The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

The Discontent in Culture - A Unifying Element in the World of Today?

Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Fritz Peter Kirsch (Wien)

> Speakers

ABSTRACT: Freud's book, The Discontent in Culture (1930), can brought into connection with an epoch shaped by doubts about the supremacy and future chances of Europe. These doubts are being revived today in another context and for other reasons. Often the idea of "anything goes," as an alleged triumph of the freedom and pleasure principle in Postmodernism, is being made responsible for the actual world weariness (Zygmunt Bauman) A group formed around Pierre Bourdieu (Raisons d'agir with the Charta 2000), which would like to ward off the attack of "American" technocracy on the European social states and thus the "discontent in the neo-liberal culture." In the light of the controversies over the Clash of Civilizations (by Huntington zu Bassam Tibi), one could, however, also ask whether the planetary perspectives which today's cultural concept opens, could not be considered an occasion to analyze more consistently the real struggle for dominance and survival, which has prevailed up to now between stronger and weaker power centers and power zones, this struggle which unites the fine arts with politics.

CONTRIBUTIONS FOR SECTIONS

• Jens Aderhold (TU Chemnitz): Probleme mit der Vergegenwärtigung von Gesellschaft  [ABSTRACT]
• Hakan Gürses (Wien): Kultur oder Kritik?  [ABSTRACT]
• Martina Kaller-Dietrich (Wien): Kultur erinnern oder vorschreiben?  [ABSTRACT]
• Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Vienna), A New Reading of Freud's "Discontent in Culture"  [ABSTRACT]
• Hans Schelkshorn (Vienna), Discontent in Which Modernity?  [ABSTRACT]
• Jost Schneider (Bochum): Psychische Globalisierung? Vom Projekt einer Weltliteratur zur Realität der Weltunterhaltungsliteratur  [ABSTRACT]
• Franz Martin Wimmer (Wien): Differenz als Defizienz und als Chancer  [ABSTRACT]

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES

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