The foundational paradox of Gunter Teubner

At the heart of Gunter Teubner’s work, there is a foundational paradox. The work, as attested in this long-awaited collection of Teubner’s texts that span a few decades, is erudite, expansive, involved with the world, and of high theoretical merit. It is populated with references as varied as von Kleist, Derrida, Latour, Kafka, and of course Luhmann; but also global financial markets, Africa and HIV pharmaceuticals, private law and contract, politics, media, protest movements: a kaleidoscope of issues and references that attempt to capture the world, to describe and indeed to change it for the better. Yet at the same time, the work refuses to be captured by the world. It never allows itself to become a simple blueprint, an incontestable theoretical suggestion with pretences of universality, or even a text devoid of deliberate ambiguity, and closed to the contingent and the differently interpreted. The work hardly ever surrenders itself to the world. Rather, it superimposes a layer onto the world, an exegetic membrane that offers both distance and a reassurance that this is how things ‘really’ are: complex, multiple, closed, engaged in cumbersome internalisations and externalisations, fighting with absences, compulsions and addictions, extreme pressures and deft steerings, riddled with anxiety about identity, limits, otherness. Teubner’s world is an apparatus of capture, seductive and indeed optimistic; yet, it offers no space of rest, no finite certainty of how things should or even can possibly carry on.