Arno Böhler / Susanne Valerie Granzer

Arno Böhler / Susanne Valerie Granzer | University of Vienna, AT / University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, AT Day 1, De Bijloke Mezzanine, 12:00-13:00 On 30 July 1881 Nietzsche sent a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, enthusiastically expressing his surprise at having discovered he had a famous precursor in the history of philosophy: I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognise myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. (Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, 30 July 1881) In our fictional lecture-performance, Franz Overbeck (Arno Böhler) responds to Nietzsche’s postcard by recommending that he read two young French philosophers: Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Overbeck is particularly enthusiastic about Deleuze’s book Nietzsche and Philosophy and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. He claims that both authors have finally understood that his friend Nietzsche’s work, due to its untimeliness, is a foreign body to what has been called philosophy so far. Having started the “Prelude of a Philosophy of the Future,” Nietzsche’s thought is now at last recognised as being a precursor of thought events, still waiting to be discovered and called into being posthumously. Such a futuristic mode of thinking and doing philosophy, says Deleuze, “has an essential relation to time.” It is fundamentally untimely, that is to say: … essentially against its time, a critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely and not of the present. The opposition in terms of which philosophy is realized is that of present and non-present, of our time and the untimely (UM II Use and Abuse of History, Preface). And in the untimely there are truths that are more durable than all historical and eternal truths put together: truths of times to come. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum 2006, 100.

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International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research

DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015

O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S

Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

University of Vienna, AT / University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, AT

Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

Day 1, 9 November, De Bijloke Mezzanine, 12:00–13:00

On 30 July 1881 Nietzsche sent a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, enthusiastically expressing his surprise at having discovered he had a famous precursor in the history of philosophy:

I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognise myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. (Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, 30 July 1881)

In our fictional lecture-performance, Franz Overbeck (Arno Böhler) responds to Nietzsche’s postcard by recommending that he read two young French philosophers: Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Overbeck is particularly enthusiastic about Deleuze’s book Nietzsche and Philosophy and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. He claims that both authors have finally understood that his friend Nietzsche’s work, due to its untimeliness, is a foreign body to what has been called philosophy so far. Having started the “Prelude of a Philosophy of the Future,” Nietzsche’s thought is now at last recognised as being a precursor of thought events, still waiting to be discovered and called into being posthumously.

Such a futuristic mode of thinking and doing philosophy, says Deleuze, “has an essential relation to time.” It is fundamentally untimely, that is to say:

… essentially against its time, a critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely and not of the present. The opposition in terms of which philosophy is realized is that of present and non-present, of our time and the untimely (UM II Use and Abuse of History, Preface). And in the untimely there are truths that are more durable than all historical and eternal truths put together: truths of times to come.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum 2006, 100.

Franz Overbeck’s reflections in response to Nietzsche’s postcard are interrupted by Susanne Valerie Granzer, who presents a selection of texts by philosophers whose philosophy has been interpreted as a disruption, or sometimes even as a crime against the classical canon of philosophy they inherited: Spinoza, who was cursed for his thoughts, the man in Kafka’s The Trial who was executed without reason, and the poets in Plato’s Republic who were expelled from the state.

The lecture-performance stages philosophy, rendering the words uttered in the performance as a sensual, bodily experience, to be shared with the audience.

Arno Böhler (Univ.Doz.Dr.habil.) teaches philosophy at the University of Vienna and is founder of the philosophy-performance festival Philosophy On Stage. He was research fellow at the University of Bangalore, University of Heidelberg, New York University, University of Princeton, and University of Bremen. He heads the PEEK project “Artist-Philosophers. Philosophy AS Arts-Based-Research” (AR275-G21) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Web: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.boehler

Susanne Valerie Granzer (Univ.Prof.Dr.) is Professor of the central artistic subject Acting at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Max Reinhardt Seminar. As an actress she played starring roles at National State Theatres across Europe (Vienna, Basel, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Berlin). Parallel to her professional work as an actress she studied philosophy at the Goethe-University Frankfurt and the University of Vienna and achieved her PhD in philosophy in 1995. In 1997 she founded the Viennese art factory GRENZ-film, together with the Vienna-based philosopher Arno Böhler.

Web: http://personal.mdw.ac.at/granzer

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Arno Böhler / Susanne Valerie Granzer

Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors