This presentation probes changing sexual cultures across a life span to traffic in the voyeuristic pleasures offered by a glimpse into the erotic life of another. Organized like a glossary, the presentation pairs a word or phrase with a brief affirmation that explores the ways sexual meaning is encoded in language. Written as abbreviated assertions rather than precise definitions, these are combined with autobiographical fragments that exemplify the ways gender, culture, age, geography, and the queer contours of a sexual life are revealed in real world exchanges.
The ICI Berlin is an independent research centre located in Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg. It defines itself through a series of interlocking core projects that are designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions of cultural inquiry. The projects are undertaken in collaboration with an international group of twelve two-year postdoctoral fellows. For the focus AutoReduction concluding our core project Reduction, we are looking for a responsible, reliable, and committed Research Coordinator (Part Time 50%).
The symposium Diagrams Between Gestures and Spaces is dedicated to exploring the material appearance and internal mechanism of diagrams. The first part will consist of close-reading exercises. Participants will look at and discuss single diagrams from various disciplines, found in literature or self-made by the participants, in order to account for their formal strategies, possible variations and conceptual consequences.
This workshop offers an opportunity to observe and reflect on diagrams, considering their materiality, visual tactics, and formal mechanisms. Through a shared, multidisciplinary exercise in ‘close reading’ and ‘slow looking’, participants will explore the open forms and conceptual possibilities of symmetry and reversibility, repetition and separation, cracks and connections, compasses, graph paper, dotted lines, arrows, and more.
Mysticism has always involved encounters with scale: the self dissolving into something larger, the vast becoming intimate, experience that overflows the boundaries of the individual and the measurable. It is telling that Evelyn Underhill referred to mysticism as ‘experience in its most intense form’.
Abyssal Apex: On Scale and scala in Christian Mysticism
Lecture, 25 Jun 2026, 19:00
In the history of Western Christian mysticism, height meets depth and scales collide. In this lecture, Kotva will be thinking about the coincidence of apex and abyss in selected manuals of mystical theology. While some manuals favour the image of the mind’s ascent, others emphasise its descent — but all speak of ‘stages’ (scalae) and step-by-step itineraries.
How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations — whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic ‘eras’ — belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies.
Organized by Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the ICI Berlin, in conjunction with the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy 2026.
