Dieses Seminar wird teilweise in englischer Sprache stattfinden. Genaue Textlektüre zur Vorbereitung der Sitzungen ist entscheidend. Es wird darauf hingewiesen, dass es sich zum Teil um anspruchsvolle Texte handelt, die intensive Vorbereitung (und gute Englischkenntnisse) erfordern. Weitere Details zum Format werden ein Thema der Vorbesprechung sein. close

Nowadays, writing is generally seen as one of the great human inventions. But the notion that writing was invented by humans has not at all times been self-evident and accepted. For a long time, writing was seen as sacred, a privileged domain of the gods and of their representatives. The letters were even thought to have preceded the creation of the world. Indeed, the whole act of creation was occasionally conceived as a form of writing, and therefore signatures were thought to be embedded in all creatures. And this tradition has continued even after secularization: there are still discourses that refer to writing without a human writer (and reading without a human reader). The world is still thought to be full of nonhuman entities (animals, plants and anorganic matter) that leave traces and inscriptions for other nonhuman entities to read. A prominent example is the “deciphered” genetic code. Machines obviously also have learned to read and write. Furthermore, psychoanalysis has asserted that the human psyche engages in writing and reading procedures of which the human subject is unaware. In this seminar, we will engage with literary and theoretical texts that engage with these nonhuman forms of writing (and that sometimes even claim a “nonhuman” status for themselves).

Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen”, in Gesammelte Schriften 2.1, hrsg. Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991.

Jacob Böhme, De Signatura Rerum , in Werke: Morgenröte / De Signatura Rerum, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, 2009.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Die Bibliothek von Babel”, in Die Bibliothek von Babel: Erza¨hlungen, übers. Karl August Horst und Curt Meyer-Clason, Ditzingen: Reclam, 2019.

Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus in Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus, hrsg. William Alexander Greenhill, London/New York: Macmillan, 1896.

William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, in The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke , New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, “The Geology of Morals”, in A Thousand Plateaus, übers. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Jacques Derrida, Grammatologie, übers. Hans-Jo¨rg Rheinberger und Hans Zischler, Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 1984.

Geoffrey Hartman, “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry”, in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, Methuen: London, 1987.

Eva Horn/Hannes Bergthaller, Anthropozän zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius, 2020.

Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, übers. Rosmarie Waldrop, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976.

Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986.

Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, übers. und hrsg. Bruce Fink, New York/London: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground, New York: Vintage, 1989.

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Cambridge University Press 1992.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, hrsg. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, und Stephen Gill, Norton, 1979.

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