Michael Mack

Considering the support behind Brexit and Donald Trump's 'America first' policies, this book challenges the idea that they are motivated solely by fear and instead looks at the hope and promises that drive these renewed forms of nationalism. Addressing these neglected motivations within contemporary populism, Michael Mack explores how our current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic and political state of affairs partakes of a history of failed promises that goes back to the inception of modernity; namely, to Spinoza's radical enlightenment of diversity and equality. Through this innovative approach, Spinoza emerges less as a single isolated figure and more as a sign for an intellectual constellation of thinkers and writers who – from the romantics to contemporary theory and literature – have introduced various shifts in the way we see humanity as being limited and prone to disappointment. Combining intellectual history with literary and scientific theory, the book traces the collapse of traditional values and orders from Spinoza to Nietzsche and then to the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad and postmodernism of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

Its Modern Roots from Spinoza to Contemporary Literature

Disappointment

Barry Stocker

This comprehensive Handbook presents the major perspectives within philosophy and literary studies on the relations, overlaps and tensions between philosophy and literature. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and literature, literary theory, philosophical aesthetics, literature as philosophy and philosophy as literature, its twenty-nine chapters plus substantial Introduction and Afterword examine the ways in which philosophy and literature depend on each other and interact, while also contrasting with each other in that they necessarily exclude or incorporate each other. This book establishes an enduring framework for structuring the broad themes defining the relations between philosophy and literature and organising the main topics in the field. Key Features • Structured in five parts addressing philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, and main areas of work within philosophy and literature • An Introduction setting out the main concerns of the field through discussion of the major themes along with the individual topics • An Afterword looking at the interactions between philosophy and literature through itself enacting philosophical and literary writing while examining the question of how they can be brought together The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in philosophy of literature, philosophy as literature, literary theory, literature as philosophy, and the philosophical aesthetics of literature. It is an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, philosophy and literature, cultural studies, classical studies and other related fields.

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Gregor Muir

Berlinde de Bruyckere

Ali Subotnick

This book focuses on recent sculptures and installations by Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere and provides a rare and intimate glimpse into her studio and working process. De Bruyckere uses a range of sculptural media, including wax, wood, wool, horse skin, and hair which are combined to create compelling forms that suggest distorted human and animal bodies. Her figures are often faceless, malformed and fragmentary. They perch precariously on high stools or are suspended from the walls, ceiling or tall iron columns. At first their shape seems familiar although they resist interpretation, offering a disturbing vision of fragility and suffering and they appear vulnerable and violated, their skin stretched and broken. The works presented in the book invoke the Schmerzensmann, the eternal Man of Suffering, and focus on eight sculptures in wax, one of the artists preferred materials. The texture of the pallid wax suggests a skin so thin and fragile that it is almost translucent. Close inspection reveals subtly mottled hues and textures that imply vulnerability to heat and cold but also to the more intangible threat of violence and fear. Each of the eight sculptures is illustrated from many viewpoints, offering the chance to examine in detail their form, surface texture, spatiality and relation to the viewer.

Schmerzensmann

In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.

The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses

German Idealism and the Jew

The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity

How Literature Changes the Way We Think

Neil Drabble

"Tree Tops Tall" is a series of pictures made by Neil Drabble over the course of the last few years. It is a collection determined not by the type or site of the trees photographed but instead by the fact that tree tops against a bright sky provide a motif for a certain state of mind, for a formal expression of the self. Each picture has been shot from the standpoint of a child, looking upwards with awe at the wonder and grandeur of the natural world--a perspective similarly communicated by book's large format and its uninterrupted sequence of 40 vivid color images, each spread across a double page. Applying his particularly intimate and studied approach, Drabble has produced a body of work that emphasizes the aesthetic pleasures of seeing and the boundless possibilities of finding beauty in our surroundings.

Tree Tops Tall

John Warwicker

Ukiyo-e

The Floating World

Sidney's Poetics is essential reading not only for students and scholars of Renaissance literature and literary theory but also for all who want to understand how human beings write and read creatively.

Imitating Creation

Sidney's Poetics

Whereas many other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers - including Derrida - have concentrated on a refusal of totality and celebration of 'otherness', the poet and intellectual Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) combines this emphasis with an equal stress on the 'need' for certain collectively acknowledged limits. Next to the wider significance of this book for discussions of Holocaust studies in relation to current theoretical and social issues, it will also offer a new interpretation of Elias Canetti's work. This is the first detailed examination of Steiner's anthropology and philosophy and its relation to the work of his close intellectual friend Canetti.

Michael Mack

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