Anja Lemke ist Professorin für Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität zu Köln. Nach einer Promotion mit einer Arbeit zu Martin Heidegger und Paul Celan an der Universität Hamburg war sie u.a. wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Institut in Essen, am DFG-Graduiertenkolleg »Zeiterfahrung und ästhetische Wahrnehmung« sowie am Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, wo sie 2008 mit einer Arbeit zu »Memoria als poiesis. Untersuchungen zur Poetik der Erinnerung in der Moderne« habilitierte. Seit 2009 lehrt sie an der Universität zu Köln, zwischen 2010 und 2013 war sie als research fellow der Alexander von Humboldtstiftung mehrfach an der UC Berkeley zu Gast.
The decapitated self – on the latent violence of formatio vitae in artistic self-fashioning processes around 1800
The project addresses the continuing presence of violent images from the reformation and baroque period in autobiographical records around 1800. The material studied is writings that are autobiographical, in the broadest sense, which make a link from the attempt to fashion oneself as a process of gaining self-awareness to the question of the writer’s own status as artist and the limits and possibilities of artistic representation. The project pursues the hypothesis that a latent, suppressed violence is present in this self-formation at precisely the moment when self-presentation took centre-stage in literary interest in the 18th century.
In the baroque period it is above all in the fine arts that one finds an aggressive engagement with the violent side of artistic production (the commonplace of the artist as victim, self-portraits in the form of decapitated heads, for example by Caravaggio and Cranach, etc.), but in the train of the enlightenment the violent moment was increasingly pushed to the background in the discourse of classicism around 1800. That which is formed by violence, the deforming and mortifying, which is inherent in process of self-fashioning as formatio vitae, retreats in favour of a harmonising and vivifying pursuit of the whole. “Pygmalion” suppresses “Medusa”, but she remains present as a subtext in the aesthetic discourses and practices of the late 18th century, and finds her special place in autobiographical texts, these being the form expressly concerned with the connection between the problems of subject, form and fashioning.
