How should we understand language, meaning, and power if reality itself is not composed of stable entities but of ongoing processes and relations? In this workshop, which takes place in the context of the Forschungskolloquium Gegenwartsphilosophie, Estonian philosopher and writer Rein Raud will explore how we may understand identities, social structures, and forms of authority as emerging through dynamic patterns of interaction rather than being based on fixed foundations. Particular attention will be given to the question of how language and power may be understood on such a processual view.

Rein Raud is Distinguished Professor of Asian and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His circle of research interests is broad and ranges from cultural semiotics and sociology to process philosophy and theories of the subject on the one hand, and various aspects of Asian and Western cultural history on the other. His academic books include Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self (Polity, 2021), Asian Worldviews: Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories (Wiley-Blackwell 2021), and Practices of Selfhood (together with Zygmunt Bauman, Polity 2015). In addition, he has published five collections of poetry, seven novels and several collections of short stories and plays.