Ionut Untea

Field of Practice:

Scientific

Fellowship:

Solitude fellowship

City, Country:

Nanjing and Shanghai, China

Bacau, Rumänien

Year:

2022, 2023

Stay(s):

Sept 2022 - June 2023

Ionut Untea teaches western philosophy in China and, through his teaching and writing, contributes to the global intercultural multilogue. He embraces the value of a willfully entangled »pro-existence«, which he considers more inclusive than that of a passive and parallel »co-existence«, and is interested in exploring the coordinates of intracorporeal relationships, as well as »reasoning« as »resonating«. This explains Ionut’s interest in many phenomena that render human beings more capable of »reasoning« together through collective »resonances« and their diverse translations: As works of art, calls for social and political engagement, religious devotion, collective experiences of either joy or mourning, and so on. Ionut believes that what we »owe« to each other has a considerable impact on what we stand »in awe of« when encountering the more or less embellished (or culturally recreated) images of other fellow human beings or natural, cultural, or political realities. His project as a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude will focus on these matters.

A recent article in which Ionut made initial forays into exploring the aforementioned ideas is Samson, Antigone and the Charismatic Agonistes: from a ‘Pro-power’ to a ‘Pro-existence’ Political Engagement, Philosophical Forum 51.4 (2020). Ionut is interested in collaborating with people seeking to develop connections that creatively exceed disciplinary limits. It is in this spirit that he is teaching the semiotics of intercultural communication and other philosophical courses in his home institution, Southeast University, in Nanjing/China. In 2021, he was also invited to teach a course dedicated to contemporary intercultural challenges from a semiotic perspective as a visiting professor at Università degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari/Italy.