Selbstlüge, Selbstschöpfung und die schwankende Gestalt in Kunst, Religion und Philosophie: Buchvorstellung und Diskussion mit Marian Baukrowitz und Jürgen Große

In the organizer's words:

How can you lie to yourself? What is this self anyway? And can it find stability in the face of the increasingly faltering form of the "truth machines" in art, religion and philosophy?

The two Berlin authors Marian Baukrowitz and Jürgen Große present and discuss their texts published in the "New Philosophy" series by "edition fatal".

The two volumes "Selbstlüge" (2023) and "Selbstschöpfung" (2025) by Marian Baukrowitz directly follow on from each other. In the former, he gets to the bottom of the mystery of lying to ourselves, i.e. how it can be possible for us to lie to ourselves and break the implicit promise of truth contained in every statement, even to ourselves.

In "Self-Creation", Baukrowitz asks more fundamentally how we can become this self in the first place. The author starts from the self as a surprising force. Wondering about one's own actions as an elementary self-experience leads to the realization: "Surprisingly, the self seems to be closely connected to me, but to be something other than me."

This realization in turn inevitably leads to metaphysical questions - which must remain unanswered. Even the great "truth machines" of art, religion and philosophy cannot be expected to come to the rescue here, especially after their "liberation" from the bondage of the great systems, as Jürgen Große points out. They have long since ceased to be able to support each other and are "of wavering form" (2024). "Modern Europe came into being on the day when the artists wanted to be priests, the priests wanted to be thinkers and the thinkers wanted to be artists."

What both authors have in common is that they break with the (rather boring) forms of conventional academic philosophy and deal with their topics in a minimalist essayistic way (Marian Baukrowitz) and in aphoristic condensation (Jürgen Große).

"edition fatal", which published the presented texts by Baukrowitz and Große, is a publishing house based in Potsdam that aims to provide a forum for original and critical works from the fields of social sciences, humanities and cultural studies.

Further information: https://www.edition-fatal.de

About the authors:

Marian Baukrowitz (*1986) is a lecturer in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He studied philosophy in London and Berlin and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein. Book publications: "Wittgenstein: Die ordnende Lesart" (De Gruyter 2020), "Selbstlüge" (edition fatal 2023), "Selbstschöpfung" (edition fatal 2025).

Jürgen Große (*1963) holds a doctorate in history and a habilitation in philosophy. He lives as a freelance journalist in Berlin. His aphoristic and essayistic work has received several awards, including the Günter Bruno Fuchs Prize, the Essay Prize of the Junge Akademie at the BBAdW and a Nietzsche Fellowship. Recent publications: "Die kalte Wut - Theorie und Praxis des Ressentiments" (Büchner-Verlag 2024), "Von schwankender Gestalt - Kunst, Religion und Philosophie nach ihrer Befreiung" (edition fatal 2024), "Die kreative Klasse - Nachrichten aus Winkel, Szene und Betrieb" (Omnino 2022); list of publications: http://www.grosse-werke.de.