TOWARDS A CULTURAL THEORY OF ALTERITY. PERSPECTIVES AND HORIZONS.

Date: February, 22nd, 2017
Venue: University of Lisbon | School of Arts and Humanities (Room 2.13)
Schedule: 2.30pm – 4pm

«Following my last book published in German (“Theorien des Fremden”, Francke 2016), I will discuss terms around the phenomenon ‘alterity’ such as the strange, the foreign(er) and the other. They have in many languages different connotations. The foreign is linked with liminal, as someone or something which is beyond a border, the strange(r) is connected with the idea of the unknown and tends to be seen as ‘uncanny` (with the ‘Unheimliche’ in a Freudian sense). The other describes the intimate aspect of alterity and is something like a double (shadow, mirror). All these configurations of alterity has in common that the adjectives – other, strange, foreign – are not essential qualities but relations that work in a certain context. Or to quote the Bavarian writer: Strange is the stranger only in a strange land.»
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Prof. for Cultural Studies. He studied German and Spanish literature, philosophy and history at the Univ. Munich. 1980/1981 PhD, 1993 ‘Habilitation’ at the Univ. Klagenfurt. 1999 Prof. at the Univ. of Birmingham /UK, 2009 Prof. at the Univ. of Vienna. Guest professorships and scholarships e.g. at the Univ. of Zagreb, Trinity College Dublin, GCSC Gießen, New School of Social Research, New York, Nehru Univ. New Delhi, UCP, Lisbon, Univ. Sapienza, Roma. Topics of Research: Cultural Theory and Philosophy, Theory of Narrative, Essayistic, Romanticism, ‘Classical’ Modernism and Avant-garde, Austrian and Central European Studies. Monographs: Theorien des Fremden (2016), Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (2016), Die Dichter der Philosophen (2014), The Architecture of Modern Culture (2012) Kulturtheorie (2006/2010), Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (2002/2008). He is also a public intellectual, a curator and an essayist. In 2014 he published his first collection of poems, and in 2017 a new one will follow. He lives with his wife, Sabine Müller-Funk, an artist, in Drosendorf and Vienna.
www.wolfgang.mueller-funk.com

Organization in the scope of the research project Aesthetics of Memory and Emotions of the group MORPHE of the Center for Comparative Studies.