Stefan Nowowtny is a philosopher and researcher at the KHM, where he studies the philosophy and politics of translation. His work on translation processes understands these as a primary linguistic phenomenon and as a complex processing of difference that cannot be abstracted from the power relations in which it takes place and which are articulated through it. In critical departure from theoretical and practical models that conceive of translation in terms of communication, explication and equivalence of meanings, as well as spatialised relationships, Nowotny therefore focuses on addressing relationships, historical-political implications, a positive concept of ambivalence (or polyvalence), and the temporalities of translation. On several points – particularly concerning the transitions between the verbalised and the non-verbalised – the question of translation processes also intersects with a second field of research that is currently central to Nowotny's work: namely, the context of critical psychiatric practices, which became known in France as ‘institutional psychotherapy’ and in which, not least, the question of linguistic articulation was renegotiated in psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic terms.
Nowotny received his doctorate from the Institut supérieur de philosophie at the University of Leuven/Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium and has taught at various European universities, including Goldsmiths, University of London (2011–2022), Leuphana University Lüneburg and Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. He is a founding member of the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) and, in this context, participated in several transnational research projects on issues of institutional critique and the politics of translation from 2005 to 2012. He is a member of the editorial board of transversal texts and the online journal transversal.
Nowotny's publications include Translation: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs (The Promise of a Term, 2008, with Boris Buden), Instituierende Praxen (Institutional Practices, 2008, with Gerald Raunig), various anthologies he has co-edited (e.g. Die Sprachen der Banlieues (The Languages of the Banlieues, 2014, with Birgit Mennel) and numerous book contributions. Since the early 2000s, he has also worked regularly as a translator, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (2007, with Alexander Joskowicz). Most recently, Nowotny worked on two volumes that he translated, edited and introduced, which – following on from the KHM conference Queer Tosquelles in June 2024, among other things – aim to make the work and influence of the Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles accessible in German: Jean Oury / Félix Guattari / François Tosquelles, Praxis des Institutionellen und Politik (transversal texts 2025), and François Tosquelles, Materialismus, Psychopathologie, Begehren (forthcoming).
