Program Area History of Theory

Prior to the reduction of literature to belles lettres at the end of the 18th century, the concept included other fields of erudition such as rhetoric, poetics, religion, natural history, and the arts. Those intellectual traditions and interpretive practices did not simply disappear around 1800, but rather underwent a transformation. One of the effects of this change was the emergence of theory, originally limited to literary theory. From the 18th century onwards, “theory” has been the name given to the study of the discursive conditions that organize any given culture. It has since expanded and turned into a mode of observation with its own historical developments and genre conventions. Theory, as a meta-discourse, is part of a history that surpasses a simple recapitulation of the theories and “turns” that have come and gone since the 1960s.

Projects of this program area, completed or processed in the past

(selected, chronologically sorted by year of completion)

• The Meaning of Humanities in Modern Society. A Study of J. Ritter’s Compensation Theory 2023
• Crisis, Critique, Governance: The History of the Theory of Liberalism and its Concepts 2022–2023
• Incorporating Innovation. Structural Moments in the History of Theory and Literary Studies (1870/1970) 2021–2023
• Exploration of the Carlo Barck Archive. Extra-European Relations in the Conception of the “Basic Concepts of Aesthetics” 2021–2023
• Redemption Through Return 2020–2023
• The Mighty Hater: Martin Luther’s Reformations of Rhetoric and Affect 2022
• Lazar Gulkovich: Writings on the History of Concepts (Edition) 2018–2022
• Theory in Translation. French Theory in East Central Europe (1960–2000) 2022
• Psychologism. History of a Suspicion in the Literary Field of the Early 20th Century 2020–2022 Dissertation project
• Selected Correspondence Between Ernst and Gretha Jünger (1922–1960): Annotated Edition 2020–2021
• Schematism: Poetics on the Way to Kant, 1760–1790 2020–2021
• Aby Warburg and Cultures of Religion 2018–2020
• Walter Benjamin’s Journalistic Networks 2019–2020
• Catastrophe in Twentieth-Century European Thought. A Critical Conceptual History 2019–2020
• The German-Jewish Paul 2019–2020
• Correspondence and Afterlife. Ernst Jünger’s Letter Archive 2015–2020
• Vagabond Wisdom. Goethe in the Face of the French Revolution 2019–2020
• Journalistic Forms of Theory. The journal “alternative” (1958–1982) 2017–2019 Dissertation project
• Philology’s Figures of Thought and Their Genealogies. Divination and the Organological Conception of the Text 2019
• Hans Blumenberg’s Variations on the End of Theory 2019
• Speaking/Speeches About Poetry 2016–2019 Dissertation project
• Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays. Means of Production, Literary Genres, Critical Theory 2016–2019
• Theory of Retreat 2015–2019
• The Theory and Concept of an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History Phase I 2008–2013; Phase II 2014–2016; Phase III 2017–2019
• The Formation of Theory and the Critique of ‘Wissenschaft’ in the Early Twentieth Century 2017–2019
• Walter Benjamin’s Conception of Montage and Politics of the Image as Non-Systematic Critical Method 2018–2019 Dissertation project
• At the Limit of the Obscene. Realism, Profanation, Aesthetics 2017–2018
• Jacob Taubes in Context. Philosophy of Religion in Germany after 1945 2014–2018
• The Poetics of the Pathos Formula. At the Intersection of Cultural and Literary Studies 2015–2018
• The Dissonant Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner Productions between Artistic Craft and Aesthetic Ideology 2015–2017
• German as the Language for the Humanities around 1800 2014–2016
• Endless Narration? On German Literature and Literary Studies After 1945 2015–2016
• Poetics and Jewish Philosophy. Gershom Scholem Edition 2014–2016
• Language Criticism as a Critique of Morals. The Unclaimed Legacy of Karl Kraus 2014–2016
• Incomprehensibility. Investigating Obscuritas in Ancient Rhetoric and Modern Literature and Philosophy (1870–1970) 2015–2016
• Testimony/Bearing Witness — a Controversial Concept. Examining the Interchange between the Systematic and Cultural Research Perspectives 2012–2016
• Correspondence of Jacob Taubes 2008–2013