Podcasts about european graduate school egs

On the heels of the outbreak of the tumultuous student movement in 1967, workers' uprisings erupted throughout Italy, bringing the struggle from the factories into the streets in a revolutionary movement that culminated in the "Hot Autumn" of 1969. This is the story of the rise of the New Left in Italy and the wave of reaction to it that set the stage for the Years of Lead. Includes interviews with Alberto Pantaloni, PhD in Historical Sciences and Documents, co-editor of Historia Magistra, and author of La dissoluzione di Lotta continua e il movimento del '77 and 1969: L'assemblea operai studenti: Una storia dell'autunno caldo, both recently published through Derive Approdi. Emanuela Scarpellini, Professor of Modern History at the University of Milan, Italy. She is the author of several books, including Material Nation: A Consumer's History of Modern Italy (2011) and Food and Foodways in Italy from 1861 to the Present (Palgrave, 2016). Michael Hardt, a political philosopher and literary theorist, best known for three books he co-authored with Antonio Negri: Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Commonwealth (2009). The trilogy, in particular its first volume—Empire—has often been hailed as the “Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century.” Michael Hardt is a professor of literature at Duke University and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Steve Wright, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University and author of Storming Heaven and The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context and Militancy in Operaismo. Table of Contents 0.00: Introduction 6.25: Classe operaia 10.00: Migration and Labor Relations 22.00: Avola Massacre 24.00: Introducing the Pisa Kids 34.00: Marzotto Uprising 39.00: 1968: The Breakout Year 42.00: Far-Right Entryism 44.30: The Veneto Group 53.00: The Veneto and Emilia Collaboration 57.00: The Roman Students 1.00.00: Battipaglia Massacre 1.05.25: Birth of La Classe 1.09.10: The Battle of Corso Traiano and the Creation of Lotta Continua 1.18.50: The Hot Autumn 1.21.35: Class War 1.29.00: The Struggle Outside the Factories 1.36.27: The Origin of the Red Brigades Works Cited Cazzullo, Aldo. I ragazzi che volevano fare rivoluzione: 1968-1978: storia di Lotta Continua. Milan: Mondadori, 2015. Edwards, Phil. "More work! Less pay!": Rebellion and repression in Italy, 1972–77. Manchester University Press, 2013. Keach, William. "What do we want? Everything!": 1969: Italy's “Hot Autumn," International Socialist Review, Issue #67. Lumley, Robert. States of emergency: Cultures of revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. New York: Verso, 1990. Palazzo, David P. The "Social Factory" In Postwar Italian Radical Thought From Operaismo To Autonomia" (2014). CUNY Academic Works. Pantaloni, Alberto. 1969: L'assemblea operai studenti: Una storia dell'autunno caldo. Roma: Derive Approdi, 2020. Sannucci, Corrado. Lotta Continua: Gli uomini Dopo. Milan: fuori|onda, 2012. Scarpellini, Emanuela. Italian Fashion since 1945: a Cultural History. Springer International Publishing, 2019. Scavino, Marco. Potere operaio: La storia. La teoria. Vol. 1. Roma: Derive Approdi, 2018. Senti Le Rani Che Canto. https://sites.google.com/site/sentileranechecantano/cronologia Thirion, Marie. La fabbriche della rivoluzione: discorsi e rappresentazioni del potere operaio nelle riviste di Pisa, Marghera e Torino, Dissertation. Università degli Studi di Padova and Université Grenoble Alpes, 2017. Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven. London: Pluto Press, 2017. Wright, Steve. The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context and Militancy in Operaismo. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

Fan of the show? https://www.patreon.com/newleftradio (Support us on Patreon)! World renowned leftist philosopher Slavoj Žižek joins for a sweeping and wide ranging conversation on the urgency of this moment as we struggle through COVID-19 while trying to cling to failed paradigms. In a world where the status quo realizes that the old way must give way to the new, there is little action being taken to transition to what Žižek calls the “communism of necessity”. How can the left win in the face of a century of losses? How do we battle against the losses of the working class to the politics of the right? What is to be done? About his new book Heaven In Disorder As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos. Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” The contemporary relevance of Mao's observation depends on whether today's catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself. Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj Žižek's new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond. Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and—above all—an urgent, “wartime” communism. https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/heaven-in-disorder/ (Buy the book here) About Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” He grew up in in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was part of the former Yugoslavia. The regime's more permissive, albeit “pernicious,” policies allowed for Žižek's exposure to Western theory and culture, in particular film, English detective novels, German Idealism, French structuralism, and Jacques Lacan. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master's degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism. He then went to Paris, along with Mladen Dolar, to study Lacan under Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan's son-in-law and disciple). During this time in Paris, from 1981–85, Žižek completed another dissertation on the work of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke through a Lacanian lens. After his return to Slovenia, he became more politically active writing for , a weekly newspaper, co-founding the Slovenian Liberal Demorcratic Party, and running for one of four seats that comprised the collective Slovenian presidency... Support this podcast

Avital Ronell (b. 1952) is the Jacques Derrida Chair and professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at New York University. Her research and theoretical contributions extend across the fields of literary studies, philosophy, feminist theory, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, ethics, and performance art. Among Avital Ronell’s significant works are: Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (ed. Diane Davis, 2007), Fighting Theory (with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Catherine Porter, 2010), Schriften zur Literatur: Essays von Goethe bis Kafka (trans. Marc Blankenburg, 2012), and Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012). Become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PARCMEDIA Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Vince_EmanueleFollow Us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1713FranklinSt/Follow Us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parcmedia/?... #PARCMedia is a news and media project founded by two USMC veterans, Sergio Kochergin & Vince Emanuele. They give a working-class take on issues surrounding politics, ecology, community organizing, war, culture, and philosophy.

Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. August 3rd, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought. Saas-Fe, Switzerland

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock's famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott's papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels' books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Slavoj Zizek talking about the explicit, truth, rules, politics, Mel Gibson, society, race, racism, antisemitism; lecturing and developing a psychoanalysis of culture and societies. Public open lecture for the students of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies … Continue reading →

Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer. Symposion in memoriam Friedrich Kittler | Symposium Fr, 19.10.2012 – Sa, 20.10.2012, ZKM_Medientheater Der Vortrag nimmt das MITTELMEER in seiner wörtlichen Bedeutung als gedanklichen Spielball auf und diskutiert dessen mediale Qualität. Verbindungen von hellenistischem und arabisch-islamischem Denken kommen dabei ebenso zur Sprache wie der Versuch des Katalanen und Mallorikaners Ramon Llull, die drei monotheistischen Buchreligionen, die die mächtigsten dieser Welt sind, über symbolische Maschinen kommunikativ zu integrieren. Siegfried Zielinski ist Professor für Medientheorie mit dem Schwerpunkt Archäologie & Variantologie der Künste und der Medien an der Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, Michel‐Foucault‐Professor für Medienarchäologie & Techno‐Kultur an der European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee, Leiter des Vilém‐Flusser‐Archivs an der UdK Berlin, Gründungsrektor der Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (1994‐2000). Verfasser u.a. der Bücher Veit Harlan, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 1981 ; Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders, Berlin, Spiess, 1985; Audiovisionen, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1989; Archäologie der Medien, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 2002 und Herausgeber der 5‐ bändigen Reihe VARIANTOLOGY – On Deep Time RelaDons Between Arts, Sciences, Technologies, Köln, König, 2005‐2011. In seinem Lebenswerk hat Medientheoretiker Friedrich Kittler (1943−2011), die Geschichte der Dichtung, der Philosophie, ja der Kultur als solche vom Kopf auf die Füße ihrer technischen und vortechnischen Medien gestellt. Was Aufschreibesysteme für die Literatur, was Befehlssätze für programmierbare Maschinen, das ist den Göttern das elementarste Medium im lateinischen Wortsinn von elementa: Buchstaben. Das Symposion »Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer«, noch zu Lebzeiten von dem deutschen Medientheoretiker Friedrich Kittler selbst vorbereitet, widmet sich dieser Hypothese. Wie bestimmen die Kontakte, Konkurrenzen, Innovationen der verschiedenen Schriften und Alphabete seit der frühesten Antike rund ums Mittelmeer die zukünftigen Geschicke des Abendlands? Seit dem Neolithikum gibt es im Mittelmeerraum Kulturen, deren Alphabete eng an Verwaltung und Handel, Befehlsflüsse und Gesetze gebunden sind, aber auch eine Kultur, die ihr Alphabet aus dem Schreiben von Musik und Gesangsvortrag, Vers und Götteranrufung schöpft. Einige Schriften des Mittelmeers − in Keilen, Bildschriftzeichen, Silbenschriften dargestellt − sind graphisch orientiert. Sie schreiben von den Worten der Sprache meist Konsonanten oder Konsonantengruppen. Andere, wie das griechische Alphabet, das als erstes der Welt auch Vokale schreibt, sind phonetisch orientiert und damit prinzipiell auf jede Sprache übertragbar. Mächtige Gesetzesgötter einerseits strafen und befehlen. Der Verkehr mit ihnen wird gesetzlich geregelt. Andererseits gibt es Götter, die an- und abwesend sind. Der Verkehr mit ihnen wird nicht verwaltet, sondern begangen. Wie sind diese verschiedenen Ausgestaltungen der Götterwelten in den Schriftsystemen widergespiegelt?