Everyone falls on their face occasionally, the political thing is to understand what it means. Slapstick can be explained nicely with a universal theory of meaning as mutual causal action. For the evening in Siegen Ann Cotten lays out this theory and its relevance for accounts of reading and of melancholy, recalling slapstick  performances of reading scenes in the Wiener Gruppe's literarisches cabaret. The theory and examples are followed by an invitation to collectively discuss the political misuseability of slapstick poetics. 

Ann Cotten is one of the most interesting authors of our time. Born in the USA in 1982, she has lived in Vienna and Berlin and experiments with gender-critical language and the mixture of languages in her texts. The current issue of the magazine "triedere", which she co-edits, deals with translation processes. Ann Cotten has worked intensively with the Japanese language and philosophy, snippets of which she likes to incorporate into her texts. She is both a theorist and a writer, so that a voice of critical reflection can always be heard in her texts. For this special reading, which is also a lecture, she responds to the question raised in the "Politics of Melancholia" conference about the activist-political potential of melancholy. Her surprising answer is: slapstick!