Wed, 15 July 2026, 6:30 p.m.
Villa Köstlin (Rümelinstr. 27)

Abstract:
From the Talmudic tradition over Roman law to Islamic law, counterfactuals have populated legal history – and still prevail. While Bentham has denounced such legal fictions as a “a syphilis which runs in every vein and carries into every part of the system” of common law, others have readily welcomed law’s ‘white lies’, later culminating in a praise of both the utility and the aesthetics of legal feigning. Since fictions are indispensable means even in today’s system of legal autopoiesis, the talk will inquire in the different forms and reasons for law’s faking, from the early history of human rights to contemporary public international law. 

Hans Lind is Schroedinger Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund and on mobility leave from the University of Vienna. He previously taught at Vienna University, Yale University and Constance University. Before Tübingen, he was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg. Hans holds a law degree from the University of Tübingen and a Ph.D. from Yale University. His book "Legal Fictions" is under contract with Routledge. His edited volume, "Fictional Discourse and the Law", appeared with Routledge in 2020.

Tue, 30 June, 2026, 6:15 p.m.
Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30

In this Public lecture, Rita Segato analyses gender-based violence and the fundamental structures of violence based on her own anthropological research on rape and femicide and theoretical perspectives from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. Her thinking on gender-based violence stands out because she brings gender analysis to the center of the contemporary political scene avoiding the usual ghettoization of the subject and transforming patriarchy into the platform replicated in all other strata of oppression and exaction of surplus value. “The Elementary Structures of Violence” is a groundbreaking analysis of the colonial influence on contemporary gender relations. The title of her lecture presented in Tübingen is also the title of one her most important books that is going to be published in German by July.

The lecture is organized by the RTG 3105 “Figurations of the Precarious in the Global South”, in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies and the College of Fellows.

About Rita Segato:
Rita Segato, born in 1951 in Buenos Aires, is a renowned Argentinean anthropologist and feminist activist, professor em. of the Department of Anthropology at Universidad de Brasilia, holder of the Chair for Discomforting Thinking (Cátedra Rita Segato de Pensamiento Incómodo) at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina and of the Chair for Thinking in Conversation (Cátedra Rita Segato "Pensar en conversación") at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. She has received, in recent years, numerous degrees honoris causa from European and Latin American universities as well as several other important awards. She is one of the most influential contemporary political thinkers in the field of decolonial feminism from Latin America who explores the structures of patriarchal oppression on a global dimension and approaches the phenomena through their often invisible or hidden structural groundwork.