2026 Blume Lecture by Gerhard Richter: "On Learning to Love the Darkness from Which I Derive: Dwelling in the Neighborhood of Poetry and Philosophy"

Gerhard Richter, the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University, will deliver the 10th annual Berhard Blume Lecture, titled "On Learning to Love the Darkness from Which I Derive: Dwelling in the Neighborhood of Poetry and Philosophy."   The Annual Bernhard Blume Lecture honors Bernhard Blume (1901-1978), Harvard's Kuno Francke Professor of of German Art and Culture until his retirement in 1966. Each year, the Harvard University German Department invites a scholar to foster lively discussions and provide students, faculty, and attendees with the opportunity to engage directly with leading experts in the field. By facilitating these scholarly exchanges, the series not only enhances the academic environment but also strengthens the department's commitment to promoting a deeper understanding of German culture and thought.

Gerhard Richter's research focuses on aesthetic theory and European critical thought since Kant; modern German literature and culture (including photography); the Frankfurt School (especially Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno); the intersections of literary writing and philosophy (especially Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida); contemporary French thought; the theory of translation; the complexities of intellectual, cultural, and political inheritance; and the theory and poetics of survival.  He is the author of eleven books, and has edited many others.  His two most recent books are This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art, which appeared in November 2022 with MIT Press, and a study in German on the idea of survival, Das Überleben überleben, which appeared with Sonderzahl Verlag in Vienna in the summer of 2023.  Read more 

Abstract:    From the perspective of the critic, the relationship between poetry and philosophy is characterized by a persistent conundrum: On the one hand, conceptual thought is required in the critical act to elucidate the substance, or cognitive surplus, of an aesthetic form; on the other hand, if such a critical act were able fully to accomplish its conceptual task, it would have made the singularity or formal specificity of the poetic artwork superfluous—since, in that case, the poem’s presumed “aboutness” could have been articulated in an entirely different, that is, discursive or conceptual, manner. One way of approaching the difficulties of this conundrum unfolds in the interrogation of the dark “neighborhood” of relations that obtain between the poetic and the philosophical. This special kind of darkness within the vicinity of the poem always stands in need of understanding, while also propelling us to consider the vexed relation or non-relation between the poem and the act of thinking anew. If the poem’s singular darkness resists the force of a sheer hermeneutic will in its interpretive quest for illumination, it is because this darkness itself constitutes an uncharted region in which the two strange neighbors, poetry and philosophy, may encounter one another in the uncontainable and unpredictable vagaries of language itself. Our particular test case will place into sustained conversation Heidegger’s reflections on poetry and the work of a German-language poet whose writings—along with those of Hölderlin, Trakl, George, and Celan—held special significance for him, namely, Rilke.