Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140733
T. Vandeputte
In an unpublished fragment from the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin famously calls for a recasting of the idea of catastrophe and its relation to the progression of history. Catastrophe, Benjamin contends, is not to be understood as an exception to the regular course of history; rather than being conceived as a singular event marking the end of the world in its given form, catastrophe is to be located in its persistent continuity—the simple fact that “things ‘go on like this.’” This article traces the origins of this thesis to an earlier text: a 1923 manuscript that Benjamin wrote during a journey through Germany at the peak of the hyperinflation. Examining this text in relation to a treatise that was of particular significance to Benjamin—Erich Unger’s 1921 Politics and Metaphysics—this article offers a reconstruction of the image of catastrophic history presented here as well as its significance for Benjamin’s emerging political thought of the early 1920s. Through a commentary on both texts, the article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the sources and meaning of the “continuity as catastrophe” thesis, sketching out how Benjamin’s singular vantage point could inform contemporary debates on catastrophe, apocalypse, and the politics of interruption.
{"title":"Continuity as Catastrophe: Origins of a Thesis in Walter Benjamin","authors":"T. Vandeputte","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140733","url":null,"abstract":"In an unpublished fragment from the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin famously calls for a recasting of the idea of catastrophe and its relation to the progression of history. Catastrophe, Benjamin contends, is not to be understood as an exception to the regular course of history; rather than being conceived as a singular event marking the end of the world in its given form, catastrophe is to be located in its persistent continuity—the simple fact that “things ‘go on like this.’” This article traces the origins of this thesis to an earlier text: a 1923 manuscript that Benjamin wrote during a journey through Germany at the peak of the hyperinflation. Examining this text in relation to a treatise that was of particular significance to Benjamin—Erich Unger’s 1921 Politics and Metaphysics—this article offers a reconstruction of the image of catastrophic history presented here as well as its significance for Benjamin’s emerging political thought of the early 1920s. Through a commentary on both texts, the article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the sources and meaning of the “continuity as catastrophe” thesis, sketching out how Benjamin’s singular vantage point could inform contemporary debates on catastrophe, apocalypse, and the politics of interruption.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43011532","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140806
Emanuel Fiano, Samuel Kessler
This study makes available for the first time five previously unknown letters from Gershom Scholem to Abraham Joshua Heschel, sent between 1940 and 1953. A contextualizing introduction precedes a transcription and annotated English translation of the original Hebrew letters. The letters printed here, along with two more from Heschel to Scholem that remain unpublished due to copyright issues, trace an arc of scholarly interaction that begins with gestures toward overlapping historical interest and ends with the silent acknowledgment of a methodological and more broadly intellectual distance.
{"title":"“My Program Is Still Broader Than the Sea”: Gershom Scholem’s Letters to Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1940–1953","authors":"Emanuel Fiano, Samuel Kessler","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140806","url":null,"abstract":"This study makes available for the first time five previously unknown letters from Gershom Scholem to Abraham Joshua Heschel, sent between 1940 and 1953. A contextualizing introduction precedes a transcription and annotated English translation of the original Hebrew letters. The letters printed here, along with two more from Heschel to Scholem that remain unpublished due to copyright issues, trace an arc of scholarly interaction that begins with gestures toward overlapping historical interest and ends with the silent acknowledgment of a methodological and more broadly intellectual distance.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47717278","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140705
M. Shafer
The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels’s controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute’s most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific contributions to the construction of the postcapitalist alternative. Through a new reading of the development of Max Horkheimer’s analysis of empiricism and an original reconstruction of Engels’s unjustly maligned philosophy of nature, this essay outlines how critical theory can move beyond the pessimism about technoscientific practice that characterized the Frankfurt School’s most influential early work—without forfeiting the historical insight such pessimism once animated.
{"title":"Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory","authors":"M. Shafer","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140705","url":null,"abstract":"The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels’s controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute’s most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific contributions to the construction of the postcapitalist alternative. Through a new reading of the development of Max Horkheimer’s analysis of empiricism and an original reconstruction of Engels’s unjustly maligned philosophy of nature, this essay outlines how critical theory can move beyond the pessimism about technoscientific practice that characterized the Frankfurt School’s most influential early work—without forfeiting the historical insight such pessimism once animated.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45641180","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140791
Yaniv Feller
This article offers a new reading of Jean Améry’s idea of resentment, identifying resentment against time as another dimension of the concept alongside resentment against the perpetrators and the willingness of society to move on. This new facet of resentment is elaborated by showing the centrality of Frantz Fanon’s thought for Améry’s theory of self-constitution. In highlighting the relation between resentment and counterviolence, the article shows how Fanon’s influence on Améry goes beyond what has been recognized in current scholarship. Améry agreed with Fanon that counterviolence and revenge reattain the dignity of the victim. The problem of resentment emerges for Améry when revenge is no longer possible. Resentment is in this sense a revolt against time as an unstoppable force that blocks the way to revenge and hence to the reattainment of the dignity of the victim.
{"title":"Revolt against Time: Jean Améry on the Constitution of the Self","authors":"Yaniv Feller","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140791","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a new reading of Jean Améry’s idea of resentment, identifying resentment against time as another dimension of the concept alongside resentment against the perpetrators and the willingness of society to move on. This new facet of resentment is elaborated by showing the centrality of Frantz Fanon’s thought for Améry’s theory of self-constitution. In highlighting the relation between resentment and counterviolence, the article shows how Fanon’s influence on Améry goes beyond what has been recognized in current scholarship. Améry agreed with Fanon that counterviolence and revenge reattain the dignity of the victim. The problem of resentment emerges for Améry when revenge is no longer possible. Resentment is in this sense a revolt against time as an unstoppable force that blocks the way to revenge and hence to the reattainment of the dignity of the victim.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47045641","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140777
John F. Hoffmeyer
The controversial issue of Martin Heidegger’s Nazism has posed hermeneutic challenges since well before the philosopher’s death. This essay approaches the political-philosophical conflict of Heidegger’s early work not through consideration of explicitly problematic statements and writings but through comparison of the structural framework of Being and Time (1927) with Thomas Mann’s roughly contemporaneous theoretical accomplishment in The Magic Mountain (1924). Specifically, the essay argues for a deep affinity between the two texts’ constellations of language, temporality, and death. By demonstrating the extensively documented ties between the novel’s philosophical framework and Mann’s politics, the essay claims that any understanding of Heidegger’s work must be contextualized alongside its concrete political valences in shifting ideological paradigms of the early Weimar Republic. This analysis suggests a new mode of ethical critique of Heidegger’s magnum opus that focuses more on the text’s greater theoretical edifice than on the problematization of localized passages.
{"title":"A Sympathy with Death: Weimar Politics from Heidegger to Mann","authors":"John F. Hoffmeyer","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140777","url":null,"abstract":"The controversial issue of Martin Heidegger’s Nazism has posed hermeneutic challenges since well before the philosopher’s death. This essay approaches the political-philosophical conflict of Heidegger’s early work not through consideration of explicitly problematic statements and writings but through comparison of the structural framework of Being and Time (1927) with Thomas Mann’s roughly contemporaneous theoretical accomplishment in The Magic Mountain (1924). Specifically, the essay argues for a deep affinity between the two texts’ constellations of language, temporality, and death. By demonstrating the extensively documented ties between the novel’s philosophical framework and Mann’s politics, the essay claims that any understanding of Heidegger’s work must be contextualized alongside its concrete political valences in shifting ideological paradigms of the early Weimar Republic. This analysis suggests a new mode of ethical critique of Heidegger’s magnum opus that focuses more on the text’s greater theoretical edifice than on the problematization of localized passages.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47874886","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140747
B. Britt
Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as “Critique of Violence” (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates, including Ernst Bloch, Erich Unger, Hugo Ball, and Gershom Scholem. This article describes the place of anarchism in Benjamin’s work, particularly in the fragment “World and Time” (1919) and in the essay on surrealism (1929), as a rhetorical double inversion, in which two reversals reconceptualize anarchist thought to yield original insights on questions of political agency, aesthetics, and tradition.
{"title":"The Inversions of Walter Benjamin’s Anarchism","authors":"B. Britt","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140747","url":null,"abstract":"Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as “Critique of Violence” (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates, including Ernst Bloch, Erich Unger, Hugo Ball, and Gershom Scholem. This article describes the place of anarchism in Benjamin’s work, particularly in the fragment “World and Time” (1919) and in the essay on surrealism (1929), as a rhetorical double inversion, in which two reversals reconceptualize anarchist thought to yield original insights on questions of political agency, aesthetics, and tradition.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42147397","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-10140719
Caleb J. Basnett
Dominant approaches to cosmopolitanism have been criticized for failing to sufficiently account for how power and privilege have entwined with cosmopolitan proposals, and cosmopolitanism itself has been accused of being the ideology of global capitalism. Taking seriously cosmopolitanism’s complicity in domination, this article draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno to sketch a theory of cosmopolitanism as solidarity. It argues that prominent approaches to cosmopolitanism understand solidarity as an identification of particular with universal, with pernicious political consequences. The article examines three concepts from Adorno’s philosophy that challenge contemporary cosmopolitanism: his concept of “constellations” offers a different way of relating particular to universal; his claim to solidarity with “tormentable bodies” reimagines moral action informed by this transformed relation; and his concept of a “global subject” offers a way to theorize the relation between this moral action and political intervention at the global level.
{"title":"Adorno’s Cosmopolitan Solidarity","authors":"Caleb J. Basnett","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-10140719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-10140719","url":null,"abstract":"Dominant approaches to cosmopolitanism have been criticized for failing to sufficiently account for how power and privilege have entwined with cosmopolitan proposals, and cosmopolitanism itself has been accused of being the ideology of global capitalism. Taking seriously cosmopolitanism’s complicity in domination, this article draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno to sketch a theory of cosmopolitanism as solidarity. It argues that prominent approaches to cosmopolitanism understand solidarity as an identification of particular with universal, with pernicious political consequences. The article examines three concepts from Adorno’s philosophy that challenge contemporary cosmopolitanism: his concept of “constellations” offers a different way of relating particular to universal; his claim to solidarity with “tormentable bodies” reimagines moral action informed by this transformed relation; and his concept of a “global subject” offers a way to theorize the relation between this moral action and political intervention at the global level.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41618295","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965360
Matthew D. Miller
Eroding the value of human life and obscuring the discernibility of shared futures, the twenty-first century’s unabating civilizational calamities compel desperate attempts to advance individual and social renewal in the navigation of dark times. Mindful of such need, this article examines the transhistorical resourcefulness of Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) with regard to contemporary challenges. Schooled in antifascism’s failures of the 1930s and 1940s, The Aesthetics abounds in detailed engagements with literary and visual works of art as well as pivotal chapters of European political history to model processes of resistance formation. Weiss’s extensive remediation of Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa in the transition from volume 1 to volume 2 and the political debate that The Aesthetics’ narrator stages between the Swedish figures Ström and Rogeby near the end of the second volume feature the imagination as a force of aesthetic and political resistance respectively: whereas the narrator’s engagement with Géricault’s Raft yields a vision of common plight and solidarity in defiance of colonialist and fascist catastrophes, his artful modulation of Ström and Rogeby’s exchanges sets a course for the expansion of resistance’s scope. The combined analysis of these segments reveals how The Aesthetics’ interrelation of struggles across historical, geographic, racial, and economic divides proves instructive for new articulations and formations of resistance amid the twenty-first century’s health, social, political and refugee crises.
{"title":"Renewing Resistance at Sea and on Isles: Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2, for the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Matthew D. Miller","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965360","url":null,"abstract":"Eroding the value of human life and obscuring the discernibility of shared futures, the twenty-first century’s unabating civilizational calamities compel desperate attempts to advance individual and social renewal in the navigation of dark times. Mindful of such need, this article examines the transhistorical resourcefulness of Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) with regard to contemporary challenges. Schooled in antifascism’s failures of the 1930s and 1940s, The Aesthetics abounds in detailed engagements with literary and visual works of art as well as pivotal chapters of European political history to model processes of resistance formation. Weiss’s extensive remediation of Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa in the transition from volume 1 to volume 2 and the political debate that The Aesthetics’ narrator stages between the Swedish figures Ström and Rogeby near the end of the second volume feature the imagination as a force of aesthetic and political resistance respectively: whereas the narrator’s engagement with Géricault’s Raft yields a vision of common plight and solidarity in defiance of colonialist and fascist catastrophes, his artful modulation of Ström and Rogeby’s exchanges sets a course for the expansion of resistance’s scope. The combined analysis of these segments reveals how The Aesthetics’ interrelation of struggles across historical, geographic, racial, and economic divides proves instructive for new articulations and formations of resistance amid the twenty-first century’s health, social, political and refugee crises.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42231131","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965388
C. Rupprecht
This article focuses on the fictionalized character of the Soviet spy Richard Stahlmann, who was attributed with “Asian eyes” by Peter Weiss, in volume 3 of The Aesthetics of Resistance. In a passage that describes Stahlmann’s visit to Angkor Wat, the character’s identity crisis is precipitated by his self-Orientalizing gaze, leading him to doubt his commitment to communism. The article relates this to Weiss’s own biographical experience as a left-wing intellectual who belatedly discovered that his father was Jewish and had kept this fact a secret to evade the Nazis. However, antisemitism continued in the antifascist, anticapitalist context of both East and West Germany, as shown in The Aesthetics: Jews were portrayed as duplicitous and accused of treason, as “spies.” Weiss himself experienced leftist antisemitism and took this narrative detour to Southeast Asia to address this problem through the fictive figure of Stahlmann.
{"title":"Stahlmann’s “Asian Eyes”: Jewish Identity in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 3","authors":"C. Rupprecht","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965388","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the fictionalized character of the Soviet spy Richard Stahlmann, who was attributed with “Asian eyes” by Peter Weiss, in volume 3 of The Aesthetics of Resistance. In a passage that describes Stahlmann’s visit to Angkor Wat, the character’s identity crisis is precipitated by his self-Orientalizing gaze, leading him to doubt his commitment to communism. The article relates this to Weiss’s own biographical experience as a left-wing intellectual who belatedly discovered that his father was Jewish and had kept this fact a secret to evade the Nazis. However, antisemitism continued in the antifascist, anticapitalist context of both East and West Germany, as shown in The Aesthetics: Jews were portrayed as duplicitous and accused of treason, as “spies.” Weiss himself experienced leftist antisemitism and took this narrative detour to Southeast Asia to address this problem through the fictive figure of Stahlmann.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"34 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41284140","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-9965402
J. Hell
This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.
{"title":"Introduction to “Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger: A Controversy”","authors":"J. Hell","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-9965402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9965402","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45113804","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}
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