Böcker i Cultural Memory in the Present-serien

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "e;What we had set out to do,"e; the authors write in the Preface, "e;was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."e;Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "e;Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."e; This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

Reinhart Koselleck is regarded as one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the late 20th century, and is an exponent and practitioner of "Begriffsgeschichte". The 18 essays in this volume illustrate the four theses of Koselleck's concept of history.

The Neuro-Image investigates cinema's survival in the digital age through neuroscientific and philosophical understandings of the brain, our conception of the future, and the affective intensity of contemporary screen culture.

This highly original interpretation of Paul by the Jewish philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes was presented in a number of lectures held in Heidelberg toward the end of his life, and was regarded by him as his "spiritual testament".

This book offers a complex theory of modern society that simultaneously considers issues of communication, the media, differentiation, and evolution.

This book offers a reading of Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic texts that represent the 12th and 13th centuries as the end of el-Andalus (Islamic Spain).

This book draws together essays that play in various ways upon questions involving books, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals.

The essays in this volume by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century formulate what he considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas-Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

This work explores the role of the literary in theory, with wide-ranging analysis of key concepts and disciplinary practices.

Through a commanding view extending over five thousand years, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory, in ten brilliant essays.

Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses is an examination of the logic governing the work of a major American artist that is, at the same time, a general philosophical examination of the logic of meaning governing all the major filmic categories-frame, camera movement, editing cut, close-up, and the relations between vision and sound.

Ross argues that the thinking of Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy must be understood as ways of addressing the problem of presentation as framed by and inherited from Kant's Critique of Judgment.

Without stigmatizing commercial activity, this book takes a philosophical and anthropological look at the universe of the gift, debt, and money in the West from ancient Greece to the present in order to examine how and why knowledge has long been assumed to be priceless.

Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, The Crossing of the Visible offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the 'nihilism' of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts which opens them to the invisible.

This book establishes first, that melancholy serves as an important focal point in the interpretation of Benjamin's early work, and second, that Benjamin's approach to melancholy releases it from its customary psychological context, turning it into a philosophical premise.

As the first book in English dedicated to Bergson's political philosophy, this study develops an original concept of human rights as a medium of self-care and personal transformation.

This book explores the possible relations between Western types of rationality and Buddhism. It also examines some cliches about Buddhism and questions the old antinomies of Western culture ("faith and reason," or "idealism and materialism").

The Specter of Capital provides a searching historical analysis and critique of the role of classical and neoclassical economic theory in creating the economic conditions which produced the global financial crisis.

Haunted by its unburied past, late Soviet and post-Soviet culture has produced unique mourning and memorial practices - this book details these practices and provides new interpretations of the cultural artifacts produced in Russia from the 1930s through the 2010s.

Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, this book argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.

In this volume, Luhmann analyzes the evolution of love in Western Europe from the 17th century to the present. In the book he aims to restore the lost link between academically reputable social theorizing and the subjective experience of life.

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting-from Pollock to Ryman-that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno.

The author shows how museum culture offers a unique vantage point on the 19th and 20th centuries' preoccupation with history and subjectivity, and demonstrates how the constitution of the aesthetic provides insight into the realms of technology, industrial culture, architecture, and ethics.

The Long Space examines how time and space have a crucial impact on the form of the postcolonial novel.

Jacques Derrida's repeatedly stated admiration and professed inability to comment on the workof Samuel Beckett are the point of departure for this book's exploration of the relation between philosophy and literature.

This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem-Miller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. Miller analyzes the changes in the contemporary research university in the West; Asensi provides the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work.

This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Also, drawing on artists' books, drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, the author illuminates the process of textual visualization.

These twelve essays treat the thought of "deconstructive" philosophers from the perspective of analytic philosophy and relate the works of such thinkers as Davidson, Quine, and Wittgenstein to the writings of Derrida and de Man.

This book examines the early development of the fantastic tale through the works of of the German romantics Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, and E. T. A. Hoffmann; the subsequent French rediscovery of the genre in works by Theophile Gautier and Prosper Merimee; and Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to the literary form.