Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3
Abstract:
Since the 1950s the German political and social theory has thematized the concept of “die Betroffenheit” to describe the horizon of many human experiences caused by the power and the violence in their objectivating and exploiting nature. Günther Anders (Stern), the first husband of Hannah Arendt, opened the discussion as a pre-theorist in this field through his writings about the blindness of the humanity concerning the apocalypse of the nuclear weapons. He renewed his theses in 1986 as the first philosopher after Tšernobyl. Ulrich Beck argues for his part that for the heterogeneity of the new social movements is common the homogeneity of their motives; the personal “Betroffenheit”. Brigitte Rauschenbach calls it as a structural conflict which prevails between the motives of participation caused through “die Betroffenheit” and the democratic premises in the Western societies and which at the same time signals the disturbance in the interactive relationship with the outside world. In the concret analyses of the German theorists this phenomenon has many reasons, but different from the concept of suffering it has a double-meaning. It is similarly also a spiritual moving point and moving force for the individual strategies to survive and overcome, for the different learning experiences and for the creative processes of the social and political movements. On the other hand it distinguishes from the pre-conscious and reactive strategies in avoiding and rejecting the social and political reality. Their irrelevance is mainly based on the lack of means of expression and the relevant and the adequate concepts. This concerns for the most part also the violence in its nature as a mute and petrified force which is unable to express itself with words in an adequate way.
In my paper I ask the possibilities of the singing to act as a counter force and a resistance to open, to express and to transform the stunned and mute petrifaction of violence. Compared with the other genres of music and art the singing has a double-language and double-order of words and tones in use to intensify its possibilities of empowerment, resistance and emancipation. At the same time the unique, relational and visionary human voice enables for the “Who” to create the common “Mitwelt” as a form of taking care of the world and telling from us as human beings. In this connection I also take some examples from the biography of the Swedish singer Valborg Werbeck-Svärdström.
