{"title":"A Well-Tempered Modernist","authors":"C. Lang","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439615","url":null,"abstract":"In the vast archive of literature from, and on, Hans Blumenberg, there are few mentions of theories of modern or contemporary art. Two exceptions exist, which both took place in 1966. One deals with the topic more obliquely: a lecture on Paul Valéry given at the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. The second takes the topic of pop and op art head-on in a discussion led by Blumenberg for the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik. In neither does Blumenberg offer anything like a working theory of contemporary art, but his lecture enacts a performative contemporary reading of Valéry’s attempt to make Leonardo da Vinci relevant for the French poet’s age. Comparing Blumenberg’s comments on contemporary art with those in US formalist art criticism (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) provides a unique constellation of later modernist thinking on the plastic arts (painting and sculpture, chiefly). This article attempts to read Blumenberg as a contemporary thinker for art, an attempt that revisits the provocation that Blumenberg set for himself in 1966 when considering the stakes for contemporary art forms. Can one say that Blumenberg was himself a modernist?","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44402822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Memory of Ernst Cassirer: Speech Delivered in Acceptance of the Kuno Fischer Prize of the University of Heidelberg, 1974","authors":"H. Blumenberg, J. Kroll","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439713","url":null,"abstract":"On the occasion of receiving a prize first awarded to Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), Hans Blumenberg assesses Cassirer’s legacy and influence. Blumenberg underlines Cassirer’s contribution to epistemology in the neo-Kantian tradition as well as his pioneering work in the history of ideas before discussing how his celebrated Philosophy of Symbolic Forms led Cassirer to reappraise the problem of history more generally. Blumenberg reads Cassirer as having tried to establish the independence of history with regard to the imperatives of the present and from this derives a defense of his own idea of historicism, which Blumenberg understands as the claim to equal consideration by historians on the part of those eras, peoples, and subjects that may not serve present interests. Historians must be aware of the contingency of their own position and preserve the memory even of those aspects of humanity that fail to meet their criteria of progress.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45809263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Hans Blumenberg at 101","authors":"Hannes Bajohr","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439587","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42638091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Vanishing Reality of the State: On Hans Blumenberg’s Political Theory","authors":"Hannes Bajohr","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439657","url":null,"abstract":"While many interpreters of Hans Blumenberg have searched The Legitimacy of the Modern Age or Work on Myth for hints of a political theory, there is still no in-depth discussion of the only essay published during his lifetime that deals directly with political theory, “The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State,” which appeared in May 1968. This article reconstructs that essay’s main arguments and contextualizes it in the “historical phenomenology” Blumenberg developed in his middle period. Arguing that we are witnessing a slow dissolution of the state, he suggests that politics is supplanted by rhetoric and the state by supranational structures. Setting apart this historical approach from the anthropological one of his later work, the article argues for a break in Blumenberg’s oeuvre around 1968.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46076716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No More Than Seeing: Hans Blumenberg’s Poetics of Spectatorship","authors":"Daniel Helbig","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439685","url":null,"abstract":"Hans Blumenberg is known as much for his theoretical focus on unsayability as he is for his ostentatious reclusiveness. This article argues that Blumenberg’s figure of the spectator connects these two elements. Blumenberg’s social and theoretical retreat to a spectatorial position bears distinctive traces of his attempt at finding new ways to do philosophy after 1945. As much a departure from as a legacy of his early attempts to critically renew scholarly practice with the working group Poetics and Hermeneutics, the figure of the spectator served Blumenberg as a means of self-stylization and embodied his striving at the descriptive representation of unsayability. Blumenberg’s theoretical figure of the distanced yet critically engaged spectator is distinguished both from Martin Heidegger’s notion of thinking as action and from Edmund Husserl’s positioning of the philosophical spectator as removed from the empirical world. The figure of the theoros, the spectator, absorbs the ambition of bringing into view the unsayable and of articulating the conditions for this spectatorial act.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46283145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decoding Aesop: Blumenberg’s Fabulistic Turn","authors":"Florian Fuchs","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9439671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9439671","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops Hans Blumenberg’s intensifying interest in fables during the 1970s and 1980s and argues that it marked his decisive turn away from academic philosophy toward a rethinking of storytelling as a philosophical practice. Blumenberg’s simultaneous writings on anecdotes are thus reframed as a testing ground and subsequent application of a philosophy of fabulistic storytelling. The systematic reach of this fabulistic turn is exhibited by tracing a set of concepts—pensiveness (Nachdenklichkeit), nonunderstanding (Unverstand), and disturbance (Störung)—that Blumenberg coined to define the specific phenomenological conditions of being interrupted by a fable-type story. Though no actual “fabulology” ensued from these plans, the fabulistic turn can be contextualized with Blumenberg’s metaphorology as it represents his ultimate attempt to study the role of language for philosophy, however, with a shift from analysis to pragmatism: while metaphorology demanded, retroactively, that absolute metaphors be revisited throughout the history of philosophy to gauge the plasticity lost by philosophical language, Blumenberg’s fabulology proposes, proactively, to change philosophical language itself by conducting narratological experiments with the lifeworld to rethink the relation between lifeworld, reality, and storytelling.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42327630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture","authors":"Dina Khapaeva","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305512","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44594442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation","authors":"Daniel M. Herskowitz","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305505","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47964242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Time of That Other Interpretation”: Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge","authors":"W. Stables","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305533","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42986294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz","authors":"Louis Klee","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9305519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9305519","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48757723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}