Former Fellow

Wojciech Engelking, Ph.D.

Department of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw

Research Abstract
“Few questions – Herbert Hart famously stated on the question what is norm – concerning human society have been asked with such persistence and answered by serious thinkers in so many diverse, strange, and even paradoxical ways”. More than half a century after his The Concept of Law, we are not any closer to the answer, but much further advanced in discovering the spaces, that can be normative, and therefore – in revealing the new contributions to this question. In the paper I am working on, I want to show, how normative an art narrative can be. Drawing on, firstly, Karl Popper’s idea of World Three as a space in which the human creations that aspire to contain objectivity live, and, secondly, Rainer Forst’s concept of noumenal power (the one which is a tool to “in different degrees – influence, use, determine, occupy, or even seal off the space of reasons for others”, as Forst writes), I analyses different art narratives to show, how, while living in World Three, each of them bases its noumenal power on different justifications and claims to legitimacy. The main aim of my research is therefore to show how narrativity encloses in itself the noumenal power in the story about the fictional world and becomes normative in a sense that it covers the factual world with the World Three as the world of norms, equating the map with the territory.

  • Biografische Angaben

    Wojciech Engelking (1992) is a research assistant at the University of Warsaw, conducting a project Awaiting a Messiah. Normative narratives in European thinking after the Great War . His research interests include history of ideas, legal philosophy and political theory (Schmitt, Strauss, Durkheim, Thucydides, Shakespeare).
  • Publikationen

    Engelking, Wojciech (2024): Caliban as legal subject: The Tempest and Renaissance juridical thought. Law and Humanities. 10.1080/17521483.2023.2298001 Engelking, Wojciech (2023): French Antecedents of Carl Schmitt’s Concrete-Order Thinking: From Georges Sorel’s Myth to Maurice Hauriou’s Institution. Interpretation. 50. 31-54. Engelking, Wojciech (2019). Shakespeare as a method. Carl Schmitt’s reading of Othello and Hamlet. History of European Ideas. 45. 1-14. 10.1080/01916599.2019.1637359.

News from the research center

Event
25./26.06.2026 | Frankfurt

Shifting Regimes, Changing Orders

Conference

Conference as part of WDC2026 in collaboration with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Designtheorie und -forschung (DGTF), Kunstgewerbemuseum/Design Campus SKD and Design and Democracy

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Event
06./07.05.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Liberalism and the Masses: Revisiting José Ortega y Gasset’s Political Thought

Conference

Two-day Conference with Keynotes by Alan Kahan (University of Versailles/St. Quentin) and Javier Zamora Bonilla (Complutense University of Madrid)

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Event
04.05.2026 | Frankfurt

Meinungsfreiheit, Meinungsvielfalt und Verantwortung für die Demokratie: Wie gestalten Medien neue Räume für Debatten und Teilhabe?

Panel Discussion

Im Rahmen der Woche der Meinungsfreiheit 2026 laden die World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026 in Kooperation mit dem Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, dem Hessischen Rundfunk, der Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft und dem Forschungszentrum Normative Ordnungen der Goethe-Universität herzlich zu einer Diskussionsveranstaltung am 4. Mai 2026 in den WDC-Hub im Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt ein.

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Event
29.04.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Kulturindustrie heute?

Panel Discussion

Das Gespräch „Kulturindustrie heute?“ widmet sich der Aktualität und Tragfähigkeit eines zentralen Begriffs der Kritischen Theorie. Die Filmwissenschaftlerin Gertrud Koch diskutiert im Rahmen der Gesprächsreihe "Frankfurter Schule" mit dem Filmkritiker Bert Rebhandl die gegenwärtigen Formen kultureller Produktion und Verbreitung vor dem Hintergrund von Digitalisierung, Plattformen und globalen Medienmärkten.

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Event
12.05.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Zwischen Transformation und Abolitionismus

Book Presentation

Buchvorstellung mit Christine Graebsch, Katrin Höffler, Jochen Bung & Ronen Steinke

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Event
28./29.05.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Global Health Justice: Principles and Practice

Conference

Following the research focus of the Global Health Justice Postdoctoral Programme, funded by Höppsche Stiftung, the "Global Health Justice: Principles and Practice" conference places a particular emphasis on themes such as the human right to health, political activism and health justice issues, and problems of structural injustice and vulnerable populations in health care. Keynote lectures by Jonathan Wolff and Kanchana Mahadevan. The Global Health Justice Programme and this conference are supported by the Höppsche Stiftung in Villmar.

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Event
14.07.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Democracy Over Time and the Climate Crisis

Lecture Series

Vortrag von Anja Karnein (Binghamton). Die Vortragsreihe untersucht Fragen der Klimakrise als Herausforderungen für demokratische Gesellschaften und konzentriert sich auf Themen wie politische Legitimität, Widerstand gegen fossile Brennstoffe und die Interessen künftiger Generationen. Sie wird organisiert von Prof. Dr. Darrel Moellendorf und Dr. Lukas Sparenborg.

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Event
10.06.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Capital Investment, Inequality, and State Power in a Time of Climate Emergency

Lecture, Lecture Series

The lecture series examines questions of the climate crisis as challenges for democratic
societies and focuses on issues of political legitimacy, fossil fuel resistance, and the interests
of future generations.

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Event
13.05.2026 | Frankfurt am Main

Failed States and Cloudy skies: Tipping Points, Overshoot and Permanent Emergency, after America

Lecture Series

The lecture series examines questions of the climate crisis as challenges for democratic
societies and focuses on issues of political legitimacy, fossil fuel resistance, and the interests
of future generations.

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