« Kultur » in der politischen Moderne. Versuch über die Institution eines Begriffs
(2012)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Maesschalck, Marc
- Abstract
- (en) The present thesis deals with the history of the concept of « culture » and focusses mainly on the genesis and the repercussions of the modern turn of this concept. However, we are neither aiming at a simple reconstruction of the various stages through which this concept could adopt highly diverse, or even disparate, meanings, nor at giving a more precise account of its « true » content. Instead, we are starting from the observation that the social impact of the new uses of the word « culture » from the 18th century onwards went hand in hand with a growing indeterminacy of its contents, and hence take particular interest in the specific dynamics of its reiteration. In order to address the political and social stakes linked with the concept of culture, we first engage in a reading of two exemplary texts (by M. Mendelssohn and R. v. Nostitz-Rieneck) dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. In a second section, we analyse the genesis of a « cultural » anthropology : from 17th and 18th century debates around a natural law and the distinction « nature-culture » as well as around the « observations » of travellers, to the remarcable invention of the plural « cultures » towards the end of the 19th century, without ignoring the anthropological turn introduced into philosophy by authors like Rousseau or Herder. A concluding section is dedicated to the discussion of more recent issues (the problem of culturalist racisms, the cultural politics of the EU, the emergence of Cultural Studies), in order to finally tackle the question of the operative shadow of the concept of culture, that is, the link it establishes between the substruction of distinct human totalities and the interest in deciphering their symbolic productions.
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Citations
Nowotny, S. (2012). « Kultur » in der politischen Moderne. Versuch über die Institution eines Begriffs. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/74738