Cassirer Seminar. Niklaus Largier (UC Berkeley). Meister Eckhart, Medieval Mysticism, and Musil’s Man Without Qualities.
Niklaus Largier
Lecture
Forms of Perception, Figures of Production: Cassirer, Warburg, Auerbach
Friday, November 13, 1-3 PM
Zoom Meeting ID: 948 2005 1599
Seminar
Professor Largier discusses repercussions of medieval mysticism, Meister Eckhart in particular, in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities in the context of an ongoing seminar (R. Campe). Everyone is welcome to join the discussion. Further information is available on the website of the German Department (Events).
Tuesday, November 10, 1:30 – 3:30 PM
Zoom Meeting ID: 948 2005 1599
The reading the class is preparing for the meeting is as follows: two essays by Niklaus Largier, Mysticism, Modernity, and the Invention of Aesthetic Experience; and: A Sense of Possibility. The reading from Meister Eckart is On Detachment (all attached here). The reference chapters from Musil’s novel are: Book I, chs. 30-32 (the major’s wife); Book II, 11-12 (Ulrich’s library); and Book II, 57-58 (Ulrich and Agathe, the last chapters submitted and withdrawn by Musil).
For the visitors this is only meant in terms of information. Everyone is very welcome to attend to listen in or participate
Niklaus Largier, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley, is an internationally leading expert on medieval mysticism. He is the editor of the standard edition of Meister Eckart’s works and author of pathbreaking studies on the philosophical and cultural aspects of medieval mysticism as well as its modern reception. He focuses on meditation as a practice and the plasticity of the human senses in religious, philosophical, aesthetic and political contexts.
Among his numerous books are In Praise of the Whip. A Cultural History of Arousal (Zone Books 2007), Diogenes der Kyniker (1998), Kunst der Begehrens. Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Begehren (2007), Spekulative Sinnlichkeit. Spekulation und Kontemplation im Mittelalter (2018), Zeit der Möglichkeit. Robert Musil, Georg Lukács und die Kunst des Essays (2016).