Public intimacy: Kluge, affects and feminist dialogues

The aim of my talk is to highlight a feminist tradition of the concept of public sphere, based on Alexander Kluge's (and Oskar Negt's) work on feelings. In 1972, in Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, Negt and Kluge opposed Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) with a description of public sphere based on proletarian experience. They insisted on the conditions that make dialogue and rightness thought possible: language, imagination and dialectical relations were at the heart of their reflections. Although both authors subsequently seemed to distance themselves from the concept of public sphere, it has recently been shown that there is a profound continuity between Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung and Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981): the transition from one book to the other corresponds to an increased attention to history and social transformations, which presupposes a valorization of subjectivities and their feelings considered in the long term (Langston, 2020). This history of feelings organizes the forms of trust and cooperation at the heart of Kluge's stories and films.

My presentation will be divided into three parts. First, following Heide Schlüppman's classic studies (October, vol. 46, 1988; New German Critique, n°. 49, 1990), I will recall the theoretical and practical debates with German feminist movements that form and construct the political and epistemological background of Klug's theory of feeling.

This review will enable me to compare the way in which Kluge and Habermas took into account feminist critiques of their respective conceptions of public sphere. In particular, I will compare the new preface to the seventeenth German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1990, with the speech Kluge gave when he received the Lessing-Preis from the city of Hamburg in 1989 (Personen und Reden, 2012, pp. 7-22). I will show how Kluge's notion of “weak feelings” blurs and historicizes the division of public and private that marks both the strength and weakness of the Habermasian conception of public sphere to this day. The latter is indeed hampered by the maintenance of a rigid distinction between the public and the private, as evidenced by its resigned inability to think of social networks as anything other than unmediated spaces (A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, Wiley, 2023). In contrast, Kluge's work constantly questions the division of public and private.

Finally, in a third section, I will show how Kluge's situated, sensitive and productive conception of public sphere enables us to think about a feminist tradition of public sphere and its transformations since the 1970s. It's not just a question of taking original account of affects in public space, but of structuring what might be called a “public intimacy”. In the French-speaking public sphere, which I'll take as an example, the recent rise of new feminist journals since MeToo gives concrete form to the Klugian project of a “parliament of feelings” (Langston, 2020).