17–18 June 2026 | College for Social Sciences and Humanities, Essen | hybrid
What is missing in the histories of German Jewish thought and of Critical Theory is a sustained account of their relations to European imperialism and colonialism. This workshop asks how apparently non-systematic references irritate established meanings, allowing the Global South to penetrate into European philosophical modernity.
Workshop co-organized by Network members Julia Ng (College for Social Sciences and Humanities, University Alliance Ruhr and Goldsmiths, University of London) and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (Ruhr University Bochum).
In the history of German Jewish thought, Critical Theory emerges as a secondary moment in the longer line of questions concerning rational religion, tradition and modernity, and political-economic emancipation that were first posed by Mendelssohn and later reframed by Marx and others. Histories of Critical Theory, by contrast, situate the legacy of German Jewish philosophy as one empirical instance of the problem of religion and myth in general and generally framed by Protestant theology. Meanwhile, what is missing in the histories of both is a sustained account of their relations to European imperialism and colonialism. Yet the first decades of the 20th century were arguably the most consequential decades of German colonialism, German Jewish philosophical modernism, and German critical social theory. What happens when we take seriously this mutual irritation of discourses, whose figures and source texts nevertheless aggregate into a barely conspicuous network of shared references and biographical data, not as a historical anomaly but as a negative space from which systematic and methodological insights might emerge? Combining presentations and textual close readings, this workshop asks how apparently non-systematic references irritate established meanings, allowing the Global South to penetrate into European philosophical modernity.
For full program details and registration, click here.