Andreas Dorschel studied philosophy, musicology and linguistics in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main and received his doctorate in 1991. Since 2002 he has been Professor of Aesthetics and Director of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz (Austria). He previously taught at universities in England, Germany and Switzerland, where he also habilitated in philosophy at the University of Bern in 2002. He was a visiting professor at Stanford in 2006 and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2020/21. In 2011, Dorschel was awarded the Research Prize of the Province of Styria and in 2014 he received the main prize of the Caroline Schlegel Prize of the city of Jena.  

Andreas Dorschel’s research focuses on aesthetics, poetics, the history of ideas and political philosophy. His most recent books are Rethinking Prejudice, 2nd ed. (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), Wortwechsel. Zehn philosophische Dialoge (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2021) and Mit Entsetzen Scherz. Die Zeit des Tragikomischen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2022). Articles and chapters by Andreas Dorschel have appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), among others. 

Changing the world. On the poetics of the manifesto 

Manifesto – in the context of Andreas Dorschel’s project, this means a text with the ambition to change the world. Not everything that calls itself a manifesto falls under this term; the mere occurrence of the term cannot be the criterion. Much of what has appeared under this title has been devoted to narrowly defined concerns. The subject of the poetological question posed here, on the other hand, is the manifesto as a text that takes a totalizing approach: all other perspectives are seen as limited to it, one’s own should not be. This claim is immediately subject to a paradox: in order to grasp the whole, one would have to stand outside it; but there is nothing outside the whole. The strategies that make up the text of a manifesto, in the ambitious sense mentioned above, aim to overcome this paradox. It can only succeed if those who read the text are, as it were, drawn into it. It is not enough to argue whether this or that assertion about the proletariat in Marx’/Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848), this or that assertion about climate change in Bruno Latour’s Terrestrial Manifesto (2018) is true, without having grasped the peculiar logic of the claim to change the world. Access to it may be opened up through the poetological question, in the sober sense of the word, namely: how it is done. 

Dorschel’s tandem partner is Birgit Recki, Professor of Philosophy at Universität Hamburg. 

His HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.