This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations on (...) the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat to Adieu au langage, the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement. (shrink)

Rage in the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is a positive, aboriginal energy. The more easily the hero can access this energetic source, the more powerful he becomes. Marshal charisma is essentially associated with the primary emotion of rage – a fact supremely exemplified by Siegfried. However, charismatic army commanders are quite different from political leaders. The position of the ruler is characterized by a high degree of self-control. Yet the disciplined king depends on his warriors, since the buttressing of his own cognitive distance (...) is accompanied by a weakening of his physical power. Representatives of this position are Gunther in the first part, and in the second, Etzel and his vassal Dietrich. Suspense in the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is thus built around the ambivalent qualities associated with anger. As a basic affect, anger's power stems from the sheer power of life itself; it helps those who admire the hero to identify with him and even feel a sense of delight in doing so. But whilst wrathful devotion is largely celebrated, it emerges elsewhere as the ugly face of general social impotence. The ecstasy of battle, which suggests narcissistic invulnerability, leads to deeply felt mourning amongst the survivors. Thus in the ‘Nibelungenlied’, anger is celebrated and unmasked simultaneously and in equal measure. (shrink)

Die Rede ist von einer merkwürdigen Variante deutscher Italiensehnsucht: Dem Wunsch, in Rom begraben zu werden, der im Fall Wilhelm von Humboldts mit einem konkreten Glücksgefühl korreliert. Das ist schon deshalb bemerkenswert, weil Humboldts römischer Aufenthalt vom Sterben dreier seiner Kinder und seines Freundes Schiller überschattet wurde. Die Frage nach dem Niederschlag, den die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Tod in Humboldts Texten fand, rekonstruiert die vorliegende Untersuchung als Form einer Werkpolitik, die es unternimmt, den eigenen Nachruhm in verschiedenen Diskursen zu steuern. (...) Humboldts Terminologie, die den christlich besetzten Begriff,Unsterblichkeit? durch den Begriff,Unendlichkeit? ersetzt, wird in sechs privilegierten Lektüren nachgegangen. (shrink)

Purpose: Commenting on the transcript of a lecture. Findings: The document reconstructs the development of the original 1973 lecture by Heinz von Foerster into his best-known paper, On Constructing a Reality. Many aspects of that paper can be identified as being shaped through interaction with the audience. Implications: The lecture documented here was a forerunner of a central paper in constructivism.

Das neue Buch des bereits mit zahlreichen Arbeiten besonders zum Vierten Kreuzzug hervorgetretenen Autors setzt sich aus drei unterschiedlichen, wenn auch eng miteinander verwobenen Teilen zusammen: einer Untersuchung zur Familie und zur Biographie des Dogen Enrico Dandolo, einer Darstellung von Politik und Verfassungsgeschichte Venedigs im 12. Jahrhundert und einer Geschichte des Vierten Kreuzzugs. Die Erzähl- und Argumentationsstränge der drei Teile sind vielfach miteinander verschränkt und verfolgen gemeinsam ein viertes Ziel: anschaulich zu machen, daß die politischen und verfassungsrechtlichen Entwicklungen des 12. (...) Jahrhunderts, besonders aber die mit der Person des Enrico Dandolo eng verbundenen Geschehnisse des Vierten Kreuzzugs die Stadt Venedig fundamental veränderten und sie von einer Kaufmannsrepublik (merchant republic) zu einer Seemacht (maritime empire) werden ließen. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the "incompleteness thesis" of Kant's General Metaphysics before completing a full analysis of the power of judgment which only occurred in the Critique of Judgment-Power. Kant scholars have argued that Kant's General Metaphysics was completed with the Critique of Pure Reason and the Third Critique added nothing significant to this quest. One of the issues in this paper is to understand Kant's various "transition problems" and their solution to unify knowledge under a metaphysics, all (...) of which has implications for the natural and cognitive sciences even today. (shrink)

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical (...) discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche. (shrink)

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical (...) discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche. (shrink)

I argue that once one holds (as Kant does) that the mind is equipped with innate, pre-existing, i.e. a priori structures, one can ask (as materialists or empiricists would), Is there an identifiable source of such structures and what does it imply? Already Schopenhauer, Moses Mendelssohn and others have taken that route of argument, without fully drawing the implications. In this paper I attempt to do so, posing the query: Is Kant's very explicit separation of the transcendent from the transcendental (...) necessary in his critical system? I try to answer from various perspectives. (shrink)

This study focuses on Kant's attempt to find the link between feeling and cognition on a priori grounds in the three Critiques to make philosophical judgment possible. As such it treats the area of aesthetics and its formal principles. This work explores the enigma: How is it that Kant values the talent to judge more than understanding and reason; indeed the lack of it «no school can make good». Yet, even though Kant demonstrates how a priori synthetic judgments and a (...) priori moral judgments are possible as particular pronouncements, he analyzes the power of judgment itself as an independent faculty only in the last Critique. The author argues that the aesthetic factor plays a recalcitrant, yet vital and necessary role in all human judging. Finding an adequate niche for feeling and its a priori principles becomes a key problem not just for Kant but for the entire philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

KANT AND HEGEL FIND THEMSELVES ON SIMILAR PATHS toward their respective goals to give a total account of reality. They share a deep commitment to science, Wissenschaftlichkeit, and raise the question: Where does science begin? Similarly, they answer: It begins with sense knowledge yet it is not founded in the senses. This essay attempts to reflect on, with the aim of cautiously reassessing, the nonsensible, universal features of sense experience from an idealist perspective. A study of the “science of sensibility,” (...) raised to new levels of interest in recent debates of how the mind works, seems to have lost nothing of its fascination, indeed urgency in contemporary discussions, in the Kant-Hegel scholarship, in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science as well as the natural and cognitive sciences in general. (shrink)