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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

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Prof. Dr. Niklaus Largier

Curriculum

Niklaus Largier is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair in the Humanities, Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent time as a fellow at the Getty Center, the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, and the Center for Advanced Studies BildEvidenz, Berlin; among other institutions, he taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Konstanz. His research focuses on the history of mysticism and its significance for genealogies of perception, affects, and imagination from Late Antiquity to Modernism. In his work, the understanding of mysticism in terms of a rhetoric of figuration, of material imagination, and of a phenomenology of rhetorical effects plays a key role. 

Publications (selection)

  • Spekulative Sinnlichkeit. Kontemplation und Spekulation im Mittelalter. Zürich: Chronos, 2018.
  • Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of Sensation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
  • “In horizonte aeternitatis. Der Horizont als Form der Wahrnehmung und Perspektivierung im Mittelalter.“ In: Shifting Horizons. A Line and Ist Movement in Art, History, and Philosophy. Eds. Beate Fricke and Lucas Burkart. Basel: Schwabe, 2022, pp. 89-100.
  • “Reweaving the Texture of Perception: Mysticism and the Production of Sensual and Affective Experience.” In: Constructions of Mysticism as a Universal: Roots and Interactions Across Borders. Ed. Annette Wilke. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2021, pp. 55-66.
  • “Die Figur des Realen. Zur Konvergenz von Realität und Möglichkeit.” In: Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus. Eds. Veronika Thanner, Josef Vogl and Dorothea Walzer. München: Fink, 2018, pp. 41-56.

Research project: Symbolic Forms – Symbolic Riffs. The Energetic Charge of Symbols

In his current book project, “Symbolic Forms — Symbolic Riffs”, Niklaus Largier focuses on the question of how symbolic expressions, in their function of shaping and modifying perception, affect, and thought, acquire an energetic, formative charge. Starting with the work of Hermann Usener, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erich Auerbach, as well as 19th century discussions about the nature of the ‘symbolic’, the project attempts to reconstruct a history of the notion of the symbol that has been overshadowed by an understanding of the symbol in representational and idealizing terms. In a reconstruction of the energetic function of ’symbolic riffs’, Largier’s research turns to the understanding of symbols in Orphic and Neoplatonic thought, in the history of hymnic forms, and in forms of poetic enstrangement where the production of wonder, astonishment, and stupor plays a key role. 

Research results: Symbolic Forms – Symbolic Riffs. The Energetic Charge of Symbols

The current book project, Symbolic Forms – Symbolic Riffs, I was working on during my research stay at the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies »Imaginaria of Force«, builds on Figures of Possibility (Stanford UP, 2022). It reconceives the symbol not as the embodied form of an abstract idea but as effective, form-generating, productive, in other words: as energetic, according to Aristotles’ notion of energeia that he deploys in his Rhetoric and Poetics. The project traces this notion of the symbolic through five early-twentieth-century thinkers — Cassirer, Warburg, Auerbach, Benjamin, Šklovskij — revealing a shared concern: Cassirer's “symbolic form,” Warburg’s “Pathosformel,” Auerbach's “energetic realism,” Benjamin's dialectical image, and Šklovskij’s notion of defamiliarization foreground a moment of energy that is inherent in symbolic forms. They also speak of sedimented symbolic forms as quasi-apriori schemata that shape perception. On the other side, they emphasize that “symbolic riffs” disturb, undermine, or defamiliarize such sedimented orders. Tracing this double perspective, chapters of the book project will move from Orphic speech through Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and hymnic traditions to Baudelaire, Šklovskij, Glissant, Mackey, and Wynter.

As an outcome of my Hamburg stay with the CAS »Imaginaria of Force«, I gave the lecture »Symbolic Forms – Symbolic Riffs« on July 8, 2025, presenting my work in progress. Contrasting Dada's formal mastery with Surrealism's hermeneutics, I developed the notion of a symbolic "force of form" that both amplifies and cancels meaning in shaping perception. Drawing on Musil, medieval prayer, and Cassirer's "energy of spirit," I traced symbolic form's double nature as perceptual apriori and energetic act. Three hymnic examples – Hugo Ball, Dionysius the Areopagite, Ficino – illustrated the recourse to the symbolic as opposed to the figurative; finally, I emphasized that – thinking with Meschonnic, Leroi-Gourhan, and Kristeva – rhythm emerges as a key element of the project.