Events

The ICI Berlin is an independent, non-profit research centre. To accompany its ongoing research, it organizes public events on a wide range of topics and in different formats including lectures, performances, conferences, art events, and readings. It welcomes diverse audiences living in or passing through Berlin.

The ICI Core Project draws input from and is reflected in an accompanying lecture series. Other conferences and symposia represent collaborative initiatives of fellows and staff. Many more events are the product of cooperations with partner institutions and other research projects.

All events are open to the public and are usually free of charge. For semi-public workshops prior registration might be requested. Reservations are not possible, the ICI Berlin asks for your understanding that doors will close if the room gets overcrowded. The Institute’s facilities are wheelchair-friendly but their navigation might require some assistance; please contact Event Management ahead of your visit.

ICI events are frequently recorded and made available within the ICI Edition later on; the audience’s consent is presumed; individual recordings are not allowed. Video documentation not available on the ICI website might be part of ICI Library holdings and can be found through its catalogue.

Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes public events on a wide range of topics. Its core project draws input from and is reflected in an accompanying lecture series.

‘Shock and awe’ is typically a state of reduced capacity to act, move, or resist. Under very special conditions it can be experienced as vitalizing, but in the current conjuncture, it is most readily associated with military or terrorist strategies directed at foreign enemies or, more startingly, turned inward in the hands of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats. The effect of dumbfounding paralysis is even more potent with actions that appear themselves self-destructive: when subjects wilfully demolish what used to secure their prestige and power; when rising authoritarian regimes are supported in anticipatory obedience; or when climate change seems to be deliberately accelerated through arms and technology races. How can one not feel utterly disoriented, when it seems as if the world is so clearly oriented towards its own destruction?

To be sure, the stupefying paradox of self-destruction, which can be pushed toward an (onto)logical impossibility that collapses activity and passivity, subject and object, can be quickly dissolved by moving to smaller scales and stressing that those who destroy are not the same as those who are being destroyed, at least not in the short term. Yet, rather than restoring the apparent self-evidence of a rationality based on competitive self-assertion, it seems equally important to challenge it and show the manifold ways in which such rationality and its aggressivity can become self-destructive. Can one make productive the paradox of such a critique, which does not take an external position and instead proceeds from within, seeking to make the paradigm of self-assertion implode into more benign forms of autoreduction such as self-restraint and self-questioning? To what extent might stupefaction in the face of frenetic destruction also have to do with the possibility of recognizing in it a self-destructiveness that is turned outward and, in its denunciation, a conservative trope of patronizing normalization?