Lambert Wiesing: "Luxury – the Dadaism of Possession"

Lambert Wiesing, Universität Jena: "Luxury – the Dadaism of Possession"

Abstract
The aim of the talk is to introduce the idea of a phenomenology of luxury. The thesis is, that luxury cannot be a characteristic of things or of actions, but that it arises through a private aesthetic experience, which can be identified as a functional equivalent to play as it is found in Schiller: If an autonomous subject possesses something exaggeratedly, superfluously or irrationally elaborate, and if that subject further experiences his ownership as liberation from the forceful demands of goal-oriented rationality and utilitarian thinking, then that something is luxury.