The first session of a seminar on “Social Theory and Emotions” took place at TU Darmstadt on June 7th. The lecturer is Cornelia Koppetsch, professor for gender relations, education and lifestyle. She offers a second seminar that starts on Monday: “Present day diagnoses I”. So it should be continued in the winter semester. The seminars take place as block events and were subsequently included in the course catalog. Disciplinary proceedings are in progress against Koppetsch because a university commission has classified the citation practice in its book “Die Gesellschaft des Zorns” and other writings as a “serious violation of the rules of good scientific practice”. Before the administrative court she forced that she was allowed to hold lectures in the current semester.
The seminar on social theory and emotions will deal with envy, resentment and shame using, among other things, the writings of Sighard Neckel. Koppetsch's preoccupation with the author of “Status und Scham” (1991) is documented in her latest book, “Right-wing Populism as Protest”, published in 2020 by VSA Verlag. As Bayerischer Rundfunk has now made known, the long footnote on page 102 comes from “Status and Shame”. Neckel is mentioned on this page, but not as the author of the sentence that those who have learned to adjust to the complexity of the environment through “self-discipline and foresight” have an advantage. A collection of posts from a group of exact readers who want to remain anonymous suggests that the book that was put into print after the plagiarism affair contains even more plagiarism than reported in the FAZ.
How should one interpret it when Cornelia Koppetsch did not have the self-discipline to properly reference citations, even at the moment of extreme threat to her status, when a new publisher gave her a second chance? Their unwavering continuation of the practice of copying leads to the conclusion that this is exactly what good scientific practice looks like for them. It should be sociologically illuminating to consider your case under the premise that the unauthorized adoption of foreign texts is not only a system, but a method.
Her profession is diagnosis of the present. The statements of this genre of sociological literature are only valid if the reader recognizes himself in the text. Colleagues like Neckel find their own words at Koppetsch, all other readers find thoughts that they have already made themselves or at least read somewhere. Even after the devastating report of the commission, reviewers from cultural journalism threw themselves into the breach for the fallen star author: Those who bring the tendency of the times to terms cannot only draw from their own.
The argument has to be pointed: The seamless integration of stolen formulations provides a deeper authentication of their social scientific value than the reference to the cannibalized work. This applies to a social science whose master discipline is the group self-portrait: the portrayal of an educated elite, marketed as self-criticism, who like to hear that they hold too much of the neoliberal fetishes of social prestige and private property. Cornelia Koppetsch's style is the lack of distinction.