Tectonics of the Systems. New Readings of Oswald Spengler.

From 15 to 17 December 2009, the research unit Text and Interpretation of the department of literary studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) organizes an international conference entitled Tectonics of the Systems. New Readings of Oswald Spengler. The aim of this conference is to explore new directions in the study of Spengler's work, and to make possible productive interdisciplinary exchanges that assess the continuing relevance of his oeuvre.

Few philosophical works have met with a more remarkable critical fate than Oswald Spengler's (1880-1936) controversial and bestselling The Decline of the West (1918, 1922). Upon publication, Spengler's philosophy of history became the object of a passionate public debate in which very different voices – such as those of Thomas Mann, Karl Kraus, and Ernst Bloch – expressed wildly divergent opinions. This so-called “Spengler-Streit” was fought in newspaper and journal articles, in essays as well as in monumental monographs, and it soon became a crucial reference point in the intellectual history of the interwar period.

After the Second World War, Spengler's work soon disappeared from the intellectual mainstream: any thorough engagement with a work that had been so controversial and ubiquitous before the war was pre-empted on grounds that were both ideological and methodological. Spengler was soon reduced to the status of a philosophical curiosity in post-war intellectual discourses. As Jacques Bouveresse notes, we have grown used to making fun of Spengler, without going to the trouble of actually reading him.

Given this state of affairs, this conference has a double goal:

1. We would like to meet Bouveresse's challenge and provide a platform for new readings of Spengler's works, including his less familiar ones. The widespread failure to engage with Spengler's work seems to be almost an “excuse,” as Adorno called it, that betrays an anxiety to confront an oeuvre that is extremely complicated and problematic on both political and rhetorical grounds. It is precisely the stylistic, rhetorical, and theoretical complexity of Spengler's work, or even its hybridity at the crossroads of philosophy and literature, of logic and rhetoric, that this conference wants to investigate.

2. The conference also focuses on the renewed international reception of Spengler's work since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After the demise of the traditional opposition between the political Left and Right, we can observe a remarkable return of and to Spengler's work – as well as cultural-pessimistic discourses more generally. This conference has welcomed contributions that attempt to test the possibilities of considering Oswald Spengler as our “contemporary.” Thus, several conference papers critically discuss the aesthetic and essayistic reactualization of Spengler in the work of Botho Strauß, Peter Sloterdijk and Rolf Hochhuth, who will give a public reading at this conference.

This double perspective should lead to a timely correction of the highly reductive traditional images of Spengler, as well as to a more adequate understanding of the place of Spengler's work in contemporaneous as well as current discursive networks.

PROGRAM

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

09:00-09:45

Registration, Coffee

09:45-10:00

Opening by Arne De Winde

10:00-11:00

Keynote lecture Gilbert Merlio (Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV)

Die seltsame Wirkungsgeschichte des Oswald Spengler

11:00-11:30

Coffee Break

11:30-13:00

Section 1 — The “Spengler-Streit”: Spengler and his contemporaries

• Knut Martin Stünkel (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Urfragen und Antworten. Spengler und das Neue Denken.
• Dina Gusejnova (University of Chicago) Germany's New Prophets: Spengler, Keyserling und die Rezeption der neuen deutschen Kulturkritik nach dem 1. Weltkrieg

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-15:30

Section 2 — Spengler's international resonance

• Pieter Verstraeten (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Spengler's Histories in Flanders. Traces of Spengler's Conceptions of History in Interwar Catholic Literary Criticism
• Galina Potapova (Universität Bremen) ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes also nur der Untergang der vaterrechtlichen Kultur?' Oswald Spengler und die Dostojewskij-Übersetzerin Less Kaerrick.

15:30-16:00

Coffee Break

16:00-17:15

Section 3 — Der Untergang des Abendlandes: a “massive novel”

• Joe Paul Kroll (Princeton University) Sachlichkeit und Maskensucht oder: Die Zerrissenheit des Raubtiers
• Rikke Louise Peters (University of Aarhus) Kulturmorphologie als Zivilisationskritik – Der Begriff ‘Kultur' in Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlandes

17:15-18:15

Keynote lecture Georg Bollenbeck (Universität Siegen / Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies – FRIAS) Die Problemsensibilität und Erkenntnis-potentiale intentional-werthafter Welterklärungen. Kulturkritik – ein Reflexionsmodus der Moderne

20:00-22:00

Evening Event

• Keynote lecture Alexander Demandt (Freie Universität Berlin) Spengler und andere Untergänge
• Piano Recital by Hilary Demske (Utah Valley University)

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

09:30-11:00

Section 4 — “The dirty literati”: Spengler and aesthetic modernism

• Hubert Roland (Université catholique de Louvain – UCL) Neue Interpretationsansätze der „Liquidation der abendländischen Idee“. Eine transgenerationelle und transnationale Perspektive
• Philipp Heine (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) Die Weltanschauung und die Literatur der Weimarer Republik (Vorstellung des Dissertationsprojekts „Die ‚Weltanschauungsproblematik‘ in der Literatur der Moderne bei Alfred Döblin und Ernst Jünger“)

11:00-11:30

Coffee Break

11:30-12:30

Keynote lecture Dieter Heimböckel (Université du Luxembourg)

„Was wir wollen, sollen alle wollen.“ Spengler interkulturell

12:30-14:00

Lunch

14:00-15:30

Section 5 — “World history is state history”: Spengler's state, nation, and politics

• Joanne Miyang Cho (William Paterson University of New Jersey) Oswald Spengler and Ernst Troeltsch on the Question of Civilization
• Zoltán Novák (University of Debrecen) Dynamic Law and Western Capitalism

15:30-16:00

Coffee Break (Entrance Hall, MSI)

16:00-17:30

Section 6 — On the Faustian: The legacy of Nietzsche and Goethe

• Kirk Wetters (Yale University) Inheritances of the Demonic in Spengler's Historical Morphology
• Hub Zwart (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)

18:00-19:30

Public Reading by Rolf Hochhuth

Followed by Discussion with Jean-Pierre Rondas (Radio producer for Klara – VRT)

20:00

Conference Dinner

Thursday, 17 December 2009

09:00-10:00

Keynote lecture Maurizio Guerri (Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera, Milano)

10:00-10:30

Coffee Break

10:30-12:30

Section 7 — “Das weltgeschichtliche Schauen”: The actuality of Spengler's morphology of culture

• Hans-Peter Söder (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) Visions of the Coming Machine Age: Spengler's Spirit of Technology
• Stephen Wheeler (London Consortium) After the Apocalypse: Primitivism, Postmodernism and the New Discourse of Decline – A Spenglerian Perspective
• Pierre Mattern (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Schichten, Risse, Interpreten: Pseudomorphose und histoire sédimentaire bei Pierre Legendre

12:30-13:30

Lunch

13:30-15:00

Section 8 — Spengler's literary reception after 1989

• Nadja Thomas “Nichts stimmt - außer der Stimmung”: Die Reaktivierung Spenglers im Werk von Botho Strauß
• Arne De Winde (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), tbd
• Hilary Demske (Utah Valley University) Classical Music since 1989: A Confirmation of Spengler's Writings

15:00-15:30

Coffee Break

15:30-16:30

Keynote lecture Markus Ophälders (Università degli Studi di Milano) Geschichtsdichtung oder Idealrealismus. Spenglers ästhetisierende Geschichtsmorphologie

16:30-16:45

Closing Words by Bart Philipsen

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Venue:
Faculteit Letteren, Erasmushuis, Blijde Inkomststraat 21, B - 3000 Leuven

REGISTRATION
before 1 December 2009 at:
tektonik.der.systeme@arts.kuleuven.be

More information (such as a detailed conference program and the registration form) on:
http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/tektonik_der_systeme/

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