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Susanne Witzgall: Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect – An Introduction
Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect – An Introduction
(p. 13 – 27)

Susanne Witzgall

Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect – An Introduction

PDF, 15 pages

  • body
  • aesthetics
  • affects
  • social media
  • performativity
  • media society
  • effectiveness

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English

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English

Susanne Witzgall

has been the academic head of the BMBF-funded cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011. She studied art history, theatre studies, psychology and art pedagogy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Stuttgart, where she received her doctorate in 2001. From 2003 to 2011 she taught in the department of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She has worked as a freelance curator, and was a curator at the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum München from 1995 to 2002. Susanne Witzgall curated or cocurated Art & Brain II (1997/1998), Das zweite Gesicht/The Other Face (2002), Say it isn’t so (2007), (Re)designing nature (2010/2011) and other exhibitions, and is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, and subjects of current interdisciplinary debates. These include her monograph Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003) as well as the publications New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (ed. with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, Ashgate, 2013), Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present of the Future (all three ed. with Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and Real Magic (2018). Since 2019 she is member of the advisory board of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam as well as of the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg.

Other texts by Susanne Witzgall for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect

In the past decade the relevance of emotion and affect in societal dynamics and power relations has increasingly become the focus for scientists and artists. Across disciplines they are breaking down the opposition of cognition and feeling, and emphasizing the central meaning of emotions and affective atmospheres for personal judgement, decision-making and the realm of politics. The present publication can be seen as an enhancing contribution to these discourses. It particularly focusses on artistic positions, which are brought into dialogue with philosophical, gender-theoretical or neuro- and social-scientific approaches. It addresses the ambivalent political dimensions of anxiety, hope and empathy, as well as the relationship between emotion and habit or the power of (media-)technical affective processes. The publication is the result of the sixth annual programme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

 

With contributions by Marie-Luise Angerer, Ben Anderson, Jace Clayton, Keren Cytter, Antonio Damasio, Cécile B. Evans, Karianne Fogelberg, Deborah Gould, Susanna Hertrich, Serhat Karakayali, Marietta Kesting, Carolyn Pedwell and Susanne Witzgall.

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