Portrait of Sami Khatib. Credits: American University in Cairo
Sami Khatib
Public Lecture
18 November, 18.00
HS I, Rechbauerstraße 12, 8010 Graz
This lecture approaches the theme of the “irreversible" through the concepts of history, capital and resistance. “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis …” (Jameson, 1981). What has been destroyed cannot be repaired, the destructive effects of history’s violence are irreversible. The modern concept of history, however, is equally based on a concept of class struggle (Marx) – a struggle that constantly reworks and reconfigures its relation to the past (Benjamin). Precisely because the past is never fully gone and can never be fully historicized, history remains an open wound. In Benjamin’s last text, entitled “On the Concept of History” (1940), those who are defeated by History are not erased, even if their memories are lost; they are still connected through an ana-chronic medium, which he calls the “tradition of the oppressed.” Paradoxically, this medium is a discontinuum – its texture is woven out of struggles, empty-spots and disjointed elements, which cannot be inscribed into one multifaceted yet coherent world-history or the pluralistic diversity of competing memory cultures. On the contrary, Benjamin’s tradition of the oppressed speaks much more to the “Wretched of the Earth” (Fanon, 1961) and the experience of extreme state violence.
Prof. Dr. Sami Khatib is the Professor for Political and Social Aesthetics and Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Cooperations at HfG Karlsruhe. Before Khatib joined the HfG Karlsruhe in spring 2025 he was most recently at the German Orient Institute in Beirut undertaking research on critical theory from the Global South. Since 2006 he has been teaching media philosophy, aesthetics and art theory at renowned universities and art schools worldwide, including the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests include critical theory, aesthetic theory and continental philosophy. His current book project is Realabstraktion: Die Geburt der Ästhetik aus dem Geiste des Kapitalismus [working title, Real Abstraction: The Birth of Aesthetics from the Spirit of Capitalism], projected for 2025. He published “Teleologie ohne Endzweck.” Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen [“Teleology without End”: Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic], Marburg: Tectum, 2013.
