idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
idw - Informationsdienst
Wissenschaft
11/13/2025 - 11/13/2025 | Praha 1
Participation appears as a contemporary panacea. It is supposed to grant democracy, freedom, justice, creativity, affluence, sustainability, in short: the good life. Yet, there is an under-addressed ambivalence that challenges the emphatic promise of participation: on the one hand, it is at the heart of liberal democracy, digital media, and consumer capitalism – on the other, promises of attaining a better life motivate people to participate in political and mass violence. Still, the multidisciplinary research on these two strains hardly ever intersects. I approach challenging modes of participation by means of 21st-century literary texts portraying complicity and conformity with totalitarianism and violence in Central and Eastern Europe, notably Jáchym Topol’s Citlivý člověk (A Sensitive Person) (2017).
These texts address convergences between involvement in totalitarian violence and modes of participation in humanitarian, political, ecological, and other wrongdoing in the neoliberal present. What is at issue in both is a fundamental dimension of life: relationality. Neoliberalism champions individual autonomy, while everything that contradicts this ideal is considered as illicit complicity. Renegotiations of the cultural memory of totalitarianism and violence in Central and Eastern Europe provide a more nuanced understanding of participation. Agency, they suggest, is in determining not whether to participate, but how.
---
Juliane Prade-Weiss is professor of Comparative Literature at LMU Munich. After studying German literature, Czech literature, and Philosophy in Dresden and Frankfurt/Main, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature in Frankfurt, where she was also assistant professor until 2017. 2017-2019, she was a DFG-postdoc at Yale to finish her habilitation, published as Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining (Bloomsbury 2020). 2019-2020, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant in Vienna for a project on complicity. She works on the link between language and violence from the Graeco-Roman antiquity to the Western and Eastern European present.
Information on participating / attending:
Der Vortrag findet in der Valentinská 91/1, 3. Stock statt und wird über Zoom übertragen. Bei Interesse an dem Link wird gebeten, sich an florian.ruttner@collegium-carolinum.de zu wenden.
Date:
11/13/2025 17:00 - 11/13/2025 18:30
Event venue:
Valentinská 91/1
11000 Praha 1
Czech Republic
Target group:
all interested persons
Email address:
Relevance:
international
Subject areas:
History / archaeology, Religion
Types of events:
Presentation / colloquium / lecture
Entry:
09/26/2025
Sender/author:
Virginie Michaels
Department:
Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
Event is free:
yes
Language of the text:
German
URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event80141
You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
You can use brackets to separate combinations from each other, e.g. (Philo not logy) or (Psycho and logy).
Coherent groups of words will be located as complete phrases if you put them into quotation marks, e.g. “Federal Republic of Germany”.
You can also use the advanced search without entering search terms. It will then follow the criteria you have selected (e.g. country or subject area).
If you have not selected any criteria in a given category, the entire category will be searched (e.g. all subject areas or all countries).
