Gerhard Richter
The Darkness of the Lived Moment
Mercoledì 12 giugno (16.30-18.30)
exPam - Sala Riunioni del Dipartimento di Architettura (primo piano), via Saragozza 8, Bologna
Abstract: "Präsens ist noch keine Präsenz": Revisiting the Darkness of the Lived Moment”
Gerhard Richter
This talk focuses on the question of “the moment” and the ways in which it challenges and even withdraws from intelligibility. One of the most remarkable adventures in modern critical thought pertaining to the question of the moment and the problem of how to interpret it is to be found in the work of Ernst Bloch. Indeed, what Bloch terms “das Dunkel des gelebten Augenblicks,” the darkness or obscurity of the lived moment, suffuses not just a few of his texts here and there but rather inflects a significant part of his entire oeuvre, from his earliest work on utopia, via his reflections on hope as a principle, to his late work on the problem of materialism. It also frames, often implicitly yet persistently, a significant part of his most important (and often rather difficult) intellectual associations and friendships, including those with Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Mach, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, and, until their dramatic break-up over the meaning of the particular darkness of the lived moment that was World War I, Georg Simmel. One might even say that the question of the darkness of the lived moment is one of the singular forms that Bloch’s heterodox and unconventional path of thinking assumes, a thinking that, as Levinas makes vivid in his reflections on the status of death in Bloch’s work, always works to develop a unique and unorthodox form of historical materialism that is tightly interwoven with both a persistent onto-phenomenological sensitivity and a relentless emphasis on learning to read the texts, narratives, and objects before him. The lecture proposes that Bloch’s perpetual engagement with the darkness of the lived moment specifically conditions his continued attempts, right up to his death in Tübingen in 1977, at creatively inheriting, by ceaselessly confronting, a certain Hegelian legacy. The centrality that Hegel assumes for Bloch is underscored by the fact that Hegel is the only philosopher to whose thinking Bloch, throughout his far-reaching oeuvre, devoted an exclusive book-length study. As a consideration of Bloch’s thinking in relation to Hegel’s reveals, the darkness of the lived moment is not just our moment but also our darkness—“unser eigenes Dunkel,” as Bloch writes—which is to say, the particular obscurity and the specific way of differing from ourselves that we present to ourselves. For all its refractory and decentralizing movements, the self upon whose coordinates of consciousness these intimations of the moment intersect begins to see itself as a question mark—both in relation to itself and to others, that is, both ipseically and communally, which also is to say: politically. Being situated in one’s own blind spot therefore does not merely present a cognitive embarrassment or an epistemo-critical hurdle to be overcome in the name of perfect transparency (which would be stasis, even death). Rather, it presents the condition of possibility sustaining the hope for an unexpected, rigorous, and—at least in principle—ceaseless thinking and mode of being to come.
Gerhard Richter is University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University (Providence), will introduce the theme of his new research, The Darkness of tthe Lived Moment from the thought of Ernst Bloch and beyond. Among his many publications: Das Überleben überleben (2023), This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art (2022), Uncontainable Legacies: Theses on Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Inheritance (2021), Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (2019), Inheriting Walter Benjamin (2016), Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (2007).
I lavori si potranno seguire anche da remoto collegandosi all’indirizzo:
https://unibo.zoom.us/j/89235202829
Per ulteriori informazioni scrivere a
pierpaolo.ascari@unibo.it