Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation

Summary
Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation uses Simon Weil’s concept of decreation in order to frame an approach to Romanticism that moves beyond the concerns with self and identity that have occupied traditional and even more progressive accounts of the field. Decreation foregrounds the materiality of a political life in the here and now, whilst nevertheless insisting that we remain open to that which remains elusive and resistant to all attempts to bring it into presence. According to Weil and the writers whose works I examine in this project, the withdrawal from structures of sovereign power that are intrinsic to the formation of identities allows an activity of worlding that releases us from the cyclical forms of violence that have been seen to underwrite some of the most terrible atrocities of history. For these writers, decreation not only questions formalised modes of identity politics, it allows new ways of being in the world, both ethically and politically, thus engendering new forms of relationality and co-existence.
Investigator
Dr Phil Habil Jennifer Wawrzinek, Freie Universität Berlin
Contact
Email: j.wawrzinek@fu-berlin.de
Research projects
- Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds
- Azuchi Screens Research Network
- Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation
- British Romanticism and colonial modernity in India, 1780-1840
- Climate Science Denialism and its populist Analogs
- Critique, Creativity, Innovation
- Extremism and the Australian Imaginary
- Gothic Fictions: Emotion, Contagion, and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity
- Human Kind: transforming identity in Australian and British portraits 1700-1900
- Islam and the Left in Indonesia and Turkey
- Kenzaburo Ōe and William Blake: Modernity, Romanticism, Japan
- Literary Romanticism and the Media of Romantic Love
- Natural Born Subjects: A Cultural History of Naturalization in Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1660-1850
- New tastemakers and Australia's post-digital literary culture
- Observation and Analogy in Enlightenment and Romantic Natural History
- Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce
- Regency Flash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1788-1848
- Romantic Worlding
- The Butterfly Men of Kuranda: natural history dealers in the 'deep north'
- The George Lyell Collection
- The Past and Present of Sugar
- The Pasts and Futures of Virtual Reality
- Theorising the online anti-public sphere
- War-Widow, Mother, Slave, Refugee: Andromache in Romantic Europe
- William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization
- World Literatures, Theatres and Cultures research network