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Office Hours Fall 2024: M 2:30–3:30pm.
News:
The Deaths of Franz Kafka: On November 7, 2024, a student roundtable responded to my monograph Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit.
Spring 2025 Course Offerings:
Heidegger [01:470:355:01 • 16:470:672:01 • 01:730:316:01]: Martin Heidegger counts among the most impactful but also the most problematic thinkers of the 20th century. His 1927 magnum opus Being and Time revolutionized the history of philosophy and became a foundational text for existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, object-oriented ontology, and other philosophical movements. Heidegger’s innovative ideas and terminology, the way in which his thinking attunes itself to language, and his critique of modern technology have been widely influential. At the same time, the philosopher from the Black Forest pledged allegiance to Hitler’s regime as early as 1933 and remained a member of the Nazi party until 1945. In his private notebooks from that period, we can find anti-Semitic remarks and suppositions. Heidegger’s case thus forces us to confront how we should approach the archive of a politically discredited author. The course will introduce students to Heidegger’s ideas and their aftermath, relevant moments in his biography, and the ethical and political discussions surrounding them.
The Poetry of Indie Music [01:470:304:01 • 01:195:314:01]: Surrender to the sound! This course embarks on a sonic journey through the past 25 years of indie music, charting the evolution of distinctive musical genres and subgenres that have shaped the landscape of pop culture. A special emphasis will lie on the practice of songwriting, as we will subject a broad selection of songs to close reading and hermeneutic analysis. Ideally, we will discover that the engagement with indie music is akin to an encounter with poetry and that song lyrics offer a unique experience of language and expression. Artists to be studied include Elliott Smith, Jack White, The National, Okkervil River, Neutral Milk Hotel, Modest Mouse, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, Conor Oberst, Fiona Apple, Sharon van Etten, Adrianne Lenker, Ezra Furman, Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Michelle Zauner, and Mitski.
Kafka Transformed: In September 2024, Carolin Duttlinger and her team at Oxford University organized a conference commemorating a century of receiving, reworking, and recasting Kafka’s writings. I was honored to speak about the covert relationship between Kafka and Bob Dylan.
Serena Lückhoff and I are planning a seminar for the 2025 gathering of the American Comparative Literature Association:
The Austrian radio station “Radio Orange” recently aired a segment on the launch of my book Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit (“Kafka and the Problem of Finitude,” Sonderzahl 2024):
In dieser Folge geht es um das neue Buch des Germanisten, Philosophen und aka-Fellow 2024 Dominik Zechner. Mit der Frage nach der Endlichkeit in Kafkas Texten adressiert er darin einen verschwiegenen Hauptschauplatz von dessen Literatur. Endlichkeit wird hier nicht als Thema unter anderen verstanden, sondern als das inhärente Problem von Kafkas Schreiben, insofern es die Produktion und Wirkungsweise von Bedeutung und deren Lesbarkeit betrifft. Mit Formulierlust und Witz wird dieser Essay zu einer erstaunlich unbeschwerten Betrachtung über den Zusammenhang von Sprache und Endlichkeit, Tod und Bedeutung.
The program can be accessed here.
In the Summer 2024, I served as the first ever Fellow in Residence hosted by the Arbeitskreis Kulturanalyse (“Working Group Cultural Analysis”) in Vienna, Austria:
On June 19, 2024, my new monograph Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit (“Kafka and the Problem of Finitude”) was presented at the University of Vienna. The event was cosponsored by aka: Arbeitskreis Kulturanalyse, Sonderzahl Verlag, the City of Vienna, and the German Department at the University of Vienna. I am thankful to everyone who participated!
On May 31, 2024, my book The Violence of Reading: Literature & Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain was the subject of a virtual roundtable featuring speakers Ian Fleishman (Penn), Michael Levine (Rutgers), Kristina Mendicino (Brown), Jan Mieszkowski (Reed), and Emily Trujillo (Rutgers).
I am very excited to announce that my monograph The Violence of Reading: Literature & Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain has been published! The book puts the reader’s body under duress as it explores various forms of linguistic pain.
Voices:
“This book is provocative, compelling, and beautifully written. Zechner has transformed the pain of reading into a very pleasurable experience.”
—Elissa Marder, Professor of Comparative Literature and French, Emory University
“Dominik Zechner writes: ‘Instead of putting up a resistance to language as such, pain divests linguistic structures of their unreliable secondary functions’ – communication, representation, etc. – ‘and discloses an occurrence of language divided from the constraints that subjugate its experience under the supremacy of phenomenal representation.’ In other words, pain is poetry. As every Tumblr girl already knows.”
—Olivia Kan-Sperling, Assistant Editor, The Paris Review
On April 5, 2024, I facilitated the workshop “Justice in Language: Literature and the Construction of Race,” together with Stephanie Galasso, in which we discussed the relationship between race and language in texts by Toni Morrison and Sharon Dodua Otoo.
My article “Törleß and the Scene of Reading” appeared in a special issue on Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis with the journal humanities.
The article reads Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless, 1906) as a novel of the institution (Campe) in which diverse forms of violence are intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel aims at the depiction of sado-masochistic transgressions, my argument focuses on a reading scene that mediates the novel’s various potentials of violence: only when Törleß reads Kant does it become clear which violence and which pain are meant by Musil’s text. The experience of reading becomes a masochistic act in the course of which the pleasure of the text is recast in terms of a negative textual jouissance. Musil’s novel, in turn, becomes readable not as an exhibition of schoolboys in disgrace, but as an exploration of the violent structure of practical reason itself.
The extended German version of this essay has recently been published in the collected volume Robert Musil im Spannungsfeld zwischen Psychologie und Phänomenologie, edited by Artur R. Boelderl and Barbara Neymeyr.
Out now: Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology
co-edited with Kristina Mendicino, with contributions by Michael Auer, Christine Frank, Irina Kogan, Michael G. Levine, Natalie Lozinski-Veach, Kristina Mendicino, Jan Mieszkowski, Pasqual Solass, Simone Stirner, Sarah Stoll, Naomi Waltham-Smith, and Dominik Zechner.
Paul Celan’s works dwell on the threshold between the extremes of poetic expression and philosophical reflection. The divergent literary and critical idioms that have marked Celan’s writing—and that Celan’s writing has come to mark for others (Hamacher, Derrida, Szondi)—thus call for a new philology. This philology cannot be situated within presupposed genres or fields but rather explores the ways in which poetic and philosophical ambitions meet in texts by, and on, Celan. The first part of Thresholds, Encounters (“Ex-posing the Poem”) speaks to issues of history, ecology, and aurality; the second part (“Language Dislodged”) delves into Celan’s articulations of encounter, positionality, and translation. Throughout, contributors probe the consequences of Celan’s poetry for thinking and writing, while inviting readers from different disciplinary spaces to further pace out the liminal zones opened by his oeuvre.
Praise:
“This book stakes its ‘claim of philology’ by estranging preexisting critical positions on Celan and fathoming his multivocal idioms as if for the first time.”
—Critical Inquiry
“Beautiful and very open in its structure, Thresholds, Encounters is an invitation to dialogue.”
—Ilit Ferber, author of Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language
“The volume demonstrates an exemplary fidelity to a practice of philology that is attentive to language’s capacity for ungrounding its propositions. It would not be an exaggeration to describe these performances of reading as tours de force.”
—Jason Groves, author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary
Out now: parallax 28.3 “Initiations: The Pitfalls of Beginning”
co-edited with Kristina Mendicino, with essays by Saul Anton, Ian Balfour, Jörg Kreienbrock,
Kristina Mendicino, Jan Mieszkowski, Charles de Roche, Adam R. Rosenthal, & Dominik Zechner
