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Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Remigration: Postponed. The Architect Paul Bonatz between Turkey and Germany

May, R. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

In August 1944 Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Germany. Despite the order to leave the country immediately, some five hundred German citizens refused to return to their homeland. Among them was one of the most prominent German architects of those years: Paul Bonatz (1877–1956). Having abandoned his country neither for political nor for racist reasons and having been commissioned for numerous projects in the Third Reich, Bonatz can hardly be integrated into the context of German émigré architects of the Nazi times. The dilemma increases with the problem of pigeonholing his ambiguous personality and confusingly broad oeuvre into a certain scheme, and thus Bonatz so far has been widely ignored in the historiography of architecture. This article tries to help fill this gap by telling the barely studied story of the final phase of Bonatz's career. While he soon was a highly influential adviser and university teacher at the edge of Europe, Bonatz felt unwelcome in his own country after the end of World War II, and it took him until 1954 to return permanently to his homeland. The case of Paul Bonatz, who wandered between two worlds for nearly eleven years, is an exceptionally interesting one in the little-studied field of remigration to Germany after the Nazis' reign.

Modernism Reconsidered: The Kultur-Zivilisation Dichotomy in the Work of Adolf Rading

Barnstone, D. A. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Architecture historians have generally posited Kultur and Zivilisation as oppositional values, and aesthetic categories used to "classify" art and architecture production tend to support this division: representational versus abstract art, intuitive versus rational thinking, Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft, traditional versus modern, rural versus urban, handicraft versus machine-made. But many important architects, like Adolf Rading in Breslau, who were considered members of the avant-garde did not fully accept or reject modernizing tendencies but embraced modernization and modernism conditionally. In architecture, "modernization" resulted in the invention of new materials and construction or production methods (technology), and the design challenge of new building types like railroad stations, airports, and public housing. "Modernism" refers to the corresponding aesthetic renewal. The ideas and work of a group of architects residing in the Silesian capital city, Breslau, between 1918 and 1932 demonstrate one response to the Kultur-Zivilisation dichotomy. The group included such internationally renowned architects as Max Berg, Ernst May, Hans Poelzig, Hans Scharoun, and Rading. The Breslau group worked with the new formal language and shared the utopian aspirations and progressive politics considered central to the modern project. The architects embraced new materials, functional and rational approaches to space making, and public housing as a central contemporary problem, but they refused to reject history, were both intuitive and Romantic in their work, and regarded technology with suspicion. Their collective attitude could be described as the reconciliation of Kultur and Zivilisation. However it is defined, the Breslau work is important to consider because it gives a picture of the complex ways in which German artists and architects grappled with the simultaneous, and often conflicting, pressures of modernization during the Weimar era.

Uneasy Pleasing: Film as Mass Art

Koch, G. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

To revive the question about film as mass medium, this essay turns to analyses of Samuel Beckett's Film by Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. Their readings are compared regarding the problem of self-knowledge—and how this epistemic motif is transferred into the cinematic medium. Adorno's more than skeptical position toward film relies on notions of self-reflexivity usually on reserve for high art. When Stanley Cavell situates film as a reflective form of skepticism that binds camera, spectator, and image together, it comes neatly to this position. Adorno at this point does not ascribe to film as film negative qualities, possibly diminishing his reflective capacities. The dispute about the difference between mass art and high art is taken back to the emergence of the notion of culture industry as replacement for mass art in the frame of social theory. Comparing the different outcomes of the positive judgment of the Marx Brothers' films in Adorno and Cavell, one can find the decisive bifurcation that separates their thoughts on film. The tension between opera and film as screened in Marx Brothers at the Opera becomes the touchstone for the differences in value judgment. While for Cavell skepticism is something that pragmatically will be suspended for the sake of constructing a lifeworld bridging opera, film, and life, Adorno stays with the incompatibility of the easy, happy end with art as a reflexive form. Thus Adorno emphasizes the paradox between the wish for wish fulfillment and critical knowledge as the emotional form of ambivalence, insofar as his often-cited harsh judgments on culture industry are countered by a more complex argument about the inherent ambivalence over the aims and issues of (mass) (art).

Mimetic Rationality: Adorno's Project of a Language of Philosophy

Muller, H. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Theodor W. Adorno did not produce an explicit philosophy of language but was interested in theoretical and practical problems of language during his entire life. Situating Adorno's language conception within twentieth-century language philosophy and theory, this article reconstructs four suppositions that are constitutive for his way of philosophy: his repudiation of prima philosophia; his plea for a relational, differential construction of concepts; his postulate of radical secularization; and his demand that there should be consequences for the form of representation. The article then clarifies how Adorno positions himself in regard to the conception and critique of language, where he stakes out the position from which he observes, and how he links the critique of society and language, driven by his initial intuition to formulate "philosophy in an authoritative sense, without either systems or ontology." After presenting fundamental aspects of Adorno's theory of language (use of foreign words, tautology, paradox, equivocation), followed by his concepts of constellation, representation (Darstellung), and truth, the article concludes by showing how Adorno's conception of language is linked to that of freedom and how the conception of language, the presumption of freedom, and assumptions about the theory of time are interwoven.

Enlightenment as Religion

Rasch, W. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Recent polemical and philosophical claims about modern, secular, liberal, enlightened Europe are examined from the perspective of Europe's relation, past and present, to the non-European world. The notion that Enlightenment reason and liberal institutions represent a higher level of culture because they serve as a universal, neutral medium in contrast to particular religious or ideological worldviews and most especially religious "fundamentalism" is questioned through a discussion of texts by Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Martti Koskenniemi, Carl Schmitt, and Tzvetan Todorov. The legitimacy of Europe's identity as enlightened, secular, and liberal is not denied, only its self-understanding that with Enlightenment (implicitly regarded as the final stage of history) come universality and neutrality. Such a self-understanding contributes to the political problems that rational, "neutral" discourse is meant to solve.

Daniel Richter and the Problem of Political Painting Today

Hughes, D. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Over the years, one question has irked critics of Daniel Richter's work more than any other: are his paintings political? For a German artist who began his professional career producing abstract-expressive pictures in 1995, it seemed particularly hard to maintain a left-wing stance while working in a medium that belonged historically to the internationalist conformism of the 1950s. His turn to figuration around 1999–2000, however, only compounded the problem: how dare he raise sensitive political issues—the war in the Balkans, mass unemployment, terrorist bombings, police drug busts, the plight of North Africans trying to reach Europe—without offering a coherent commentary on them? To make matters worse, Richter—for a supposed radical—has made quite a profit from his art while systematically avoiding a clear stance on what purportedly matters most to him. Focusing on three of Richter's best-known paintings—Warum ich kein Konservativer bin (2000), Eine Stadt namens Authen (2001), and Phienox (2000)—I explore the complexities of political painting in today's world. Through a consideration of Richter's neosymbolist style, his postmodern penchant for citation, the influence of the new fauves, and the legacy of socialist realism, I debunk many commonly held myths about leftist art and illustrate how intensely problematic such art has become.

Contributors

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

Introduction

The Editors — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

A "Political Struwwelpeter"? John Heartfield's Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation

Zervigon, A. M. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

This essay investigates the little-known early film work of the German photomontagist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891). A firm opponent of World War I and an early member of Berlin's rambunctious Dada movement, Heartfield nonetheless agreed to produce propaganda films for the German High Command. However, he shunned live-action film sequences of the war, which were subject to heavy censorship, and instead drew on American-style cinematic animation to convey a subversive message about the war's violence and horror. Although he later became famous for his photomontages, here he avoided the photographic basis of film because it lent itself all too easily to prowar propaganda. His work with George Grosz, by contrast, attempted to reinsert somatic terror into representations of the war and thereby to counter the visually sedative aspect of contemporary German war photography. Berlin Dada, of which Heartfield was an early member, achieved similar effects in its live performances, staged at precisely the same time these films were produced. The essay concludes by noting the parallel between Heartfield's animation and Walter Benjamin's later reflections on the subversive dimension of Disney's early shorts. Benjamin knew that the Dadaists appealed not just to the visual but to all somatic dimensions of perception—the aural, the visual, and the tactile.

Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield's Mass Medium

Kriebel, S. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

Because photomontage is based on the structural principle of pictorial rupture and reassembly, the medium is understood in scholarly literature as the symbolic register of the shocks and disjunctures of modern life. Yet most of John Heartfield's photomontages for the communist journal Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) insistently suppress the seams and ruptures of their manufacture, instead offering up pictorially sutured photomontages that propagate fictions of visual wholeness. They do so to issue an ideological critique from a leftist perspective, staging our illusory, unstable apprehension of the world. Characterized by a continuity of surface, these photomontages are bound into (and thus integral to) a mass-circulation journal, in critical dialogue with the photo-reportages that preceded and followed them—occasionally in content but primarily through imitating their matter, their medium, their form. Heartfield's AIZ works offer a radical Left critique of the mass-circulated photograph and its production of political consciousness by internalizing and miming its very means through photomontage. Leftist critique in Heartfield's montages, I maintain, resides in suture. In using that term to discuss Heartfield's work, I incorporate its cinematic connotations, in their most basic sense, into my analysis, considering how his photomontages summon their beholder both optically and psychologically. We have not entirely grasped the metaphorical operations of photomontage until we have understood the role of pictorial suture, and the deliberate suppression of rupture, in Heartfield's project.

A "Schooling of the Senses": Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt

Otto, E. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

This essay focuses on the photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt primarily during their time at the Bauhaus. Initially inspired by Berlin Dada's fragmentary montaged critiques, both of these photomonteurs quickly turned to a constructivist approach that placed photographic elements in dynamic relation to one another. While Moholy-Nagy was a prolific theorist who published frequently on the role of photography and related visual technologies in postwar society, few of Brandt's writings survive. Yet her montages address similar issues, particularly questions of how photographic fragments in a montage might engage viewers in a new way. In addition, Moholy-Nagy's and Brandt's photomontages resituate the mass media's representations of New Women and frequently create representations of the figure of the constructor, a hybrid technician-artist that each artist sought to embody. Through close analysis of their photomontages, this essay argues that Moholy-Nagy and Brandt were like-minded in their investigations of how the lessons of Dada and constructivism might be absorbed into a new form of Bauhaus photomontage, how artists and designers could help reshape society in the wake of World War I by embracing new technologies of vision, and how a gendered experience of modernity could be envisioned through photomontage.

Back in the USSR: John Heartfield, Gustavs Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda

Gough, M. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

Drawing on archival and recently published documents, this essay examines the historical encounter of two major communist photomonteurs in Moscow in 1931—John Heartfield, visiting from Weimar Germany under the auspices of the Comintern, and Gustavs Klucis, a Latvian resident of the city and thus a member of one of its diaspora nationalities. Despite their formal and procedural differences, both artists promoted photomontage as the premier agitational weapon of world communism and Soviet propaganda, contra the rise of documentary photography as well as various modes of realist painting. The essay provides a new narrative that moves beyond the polarity of realism and constructivism that has shaped our understanding of their work and relationship and has also tended to squeeze out the contradictions of the visual objects to which it supposedly pertains, rendering them mere epiphenomena. An examination of Heartfield's visual production on the ground in the Soviet Union shows how the German monteur responded to the challenge of working in the overwhelmingly affirmative culture of the Five-Year Plans, rather than simply how he was instrumentalized by others in the story of the great undoing of constructivism. Analyzing in detail for the first time his contribution to the photo-illustrated propaganda magazine USSR in Construction—on the reconstruction of Moscow and the Soviet oil industry—the essay probes the relation of Heartfield's production to that of Klucis. It concludes with a brief consideration of three conspicuously Klucis-related photomontages that Heartfield produced for the AIZ in 1934 during his Prague exile.

Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Munzenberg and John Heartfield

Cuevas-Wolf, C. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

This essay posits that the tactical alliance in the mid-1920s between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield shaped the imagery of a united political front for the Communist International (Comintern). The collaboration between the Comintern's minister of propaganda for western Europe and this avant-garde artist led to the fusion of the international reputation of Heartfield's photomontages and of Münzenberg's Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) in 1929. Consequently, Münzenberg formed a transnational network that relied unintentionally on the various publishers and illustrated magazines that imitated the AIZ or the graphic artists who reproduced Heartfield's montages in the name of pro-Soviet sympathy and antifascist solidarity. An overlooked detail in this story is the role that Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde played in expanding the reception of Heartfield's work among Spanish and French graphic artists in 1931. This essay therefore sheds light on what has remained obscured by the political history of the interwar and postwar years.

Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo's "Baader-Meinhof"

Crawford, K. L. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

This essay focuses on the relationship between ideology, language, and image to consider the question of subjectivity that is at the core of Gerhard Richter's cycle of paintings on the Red Army Faction. Through a close reading of Richter's paintings, I demonstrate how their narrative impulse follows an aesthetic, political, and feminist strategy aimed at resuscitating a modern mode of subjectivity. With this model of subjectivity, Richter optimistically gestures toward an open public sphere beyond the public sphere that has been compromised and marred by terrorism. A reading of Don DeLillo's short story reveals the risks Richter takes with this approach to subjectivity, particularly female subjectivity. DeLillo exposes the dangers and vulnerabilities that may arise when the individual engages in self-questioning while threatened by the realities of post-9/11 life. Richter's paintings take several risks, one of which is that the viewer may sympathize with the terrorists Richter portrays or may see these paintings, particularly Funeral, as redeeming them. Yet a dialectical reading that focuses on the narrative impulse of Richter's images demonstrates that the hope Richter holds out to the viewer rests on a powerful realization of subjectivity that necessarily moves through a momentary consideration of uncomfortable questions regarding women, the mass-media image, and terrorism.

Intermediality and the Topography of Memory in Alexander Kluge

Malkmus, B. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:08:29 PDT

This essay explores the relation between text and image in Alexander Kluge's literary work. The publication of Chronik der Gefühle, which accounts for Kluge's entire literary production until 2000, allows a detailed study of his techniques of intermediality and how they developed. Kluge is increasingly concerned with techniques of mutual disruption between text and image—what he describes as "heterotopia" and "heterochronia." His literary work of the 1990s, as is demonstrated in three close readings, uses images to challenge discursive and narrative constructions. By the same token, Kluge decontextualizes images and their rootedness in collective memories, facilitating the individual reader's reappropriation of both image and text. In providing these interpretations, the essay highlights the most important theoretical influences on Kluge's literary mnemoscapes and their textual and visual renditions. Kluge incorporates Walter Benjamin's idea of a dialectical image while moving beyond that paradigm in his concept and literary practice of a "third time" that is ultimately designed to enfranchise the reader.

Contributors

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

When the Perpetrator Becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes

Suleiman, S. R. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

Purporting to be the first-person narrative of a former SS officer writing many years after World War II, Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes, published in France in 2006, became the biggest best seller of the year and won the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The author, an American, wrote the book in French. Many critics praised the novel, comparing it to War and Peace and other masterpieces, while others were quite hostile. In this essay I argue that Les bienveillantes accomplishes a rare, indeed a totally original, feat: representing a Nazi perpetrator as a reliable historical—and even moral—witness of the Holocaust. Whether one admires Les bienveillantes or loathes it depends largely on how one responds to this improbable combination of perpetrator and reliable witness. One problematic aspect of the novel is its use of the Oresteia theme: by making his protagonist a matricide, does Littell weaken his effectiveness as a historical witness?

On the German Reaction to Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes

Theweleit, K. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

This article addresses criticisms of Jonathan Littell's 2006 novel about the Holocaust, Les bienveillantes. Littell's German critics largely panned the book for its lack of literary merit or as a failed contribution to historical scholarship on the genocide of European Jewry. The article questions the expectations of these German critics, their insistence on literary convention and almost proprietary claims to insight into the Holocaust. It is the departure of Les bienveillantes from "the novelistic aesthetic of the nineteenth century" that enables the novel's achievement as a portrait of perpetrators in all their human complexity.

The Holocaust and Hannah Arendt's Philosophical Critique of Philosophy: Eichmann in Jerusalem

Mack, M. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

This essay both contributes to Hannah Arendt scholarship and attempts to understand the mentality of the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide. It does so by analyzing how Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem grew out of her effort to come to terms with the particular and unprecedented aspects of the Holocaust in light of her general political philosophy. Arendt avoids giving a straightforward reply as to why Adolf Eichmann and his fellow perpetrators acted as they did. Critics have so far ignored how the linguistic instability of Eichmann in Jerusalem reflects the absence of legal and moral stability that is the very subject of the book. The focus on criminal guilt is not enough, because the Nazi genocide distorted legal and moral standards by which one could judge crimes in the past. The unprecedented nature of the atrocities under discussion requires philosophical reflection. This article attempts to explain apparent contradictions between Arendt's Eichmann book and her political philosophy: one reason lies in her historiographical approach, which shifts back and forth between the metaphysical and the empirical. The article uncovers Arendt's motivation for such a seemingly contradictory movement from a purely observational to a theoretical stance: according to Arendt, we can understand the historical implications of the Nazi genocide only if we engage in the crisscrossing of history and thought.

"The Odium of Doubtfulness"; or, The Vicissitudes of Metaphorical Thinking

Blumenthal-Barby, M. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

Metaphors, Hannah Arendt contends, link the unknowable with the knowable, the supersensuous with the sensuous—a carrying over or linguistic "transference" much in line with the Greek metapherein (to transfer). In her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism, the unknowable corresponds to the "modern lie" of totalitarianism, a lie so big, a totality so total that the possibility of argumentative critique appears to have evaporated. At this point, only the linguistic transference of the perfect fiction of totalitarianism into the more graspable language of metaphors seems to allow for "understanding." The author discusses Arendt's theory of metaphorical thinking, as developed in the only recently published Denktagebuch (2002), vis-à-vis her art of storytelling, which appears remarkable in that its hyperbolic mobilization of metaphorical language, allegedly "explaining" the dynamics of totalitarianism, read as an ongoing attempt to "destroy" the coercive force of totalitarian logicality. What the calculated unpredictability of Arendt's speech act, what its stylistic dissonance and the correlating dislogic seem to invoke, is the epistemic appropriation of the totalitarian phenomenon. This happens not by employing metaphors as analytic tools; what comes to the fore, rather, is the pleonastic figurative logic of Arendt's presentation itself. Arendt's historiography of totalitarianism oddly appears to set itself against the cogent systematology of totalitarian politics.

Georg Simmel's Timeless Impressionism

Cronan, T. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

Georg Simmel's sociology tends to elicit mixed feelings even among his admirers. "The Metropolis and Mental Life" provides one of the most compelling and influential accounts of modern, urban experience available, yet the meaning of this work is notoriously elusive. Does the difficulty lie in Simmel's deep ambivalence toward the new forms of experience he describes? And does this ambivalence legitimate his historically transitional status in the history of modernist thought, ceding the role of critic of modern life to Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin? Or is Simmel's tone better understood as reserve, a refusal to suggest a totalizing account of modernity? This essay aims to reevaluate and defend Simmel's aesthetic interpretation of modernity on the grounds of his latent materialism. Focusing on his discussion of Auguste Rodin's sculpture and the impressionist aesthetic more generally, I aim to draw out the implicit claims of Simmel's materialism from within his seemingly seamless commitment to psychologism.

A Close Reading of Georg Simmel's Essay "How Is Society Possible?" The Thought of the Outside and Its Various Incarnations

Symons, S. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

Georg Simmel's essay "How Is Society Possible?" is built on the idea that an individual can develop himself or herself fully only by entering into society but nevertheless remains marked with an "in-addition" or "individuality-nucleus" that is never entirely socialized. In this manner, Simmel describes how a fundamental gap cannot but separate the essence of an individual from his or her expression in society, how he or she occupies the singular place where the "outside" and "inside" of a society have become indistinguishable, and therefore how the very dynamic that makes society possible does not in fact fully belong to it. More than fifty years after Simmel's essay the concept of an "irreducible outside" reemerged in the works of the French poststructuralists as a way to analyze the primacy of strategies of resistance over manifestations of power. Exploring how processes of "micropolitics" occur in coexistence and confrontation with state apparatuses and not in independence from them, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari built their philosophy on intuitions closely related to those of Simmel, thus illustrating the relevance of his views on society for the world of today.

"The Merely Illusory Paradise of Habits": Salomo Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque

Haakenson, T. O. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

In the early twentieth century, the German author and philosopher Salomo Friedländer, known as Mynona and especially active in the Berlin dada movement, produced several texts that clarified and revised the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Friedländer's philosophical writings targeted the limited scope of sensory knowledge employed in modern empirical scientific practice. Friedländer's engagements with art, science, and philosophy were inspired in no small part by a philosophical challenge to modern empirical sense physiology made possible by a unique reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's early-nineteenth-century work on vision. Friedländer sought to realize his philosophical revisions, in particular his understanding of the function of the Kantian imagination and its relationship to sensory perception, in his artistic parodies and short stories, or Groteske (grotesques). Situated in its proper historical and intellectual context, Friedländer's early-twentieth-century corpus thus should be understood as part of an effort to incorporate the diversity of human sensory experiences into a Kantian-influenced theory of knowledge, a theory of knowledge critical of perceptual standardization and the consequent devaluation of unique aesthetic experience. A comparison of the work of Friedländer, the philosopher-artist, with that of Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic, reveals the limits and the potentials in their attempts to recover and to celebrate the diversity of human experience in the face of modern empirical science's advocacy of perceptual conformism.

The Phenomenology of the German People's Body (Volkskorper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body

Neumann, B. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:55:32 PST

While the Nazi politics of the body have been studied at length, the historiographical literature has largely failed to address the role of the Volkskörper, or the German people's body, in the Nazi worldview. As I attempt to explain, it was not the individual bodies of Germans that constituted the foundation for Nazi concepts of the corporeal. The handful of studies that have addressed the subject of the Volkskörper has underestimated its full significance because these studies have considered it an expression of "something else," that is, a metaphor, or a sign of an organic view of society so characteristic of fascist ideologies. Using the phenomenological insights of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Nolte to recount the history of the Nazi Volkskörper, I describe the meaning this manifestation of the body of the German people had for the Jew as a body, in general, and as a foreign body (Fremdkörper), more specifically. The Volkskörper is what turned the Jew both into a body and into a Fremdkörper, existing either in a parasitical relationship vis-à-vis the Volkskörper or as a dangerous, cancerous body that had penetrated the Volkskörper. In this respect, I claim that the phenomenology of the Volkskörper already contains the phenomenology of the Jewish body. Thus phenomenology has methodological promise for the historical analysis of the phenomenon of Nazism.

Contributors

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

Introduction

Lebovic, N. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

Political Theology versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt

Gereby, G. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

The analysis discusses the earliest phase of the debate on political theology between Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and his former friend, the church historian and theologian Erik Peterson (1890-1960). In the 1930s Peterson challenged Schmitt's central tenet, the possibility of an analogy between the divine and the human realms, the foundation of modern immanentist theology of the secular. Using a rich patristic material, Peterson showed that Schmitt's arguments would founder on the orthodox Christian dogma of the Trinity and that any political establishment on earth is rendered transitory and thereby contingent by eschatology. On this latter point there is an interesting parallel of Peterson to Walter Benjamin. An assessment of the aftermath of the debate shows that Peterson's arguments hold and that the denial of political theology by Peterson implied a principled, albeit conservative, theological stance against the frightful political developments in the 1930s.

{kappa}{lambda}Formula{sigma}{iota}{sigma}/Beruf: Luther, Weber, Agamben

Frey, C. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

This essay attempts a rather minimalistic reconstruction of different understandings of the notion of calling (klesis, vocatio, Beruf) from Paul to Giorgio Agamben in an effort to better understand and more accurately gauge Agamben's reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans. At issue is in part the political and the eschatological dimensions of the Pauline usage of klesis and of related political-theological concepts at work in Martin Luther, Max Weber, and Agamben. The essay should be read as a point of departure for two considerations that seem of particular interest: the (biopolitical) implications of the emergence of the modern notion of Beruf, and the relevance and possibility of a "secularized" or "postsecular" messianism.

The Image of Happiness We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Cohen, Benjamin, and Paul

Deuber-Mankowsky, A. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

In his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben states that the famous hunchbacked dwarf from Walter Benjamin's first thesis on the philosophy of history was none other than Paul. Unlike Agamben, Benjamin was a reader of the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose interpretation of human weakness represents not only an alternative but in many respects a counterposition to Paul. In my article I present Cohen's messianism and his generation of the concept of the individual out of the recognition of human weakness. I return then to the question of whether Benjamin in fact refers to the second letter to the Corinthians or whether there are not good reasons to assume that Benjamin is closer to Cohen's thought of the messianic power of weakness than to Paul's heroic suffering.

Hannah Arendt on the Secular

Moyn, S. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

This essay shows that Hannah Arendt was a theorist both of secularization as a process and of the secular as a goal of modern politics. It reconstructs these arguments in her corpus, especially On Revolution, and argues that this dimension of her work may have been a response to Carl Schmitt (and is in any event now usefully read in such a way). The essay ends by examining how Arendt might reply to currently influential challengers of a secular politics.

The Jerusalem School: The Theopolitical Hour

Lebovic, N. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

This article addresses the strange reappearance of Carl Schmitt in the context of German Jewish thought after 1940. The focus is on the role political theology played in the work of Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman, and Jacob Taubes, three men who met in Jerusalem during the late 1940s and early 1950s. They interpreted their own contemporary reality through the discourse of political theology, using the Schmittian concepts of divine decision, the crisis of democracy, and so on. With the entrance of Geulah Cohen—a former terrorist and a right-wing activist, but also a close friend of the three—the discourse swerved, taking on the theopolitical as the "true" messianic calling. By historicizing political theology within the German Jewish response in Palestine, the article problematizes some key concepts of current biopolitical critique.

Herrschaftszeiten! Theopolitical Profanities in the Face of Secularization

Wedemeyer, A. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

This article starts from the observation that Giorgio Agamben, in making the Roman sacratio the emblem for the modern political condition, passes over the peculiarities of the curse as a speech act. He suggests that Walter Benjamin offers the tools for such an analysis and hence for determining the linguistic conditions of political theology. He demonstrates the curse's ineluctable role in the theopolitical programs of Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber, and Erik Peterson and argues that the complications of secularization—famously debated between Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg—are best understood with the linguistic and performative transformations of sacred cursing in mind.

On the Origins of "Political Theology": Judaism and Heresy between the World Wars

Lazier, B. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:53:44 PDT

This essay traces the origins of the contemporary interest in "political theology" and focuses on the work of Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and Jacob Taubes in particular. They offer three competing instrumentalizations of the concept; they alert us to a dimension of the problem thus far unrecognized, namely, how the problem of heresy figures at its core; they help us recall the interwar origins of the contemporary fascination with the term, the historical "horizon" in which it was born; they make plain what was at stake for Jewish thinkers in particular; and they help us ask after its resurgence, whether political theology means quite the same now as it did in the era of its birth.