The plasticity of emotions - Günther Anders’ contribution to the history of feelings

In the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (“The Obsolescence of Man”), Günther Anders states that the lack of a history of emotions might be considered “the biggest desideratum of any philosophy of history and historical science”. This claim represents an example of Anders’s astonishing clairvoyance. Already in 1956, he pointed to a field of research which has received full attention only during the last thirty years. Anders himself very early provided several fragments for such a history. Thus, in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen he speaks of an emotional ‘gap’. The “slowness of the transformation of emotions” results, as he thinks, in a ‘discrepancy’ between the human capacity of feeling and the challenges of an environment produced mainly by men. Therefore, according to Anders, the capacity of feeling has to be modelled in order to adjust it to a very different reality.

Adopting a word from Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1922), Anders demands an ‘effort’ of feeling, “a voluntary expansion of our emotional comprehension faculty”. His book Love Yesterday (1986) was also intended to present— as the subtitle suggests—Notes on the History of Feelings. It is concerned with the transformation of love at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Taking into consideration the experiences of two wars, emigration, but also the impact of psychoanalysis, Anders points out, love can no longer be regarded as the same. With the conference at the University of Copenhagen, organised in collaboration with the International Günther Anders Society, this very independent contribution to a field which nowadays is known as ‘emotion research’ will receive due critical appraisal.

The conference will be held in English and German.

The conference is part of the VELUX project Where Love Happens: Topographies of Emotions in Nineteenth-Century European Literature, hosted by the University of Copenhagen.

We try to reimburse all participants their expenses for travel and accomodation as far as possible. At this point of time, however, we cannot give any guarantees for this.

Programme

Thursday, 29 June 2023

Friday, 30 June 2023

Saturday, 1 July 2023