Internationale Konferenz unter Leitung von Prof. Birgit Schäbler
Orient Institut Beirut, American University of Beirut, Max Weber Kolleg, Universität Erfurt
29.9. bis 1.10.2022 hybrid
Am Beiruter Orient Institut und an der American University of Beirut organisierte Birgit Schäbler in Kooperation mit dem Max Weber Kolleg eine internationale Konferenz zum Thema Labors of Love, Trials of Friendship: Challenges of the Modern Social Relation.
Beziehungen liegen allen Gesellschaften zugrunde, seien sie persönlicher, sozialer oder politischer Natur. Trotzdem stehen sie selten im Mittelpunkt geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung, mit Ausnahme der Internationalen Beziehungen, in denen sie sogar namensgebend sind, und der Psycho-Analyse/Psychologie, wo sie im Zentrum stehen.
Seit Freud werden gemeinhin Begehren und Angst als die hauptsächlichen Triebfedern menschlichen Handelns definiert, und spätestens seit der Antike – und in allen Weltreligionen – Freundschaft und Liebe als zentrale Beziehungen nicht nur für ein gelingendes Leben sondern auch für ein funktionierendes Gemeinwesen gesehen. Weber definierte daneben Nachbarschaft und Verwandtschaft als zentrale Beziehungen, die ebenfalls nicht nur persönlicher, sondern auch politischer Art und immer auch gesellschaftlich konstituiert sind – worauf Marx/Engels in besonderer Weise abhoben. Die Kritische Theorie ihrerseits hat vor einem halben Jahrhundert bereits argumentiert, dass die soziale Beziehung in der (Spät-)Moderne von Entfremdung geprägt sei.
Der Brückenschlag zu Hartmut Rosas Resonanztheorie und zum Max -Weber-Kolleg und seinem Schwerpunkt „Weltbeziehungen" lag also nahe.
Die Konferenz hatte sich zum Ziel gesetzt, einerseits die zentralen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen und andererseits auch WissenschaftlerInnen aus Gesellschaften außerhalb des Westens zum Thema Freundschaft und Liebe ins Gespräch zu bringen. Dies gelang und es diskutierten an zwei spannenden Tagen VertreterInnen von Psychoanalyse Lacanscher Prägung (Amanda Holmes), europäischer Philosophie (Emily Laurent-Monaghan), Geschichte Indiens (G. Arunima) und des Nahen Ostens (Birgit Schäbler), Politikwissenschaft in Russland (Oleg Kharkhordin), islamischer Theologie (Nayla Tabbara) und Philosophie (Hussein Ibrahim), sowie Soziologie in Italien (Gennaro Iorio, Silvia Cataldi). Hartmut Rosa hielt den Keynote Vortrag.
Concept note
Labors of Love, Trials of Friendship: Challenges of the Modern Social Relation
Relations and relationships lie at the heart of the personal, the social and the political. Yet, they are rarely research topics themselves - except in psycho-analysis, and the field of psychology at large. Love relationships, presumed to be the base of personal happiness are rarely a topic in the humanities and social sciences - yet, self-help literature on the topic abounds. It is not often considered that the common good of a given society, the rationale of good governance, may hinge on relationships of love and friendship.
Love and hate, friendship and enmity are also fundamental themes for philosophies and religions when considering human relations. Behind them are two cardinal driving forces of the human condition: desire and fear, attraction and repulsion. Desire or fear largely determine the quality of our ensuing relationship to an other: whether it is another subject or the world.
Disciplines like sociology, psychoanalysis, history, and political theory approach the question of love and friendship relationships from different angles. The conference invites an interdisciplinary perspective to this theme and hopes that the discussion will also motivate new relations among what appear to be distinct epistemological fields. The question of the social relation is not only epistemological, designating distinct fields of approach – the relation cannot be assumed but has to be interrogated, analyzed, and worked through within the structures of social formations and beyond them.
Modern scholarship in the wake of Freud, from Lacan to Agamben, sees "desire" as the prime mover of human action in the world; fear appears as prime inhibition in the subject's relation to symbolic spheres of meaning – and significant relationships. The social relation at the base of society, as love and friendship, premised on dialectics of identification, has been analyzed by Weber, Marx/Engels as well as Freud as having political implications for collective existence.
While love relationships have been much relegated to the private sphere of individuals, we would like to argue that they are always already the work of the social on the individual and their successes and failures cannot be simply attributed to the individual psychological personalities of the subjects involved. Simply put, when relations don't work the blame is placed on mal-adapted individuals who are solely responsible for their unhappiness.
We argue that the question of relationships of love and friendship implies that they are always already social ones and hinge on conditions in the world that are conducive and not hindering to the establishment of 'successful ('gelingende') relationships. Rosa places the question of "resonance", i.e. 'resonant relationships' in the world squarely in the center of social theory, arguing that our relationships to the other and to the contemporary (late-)modern world have largely become 'alienated' ones, geared towards material gain and deprived of their relational, 'resonant' dimension.
As Critical Theory has first argued half a century ago, the social relation in our contemporary world is characterized by challenges and problems arising out of the modern condition of alienation – which is, following Rosa the opposite of resonance - but these challenges and problems, despite being globally ubiquitous, have distinctive flavors and vernaculars in different societies.
We want to concentrate in this conference on the concrete relationships of love and friendship – including the differences between them – which arguably lie at the core of society.
Following Freud the libidinal economies that underlie our relations to others are never without anxiety and ambivalence, which are at the core of every close relationship (or familiarity), and that much libidinal energies are spent on disavowing and covering this up with objects: flags, symbols, symbolic functions. Do these symbolic functions succeed in making up for the original alienation that is constitutive of identification processes?
The notion of friendship has been placed as a canonical concept at the very core of political and social theory, going back to Aristotle's notion of friendship as bond between two male fellow citizens in the tiny polis – which was very a closed and filial approach. Friendship has also been a fruitful concept in International Relations.
Bringing sociology, history, psychoanalysis, theology and political thought together we ask for contributions which thematize love and friendship relationships (and the difference between them) as social and political relationships in societies in East and West.
In light of the above discussion, we invite a number of scholars from the disciplines outlined above to Beirut, a historical site for the playing out of the drama of struggling relationships at the base of society.
"Von Kairo nach Karl-Marx-Stadt: Studieren im Kalten Krieg"
Eine Veranstaltungsreihe des Orient-Instituts Beirut (OIB) unter Leitung von Prof. Birgit Schäbler mit Beteiligung von Forscherinnen der Uni Erfurt im Rahmen des BMBF-Projekts "Wissen Entgrenzen" von 11. bis 23. Juni sowie 11. Oktober bis 12. Oktober 2021 in Berlin in Anknüpfung an das internationale Forschungsprojekt „Wissensbeziehungen im ideologischen Raum (Ideoscape): Mobilität von Studierenden aus dem Nahen Osten in die Staaten des Ostblocks, 1950er Jahre bis 1991“
Prof. Dr. Birgit Schäbler, Prof. Dr. Sophia Hoffmann, Dr. Patrice Boutros, Dr. Ala Al-Hamarneh, Stella Kneifel, Ekaterina Vasileva, Patrang Niakan
11.06. - 23.06. 2021 sowie 11.10. - 12.20.2021
Workshop: Histories and Rhythms of Urban Violence: Global-local Encounters in the Nexus of Space and Time
Mara Albrecht, Jutta Bakonyi, Alke Jenss, Kirsti Stuvøy
Sponsoren: Forschungsgruppe Erfurt RaumZeit-Forschung, Forum for the Study of the Global Condition, Durham Global Security Institute
05.-07.12.2018, Plakat ;Plakatder Keynote-Lecture von Klaus Weinhauer
Konferenz: „The Power of Remembrance - Political Parties, Memory and Learning about the Past in Lebanon” an der Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU), Libanon
Mara Albrecht, im Zusammenarbeit mit Bassel Akar (Director of the Center for Applied Research in Education, NDU) im Auftrag von forumZFD
23.11.2015
Tagung: „Area Histories Transregional”
Birgit Schäbler, Joseph Prestel, Robert Fischer, Kevin Anding, Dani Kranz, Shelley Harten, Diana Hitzke, Yahya Kouroshi, Nils Riecken, Gunther Mai
28.2. - 1.3.2014
Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen-Konferenz zu Middle East and Islamic Studies
mit Center for Middle East Studies, Lund Universität, Leif Stenberg, Birgit Schäbler, Eric Hooglund, Jonas Otterbeck
25. - 26.3.2011
Workshop: „Postcolonial Arab Thought”
Dr. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (Orient Institut Beirut; DAAD-Stipendium), Birgit Schäbler
5.6. - 6.6.2010
Konferenz (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung): Alltag in transnationaler Perspektive, oder: Zur Aktualität der Alltagsgeschichte - Everyday Life in Transnational Perspective: Alltagsgeschichte Revisited
Birgit Schäbler, in Zusammenarbeit mit Claudia Kraft, Jürgen Martschukat, Rainer Prass und Sebastian Jobs
Kongress (DAAD, AA): Visionen einer Weltregion: Jahreskonferenz der Deutschen Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orien
Birgit Schäbler, in Zusammenarbeit mit Mara Albrecht und Konstanze Gemeinhardt-Buschhardt
2.-4.10.2008
Universität Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt