Colloquium
HAIT Colloquium - The Burden of our Time?
20/10/2022 to 26/01/2023
HAIT/hybrid
Description of the event
At the latest since 24th February 2022 we are confronted with the challenge of not merely situating activities of the Russian Federation and its President, Vladimir Putin, in international daily events. For the humanities and social sciences, too, this date marks a "turning point". The historical-mythological justification of imperial claims to power and the declared hostility against the Western world, the extensive monopolisation of public communication within Russia in connection with strategies of corruption and manipulation of truth to weaken Western societies, and finally the blatant threat of genocide as a means of warfare or its justification in a specific case - these circumstances accompanying the military assault on Ukraine have to be understood, categorised and conceptualised in bluntness and unsparing detail. This endeavour must in no way be a matter of comforting self-appeasement - as Hannah Arendt put in a nutshell in the preface to her treatise on totalitarianism 72 years ago.
"The burden which our century has placed on us" reffered to the - at this point anything but overcome - existential threat of modern democracy and its international order posed by the varieties of totalitarian rule raging in the mid-20th century. "The Burden of our Time" - with this title, the British publishers thus issued the first edition of Arendts opus magnum, before the US edition's title "The Origins of Totalitarianism" established itself as a more catchy cipher for this genealogical-reconstructive reading of National Socialism and Stalinism.
Does the Russian autocracy and its aggressive enforcement of claims to power, based on a breach of International Law and unbounded warfare, represent the burden which our globalised era has to bear, which it has to face? Certainly not the only one, if one considers the challenges for liberal democracies posed by the global power China. Nonetheless, when accepting the challenges posed by the Russian autocracy, it is helpful to remember the intellectual traditions and resources previous generations of social scientists and philosophers utilised to come to terms with the traumatic shock of the "totalitarian experience". To that effect, our lecture series will bring up positions and suggestions on the theoretical classification of "Putin's Russia" for discussion.
The colloquium will take place hybridly or via Zoom.
If you are interested, you may register with your full name and by Monday before each event via: hait@mailbox.tu-dresden.de. You'll receive the event access link a few days before the event.
This project is co-financed by tax funds using the budget approved by the Landtag of the Free State of Saxony.


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