Stefani Engelstein (University of Missouri): Sibling Logic. The Genealogical Structure of Modernity

Venue: ZfL, Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin, 3. Et., Trajekte-Tagungsraum

In the eighteenth century, Europeans began to classify historical systems genealogically, turning contemporary terms in these systems – whether languages, religions, races, species, or individuals – into siblings of varying degrees. This genealogical theory came to structure the modern subject, modern state, and methodologies of the life- and human-sciences. In this talk, I will explore the implications of this genealogical structure in both comparative philology and evolutionary theory of the long nineteenth century, and will analyze Goethe’s early interrogation of the system in Iphigenia auf Tauris. Within a language family, a sister language is a boundary object whose delineation enables, and yet simultaneously calls into question, the definition of any particular language; the speaking sibling puts similar pressure on the notion of the subject. Darwin turned naturalist epistemology on its head by endorsing this same contingency in biological classification. To reinforce threatened boundaries, both linguistics and evolutionary theory embraced unidirectional diversification, repudiating merger as »monstrous,« thus participating in an affective rhetoric also implicated in policing the genealogical boundaries between population groups.

Stefani Engelstein ist als Forschungsstipendiatin der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung zu Gast am ZfL.

Sie studierte Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaften an der Yale University und der University of Chicago und promovierte 2001 an der University of Chicago. Von 2001 bis 2007 war sie Assistant Professor, seit 2007 ist sie als Associate Professor am Department of German and Russian Studies an der University of Missouri tätig. Dort leitete Engelstein 2009 bis 2014 das Life Sciences & Society Program.

Publikationen (Auswahl):

»Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion.« Fact and Fiction: Literature and Science in the European Context. Ed. Christine Lehleiter. Forthcoming with University of Toronto Press.
»The Allure of Wholeness: The Organism around 1800 and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate.« Critical Inquiry. 39.4 (2013): 754–776.
»Sibling Logic; or, Antigone Again.« PMLA. 126.1 (Jan 2011): 38–54.
Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture. Co-editor with Carl Niekerk. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 79. Rodopi Press 2011.
Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. SUNY Press Hardcover 2008, Paperback 2009.
»The Open Wound of Beauty: Kafka Reading Kleist.« The Germanic Review. 81.4. (Fall 2006): 340–359.
»Out on a Limb: Military Medicine, Heinrich von Kleist and the Disarticulated Body.« German Studies Review 23.2 (May 2000): 225–244. (Winner of the DAAD/GSA Outstanding Article Prize)