Katrin Truestedt

• Professor
• Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung

The trial against the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” (NSU), a right-wing terrorist cell responsible for at least 10 assassinations and two bombings in Germany, officially ended in 2018. And yet, the end of the trial seems to be only the beginning of a reckoning with its larger implications. This lecture focuses on how the NSU, on th...

This volume pursues the question as to how the constitution of subjective agency and the formation of personhood depend in fundamental ways on the ability to be represented and to stand in for someone else. As the special issue shows, the fundamental bond tying agency and representation irreducibly together becomes especially visible in legal and l...

This introduction examines the main premises and terms of the special issue: person, agency, and representation. It argues that representation and agency stand in an internal relation: There is no agent without its personification and no agency without its possible vicarious representation. Yet, personification and representation enable agency only...

Was heißt es, für andere zu sprechen? Was, wenn für einen gesprochen wird? Gegenwärtige Krisen geben der Frage nach dem Sprechen und Handeln für andere eine neue Dringlichkeit. Wie tritt man für diejenigen ein, deren Stimme nicht gehört wird? Für Staatenlose, künftige Generationen, nichtmenschliche Akteure, Umwelten? Die Frage nach den Möglichkeite...

Annual volume, this time featuring special sections on Brecht's dramatic fragments and on comedy in post-Brechtian theater, along with a variety of other contributions.

Annual volume, this time featuring special sections on Brecht's dramatic fragments and on comedy in post-Brechtian theater, along with a variety of other contributions.

Against the tendency to regard Müller as a tragedian and his Hamletmas- chine as a tragedy, I will read his play as an experiment on the possibility of comedic theater after Brecht. Hamletmaschine can thus be understood as an attempt to affirm the possibilities of theater and its own forms of estrange- ment without abstracting from tragedy, alienat...

This special section on comedy since Brecht argues that the rise of performativity and theatricality that we have experienced over the past century was largely enabled by what we might cail a comic dispositif. This comic dispositif -- forged beyond the illusionistic dramatical and cultural forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- has gre...

This contribution addresses issues of interpretation and translation in Derrida’s reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in relation to the supposed opposition of the letter and the spirit of the law. Rather than supporting a supersession of the law’s letter in favor of its spirit and advocating a sublation of the law by means of mercy, as a t...

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and anglopho...

In Samuel Becketts Texten provozieren die Wörter »no« und »not«, »pas« und »ne«, »nicht« und »nichts« die Frage, was sie überhaupt bezeichnen. Sie verwirren die Unterscheidungen zwischen materiellem Zeichenträger und Zeichen, zwischen Zeichen und Metazeichen oder Sinn und Unsinn und markieren gleichzeitig Anwesenheit, Abwesenheit und die Durchstrei...

This contribution investigates the intimate relation and the tension between legal and literary procedures of personification and subjectivation. In order to do so, the contribution turns to Kafka’s The Trial and examines the proximity of the juridical procedure depicted in the novel, intending to establish Josef K. as a (guilty) subject, to the na...

If being a person, according to Hobbes, means being representable and substitutable, then certain dangers come with this conception of a person - dangers that are unfolded by Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas": the threat of an alienating split between representer and represented, or alternately, the possibility of their overlap and mutual indistinction....

Wenn Pygmalion der Schönheit seiner Statue, die er selbst kunstvoll geschaffen hat, so verfällt, dass er sie für ,echt‘ hält, dann beschreibt Ovid die Leistung der kunstvollen Verfahren seiner Metamorphosen als die Kunst, sich selbst als Verfahren zu verbergen: „ars adeo latet arte sua“ (Ovid 1996: X.253). Die Latenz, die in dieser Beschreibung ste...

Der amerikanische Philosoph Stanley Cavell hat entschiedener als irgend ein anderer Philosoph unserer Zeit über die Spielarten des Glücks im alltäglichen Leben, seine möglichen ebenso wie seine unmöglichen Aspekte nachgedacht. Anstatt Traktate zur Lebenshilfe zu verfassen, hat Cavell die Frage nach einem Lebenswissen aufgeworfen und sie mit der phi...

This paper focuses on the status of law in regard to nature and art in Shakespeare's late play The Tempest. The inscription of law into nature as it can be seen in King Lear's trial to legitimize sovereignty with nature, leads to crisis and the suspension of law. Rather than being natural, it points to an `outlaw' dimension of law internal to sover...

In a classical understanding of satire, its secondary status—giving in to literary distortions of an underlying reality—leads to a paradoxical trap. Satire seeks to reinstate a nonliterary norm by literary means. Shakespearean romance shares the paradoxical character of the satirical, but opens up an alternative response. Instead of attempting to e...