LOSS

Robert Misik in conversation with Andreas Reckwitz

LOSS
A fundamental problem of modernity

»Can the claim to progress of Western modernity still be maintained when the experiences and expectations of loss become as powerful as we are currently experiencing?«

Experiences of loss, but also just the feeling of impending loss, the sense that everything is on shaky ground and the future is clouded - this has become an almost dominant feeling of the times and is partly responsible for the irritability, populism and other political and social pathologies of our time. Andreas Reckwitz, the much-celebrated sociologist and contemporary diagnostician, has now written the book of the season on loss, the „fundamental problem of modernity“.
Losses afflict contemporary Western societies in great numbers and in great variety. They are driving people onto the streets, into therapists' surgeries and into the arms of populists.
Under the banner of progress, Reckwitz explains, Western modernity has always been driven by a paradox of loss: it wants to (and can) reduce experiences of loss - and at the same time potentiate them. This fragile arrangement has endured for a long time, but the narrative of progress is losing much of its credibility. The existential question of the 21st century is: can societies remain modern and at the same time deal productively with loss? A groundbreaking book.

Andreas Reckwitz, born in 1970, is Professor of General Sociology and Cultural Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin and was a fellow at Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. His book „The Society of Singularities“ was awarded the Bavarian Book Prize in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair's non-fiction prize in 2018. In 2019, he received the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.

Moderation
Robert Misik, Author and journalist

Andreas Reckwitz:
Loss. A fundamental problem of modernity
Suhrkamp Insel, October 2024, ISBN 978-3-518-58822-2; € 32,-also available as an ebook!