Stefani Engelstein – författare

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees, transforming the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals into siblings. Encompassing political fraternity, sister languages, racial discourse on brotherhood, evolutionary sibling species, and intense, often incestuously inclined brother-sister bonds in literature, siblinghood stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. In all such systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein explores the pervasive significance of sibling structures and their essential role in the modern organization of knowledge and identity.Sibling Action argues that this relational paradigm came to structure the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Engelstein considers theoretical constructions of subjectivity through Sophocles' Antigone; fraternal equality and its exclusion of sisters in political rhetoric; the intertwining of economic and kinship theory by Friedrich Engels and Claude Levi-Strauss; Darwin and his contemporaries' accounts of speciation; anthropological and philological depictions of Muslims and Jews at the margins of Europe; and evolutionary psychology's theorizing around the incest taboo. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous—yet unacknowledged—conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings—often incestuously inclined—negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not quite same and not quite other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification.In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

Examines the body in literature and science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.In Anxious Anatomy, Stefani Engelstein reconstructs the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century human body to offer startling new readings of major works by Goethe, Blake, Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Engelstein links research on reproduction both to the ability of organisms such as hydra, snails, and newts to replace severed heads and gouged out eyes, and also to technical advances in battlefield amputation and artificial limbs. Readings of German and British literature, alongside natural history, surgery, aesthetics, and art, illuminate the importance of investigations into the body for emerging theories of human subjectivity, gender, volition, ethical behavior, and political organization. Engelstein also demonstrates how attempts to explain the structural characteristics of the body developed into biological justifications for ideologies of race, gender, and social hierarchies.

Im 19. Jahrhundert trat die Genealogie als führende Methode hervor, historisch wandelbare Systeme wie z.B. Sprachen, biologische Arten, Religionen und sogenannte „Rassen" zu organisieren. Genealogisches Denken bestimmt Begriffe durch ihre Differenzierung von anderen. Das ist ein Verfahren, das keine Singularitäten, sondern nur Verwandtschaftsnetze hervorbringt. In solchen Systemen wirken Geschwisterbegriffe, also benachbarte Begriffe, die weder identisch noch absolut verschieden sind, als aktive Störungszone. Sie sind füreinander nötig, aber auch destabilisierend.

Engelstein verbindet eine weitreichende Geistesgeschichte mit detaillierten Analysen aus den neuen Disziplinen der Lebens- und Humanwissenschaften und bezieht sich dabei unter anderem auf literarische Werke von Goethe, Schiller, Percy Shelley, George Eliot, Richard Wagner und Thomas Mann. Sie erläutert die Folgen dieses Paradigmawechsels für die Auffassung von Subjektivität, Staats- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft und für die Klassifizierung von Menschen, ob biologisch oder philologisch.

Das Buch bietet eine neue Theorie über die Struktur modernen Wissens: Eine Theorie, die die Grenzen von Subjektivität und Gruppenidentitäten durchlässig macht, um eine Grundlage für flexiblere Formen von Zugehörigkeit, Selbstidentifizierung und Wissensbildung zu erschaffen.

Im 19. Jahrhundert trat die Genealogie als führende Methode hervor, historisch wandelbare Systeme wie z.B. Sprachen, biologische Arten, Religionen und sogenannte „Rassen" zu organisieren. Genealogisches Denken bestimmt Begriffe durch ihre Differenzierung von anderen. Das ist ein Verfahren, das keine Singularitäten, sondern nur Verwandtschaftsnetze hervorbringt. In solchen Systemen wirken Geschwisterbegriffe, also benachbarte Begriffe, die weder identisch noch absolut verschieden sind, als aktive Störungszone. Sie sind füreinander nötig, aber auch destabilisierend.

Engelstein verbindet eine weitreichende Geistesgeschichte mit detaillierten Analysen aus den neuen Disziplinen der Lebens- und Humanwissenschaften und bezieht sich dabei unter anderem auf literarische Werke von Goethe, Schiller, Percy Shelley, George Eliot, Richard Wagner und Thomas Mann. Sie erläutert die Folgen dieses Paradigmawechsels für die Auffassung von Subjektivität, Staats- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft und für die Klassifizierung von Menschen, ob biologisch oder philologisch.

Das Buch bietet eine neue Theorie über die Struktur modernen Wissens: Eine Theorie, die die Grenzen von Subjektivität und Gruppenidentitäten durchlässig macht, um eine Grundlage für flexiblere Formen von Zugehörigkeit, Selbstidentifizierung und Wissensbildung zu erschaffen.

This volume illuminates the vexed treatment of violence in the German cultural tradition between two crucial, and radically different, violent outbreaks: the French Revolution, and the Holocaust and Second World War. The contributions undermine the notion of violence as an intermittent or random visitor in the imagination and critical theory of modern German culture. Instead, they make a case for violence in its many manifestations as constitutive for modern theories of art, politics, identity, and agency. While the contributions elucidate trends in theories of violence leading up to the Holocaust, they also provide a genealogy of the stakes involved in ongoing discussions of the legitimate uses of violence, and of state, individual, and collective agency in its perpetration. The chapters engage the theorization of violence through analysis of cultural products, including literature, museum planning, film, and critical theory. This collection will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Gender Studies, History, Museum Studies, and beyond.