Claudia Welz (alte Version)
Professorin für Jüdische und christliche Religionsphilosophie, University of Kopenhagen
Aufenthalt
Oktober–Dezember 2019
Forschungsthema
»Vox peregrina – An Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of Listening. Exploring the Role of Emotion, Imagination, and Communication for Existential Re-Orientation«
Projektbeschreibung
As a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, I will work on my book project Vox peregrina: An Ethical, Theological, and Psycho(patho)logical Phenomenology of Listening. This project is a trilogy that shall clarify the connection between listening and understanding in developing an inter-modal ›hermeneutics of the senses‹ with special consideration of the sense of hearing. The three parts of the book belong to different disciplines, but have one thing in common: they attend to a voice, a word, or speech (vox) that is foreign (peregrina) in the sense that it is experienced as reaching one ›from outside,‹ yet touching and transforming one’s own and innermost.As a whole, the project aims to reveal how human beings may successfully re-orient themselves in complex situations of crisis or conflict when their familiar world, relational home and previous system of ›coordinates‹ seem to be out of joint. The project will focus on exemplary paradoxes of orientation where the norms (e.g. human dignity, personal identity, religious commitments) as well as the means (e.g. thinking, feeling, imagining, remembering) of re-orientation become ambivalent. Paradoxes occur when contradictory alternatives exclude each other, and yet both alternatives seem to be correct. Paradoxes can block thinking, but they can also become productive if they enable one to operate with both alternatives and thereby to explore new paths of thought. I will investigate how the confusion caused by ambivalence and the confrontation with paradox can be potentially turned into multilayered comprehension, which transforms dis-orientation into a deeper and richer-faceted form of re-orientation.
My contribution to the LOEWE-Schwerpunkt ›Religiöse Positionierung: Modalitäten und Konstellationen in jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Kontexten‹ will consist in the study of three modalities of orienting and positioning oneself: (1) via emotions disclosing one’s relations to others and the wholly Other, (2) via the faculty of imagination (Vorstellungskraft), which comprises the ability to see things from another’s perspective, and (3) via (verbal and non-verbal) communication including the components of listening and responding. In particular, I will compare Jewish and Christian approaches to the dialogical dynamics of becoming oneself vis-à-vis the Other.
Wissenschaftliches Profil
Claudia Welz studierte Theologie und Philosophie in Tübingen, Jerusalem, Heidelberg und München, war Doktorandin und Habilitandin am Zürcher Institut für Hermeneutik und Religionsphilosophie und lebt seit 2006 in Kopenhagen, wo sie zunächst als Postdoktorandin am Center for Subjectivity Research und dann von 2010 bis 2018 als Professorin mit besonderen Aufgaben in Ethik und Religionsphilosophie an der theologischen Fakultät der Universität Kopenhagen tätig war. 2014 gründete sie das interdisziplinäre Center for the Study of Jewish Thought in Modern Culture an der Universität Kopenhagen, das sie seither geleitet hat.
Sie ist die Autorin der Monographien Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Mohr Siebeck 2008), Vertrauen und Versuchung (Mohr Siebeck 2010), Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Oxford University Press 2016) und (zusammen mit Elazar Benyoëtz) SinnSang: Theologie und Poesie. Aphorismen – Essays – Briefe (NordPark-Verlag 2019).
Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)
- »A Theological Phenomenology of Listening: God’s ›Voice‹ and ›Silence‹ after Auschwitz«, In: Religions (139:10), 2019. [Hier verfügbar: PDF.]
- »A Voice Crying out from the Wound – with or without Words: On Trauma, Speech, and Silence«, In: Dialog: A Journal of Theology (56:4), 2017, 412-427-
- »The Voice of Conscience, Kierkegaard’s Theory of Indirect Communication, and Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue«, In: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2017, 363-377.
- »Dem Unsichtbaren eine Stimme geben: Gebet, Glaubensanfechtung und (Un)Gehorsam«, In:Anfechtung. Versuch der Entmarginalisierung eines Klassikers (hrsg. Pierre Bühler et al.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016, 253-282.
- »Paradoxien ethischer und religiöser Orientierung als Neuanfänge des Denkens«, In: Zur Philosophie der Orientierung (hrsg. Benjamin Alberts et al.), Berlin: De Gruyter 2016, 217-232.
