On Participation: Anatomy of a Promise, with Prof. Dr. Juliane Prade-Weiss

On Participation: Anatomy of a Promise

Participation is a popular buzzword. However, there appears to be an under-addressed ambivalence: on the one hand, participation is the idea and emphatic promise at the heart of liberal democracy, digital media, and consumer capitalism. On the other hand, participation can be an eminent threat to democratic principles and, more fundamentally, human life, when people participate in acts of political or mass violence—a phenomenon that is, as such, by no means under-researched. Yet the two inquiries hardly ever overlap. This is surprising because it is the same features that make participation a promise and a threat. My talk will scrutinize an array of perspectives from different disciplines that allow to understand what makes the promise of participation inviting, and turn to one of Elfriede Jelinek’s most recent texts (Angabe der Person, 2022) which points out how the mediated promise of participation takes a sinister turn when the promise remains unreflected.

Juliane Prade-Weiss is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. 2019-20 she has been a European Union Marie-Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Vienna University with the project on Complicity, 2017–19 she has been a DFG research fellow at Yale University to complete her habilitation, published with Bloomsbury as Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining (2020). She is author of several articles on complicity in mass violence commemoration in German, Czech, and Russian literature, and one of the PIs in the multidisciplinary research project “Discourses of Mass Violence in Comparison”, www.lmu.de/discoursesofmassviolence