Robert Ziegelmann is a philosopher specializing in critical theory, social and political philosophy. His PhD at Humboldt University Berlin focused on the role of utopian anticipation in left-Hegelian social theory (supervisors: Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates). Prior to the Rosenzweig Minerva Center, he was a fellow at the Hannover Institute of Philosophical Research. Undergraduate and master’s degrees from Heidelberg University. Study and research visits at Paris-Nanterre, Tel Aviv University and Gaston Berger University. Awards include full undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, as well as the Essay Prize from the Hannover Institute of Philosophical Research.
Publications on:
- naturalizing social phenomena as a strategy of social critique (in the work of Theodor W. Adorno)
- the relation of genesis and validity (according to Alfred Sohn-Rethel)
- how to deal with authoritarian aversion to “facts” (following Hannah Arendt and, again, Adorno)
Current and future projects involve the following claims:
- It is useful to think of societies in analogy both to individual persons and to biological organisms.
- Contrary to what the current political climate suggests, the critique of morality can be progressive – and is actually important.
-In response to the climate crisis, we need more democracy, not less.
Project at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center: “Immanent Critique of Everyday Life”
In its approach to everyday life, critical theory is committed to the method of “immanent critique.” Current accounts of this method, however, suffer from a normativistic bias. They focus on norms supposedly already contained within everyday practices. This leads to an idealization of everyday life and makes its radical transformation unintelligible. In my project, I turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s “Minima Moralia” in order to address these shortcomings. Adorno’s method differs significantly from what many accounts of immanent critique suggest. In his view, the norms contained within ordinary life have to be overcome just as much as the practices from which they are derived. The key to his alternative methodology is the idea of a “standpoint of redemption” – a concept Adorno extracts from Franz Kafka’s literary works (drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s respective readings of Kafka). Kafka, Adorno argues, succeeds in presenting the everyday in such a way as to make it lose its self-evidence. Rather than affirm the ordinary, Kafka seeks to defamiliarize and thus disempower it.