Book part:

Unknowing and Silent Knowledge as a Challenge. Iconic, Performative, and Material Perspectives

Unknowing plays an important role in anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Here, unknowing is often not considered negative but is deemed a constitutive condition of knowledge. In historical anthropology, we have picked up on this insight and understanding and, following Helmuth Plessner, assume that the human being must be understood as “homo absconditus,” which itself is never completely recognizable. Following the “linguistic turn” in the final quarter of the twentieth century, there have been several “turns” in the cultural sciences (humanities), in which dealing with the limits of knowledge and tacit knowledge play an important role.