Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University, Pennsylvania (USA)

Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. Nitzan Lebovic

"The End of the Polis. Biopolitical Films in the Post-Democratic Age"

Ort: Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Georgenstraße 11, Raum 109

Zeit: Mittwoch, 13.07.2016, 18.30 Uhr

Organisation: Prof. Dr. Evelyn Annuß

As a distinct strand in current cinema suggests, our political culture sees itself reflected in the dark horizon of the German 1920s-1940s: A catastrophic dystopian view of western urban culture controls the narrative in David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom, Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuaron, and Roland Emmerich. All use the sci-fi genre to question a present-past processes, the failure of democracy and a landscape covered with destroyed cities, concentration camps and the walking dead. Other film-makers, like Gabriel Range or David Fincher research the mechanism of control and power, and use biopolitical critique, including the pre-assumed state of emergency (the murder of a president, a city in siege), in order to depict it.
As will be shown in this lecture, the Biopolitical film of our era is not about a society without history, but rather, a society that sees itself mediated through a historical model of a post- Holocaust catastrophe and in urgent need of a new culture of decisionism. These conventions rely heavily, literally and metaphorically, on the problems presented by a post- Nietzschean, post-liberal critique.

Nitzan Lebovic ist Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies an der Lehigh University, USA. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Biopolitik und Film ist einer seiner zentralen Arbeitsschwerpunkte. Publiziert hat er u.a. "The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics" (2013) und "Zionism and Melancholia. The Short Life of Israel Zarchi" (hebräisch 2015; englische Fassung im Erscheinen). Darüber hinaus ist er Mitherausgeber von "The Politics of Nihilism" (2014), "Catastrophe: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept" und verschiedenen Themenheften u. a. für New German Critique.