Adrian Daub: »›Noch‹, ›Nicht mehr‹, ›Endlich wieder‹: Kollektive Zeitwahrnehmung und Verbotsdiskurse«

“‘Still,’ ‘No Longer,’ ‘Finally Again’: Collective Perceptions of Time and Discourses on Prohibition” with Ulrike Vedder.

The claim that “one” can or may “no longer” say x, y, or z today has been firmly anchored in political discourse since at least the 1980s. It stands for a broader sense of the unspeakable and the mechanisms by which this supposedly spreads—mechanisms that, for the people who describe them, have the character of prohibitions, even though these prohibitions are rarely explicitly put into words. Moreover, the sense of a historical shift expressed through speech prohibitions seems to structure a certain audience’s relationship to the political.

This lecture examines the notions of sayability and unsayability, of historical upheaval and political power, that underlie this linguistic game. Above all, however, it deals with time and the experience of time, with nostalgia, and with the feeling that “everyone” speaks the way one does oneself.

ADRIAN DAUB: Literary scholar; J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in the departments of Comparative Literature and German at Stanford University. Since 2019, Daub has also served as Faculty Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. His research interests include the intellectual and cultural history of the 19th century as well as issues of gender and sexuality. In addition to his academic work, Daub serves as a political commentator on current events in German and English-language newspapers [including FAZ, DIE ZEIT, NZZ, and The Guardian] as well as on the podcast “The Feminist Present,” produced with Laura Goode. His latest book, “Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic Is Taking Over the World,” was published in 2022 and appeared on the non-fiction bestseller list of ZDF, Deutschlandfunk, and DIE ZEIT in January 2023.

Overview of the lecture series

“Thou shalt, thou shalt not. Prohibitions and Commandments between Religion, Law, and Politics”

Prohibitions and commandments are at the heart of religious and ethical living; they stabilize social orders, protect against violence, and limit the abuse of power. Rights, including fundamental rights, are secured through prohibitions. At the same time, prohibitions themselves are an expression of political, economic, and social power relations. Prohibiting others—or even oneself—from doing something means restricting freedom of action and self-realization. The fact that this repressive function of prohibitions and taboos has an inherent culture-forming dimension is what accounts for the unease that Sigmund Freud already attributed to culture at the beginning of the 20th century. The productive power of prohibitions can also be traced etymologically: as far back as Old Low German, the verb “to prohibit” [mnd. vorbēden] was closely related to the command, in the sense of an emphatic directive for action.

In the summer semester of 2026, the Mosse Lectures aim to shed light on the ambivalences of prohibitions from a historical and systematic perspective and to examine their relevance to contemporary social debates. For while criticism of prohibitions has seemed ubiquitous in many social spheres for some time now, and “breaking taboos” carries positive connotations for good reason, prohibitions are experiencing a renaissance in contexts where they become instruments of crisis management. For instance, in the global discussions surrounding the necessity and legitimacy of a social media ban for children and adolescents. Or in current climate policy, which, under the banner of safeguarding intertemporal freedom, faces the task of readjusting the relationship between intergenerational justice and “prohibition culture” and discussing a current imperative for bans. Debates surrounding cancel culture, fake news, and digital personality rights also revolve around possibilities for prohibitive restrictions.

The Mosse Lectures bring together philosophical, cultural studies, ethnological, and legal perspectives to examine the conditions under which bans appear legitimate, their cultural prerequisites and political functions, and, not least, the power that is constituted in the act of banning.

Further events in this series:

– Heike Behrend: “The Horrors of Wanting to Know: The Prohibition of Questions and the Questionability of Questions in Ethnographic Field Research” | Thu, June 11, 2026

– Jule Govrin: “Forbidden Bodies? Democratic Care and Bodily Self-Determination in Times of Authoritarian Austerity” | Thu, July 2, 2026

– Sabine Müller-Mall: “Future Freedom and the Presence of Prohibition” | Thu, July 9, 2026