Sprechen Sie Loewe?

Prompted by watching Peter Friedl’s film, Report (2016), my talk will offer some stray reflections on “the way of humanity” (as Kafka calls it in his satire of the human ape, A Report to an Academy) – not least, as this concerns relations between captivity and asylum, freedom and expression, art and civil rights. As many have proposed, from Aesop to Wittgenstein, the allegory of a talking animal suggests that a lack of understanding in foreign languages is not limited to what others have to say, but provides a model for a lack of self-understanding. Produced in the context of Documenta 14, what Friedl’s film offers, I would like to suggest, is an example of this mimesis of the familiar as foreign, of an ethics of speaking and understanding, which exposes not only aspects of a European “political theatre”, but an underlying culture of what the primatologist Frans de Waal has called “anthropodenial”. In dialogue with what is staged by the film, this talk will explore a European imagining of alterity – with the paradox of a medium where what is edited out makes something become visible.