Paul Kaletsch

Paul (he/him/his) conducted extensive fieldwork in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Since 2019/20 he has been a guest researcher with the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the University of Giessen. 

He serves as the speaker of the GCSC’s Research Area 3: Cultural Transformation and Performativity Studies. So far, the research area has engaged with phenomenological conceptualizations of the body and embodiment. In the winter semester 2024/2025, the focus of the research area will be on affect. At the University of Giessen, Paul teaches an introductory seminar on theories of political resistance. Recently, he received the second prize of the Hong Kong Studies Association’s Best Paper Award 2024 for his paper on “The Discursive End of Hong Kong’s 2014 Protests.” 

The paper’s analysis of government statements examines how statist discursive practices facilitated a discursive end of Hong Kong’s pro-democratic occupation in 2014 and, at the same time, often unintentionally transformed these protests. For this purpose, the paper thinks linguistically with Deleuze and Guattari about how language acts on events by closing them down or carrying them away. 

At the GCSC’s “Arboreal Entanglements” conference in June 2024, Paul presented a paper, titled “The Trees Growing in Our Heads: A Sad Image of Thought.” The paper worked through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of arborescence as a conceptual order that orients how we think concepts and do concept analysis and conceptual work. This served as preparatory work for his organization of a roundtable on the concept of the concept at the 2024 Pan-European Conference on International Relations of the European International Studies Association. 

At the conference, Paul will also present a paper, titled “Only Temporary? Friendship in (Failed) Political Resistance Movements,” that rethinks the notion of success through Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the spontaneous facilitation of temporary bonds between strangers. Moreover, his paper, “Reconceptualizing Failed and Ended Collective Political Resistance Through the Concept of the Deleuzian Event,” will explore the methodological affordances that the Deleuzian event offers for the study of the productivity of seemingly failed and ended political resistance. 

Recently, Paul published an edited volume on the event with Quintus Immisch (Comparative Literature PhD student Tübingen/Aix), a review of the resurgence of negativity in contemporary political theory and is working on a forthcoming essay on the productivity of difficult theory in discarded drafts. 

Paul participates in a Lacan reading group, a reading circle on “Poststructuralism, Gender Theory, Psychoanalysis”, a political theory colloquium, and is a member of the European International Studies Association and the Hong Kong Studies Association. Paul received the Sasakawa Postgraduate Studentship, the SOAS Fieldwork Award, and the Meiji Jingu Scholarship. He did his Master of Research in Politics with Japanese at SOAS University of London. Paul attained his Bachelor of Science in International Business from Maastricht University, including a study abroad in the Republic of Korea (South Korea).

• Cultural Transformation and Performativity Studies

Research interests: French theory, psychoanalysis, the politics of concepts. Postdoc: Paul welcomes conversations about the relations between political, psychoanalytical, literary, and physical conceptualizations of resistance and exchanges on the role of desire in the rise of the far-right and micropolitical responses to this threat. PhD: His thesis critiques the confusion of the historical outcomes of end and failure with resistance itself in predominant conceptualizations of political resistance. The thesis ontologically redescribes the 2014 pro-democratic occupation of Hong Kong, which did not achieve democracy and that the government cleared, as a Deleuzian event. 

Deleuze’s concept of the event distinguishes between the historical outcomes of an event and an event’s becoming: its undirected and unpredictable productivity. The ontological redescription of Hong Kong’s 2014 protests reconceptualizes failed and ended resistance as both a productive and politically frustrating event to intervene against such reductive notions of resistance. windpark book’s transdisciplinary volume on the event: In the introduction Paul reflects on how a playful approach to writing that does not succumb to sloppiness and unintelligibility can transform writing from a tool to drive a certain point home into an eventful epistemic journey. 

In the collaborative sixth chapter, Saskia Schomber, Classics PhD student at the University of Giessen, using narratological perspectives, and Paul, drawing on Deleuzian thought, engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on their different viewing experiences of David Lynch’s Lost Highway and the effects of the movie’s excessiveness. Review on contemporary theories of negativity with Kult_Online: He elaborates on how two edited volumes conceptualize positivity, affirmations, and vitalism in Deleuzian, new materialist, and non-representational thought and the political problems this entails. On the other hand, Paul’s review stresses how the volumes contrast the concept of negativity to this joyful tradition of thought and what makes negativity such a promising analytical and political perspective for research.