“Human beings are first and foremost resonant beings”

Interview with Professor Hartmut Rosa of Universität Jena and director of Max-Weber-Kolleg

Abstract

Hartmut Rosa is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Jena, and one of the most original and prolific critical social theorists of our time. The connections between the theoretical and substantive concerns of Rosa’s work, on the one hand, and the analytical purposes of this issue of Civitas dedicated to “existential sociology”, on the other, are manifold. Rosa’s arguments on how acceleration as a social-structural trend of late modernity throws light upon intimate dilemmas of individual self-identity, for instance, could certainly be interpreted as (existential) sociological imagination at its best. The same goes for Rosa’s subtlety and ingenuity in capturing human modes of relating to the world in his theory of resonance, which apprehends the intermingling of bodily, affective, evaluative and cognitive dimensions in a manner that could be deemed “existential” - in a broad and original sense of the word - as broad and original is also the conception of the “critical” element in his “critical theory” of late modernity. For these reasons, we are very pleased to include the following interview in this issue of Civitas.