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Law and literature: that is a sufficiently broad subject to warrant reference to the Fontane character Effy Briest’s "wide field." Indeed, the sites where law and literature encounter each other, where they border on each other, merge, converge, overlap, or where they relate as opposites, even finding themselves as rivals or enemies seem legion. In contrast to the intentions of Effy Briest in that famous novel, my reference to this line is not intended to abort further inquiries; instead I want to chart the field in question with the aim of developing a preliminary typology of the ways in which law and literature have been engaged and have engaged one another. Against the background of this overview, I want to turn to a much smaller field. This small field - a plot of long fallow farmland, to be exact, located between two adjacent, perfectly maintained wheat fields in a fictive Swiss village - will serve as an example or test site for "law and literature" as they emerge in Gottfried Keller’s narrative 'Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe', from his mid-nineteenth century collection of novellas 'Die Leute von Seldwyla'. Whether and how the case study of that small field at the centre of Keller’s story can make a case for the larger field of "law and literature" remains to be seen.

Before turning to the essay on the experiment from 1793, which is unavoidable when discussing series, but does not exhaust the varied functions of seriality in Goethe’s morphology, a few words about the purpose of reconstructing Goethe’s practice of seriality are necessary. I want to argue that Goethe’s morphology is the site of a massive transformation of the notion of form, the scope and implications of which resurface after long latency at the beginning of the 20th century, for example, with Georg Simmel’s sociological notion of form-processes and the related idea of "reciprocity" ('Wechselwirkung') (cf. 265). My interest lies in interpreting what looks like a theory of organisms and nature as a more general theory of formation and transformation.

At a moment when many suggest that the end of an era has been reached, and when struggles against climate change, exploitation, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and racism proliferate, what role can Arendt’s account of political beginnings play in the conceptualization of a new time? Arendt has been celebrated as a key theorist of politics, freedom, and judgement. Yet she has also been questioned when it comes to her understanding of the social question, the public-private divide, or the persistence of structures of systemic injustice. Is her work then still timely for understanding how to begin anew? This conference will test the wide influence and perseverance, the attraction but also the criticism, of Arendt’s thought by recentering her approach to political beginnings. Arendt’s attempts to understand political beginnings animate her work. From her doctoral dissertation on Augustine to her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind, beginnings are omnipresent in her oeuvre. Conceiving Arendt’s attempts as an open legacy, digging up the plurality and worldliness, the tragic and agonistic character of beginnings, the conference aims to investigate how and why political beginnings are set off ‘not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of the many’., The Politics of Beginnings: Hannah Arendt Today, conference, ICI Berlin, 15–16 February 2023

In the last decade of his life, Siegfried Kracauer, now mostly known as a media theorist, began preparing a book on history. Unfinished at the time of his death, History: The Last Things Before the Last was published posthumously in 1969. This workshop will explore a concern that is arguably central to the book: the problem of historical time. For Kracauer, every conception of historical time has to confront what he calls its ‘insoluble antinomy’, the necessity to think the flow of time together with the shapes of time incommensurable to it. Over the course of our one-day workshop, we will discuss Kracauer’s analysis of this antinomy and the challenge it poses to traditional historical categories such as the date, the period, and the transition between periods. Comprised of two parts, the workshop will start from a collective reading of excerpts from History in order to then consider its relation to other engagements with the ‘riddle of time’, from Marx to Kubler and Benjamin to Blumenberg. This workshop is a collaboration with the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung and is occasioned by the (videorecorded) talk ‘When Time Becomes Form’ Eva Geulen gave in the context of the ICI Lecture Series ERRANS, in Time. Last Things Before Last: Kracauer’s History, workshop, ICI Berlin, 7 May 2018