Contribution

Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term ‘tension’ and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry.

Please join us for the launch of the series ‘Cultural Inquiry’ with Turia + Kant and the celebration of the first volume edited by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, containing contributions of ICI Fellows participating in the inaugural core project during 2008/09.

Christoph Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin, which he has directed since 2006. He received his first Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote his second dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics. Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and in the project ‘Mystik und Moderne’ at the Universität Siegen.

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is professor for media studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. She studied philosophy and literature in Zurich and Berlin, and has published extensively in the fields of religion and modernity, philosophy and feminist theory, gender and media studies.

Sara Fortuna teaches philosophy of language at the Università Guglielmo Marconi and is associate member at the ICI Berlin. She works on theories of physiognomics, perception and origin of language as well as on aesthetics, feminist theories, and film.

Manuele Gragnolati teaches Medieval Studies and Italian Literature at Oxford University, where he is Fellow at Somerville College. He has investigated the relationship between identity and corporeality in Dante and medieval eschatology, the intersections between language, textuality, and subjectivity in medieval and modern authors from Guido Cavalcanti to Elsa Morante and Giorgio Pressburger, as well as the metamorphoses undergone by Dante’s oeuvre in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. He serves as Associate Director at the ICI Berlin.

Programme:
Welcome: Manuele Gragnolati
Book Presentation: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Christoph Holzhey, Manuele Gragnolati, and Sara Fortuna
Followed by a discussion