Philipp Stoellger
Gewalt der Gefühle und gefühlte Gewalt. Zur Verschränkung und ihren Eskalationen
[Violence of Emotions and Perceived Violence. On Entanglement and its Escalations]
Feelings, especially pious feelings with their impious flipsides, are so powerful that they are usually well-cooled and preferably deep-frozen. But when global temperatures rise, this strategy ceases to work. The old glaciers melt away, releasing old and new emotional cultures accompanied by violence in all its phenomenal density. While feelings were traditionally kept cossetted as anti-divine and unreasonable, they have now become the leading medium in religious cultures: what is felt is what counts, especially if it feels good. The secular version of this is when felt violence becomes the reason for legitimate counter-violence. The power and potential of the violence of feelings have become a reason to justify self-assertions in response to aggression and micro-aggression. I will describe the entanglements between felt violence and the violence of feelings using a few examples from religious and secular contexts.
Philipp Stoellger is Professor for Systematic Theology at the University of Heidelberg. After studying theology and philosophy in Göttingen, Tübingen, and Frankfurt a.M., he was an assistant in the Department of Theology and at the Institute of Hermeneutics at the University of Zurich. From 2007 to 2015 he was Professor for Systematic Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Rostock. Selected publications: Passivität aus Passion: Zur Problemgeschichte einer categoria non grata (2010); Metapher und Lebenswelt: Hans Blumenbergs Metaphorologie als Lebenswelthermeneutik und ihr religions-phänomenologischer Horizont (2000); Wortmacht – Machtwort: Deutungsmachtkonflikte in und um Religion (co-editor, 2017); Bild und Tod: Grundfragen der Bildanthropologie (co-editor, 2016); Rhetorik und Religion (editor, 2015); Deutungsmacht: Religion und belief systems in Deutungsmachtkonflikten (editor, 2014); An den Grenzen des Bildes: Zur visuellen Anthropologie (co-editor, 2014); Impossible Time: Past and Future in the Philosophy of Religion (co-editor, 2013); and Textwelt – Lebenswelt (co-editor, 2012).