Schwerpunkt der Juni/Juli-Ausgabe des Mittelweg 36 (3/2008) ist das große Thema Freundschaft.

Heinz Bude: Die Aktualität der Freundschaft
(Summary: This contribution aims to explain why friendship is a highly relevant topic for contemporary society. One answer is the emergence of an older generation that no longer wants to rely on the family and mistrusts the welfare state. Friendship is a way of living in old age that repre-sents a third path situated between the fate of familial circumstances and free choice. Friend-ship remains, however, a form of socialization that is characteristic of youth and linked to the »wound of incompleteness«. It is here that the impossibility of friendship as an *intermediate social form is revealed. Nonetheless, this unique feature accounts for the potential of a »politics of friendship« – a politics that takes up the notion of unconditional reciprocity and estab-lishes it as the foundation of a mode of political thought that sets singularity and universality in relation to one another.)

Janosch Schobin: Sechs Farben und drei Rotationsachsen. Versuch über Verpflichtungen in Freundschaften
(Summary: Our friends are free; free to come and free to go. What is it, then, that forces them to stay, especially when we really need them? Good friends owe us succor in bad times: a friend in need is a friend indeed. But what is it exactly that we invoke, when we call on friends for sup-port? No contract binds friends and no authority monitors their actions. The question that arises is how commitments within friendships take shape and how friendship becomes bind-ing. This contribution attempts to retrace the processes in which demands made on friendship become realities.)

Michaela Gummerum und Monika Keller: Freundschaftskonzepte und Handlungsvorstellungen in Freundschaft. Der Einfluss von Enwicklung und Kultur
(Summary: Friendship is a phenomenon found in all cultures, and, moreover, one that accompanies peo-ple throughout their lives. This essay explores the notions of children and youths about friend-ship by characterizing their responses to hypothetical dilemmas. Reactions from various groups of respondents are compared in order to elucidate how concepts of friendship change in the course of psychological development and what cultural factors influence the ideas of children and youths about friendship and appropriate behavioral patterns. According to the work presented here, friendship is best understood as the result of a complex interaction between psychological development and culture.)

Sasha Roseneil: Neue Freundschaftspraktiken. Fürsorge und Sorge um sich im Zeitalter der Individualisierung
(Summary: This paper offers some reflections on a UK-based research project which sought to investigate the practices and experiences of care and intimacy of people living at the cutting edge of indi-vidualization. Working from a psychoanalytically-informed ontology and with a psycho-social methodology, the research consisted of a qualitative longitudinal study of those who might be considered the »most individualized« – people living outside co-habiting, conjugal couple relationships. Borrowing certain notions from Queer Theory, which capture key find-ings of the project, the paper aims to return to sociology new perspectives on friendship and care under conditions of individualization.)

In der Literaturbeilage erinnert Manfred Bauschulte unter dem Titel Erfahrung und Selbstzerstörung an die Zivilisationsanalyse des Berliner Religionsphilosophen Klaus Heinrich, der in Mythos, Religion und der Kunst nicht das Andere der Aufklärung, sondern sie mitkonstituierende Ressourcen identifiziert hat.

Schließlich denkt Ulrich Bielefeld über Nation und Weltgesellschaft nach. Er fragt, ob uns das Stichwort von der „post-nationalen Konstellation“ tatsächlich schon den Schlüssel für eine Soziologie der Weltgesellschaft an die Hand gegeben hat.

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