A foggy, cold winter evening.
The way from Thielplatz to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science leads past the Henry Ford Building.
On Mondays and Thursdays, Klaus Heinrich held his lectures there in lecture hall C in the afternoon.
How deserted the building lies there in the cold light!
In the entrance to the MPI, the physiognomy of the guests invites you to remember.
Recognition bridges decades.
The host Jürgen Renn does the honors.
Klaus Heinrich enthusiastically welcomed the founding of the institute in 1994.
Will his thinking find a home and continuation there?
We have to wait for answers.
Because that requires an alliance: that something will happen.
How demiurgic can it be?
How does an alliance in creation with the created beings come about?
The religious scholar Lorenz Wilkens recalls Heinrich's Lucretius lectures.
It is thanks to the goddess Venus that “the atoms combine to form stable, reliable connections”.
Lucretius calls these connections "foedera naturae", alliances of nature.
Experimental nature creates binding power.
And Venus helps!
But alliances are always put to the test.
God and Satan bet on the faithfulness of the servant Job.
Does Job, his trust in God, withstand the afflictions?
Anyone who brings the God of Israel, Job and Venus together in their thinking also understands how not to make conditions absolute, but to live from the energy that can transcend them, to find ways that go beyond the existing.
A leitmotif of survival
Bearing in mind the misery and the loss of paternal protection, which is also always present in modern times, as the ethnologist Karl-Heinz Kohl explains, links back to myths of origin provide misleading answers to salvation to very different threats.
In market terms, there is a surplus of identity offers without their prices falling.
Your costs skyrocket.
Blood, soil and loden are dubious calling materials.
It becomes macabre when the descendants of African slaves criticize the return of Benin bronzes to descendants of the slave traders who hunted and sold their ancestors.
How can chasms and chasms resulting from competing origin narratives be bridged in such a way that an understanding shaped idea of cohesion in the face of new threats comes about?
That is the question,
The author Monika Rinck, always good for tracking down abysses, reading, writing and reasoning errors in the material of language, writes about a woodcut by artist Gil Schlesinger: “Make a gesture you, strong enough to carry everything / a gesture to Farewell, that it's not farewell.
/ Since the gesture is stronger than the farewell, the word carries, / because it is a word, better than the handle, nit?
Does it hold?” With the “nit” she jumps into the eighteenth century, like the narrator Angela Steidele in her novel “Enlightenment”, without this becoming a regressive backward movement.
"Here's how it works: holding something very heavy up, yes.
/ Hold it as if it were something heavy – and you hold it.
/ Without ceasing thought power.
In the forest room lies what is still lying on the binding.
Flies up, yes, yes, / the plumeau covers you,
because it is full of bird's feathers, / quite noticeably with weight.
It's not too easy, thanks."
From Schlesinger, Rinck builds a bridge to the work of the media philosopher Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: "Discriminating Data".
Big data sees them as a bastard baby of psychoanalysis and eugenics.
Living in difference becomes a survival leitmotif.
Spelling mistakes enable the most cheerful understanding in this logic: "Weapons of mass destruction" become weapons for the destruction of rampant false calculations.
Surveillance technology engineers are betting on changing individuals to influence a culture of change.
Transferred to criminology, murderers and the murdered are transformed into suspected participants in a homicide.
Being there configures new debt relationships.
Utopian narration makes it possible to eliminate the grammar of tenses instead of traditional historical sources: past, present and future interpenetrate.
The Afro-American scholar Saidiya Hartman thus advocates recombinant fables, with categories of genetic engineering finding their way into literary studies.
Love of equality destabilizes norms and polarizes the ambivalent.
At the end of this development, the costs of the love of equality could also be understood differently.
He who loves his neighbor as himself
The evening in Dahlem ends with a piano recital of Franz Schubert's Piano Sonata in E minor D 566 (unfinished).
The pianist Vladimir Stoupel makes a good face to a badly out of tune grand piano.