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Rethinking Romanticism with Spinoza : encounter and individuation in Novalis, Ritter, and Baader
(2021)
Siarhei Biareishyk setzt sich mit Berührung bei Novalis, Joachim Ritter und Franz Baader auseinander, bei denen er ein materialistisches Denken findet, das starke Parallelen zur Philosophie Spinozas zeigt. Mit Novalis erweist sich Berührung - und nicht 'Begegnung' wie etwa bei Gilles Deleuze - als eine zentrale Denkfigur für Individuierungsprozesse und Konzepte der Transindividualität. Der um Novalis angesiedelte Kreis der 'Freiberger Romantik' bildet so ein interessantes Scharnier zwischen einem Denken von Berührung und aktuellen Debatten um einen neuen Materialismus.
This article takes the renowned study "Der Akt des Lesens" (1976) by Wolfgang Iser and its translation "The Act of Reading" (1978) as its starting point. The differences between the two texts are discussed in terms of Iser's own idea of translatability as a cultural practice that was outlined in the short text "On Translatability". This theoretical frame will shed light on the decisions made in his own translations, and will help to develop a conceptualization of self-translation as a practice inherent in cultural change. [...] I will propose a combination of two concepts, Iser's 'translatability' (in II.) and the notion of 'autocommunication' by Lotman (III.), to suggest a concept of self-translation that entails three interrelated aspects: a) translation as a rewriting of the text as such, b) translation as continued work on one's argument as well as c) the re-translation back to the original source as a manifestation of a change in one's thought structure - Änderungen der eigenen Denkstruktur, as one of Werner Heisenberg's papers is entitled, and to which I will come back in my conclusion (IV.). Hence, the focus is mainly systematic and conceptual, however, I will first comment on my example of self- and re-translation and start with a comparison of different versions of Iser's "Der Akt des Lesens" and the shorter texts that led to the actual monograph.
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner's linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue - the only way to conceive patriotism - is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious 'Heimat' (home).
The mother tongue at school
(2023)
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm's writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
Like identical twins, philosophy and history seem to be tied together in an uneasy way. On the one hand, philosophy is very concerned to engage with the history of philosophy. There are not many other branches of knowledge so preoccupied with continually referring back to their own 'classics'. On the other hand, quite a few of these classical authors did not hold history in high esteem. Aristotle, as is well known, even preferred drama to history, arguing that the latter merely concerned contingent issues. The marriage between history and philosophy quite often results in monsters like Hegelian philosophy of history: grand narratives that are all too easy to criticize and to debunk. If we want to better understand this complex relationship between philosophy and history, it might be worth turning to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg.
Berühmt sind Benjamins Überlegungen zum bürgerlichen Interieur vor allem im "Passagen-Werk". Weniger bekannt hingegen sind seine Reflexionen über eine eigenartige Form von Erzählraum, der sich in der Mitte seines Erzähler-Aufsatzes lokalisiert. 'Eigenartig' ist er, weil es dort weniger um mündliches oder schriftliches Erzählen geht, als vielmehr um filmische Projektionen. Was projiziert wird, sind nach Benjamin "Ansichten der eigenen Person, unter denen er ohne es inne zu werden, sich selber begegnet ist". Solche Begegnungen gehören weder zur Erfahrung dieser Person noch zu ihrer Selbsterzählung oder Autobiographie. Diese "Out-takes eines Lebens" werden unwissentlich aufgenommen, unbewusst aufbewahrt und am Sterbebett mechanisch projiziert. Benjamin modifiziert in seinem Erzähler-Aufsatz die geläufige, entscheidend filmische Vorstellung, dass einem kurz vor dem Tod noch einmal das ganze Leben vorgeführt werde: Die Vorführung, die hier stattfindet, projiziert nur die Momente, die nie wirklich zum eigenem Leben gehört haben. Um diese andere Erzählart und diesen anderen Erzählraum zu erkunden, muss die betreffende Stelle im Erzähler-Aufsatz zusammen mit Benjamins Schriften zum buckligen Männlein gelesen werden. Was sich durch diese Lektüre manifestiert, ist eine andere Theorie der erzählerischen Autorität und der Tradierbarkeit von "unvergesslichen" Erfahrungen.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of body developed by Luhmann's systems theory. Privileged places where one can look for the body will be the interpenetration between human beings and the concept of socialization. Another fundamental problem is the relationship between semantics and body, although the most explicit presence of the body in this theory comes with the concept of symbiotic mechanisms or symbols. The last place where this enquiry will look for a bodily reference are emotions, which were highly ignored by Luhmann. Alternative approaches explored in the paper are treating the body as a structure, as a medium or as an internal environment.
Benjamin's early reception in the United States can be broken into eight phases: 1) a few notices of his work in the 1930s; 2) the appearance of two major works, without translation, in the 'Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung', when it was published in New York and mimeographed in Los Angeles; 3) several reports of his suicide along with the death of other Jewish and left-wing writers who fell victim to Nazi terror; 4) scattered use of his work in the late 1940s and 1950s; 5) a growing realization in the early 1960s that American literary and cultural criticism was missing something of significance by neglecting Benjamin's work; 6) the appearance in the 1960s of competing portraits of Benjamin by four of his surviving friends, including Hannah Arendt, who edited and introduced the first collection of his writings in English; 7) an uncanny repetition of the earlier neglect, as a significant number of Benjamin's texts are published in Great Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s but remain unavailable in the States; 8) the beginning of a sustained critical engagement with Benjamin in the late 1970s.
At the forefront of those who tenaciously pondered this issue are, I would claim, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Benjamin and Wittgenstein both are philosophers of language who tried to establish in unique ways the doctrine of resemblance respectively: "Lehre vom Ähnlichen" and "[Lehre der] Familienähnlichkeit." What they see and find in language are not communication and mutual understanding but instead one of the weirdest phenomena in/of the world, viz., resemblance (likeness) in/of language. This phenomenon, I would insist, indicates the correlation of appearing and disappearing, of differentiating and integrating, and of dividing and imparting of language as such. For Benjamin and Wittgenstein, to sum up, language is a paradigmatic paradoxical site of (dis)appearance, differentiating integrity, and divisive imparting. For this reason, it is worthwhile to pin down where their thoughts on language converge and where they diverge.
To explicate what distinguishes pain, Benjamin elaborates: "Of all corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the sea. [...] Pain [...] is a link between worlds. This is why organic pleasure is intermittent, whereas pain can be permanent. This comparison of pleasure and pain explains why the cause of pain is irrelevant for the understanding of man's nature, whereas the source of his greatest pleasure is extremely important. For every pain, even the most trivial one, can lead upward to the highest religious suffering, whereas pleasure is not capable of any enhancement, and owes any nobility it possesses to the grace of its birth - that is to say, its source. (SW I, 397)" In these important lines, pain's unique strength is linked not to its origin (this is reserved for pleasure), but rather to the way that its strenuous flow throughout the suffering body has the power to lead it to infinite heights. In contrast to pleasure, which is forever seeking out its sources, pain manifests itself most consummately when it is intensified; it fulfills itself most deeply by gradually reenforcing its own fortitude. To make sense of pain, therefore, we must understand the nature of its 'movement': and in Benjamin's metaphor of the "navigable river" - its flow. In what follows, I develop Benjamin's idea of the nature of pain as manifested in the internal law of its ,ow in two other of Benjamin's texts: 'Berlin Childhood Around 1900' (1934) and 'Thought Figures' (1933).
One of the cruxes of Walter Benjamin’s work is the tension between an indebting and an expiating "memoria", i. e. the afflicting and the salvific insistence of history within the present moment. On the one hand, memory inscribes itself onto spaces and bodies in the violent and painful fashion of Kafka's "Penal Colony" apparatus. On the other hand, it can, in the form of rememoration ('Eingedenken'), sublate these very inscriptions. This sublation usually involves some form of redemptive, timely (re-)verbalization, but Benjamin’s conception of it varies. To gain a better insight into this inherent, varying tension, the article will take a closer look at the connection between pain, memory and law-positing violence in some Benjaminian texts, occasionally relating them to the historical background of his discussion.
Walter Benjamin had a revealing fascination with the legend of a Chinese artist who entered his painting and disappeared in it. In his writings this character becomes an emblematic figure that enables the philosopher to discuss the nature of representation in its various infections (in games and in painting, in theater and in cinema); to explore the status of the image and of the threshold that simultaneously separates and connects image and reality; to analyse the different bodily (i. e. "aesthetic") attitudes of the beholder in his/her close or distant relationship to the image; to investigate the manifold implications of empathy ('Einfühlung ') toward the figurative world; and finally, to approach a peculiar kind of dialectics, namely the "Chinese". My paper aims at considering such varied aspects in Benjamin's interpretation of the Chinese painter, understanding it as a true "dialectical image" that in its 'non-coincidentia oppositorum' provokes not only significant hermeneutic oscillations, but even a radical inversion of its fundamental meaning.
If we take Benjamin's definitions to their logical conclusion, then the monad and the reproduced copy are set unequivocally into binary opposition, as we, the masses capable and most needful of action, are implicitly denied the potential for liberation through aesthetic experience. This denial could not have been his long-term intention. When we take into account the breadth of his writings in response to Fascism, and we look at the artistic movements, Dada in particular, that Benjamin defines as 'politicizing art,' it seems as though we risk too narrow a reading of Benjamin's theories by assuming the aura can be, or must be, done away with. Rather, I would argue that this moment of auratic interaction is crucial to effectively politicizing art at all. Mechanically-produced art, in order to function politically, must allow its audience the space necessary to step back, awaken their 'Geistesgegenwart', and take action 'before' the present moment is finished and past. The elimination of aura - as per Benjamin’s own definitions of aura - neuters the interaction this awakening requires. While Benjamin provides the framework and asks the right questions, when determining what will allow his definitions to realize their aims most fully, I submit that he draws his line in the wrong place.
The flourishing of literature and thought during the age of Goethe may have inspired German nationalism in the 1930s, but Walter Benjamin identified other values in the period worth defending. 'Deutsche Menschen' is a short collection of edited letters by well-known German authors which Benjamin published in 1936 under the pseudonym Detlef Holz in order to hide his Jewish identity. In his inscription to Scholem's copy of the book, Benjamin wrote, "May you, Gerhard, find a chamber in this ark - which I built when the Fascist flood started to rise - for the memories of your youth," and in his sister’s copy Benjamin wrote, "This ark, built after a Jewish model, for Dora - From Walter." This essay considers what Benjamin may have meant by those inscriptions. Looking beyond discussions of "German," "Jewish," and even "German-Jewish" identity, this essay explores Benjamin's descriptions of his letter collection, asking how he conceptualized and framed it at first and how it may have changed between 1931 and 1936. The categories of tradition and agency will be my focus, which I will develop in the context of Benjamin's other writings and his particular interests in quotation and materialism. &e formation and reception of 'Deutsche Menschen' reveal a complex, ambitious project that combines many of Benjamin's ideas and goals.
It is no accident that the figuration of rewriting as copying is an image from "One Way Street". This apparently casual assemblage of small, rather belletristic texts - still some of the least explored terrain in all of Benjamin - is in important ways the key to all of Benjamin’s later writing, and especially that writing based on the form of the "Denkbild" or figure of thought. In what follows, I will concentrate on one set of paired examples in order to demonstrate in a more focused way the practice of rewriting and its effects: on the relationship between "Berlin Childhood around 1900" and "One Way Street".
Walter Benjamin's 9th thesis on the concept of history is his most-quoted and -commented text. As it is well known, his idea of the "Angel of History" appears as a commentary on Paul Klee’s famous watercolor titled 'Angelus Novus'. I think it is necessary to open another way of interpretation through the connection of Benjamin’s Angel of History with the political iconography of Berlin, the city where he was born and lived for many years and about which he wrote in his memories of childhood, his Berlin chronicles and radio programs. I shall begin the historical narrative of Berlin's political iconography with a figure to which Benjamin paid little attention: the Goddess Fortune.
Walter Benjamin's best-known comment regarding nihilism - "to strive for such a passing away [for nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away] [...] is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism" (SW III, 306) - occurs at the conclusion of his "Theological-Political Fragment" (1920–1921). In this pithy fragment Benjamin challenged the distinction between the political and the theological by pointing out the necessary relation - even codependence - of historical time and messianic time, the secular and the redemptive. The focus is the temporal dimension that dictates one’s "rhythm of life," on the one hand, and politics - its formative power - on the other. Benjamin’s translation of such abstract principles into different systems - the secular and the religious, the abstract and the particular, the collective and the individual - have confused scholars for many years. The result was often a misreading of Benjamin’s last sentence, connecting politics to nihilism and identifying the maker with his method. In order to reverse such readings, this chapter moves in four consecutive stages. I begin with the "temporal-rhythmic" principle, relating it to Benjamin's notion of Nihilism as a method. Second, I consider the specific meanings of "Nihilism" during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which I identify with the idea of a temporal 'stasis'. Third, I track down Benjamin’s uses of Nihilism and demonstrate that they reflect a certain methodological approach rather than a solution to a problem. Finally, commenting directly on contemporary interpreters of Benjamin who see him as a "nihilist" or an "anarchist," I show that Benjamin focused on the temporal and critical dimensions in order to 'overcome' nihilism and stasis.
Although Walter Benjamin was never timid when it came to writing, one practice he consistently avoided was that of creating neologisms. It is therefore with all the more reluctance that I find myself compelled to resort to something similar, in order to sum up a motif that has imposed itself over the years in my reading of Benjamin. What is involved is, to be sure, not exactly a neologism, since it does not involve the creation of a new word, but rather the highlighting of a word-part, a suffix (eine Nachsilbe). In English, to be sure, this suffix, when spoken, is indistinguishable from a word: what distinguishes it from a word is not audible, but only legible: a hyphen, marking a separation that is also a joining, a 'Bindestrich' that does not bind it to anything in particular and yet that requires it to be bound to something else. The suffix in question thus sounds deceptively familiar, since it coincides, audibly, with the word "abilities". However, unlike that word, its first letter - which purely by accident happens to be the first letter of the alphabet--is preceded by a dash. When written in isolation, this gives it a somewhat bizarre appearance, to be sure, since suffixes are not usually encountered separately from the words they modify. But this bizarre appearance pales when compared to its German 'original'. If the book of essays to be published in English under the title, "Benjamin’s -abilities," is ever translated into German - "back" into German I was tempted to write, since German here is of course the language in which Benjamin wrote and in which I generally read him - then its title, were it to be entirely faithful to the English, would indeed have to involve the creation of a neologism. For translated back into German, the German title would require its readers to "read, what was never written", namely: "Benjamins -barkeiten" (written, "Bindestrich- b--kleingeschrieben").
In a letter to Scholem, dated 22 December, 1924, Benjamin famously writes of the manuscript that was to become his 'Trauerspiel' book: "[I]ndessen überrascht mich nun vor allem, daß, wenn man so will, das Geschriebene fast ganz aus Zitaten besteht" (GS I.3, 881). Much has been made of the mosaic-like citational technique to which Benjamin refers here; his "Zitatbegriff" is said, for example, to subtend the theory of a "mikrologische Verarbeitung" of "Denkbruchstücken" into "Ideen" that Benjamin develops as his theory of representation in the "Erkenntniskritische Vorrede", which in turn figures the relation between individual phenomena and their "ideas" in astral terms. Because, however, the 'Trauerspiel' book is so often understood only on this theoretical level, e.g. as either an early articulation of Benjamin’s "avant garde" and "messianic" philosophy of history (Jäger, Kany, and Pizer) or as a performance of his systems of allegory (Menninghaus) and "constructivism" (Schöttker), his "Zitierpraxis" and the actual citations that form large parts of 'Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel' have seldom been read for the purchase they provide on the vexed status of the period and concept that was the book’s direct subject, namely, the German Baroque.
The nascent field of neuropsychoanalysis positions itself as a putative bridge between two »historically divided disciplines«. In this chapter, we address this attempt to bridge these two disciplines, through considering a particular scientific and conceptual debate that is taking place within this new field. Neuropsychoanalysis is a diverse and loosely defined interdisciplinary field that comprises the efforts of researchers and clinicians within several branches of both psychoanalysis and the neurosciences to construct a shared space of inquiry in which clinical concepts and findings can be correlated with neuronal data and models. While researchers differ in how they conceptualize the specific contours of this shared space, they tend to converge in their desire to figure out how Freudian concepts might be anchored through neurobiological and anatomico-functional investigations.