2025/26: Weakness

In the seventh year we want to dedicate ourselves to the Other of force that does not react as a counterforce but threatens force, as it were, from within: that is, weakness. Until the 17th century, the necessary fatigue of forces was a natural-philosophical axiom, before the concept of inertia attributed the waning or decay of motive forces exclusively to the countereffect of other actors. Previously, forces had been conceived as striving capacities that necessarily had to expend themselves in their actualization. This basic conviction of the late medieval and early modern impetus physics is brought to a point by Leonardo da Vinci when he imputes to the causality of kinetic transmission a suicidal desire that strives for its own death, with rest as its goal. In the production aesthetics of artistic ingenuity, the confrontation of creative power with contingent, difficult or uncontrollable phases of exhaustion and melancholic acedia is a constant theme. At the latest with the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, exhaustion and fatigue become key concepts of cultural (self-)description. Alongside overexertion, lethargy and fatigue, however, the question of weakness also brings into view conceptualizations of small-scale or subtle forces. Goethe’s discourse of ‘imperceptible forces’, Stifter’s interest in the minor effects of natural forces, and Benjamin’s idea of the ‘weak force of the messianic’ offer keywords from which the aesthetic potentials of weakness could be developed.