The philosopher Walter Benjamin famously distinguished two different levels of experience: Erlebnis as “lived experience” in its immediate, affective, not-yet-processed reality, and Erfahrung as more self-conscious, theorized, conceptualized experience. This will be a discussion among Ukrainian intellectuals who in most of their lives devote much energy to conceptualizing and theorizing. Now they find themselves in the midst of what is the largest-scale invasion in Europe since the defeat of Nazi Germany. “This is the third world war,” the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan wrote in Der Spiegel last week. Given that extremity, can the subjective, immediate experience given to individuals be expressed? What can be intellectually grasped? Which conceptual questions seem most urgent? What can be understood and conveyed in real time?
Speakers:
Ihor Andriichuk, Politics PhD student, The New School for Social Research
Kateryna Mishchenko, Ukrainian writer, curator and publisher
Yustyna Kravchuk, Ukrainian author, translator (Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv)
Mariia Shynkarenko, Politics PhD candidate, The New School for Social Research
Volodymyr Yermolenko, Ukrainian philosopher, analyst & journalist
Moderated by:
Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University
Hosted By:
Jeffrey Goldfarb, the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology Emeritus at The New School for Social Research
Lala Pop, Program Manager and Ph.D. Student in Politics at The New School for Social Research
This event is organized and supported by the Democracy Seminar & Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research and The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program (REEES) of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
March 28: A Dialogue about War, from Inside