Newsletter des Collegium Carolinum 19/2016

(1.8.2016)

Werkstattgespräch

Das Collegium Carolinum vergibt jährlich Gaststipendien an Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen für einen Forschungsaufenthalt in München. In diesem Zusammenhang laden wir herzlich zu einem Werkstattgespräch mit einer der diesjährigen Stipendiatinnen ein:

Lucie Dušková (Charles University in Prague):
The Night and the Night Life in Czechoslovakia 1945-1960

am Donnerstag, 4. August 2016,  17.00 Uhr, im Seminarraum des Collegium Carolinum
(Hochstr. 8 / 2. Stock, München)

The actual political and experts´ discourse about questions of control and security is semantically tinted by topics like the Night, the Darkness and the Shadow – as the undesirable reverse of the Light of Security, the Normality and the Western Civilization. This way, it evokes C.G. Jung´s archetype of the repressed collective values and of the escape from control. Instruments to regain control, like street lights, cameras, biometric databases can be understood as visible aspects of this discourse that, as Giorgio Agamben points out, appeared during the Enlightenment.

This presentation focuses on the representations of the Night in the public discourse during the period of post-war Czechoslovakia 1945-1960 and on one particular social practice, that is commonly associated with the night: criminality. Within the scope of Derrida´s deconstructionism, the night shows up as a fruitful tool to analyze deeper social and political processes.


Lucie Dušková is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Economic and Social History of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. She is approaching the social history of the night during the post-war phase of socialist dictatorship through methods of the history of the Imaginary and the history of everyday life. Parts of her researches, i.e. “Vigilance in the Images of the Czech Films 1947-1959” were published in collective monographs.