Guest Lecturer: Alexandra Colligs, University of Kassel

A Different Story of Reason

In my current research project I will pursue the question of the extent to which the failure of
liberation (as stated by Theodor W. Adorno and recently Christoph Menke) is connected to a genealogy of reason in which not only domination over nature but also social domination remains fundamentally inscribed. Following the Odyssey chapter of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, I would like to propose a model of reason becoming reasonable that does not only refer to the “remembrance of nature within the subject” but can also incorporate the social division of labor, through which domination over nature remains mediated. Only when reason becomes aware of its own materialist history, not only as the history of the domination of nature, but also as the history of social domination - so my thesis - it can become a different reason, the reason of liberation.