Madame la Professeure Illouz,
Dr. Hönes,
Professor Zumbusch,
Professor Sherman,
Members of the Jury,
Members of the Warburg family,
Members of the Hamburg Parliament,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Do you happen to know the animated film "Inside Out"? It is set in the head of a little girl called Riley, and focuses on her five basic emotions: joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. They are embodied by five fictional characters which stand together at a large console inside Riley’s head. From there, they try to cooperate more or less in steering the little girl through the turbulences of her daily life.
In a colourful manner that children can understand the film explains how our brain functions. It tells a charming story about coming of age and how we manage our emotions.
There is now even a sequel which pokes fun at the emotional turmoil we experience during puberty.
Psychologists, paediatricians, and trauma therapists have praised "Inside Out" because the film provides children with a vocabulary that enables them to talk about their feelings. The personifications oft he basic emotions make it easier to accept the existence of unpleasant feelings and at the same time to express one’s own internal experiences. The fact that the movie expresses emotions in the form of images allows us to talk about them.
But there is an important caveat. While this may work on an individual and concrete level we regularly fail to accomplish the same on an abstract and societal level. In public one is told that emotions are out of place. The public sphere is supposed to be the realm of enlightened reason where urges and feelings need to be kept under control.
They must not endanger what Norbert Elias has called "the civilizing process" which is characterised by something he called „Triebkontrolle“ meaning control over one’s urges.
In an ideal world the public sphere is free of emotional outbursts, and public speakers simply take their cue from the better arguments. Jürgen Habermas, the great sociologist of the public sphere, states that emotional and expressive utterances are no subject to reason. They are supposed to have no part in a public discourse since their claims cannot be substantiated by better arguments.
These theoretical and to some extent prescriptive considerations have practical consequences. After 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany developed a kind of paradigm which the sociologist Theodor Geiger calls a "pathos of sobriety." It is supposed to ensure that after the National Socialist reign of terror the allegedly black magic of emotionalism cannot lead our society astray a second time.
However, it goes without saying that political life cannot function without emotions, even in a democracy. Even the demonstrative renunciation of a public display of emotion is actually based on an emotional decision.
We are well aware of the fact that as social beings we depend on empathy in order to construct social relationships. And we see on a daily basis that passion, anger, fear and love are part of the foundations of social and political movements. But we still neglect to make use of this on an analytical or political level. It is true that in certain academic disciplines there has been an "emotional turn". However, this has not as yet become sufficiently apparent in the ethics of the public sphere. We do not seem to be ready to accept, that our reality is more complicated and a lot messier than most idealistic models of democratic conversations suggest.
For this reason I am delighted that we are paying tribute to three intellectuals today, two of them award recipients, and one of them the name-giver of the award itself. On a scholarly level, in the context of various historical epochs, and, acting as a mirror of their own age and beyond, they have made possible and sustain a discourse about pictures and emotions.
Thank you so much, Madame La Professeure Illouz, that you have come all the way from Paris for this event. And Dr. Hans Christian Hönes, the recipient of the Aby Warburg Fellowship, has come all the way from Scotland.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Since 1980 the Warburg Award of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has been given to intellectuals whose thinking and research are interdisciplinary, which is exactly what Warburg envisaged.
Creating a dialogue between the theoretical ideas of Aby Warburg and those of Eva Illouz is a real challenge, for between their work lie the tangled paths, the progressive achievements and the catastrophes of a whole century. Furthermore, their research goals and methodology are not exactly similar. And yet both analyze in a paradigmatic manner the relationship between culture, emotion, and social structure.
In a few moments Cornelia Zumbusch will be telling us about all of this in greater detail. And I am sure, that Eva Illouz will provide us with striking evidence why the jury came to a profound and profoundly necessary decision when it decided to award her the honor of the Warburg Prize.
Conferring an award in Aby Warburg’s name in this day and age makes us remember a polymath who always kept university structures and constraints at arm’s length, and translated his family’s wealth into an intellectual treasure.
His library with its more than 65,000 volumes devoted to cultural history was moved to London in 1933 in order to prevent it from falling victim to the barbarism of the Nazis. It is now in good hands. And in Hamburg we once again have an institution in the shape of Warburg Haus which makes the hermeneutics of cultural history the starting point for contemporary analysis.
That is of some importance, for many of the questions that arise in areas in which we seem to be failing as democratic societies cannot be answered in terms of purposive rationality or even instrumental rationality.
They have deep and firm roots in cultural and social co-existence, and in its values, images and emotions.
It sometimes seems almost grotesque when we think about the extent to which the disciplines that study these questions are being marginalized, when at the same time we are in despair on account of our inability to give the crises of meaning a specific form which can help us to make them answerable.
From Aby Warburg we can still learn to find human expression in images and symbols and thus to integrate visual and emotional forms into the way we think.
Whether Warburg would have liked the film "Inside Out" is a matter for speculation an most probably debate. But the idea of showing feelings as a seething mass of colourful figures with their own agenda and at an emotions mixer console is no doubt an example of an iconological idea which takes a complex subject and makes it readily accessible. This is what we need today, especially if we want to tackle today’s political, social, and cultural crises.
Warburg’s close scholarly partner Ernst Cassirer accused the democrats of his time of not having done enough to design attractive images of a democratic society which had something to pit against the supposedly pristine purity of pre-democratic myths.
Current events suggest that we may very well come to grief as we attempt to deal with an identical challenge.
Ladies and gentlemen,
As a scholar Aby Warburg decided to work on various aspects of art history. And as an intellectual he sparked and encouraged public discourse.
A state of affairs in which scholars are also intellectuals is something we would welcome today. We want to be able to think our own thoughts – openly and without constraints. But we are also perfectly aware of the fact that the number of people who are willing to face up to the rough and tumble of contemporary debate is steadily decreasing. In part this is because the debate has unfortunately degenerated into a maddening shouting match.
Easy and often one dimensional anwers are all that matters. Complexity seems to be unbearable and ambiguity untolerable. In this turmoil the counterfactual assertion that everyone is somehow or other interested in reaching some kind of mutual understanding is of little or no importance.
In her book of essays entitled "Israel", which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2015, Eva Illouz illustrates the role of the intellectual with a small picture in the preface in which, depending on how one decides to look at it, there appears either the face of an old woman, or that of a young woman with imposing head-gear.
She uses this image to explain how she is torn between her belief in the universalistic ideals of the first French republic and her worries concerning the growing antisemititism in the western and muslim world. She argues:
"The role of the intellectual is to place these differing images next to each other and to switch from one to another. Placing the images next to each other, and the realization that there are other ways of linking the same dots and lines, does not absolve us from the duty to look unwaveringly at one of these images, namely the one which most urgently asks us to take action, the one which seems to rule out the possibility of also seeing the other one."
Eva Illouz uses this image to draw attention to the increasingly complicated circumstances through which we have to navigate. She encourages us to accept various kinds of ambiguity in an ambiguous world and to perceive what is happening simultaneously. And to still decide what is most important. And to take action.
Illouz paints a picture of public communication that is clearly more complex than that of many well-tried models. She focuses not only on what is obviously rational, but takes emotions into account at an early conceptual stage. And she attempts to survey the whole contradictory complexity of human co-existence.
In a time in which technological and economic factors increasingly permeate the emotional and affective dimensions of social relationships, Eva Illouz supplies an indispensable intellectual toolbox. She helps us to scrutinize these developments in a critical manner, and to think about emotions and their effect in a society organized on the basis of capitalist principles. At the intersection of sociology, psychoanalysis and cultural theory she creates an intellectual framework which leaves its stamp on a large number of people in the public sphere.
In fact, she not only analyzes the public sphere, its raison d’être and its emotions, but often enters it herself in a very passionate manner. After the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023 she repeatedly criticized and admonished her contemporaries and issued warnings about what was happening on the ground.
Illouz has said that she is shocked by the fact that she now finds it difficult to recognize former political and intellectual allies.
Herself a decidedly critical thinker, Eva Illouz has rebuked those members of the global left wing who are trying to turn the jihadist fundamentalism of Hamas and its violent excesses into an act of liberation and resistance.
She insists that ideas of esteem, respect and acceptance can only become operative if they are universally valid. That is not easy to accept. It is necessarily complex and sometimes even messy. Solidarity unfolds in its entirety in the modern age if and when it applies not only to one’s own compatriots, but also to other groups. If one accepts this premise there is no easy or even morally pure way towards any truth.
This solidarity agreement applies to everyone. Last but not least it must apply to Jews, who live as a minority in our society. That this promise must be upheld is the ethical basis of the post-war consensus – that "it shall never happen again."
After 7 October Jews throughout the world and even here in our society were no longer sure that the notion of whole-hearted solidarity still applied to them. In point of fact anti-Semitism resurfaced, an ancient concoction of suspicion, slander, and collective defamation. This in itself is hardly surprising, since antisemitism never disappeared. But the extent to which our society seems to be unable to deal with this issue makes one speechless.
The wide emotional gap in public policymaking that has existed for decades began to find a toxic filling a long time ago. But for a year now its intensity has increased. Rumors about Jews abound. Conspiracy theories are everywhere to be seen. Fundamentalists such as neo-Nazis or jihadist fascists claim that their opinions are the absolute truth, fuel resentments against anyone who is different, and make no secret whatsoever of their hatred of Jews.
But the worst thing is that our society, apart from the usual slogans, does not have any idea of how to deal with this problem.
For this reason Madame Illouz believes that, when it comes to solidarity, the consensus of our post-war world is currently endangered. Furthermore, she has noticed an erosion of the thinking and action patterns which, when all is said and done, led to this consensus in the first place.
"Never has morality been such an enemy of what is good", Illouz wrote at the end of a long and bitter essay that was printed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in May this year. In this essay she describes how people are in fact betraying the very foundation of their own positions if and when they are no longer prepared to universalize the sense of solidarity, and are beginning to exclude individual groups from the benefits of solidarity and in so many words from society as a whole.
The Enlightenment has taught us that there is no such thing as a single and incontrovertible truth. In open and free societies what counts are the good reasons and better arguments which have gained the upper hand in the public debate.
Yet in recent years this insight has come under a great deal of pressure from people who believe that they have found a generally valid truth or, more precisely, a more primordial cultural core. Those who choose to think this way, no matter whether they are right-wing or left-wing, are actually preparing the ground for fundamentalism by claiming that morality does not need to adopt the better arguments. Instead they turn morality into something absolute and unassailable. The consequence is that solidarity is once again an exclusive resource for a small number of people who believe that they are on a par with one another.
Those who are interested in forward-looking, modern, open-minded and solidarity-based thinking in our society, must possess the openness to admit that human rights are the only presupposition that can claim a status of genuine truth.
George Tabori once wrote that „Everyone is somebody“.
Theodor W. Adorno was of the opinion that people should be able to be different without fear.
Jürgen Habermas states the intuition that every utterance is based on a desire to reach understanding in communication.
And Hannah Arendt has taught us that the political dimension of life is to be found in the conversations of the many in a society.
These admonitions contain images and emotions of a society which we can actually comprehend as a forthcoming and better one, in fact, a society which it is worth public support and struggle.
The feeling that one is standing at a historical watershed no doubt overwhelms us on a number of occasions in our lives. At the moment things are happening thick and fast. The worsening crises have compelled us to think about what is happening.
There are new agreements and new realities. There is the necessity of ongoing evaluation. And last but no least, we should not lose sight of ourselves and of what we are trying to achieve.
At any rate Madame Illouz still instits that these humanist insights rightously claim to be true. And she defends the achievements of the modern age, even though at the moment they seem to be on the point of slipping through our fingers.
Ladies and gentlemen,
That is why this evening is so important. Animated films, which help us to speak about feelings, are all well and good, but they are clearly insufficient.
What we need is intellectual precision and scholarly originality. You are the people who help us to draw lessons from the past, to read symbols, to look at pictures in an emotional manner and with understanding, to contextualize developments as they happen.
To cut a long story short, you have provided and will continue to provide us with the orientation that we so urgently need.
I am very pleased indeed that today we are going to be presenting the awards to people who have dedicated themselves to this very task.
It gives me great pleasure to honour you, Madame La Professeure Illouz, and you, Hans Christian Hönes.
Finally, I am happy to hand over to Professor Bill Sherman, the director of the Warburg Institute in London, who has kindly agreed to deliver the encomium for Dr. Hönes.
Die Rede der Preisträgerin Eva Illouz finden Sie hier (Veröffentlicht in der Süddeutschen Zeitung).