As a group, we seek to develop critical approaches to established concepts of linear, progress-oriented temporality. To this end, we ask the following questions: What is the relationship between the experience of time and democracy as a way of life (Lebensform)? How are our experiences of modernity and expectations of democracy shaped by our understanding of time? Can the dominant logics of modernity and progress be challenged by engaging with time and temporalities?

Departing from a historical approach to modernity, we want to explore disruptions of linear time, futures, and contingencies. In doing so, we draw on perspectives from cultural and literary studies, political science, sociology, and philosophy. Texts by Baruch de Spinoza, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze serve as our initial theoretical foundation.

Our shared interest in temporalities stems from the individual dissertation projects. More specifically, discourses of rejuvenation in print media cause a state of temporal ambivalence, with middle-aged and elderly men oscillating between past and future self-conceptions. This dual experience fosters a sense of community, allowing them to negotiate age-related anxieties and express hopes for temporal alternatives. Contemporary literary retellings are inherently shaped by questions of temporality through their engagement with canonized texts. In particular, through aesthetic transformations of content and form, as well as the relocation of the narrative into different temporal contexts, they allow for new configurations of past, present, and future. Temporality also plays a crucial role in an experience of life and the world in the context of HIV infection. This is not only because infection meant a near-certain death sentence in the first years of the epidemic (and in many cases still does today), but also because of the dissonance between queer and terminally ill experiences of time on the one hand, and normative notions of progress, as well as an economization of time and the temporality of grief on the other.

We always welcome suggestions, proposals for collaboration, or other inquiries.

Members: Pauline Scholz, Alican Şimşek, Paula Höhn, Julia Schade