Strategies of Critique. A Systematic Reconstruction of the Debate on the Antisemitism Scandal at documenta fifteen

• Applicant: Dr. Georg Simmerl
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535798180

In 2022, the fifteenth edition of the art show documenta caused an incisive debate in the German public. Its main points of contention were how to detect antisemitism (especially in works of art), what role it plays in Germany and in the "global South," and where the boundaries of the freedom of a politicized contemporary art thus need to be drawn. This cultural studies research project, which seeks methodological and theoretical exchange with sociology, undertakes a systematic reconstruction of this debate. To this end, it first conducts a comprehensive collection of opinions expressed in the course of this debate in German newspapers and on the social network Twitter. Second, it subjects this comprehensive collection of opinions to a discourse analysis. The guiding question of this analysis follows from the awareness of a problem that was already widespread among the participants of this debate. In it, various forms of critique - especially criticism of Israel - were considered potential carriers of antisemitism, the presence of which had mostly to be determined in works of art and would therefore have required a differentiated art criticism. However, the criticism practiced by the respective opposing side was often accused of following not so much a deliberative as a polemical logic or even an unspoken agenda (such as covertly spreading antisemitism or suppressing legitimate criticism through such accusations). Therefore, in a methodological development of Luc Boltanski's sociology of critique, this project examines which procedures of critique the participants of this debate actually used, i.e. how they made judgments, drew distinctions, and intervened in the dispute - and in which relationship they thereby entered into with one another. Reconstructing the documenta debate along these lines generates a reflexive knowledge about it and at the same time opens up social theoretical insights into an acute problem of liberal societies. For the project pursues the thesis that the dynamic of this debate did neither derive from a specifically German handling of antisemitism nor from societal polarization driven by social media, but rather from the problem that critique can proceed strategically in liberal publics. Since thus even antisemitic criticism can strategically refer to the freedom of opinion or the freedom of artistic expression and is largely protected by them in these publics, such a critique provokes informal efforts to contain it - first and foremost an equally strategic counter-critique. Ultimately, therefore, this project inquires into the strategies of critique deployed in this dispute. It introduces this topic to the interdisciplinary research on critique and thereby brings it into conversation with antisemitism research, while a comprehensive reappraisal of the documenta debate is a desideratum to which the state of research on it points. Furthermore, such a reappraisal would affirm the sociopolitical significance of this debate.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants