Rewriting political concepts

Workshop in cooperation with the Lexicon Project of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University (Lexicon for Political Theory)

At this workshop concepts will be discussed which are relevant in discourses both political and interdisciplinary. Against the backdrop of current conflicts, particularly within the Middle East, with respect to the distribution of power (i.e. between pressure by the economic market, mechanisms of the state, the constrictions of political theology and religious politics, etc.), the lexicon in the making (published online in both English and Hebrew by the Lexicon Project of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University) seeks to investigate both the semantics and the boundaries of the political, giving particular attention to imports from other disciplines and everyday language. The critical interpretation of seemingly given concepts of political thought and the attempt at their redefinition employs a central analytic question: What is x? This approach overlaps with that of the Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte project, which also takes current epistemological constellations as its starting point from which it historically investigates the semantic boundaries and interdisciplinary transfers applying to any reasoning or discourse.

We expect the workshop will have synergetic effects for both projects. The participants from Tel Aviv will present theories and essays on the concepts common sense, animal, suffering, testimony/witnessing, university, which will then be commented on and discussed from a conceptual history perspective by the ZfL participants.