Workshop "Taming the Monsters"

An event as part of the faculty's Core Research Area on "Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics"

The history of mankind is also a history of human affectivity. Anxiety is a strong emotion that is individually and collectively linked to scenarios of threat and crisis. With the advent of modernity as a historical turning point from the 19th to the 20th century, and parallel to the emergence of psychoanalysis, anxiety becomes a theme in modern art as well as in existential philosophy, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. In sociology, anxiety as a collective phenomenon plays an increasingly important role in the analysis of social and political developments. Similarly, negative emotions have received increased attention in recent political philosophy and social epistemology. The intellectual-analytical as well as the creative and expressive treatment of anxiety in this diversity of media becomes the driving force behind a reflected and inevitably ambivalent human self-understanding.

The workshop on November 27 and 28, 2025 takes up the topic of anxiety in the broad spectrum of art, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy in order to explore current manifestations of anxiety, experiences of anxiety, and coping strategies, as well as the connection between anxiety and hope in various theoretical and practical contexts.

Programme of the workshop