Dr. Johannes Bennke
A culture of remembrance is mostly concerned with memory and preservation, while forms of forgetting remain to be conceptualized. In my dissertation I introduce the concept and practice of obliteration as a key term for an epistemology of forgetting. Starting with the French artist Sacha Sosno and his art practice of obliteration, I turn to his reading by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. By collecting rare statements by Levinas about art and aesthetics, I further develop obliteration as a media philosophical concept, introducing Levinas also as a media philosopher. Obliteration addresses forms of deletion and destruction as a fundamental condition of creativity.