Illinois Mobile App Master Calendar

Join us for our annual Max Kade lecture, presented to you by Dr. Phipipp Weber, visiting professor from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.

“Margarete and the Evil Spirit: The Unconscious Practices of Power and Their Critique in Goethe’s Faust.”

The talk reads Goethe’s Faust as a drama deeply concerned with unconscious practices of power – forms of influence, constraint, and self-constraint that operate beneath the level of explicit moral reasoning. Centering gender and social hierarchy, it argues that the play turns Margarete into a key site where patriarchal and class authority take hold: through desire and respectability, through surveillance and gossip, and – crucially – through the moralization of female sexuality. From this perspective, guilt, shame, and “inner voices” emerge not as purely private experiences but as social technologies through which norms are internalized and enforced. Thus, the talk traces how Faust stages the precarious boundary between autonomy and coercion, responsibility and imposed guilt – and how, by exposing this boundary, the drama articulates a critique of power’s unconscious operations.