“When is the drag queen arriving?” Among American Kant scholars, word on the street was that a drag queen would perform at Kant’s tricentennial birthday celebration, which took place in Berlin on April 22nd. This wasn’t necessarily what one expected from a party thrown by the German academic establishment, but as multiple Kantians had noted, the program said that “Nina West” would be reading passages from Kant. A Google search pulled up images of a former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant with voluminous orange hair and a sunflower-print jumpsuit. The former president of the North American Kant society had related this point to Kantians assembled in Baltimore for the American tricentennial event earlier that year, turning the drag program into common knowledge. It may seem fanciful to believe that any drag, Kantian or not, would be on the agenda for an event whose other speakers were the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Volker Gerhardt, who oversees the authoritative edition of Kant’s collected works. But what did we know about a Festakt, a German academic celebration for a canonical thinker? To American sensibilities, the fact that the head of state was speaking at an eighteenth-century philosopher’s birthday party was already extraordinary. Why shouldn’t there be drag for good measure?
The line to get inside the Berlin celebration was halfway down the block by the time we arrived. But this was not Berghain so much as its precise opposite. The tickets had been available to the public, so the line was mostly composed of retirees whom a German friend identified as Bildungsbürger, educationally oriented German citizens whose retirement years were a chance to cultivate enthusiasms for national intellectual heroes such as Goethe, Schiller and, as we now realized, Kant. I scrutinized the tidy suits and sensible shoes with something approaching wonder—hundreds of people had decided, for their own enjoyment, to spend a Monday night listening to politicians and scholars give speeches about Kant. As my enthusiasm swelled, I considered the unlimited potential of the human spirit: the Goethe-reading Kant enthusiasts were probably especially looking forward to the drag.
The program began with the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in E Minor by Johann Bernhard Bach, played by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. The president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Christoph Markschies, ascended to the podium. He wore academic robes and a massive gold chain, and delivered an address in academic German perfect enough to puzzle a non-native speaker. Relative clause was layered upon relative clause, creating a series of nesting grammatical structures of fractal-like complexity that seemed to only terminate several long minutes later, with the verb that retroactively gave meaning to the whole sentence (“He must have spent months working on those sentences,” a Kantian hissed in my ear).
Then Olaf Scholz stepped up to the podium. A picture of him was sent around our “Kant’s Birthday Berlin” WhatsApp group. “Tell him to fix the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz,” texted another Kantian, not in attendance. “And capitalism.” Scholz referred to Kant’s 1795 “Perpetual Peace” essay, in which he argues that a federation of nations is needed in order to create the institutional preconditions for lasting peace. Scholz then denounced Russia’s war of aggression [Angriffskrieg], as well as Putin’s effort in the tricentennial year to recast Kant as something of a national hero for Russia. This was not the beautiful, looping, ornate academic German spoken by a master of ceremonies; it was the staccato German of a politician who wants to make sure that you get his point. After Scholz spoke, the applause went on for a long time. The orchestra then played C.P.E. Bach’s Symphony in C Major (Wq 182:3).
The next day, a Deutschlandfunk headline read, “Scholz criticizes Putin’s Kant interpretation as ‘absurd.’” Warring Kant interpretations are usually confined to the seminar room. But this past year, rival Kant tricentennials in Berlin and Kaliningrad each staked their claim to Kant. They also developed different aesthetics corresponding to their politics: while Germany opted for high-culture restraint, Russia went maximalist. The website for the Kaliningrad Kant tricentennial includes a brief teaser video in which images flash across the screen as a synthetic drumroll keeps up a rapid beat: Kant in sunglasses. An international philosophy Olympiad. An “emotional map” of Kaliningrad-Konigsberg. A “neural network-based conversational chatbot.” A “Kantopaedia.” At the end of the video, the screen fills up with text: “MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.”
Volker Gerhardt, the most senior academic on the program, ascended to the podium. Gerhardt is overseeing the publication of a new edition of the works in the Akademie-Ausgabe, which is the standard edition of Kant’s texts used by academics. The first volume of the new edition had come out in time for the tricentennial. One of the main features of the new edition would be a reedited version of Kant’s incomplete last work, the “Opus Postumum,” which includes the so-called “ether deduction” in which Kant argues that space must be filled by a kind of moving substrate. “I cannot believe,” a colleague said later, “that the Chancellor of Germany has just spent his evening hearing about the Opus Postumum.” For while the new edition of the texts in the Akademie-Ausgabe is a very big deal to Kant scholars (many of us are still emotionally processing the fact that our citation practices will have to change), we generally do not expect that our head of state is going to care.
Finally, it was time for the much-anticipated drag performance. The main stage now held three people: the Kant scholar Marcus Willaschek, the Kant scholar Andrea Esser and Nina West. The Kantians were flanking Nina West, who was not wearing an orange wig, or a sunflower-print jumpsuit. Nina West had chin-length brown hair and wore a sensible maroon top. “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will,” said Nina West, reading from the Groundwork. “Now and again one hears complaints about the superficiality of our age’s way of thinking,” said Nina West, reading from the first Critique. “Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.” This was not lip-synced or performed to a driving beat. Willaschek and Esser were not there to serve as backup dancers, but rather to provide explanations of the philosophical significance of the passages being read aloud. As we American Kantians would come to realize, there are two “Nina Wests.” One is the stage name of Andrew Levitt, who has over seven hundred thousand Instagram followers and was formerly a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. The other is Nina West, a German actress and public speaker. The program concluded with the musicians playing Telemann.
The crowds streamed into the hall next door for the reception that would conclude the night’s official program. Lines formed for a buffet serving spätzle and stew, and standing tables had been set up throughout the hall. The politicians were clustering at the tables near the door, and next to them was a grouping of German and American Kant scholars. Some of the senior-most Kant scholars would occasionally exchange words with the politicians (“Anyone who gets a pic talking with Kanzler gets a drink from me,” said a Kantian on the WhatsApp group chat). “There are so many important SPD people here,” said one of my German Kantian friends, gesturing at the politician’s crowd. I looked over at the forest of white men in dark suits who seemed to differ only with respect to height. But one did not need to tell the ministers apart in order to appreciate the overall point, which was that Olaf Scholz hadn’t merely showed up along with one or two assistants in order to put in a few words about Russia and leave. Tonight, if you were anyone worth knowing in the SPD, the “300 Jahre Kant Festakt” was the place to be. As Kant himself put it back in 1784: “If it is now asked, ‘Do we currently live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’”
The Americans in attendance were gradually becoming enlightened regarding the nature of a Festakt. This was not the kind of event that could easily accommodate a drag performance. Multiple Kantians later confessed that they feared they’d been the rumor’s source (“I only told one colleague,” said an American Kant scholar). Perhaps we should have known better. Perhaps drag at the Kant Festakt should have been ruled out straightaway as impossible, on par with a square circle. And yet, at a bar later that evening with a half dozen junior Kantians from Germany and America and Italy, it seemed that we were already in the midst of a kind of impossibility. It was, in part, the impossibility that, after spending years writing dissertations on Kant’s theory of time, or views on God, or account of reason, we’d be standing around with politicians eating spätzle. But there’s also a more all-encompassing impossibility, or at least improbability, built into Kant’s vision of human dignity and human reason, set against the backdrop of what Kant called the “nonsensical course of things human,” in which “childish malice and the rage to destruction” are the rule rather than the exception. His verdict on humanity? “In the end one does not know what concept to make of our species, with its smug imaginings about its excellences.” Although Kant can be stereotyped as a cheery optimist, his moral and political vision is less one of complacency than of holding out against all odds. There is an impossibility in this, and an impossibility in the fact that all around Berlin that evening, Kantians were raising glasses (“Zum Wohl! Auf Kant!”) in honor of a philosopher who, hundreds of years after his death, was somehow still holding out. Who’s to say that a drag performance at the Kant Festakt is impossible? That night, carousing Kantians stayed in the bar past the closing hour. The next morning, they returned to their desks and reopened their Critiques.
“When is the drag queen arriving?” Among American Kant scholars, word on the street was that a drag queen would perform at Kant’s tricentennial birthday celebration, which took place in Berlin on April 22nd. This wasn’t necessarily what one expected from a party thrown by the German academic establishment, but as multiple Kantians had noted, the program said that “Nina West” would be reading passages from Kant. A Google search pulled up images of a former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant with voluminous orange hair and a sunflower-print jumpsuit. The former president of the North American Kant society had related this point to Kantians assembled in Baltimore for the American tricentennial event earlier that year, turning the drag program into common knowledge. It may seem fanciful to believe that any drag, Kantian or not, would be on the agenda for an event whose other speakers were the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Volker Gerhardt, who oversees the authoritative edition of Kant’s collected works. But what did we know about a Festakt, a German academic celebration for a canonical thinker? To American sensibilities, the fact that the head of state was speaking at an eighteenth-century philosopher’s birthday party was already extraordinary. Why shouldn’t there be drag for good measure?
The line to get inside the Berlin celebration was halfway down the block by the time we arrived. But this was not Berghain so much as its precise opposite. The tickets had been available to the public, so the line was mostly composed of retirees whom a German friend identified as Bildungsbürger, educationally oriented German citizens whose retirement years were a chance to cultivate enthusiasms for national intellectual heroes such as Goethe, Schiller and, as we now realized, Kant. I scrutinized the tidy suits and sensible shoes with something approaching wonder—hundreds of people had decided, for their own enjoyment, to spend a Monday night listening to politicians and scholars give speeches about Kant. As my enthusiasm swelled, I considered the unlimited potential of the human spirit: the Goethe-reading Kant enthusiasts were probably especially looking forward to the drag.
The program began with the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in E Minor by Johann Bernhard Bach, played by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. The president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Christoph Markschies, ascended to the podium. He wore academic robes and a massive gold chain, and delivered an address in academic German perfect enough to puzzle a non-native speaker. Relative clause was layered upon relative clause, creating a series of nesting grammatical structures of fractal-like complexity that seemed to only terminate several long minutes later, with the verb that retroactively gave meaning to the whole sentence (“He must have spent months working on those sentences,” a Kantian hissed in my ear).
Then Olaf Scholz stepped up to the podium. A picture of him was sent around our “Kant’s Birthday Berlin” WhatsApp group. “Tell him to fix the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz,” texted another Kantian, not in attendance. “And capitalism.” Scholz referred to Kant’s 1795 “Perpetual Peace” essay, in which he argues that a federation of nations is needed in order to create the institutional preconditions for lasting peace. Scholz then denounced Russia’s war of aggression [Angriffskrieg], as well as Putin’s effort in the tricentennial year to recast Kant as something of a national hero for Russia. This was not the beautiful, looping, ornate academic German spoken by a master of ceremonies; it was the staccato German of a politician who wants to make sure that you get his point. After Scholz spoke, the applause went on for a long time. The orchestra then played C.P.E. Bach’s Symphony in C Major (Wq 182:3).
The next day, a Deutschlandfunk headline read, “Scholz criticizes Putin’s Kant interpretation as ‘absurd.’” Warring Kant interpretations are usually confined to the seminar room. But this past year, rival Kant tricentennials in Berlin and Kaliningrad each staked their claim to Kant. They also developed different aesthetics corresponding to their politics: while Germany opted for high-culture restraint, Russia went maximalist. The website for the Kaliningrad Kant tricentennial includes a brief teaser video in which images flash across the screen as a synthetic drumroll keeps up a rapid beat: Kant in sunglasses. An international philosophy Olympiad. An “emotional map” of Kaliningrad-Konigsberg. A “neural network-based conversational chatbot.” A “Kantopaedia.” At the end of the video, the screen fills up with text: “MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.”
Volker Gerhardt, the most senior academic on the program, ascended to the podium. Gerhardt is overseeing the publication of a new edition of the works in the Akademie-Ausgabe, which is the standard edition of Kant’s texts used by academics. The first volume of the new edition had come out in time for the tricentennial. One of the main features of the new edition would be a reedited version of Kant’s incomplete last work, the “Opus Postumum,” which includes the so-called “ether deduction” in which Kant argues that space must be filled by a kind of moving substrate. “I cannot believe,” a colleague said later, “that the Chancellor of Germany has just spent his evening hearing about the Opus Postumum.” For while the new edition of the texts in the Akademie-Ausgabe is a very big deal to Kant scholars (many of us are still emotionally processing the fact that our citation practices will have to change), we generally do not expect that our head of state is going to care.
Finally, it was time for the much-anticipated drag performance. The main stage now held three people: the Kant scholar Marcus Willaschek, the Kant scholar Andrea Esser and Nina West. The Kantians were flanking Nina West, who was not wearing an orange wig, or a sunflower-print jumpsuit. Nina West had chin-length brown hair and wore a sensible maroon top. “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will,” said Nina West, reading from the Groundwork. “Now and again one hears complaints about the superficiality of our age’s way of thinking,” said Nina West, reading from the first Critique. “Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.” This was not lip-synced or performed to a driving beat. Willaschek and Esser were not there to serve as backup dancers, but rather to provide explanations of the philosophical significance of the passages being read aloud. As we American Kantians would come to realize, there are two “Nina Wests.” One is the stage name of Andrew Levitt, who has over seven hundred thousand Instagram followers and was formerly a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. The other is Nina West, a German actress and public speaker. The program concluded with the musicians playing Telemann.
The crowds streamed into the hall next door for the reception that would conclude the night’s official program. Lines formed for a buffet serving spätzle and stew, and standing tables had been set up throughout the hall. The politicians were clustering at the tables near the door, and next to them was a grouping of German and American Kant scholars. Some of the senior-most Kant scholars would occasionally exchange words with the politicians (“Anyone who gets a pic talking with Kanzler gets a drink from me,” said a Kantian on the WhatsApp group chat). “There are so many important SPD people here,” said one of my German Kantian friends, gesturing at the politician’s crowd. I looked over at the forest of white men in dark suits who seemed to differ only with respect to height. But one did not need to tell the ministers apart in order to appreciate the overall point, which was that Olaf Scholz hadn’t merely showed up along with one or two assistants in order to put in a few words about Russia and leave. Tonight, if you were anyone worth knowing in the SPD, the “300 Jahre Kant Festakt” was the place to be. As Kant himself put it back in 1784: “If it is now asked, ‘Do we currently live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’”
The Americans in attendance were gradually becoming enlightened regarding the nature of a Festakt. This was not the kind of event that could easily accommodate a drag performance. Multiple Kantians later confessed that they feared they’d been the rumor’s source (“I only told one colleague,” said an American Kant scholar). Perhaps we should have known better. Perhaps drag at the Kant Festakt should have been ruled out straightaway as impossible, on par with a square circle. And yet, at a bar later that evening with a half dozen junior Kantians from Germany and America and Italy, it seemed that we were already in the midst of a kind of impossibility. It was, in part, the impossibility that, after spending years writing dissertations on Kant’s theory of time, or views on God, or account of reason, we’d be standing around with politicians eating spätzle. But there’s also a more all-encompassing impossibility, or at least improbability, built into Kant’s vision of human dignity and human reason, set against the backdrop of what Kant called the “nonsensical course of things human,” in which “childish malice and the rage to destruction” are the rule rather than the exception. His verdict on humanity? “In the end one does not know what concept to make of our species, with its smug imaginings about its excellences.” Although Kant can be stereotyped as a cheery optimist, his moral and political vision is less one of complacency than of holding out against all odds. There is an impossibility in this, and an impossibility in the fact that all around Berlin that evening, Kantians were raising glasses (“Zum Wohl! Auf Kant!”) in honor of a philosopher who, hundreds of years after his death, was somehow still holding out. Who’s to say that a drag performance at the Kant Festakt is impossible? That night, carousing Kantians stayed in the bar past the closing hour. The next morning, they returned to their desks and reopened their Critiques.
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