This motto pervades Sigrid Weigel’s work, from her early feminist writings to her studies of Walter Benjamin and Ingeborg Bachmann, from her works in the fields of religious and visual studies to her critical engagements with the life-sciences. Guilt and debt, genealogy and heritage, culture and nature, image and text, art and science, history and the present – Sigrid Weigel’s research does not content itself with filling so-called historical or philological research-desiderata; on the contrary, she examines multi-layered entanglements that are relevant because we encounter their effects in problematic situations of the present.
Such an approach is not only labor-intensive, it also often leads the researcher into formerly unknown territories. For the work of disentangling, of unthreading and re-threading requires regular excursions from one’s own disciplinary dwelling. The latter must be opened for other approaches if one wants to get acquainted with the particularities of new territories and the unforeseen relations between them. Cultural research then becomes a practice of skillfully exploring thresholds. Guided by concrete political, epistemological, ethical etc. problems, Weigel’s research is therefore constitutively un-disciplinary.