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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Prof. Dr. Antonia Eder

Curriculum

Antonia Eder holds the Chair of Modern German Literature at the German Studies Institute of Universität Münster. After studying German language and literature, philosophy, psychology and political science at the Sorbonne, Paris IV and Freie Universität Berlin, she completed her doctorate in Tübingen on Hofmannsthal (Der Pakt mit dem Mythos, 2013), then taught as a senior assistant at the Département d'allemand of the Université de Genève and the Institute of German Language and Literature of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie. She habilitated in 2021 with a thesis on evidence in law, semiotics and literature. She has been a guest and substitute professor at the Universität Bonn, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, as well as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and the Universität Konstanz, and a fellow of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies of the Universität zu Köln. Her research focuses on the interrelationships between literature and knowledge from the 17th to the 20th century (law, forensics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology), myth theory and the reception of antiquity, drama and drama theory, aesthetics and poetics of tiredness, gender studies (spatial semantics and gender).

Publications (selection)

  • Unzeiten und Gegenwarten. Zum Werk von Angelika Meier. Ed. with Corinna Schlicht. Will be published: Baden-Baden 2026.
  • Indizien. Entstehung einer Erzählordnung in Recht, Semiotik, Literatur (1740-1820). Berlin 2025.
  • Sprachabbruch als Bewegungszunahme. Mediendramatische Text- und Körperdynamiken um 1900. In: Torsten Hoffmann et al. (eds.): Bewegung um 1900: Literarisch, Ästhetisch, Anthropologisch. Göttingen 2025, pp. 33–47.
  • Glaube, Liebe, Räume. Geschlechtertopologie und Raumsemantik in Schillers Die Jungfrau von Orleans. In: Helmuth Hühn, Nikolas Immer, Ariane Ludwig (eds.): Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801). Lektüren. Schiller-Studien 3/2023, pp. 93–127.
  • Müdigkeit. Allzumenschliches in Anthropologie, Philosophie und Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. In: Body Politics. Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte Issue 14, 10/2022, pp. 148–170.

Research project: Tiredness. On the Cultural History of Perseverance

Tiredness is persistent. The resistance of its aneconomy is a historically and currently virulent topic in philosophical, economic, mechanical, physiological and psychiatric contexts. Tiredness is regarded as resistance, but also as potential energy, as a kind of active passivity (Seel 2014). Tiredness can therefore be linked to a critical observation: as the resilience of persistence and inertia, it confronts biopolitics and meritocracy with capitalist-critical concepts of negative potentiality (Agamben 1998). Against this backdrop, tiredness can be described as a phenomenon of insistent ‚letting be‘, which is situated in the discourse field of related phenomena such as exhaustion, fatigue, melancholy, but also laziness, boredom, uselessness, etc. (Schäfer 2016; Carduff/Felten 2013; Felten/Pankow 2015), in which tiredness has not yet been explicitly extrapolated as a form of resistance. Tiredness, according to my further thesis, also releases a specifically poetic potential as a dual phenomenon of fatigatio and lassitudo. With its characteristics of potentiality and ephemerality, tiredness also appears in the aesthetic field as an aneconomic figure whose poetic and philosophical dimensions interest me. This is already recognizable in the 17th century (moral philosophy: acedia) and 18th century (French materialism), became virulent in the long 19th century due to the massive changes in working and production conditions brought about by industrialization (Rabinbach 1992), shaped psychiatric discourse in the 20th century, and is reappearing today on social and ethical levels. Based on the literature, the project focuses on the political, ethical and medical implications and the specific correlations between tiredness, aesthetics and anthropology.