Freibaduniversität Mai 2007

DIE FREIBAD-SAISON IST ERÖFFNET!

On Actualisation.
Vortrag im Rahmen der Ausstellung der Gruppe ›Chto Delat?‹ im in Hamburg.

In my talk I will focus on the philosophical notion of ›actuality‹, as it has been developed in contrast to the categorical terms ›possibility‹ and ›reality‹, mainly by Aristotle. In the twentieth-century Ernst Bloch translated this configuration of actuality-possibility-reality into a keyword of a critical theory of history. Whereas in Bloch’s thinking this configuration stands for a strong utopian perspective, i.e. for the very potentiality of mankind, Walter Benjamin has argued for a perspective in the other direction, the past; that is to say, whereas Bloch is principally concerned with the category of possibility, Benjamin stressed the complex of actuality, the actual, and actualisation, thus referring the dialectical implications of a historical past, that neither is finished and sheltered, nor can simply be recovered and »relived«. Thereby actualisation has to be considered as both, a problem of historical concepts such as »progress«, »regress«, or »repetition«, and a problem of the narrative, archaeological and genealogical approaches to history. Not at least here we enter the realm of arts and artist production; like so, I will conclude my remarks on actualisation with two questions: To what extend can art be a method, literally a practise of actualisation? And is possible to actualise the past through the arts (as art-history)?

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