Sigrid Weigel

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Sigrid Weigel (born March 25, 1950 in Hamburg ) is an internationally renowned German literary and cultural scientist.

Live and act

Sigrid Weigel was in 1977 with a thesis on "pamphlet literature 1848 in Berlin" at the Literary Scientific Seminar of the University of Hamburg for Dr. phil. doctorate, where she subsequently worked as a lecturer from 1978 to 1982. In 1986 she qualified as a professor at the Department of Modern German Literature and Art Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg . In 1984 she was appointed professor at the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Hamburg, where she built up a focus on intercultural literary studies and (together with Inge Stephan) founded an office for women in literary studies, whose international conferences were held in the 1980s to establish gender research in Germans Universities contributed.

In 1990 Sigrid Weigel moved to the board of directors of the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen , where she supervised an interdisciplinary fellow group on memory research and headed a group on 'Topography of the Sexes': a "working group of seven brilliant women" (A. Assmann, Chr. Braun, S. Schade, R. Schlesier, H. Schlüpmann, M. Wagner), who in the following as professors should make a decisive contribution to the establishment of cultural studies at German universities. In 1993 she was offered a professorship in literary studies at the German Department of the University of Zurich , where she initiated an annual poetics lecture that began in 1996 with Anne Duden ; Here WG Sebald gave his first lecture "Air Warfare and Literature" in 1997. During the years in which she was President of the 'Commission for Interdisciplinary Events at the University and ETH', its lecture series became a center of debate on the “Nazi gold affair” in Switzerland.

In 1998 she took over the management of the Einstein Forum Potsdam. From 2005 to 2016 she was Permanent Visiting Professor at the German Dept. from Princeton University.

In 1999 she was appointed director of the Center for Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL) and professor at the Technical University of Berlin and, until her retirement in 2015, also served as chairwoman of the Berlin Humanities Centers. The ZfL, founded by Eberhard Lämmert in 1996, developed during this time "into a distinguished, nationally and internationally visible research center [...] and a key location in Germany on the one hand for theoretical discussions between historical-philological and cultural studies approaches in the humanities and on the other on the other hand, for an interdisciplinary study of the natural and technical sciences ", said the Science Council in 2006, whose positive evaluation was the first step towards stabilizing the facility, which was originally founded for 12 years. The ZfL is an example of a creative collaboration between the knowledge cultures from East and West, as scientists from the Central Institute for the History of Literature of the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR worked in team and project work on a future-oriented research profile with scientists from a mostly younger generation from the old FRG .

First cultural studies

With regard to the “cultural turn” in the humanities of the 1980s and 1990s, Sigrid Weigel speaks of the “first cultural studies”; it describes a constellation of intellectual history around 1900 in which predominantly Jewish German-speaking authors such as Sigmund Freud , Aby Warburg , Georg Simmel , Ernst Cassirer , Helmuth Plessner , Walter Benjamin crossed their specialist boundaries and practiced working on transitions . She regards these authors as outsiders, whose way of thinking stems from the flip side of Europe's colonial and nationalist past, and advocates using this epistemic potential for the present. Essential components for her are a history theory beyond the history of progress, detailed research and attention to the afterlife of religion, myth, ritual in modern times and to correspondences between European and non-European cultures. She sees a precursor to the first cultural studies in literature, as shown by the example of Freud and Warburg's proximity to Heinrich Heine . For her, authors such as Gershom Scholem , Hannah Arendt , Stéphane Mosès and Susan Taubes succeeded the first cultural studies . The estate of this Jewish philosopher and writer, which Weigel found among the heirs, is looked after and edited by her. One goal of the director of the ZfL was to make the archive of this type of cultural studies accessible through editions (including Aby Warburg's writings in one volume , Gershom Scholem's Poetica ). As an author, Weigel has profiled a number of new cultural-scientific topics, for example with the works on the history of the generation concept, on genea logic , on testimony, on the topographical turn , on portraits of martyrs . And the journal Trajekte des ZfL, which she founded (twice a year from 2000 to 2015), outlined current research topics (arts of knowledge, archeology as method and metaphor , forgery, inheritance / inheritance, expression / affect, survival, east-west passages, Archives, interdisciplinary conceptual history, archives of nature, etc.) play a role as a seismograph and source of inspiration for cultural studies.

Walter benjamin

Walter Benjamin occupies a special position in Weigel's writings , especially with figures of thought such as legibility, historical index, setting / topography, body and image space and with his epistemological threshold studies. His thinking is "neither theological nor secular", but shaped by a double reference to the biblical and profane language register. Directed against Giorgio Agamben , she emphasizes the differences between Benjamin and Carl Schmitt by reading their theories of sovereignty from the perspective of the respective opposing figures (martyrs and partisans) and shows that the closeness e.g. T. based on distorting translations, z. B. "Tremendous cases" as "exceptional cases". Another focus of her Benjamin studies concerns his extensive preoccupation with images, not only film and photography, but also paintings, which Weigel understands as the basis of his pictorial epistemology. And for the first time she systematically worked out the music theory hidden in Benjamin's writings.

Image science

In 2015 Weigel presented an image theory based on the sentence “It is important to think the trace before being” from Jacques Derrida's grammatology . In contrast to the traces left behind, she questions the traces that precede the image and develops a theory of the iconic. The focus is on the question of how something that is not itself a picture or is not visually accessible (feelings, sadness, honor, shame, transcendence, thinking) can itself become a picture. Because the figure of the angel is a picture of transcendence, Weigel interprets representations of angels in philosophy, art and science as a symptom of the picture question. In terms of image theory, it is about concepts such as indexical image, effigy, cult image. Andreas Beyer rates Weigel's grammatology of images as “the most integral image theory that we currently have”, it has “everything it takes to become a classic”. Even Wolfgang Ulrich recognizes the potential to become a standard work of visual studies at Weigel's picture theory; he emphasizes the clarity of the line of thought and describes the chapter on the caricature as masterful, but he also shows a certain reserve towards its reference to religion.

Cooperation between cultural and natural sciences

“The boundary between the body, which is accessible to empirical methods, and language in the broadest sense (including gestures, feelings, images, music, etc.), which depends on deciphering and understanding, is a hot zone of research: contested area and a promising field of interdisciplinary research at the same time. So far there has only been little border traffic here, ”Weigel wrote in an article that appeared in the Financial Times Deutschland in 2007 (Year of the Humanities) with the title For large border traffic . She refers to her own collaborations with colleagues from biology, medicine, neuroscience and clinical psychoanalysis in research projects - for example on the relationship between biological, economic and social aspects of heredity , the interrelationship between Sigmund Freud and neuroscience , empathy in the history of philosophy and current laboratory research. Due to the language barrier between the two cultures and the misunderstandings that arise from different meanings of the same terms, Weigel diagnosed the lack of a history of scientific terminology and initiated research into interdisciplinary terms at the ZfL .

In recent years her work has focused on the face, head and facial expressions. It examines what effects there could be for these three subject areas if, against the background of their knowledge and image history, they increasingly become the object of laboratory research, surgery and digitization. The exhibition she conceived on the face in the German Hygiene Museum was a public success in 2017.

Transnational cultural policy

In 2019 a study by Weigel on Transnational Foreign Cultural Policy - Beyond National Culture, commissioned by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, triggered a public debate. Weigel diagnoses a credibility problem in foreign cultural policy because its goals, such as support for human rights , making globalization responsible and sustainable, are less and less covered by German domestic policy, and advocates upgrading foreign cultural policy politically and its knowledge of other cultures and intercultural ones Making better use of internal exchange, for example in integration policy. On the question of the nation, she discusses the endangerment of the privileged community as the basis of our constitution and warns, as in previous debates, against the renaissance of the idea of ​​the cultural nation, since this stems from a xenophobic nationalist discourse that was involved in the ideological preparation of the First World War .

Honors

Publications

Author

  • Pamphlet literature in Berlin in 1848. History and public sphere of a popular species. Metzler, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-476-00393-0 (short version of: Hamburg, University, dissertation, 1977: pamphlets eighteen hundred and forty-eight in Berlin. ).
  • “And free even in dungeon…!” Writing in prison. On the theory and genre history of prison literature (1750–1933). Guttandin & Hoppe, Marburg (Lahn) 1982, ISBN 3-922140-14-9 .
  • The hidden woman. Six contributions to a feminist literary study (together with Inge Stephan) (Berlin: Argument 1983).
  • The voice of Medusa. Spellings in contemporary women's literature. Tende, Dülmen-Hiddingsel 1987, ISBN 3-88633-101-6 .
  • Nine portraits of women authors - From Aichinger to Zürn (together with Inge Stephan, Regula Venske) (Frankfurt / M .: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag 1986; new edition 2017)
  • Topographies of the sexes. Cultural history studies on literature (= Rowohlt's Encyclopedia. 514). Rowohlt Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-499-55514-X .
  • Images of cultural memory. Contributions to contemporary literature. Tende, Dülmen-Hiddingsel 1994, ISBN 3-88633-155-5 .
  • Body and image space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin. Routledge, London et al. 1996, ISBN 0-415-10955-8 (In Spanish: Cuerpo, imagen y espacio en Walter Benjamin. Una relectura (= Género y cultura. 4). Paidós, Buenos Aires et al. 1999, ISBN 950-12 -3804-0 ).
  • Distorted resemblance. Walter Benjamin's theoretical notation (= Fischer. 12964). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-12964-8 .
  • Ingeborg Bachmann. Legacies in compliance with the confidentiality of letters. Zsolnay, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-552-04927-4 .
  • Literature as a prerequisite for cultural history. Scenes from Shakespeare to Benjamin. Fink, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7705-3705-X .
  • Genea logic. Generation, tradition and evolution between cultural and natural sciences. Fink, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7705-4173-1 .
  • The “internal tension in the alphanumeric code” (Flusser). Letter and number from a grammatological and scientific history perspective (Cologne: Walter König 2006)
  • Walter benjamin. The creature, the sacred, the images (= Fischer. 18018). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-18018-9 .
    • English edition: Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy. Translation Chadwick Truscott Smith (Stanford University Press 2013)
    • Italian edition: Walter Benjamin. La creatura, il sacro, le immagini. Traduzione di Maria Teresa Costa (Macerata: Quodlibet 2014)
    • French edition: Walter Benjamin. La créature, le sacre, les images. Trad. de Marianne Dautrey (Paris: Edition Mimésis i.Dr.)
  • Grammatology of Pictures (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. 1889). Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-29489-5 .
    • English edition: Grammatlogy of Images. Translation Chadwick Truscott Smith (Forham University Press i.Dr.)
  • Transnational Foreign Cultural Policy - Beyond National Culture. Requirements and perspectives for the interweaving of inside and outside. Collaboration: Zaal Andronikashvili, Christian Schön. Editor: Institute for Foreign Relations V. (ifa), Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-921970-06-5 .
    • English edition: Transnational Foreign Policy - Beyond National Culture. Prerequisites and Perspectives of the Intersection of Domestic and Foreign Policy (Stuttgart: ifa Edition Culture and Foreign Policy 2019)

Editions

  • Aby Warburg: Writings in one volume . Ed. together with Martin Treml and Perdita Ladwig (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010)
  • Stéphane Mosès: Snapshots. = Instantanés. German and French. With translations from the French by Dirk Naguschewski and Clemens Härle (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010)
  • Gershom Scholem: Poetica. Writings on literature, translations, poems. Ed. together with Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Hannah Markus, Martin Treml (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2019)
  • Susan Taubes : Writings. 3 (in 4) volumes. Fink, Munich et al. 2011–2015;

Editor

  • Trajectories. Journal of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (H. 1 - H. 30, 2000–2015)
  • Ingeborg Bachmann . Special volume of the journal Text und Critique (Munich 1984)
  • Body and image space. Readings according to Benjamin (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 1). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1992, ISBN 3-412-06891-8 .
  • Message in a bottle and postcard. Correspondences between critical theory and post-structuralism (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 5). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1995, ISBN 3-412-07593-0 .
  • Genealogy and genetics. Interfaces between biology and cultural history. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-05-003572-2 .
  • Martyr portraits. Of sacrificial death, martyrs and holy warriors. Fink, Paderborn et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-7705-4553-7 .
  • Heine and Freud. The ends of literature and the beginnings of cultural studies (= literature research. 7). Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86599-067-9 .
  • Faces. Cultural-historical scenes from the work on the portrait of man. Fink, Paderborn 2013, ISBN 978-3-7705-5344-0 .
  • The face. Images, media, formats. Ed. for the German Hygiene Museum Dresden (Göttingen: Wallstein 2017)

Co-editor

  • with Vanessa Lux: Empathy. A neurobiologically based capacity and its cultural and conceptual history. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2017).
  • with Sybille Krämer: Testimony / Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield 2017)
  • with Gerhard Scharbert: A Neuro-Psychoanalytical Dialogue for Bridging Freud and the Neurosciences. Luxembourg 2016.
  • with Zaal Andronikashvili: basic orders. Geography, religion and law. (= Literature research. 14). Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86599-152-2 .
  • with Stefan Willer, Bernhard Jussen: Erbe. Concepts of transmission between nature and culture (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013)
  • with Eckart Goebel: "Escape to Life". German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-025867-7 .
  • with Sabine Flach: knowledge arts. The knowledge of the arts and the art of knowing. = The knowledge of the arts and the art of knowledge. VDG, Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-89739-439-1 .
  • with Martin Treml and Perdita Ludwig: Aby Warburg : Works in one volume. Based on the manuscripts and personal copies. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-58531-3 .
  • with Daniel Weidner : Benjamin Studies. Volume 1-3. Fink, Munich et al. 2008-2014, ISBN 978-3-7705-4637-4 (vol. 1), ISBN 978-3-7705-5071-5 (vol. 2), ISBN 978-3-7705-5782-0 (Vol. 3).
  • with Bernhard J. Dotzler : “full of combination”. Literary research and the history of science. Fink, Paderborn et al. 2005, ISBN 3-7705-4077-8 .
  • with Ohad Parnes, Ulrike Vedder and Stefan Willer : Generation. On the genealogy of the concept - concepts of genealogy. Fink, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7705-4082-4 .
  • with Thomas Macho and Wolfgang Schäffner: "God is in the details". Microstructures of knowledge. Fink, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7705-3704-1 .
  • with Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Schäffner: Between noise and revelation. On the cultural and media history of the voice. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-05-003571-4 .
  • with Jakob Tanner : Memory, Money and Law. On dealing with the past of the Second World War (= Zurich University Forum. 29). vdf - University publishing house at the ETH, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-7281-2658-6 .
  • with Stéphane Mosès : Gershom Scholem. Literature and rhetoric (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 15). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2000, ISBN 3-412-04599-3 .
  • with Gerhard Neumann : readability of culture. Literary studies between cultural technology and ethnography. Fink, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7705-3465-4 .
  • with Elisabeth Bronfen and Birgit R. Erdle: Trauma. Between psychoanalysis and cultural patterns of interpretation (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 14). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1999, ISBN 3-412-14398-7 .
  • with Bernhard Böschenstein : Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Poetic correspondence. Fourteen posts. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-40853-4 (paperback edition: (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch. 3127). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-39627-7 ).
  • with Birgit R. Erdle: 50 years later. On the post-history of National Socialism (= Zürcher Hochschulforum. 23). vdf - University publishing house at the ETH, Zurich 1996, ISBN 3-7281-2169-X .
  • with Thomas Koebner : Post March. The origin of aesthetic modernity from a post-revolutionary situation. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1996, ISBN 3-531-12413-7 .
  • with Birgit R. Erdle: Mimesis, image and writing. Similarity and distortion in the relationship between the arts (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 7). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1996, ISBN 3-412-14395-2 .
  • with Corina Caduff : The gender of the arts (= literature, culture, gender. Small series. Vol. 8). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1996, ISBN 3-412-07693-7 .
  • with Sigrid Schade and Monika Wagner : Allegories and gender difference (= literature, culture, gender. Large series. Vol. 3). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1994, ISBN 3-412-02693-X .
  • with Inge Stephan and Sabine Schilling: Jewish culture and femininity in modernity (= literature, culture, gender. Large series. Vol. 2). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1994, ISBN 3-412-00492-8 .
  • with Klaus Briegleb : Contemporary literature since 1968 (= Hanser's social history of German literature from the 16th century to the present. Vol. 12.) Hanser, Munich et al. 1992, ISBN 3-446-12787-9 .
  • with Inge Stephan, Kerstin Wilhelms: “Who cares who speaks”. On the literature and cultural history of women from East and West (Cologne: Böhlau 1991)
  • with Inge Stephan: The Marseillaise of women. Women, the French Revolution and their reception (Hamburg: Argument 1990)
  • with Annegret Pelz u. a .: women - literature - politics. Documentation of the conference in Hamburg from May 1986 (Hamburg: Argument 1988)
  • with Inge Stephan: Femininity and Avant-garde (Hamburg: Argument 1987)
  • with Renate Berger u. a .: women - femininity - writing. Documentation of the conference in Bielefeld from June 1984 (Berlin: Argument 1985)
  • with Inge Stephan: Feminist literary studies. Documentation of the conference in Hamburg from May 1983 (Berlin: Argument 1984)
  • with Ruth-Esther Geiger: Are they still women? From the learned women's journal to feminist journalism (Munich: Kunstmann 1981)

Festschriften for Sigrid Weigel

  • From head to toe. Building blocks for a cultural history of clothing. Ed. V. Christine Kutschbach, Falko Schmieder. Berlin 2015.
  • Passions. Objects - locations - styles of thinking. Festschrift for Sigrid Weigel. Ed. V. Corinna Caduff / Anne-Kathrin Reulecke / Ulrike Vedder. Munich 2010.
  • " So let's sing". 60 contributions on the cultural history of music. Festschrift for Sigrid Weigel. Trajekte special issue (2010). Ed. V. Dirk Naguschewski and Stefan Willer.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Women change science at the University of Hamburg, ed. v. Dagmar Filter / Jana Reich, 2020, p. 371.
  2. ^ Aleida Assmann, Career - Marriage - Children, an impossible triad? In: Gegenworte, 11th issue, spring 2003, http://www.gegenworte.org/heft-11/assmann-probe.html
  3. ^ WG Sebald, Air War and Literature
  4. Jakob Tanner, Sigrid Weigel (ed.), Memory, Money and Law. On dealing with the past of World War II. Zurich: vdf 2002
  5. ^ Anna-Lena Scholz: Literature in the center of society. In: Der Tagesspiegel from July 20, 2015.
  6. Wissenschaftsrat recommends further funding of the ZfL, idw March 15, 2006, https://idw-online.de/de/news151072
  7. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/die-literaturwissenschaftlerin-sigrid-weigel-wird-70-16694732.html ?
  8. ^ S. Weigel: cultural studies as work on transitions and as detailed research. On some primal scenes from the history of science around 1900: Warburg, Freud, Benjamin. In: Opitz (ed.): Experience and Form. For the perspective of a transdisciplinary problem complex from the perspective of cultural studies. Trier 200, pp. 125-145.
  9. S. Weigel's lecture Thinking Culture in Transition at the Martin Roth Symposium (July 2018 in Berlin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3GhXKDfogA
  10. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/gesundheit/das-phantom/685040.html
  11. ^ S. Weigel, Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturly, and the Holy, Stanford UP 2013, p. 71.
  12. ^ S. Weigel, Walter Benjamin's music theory. On the birth of the music from the lament and the relationship between opera, tragedy and musical drama. In: Dirk Matejovski (ed.), Resonance spaces. Media cultures of the acoustic. Düsseldorf 2014. pp. 167–190.
  13. Andreas Beyer in the laudation for the award of the Aby Warburg Prize, https://www.zfl-berlin.org/files/zfl/downloads/publikationen/interjekte/Interjekte_10.pdf
  14. Wolfgang Ulrich in Die Zeit, May 13, 2015, https://www.zeit.de/2015/20/sigrid-weigel-bildwissenschaft-grammatologie-der-bilder
  15. S. Weigel, For large border traffic, Financial Times Deutschland, March 28, 2007, https://www.genios.de/dosearch?isBackToSearch=true&offset=0#content
  16. Forum Interdisciplinary Terms, on-line journal of the ZfL, https://www.zfl-berlin.org/forum-begriffsgeschichte.html
  17. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/schoenheit-und-chirurgie-schaedel-schoener-als-in-der-kunst-1.1523543-0#seite-2
  18. https://www.dhmd.de/ausstellungen/rueckblick/das-gesicht/
  19. Jörg Häntzschel, German National Culture ?, in the SZ v. August 26, 2019, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/auswaertige-kulturpolitik-deutsche-nationalkultur-1.4576458
  20. Interview series by Deutschlandfunk Kultur in the week of August 28, 2019
  21. https://www.zfl-berlin.org/files/zfl/downloads/haben/weigel/2008_die_flucht_ins_erbe.pdf
  22. Laudation by Prof. Dr. Bart Philipsen, https://www.zfl-berlin.org/files/zfl/downloads/haben/weigel/laudatio.pdf
  23. https://www.zfl-berlin.org/files/zfl/downloads/publikationen/interjekte/Interjekte_10.pdf