What Comes After? International Conference on the Making and Unmaking of the "Post-Age"

Confirmed participants of the conference "What Comes After?" are James Davis (St. Gallen), Philipp Felsch (Humboldt University Berlin), Svenja Flaßpöhler (Berlin), Eva Geulen (ZfL Berlin), Boris Groys (New York University), Bonnie Honig (Brown), Axel Honneth (Columbia), Eva Illouz (EHESS Paris), Albrecht Koschorke (Konstanz), Christoph Menke (Frankfurt), Melanie Möller (FU Berlin), Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), Martin Puchner (Harvard), Jini Kim Watson (New York University). The papers will address the prefix “post,” which belongs to the most successful inventions in the field of the humanities and social sciences after 1945. It has played an instrumental role in numerous influential theoretical endeavors, among them the posthistorical age including “the-end-of-history” thesis, postmodernism, postsocialist societies, postheroic warfare, postmetaphysical thought, postcolonialism, posthumanism, post-critique, and many others. That this prefix has developed an appeal across disciplines and generations can be regarded as an achievement of a kind. Yet these “postisms” – as they have been called – are marked by a troubling ambivalence. While promising to take a step forward, they are indebted to what they pretend to leave behind. Every “postism” depends on established vocabulary. While keeping concepts at a distance by bringing them under the yoke of “post”, this prefix tends to have the effect of empowering the past. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past isn’t dead. It is not even past.” What if the prefix “post" complemented the ghostly presence of the past by an equally ghostly pastness of the presence? Are “postisms” well prepared for tackling the problems of today and tomorrow? By scrutinizing various “postisms,” the speakers will aim at taking stock of intellectual and political movements of considerable import and assess their achievements and shortcomings. Moreover, the conference gives room for considerations on the timeliness or temporality of theories, worldviews, and human self-understanding in general. By addressing the issue of temporal self-positioning, it wants to tackle notions of historical continuity and discontinuity, retroactive and proactive horizons of agency and imagination, liberation and dependency. This includes inquiring if and how it is possible to draw a line, proclaim an ending, start something new, connect and set free.