From Resonance to Social Energy: New Directions In Critical Theory (with Hartmut Rosa)

This session addresses the intellectual arc of Hartmut Rosa’s critical theory and charts pathways for its expansion, engaging both his groundbreaking work on resonance and recent concepts such as “social energy” and the opposition between “situation” and “constellation.” Rosa’s work on social acceleration diagnosed modernity’s dynamic stabilization, a mode of social reproduction requiring perpetual growth and innovation that paradoxically produces alienation. The theory of resonance offered a normative and phenomenological corrective, articulating a responsive and affectively charged relationship to the world in which subjects and objects mutually affect one another. His latest book, Situation und Konstellation: Vom Verschwinden des Spielraums, diagnoses the erosion of situational judgment under algorithmic and bureaucratic logics that reduce complex, embodied situations to measurable and controllable constellations. By narrowing action into mere execution, this loss of Spielraum (room for maneuver) generates a distinctive form of powerlessness. Rosa’s emerging work on social energy, in turn, reframes the problem of collective agency. Drawing on notions of libido, élan vital, and emotional energy, he theorizes a social capacity to “get things done” that is irreducible to individual psychology or physical power, circulating relationally through groups, movements, and institutions. The session invites critical reflection on these questions, aiming to push Rosa’s project into new terrain and explore what critical theory can learn from the frictions and energies of contemporary social life. Hartmut Rosa will take part throughout the session, responding to the papers and joining a shared discussion of the questions his work opens.