (chronologically ordered) protagonists.

The aim of the LSR project is to show that at the respective high points of the modern Enlightenment, a radically materialistic - atheist thinker appeared, whose ideas were "suppressed" and, so to speak, hushed up by his contemporaries - paradoxically especially by Enlightenment thinkers. Furthermore, it should be shown that after the implementation of Enlightenment ideas and the processing of the history of ideas of the Enlightenment, this tacit condemnation was passed over again, so "secondary repressions" exist. The intellectual historical relevance of these processes is to be shown by the fact that in the three cases, each almost a century apart, despite very different social and philosophical contexts, a very similar basic structure can be prepared, namely that of the "history of re (pulsation and de) reception" .

In the LSR project, which has so far been carried out largely outside of academia and primarily through the individual work, not the overall claim, the aim is not to rehabilitate the three authors, La Mettrie, Stirner and Reich, who are marginal in the history of philosophy. The case studies of these thinkers, referred to as the “pariah of the mind”, and a history of Enlightenment philosophy that is consistently read against the grain should rather give an impulse “for the reanimation of the paralyzed Enlightenment” according to the self-image of the project. LSR publication reviewers have been both positive and negative.

history

Laska's works, which have so far been published in magazines and books, are predominantly studies of the history of reception, which, often with great meticulousness, investigate connections that normally receive little attention in the established history of philosophy - as the names of the three protagonists already show. Obviously, however, it is also, probably primarily, about content, because the reasons that provoked the conflict between Freud and Reich led the way to the other two conflicts that are discussed in the LSR project and their analysis is loud Laska is said to be suitable “to revive the European Enlightenment, which has been paralyzed since the middle of the 20th century.” In order to counter the accusation of the ahistorical approach, Laska emphasizes the structural and substantive commonalities of the three conflicts, each of which took place a century apart. Structurally, the conflicts are characterized by the process of “repression”, which can be grasped both psychologically (with the protagonists) and ideologically (with their theory production) - which becomes clearer in the examples below. What the content of the three conflicts was about has only been worked out in a rudimentary fashion and an attempt can only be made to present the current status of the LSR project.

Freud versus Reich

The largely little-known conflict between Freud and his forty-year-old student Reich appears as the nucleus of the LSR project. As early as 1981, before the LSR project was initiated, Laska emphasized this conflict and its particularities in his Rowohlt monograph. While other conflicts between Freud and his students that led to the separation ( Jung , Adler , Rank , Ferenczi and others) always started from these, Reich was excluded from the organizations of psychoanalysis at Freud's insistence . While Freud otherwise publicly discussed the differences with his dissidents in order to clarify his own position, he remained silent in the case of Reich. Empire exclusion, which only incidentally, and as from the semi-official history of psychoanalysis occurs mentioned, took place in politically turbulent time (1934) and long remained unnoticed. Even when Reich was rediscovered in 1968, his conflict with Freud was not a problem. Only after the policy of psychoanalysis against National Socialism was reviewed in the late 1980s did the "Wilhelm Reich case" appear in a new light. Reich was now seen by some “Left Freudians” as the one among the psychoanalysts who recognized the threat to psychoanalysis posed by the NS at the earliest and reacted in such a way that he took an active Marxist position and was most consistent against the NS.

Notwithstanding the great loss of validity that Freud and Marx have experienced in recent decades, Laska wants to expose what was then buried; First of all, the seemingly very conspiratorial processes surrounding Reich's exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPV) are in the foreground. In the last few years, informative materials have become known from archives that have been closed for a long time, including Freud's instructions to Max Eitingon , the chairman of the Berlin Psychoanalytical Association, regarding the exclusion of Reich: “I wish it for scientific reasons, I have nothing against it if it happens for political reasons . ”These“ scientific reasons ”, which Freud never mentioned, neither publicly nor privately, but which - as Laska emphasizes - no one ever asked, are to be developed in the LSR project.

Marx and Nietzsche versus Stirner

The Stirner case predates the Reich case about a century and seems to have little connection with it. Laska tried, however, to work out previously overlooked parallels, both in terms of content and historical reception, between the two cases. As for Marx's relationship with Stirner, he builds on relevant research that Wolfgang Eßbach summarized and expanded in 1982. The research on Nietzsche's relationship to Stirner, which was completed at the beginning of the 20th century without a clear result, he himself evaluated and continued on the basis of a new biographical find.

French scouts against La Mettrie

In his History of Materialism (1866), Friedrich Albert Lange calls La Mettrie (1709–1751) “one of the most vilified names in literary history” and “the whipping boy” of the French Enlightenment. For decades the French materialists tried to distance themselves from La Mettrie by silence. Finally, one of the spokesmen, Denis Diderot , named the reason: it was necessary to expressly exclude “a person so depraved in his customs and beliefs” from the community of philosophes . According to Laska, however, the most powerful “displacement” of La Mettrie was carried out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau , whose “famous illumination ” of October 1749 - the birth of the philosopher Rousseau - was neither due to an inexplicable coincidence nor to a fantasy invented by Rousseau afterwards was, but in all probability was triggered by a recently published book, the Discours sur le bonheur ou Anti-Sénèque (discourse on happiness or anti-Seneca) by Julien Offray de La Mettrie. "

reception

The LSR project has so far not been received as an overall project for the history of ideas, as it is obviously intended for the long term, but only as a web presence for the publication of materials, treatises and essays on three philosophically-historically marginalized thinkers.

Fonts

magazine

Books

  • Wilhelm Reich, in personal testimonies and picture documents, Reinbek: Rowohlt 1981 (6th edition 2008) ISBN 978-3-499-50298-9
  • Stirner studies :
    • Volume 1: A secret hit. Edition history of Max Stirner's "Unique", Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag 1986 ISBN 3-922058-61-2
    • Volume 2: A Permanent Dissident. History of the impact of Max Stirner's “Unique”, Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag 1986 ISBN 3-922058-62-0
    • Volume 3: "Katechon" and "Anarch". Carl Schmitt's and Ernst Jünger's reactions to Max Stirner's “Sole”, Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag 1986 ISBN 3-922058-63-9
  • (as editor and translator): Work edition by Julien Offray de La Mettrie
  • (as editor):
  • (as translator):

Articles (selection)

  • Wilhelm Reich as a sexologist. In: Sexuologie 4 (3) 1996, pp. 232–241 ( online )
  • Remained dissident. How Marx and Nietzsche ousted their colleague Max Stirner and why he survived them spiritually. In: DIE ZEIT, No. 5, Jan. 27, 2000, p. 49 ( online )
  • LSR as an “anarchist” project. In: The Right Idea for a Wrong World? Perspectives of Anarchy. Edited by Rolf Raasch and Hans Jürgen Degen, Berlin: OPPO-Verlag 2002, pp. 93-100, ISBN 3-926880-12-0 ( online )
  • Nietzsche's initial crisis. The Stirner-Nietzsche question in a new light. In: Germanic Notes and Reviews, Vol. 33, No. 2, fall / Herbst 2002, pp. 109-133 ( online )
  • Otto Gross between Max Stirner and Wilhelm Reich. In: Raimund Dehmlow & Gottfried Heuer (eds.): 3rd International Otto Gross Congress, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich. Marburg: LiteraturWwissenschaft.de 2003, pp. 125–162, ISBN 3-936134-06-5 ( online )
  • La Mettrie and the art of feeling wo (h) llust. Portrait of an ostracized thinker. In: The Blue Rider. Journal für Philosophie, Issue 16 (June 2003), pp. 98–103 ( online )
  • The Sting Stirner. Review essay [About Alexander Stulpe: The Faces of the One ]. In: Enlightenment and Criticism, Vol. 17, Issue 4, October 2010, pp. 272–279 ( online )
  • 1750 - Rousseau ousts La Mettrie. A course in the history of ideas. In: Enlightenment and Criticism, Volume 19, Issue 4, October 2012, pp. 174–185 ( online )
  • Individual self-empowerment and rational super-ego. Max Stirner as a psychological thinker. In: Wolf-Andreas Liebert / Werner Moskopp (ed.): The self-empowerment of the individual. Berlin: LIT-Verlag 2014, pp. 127-163, ISBN 978-3-643-12454-8
  • Vade retro! - On the history of the repulsion of Stirner's 'Unique'. In: Anarchism in pre and post March. Ed. V. Detlev Kopp and Sandra Markewitz, Bielefeld: Aisthesis-Verlag 2017, pp. 71-100, ISBN 978-3-8498-1205-8 . (FVF Forum Vormärz research, yearbook 2016)


Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Information based on Laskas Rowohlt's monograph Wilhelm Reich (1981; 6th edition 2008)
  2. ↑ A strange advertisement and its strange consequences
  3. ↑ Overview, short descriptions, tables of contents of previous titles here
  4. ↑ After reading the standard work The Enlightenment of Panajotis Kondylis . He gives more details in a kind of obituary for the 1998 deceased Kondylis, Panajotis Kondylis - involuntary godfather of the LSR project .
  5. ↑ Bernd A. Laska: Introduction to La Mettrie, Man as a machine, Nuremberg 1985, p. Xxxiv-xxxvi
  6. ↑ These articles are available online.
  7. ↑ In addition to the volumes of the Stirner studies , see above all the articles
    Nietzsche's initial crisis. The Stirner-Nietzsche Question in a New Light (2002) and
    1750 - Rousseau displaces La Mettrie. Setting the course for the history of ideas (2012)
  8. ↑ The sketch that Laska gave in 1985 in his introduction to La Mettrie's book Man as a Machine (pp. Xxxiv – xxxvi) can be regarded as the “founding document”
  9. ↑ wilhelm-reich-sheets
  10. ↑ Wilhelm Reich has only rarely been honored as a philosopher, but explicitly by Paul Edwards in a lengthy article in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967 ff., Rev. 2006) or in the Biographical Encyclopedia of German-Language Philosophers (2001).
  11. ↑ This term is explained in the intro as follows: “Paraphilosophy is a word that has hardly been used so far - and rightly so, because it has never been possible to develop ideas from an original philosophical impetus that are not in the usual field of philosophy are to be assigned; they are, so to speak outside, in addition to the conventional philosophy. ... (In any case, it would be a misunderstanding to understand the paraphilosophy of the LSR project as analogous to the more recent parasciences or the somewhat older parapsychology) "
  12. ^ This is the name of a book series announced in 1985 by LSR Verlag
  13. ↑ See e.g. B. Bernd A. Laska: Sigmund Freud versus Wilhelm Reich (excerpt from Bernd A. Laska: Wilhelm Reich. Reinbek 1981, 6th edition 2008)
  14. ↑ Dirk van den Boom in: peculiarly free. Marketplace for liberalism, anarchism and capitalism. Vol. 1, No. 3, 3rd quarter 1998, pp. 98-99
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Schuller in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 4, 1997
  16. ↑ Karl Fallend, Bernd Nitzschke: The 'Fall' Wilhelm Reich. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 81
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Essbach: countermoves. The materialism of the self. A study of the controversy between Stirner and Marx. Materialis, Frankfurt am Main 1982
  18. ↑ Bernd A. Laska: Nietzsche's initial crisis. The Stirner-Nietzsche question in a new light. In: Germanic Notes and Reviews, Vol. 33, n. 2, fall / Herbst 2002, pp. 109-133 ( online )
  19. ↑ Friedrich Albert Lange: History of Materialism. (1866) Reprint (2 volumes): Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1974, Volume I, p. 344
  20. ↑ Denis Diderot: Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron et sur la vie de Sénèque (1778/82). Various Issues, various translations; Quote from book 2, section VI.
  21. ↑ Bernd A. Laska: 1750 - Rousseau displaces La Mettrie. A course in the history of ideas. In: Enlightenment and Criticism, Volume 19, Issue 4, October 2012, pp. 174–185. ( online )
  22. ↑ http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/cgi-bin/fullrecord.pl?handle=humbul8991
    In the guest book of the website of the LSR project , Laska wrote on April 4, 2007 that he had not received a monograph on the LSR Project is known.
personal data
SURNAME Laska, Bernd A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laska, Bernd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosophical writer , translator and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin