Andreas Reckwitz: VERLUST

Robert Misik in conversation with Andreas Reckwitz LOSS A fundamental problem of modernity "Can the claim to progress of Western modernity still be maintained when the experiences and expectations of loss become as powerful as we are currently experiencing?" Experiences of loss, but also simply the feeling of impending loss, the sensation that everything stands on shaky ground and the future is clouded – this has become an almost dominant contemporary feeling and is partly responsible for the irritability, populism, and other political and social pathologies of our time. Andreas Reckwitz, the much-celebrated sociologist and contemporary diagnostician, has now written the book of the season on loss, the "fundamental problem of modernity." Losses plague contemporary Western societies in great numbers and diversity. They drive people onto the streets, into therapists' offices, and into the arms of populists. Under the banner of progress, Reckwitz argues, Western modernity has always been driven by a paradox of loss: It seeks (and can) to reduce experiences of loss – yet simultaneously intensifies them. This fragile arrangement has long endured, but the narrative of progress is losing massive credibility. The existential question of the 21st century is: Can societies remain modern and simultaneously engage productively with loss? A groundbreaking book. Andreas Reckwitz, born in 1970, is Professor of General Sociology and Cultural Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin and was a Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. His book "The Society of Singularities" won the Bavarian Book Prize in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair's Non-Fiction Prize in 2018. In 2019, he received the Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation. Moderated by: Robert Misik, author and journalist Andreas Reckwitz: Loss - A Fundamental Problem of Modernity Suhrkamp Insel, October 2024, ISBN 978-3-518-58822-2; €32, also available as an ebook! Recorded at the Kreisky Forum on December 9, 2024 Technical production: Milan Loewy