Debit and credit

German private television is not exactly known for its sophisticated discussion formats, so the midday zapper is all the more surprised when sentences like: "&Occonomic superstition is something like the spectrum of bourgeois virtues" or "The solutions always lie in the streets, in traffic". He has, without a doubt, fallen into one of Alexander Kluge's cultural magazines, which are strange in the truest sense of the word. Alexander Kluge, probably Germany's most stubborn author, filmmaker, philosopher, cultural theorist, director, media politician and chronicler, has been producing independent culture magazines on German private television since 1988. Since 1994, the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl has been a regular guest on his programmes. Alexander Kluge's characteristic interview technique has found its congenial counterpart in him. The result of their mutual passion is over forty television interviews that cultivate their own art of goal-oriented digression and completely reinvent the genre. Soll und Haben brings together a selection of these interviews in book form for the first time. The thematic spectrum ranges across times and cultures. Whether Vogl is talking about running amok, capitalism in the East Indies, globalised feelings, political animals or the secret connection between terror and power, poetry and bureaucracy, Kluge's insistent presence not only always leads the interviewee to say more and something different than what was previously known, what had already been publicly laid down. And there are always glimpses of the current situation: "Our closest thing comes back from afar".