Head: Univ.-Prof.
PD Dr. Jan Völker
Why philosophy? What use does philosophy even have? Such are the
questions posed by Adorno and Deleuze in the last century. These questions are all the more relevant for a Philosophy Department
in a University of Applied Arts, where philosophy is an outsider.
Questions concerning the outside of philosophy
reveal their creative import only if one exposes their immanence. The “outside” of philosophy is an irreducible condition
for philosophy itself, it insists upon the elementary dimension of philosophy’s procedures. For philosophy is always triggered
by a stumbling block, by something troubling, whether - it is called speculation, astonishment or criticism.
Inventive
philosophical work never proceeds exclusively out of the historical relation of philosophy to itself. Its chance lies in its
relation to what has been called “non-philosophy”. This connection has often been scrutinized. Theory was posited by Deleuze
and Foucault as a tool-box, in which non-philosophers search for tools. One finds a rejoinder to this instrumental logic in
Hegel, for whom concepts are not means to further an end; under a concept there is nothing to be thought but the concept itself.
However, the French philosophers also argue that concepts are not means, but thresholds for other forms of thought, for different
practices. Whilst Hegel insists that conceptual language is a moment of all language forms that enter into the arts, theory
of state, religion and empirical sciences.
The philosophy department addresses these thresholds as the presence
of an unknown conceptuality in all our representations. The disquieting exercise of philosophical thought depends on its relations
to political, epistemological, artistic, and ethical problems. This meshing has intensified and undergone many changes in
the twentieth century. Such “disturbances” are exactly what launches philosophy, what brings it about. The question is: how
do interferences, discontinuities, and all the different materializations of thought put us in relation to the universality
of reason? When do political struggle, aesthetic relations to the world, desubjectivations, affirmations of desire, or changes
of form thwart the naturalized “discourse” of interest and egoism? In this sense, philosophy participates in the practices,
interests and questions of all disciplines, contributing to their problematization.
This is the landscape explored
by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, in close contact with theorists, artists, and
students of all disciplines.
