We Take a Summer Break!
In the Meantime: Silence
Dear readers,
After some busy months, we’re off on our summer break. But it’s only this newsletter that is pausing; our daily business continues, of course.
Which, by God, shouldn’t stop you from taking a break yourself. Remember that, “breaks”? Those rare stretches of time when you do absolutely nothing – no Sunday papers, no scrolling, no sudoku, nada! Just silence.
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I’ve been rebuilding my own relationship with that lately, inspired by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In his essay Sprechen über Gott (“Talking about God”), he’s “in dialogue with” the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil about our neoliberal society of information and consumption. Transcendence, Han argues, is something we lost – and that we have replaced with consumption instead, as our default way of relating to the world. We devour whatever we come across: information (!), images, flowers, people. Forever searching, often addicted. Han diagnoses an “obesity of the soul” and, drawing on Weil, prescribes an “ethics of the gaze”: to not pick the beautiful flower, to not even want to name it, but simply to look at it – with our whole attention. No judging, no wanting, no coffee in our hand, no photo for the next Instagram story in mind.
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Sounds pretty radical, right? I tried it over the past few days and learned a lot. That I couldn’t, for instance, sketch the façades on my street from memory, despite walking past them every day. That it’s surprisingly difficult to just look at a façade without thinking “façade”. That someone had knotted glitter ribbons onto their balcony, fluttering in the wind. That next to it, two elderly neighbours were leaning over the railing, with their elbows propped up, chatting, faces folded into happy creases.
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Das Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht sucht für den Arbeitsbereich Integrierte Wissenschaftskommunikation und Wissenstransfer zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt, zunächst für ein Jahr befristet (mit der Option der Verlängerung), eine
Studentische Hilfskraft (m/w/d)
Kommunikationsdesign oder verwandte Fächer, ab 2. Semester
(10 Stunden/Woche; Dienstort: Heidelberg/hybrid)
Weitere Informationen unter: Studentische Hilfskraft (m/w/d)
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When we really look, the world grows larger, and time thickens. With Weil, five minutes stretch into a Langeweile, literally “a long while”, the German word for boredom. In the best possible sense.
We wish you plenty of that, until we’ll break the silence again on 4 September.
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That’s it for this week. Take care and all the best!
Yours,
the Verfassungsblog Team
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