Christoph Holzhey

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity

Multistable figures offer an intriguing model for arbitrating conflicting positions. Moving back and forth between the different aspects under which something can be seen, one recognizes that mutually contradictory descriptions can be equally valid and that disputes over the correct account can be resolved without dissolving differences or establishing a higher synthesis. Yet, the experience of a gestalt switch also offers a model for radical conversions and revolutions – that is, for irreversible leaps to incommensurable alternatives foiling ideals of rational choice while providing the possibility and necessity of decision. Accentuating the temporal dimensions of multistable figures, this multidisciplinary volume illuminates the critical potentials and limits of multistability as a complex figure of thought.

Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Niemand hat die politische Intention dieser Frage besser verstanden als Foucault, der in Canguilhems Nachfolge den Menschen als Lebewesen und dessen Geschichte als Teil der Geschichte der Rationalisierung des Lebens problematisierte. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit der amerikanischen feministischen Wissenschaftskritik, der Actor-Netzwerk-Theorie, der Philosophie des Pragmatismus und Whiteheads relationistischen Philosophie an die von ihm gestellte Frage an. In dem vorliegenden Band diskutieren namhafte PhilosophInnen, EpistemologInnen und MedienwissenschaftlerInnen aus Frankreich, Belgien und Deutschland offenliegende und verborgene Bezüge, Relationen und Differenzen zwischen dem Konzept des „situierten Wissens“ Haraways und der „regionalen Epistemologie“ Canguilhems. Es ist eine Diskussion, die zugleich interdisziplinär und international ist und damit in doppelter Weise versucht, dem Anspruch der Situiertheit und der Regionalität des Wissens gerecht zu werden.

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.