Events

For decades, there has been talk of ‘a crisis of criticism’ in the artworld, following the loss of credibility of the critical paradigms established in the early- and mid-20thcentury. This has in part been a democratic reaction against the institutional of hegemony of certain forms of judgment. Yet its main effect has been to delegate effective social judgment to the market. This lecture traces the so-called 'crisis of criticism' back to artists' reactions against critics in the late 1950s and 1960s and their subsequent consequences in both the emergence of the figure of the artist-critic and the broaderinterpretative paradigm of Visual Culture. It asks: is there really a intellectual crisis of art criticism or rather a crisis in the self-image and social power of the critic? It suggests an alternative approach by returning to the question of the ‘criticizability’ of works themselves. What makes a work ‘criticizable’, rather than merely an object of descriptive commentary and subjective evaluation? What does it mean to criticize an artwork today?

This lecture will consider the motivational logic of nonviolent direct action, along with recent judicial responses to it in British courts. As the term implies (and as pioneering advocates like Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan explain), such action aims to compress the distance between purpose and execution to a minimum. Disarmament operations in the Ploughshares tradition (for instance the ‘Seeds of Hope’ action of 1996) are a good example, as are some more recent protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Although the record is variable, up until a few years ago people prosecuted for direct action (typically on charges of criminal damage) were often free to discuss their intentions and motivations with both judge and jury, in keeping with familiar legal intuitions about intentional action. In the last couple of years, however (to cite a Court of Appeal ruling from 2024) juries have regularly been instructed to pay no attention to ‘the reasoning or wider motivation of the defendant,’ on the startling grounds that ‘those matters are too remote from the damage’ they are accused of causing. Deprived of any chance to justify their actions in terms of ‘lawful excuse’ or ‘lesser harm,’ political defendants can now be prevented from mounting any legal defence at all.

Friday 20 November 2026, 10.30–18.00

Diffrakt | Zentrum für theoretische Peripherie, Crellestraße 22, 10827 Berlin

Registration opens 1 October 2026

Walter Benjamin understood, well in advance, that “the only image our generation will leave is that of a defeated generation [as] its legacy to those who come.” Philosophy and the humanities have still not fully reckoned with the methodological consequences of this sentence.

The postwar image of the prewar period was formed, necessarily, from what survived: lives not extinguished, archives not destroyed, collections not dispersed beyond recovery, authorities still able to speak, edit, classify, and remember. Benjamin’s works and correspondence were first assembled by friends, certainly, but also by figures external to many of the most intimate constellations of his life — assembled, moreover, from those survivors, collections, and memories available to them. In Benjamin’s own autobiographical diagram, Theodor W. Adorno is absent, while Gershom Scholem appears as a node without connection. Yet it was substantially on the basis of such surviving authorities that the religious or “messianic” hypothesis concerning Benjamin’s thought was constructed; a hypothesis that, despite several later waves of archival expansion, remains one of the dominant frameworks of Benjamin scholarship.

This seminar asks, ‘what changes when Benjamin’s thought is approached not from the retrospective authority of survival, but from the defeated and dispersed generative world out of which it emerged?’. Much contemporary work in the humanities remains governed by an archival positivism: what is not cited, named, or textually preserved cannot be avowed in interpretation. Yet the archive is never simply given: it is the historical remainder of destruction, exile, accident, friendship, hostility, institutional mediation, and editorial power. Even the most stringent philology presupposes a hypothesis that renders its findings intelligible. The question, then, is not whether interpretation may move beyond the archive, but how the archive itself demands a more rigorous account of its own absences. What is needed is not speculation against philology, but a speculative philology: a disciplined reconstruction of the vanished relations without which the surviving documents cannot be understood. Through the archaeology of a lost generation, this event looks to construct a space in which hypotheses transcendent to the archive can be formulated anew.

Certain enigmas were visible from the beginning. What, for example, are we to make of Gustav Glück — the Austrian banker, art expert, and Benjamin-Brecht intimate to whom texts such as “Karl Kraus” and “The Destructive Character” are dedicated — who appears at the centre of Benjamin’s own diagram of life? How could such a figure, apart from the archival dead-end to which he seemed to lead, remain marginal to the dominant construction of Benjamin’s intellectual origins? Recent work by Georg Wiesing-Brandes on Benjamin’s address book, and by Sam Dolbear on the figures named in Benjamin’s life diagram, begins to reopen this question. Such projects do not simply supply new ‘influences’, but reconstruct the generational environment in which Benjamin lived, read, argued, loved, and wrote.

The critical history of philosophy is not an inventory of citations, but a science of origins.

The seminar will therefore construct a constellation of figures and relations drawn, among other contexts, from the German Youth Movement, including the psychologist Siegfried Bernfeld; from Berlin Expressionist culture, including Lotte Wolff; and from the wider philosophical, sociological, and political milieu of figures such as Alfred Seidel and Gottfried Salomon-Delatour. Following the event, CRMEP BOOKS will publish an anthology of the seminar papers, accompanied by some English translations of relevant texts by the figures discussed and also by Walter Benjamin himself.

Confirmed speakers include: Franziska Aigner, Howard Caygill, Sam Dolbear, Louis Hartnoll, Mimi Howard, Christian Voller

The first chapter of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, ‘Les données de la biologie’, has dismayed many of her feminist readers, since it apparently argues that the female is ‘enslaved’ to the species via her reproductive role and that her femaleness is a natural impediment to her self-assertion as a free human being. How can we explain this apparent lapse into an uncritical repetition of exactly the kind of ideological ‘ramblings’ that she elsewhere criticises? In this lecture I offer an interpretation of Beauvoir’s comments on biology in The Second Sex in the context of two sets of literature: some French works on human (and specifically female) reproductive biology, 1860–1942, and the work of the anglophone Dialectics of Biology Group, and feminist biologists associated with it, mostly from 1980s. It will be argued that the fundamental error in Beauvoir’s discussion of biology is the presumption of a misplaced and ultimately metaphysical dialectic of individual and species. Drawing on the dialectical biology tradition, I will suggest instead that the pertinent dialectic for a feminist discussion of human biology is that between organism and society. How can we think critically about the dialectical relation between the concepts and ‘facts’ of human reproductive biology and the social?

This lecture will reexamine the Foucaldian hypothesis of civil war as a ‘matrix of power’, from its Nietzschean-Marxist construction and its affirmation as a strategy in ‘the element of political struggle around power, against it ” (The Punitive Society), all the way to its critique in the form of a crash test (Society Must Be Defended) and its definitive abandonment in the studies on (neo-)liberal governmentality (The Birth of Biopolitics) and their shift toward the analysis of subjectivation (The Care of the Self). In a curious trans-historical combination, these analyses mobilize the themes of an ‘ontology of the present’ and of ‘actuality’. We will revisit them from the divergent perspective of our present today.

Is affirmation the primordial gesture of thought, with negation arising only afterward as refusal, correction, or withdrawal? Or does thought begin with the capacity to say no—to interrupt what is given, suspend adherence, and open a distance within experience? This lecture explores the asymmetry between affirmation and negation through Bergson, Alain, and Freud among others. For Bergson, reality is fundamentally affirmative: negation does not belong to things themselves but emerges through intellectual expectation and social address. Alain, by contrast, famously maintains that thinking means saying no, making refusal the inaugural gesture of judgment and freedom. Freud’s essay ‘Negation’ radically complicates this opposition: the ‘no’ allows a repressed content to enter consciousness while preserving the repression that excludes it. Negation simultaneously refuses and admits; it is already a compromised affirmation. In Hegel, finally, negativity is neither a secondary logical operation nor a simple act of refusal, but the movement through which determination, subjectivity, and affirmation themselves become possible.