Kritik der Gegenwart "Wir Avatare"

In the organizer's words:

The working group (Critique of the Present) attempts to critically classify current social phenomena and ideas, based on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. No prior knowledge or money is required to attend our events. On the contrary: we want to create (pre-)knowledge and get into conversation together.

Through Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse project, avatars as virtual representations of real subjects have once again gained importance, insofar as the various virtual representations of real people and their reflections are bundled here. The lecture will examine these different modes of representation and their respective reflections by first discussing the relationship between avatars and profiles.

A second step then unfolds a network of different avatar existences in order to show, thirdly, a reversal according to which real people themselves are increasingly becoming avatars of virtual structures (real avatars). A final step deals with the limits of this avatarization and searches for escape routes from these multiple manipulations

Dirk Stederoth studied philosophy, sociology and politics at the University of Kassel and received his doctorate in 2000 at the Institute of Philosophy with a thesis on Hegel's philosophy of the subjective mind. He worked there as a research assistant and lecturer for special tasks and habilitated in 2013 at the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of Kassel with a thesis on 'Degrees of Freedom'. Since 2014, he has worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Kassel, where he has been an associate professor specializing in the history of philosophy since 2019. His main areas of work are: Classical German Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Education, Philosophy of Music and Intercultural Philosophy.

This event will take place on the 1st floor in the "Grand Kitchen" room