Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida's and Freud's concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, (...) she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel's approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art. (shrink)

Das Buch der bekannten Literaturwissenschaftlerin untersucht die Formen des Bildertausches zwischen Wissenschaft, Religion, Kunst und Literatur. Jenseits der Kontroverse zwischen pictorial und linguistic turn geht es um das Wissen der Bilder an der Grenze zwischen Messen und Deuten: an der Schwelle zwischen Spur und Zeichen, Imaginärem und Sichtbarem, Material und Figur, Schauplatz und Erzählung, Daten und Graphik/Begriff. Momente des In-Erscheinung-Tretens stehen im Zentrum: von Bildern im Denken, von Affekten im Gesicht, von Transzendenz in Gemälden oder in der Dichtung. Ausgehend von (...) der Differenz zwischen neuronalen Indikatoren und Semantik in den bildgebenden Verfahren der aktuellen naturwissenschaftlichen Forschung, widmet sich Sigrid Weigel vor allem dem Wissen, das Malerei und Einbildungskraft über Bilder bereithalten. Ziel ist es, durch die Aufmerksamkeit für das Detail und für das "Unbedeutende" dem "Geist wahrer Philologie" (Benjamin) zum Ausdruck zu verhelfen. (Quelle: www.buchhandel.de). (shrink)

This book digs into the complex archaeology of empathy illuminating controversies, epistemic problems and unanswered questions encapsulated within its cross-disciplinary history. The authors ask how a neutral innate capacity to directly understand the actions and feelings of others becomes charged with emotion and moral values associated with altruism or caregiving. They explore how the discovery of the mirror neuron system and its interpretation as the neurobiological basis of empathy has stimulated such an enormous body of research and how in a (...) number of these studies, the moral values and social attitudes underlying empathy in human perception and action are conceptualized as universal traits. It is argued that in the humanities the historical, cultural and scientific genealogies of empathy and its forerunners, such as Einfühlung, have been shown to depend on historical preconditions, cultural procedures, and symbolic systems of production. The multiple semantics of empathy and related concepts are discussed in the context of their cultural and historical foundations, raising questions about these cross-disciplinary constellations. This volume will be of interest to scholars of psychology, art history, cultural research, history of science, literary studies, neuroscience, philosophy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Assembled here for the first time in English translation, Sigrid Weigel and Georgina Paul offer illuminating new insights into Benjamin's theory, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis.

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In _Body-and Image-Space_ Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds (...) the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin's theory. (shrink)

This text was delivered as the laudatory speech on the occasion of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Adorno prize in 2015. The influence of Adorno’s work on Didi-Huberman’s methodology is clarified, especially Adorno’s reflections on montage, the essayistic style and the anachronism of time. Didi-Huberman thematizes and analyses anachronism as a specific time structure of images. His works stress the similarity of images with the literary montage technique to develop a comprehensive theory of the readability of images – a practice in (...) which we approach images, based on the combination of voir and savoir, of looking and knowing. Two books, dealing with images and the Holocaust, are specifically exemplary of this approach: Images in Spite of All and Bark. Images in Spite of All calls a halt to one of the crudest erroneous readings of Adorno’s work, since the theorem of the Unspeakable or Unrepresentable always referred to Theodor W. Adorno ; and it is remarkably resistant to nuanced philological–philosophical studies of Adorno’s writings. By attentively considering the conditions in which the four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau were produced, Didi-Huberman dares to imagine the unimaginable. In this and in his more personal work of Bark, he successfully avoids an impossible reconstruction but instead asks what happened in that other place, in the cultural and our personal and memory. This is the work of ‘readability’ in the Benjaminian sense. (shrink)

The Denktagebuch, kept by Hannah Arendt from 1950 until 1973, is not only a fascinating parergon, or secondary work, containing many reflections, observations, and notes on other articles that had not, or not yet, taken on their finished form as essays or books. It presents the foundations and premises of her writing that originate from her notebooks—foundations in a literal sense, i.e., those writings that preceded the author's work in political theory. Several entries contain methodological reflections, explanations of definitions, and (...) analyses of philosophical texts. These are self-commentaries on her own publications, such as reflections on the ambiguous and often…. (shrink)

Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry.

Proceeding from the statement that «reading» images is not at all analogous to any culturally codified lecture of written texts, Sigrid Weigel develops a crucial critic of the anthropological paradigm linked to the left-right problem in the visual arts. Focusing on various examples of painted and sculpted Annunciations, the author argues how the decline of the traditional orientation, based on the figure of God in central position, leads to a growing importance of the spectator gaze and to a (...) new relation between iconic narration and symbolic meaning. (shrink)

Arguing that the importance of painting and other visual art for Benjamin's epistemology has yet to be appreciated, Weigel undertakes the first systematic analysis of their significance to his thought. She does so by exploring Benjamin's dialectics of secularization, an approach that allows Benjamin to explore the simultaneous distance from and orientation towards revelation and to deal with the difference and tensions between religious and profane ideas. In the process, Weigel identifies the double reference of 'life' to both (...) nature and to a 'supernatural' sphere as a guiding concept of Benjamin's writings. Sensitive to the notorious difficulty of translating his language, she underscores just how much is lost in translation, particularly with regard to religious connotations. The book thus positions Benjamin with respect to the other European thinkers at the heart of current discussions of sovereignty and martyrdom, of holy and creaturely life. It corrects misreadings, including Agamben's staging of an affinity between Benjamin and Schmitt, and argues for the closeness of Benjamin's work to that of Aby Warburg, with whom Benjamin unsuccessfully attempted an intellectual exchange. (shrink)

This article analyses how Benjamin takes Kraus's reference to the creaturely as a symptom of an ahistorical attitude which projects the state of genesis, i.e. the world of God's creatures, into history. It reads the essay on Karl Kraus as a main site for Benjamin's dialectical approach to secularization, which is characterized by the distance both from genesis and redemption. The awareness of the fundamental difference which separates human concepts from biblical ideas or words which may be observed in many (...) of Benjamin's texts forms a kind of leitmotif of his work. It is only from this radical separation that he is able to deal with the echo realm of the sacred in modernity. (shrink)

The caesura of tragedy, more precisely tragedy as the scene of a caesura upon which an interruption occurs in the relation between divine grounds and human will, stands at the center of Susan Taubes's confrontation with tragedy. Moving beyond an explication of generic history, she analyzed the “Nature of Tragedy” (1953) as a phenomenon emerging from a cultural-historical threshold situation, illuminating tragedy's origins in the framework of her approach to ritual, religion, and philosophy. In respect to the history of theory, (...) these reflections are located at a transition point between religious and cultural history. Her argument that tragedy maintains a…. (shrink)

The article discusses different but related figures of trans-generational heritage in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud. The common ground of these German-Jewish authors is an interpretative pattern within the theory of history/memory based in the idea of a strong bond of subsequent generations and their interrelation, which refers back to the biblical origins of the idea of ‘heritage’. Both Heine and Benjamin hypothesize a secret agreement between the generations, which might be read as (...) the origin of the idea of solidarity. In Freud’s psychoanalysis we find a complementary concept in the figure of ‘archaic heritage’ elaborated in Monotheism, namely a trans-generational trans- feral of repressed memories of the ancestors to their offspring. While Freud, not coincidentally after the First World War and during the rise of Nazism, discovers the unconscious transfer of guilt, Arendt seeks – after the Second World War – to regain, in the space between human beings, action as the space of the political. By emphasizing ‘natality’ as a basic human condition she invests policy in the acting of men in history with the condition of the possibility of a new beginning. The future, according to the insight of these authors, will not be created in abstract images or produced by means of a program, but will come into being by the treatment of the past and the heritage of those who lived before us and by the way in which we act in the present. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 11 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 115-129.

Limits of a (historico-)philosophical discourse vis-a-vis the rutpure in the fabric of civilization marked by the shoah. Examines the textual place of those aspects of history which elude rational analysis.

As empirical research in neuro- and life sciences is aimed at the core of humanities, they adopt those formulas of pathos like "intention", "mind", "identity" or "consciousness" which, after all, have long been analysed with regard to their symbol-theoretical and media-anthropological principles. Meanwhile, cultural as well as media sciences have established themselves – beyond the contrasting 'two cultures' – as a kind of third culture of knowledge and thus connect to traditions of thought like, for instance, Freud's theory of subjects (...) or Benjamin's theory of media. (shrink)

I. The New World Order The issue at the center of Giorgio Agamben's book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), that of the relation of bare life to politics and the law, has, in the ten years since the book's appearance, been propelled so forcefully into the foreground by events on the world political stage that Agamben's central figure has taken on an uncanny actuality.1The images broadcast around the world of Guantánamo Bay appear like visualizations of the homo (...) sacer, the definition of which is he who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”2 Even more so…. (shrink)

As regards Aby Warburg’s oeuvre, it is fascinating that three unfinished or unpublished projects have come to represent the very theorems now appearing of most interest for cultural historians and theorists: The Mnemosyne Atlas representing pictorial memory; the Serpent Ritual as theorem for a cultural-anthropological reading of pagan cultures; and the Nymph Fragment as a foundational figure of modern iconology. This essay undertakes an analysis of the fragmentary character of Warburg’s way of working, arguing that his search for an analytic (...) model to account for the interplay between Christian and pagan/polytheistic traditions displays striking asynchronies and displacements. Rather than explicating these irregularities biographically, the conceptual problems tied to his methods and cognitive interests are investigated. The article thus examines a set of conceptual questions whose relevance extends well past Warburg’s methodology, considering the dimensions of religious and cultural-historical theory within a broader history of European arts and media. Concentrating on probably the most cited figure from Warburg’s repertoire of images, the “nymph” figure on Ghirlandaio’s fresco The Birth of St John the Baptist, the essay focuses on Warburg’s borrowings from Heinrich Heine and reveals Heine to be a blind spot in research on Warburg up until now. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

For the first time, this book compiles original documents from Science for the People, the most important radical science movement in U.S. history. Between 1969 and 1989, Science for the People mobilized American scientists, teachers, and students to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits. Through research, writing, protest, and organizing, members sought to demystify scientific knowledge and embolden "the people" to take science and technology into their own hands. The movement's (...) numerous publications were crucial to the formation of science and technology studies, challenging mainstream understandings of science as "neutral" and instead showing it as inherently political. Its members, some at prominent universities, became models for politically engaged science and scholarship by using their knowledge to challenge, rather than uphold, the social, political, and economic status quo. Highlighting Science for the People's activism and intellectual interventions in a range of areas -- including militarism, race, gender, medicine, agriculture, energy, and global affairs -- this volume offers vital contributions to today's debates on science, justice, democracy, sustainability, and political power. (shrink)

1. Universi corporis pansophici caput summum --2. Arithmetische Beschreibung der Moral-Weisheit von Personen und Sachen.

Management of the renewable natural resources in Madagascar is gradually being transferred to the local communities, particularly that of forest resources. However, these local communities are struggling to assess the consequences of management plans that they themselves must develop and implement on ecologically, economically and socially sustainable grounds. In order to highlight key aspects of different management options beforehand, we have developed MIRANA, a computer model to simulate various scenarios of management plan implementation. MIRANA differs from other simulation models by (...) not only taking into account individual practices and economic exchanges, but also by accounting for the applicable regulations. These regulations are taken into consideration by means of a multiplicity of normative structures within a spatial context. The objective of this paper is to describe the representations of institutions, norms and territories proposed by MIRANA and to discuss these representations in relation to the state of the art in the field of normative multi-agent systems. (shrink)

An extensive body of research documents that women experience a motherhood penalty at work whereas men experience a fatherhood premium. Yet much of this work presupposes that employers are aware of a worker’s parental status. Given the different consequences that parenthood has on outcomes such as pay and promotions, it is conceivable that men and women may deploy their status as parents differently when interacting with employers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a racially diverse sample, this article examines how mothers (...) and fathers working in the service sector use their parental status when negotiating work and child care responsibilities. Mothers, particularly black mothers, were less likely to openly discuss their children at work. In some cases, women purposefully concealed from their employers the fact that they were mothers or found other ways of signaling their commitment to their jobs. Fathers, on the other hand, were more likely to discuss their children with their employers and overwhelmingly characterized their managers as understanding of their parenting obligations. Together, these findings help us understand how mothers and fathers navigate the consequences of parenthood in the workplace and add nuance to previous studies of motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums. (shrink)