LITMIR.BIZ

An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos , the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos , measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture , Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time. According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct «regime of historicity,» a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

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In The Spatial Reformation , Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350 and 1850. He argues that this «spatial reformation» provoked a reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements . Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the early modern era. According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range. The Spatial Reformation contends that space is a human construct: that is, it is a concept that arises from the human imagination and gets expressed physically in texts and material objects. Sauter begins his examination by demonstrating how Euclidean geometry, when it was applied fully to the cosmos, estranged God from man, enabling the breakthrough to heliocentrism and, by extension, the discovery of the New World. Subsequent chapters provide detailed analyses of the construction of celestial and terrestrial globes, Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia , the secularization of the natural history of the earth and man, and Hobbes's rejection of Euclid's sense of space and its effect on his political theory. Sauter's exploration culminates in the formation of a new anthropology in the eighteenth century that situated humanity in reference to spaces and places that human eyes had not actually seen. The Spatial Reformation illustrates how these disparate advancements can be viewed as resulting expressly from early modernity's embrace of Euclidean geometry.

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Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place. Robert C. Holub counters this narrative, arguing that Nietzsche was very well attuned to the events and issues of his era and responded to them frequently in his writings. Organized around nine important questions circulating in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century presents a thorough investigation of Nietzsche's familiarity with contemporary life, his contact with and comments on these various questions, and the sources from which he gathered his knowledge. Holub begins his analysis with Nietzsche's views on education, nationhood, and the working-class movement, turns to questions of women and women's emancipation, colonialism, and Jews and Judaism, and looks at Nietzsche's dealings with evolutionary biology, cosmological theories, and the new «science» of eugenics. He shows how Nietzsche, although infrequently read during his lifetime, formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries, and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in the nineteenth century. Throughout his examination, Holub finds that, against conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was only indirectly in conversation with the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes through German idealism, and that the books and individuals central to his development were more obscure writers, most of whom have long since been forgotten. This book thus sheds light on Nietzsche's thought as enmeshed in a web of nineteenth-century discourses and offers new insights into his interactive method of engaging with the philosophical universe of his time.

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As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX , intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy . But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the «suffering scholar» reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres , first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor. In Suffering Scholars , Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the «suffering scholar» syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe , the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was partially filled by moving images. At the same time, the emerging human sciences—psychiatry, neurology, sexology, eugenics, industrial psychology, and psychoanalysis—began to play an increasingly significant role in setting the terms for the way Germany analyzed itself and the problems it had inherited from its authoritarian past, the modernizing process, and war. Moreover, in advancing their professional and social goals, these sciences became heavily reliant on motion pictures. Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine, and the history of modern Germany, Homo Cinematicus connects the rise of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences. Taking its title from a term coined in 1919 by commentator Wilhelm Stapel to identify a new social type that had been created by the emergence of cinema, Killen's book explores how a new class of experts in these new disciplines converged on the figure of the «homo cinematicus» and made him central to many of that era's major narratives and social policy initiatives. Killen traces film's use by the human sciences as a tool for producing, communicating, and popularizing new kinds of knowledge, as well as the ways that this alliance was challenged by popular films that interrogated the truth claims of both modern science and scientific cinema. In doing so, Homo Cinematicus endeavors to move beyond the divide between scientific and popular film, examining their historical coexistence and coevolution.

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Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of identity as the answer to the question, «who, or what, am I?» It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success. Along the way the book examines Erik Erikson's concepts of psychological identity and identity crisis, which made the word famous; the turn to collective identity and the rise of identity politics in Europe and America; varieties and theories of group identity; debates over accommodating collective identities within liberal democracy; the relationship between individual and group identity; the postmodern critique of identity as a concept; and the ways it nonetheless transformed the social sciences and altered our ideas of ethics. At the same time the book is an argument for the validity and indispensability of identity, properly understood. Identity was not a concept before the twentieth century because it was taken for granted. The slaughter of World War I undermined the honored identities of prewar Europe and, as a result, the idea of identity as something objective and stable was thrown into question at the same time that people began to sense that it was psychologically and socially necessary. We can't be at home in our bodies, act effectively in the world, or interact comfortably with others without a stable sense of who we are. Gerald Izenberg argues that, while it is a mistake to believe that our identities are givens that we passively discover about ourselves, decreed by God, destiny, or nature, our most important identities have an objective foundation in our existential situation as bodies, social beings, and creatures who aspire to meaning and transcendence, as well as in the legitimacy of our historical particularity.

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In Christian Human Rights , Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war. The Roman Catholic Church and transatlantic Protestant circles dominated the public discussion of the new principles in what became the last European golden age for the Christian faith. At the same time, West European governments after World War II, particularly in the ascendant Christian Democratic parties, became more tolerant of public expressions of religious piety. Human rights rose to public prominence in the space opened up by these dual developments of the early Cold War. Moyn argues that human dignity became central to Christian political discourse as early as 1937. Pius XII's wartime Christmas addresses announced the basic idea of universal human rights as a principle of world, and not merely state, order. By focusing on the 1930s and 1940s, Moyn demonstrates how the language of human rights was separated from the secular heritage of the French Revolution and put to use by postwar democracies governed by Christian parties, which reinvented them to impose moral constraints on individuals, support conservative family structures, and preserve existing social hierarchies. The book ends with a provocative chapter that traces contemporary European struggles to assimilate Muslim immigrants to the continent's legacy of Christian human rights.

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Long before we began to speak of «public intellectuals,» the ideas of «the public» and «the intellectual» raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher—and sometime National Socialist—Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics. Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.

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