Die Freiheit des Kapitals

Das Dissertationsprojekt stellt die Frage nach der Struktur und den materiellen Bedingungen des sozial dominierenden, liberalen Freiheitsverständnisses. Ausgehend von zeitgenössischen feministischen Kritiken der kapitalistischen Subjektivierung (u.a. Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Nancy Fraser und Silvia Federici) wird der Zusammenhang zwischen der Logik kapitalistischer Produktion und einer Vorstellung von Freiheit untersucht, die den Schein permanenten Wandelns, unbegrenzter Transformationsmöglichkeiten impliziert. Methodologisch schließt die Arbeit dabei an die Analysen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft bei Hegel und Marx an, die die Genese und innere Logik des liberalen Freiheitsbegriffs untersuchen und daran aufzeigen, dass der liberale Staat die subjektivitätshervorbringenden Prozesse nicht als politische begreifen kann und sich dadurch selbst der Möglichkeit ihrer Gestaltung entzieht. Entgegen diesem Konzept von Freiheit, das sein Modell in dem durch keine äußeren Bedingungen beschränkte Willkürsubjekt findet, wird sich das Dissertationsprojekt im abschließenden Teil Praktiken der Selbstbildung zuwenden, wie sie von Vertreterinnen der proletarischen Bildung und Frauenbewegung (insb. von Alexandra Kollontai, Nadeshda Krupskaja, und Clara Zetkin) entworfen wurden. Geht aus der veränderten Organisation der gesellschaftlichen Produktion und Reproduktion auch eine Veränderung der Handlungs- und Begehrensweisen der Subjekte hervor? Wird hier ein verändertes Konzept des freien Subjekts erkennbar, verstanden als eines, das sich aus Freiheit selbst politische Bestimmungen gibt? Inwieweit weisen die sich hier vollziehenden Subjektivierungsprozesse über die disziplinierenden Praktiken der Subjektwerdung im Kapitalismus hinaus und gründen nicht nur ein anderes disziplinäres System?

Mutable Nature

Frankfurt School Critical Theory is a theory of crises with a long history of critical interventions. Yet its voice is barely audible in the context of the climate crisis. Currently, therefore, the dynamics of the crisis of social relations to nature are increasingly being discussed in theoretical languages that exhibit only a meager social-theoretical and ideology-critical profile. The project assumes that conceptual problems of contemporary Critical Theory contribute to its disregard and that the theoretical elucidation of its own sources represents a starting point for its revision. The hitherto unsystematized reception of Schelling’s philosophy in Frankfurt School Critical Theory serves as a starting point for this undertaking.

On the Construction of Enemy Images: Populism and Authoritarianism in Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and the Frankfurt School

The question of antagonism is a constant in political theory. It has been at the center of major historical events, such as the French Revolution, and it is still at the core of contemporary debates. The much-discussed crisis of (liberal) democracy, for example, is closely related to the question of how to shape antagonistic oppositions.

In my study, I analyze the theories of Laclau, Mouffe, and the first generation of Critical Theory in terms of three dimensions that play a central role in the construction of antagonism: (1) the political, (2) the social, and (3) the psychological or psychoanalytic dimension. From this follows the thesis that a theory which aims to systematically grasp the complexity of antagonism must include all three of these aspects. On this basis, critical research can be conducted on the construction of productive and destructive antagonisms, such as in the context of the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy.

Epistemologías especulativas

La crítica depende de un momento especulativo en la medida en que debe ir más allá de lo dado de forma inmediata para poder pensar la sociedad y las relaciones sociales. La especulación adquiere así una relativa autonomía frente a lo existente: se distancia de lo dado y constituye al mismo tiempo una práctica productiva en la que pueden surgir nuevos conceptos, conexiones y teorías. En este sentido, ninguna teoría crítica puede prescindir de elementos especulativos. En mi proyecto de tesis doctoral desarrollo estas tesis a partir de un análisis de las teorías de Theodor W. Adorno, Saidiya Hartman y Donna J. Haraway. A pesar de sus diferentes contextos, los tres ponen de manifiesto un componente especulativo en su crítica de la sociedad o de la socialidad, sobre el cual también reflexionan explícitamente. La especulación no se entiende aquí en un sentido idealista, sino como una fuerza social que da voz a experiencias concretas y encarnadas, y que impulsa formas específicas de representación que señalan los límites del discurso filosófico.

Forms of Dwelling and Forms of Thinking. Studies on a Historical-Sociological Subject Theory of Housing

This doctoral project explores the fundamental assumption that specific forms of dwelling enable specific forms of subjectivity, and that dwelling is a precondition for thought, a factor often abstracted from in social theory. The project therefore examines the reciprocal relationship between forms of dwelling and forms of thought and subjectivity, drawing on comparisons across different historical periods. The theoretical focal point of the project is an empirically open concept of habit.

Religious and Non-Religious Modes of Coping with Contingency in an Individualised Society

The humanities and social sciences tend to regard dealing with contingency as a primarily religious phenomenon. As a result of such a narrow view, non-religious forms of coping with contingency have not received the systematic examination they deserve. Moreover, the largely theoretical and intellectual-historical analyses of experiencing and dealing with contingency not only lack empirical foundation, but even the kind of conceptual precision necessary to adequately delineate the phenomenon. The present project addresses these desiderata: To this end, the project examines specifically modern experiences of contingency that are caused by current societal developments and which agents experience in the mode of a biographical conception of their lives. The aim is to develop an empirically founded theory to explain the formation, application and effects of religious and non-religious modes of coping with contingency.

The study’s results will serve, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the functionality of religiousness and non-religiousness in processes of coping with contingency; on the other hand, they will contribute to bringing up to date sociology’s understanding of coping strategies under conditions of late modernity.

The Political Economy of Social Reproduction

The dissertation project examines the practice of nursing in hospitals and contributes to an understanding of the contradictory constellations of social reproduction and its reorganisation in contemporary capitalism as market-driven care work.

Starting from the premise that the orientation of the capitalist mode of production towards unlimited capital accumulation tends to destabilise the social reproduction of capitalist social formations, the research project examines this (crisis) tendency through the analytical prism of social-reproductive contradiction. The existing contradictions between care and capital, as currently experienced by nurses in public hospitals, form the starting point of the study. According to the guiding thesis, the deficits of public services in general can be identified in hospitals as an expression of this contradiction and, in particular, how it manifests itself in the daily work routines and work content of nurses can be examined.

Abject Nature. A theory of contemporary art after Georges Bataille

The doctoral project investigates how the capitalist relationship between spirit and nature is made experienceable in contemporary art. In art theory, such an investigation is usually reduced to the ecological question of flora and fauna, which aims to reconcile spirit and nature. Yet gender, body, race, and sexuality are also modulated as nature through this relationship. Nature is thus not only a precondition but also a determination of the capitalist spirit itself, from which this historical relationship to nature emerges. What does not serve the reproduction of the capitalist spirit is excluded from this determination as counter-natural; the modulations of the relationship to nature thus constitute corresponding exclusions of abject nature. Drawing on Georges Bataille's theory of art, the investigation is therefore based on works of contemporary art that, by the respective turning of abject natures against the very spirit that excludes them, render the fundamental irreconcilability of the capitalist relationship between spirit and nature experienceable. Indexing such inversions of abject nature in contemporary art and bringing them together in an overarching theory is the aim of this dissertation.

Negative Normativity: On the Actuality of Adorno’s Idea of Natural History for Critical Theory and Ecopolitics

Social theory has been a source of critical and normative tools for environmental thought, and the critical theory of society is no exception. This dissertation examines the enduring relevance of Adorno’s idea of natural history for contemporary critical theory of nature and ecopolitical debates. By reconstructing its materialist and normative dimensions, the dissertation demonstrates how this framework provides a crucial perspective for rethinking social theory in the context of ecological crisis, one that moves beyond narrowly intersubjective approaches to engage with the mediated relationship between humanity and nature. Furthermore, it explores the implications of this idea for current ecopolitical debates.

Frameworks of State Culturation.

The doctoral project »Frameworks of State Culturation«, examines the orientations of central actors of the educational system in context of their daily work in authorities, schools, and extracurricular educational projects and with regard to migration-related discourses and experiences. The central research question of the project is: What are the orientations of actors in the school education system regarding the topic of migration? To address this question, semi-structured interviews and group discussions of educational actors in the education system from Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony on the topics of migration are analysed by using the documentary method. The interviews were conducted with people from the school development institutes and state offices of the federal states, teachers, and actors from extracurricular educational institutions from 2020 to 2024.

Class Relations in Psychotherapy

This work begins with the observation that social class significantly influences the distribution of psychosocial distress in society, yet the specific social situation and position of those involved in psychotherapy far too often represent a blind spot. The project therefore aims to reconstruct the significance of class relations in therapy and focuses on the perspective of the practitioners. The study centers on their symbolic boundary-drawing and classification practices when dealing with patients from diverse social backgrounds. The study specifically inquires into which norms of competent self-management are employed by the practitioners, how they use these to address the situation of their patients—who are marked by current employment crises, acute threats of downward mobility, and denied aspirations of upward mobility—and in what ways the therapy contributes to the renegotiation or reproduction of class-related inequalities. The analysis is based on ethnographic observations and interviews with practitioners in eight psychosomatic clinics.

Bürgerliche Bewusstseins- und Subjektivierungsformen angesichts der Klimakatastrophe

The doctoral project examines bourgeois forms of consciousness and subjectivation in the face of the climate catastrophe. It centres on the question of how people process the ecological crisis psychologically and societally, on how they react to it - and how these forms of processing relate to existing modes of domination and socialisation. A particular focus is on the analysis of liberal-sustainable and reactionary forms of responding to the climate crisis. The aim is to make visible those unconscious and latent structures of meaning in which affective reactions, conformist psychological defence mechanisms and ideological patterns are manifested in light of the climate catastrophe. The project contributes to a critical analysis of current subjectivation with the aim to reveal new perspectives on the necessary socio-ecological transformation and its societal as well as psycho-social blockages.

Walter Benjamins »Arcades Project« as Theory of the Social Imaginary

The dissertation project pursues two interrelated goals. First, it develops a socio-philosophical reading of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as a theory of the social imaginary, thereby closing a gap in the research on Benjamin. It argues that Benjamin, although he does not use the term, operates with a concept of the social imaginary in the sense of an unconscious, collective, reflexive and constitutive image of society as well as the faculty of its production. Second, the dissertation project positions Benjamin in current debates about the social imaginary. It focuses on the question how the materiality of the imaginary, in the sense of its technical-medial mediation, can be conceived without denying the fundamental indeterminacy of social imagination and thus the possibility of social renewal. In this way, the close correspondence between imagination and the forces of production, and thus at the same time the historicity of the imaginary itself, becomes comprehensible.

Politische Talkshows als Arenen der Deutungskämpfe bundesdeutscher Geschichte

The starting point for this research is an empirical study of the shift in the sayability boundaries in political talk shows between 1980 and 2024. As an important arena for the media reenactment of political exchange, political talk shows are the subject of a wide variety of appeals, which are condensed here. Their research aims to provide information about which positions and statements are classified as legitimate and debatable at what point in time, and which are problematized, sanctioned, or completely excluded. The sociological reflection includes a reference back to the specificity of the field of research and its historical development. Only in this way can it be clarified which statements about social processes can be made through their analysis. In addition, it will be asked how the observed changes in the field of research relate to developments in society as a whole and how they are integrated into social power and domination structures.