Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary. This volume brings together for the first time all of (...) Kracauer’s essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history. With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer’s theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures, photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert. (shrink)

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hölderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects, such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, (...) with a new introduction by Paul Kottman. (shrink)

A partir de 1922, Siegfried Kracauer escreveu uma série de textos que comporiam o livro O romance policial: um tratado filosófico, mas que só seriam publicados em 1971, no primeiro volume de seus Escritos póstumos. O presente artigo tem como objetivo reconstituir a teoria do romance policial formulada por Kracauer, buscando analisar como essa teoria foi fundamentada e quais eram suas principais definições. Inicialmente, o intuito é localizar essa teoria dentro do pensamento mais geral do autor, relacionando-a a sua (...) produção anterior e, principalmente, posterior. Em um segundo momento, tentaremos dimensionar a interlocução estabelecida entre Kracauer e autores do chamado marxismo ocidental, como György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno entre outros. (shrink)

During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, _From Caligari to Hitler_ and _Theory of Film_. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual (...) and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies and shows how, in turn, Kracauer’s American writings helped shape the emergent discipline. Using archival sources and detailed readings, von Moltke asks what it means to consider Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became in the last quarter century of his life. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer’s work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions in conversation with contemporary critics from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality; about high and low culture; about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung debates, Kracauer’s own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema. (shrink)

Siegfried Kracauer was a leading figure on the Weimar arts scene and one of the foremost representatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including the critic Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other intellectual. Kracauer.Photographic Archive, a companion volume to The Past’s Threshold: Essays on (...) Photography, collects previously unpublished photographs by Siegfried and Elisabeth, “Lili,” Kracauer. With its remarkably rich material, the book tells the story of the Kracauer’s close working relationship, from their marriage in Germany to their escape to Paris and the war and postwar years in the United States. While neither Kracauer nor his wife trained in photography, their portraits, city views, and landscapes evince impressive aesthetic and technical skill, while simultaneously shedding light on their lives marked by exile and flight. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adornos Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1963) gehört zu den umstrittensten Texten der Kritischen Theorie. Während der Titel inner- und außerhalb der akademischen Debatte längst zu einem geflügelten Wort mutiert ist, steht diesem die Kenntnis des Inhalts diametral gegenüber. Zumeist wird die Schrift als eine Polemik gegen Martin Heidegger abgehandelt, die zu einer 'philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung' Hermann Mörchen) zwischen Frankfurt und Freiburg geführt habe. Plattitüden dieser Art verkennen jedoch den ideologiekritischen Charakter der Streitschrift. Adornos Kritik am neudeutschen Jargon richtet sich (...) keineswegs primär gegen Heidegger, sondern bezieht sich auf ein breites gesellschaftliches Phänomen. Sie hat ihren Ursprung bereits in den 1920er-Jahren in der Kritik Siegfried Kracauers an der Bibel-Übersetzung von Martin Buber und Franz Rosenzweig. Ziel des Sammelbandes ist es, den Jargon der Eigentlichkeit jenseits akademischer Departementalisierungen zu erschließen und auf die Aktualität von Adornos Kritik hinzuweisen. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. Thus, the (...) term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

Les philosophes et les clowns se ressembleraient-ils? L'hypothèse est peut-être moins incongrue qu'il n'y paraît. Elle est même suggérée par... des philosophes, en particulier ceux qui, observant ce que devient l'individu humain depuis le début du terrible XXe siècle, interrogent sa foncière ambivalence. Le clown serait-il le modèle d'un sujet devenu bancal mais rusé, dépassé mais calculateur, égaré mais lucide, épuisé mais inventeur d'espérances? Le temps des clowns que décrivent les philosophes et écrivains ici invités (Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, (...) Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders) n'est pas celui des Lumières, et il n'est pas non plus celui des transports romantiques ou tragiques du XIXe. Il témoigne d'une expérience historique spécifique, qui pourrait bien être encore, pour une grande part, la nôtre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The paper discusses the active part in the process of perceiving, usually expressed by the Greek word krinein. It is argued that krinein in one of its uses means "to judge" in the sense of judging a case, i. e. deciding it. It is not used for making statements. A second meaning of the Greek word is that of discerning or discriminating, and it is this meaning that plays a central part in Aristotle's theory of perception.

The question as to what makes a perfect Aristotelian syllogism a perfect one has long been discussed by Aristotelian scholars. G. Patzig was the first to point the way to a correct answer: it is the evidence of the logical necessity that is the special feature of perfect syllogisms. Patzig moreover claimed that the evidence of a perfect syllogism can be seen for Barbara in the transitivity of the a-relation. However, this explanation would give Barbara a different status over the (...) other three first figure syllogisms. I argue that, taking into account the role of the being-contained-as-in-a-whole formulation, transitivity can be seen to be present in all four first figure syllogisms. Using this wording will put the negation sign with the predicate, similar to the notation in modern predicate calculus. (shrink)

This short article aims to strengthen Hume's case against the rationality of believing in religious miracles by incorporating certain lessons borrowed from the growing literature on the history and psychology of magic tricks.

Aristotelian metaphysics is a change in the form of metaphysics, which seems to be extraneous to it but in reality co‐determines it in the most intimate way. Descartes’ Meditations are intellectual exercises that extend over six days. On almost every new day, a reference is made to the results or intermediary results of the previous day, or the spiritual experiences of the last days. This division into days, as well as the physical back‐references, mentioned in the First Meditation and repeated (...) in the Third, the repetitions, the monologue form, and other elements, point to the fact that Descartes’ Meditations must be understood within the tradition of philosophy in the sense of spiritual exercises. The knowledge of God must be considered as the highest stage of freedom. Descartes himself described the true path to the truth as the path a facilioribus ad difficiliora [from easier to more difficult things]. (shrink)

This is a German translation with commentary of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, Book I. The introduction (‚Einleitung‘, pp. 97–182) contains a concise history of the reception of Aristotle’s syllogistic from Theophrastus to Kant and Hegel. The commentary places special attention to the modal chapters (i. e. I 3 and 8–22). Aristotle’s modal syllogistic is treated with more sympathy than in other modern commentaries and discussions of this part of Aristotle’s logic.

I argue, firstly, that the accounts of 'accident' in Aristotle's Met. V 30 and in Top. I 5 cannot be used to elucidate each other: the Metaphysics passage tries to disentangle the uses of a Greek word, the Topics passage introduces technical terms for Aristotle's semantics. I then argue that the positive definition in Top. I 5 is to be understood in the following way: X is an accident of Y iff X belongs to Y and if there is a (...) Z such that X can belong to Z and also not belong to Z. Thus, being white is an accident of snow. I finally argue that certain shortcomings in the Topics account lead Aristotle to redefine accident in the Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI) is to be taken as a necessary and sufficient condition for any action that is permissible, i. e. not prohibited. The class of permissible actions contains actions which are allowed as well as those which are morally required. If to perform an action and to abstain from this action can be taken to be ‘practical opposites’, then an action that is morally required for, a duty, is an action whose practical opposite is prohibited, and vice versa. (...) The class of actions which are merely allowed (neither prohibited nor morally required for) contains all and only those actions who together with their practical opposites belong to the class of permissible (not prohibited) actions. The paper then adduces passages from Kant’s ethical writings on the CI supporting these distinctions. (shrink)

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors (...) to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. (shrink)

Introduction: Setting the scene -- The soul, Dharma, and liberation -- The supreme person's descent -- The path of enlightened action -- The path of classical yoga -- The vision of the supreme, I -- Quitting the body, the ephemeral, and eternal worlds -- The vision of the supreme, II -- Seeing the supreme in this world -- The revelation -- Stages of devotion -- The vision of the supreme in the heart -- The three Gusas -- The journey from (...) bondage to liberation -- The divine and the demonic -- The manifestation of the three Gusas in human life -- Summary and conclusion: Surrender to Kusa alone. (shrink)

It is argued that recollection in Plato's "Meno" is used as a metaphor, though not one for a priori knowledge: the point of comparison is the analogy between the processes of learning in the sense of coming to know from an error and recollecting something one has forgotten. Recollecting in this sense as well as correcting an error implies the becoming aware of a lack of knowledge previously unnoticed. It is shown that the geometry lesson (82b9-85b7) is intended to bring (...) out this analogy. It is argued further that the error to be corrected by the staging of the geometry lesson is an error of Meno's concerning the nature of knowledge. It is finally argued that Socrates' speech in 81a5-d5 is a parody of a Gorgian speech and that the learning-is-recollection statement in this passage is an allegorical conceit in the manner of Gorgias and Empedocles. (shrink)

Figure éminente de la Kulturkritik allemande, c’est-à-dire de la critique de la civilisation moderne, Siegfried Kracauer a rencontré Theodor W. Adorno alors que ce dernier, de quatorze ans son cadet, n’était encore que lycéen. Une amitié s’est nouée à travers le singulier rituel hebdomadaire d’une lecture de la Critique de la raison pure. Ce rituel qui a duré plusieurs années a tissé une durable amitié que des différends théoriques, survenus plus tard, ont néanmoins mise à rude épreuve. Les (...) deux penseurs ne se sont donc jamais perdus de vue et leur correspondance, telle un baromètre, enregistre leurs éloignements stellaires, leurs retrouvailles comme leurs conflits philosophiques. Nous livrons ici quelques échantillons de ces oscillations barométriques. (shrink)

Biology in the popular mind remains tied to the doctrines of the struggle forsurvival and the survival of the fittest. Physics is linked to the heat deathof the universe – the inexorable march towards greater disorder,increasing entropy. Our field, on the other hand, focuses on orderedstructures, molecules and crystals, and their aggregates, and what holdsthem together. The philosophy of chemistry is centered on affinity,cohesion, the architecture of the very small, attraction, harmony, and, ifyou permit, beauty. Our discipline is the voice (...) of the twenty-first century,a message, a clarion call of life, of hope. This paper addresses failures ofreductionist and deterministic claims in the face of the cussedness ofchemical facts. It will examine uncertainty principles, Edmund Whitaker'spostulates of impotence, Gerald Holton's themata, Isaiah Berlin's warning –and the wisdom of the Chinese. We can teach the world the need for humilityin the face of the wonder and mystery of our world. (shrink)

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa combines Vedāntin philosophy, dramatic and aesthetic elements, and personal expressions in a unique manner. Moreover, it seems to be conveying a notion of selfhood or personhood which is unique and innovative for the Hindu tradition. This paper aims at uncovering this unique notion. It deconstructs the BhP by arguing for the amalgamation of the Rasa-aesthetic school with Vedānta. It then turns to the topic of personhood in the Hindu tradition; it raises the complexity of discussing personhood in (...) the Indian context and discusses three notions of personhood which are ‘the Worldly Self of Mīmāṁsā’, the ‘Solitary Self of Sāṅkhya’, and the ‘Transcendental Self of Vedānta’. Having articulated these three notions, it highlights the notion of aesthetic personhood underlying the BhP. The paper goes further to differentiate notions of Vivarta from those of Pariṇāma, pointing out at the Pariṇāma worldview to be underlying the notion of aesthetic personhood of the BhP. At last and as an outcome of its main argument, it offers a sketch of ascending notions of aesthetic notions of personhood in the BhP. (shrink)