The Democratic Unconscious
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1Bard College Berlin (Lecture Hall), Platanenstr. 98A, 13156 Berlin
American democracy takes off with the profoundly ambiguous phrase "We the people . . . " But who are "the people?" A motley collection of individuals, micro-communities, and macro-communities? Or a unified entity, national (das Volk), religious, or otherwise? Though it’s easy to define the word democracy as the power of the people, the definition doesn’t get us very far. The fragility of the democratic idea has much to do with the insecurity of democratic experience.
In this lecture, Michael Steinberg will argue, first, that democracy needs to be defined and historicized according to the principle of plurality and, second, that participation in a polity defined by plurality can be understood as a function of affect as well as contract—the affective dimension of what Avishai Margalit has called "thin relations." Third, where there is affect there is also the unconscious. Democratic affect needs to be understood, with the help of insights from psychoanalysis, to allow enough room for the unconscious and its manifestations, including the arts.
Register for the lecture here.
Michael P. Steinberg is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. From 2016 to 2018 he served as president of the American Academy in Berlin. At Brown he served as the founding director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities (2005-2015) and as Vice Provost for the Arts (2015-16). He was member of the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers ad Institutes (CHCI) between 2006 and 2016 and serves as a board member of Bard College Berlin as well as the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA. His books include The Afterlife of Moses: Exile, Democracy, Renewal (Stanford, 2022), The Trouble with Wagner (Chicago, 2018) as well as the edited volume Makers of Jewish Modernity (Princeton, 2016; winner of the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction); Listening to Reason: Culture, Music, and Subjectivity in 19th - Century Music (Princeton, 2004), and The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Cornell, 2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele; Anton Pustet Verlag, 2000) won Austria's Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001.
Educated at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he has been a visiting professor at these two schools as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and National Tsing-hua University in Taiwan. He was a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005; a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin in 2003 and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2015-16. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 2009 and 2013 he served as dramaturg on a co-production of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Berlin State Opera and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. He was curator of the exhibition “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling” at the German Historical Museum in Berlin (April – September 2022).
Email: [email protected]