June 14th, 2017
7pm
Salon of former Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

A Prize-Gestell: Hannah Arendt Swallows the Lessing-Preis Lecture by Avital Ronell

Hannah Arendt faces down the bestowal of a German prize with greatest acuity and distress. As supplement to her writings, the acceptance speech creates a glitch in the interpretability of her political theories. The constraints inhibiting Arendt have something to do with a historically disrupted delivery. She is charged, by the legacy and phantom of Lessing, with delivering the "gift of friendship"--a counter-endowment of sorts, an undeliverable granting, with no viable trustee at the reception desk, ready to sign for it: really sign for it, versteht sich, and not just sign off on her according to some sinister calculation of reimbursement or restitutional deposition.

At the end of her speech, in which she at once merges with and voids the spectral donor, Lessing, none of the undead bestowers was clapping. A stunned audience tunes her out reprovingly. Prepare for a medial-hermeneutic adventure!