September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, ENZO TRAVERSO, Allgemein.
Quoting a text on Tocqueville written by Carl Schmitt in 1946, Reinhart Koselleck hypothesized about the epistemological advantage of being vanquished in writing history. This essay analyzes Schmitt’s intellectual and political positions in reaction to three successive defeats: the collapse of the German Empire in 1918; the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933; and the overthrow of the Third Reich in 1945. Schmitt was a German nationalist and, at least until Hitler’s rise to power, an anti-Nazi conservative, but he easily adapted to both the Weimar Republic in 1919 and National Socialism in 1933, two political turns that coincided with significant improvements in his academic career. He felt vanquished only in 1945, after his double imprisonment, the Nuremberg trial, and finally his retirement to Plettenberg. 1945 was a watershed that he symbolized through two metaphorical figures: the reactionary thinker of Spanish Absolutism Juan Donoso Cortés and Melville’s literary character Benito Cereno. Thus, the case of Carl Schmitt does not confirm Koselleck’s hypothesis, insofar as the most productive and creative part of his intellectual life does not fit into an awareness of being vanquished. Koselleck’s statement deals with the gaze of the ruled, whereas Schmitt belonged to a different tradition of political thinkers interested in building domination and smashing revolution (Hobbes, Maistre, Donoso Cortés). He was a thinker of action, not of mourning. Defeat did not inspire, but rather paralyzed his thought.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, FEDERICO FINCHELSTEIN, Allgemein.
Carl Schmitt’s work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, SERGE GRIGORIEV, Allgemein.
This essay examines the relationship among some key elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s general theory of scientific inquiry (such as final causality, real possibility, methodological convergence, abductive reasoning, hypothesis formation, and diagrammatic idealization) and some prominent issues discussed in the current philosophy of history, especially those pertaining to the role of generalizations in historical explanation. The claim is that, appropriately construed, Peirce’s recommendations with respect to rational inquiry in general can provide a reasonable basis for formulating a productive critical method for a responsible philosophy of history. The essay further seeks to reduce the tension between Peirce’s interest in epistemic convergence and the arguments that champion the value of historical distance and perspectival pluralism. On the account offered, the kind of methodological convergence envisioned by Peirce need not conflict necessarily with a responsibly construed historical pluralism. On the other hand, the critical perspective of an epistemically disciplined philosophical inquiry may prove indispensable in weeding out wishful but unrealistic ideological perspectives from the writing of history. Hence, the resulting proposal envisions the critique of historical imagination as one potentially viable modality for the pragmatist philosophy of history.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, Dale A. Wilkerson, Allgemein.
This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger’s remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton’s Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger’s Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay’s themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological-existential significance of Heidegger’s text. Although Bouton’s treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton’s study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical-intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton’s lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger’s assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being’s most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, Richard Eldridge, Allgemein.
This review essay surveys and assesses Rage and Denials: Collectivist Philosophy, Politics, and Art Historiography, 1890–1947 by Branko Mitrović, focusing on a) Mitrović’s case that German art-historical practices during this period were factually ill-founded, inconsistent, and motivated by narcissism and ethnic prejudice, and b) the broader issue of whether collectivist historical explanations of artistic and cultural developments can ever be apt.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, History and Theory, Allgemein.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10810
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, History and Theory, Allgemein.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10811
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, Hans Ruin, Allgemein.
Thomas Laqueur has brought together half a century of research on modern European mortuary culture into an impressive narrative of how the Christian churchyard was replaced by the modern cemetery, how interment was partly replaced by the technology of cremation, and how writing and preserving the names of the dead coincided with democratization and social reform. Beyond the grand narrative of the history of modern burial, he also shows how the modern culture of history and memory is intertwined with the transformation of mortuary practices. On a deeper level, he points toward new ways of conceptualizing the relation between the living and the dead, leading up toward, if not fully confronting, the challenge that propels his own endeavor, namely the existential-ontological predicament of living after those who have been and the nature of spectrality.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, Richard J. Bernstein, Allgemein.
Martin Jay’s sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self-destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas’s project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay’s narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.
September 5, 2017, 9:31 am, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Allgemein.
In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld’s Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld’s account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld’s book), actually maintain the Holocaust’s status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.