Tangentiality

Tuesday, 15 October 2024

13:00	Stefanie Heine & Holger Schulze	Introduction – Tangential Things, Tangential Affects: Beyond Entanglement
14:00	Caroline Bassett (Professor, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Digital Humanities, Faculty of English)	These Tangential Forms of Life: Thinking AI
14:40		Coffee Break
15:00	Kristin Veel (Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, IKK, Modern Culture)	The Tangentiality of House Dust
15:50	Jamie Stephenson (Postdoc, University of Leeds, Arts and Humanities Research Institute)	Tangentiality, Sound and the Aestheticization of the ‘Between’
16:30	Sound Performance with Pedro Oliveira (sound artist, Berlin)	Contiguity (or arriving without colliding)
18:00		Conference Dinner

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

09:30	Naomi Waltham-Smith (Professor, Oxford University, Musicology)	Off on a Political Tangent: Touching Stories and Glancing Blows
10:10	Johan Boemann Hansen (BA student, University of Copenhagen, Philosophy)	Tangentiality as a Queer Method of Production
10:50		Coffee Break
11:05	Johanne Gormsen Schmidt (Postdoc, University of Copenhagen, University of Southern Denmark, Nordic Studies)	Passing Wolfs in Contemporary Nordic Literature
11:45	Martina Leeker & Konstanze Schütze (Professor Leuphana University Lüneburg, Center for Digital Cultures and University of Cologne, Department of Art and Music & professor for Aesthetic Education and Art Mediation at University of Education Karlsruhe)	Care Lab Cologne. Radical Thoughts on Performing Care, or the Tangential Condition of Care
12:25		Lunch Break
13:45	Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky (Professor, LMU Munic, Sociology)	Tangentiality as failure? On Eigensinn vs. the sculptural body
14:25	Jessie Beier & Rémy Bocquillon (Assistant Professor, Concordia University Montréal, Art Education & Lecturer, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingoldstadt, Sociology)	Cursory Touches: Algorithmic Mediation as Tangential Conjuring
15:05		Coffee Break
15:25	Rune Gade (Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, IKK, Art History)	Soft as a Stone, Hard as a Rock: The Penis as Tangential Object in Contemporary Art
16:30	Reading and Panel Discussion with Katja Kullmann (author and journalist, Berlin)	The Singular Woman

Thurssday, 17 October 2024

09:00	John Paul Ricco (Professor, University of Toronto, Department of Art History and Comparative Literature)	The Photographer as Non-witness
09:40	Martin Fog Arndal (Postdoc, KU, German Studies)	Coleridge and the Separations of Touch
10:20		Coffee Break
10:35	Troels Andersen (PhD student, Humboldt University Berlin, KU, Literary Studies)	Browsing the Contemporary: A Tangential Approach to Literature
11:15	Matteo Kobza (PhD student, University of Zurich, Comparative Literature)	Losing Touch with Your Desk: Tangential Conceptions of Memory and Reading in Nicole Krauss’ Great House
11:55		Lunch break
13:30	Philippe P. Haensler (Postdoc, Brown University/University of Zurich, Comparative Literature)	‘lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense’: Tangentiality and Translation in Walter Benjamin
14:10	Charles de Roche (Privatdozent, University of Zurich, Comparative Literature)	From Representational to Perceptional Metrics: Metrical Tangentiality in F.G. Jünger, Nicolas Abraham and Charles Olson
14:50	Vanessa Franke (PhD student, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Graduiertenkolleg Medienanthropologie)	The Horizon as a Tangential Figure and Symbol of Embodied Cosmopolitanism
15:10		Coffee and Concluding Discussion
16:00		End of Conference

Caroline Bassett: These Tangential Forms of Life: Thinking AI

It is a commonplace that increasingly intelligent machines and humans are inching closer together. ‘They’ assume language, ‘we’ assume their machinic approaches to multiple forms of life (we calculate friends, extrapolate exam marks, make AI art, elaborate forms of bureaucratic stupidity informed by statistical abstraction as a mode of government, and all the rest). Finally, or in the last analysis, or so this trajectory suggests, convergence will be complete: they will be us, or us them. It’s not convincing, so let’s throw that story away, and consider instead, that what we are engaged in now, is a glancing relation: that we’re at a tangent and we shall diverge. The suggested paper explores this proposition with the intention of re-thinking AI futures, imagined, proposed, and possible. At its heart is a challenge to the unambitious assumptions that often underpin future visions, which latter are themselves chained to the principle of simulation, of the human by the machine, as the fixed principle of AI development. Breaking with simulation as a form of human machine relation, we can then consider tangential forms of multiple kinds of intelligent life; as dream, as possible, or at least as a means through which to think, through the fiction that intelligence does constitute life, about new forms of relation between alien and human agents of all kinds.

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Kristin Veel: The Tangentiality of House Dust

Dust is a material that represents the entanglement of our human bodies with our environment as our discarded skin cells and hair mix with the fibers and debris from our interior settings and the pollen and pollutants from the outdoors. In this way dust represents the most intimate and bodily entanglement with our resting places in the world – an embrace on the micro-scale between the dead skin cells from behind your left earlobe and the particles of car exhaust on your street. At the same time dust is also an intriguing figure for a tangential encounter – its ephemerality and the fact that we regularly remove it to continue to live fairly healthy lives without respiratory illnesses in the spaces we inhabit, makes the tangent also a useful figure for thinking about the relationality of dust. Dust might accumulate, but the dust we remove every week is also always different dust, renewed. This presentation tries to capture the temporality and relationality of house dust at the crossroad of entanglement and tangentiality by way of turning to American artist Allison Cortson’s “Dust Paintings” (2005-2011).

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Jamie Stephenson: On Ontological Ambience: Tangentiality, Sound and the Aestheticization of the ‘Between’

Driven by discontent with a certain hegemony of agency in Anthropocene discourses, this paper considers the concept of tangentiality (and its application), in tandem with my consonant notion of ontological ‘ambience’. I provide a critical perspective on Western thought’s tendency to privilege presence over absence, on the grounds that its perpetuates a problematic anthropological bias via a primarily visualist grammar. By employing ambience as an ontological starting place, my paper explores the reductive and problematic consequences of some canonical narratives, by aestheticizing the ‘between’ through an aesthetics of sound and the tangential.

Since Western philosophy’s inception, the metaphysical study of reality has been predicated on division. Be it the onto-hierarchical gulf between Heraclitean absence and Parmenidean presence, or between the former’s postulate of flux and Aristotelian substance, themes of ‘between’, of liminality and interstices, continue to pervade philosophical inquiry. Initiated by Descartes, and apotheosised in Kant, ontological realism has – since the Enlightenment – concerned itself with articulations of finitude, ‘between’ noumena and phenomena. Moreover, until the early to mid-twentieth century, this ‘between’ has been conveyed in an inherently scopic manner, and almost always phallocentrically, surreptitiously hierarchising the (male) human as arbiter of reality.

Tangentiality provides a productive means of rethinking this connective distance, in an expanded sense of Being as a force unrestricted to somatic, ‘bodily’ existence, thus disrupting Western thought’s vitacentrism. Similarly, a metaphysics of ambience reorients relationality in a manner that does not presuppose the ubiquity of Baradian entanglement, nor millennia-old distinctions between substance and process. Both offer a critical nexus in which to discuss post-entanglement ideas in excess of reductive human-nonhuman binarisms, pushing beyond oft-repeated tropisms of embodiment.

My paper explores these themes through contemporary expositions of Heidegger’s Mitsein (‘being-with’) and ‘the “between” [Zwischen]’, including the ‘continuous-discontinuity’ of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘touch’, Graham Harman’s ‘sensual noise’, and Florence Krall’s ‘ecotone’, with an explicit emphasis on Bracha Ettinger’s ‘matrixial borderspace’ as a critique of ‘feminine’ (sound) and ‘male’ (vision) tropes as applied to art theory and practice. In so doing I hope to sound out how the aesthetic and metaphysical registers of sonority might aid the discussion of tangential relations, providing novel alternatives to erroneous narratives of human exceptionalism.

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Naomi Waltham-Smith: Off on a Political Tangent: Touching Stories and Glancing Blows

Derrida’s book on – or more precisely, around, on the periphery of, at a tangent to – Nancy’s thought of touching is a meditation on storytelling. His narrative, he declares, will have “mythological overtones.” His “baroque composition” is, he hopes, a calculated if bashful response to the aporias of tact. If he is to “admit the inadmissible,” then storytelling – recounting the history of the philosophy of touch as a series of repeatedly touched-up little stories – is his only way forward. But this will be no path to thought, only the twists and turns of multiple detours. Derrida will constantly have to begin over again and can approach his object only through a series of asymptotic tangents. Far from cleanly separating tangentiality from entanglement, or relation from exclusion, the upshot of Derrida’s stories around Nancy and touch is that tangents are a little bound and a little unbound, as reticent as they can be pressing. The detours of storytelling, in Derrida’s tactful hands, are glancing blows that shatter limits in grazing them. Derrida’s tactics of reading is of philosophical and indeed of aesthetico-literary interest. I aim in this paper, however, to make the kiss that Derrida orchestrates between touch and storytelling itself touch (in a double kiss) on the recent flurry of interest in storytelling and “storylistening” in theories of public reason and participation. On the one hand, political actors have traditionally been inclined to brush off stories in favour of listening to more testable and reproducible forms of evidence. On the other hand, politicians know all too well how it is a well-chosen personal story that has more incisive power to cut through the noise. In politics, I argue, stories have an “impertinent pertinence” to borrow Derrida’s description of the tangent. At once only skating the surface, the baroque rationality of stories and listening to stories has a striking capacity to penetrate the public psyche. In a climate in which the arts are increasingly sidelined as tangential to the main (economic) incentives in politics – culture delimited as the affecting kiss of desire whose task is to cushion the blow of “hard times” without rebounding in a second strike of critique – or else are cordoned off, untouchable for all but the rich – in such haptologocentric Weather, the “telltale stories” put into motion via the arts “spell trouble” for not only metaphysical fantasies of immediate communion but also white-liberal political rationality, exposing their contingency.

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Johan Boemann Hansen: “Tangentiality as a Queer Method of Production”

I want to propose tangentiality as method of producing multiplicity, which holds itself open and complicates unequivocal or non-erratic readings – specifically by producing a textual multiplicity by interweaving, or cutting together-apart, text. It is a method which inherently seeks to create and un-/recover alliances – as well as disorientation as a queer(ing) affect/effect, and thereby un-/recover possibilities of (queer) readings, which can be productive for and in their queerness. The method’s grounding is in the ‘practical’ roots of deconstruction: the dismantling and building anew out of the dismantled parts.

By following the related concepts and motions of ‘transposition’, ‘signature’ and ‘queer use’, I will dwell on the tangentiality inherent therein while sketching it as a methodology of producing which might be seen as a ‘perverse methodology’ which upsets hegemonic academic epistemology and makes not one argument but a thousand or gives us a barrage of fleeting/flickering touches.

In being more transparent about the systems of thinking in which an interweaved have come to be, the friction and latent potential of much of theory’s contact zones can come into contact, as its text and textual qualities are ‘transposed’, ‘displaced’/‘moved’, and ‘reused’ into a new whole. Specters of the past are present, at the same time, the text that is interrogated and exposed also establishes a network of connections and can map its enduring effect in the present. At the same time the text can be said to exist only in the intersection of tangents which creates a vacuous and virtual zone of affinity, which can hold onto and bring forth grievable alliances across space-time.

Much of this can be seen in texts such as “Butterfly Kiss”, “Diffracting Diffraction”, and Clang. As well as by looking to the recent (artistic) research which have been concretised in the sound of the installation Trois milliard de pervers and the sculptures, or thought-forms, Surplus I; II; III; IV. All of which will be highlighted in various ways and which the text will be diffracted through.

In order to do all this faithfully, I will have to follow what I’m proposing and make an interweaved text, which thereby shows its own tangentiality. In doing this there will be an accumulation of tangentiality. This will leave the text concerned with the archive and archiving, and therefore the power structures inherent in tangentiality as a method of producing.

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Johanne Gormsen Schmidt: Passing Wolfs in Contemporary Nordic Literature

Animals, including the question of wildness that cling to them, are a current topic of fascination in literature. In recent literary representations, animals tend to be marked by a conspicuous undertone of impermeability to or separation from the human mind and culture – a tendency that might be seen as a way to reflect on the extensive rewilding projects that are now taking place in the global north and put the complexity of the human-nature relation to the fore. Especially the return of the wolf in nature has engendered heated public debates around protection of the natural environment (Carell, Phildius, Quistgaard). The wolf has been keeping man company since the dawn of human culture. It is arguably the species that is the most entangled in our own history. At the beginning of the 20^th century, this entanglement had come to a point at which the wolf had completely disappeared as a wild animal living independent of humans in North Europe, and its transformation into a dog, man’s best friend and fully a part of the human family, was since completed. But now, due to legal protection, depopulation of the countryside, and rewilding projects, the wolf has re-immigrated. As the formerly dispelled and domesticated wolf is now welcomed – and in some cases actively released into the wild – its reappearance in literature responds to its new proximity as a wild creature.

This paper examines two contemporary literary representations of the wolf or the wolfish dog in Nordic fiction: the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman’s novel Löpa varg [Wolf Jump] (2021) and the short story “Hundene i Aix” [“The Dogs in Aix”] from the Danish writer Pernille Abd-El Dayem’s collection of short stories Omsorgsdage [Days of Care] (2022). Both texts grapple, through what is really best described as tangential (Heine) meetings with or relations to a wolf, in Ekman, or wolfish dogs, in Dayem, with the question of how to care for nature. Ekman and Dayem give no answers. Rather, they express some kind of limit experience that involves both identification and disidentification with the wolf, and both dependency and independency between man and wolf.

The paper argues that Ekman’s and Dayem’s wolf encounters in this way contribute to current efforts to rethink human-nature relations not only in terms of entanglement but also of withdrawal and impassable distance (Giraud, Preston, Duclos), vital to our notions of the domesticated and the wild that so much define the rhetoric of contemporary land politics.

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Martina Leeker & Konstanze Schütze: Care Lab Cologne. Radical Thoughts on Performing Care, or the Tangential Condition of Care

Care, understood as a cultural technique for organising sociality and the politics of distributed responsibility, is now seen as the most striking example of an existence in entanglement (Barad; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). This often means that different agents are woven together in more or less symmetrical and flattened relations. In this way the conceptualization of care as entanglement tends to obscure struggles, conflicts, frictions, disruptions and exclusions that make up care and that first reveal its potentials and cultural effects. Rather than making care a softened concept of being together in peace, its reality is quite different at the individual, social, infrastructural and technological levels (Tronto 2013; Brunner/Lange/wessalowski 2023). Care is constituted in unavoidable ambivalences and dilemmas that unfold between caring for others and caring for oneself (THE CARE COLLECTIVE, 2017), between giving and taking, between excesses and deficits of care. The performative methods of the Care Lab Cologne (Konstanze Schütze and Martina Leeker, since 2022), a learning environment for researching, experiencing and reflecting on this constitution of care as an education for global care, are presented in order to spell out the concept of tangentiality. (1) Theatrical exercises and improvisations show this dilemmatic constitution in giving up one's own ideas and intentions and at the same time bringing them in. The scenic play with "figures of care" shows the masks and counter-masks of care in the politics of power between the power of giving and the subjugation of taking. The exchange of stories, attitudes and objects of care makes the interplay of giving and receiving tangible. (2) Performing theories of care as lecture-performances shows the ambivalent constitution of care in unresolvable pros and cons. The performing of care elements shows, especially within the embodiment of care and the operations of artistic research as a dealing with the unpredictable, that the relations developed with care cannot be described as entanglement, but must be understood as an interplay of involvement and separation – as being with and disrupting of relations. It is this mutually torpedoing tension, this contact with the uncomfortable, this "staying in trouble" (Haraway 2016) and this relinquishing of privilege that opens up opportunities for the development of new concepts, rules and cultures of action in dealing with the coming complex politics of the crisis(es), rather than assuming a peaceful coexistence.

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Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky: Tangentiality as failure? On Eigensinn vs. the sculptural body

Tangentiality evokes the non-controllable dimension of being, the possibility of being as becoming- not with, but becoming through the encounter with other(s)ness - in another quality compared to the existential notions of affectedness, entanglement, co-construction. In my presentation, I aim to explore tangentiality in the realm of the lived embodiment of individuals. I will focus on the (re)presentation and mis en scence of tangential moments of embodiment in contemporary series or films, close-reading how tangentiality is often presented as a moment of crisis of the sovereign self and its sculptural ideal of embodiment. More specifically, the presentation will analyze the sexual self / sexuality as a field in which self-determination and embodiment are co-constutitive while - so I assume - tangential elements are dramatized as ‚external‘ problems, challenges, or questionings of the morally and socially correct sovereign (sexual) self. How then, is otherness presented as tangential - or tangentiality presented as otherness - to a ‚good‘ self in the field of the sexual? In order to work through this question, I rely on insights and impulses from some (queerfeminist) contemporary thinking which question the hegemonic notion of the autonomous / sovereign self in sexual matters, such as Maggie Nelson’s Essay ‚The Ballad of Sexual Optimism‘ (2021), Vir Cano’s 'Ética tortillera: ensayos en torno al éthos y la lengua de las amantes' (2015) and Avgi Saketooulous’ ’Sexuality beyond Consent’ (2023).

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Jessie Beier & Rémy Bocquillon: Cursory Touches: Algorithmic Mediation as Tangential Conjuring

The tangent – as line, as surface, as volume – is only actualized through encounter. This touching relation is always flee(t)ing, it is one of brief attention, an encounter en passant: the slight touching of shoulders on a crowded street, the longing brush of a hand along a dusty shelf, the skimming over of theories in an academic paper. A digressive departure? Or is it a distracted avoidance? Despite this “mere touching,” imprints, however slight, are left behind; traces are drawn, flows are redirected, desires remachined. The point of contact becomes a point of impact, a singular event wherein differential forces intersect in ways that we can’t

see coming, only leaving. Such events carry no specific outcomes or utility, but they can nevertheless make their mark. The tangential relation, as cursory and punctual as it might be, is not indifferent, but emerges in difference. It is an encounter en passant that refuses to merely pass by.

Taking off from this tangential thinking, this collaborative performance-lecture experiments with passing relations as they might emerge, in unforeseen and non-linear ways, through aesthetic practices (where aesthetics refers to sensorial conditioning and perceptual distributions, aesthetics as aisthesis). In this particular occurrence, the invocation of tarot reading as an algorithmic medium turned occulted composition device will be combined with philosophical riffing and sonic computational techniques (such as live coding) in order to experiment with how seemingly codified and codifiable moments of interaction emerge not as causally-entangled relation but instead as “dark precursors” (Deleuze, 1994). Here, we understand the tangential relation as just one form of “aberrant nuptial” (Deleuze, 1994), as just one instance of the subtractive encounters that are enabled between the momentary touching of systems characterized by fundamental difference. It is through this touch that we hope to invoke, or better, conjure, unthought modes of collectivity where the “collective” refers to a sense of anorganic and inhuman multiplicity that deploys itself beyond individual entanglements toward “the side of preverbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimited sets” (Guattari, 1995, p. 9). Through this performance-lecture we want to consider, in witchy ways, how the tangential meeting of “heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance” (Assis & Giudici, 2017, p. 9) might impact our own thinking, as artists, teachers and researchers of sociology and pedagogy, in yet unthought ways.

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Rune Gade: Soft as a Stone, Hard as a Rock: The Penis as Tangential Object in Contemporary Art

Danish sculptor Kai Nielsen made his controversial Ymerbrønden in the beginning of the 20^th Century. The sculpture made in sandstone was placed on a central square in Faaborg and it was presented to the public in June 1913. It represents a motive of deep entanglement from Nordic mythology: the creation of the world. The giant Ymer is born from mist as is the cow Audhumla. Ymer feeds on Audhumla’s milk, while Audhumla licks a salt stone from which the human being Bure is created. When first presented in 1913 the sculpture caused controversies because of the representation of Ymer’s penis, which – fitting for a giant – is not small.

My paper will not be a conventional art historical analysis of the work. Instead, it will be an associative exploration of the penis as a (phenomenologically, physically, materially as well as visually) metamorphosing object resisting sight while nonetheless being a ubiquitous imaginary object carrying numerous symbolic meanings. The penis as In Ymerbrønden Ymer’s penis is huge but soft, although made out of stone. Stone which is, of course, the often called upon metaphor when it comes to (euphemistically?) describing the erection of the penis. As it can be encountered, for instance, in the song Hard as a rock (1995) by Australian band ACDC. The metaphor also appears on porn sites such as Pornhub where ‘rock hard’ is a commonly used tag. Unsurprisingly, it is a standard component on many ‘advisory’ web sites that promises to cure erectile dysfunction as well, thus openly addressing male fears and insecurities, penetrating – as it were – the male Körperpanzerung.

In 1964 Kai Nielsen’s original sandstone sculpture was replaced by a bronze copy while the original sandstone sculpture was moved to Faaborg Museum where it is still located. Today, the bronze copy on Torvet in Faaborg appears polished and with a golden shine from touching in many areas, particularly around the genital area, whereas in other areas it has achieved the green patination characteristic of bronze left to outdoor conditions. What invites these touches, what opposes the direct gazes? In my paper I want to play around with the penis as a metamorphosing object whose tangential omnipresence makes it at once difficult to overlook and hard to look at.

In this consideration of being alone, artist Dean Sameshima's recent photo series of solitary figures in the dark interiors of sex clubs, I explore the photographer as non-witness – a non-specular and indifferent aesthetic subject eminently attuned to what of desire and pleasure remains irreducibly beholden to separation, dissociation, and incongruity. The ethics of such tangential accord lies in leaving the other alone, and in the intimacy of that exclusion, of returning the other to the singularity of their solitude.

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John Paul Ricco: “The Photographer as Non-witness”

In this consideration of being alone, artist Dean Sameshima's recent photo series of solitary figures in the dark interiors of sex clubs, I explore the photographer as non-witness – a non-specular and indifferent aesthetic subject eminently attuned to what of desire and pleasure remains irreducibly beholden to separation, dissociation, and incongruity. The ethics of such tangential accord lies in leaving the other alone, and in the intimacy of that exclusion, of returning the other to the singularity of their solitude.

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Martin Fog Arndal: Coleridge and the Separations of Touch

This presentation aims to unpack the notion of distance implied in two of Coleridge’s concepts of touch: Both distant and actual-physical. In line with the notion of “tangentiality” as “merely touching,” a kind of touch that opens up distance, separation, and individuation, I would like to explore Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of “ghostly touch”. In one of Coleridge’s notebook entries, he separates between “real Touch,” as physical contact, and “ghostly touch,” implying a form of touch across distance. Imagining a finger touching him across distance, Coleridge remarks how “the [“ghostly”] touch must be the effect of that Finger, I see, yet it’s not near to me” (CN, 2, 3215). This, however, raises the question of how a touch could travel across distance and hence become de-subjectivized, found in the passing between object and subject. On the other hand, I would like to address how, in both moments of “ghostly” and “real” touch, Coleridge imposes a notion of distance or separation. Foreshadowing Jean-Luc Nancy, who in Being Singular Plural (200) argues that “the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other” (Nancy 2000, 5), Coleridge appears to argue that touch might not be antithetical to distance. Following Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), who in Das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798) states that “Berührung ist Trennung und Verbindung zugleich” (HKA III, 293), in his poetical compositions, Coleridge appears to develop an idea of touch opens up a necessary distance that allows for the individual to erupt. What is found in several of Coleridge’s poems appears to be the idea that when touched, the subject realizes its difference from the world, that although entangled in various ways, this very touch entanglement allows for the realization of a fundamental nonidentity between world and subject: When touched, the subject recognizes its corporeal distinction from the matters of the world. In other words, Coleridge’s account of touch implies a kind of “tangentiality” as a form of touch that rests upon rupture, distance, and frailty. Coleridge’s touch shows, as Nancy highlights as well, that in touch, “there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up.” (Nancy 2000, 5).

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Troels Andersen: Browsing the Contemporary: A Tangential Approach to Literature

 In his essay on Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für alle, Jörg Kreienbrock shows that the Germanwriter develops a “theory of attentiveness” (Kreienbrock, 221) that proves to be fundamental to his own poetics. Contrary to what one would expect, this theory does not describe how to successfully focus or concentrate attention on a specific object of creative or poetic study. Rather, the theory of attentiveness can be understood as an integral part of Goetz’ own struggle with hyperfocus and excessive concentration. By means of the theory of attentiveness, Goetz tries to decentre himself through the simultaneous reception of multiple media inputs: television, music, internet, art, literature (Goetz 1999, 18). As Kreienbrock notes, “[o]ne mode of this unfocused reception is that of blättern, of opening any given book at a random page.” (Kreienbrock, 223).

In my presentation, I shall argue that blättern – or browsing – is at the core of a tangential approach to literature. In our contemporary world of a steadily increasing amount of media inputs, a study of such an approach to literature seems to be of great pertinence and interest. How does a tangential approach to literature shape thinking and writing and, thus, literary representations of contemporary society and culture?

Goetz not only formulates the theory of attentivenessin his first literary online blog Abfall für alle (1999), he continues developing itin his second literary online blog Klage (2008). And, very recently, Goetzhas again brought up the topic of browsing in the paper Absoluter Idealismus, which was published earlier in 2023 in the journal Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte.

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Matteo Kobza: Losing Touch with Your Desk: Tangential Conceptions of Memory and Reading in Nicole Krauss’ Great House

Though it appears, on the surface, to revolve around the loosely connected stories of several different protagonists, Nicole Krauss’ Great House is ultimately about a desk – an imposing and unforgettable piece of furniture that, even if only encountered briefly, tangentially, seems to throw entire lives and narratives off track. In fact, it is not only the novel’s characters, but also its readers that experience a relationship with this (textual) desk that is best described as fleeting and transitory. As the desk unexpectedly enters and leaves the lives of the characters, readers, too, are left waiting for its next re-surfacing in the text, that is, for the rare, but all the more memorable passages in which the desk, “something else entirely” (83), is described in scintillating detail. This paper, then, re-traces the desk in its discontinuous trajectory both, as a physical thing, through the experience of the novel’s characters and, as a textual thing, through the text itself in an attempt at exploring the potential of the concept of tangentiality in a twofold way: Firstly, pursuing the desk’s trajectory through the diegesis, where it not only figures as the object of memories and desires, but also comes to represent and elicit them, reveals how tangentiality challenges how we conceive of memory and its relationship with the material world. Specifically, it compels us to think about memory as a process characterized by not only proximity and connection, but also indifference and distance. As our desks (and all manner of other human and non-human entities) are displaced by time, we lose access to them, but the tangent along which they have touched our narrative remains in place – memory is concerned with precisely such tangents. Secondly, re-tracing the desk’s trajectory on the level of the text, where it is encountered by the reader only at very few but vibrant and dense moments, draws attention to the potential of tangentiality as a practice of reading. To illustrate, as readers are left to wait for the next point of tangency as a result of the desk’s (textual) transience, Great House encourages a practice of reading that shifts into focus the ongoing importance of certain textual moments, particular points of intense contact, which impel readers to pause and reconsider both text and reading as non-linear and processual – as things that require going on a tangent from time to time for fresh and nuanced perspectives to become possible.

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Philippe P. Haensler: “lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense”: Tangentiality and Translation in Walter Benjamin

In his 1923 essay, »Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers«/»The Task of the Translator«, Walter Benjamin, at one point, confronts his readers with the following »Vergleich«/»comparison«: »Wie die Tangente den Kreis flüchtig und nur in einem Punkte berührt […], so berührt die Übersetzung flüchtig und nur in dem unendlich kleinen Punkte des Sinnes das Original […].«/»Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point […], a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense […].« Trying to elucidate this difficult passage (and the kind of passing touch it touches upon), my paper, in a first step, will follow Benjamin’s essay across different of its translations (Maurice de Gandillac, Harry Zohn [quoted above]) and interpretations (Jacques Derrida, Carol Jacobs, Paul de Man). Closing the circle, so to speak, I will, in a second step, turn to the origins of Benjamin’s essay (which initially served as an introduction to the German translation of select poems in Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil]) and compare Benjamin’s »comparison« to his own translational practice. In this context, special attention will be paid to Benjamin’s rendering of Baudelaire’s sonnet »À une passante« (which title Benjamin, very liberally, translates as »Einer Dame«, »To a Lady«) and the »Fugitive beauté« this sonnet speaks of. Missing, though not by accident, the »beauty« of Baudelaire’s phrase, Benjamin translates it as »Die Flüchtige« – and thus presents his readers with a peculiar »Aufgabe«/»task«: to make »sense« of a (»small«, easy to miss, »flüchtige«) »point« where his theory and his practice of translation are, literally, à la lettre, in touch.

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Charles de Roche: From Representational to Perceptional Metrics: Metrical Tangentiality in F.G. Jünger, Nicolas Abraham and Charles Olson

The relation between the actual rhythmic articulation of verse writing and its schematic representation in metrical notation has probably more often been the object of aesthetic dissatisfaction and disappointment with both poets and readers of poetry than that of critical theoretical reflection. While it is true that influential 20^th century schools of literary criticism such as Structuralism and Russian Formalism were aware of an irreducible difference between rhythm and meter, they still treated the difference in terms of variants of a dual paradigm, as seen in the distinction between verse type and verse instance. The proposed paper, by contrast, endeavors to rethink the relation of rhythm and meter on the basis of their radical heterogeneity, allowing to qualify their momentary coincidence in the metrical articulation of verse writing as a tangential contact. The geometric metaphor here implies that metrical notation as indication of rhythmic articulation effects the coincidence of two radically heterogeneous temporal dimensions, which in turn call for equally different spatial representations. Metrical notation, considered in a traditional way as graphic representation of actual speech, can only represent its linear temporal dimension, for example as a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables, and can therefore be spatially represented as a straight line. The rhythmic articulation of speech, however, according to the conditions of rhythmic perception elaborated by the phenomenology of rhythm from Hume to Husserl, implies the simultaneous cooperation of all dimensions of linear time in complex temporal-intentional relations such as retention and projection, expectation, deception and fulfilment; relations only spatially representable as a complex ensemble of differentially articulated curves. As a consequence, metrical notation would no longer be understood as representation of repeated units of linear speech, but as calculation of points of contact, tangential touches, between the linear and the rhythmically simultaneous dimension of poetic speech. It would no longer indicate points of repetition, but of repeatability; no longer measure finite articulated units of speech, but the infinitesimal energetic interval of articulation between them. The planned paper will propose its arguments in critical readings of three 20^th century poetological texts, Friedrich Georg Jünger’s Rhythmus und Sprache im deutschen Gedicht (1952), Nicolas Abraham’s Pour une esthétique psychanalytique: Le temps, le rythme et l’inconscient (1962) and Charles Olson’s Projective verse (1950).

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Vanessa Franke: The Horizon as a Tangential Figure and Symbol of Embodied Cosmopolitanism

This presentation is situated within the context of my doctoral project “Entgrenzte Körper: Eine Medienkomparatistik der Globalität” [“Unbounded Bodies: A Comparative Media Study of Globality”] (working title). I am a fellow at the graduate school of Media Anthropology at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar as well as a doctoral candidate at the Université Paris 8 (cotutelle de these).

In contemporary works of literature, film and art, a new tendency toward an aesthetics of an embodied cosmopolitanism is discernible. This trend integrates corporeality with a global being-to-the-world and thus navigating the bodily experience of the global condition in the 21^st century. Within this aesthetic, I would like to suggest, the horizon becomes a crucial element in various dimensions: as a geometrical form, a figure of thought, a metaphor, and, as I aim to explore, as a figure of tangentiality.

Building on Stefanie Heine’s and Holger Schulze’s suggestion, a tangential relation is defined by the merely touching, thus leaving entities “as separated as they are connected” (Heine and Schulze 2023). In terms of spatial types, a horizon operates between a threshold and a border, connecting and separating two different realms (sky and Earth, as well as here and there). It not only points toward transgression but also towards limitation, always subject to an insuperable distance, thereby invoking a relation of tangentiality between the local and the translocal, between what is near and far, what is present and absent.

Through different emblematic examples, notably drawn from the films of Kelly Reichardt (such as First Cow, 2019, Meek’s Cutoff, 2010, or Wendy & Lucy, 2008), I first would like to show how the horizon serves as a means to shape and organize filmic space, invoking its corporeal dimension, as a horizon always signifies a subjective reference line of vision (“Bezugslinie des Sehens”, Koschorke Geschichte des Horizonts 11).  Furthermore, I inquire into the ways we can interpret the horizon in these films as a symbol of a cosmopolitanism that is embodied, as opposed to classical cosmopolitanism relying on a dualism of body and mind (Raghavan Corporeal Cosmopolitanism; Braidotti et al. After Cosmopolitanism).