Julius Schwarzwälder is a doctoral candidate at the RTG “Aesthetics of Democracy” and research associate at the Institute for Philosophy at TU Darmstadt, where he is also involved in a research project on the history of bioethics. He earned an MA in Philosophy from TU Darmstadt in 2024, an MA in Aesthetics from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2025. His MA theses examined the history of the concept “Lebensform” and the social aesthetics movement (1870–1930), as well as the legal and aesthetic institutionalization of artistic research.
He was a scholarship holder at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, where he helped organize a research project on the work of Cornelia Vismann. Exchange programs led him to the London School of Economics and ENS Ulm. Since 2022, he has been organizing the GRADE-initiative “Aesthetics of Democratic Life-Forms” with Martin Renz. As a freelance journalist, he has written forty reports and analyses for Table.Media, specializing in research politics and Chinese-European relations.

The Hatred of Administration

Few characterizations of politicians and artists are more damning than that they are “mere administrators.” The persistence of negative characterizations of enforcements of order is remarkable in these two fields. From critiques of early liberalism to critiques of digitalization, “administration” functions on occasion as a metaphorical figure for the cessation of aesthetic and political vibrancy. Given the many forms of oppression that have been realized through it, its fundamental disapproval seems to require no further explanation. The antithesis between “the political/aesthetic” and “the administrative” would thus lie in the fundamental contempt for the latter. This PhD project, however, pursues a different line of thinking. It argues that this antithesis is historically conditioned and that it has structural roots in the respective concepts. The aim is therefore to examine the historical causes of the persistence of this aversion, which has more often than not proven to be an unintended kinship.

Alongside this runs the question of whether administrations perform aesthetic efforts themselves. Speaking in general terms, one could say that the nature of administration consists in implementing formats. As regulatory bodies, they install obligations that contribute to the texturing of reality. However, the evidence of the entities they execute remains fragmentary at best. In the absence of a specific addressee, administrative offices are those systemic units within large-scale organizations that must address their experiential deficits. Thus, a bureaucratically organized state is an object that is in itself unexperienceable, yet whose subjects nevertheless come to feel “it” at least indirectly through the experience of their administration. Assuming that the scope for collective self-determination remains drastically limited without administrative forms of action, and given that bureaucracy is an element of every modern form of government, an examination of its aesthetic capabilities contributes to the question of whether and to what extent administrations can be specifically democratic in the way they appear and operate.

Publications

Edited Volumes

Renz, Martin and Julius Schwarzwälder, editors. Spaces of Appearance: Aesthetics and Politics After Analogy. transcript, 2025.

Articles

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Verlaufende Verbindlichkeit: Mikrogenres auf TikTok”. kritische berichte, vol. 53, no. 1, 2025, pp. 8–18.
Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Über einige Bedingungen gegenwärtiger ART (Artistic Research Theory)”. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 72, no. 1, 2024, pp. 13–35.

Book chapters

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Vibes”. Glossar der Gegenwartsästhetik, edited by Moritz Baßler, Heinz Drügh and Nathan Taylor, Konstanz University Press, forthcoming.

Renz, Martin and Julius Schwarzwälder. “Revolutions of the Senses”. Spaces of Appearance: Aesthetics and Politics After Analogy, edited by Martin Renz and Julius Schwarzwälder, transcript, 2025, pp. 76–109.

Renz, Martin and Julius Schwarzwälder. “What Are and To What End Do We Study Spaces of Appearance?”. Spaces of Appearance: Aesthetics and Politics After Analogy, edited by Martin Renz and Julius Schwarzwälder, transcript, 2025, pp. 8–27.

Essays

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Schönheitskalküle. Was passiert, wenn wir Schönheit berechnen lassen”. form, vol. 299/300, 2023, pp. 62–69.

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Anstumpfen, Auffransen”. Pocket Crumbs, edited by Paula Heinrich, Marina Köstel, Evelyn Roh, 2022, S. 99–125.

Reviews

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Isabell Lorey – Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory”. LSE Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2023.

Schwarzwälder, Julius. “Matthew DelSesto – Design and the Social Imagination”. form, vol. 298, p. 140.

Teaching experience

Winter 2025/26: „Technology and Perceptual Change“. MA Aesthetics, Goethe University Frankfurt.

Summer 2025: „What Are Vibes, and What Do They Do?“. MA Aesthetics, Goethe University Frankfurt.