Cécile
Wajsbrot

In his 1929 novella Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann tells the story of a hypnosis show in an Italian spa town where a German family on vacation experiences rising nationalistic hostility. The magician’s story is often understood as a metaphor for fascism, as Mussolini had already been in power for several years and the Nazi party had begun to dominate Germany. In fact, dictatorship and hypnosis have something in common: the desire to freeze time, to prevent any movement. The talk will begin with the figure of Medusa, who paralyses anyone looking at her, and will analyse the hypnotic gaze and its history in art and literature, as well as its possible implications in the politics of our current times. How can we break free from the spell of the hypnotic gaze — for example, in the context of the climate crisis —, from the paradoxical feeling that time is ‘out of joint’?

Cécile Wajsbrot writes mostly novels, but also sometimes essays and radio dramas, exploring new approaches to novel writing. One of her latest novels, Nevermore, was published in both France and Germany in 2021 and deals with the process of translation. Her most recent publication is the novel Plein Ciel (2024), which was released in German as Offener Himmel (2026). It explores an unsolved air crash. She has received several awards for her writing and translation work. In her seminars at universities in Berlin, Dresden, and Innsbruck, she has explored, among other themes, how climate and natural disasters are depicted in literature. Since 2017, she has been a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, and since 2019, a member of the Akademie der Künste. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy by the University of Duisburg-Essen. She lives in both Paris and Berlin.

ICI Berlin

‘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?

The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.