The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures presents Christian Moser, Universität Bonn, 2014 Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor, who will give a talk in English on, "Barbarism as a Liminal Concept".
In the eighteenth century, the semantics of barbarism undergoes a significant transformation. During the early modern age, the term had the meaning of ‘raw’, ‘rough,’ ‘uncultivated,’ and was used as a synonym for ‘savage’. In the enlightenment, however, attempts are made to differentiate between ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ people. The concept of barbarism is temporalized and acquires the value of a third term that irritates the binary opposition between the savage and the civilized. These attempts are undertaken within two different discursive contexts – a) social theory and cultural history: here, ‘barbarism’ is conceived as a transitory phase that mediates between the savage state of nature and the state of civilization; b) the emergence of a counter-discourse to the Enlightenment theory of natural law: here, the figure of the rapacious barbarian who founds society by means of violent submission is conceived as a counter-construct to the fiction of the savage ‘natural man’ who constitutes society by engaging in a social contract. The talk analyzes how the shift in the semantics of barbarism manifests itself in social theory and literature around the year 1800. In these discourses, barbarism no longer simply marks the ‘natural Other’ of culture and its equivalents, but functions as a mediatory category that both enables and imperils the transition between nature and culture. It is an ambiguous term that irritates clear-cut conceptions of time (cultural evolution), space (cultural topography) and society (the body politic). The talk shows how this ambiguity registers in Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748), Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767),and in Heinrich von Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea (1808).
For more info, visit germanic.osu.edu.
