WestEnd

In this discussion with Daniel Fairfax, Nora Neuhaus and Felix Trautmann, Heide Schlüpmann explores the central importance Siegfried Kracauer had both on her thinking and on the origins of film studies in Frankfurt. The distinctive ensemble of...

The article substantiates the distrust, which figures as the common denominator of the heterogeneous ›Querdenken‹ COVID protest movement. This bizarre misalliance does benefit from the affective dimension of distrust for producing political...

Do Conspiracy Theories Endanger Democracy? The article subjects this supposedly straightforward question to a theoretical examination. It argues that much-discussed phenomena such as QAnon, Querdenken and Reichsbürger theses are not coherent...

Is mistrust a marker and mechanism of totalitarian regimes alone or is it present in liberal democracies too? Using twentieth and twenty-first century German history as an example, this article examines various forms and expressions of trust and...

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast in the Age of Iconoclasts. An essayistic review of Charles Camic’s biography Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics.

Climate Change confronts societies with reality checks. This concerns the economy, politics and the state, but sociology as the social science specialised on society, crises, and the present: How can they contribute to responses on existential...

The paper examines how conflicts can be dealt with, or negotiated through organized distrust in such ways that communal trust is resorted, if only temporarily, in contexts where there is a perdurance of social and communal divisions. It argues that...

According to a widespread view, we live in an age of distrust. In many cases, distrust characterizes the relation between fellow citizens, and in this form, it can be a danger to democracy. The paper aims to understand this phenomenon from the...

Characteristic of late modernity is a consciousness that claims to have recognized the way the world really works; that presents itself as enlightened to accept every social burden as inevitable. In this cynical consciousness, it is seemingly...

The VERSUS-Corona project investigates transformations of provisioning during the pandemic in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since March 2020. Our analysis of complex shifts between institutional, kin, or civil society modalities of provisioning...

This article examines the autofictions of US-American author Tao Lin in the context of networked sociality. The essay thus elaborates on a specific aspect of Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of singularization not explored in depth by Reckwitz himself,...

The article examines the works of Silvia Bovenschen with particular emphasis on their relation to Critical Theory, especially the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno. It describes this relationship, as also in other areas of Bovenschen’s political and...

It seems easy to identify aspects of Andreas Reckwitz’s society of singularities in contemporary autosociobiographical narratives of aspirations to social advancement and fears of social decline. However, novels such as Nicolas Mathieu’s Wie...

Through an original interpretation of the interview form, Rachel Cusk creates a paradoxical autofiction, a subject who “finds herself” by undertaking a journey through the lives of others. Cusk leads us to a redefinition of contemporary...

What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind’s conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself?...

Whenever the history of autofiction is told, it involves a historicization of the term autofiction and its supposed French origin in the 1970s. But the question of why a large number of writers, most noticeably Karl Ove Knausgård, started writing...

This article analyzes the background and the process of foundation of the Institute for Social Research. Special attention is paid to the role played by Felix Weil, which was central not only in financial terms, but also in the conceptual and...

The lives of two painters, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, tell very different stories about what it takes to thrive in a medium historically dominated by men.

There seem to be hardly any points of contact between the politics of memory and law. At least that is what the current debate suggests. A closer look, however, shows that law is connected to the cultural memory of a society in an ambivalent way....

The late sociologist Ulrich Oevermann is renowned as the founder of Objective Hermeneutics. But, as the article shows, his oeuvre has much more to offer than that: an original contribution to social theory, including a methodologically grounded...

In the introduction to this issue’s special theme, Johannes Voelz characterizes the contemporary debate of autofiction as one concerned with the analysis of the present social condition. In order to take seriously this analysis without simply...

This article examines prominent representatives of autofictional writing, such as Édouard Louis and Karl Ove Knausgård, and discusses whether their programmatic directness and artlessness are instances of what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz calls...