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This volume explores 'unknown time' as a cultural phenomenon, approaching past futures, unknown presents, and future pasts through a broad range of different disciplines, media, and contexts. As a phenomenon that is both elusive and fundamentally inaccessible, time is a key object of fascination. Throughout the ages, different cultures have been deeply engaged in various attempts to fill or make time by developing strategies to familiarize unknown time and to materialize and control past, present, or future time. Arguing for the perennial interest in time, especially in the unknown and unattainable dimension of the future, the contributions explore premodern ideas about eschatology and secular future, historical configurations of the perception of time and acceleration in fin-de-siècle Germany and contemporary Lagos, the formation of ‘deep time’ and ‘timelessness’ in paleontology and ethnographic museums, and the representation of time—past, present, and future alike—in music, film, and science fiction.
The book offers a critical account of how utopian thinking became defeated as a tool of philosophy whose explicit objective has been to not only analyse but emancipate the world. While such philosophy was originally inseparable from ideas of a radically better society it aimed to realise, many of its most influential practitioners today object to the use of utopian ideas. Countering this scepticism, the book argues in favour of utopian thinking. By elucidating a concept of utopia freed of its alleged pitfalls, the book contends that utopian thinking indeed presents an important resource for achieving emancipatory social goals.
What we call here the ‘Marrano phenomenon’ is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution, but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities. Our aim, however, is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), i.e., the mostly Spanish and Portguese Jews of the 15th and 16th centuries, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover’: such an approach already exists and has been developed within the field of historical research. We rather want to apply the ‘Marrano metaphor’ to explore the fruitful area of mixture and crossover which allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication—without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, which they subsequently developed as a ‘hidden tradition’. What is of special interest to us is the modern development of the non-normative forms of religious thinking located on the borderline between Christianity and Judaism, from Spinoza to Derrida.
Rehmann’s book investigates how Deleuze and Foucault read Nietzsche and apply a hermeneutics of innocence to his philosophy that erases its elitist, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist dimensions. This also affects their own theory and impairs postmodernism’s claim to develop a radical critique.
Wendy Brown is one of the most prolific and influential political theorists of her generation. This collection of essays, designed for the undergraduate classroom, presents an introduction to and critical assessment of Brown’s substantial body of work, with a particular focus on her contributions to the tradition of critical theory. Coeditors Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta provide an overview of Brown’s work, situating her scholarship in relation to some of the major thinkers and methodologies of the Frankfurt School. Brown opens the discussion with a new essay expounding upon the meaning of freedom and the prospects for emancipation in our current political moment. Subsequent chapters a...
This volume offers a critical re-assessment of the thought of Ernst Bloch, best known for his groundbreaking study The Principle of Hope and one of the most significant European thinkers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It explores Bloch’s life, work and reception; his debt to Marx and Hegel; his central concepts of hope and utopia; his affinities with philosophers such as Gramsci and Žižek; and his radical reframing of our understanding of history, society and culture. Above all, this volume examines the relevance of Bloch’s ideas today, in a world still shot through with economic inequality and social injustice. Contributors are: Agata Bielik-Robson, Ivan Boldyrev, Henk de Berg, Sam Dolbear, Vincent Geoghegan, Holger Glinka, Loren Goldman, Douglas Kellner, Cat Moir, Jan Rehmann, Nina Rismal, Johan Siebers and Peter Thompson
In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to and overview of the life and philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Bloch has had a strange fate in the English-speaking world. He wrote his famous three-volume opus, The Principle of Hope, while living in exile in the United States from 1938 to 1940. It was first published, however, in East Germany in the 1950s after he had returned to Europe and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Gradually, his other numerous works became better known and widespread in Europe and scholars in the US and UK started to take note of his works. Yet, he has still remained a somewhat neglected figure in the humanities. While this book does not set...
Korstvedt explains key concepts from Bloch's musical philosophy, making his complex ideas accessible for modern musical scholars.