Keren Shahar is a post-doctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Matanel Bar Ilan forum of the Jewish Philosophy Department at Bar Ilan University since 2022. Her research focuses on political philosophy, aesthetics, and their interrelations in continental philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her Ph.D dissertation from Tel Aviv University (2022) is titled: "The Space of The Sensible: The Aesthetic and the Political in Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière.” Currently, her research is engaged with the concept of hope, and is specifically aimed at developing a conception of immanent hope inspired by modernist Jewish-German and French post-structuralist thought. Keren also acts as editorial coordinator for “Iyyun: The Jerusalem Journal of Philosophy”.

At the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, I plan to delve deeper into the formulation of an immanent concept of hope, grounded in Ernst Bloch’s and Martin Buber’s philosophy in which I find a framework for a non-nostalgic understanding of hope that is relevant to our time. Immanent hope is not directed toward a distant future or eternal good, but lies in the multiplicity of possibilities inherent in the everyday present. Tying hope to the concept of the everyday raises questions about how we can think about the everyday in political terms. Although all questions of politics and every political dispute are closely related to everyday life, taking the opposite direction is less trivial: that is, it is not obvious in what sense the structure of the everyday can be conceived of as having revolutionary or conservative potential. Does the everyday contain the spontaneous power of life that every political structure enslaves or tames? Or is it rather that the everyday obscures some pure essence or political horizon? Following these questions, alongside research into the philosophies of Ernst Bloch and Martin Buber, can not only tie hope to the philosophical concept of the everyday, but also connect it, as Buber argus, to this hour - to the actual reality we inhabit.