Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York

Duration of stay:
August 2015 until January 2016

Research Project:
Critique of Bored Reason

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst

Fellowship in cooperation with Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient philosophy and early modern science to philosophy of history and philosophy of memory.

Research Project:
This project is meant to provide a critique of some forms of modern radical philosophy by drawing its genealogy from Diogenes the Cynic to Nietzsche and contemporary thinkers like Rorty, Rancière and Agamben. It revolves around the topic of boredom as the mode of being of the contemporary monological and lonely subject who exists in isolation and thinks itself in constant repetition. Scandal, then, is an attempt to overcome the state of the exclusion of the other, which is expressed epistemologically in the idea of the modern scientific revolution, aesthetically in modernism, and politically and socially in the idea of political revolution. I intend to argue for an understanding of reason as communicative and comically scandalous, capable of providing real answers to real problems, rather than being a negative instrument of the destruction of tradition and establishing one’s autonomous self.

Selection of most important publications (books):
Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave, 2014), Memory: A History (Oxford, 2015).

Events:
Vortrag, 7. Dezember 2015
Collective Memory and Collective Recollection
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe- Unviversität