Geschwisterlichkeit. Ästhetische Gegenentwürfe zum Bruderbund und zur patrilinearen Genealogie der Gemeinschaft

A workshop of the ZfL in collaboration with the Chair of Cultural Theory and Cultural History and Theory of Aesthetics (Därmann) at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Concept: Iris Därmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Maud Meyzaud (ZfL), Gudrun Rath (Kunstuniversität Linz), Felix Trautmann (Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main)

The workshop’s starting point are aesthetic forms of articulation and imaginary constellations of siblinghood that have developed from and in opposition to the phrase of fraternity in Early Socialist movements, a formula shaped by Christian belief and adapted by the French Revolution. What happens to the sister within the social band of brothers? Can the new political beginning also entail a revolution of the notion of motherhood? Does siblinghood have to be thought from the family’s perspective? Does a nonfamilial siblinghood require its own aesthetics? Which alternative semantics and non-genealogical figurations of political community may be conceived starting from children or animals

The workshop will explore these questions. It thereby focusses on feminist counter-concepts to the (holy) community of brothers, from Early Socialism to the Paris Commune. Furthermore, the workshop will develop cross-connections to other historical-geographical settings and epistemic fields: the egalitarian community in the marronage and in the Quilombos of formerly enslaved people, the women of the Haitian revolution, siblinghood as an epistemological category of the 19th century, children and animals in psychoanalysis, as well as the community of human and non-human beings in 20th century Brazilian ethnology, among other fields.

Fig. above: from: Friedrich Ritschl: Thomae Magistri sive Theoduli Monachi ecloga Vocum Atticarum. Halle: Libraria Orphanotrophei, 1832, source: Duke University Library.