“History and criticism: systematic and methodological resources”

Conference, workshop, publications

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Martin Saar

Project description

The research perspective with the title “Normative Orders” focuses on social and political order structures in order to analyze and explain their function of power and domination on the one hand, and their mode of validity and legitimation on the other. In this research context, certain orders are examined in terms of how they de facto or effectively create order and how they simultaneously claim legitimacy or provide grounds for justification. The methodological combination of the two perspectives (“from the outside” on the formation of order and “from the inside” on validity or meaning) can also reveal the special mode of being of the social and political: it is never simply there, but is always already narrated, interpreted and given value in certain narratives, images and discourses. Every material, specific analysis and also every rejection of a certain form of order will therefore have to operate on both levels, on the level of describing factual effects of order and domination and on the level of explicating meaningful and value-laden justification effects. And they will attempt to describe the internal connection between the two levels.
What this initial decision means methodologically or conceptually has long been researched within the framework of a theory of normative orders and their justification discourses and narratives, whereby different theoretical resources have been used, often depending on the discipline. In this sub-project “History and Critique”, a contribution to these fundamental questions is to be developed, which results from the passage through two theoretical traditions that can be enormously helpful if they are focused on the perspective of “normative orders”. Both have played a role in recent years, but have not always been the direct subject of isolated methodological consideration. Firstly, following on from a number of events in recent years, more recent contributions from critical theory in its political-theoretical part, namely as an analysis and critique of contemporary, democratic forms of rule, will be examined in terms of their procedures and conceptual means. Secondly, the perspective of a historical history of power, knowledge and self, as pursued by Michel Foucault, which is quite divergent from this, is to be questioned as to its methodological topicality and efficiency. In both respects, the “History and Critique” project pursues the key question of what theoretical and conceptual means an analysis and problematization of present and future normative orders can and should be equipped with.

Public workshop: Philosophy, Critique, History: Foucault’s historical-philosophical practice (organized together with Dr. Frieder Vogelmann)
30 and 31 July 2019

Conference “Critical Theory of Politics“
November 1, 2019