'Our positions are complementary, not in conflict!' – Recognizing complementarity offers an attractive model for the coexistence of different knowledges, systems, and cultures. However, different positions rarely simply add up like pieces in a puzzle to provide a full, harmonizing picture. The pieces usually seem to be too large and it requires violence to make them fit – for instance, by constructing others as a complement that provides just what one misses – or to make them compatible where they overlap. Instead of being visualizable in terms of a jigsaw puzzle, the principle of complementarity such as it was introduced by Niels Bohr in order to address the apparent particle-wave duality...

Self-proclaimed liberal and pluralist Western states happily turn to gender and sexual politics in order to demonstrate their presumed progressiveness. They find support from some parts of feminist and LGBTI activism that regard (neo)liberal state and diversity policies instrumental for achieving integration and recognition. Such alliances have recently been criticized for fostering new social divisions and endorsing occidentalist and sometimes racist premises. Debates around this critique have tended to reproduce the political figure of antagonism, polarizing between dominant white middle class and various minoritized positions. This lecture series seeks instead to bring to the fore the...

In a series of readings and literary soirées initiated by Agnese Grieco, the ICI seeks to conjure up in a variety of ways the notion of tension of its inaugural core project, exploring it critically as well as making it experiencable.

The aim is to make old and new, known and unknown texts meet within the free and flexible context of a dramaturgical montage.

In sports, “dream match“ refers to an encounter of two opponents in which a rare combination of competitiveness and difference promises a tantalizing game. With its series Spannungsübungen, the ICI aims at enabling such dream matches in the cultural and intellectual fields. The objective of this round table series is to address basic tensions of the present within a relaxed setting. The name “Spannungsübungen” refers to the inaugural core project “Tension/Spannung” of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. It also aims at marking a divergence from mass media's stagings of tensions. Fundamental differences are to be displayed without dramatizing them, exploring ways of productively and...

Zu den zu allen Zeiten regen politischen und kulturellen Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Italien zählte stets auch ein intensiver philosophischer Ideenaustausch. Doch waren die emphatische Entdeckung Gramscis auf deutscher Seite sowie der Autoren der Weimarer Zeit bis hin zu Habermas auf italienischer Seite die letzten Höhepunkte dieses Dialogs. In beiden Ländern ist die philosophische Reflexion weitergegangen, ohne dass sich neue Berührungspunkte gebildet hätten. Es fand eine langjährige Entfremdung statt, die es in unseren Augen wert ist, überwunden zu werden. In dieser Reihe präsentieren sich Vertreter der italienischen Gegenwartsphilosophie einem...

If tension is produced by intertwined opposite drives then corpses undoubtedly represent objects engendering great tension. They both horrify and draw us under their peculiar spell. A series of events in the first couple of months of 2010 will investigate from an intercultural perspective the specific tensions connected to the corpse in contemporary art. In order to underline the thematic relatedness of the events, we have assembled these events under the title “Under the Spell of Corpses.”