Bøger i Cultural Memory in the Present serien

Covering the period of the Frankfurt School's exile in the United States, this book examines how the critique of racism, authoritarianism, and hard-right agitation impacted the American and German individual's self-conception (identity), while examining how a new form of politics, based on defining an Other, has shaped our everyday language, institutions, and social world.

This book proposes a new and provocative reading of the clinical and political work of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary.

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty.Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.

Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to society's spiritual and moral well-being. But does modernization lead to secularization? Does secularization lead to moral decay? Sociologist Hans Joas argues that these two supposed certainties have kept scholars from serious contemporary debate and that people must put these old arguments aside in order for debate to move forward. The emergence of a "e;secular option"e; does not mean that religion must decline, but that even believers must now define their faith as one option among many.In this book, Joas spells out some of the consequences of the abandonment of conventional assumptions for contemporary religion and develops an alternative to the clich of an inevitable conflict between Christianity and modernity. Arguing that secularization comes in waves and stressing the increasing contingency of our worlds, he calls upon faith to articulate contemporary experiences. Churches and religious communities must take into account religious diversity, but the modern world is not a threat to Christianity or to faith in general. On the contrary, Joas says, modernity and faith can be mutually enriching.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "e;What we had set out to do,"e; the authors write in the Preface, "e;was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."e;Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "e;Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."e; This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

Opening with the provocative query "e;what might an anthropology of the secular look like?"e; this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the "e;strangeness of the non-European world"e; and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers-Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703-1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905)-each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

The Romantic era in England and Germany saw a sudden renewal of prophetic modes of writing, arising from a new-found freedom of biblical interpretation. This text surveys developments in 18th-century biblical hermeneutics, culminating in close readings of works by Blake, Holderlin and Coleridge.

In The Angel of History, Moses looks at three philosophers-Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem-who formulated a new vision of history informed by Jewish messianism in 1920s Germany.

The Specter of Capital provides a searching historical analysis and critique of the role of classical and neoclassical economic theory in creating the economic conditions which produced the global financial crisis.

DRAFT to be approved by sponsor:This book shows how French philosophers in the twentieth century used Spinoza's rationalism to combat the irrationalism of phenomenology and, in the process, developed a mode of philosophical critique that was effective in targeting philosophical efforts to provide an ontological basis for political engagement.

The book argues that the center of political modernity is determined by a conflictive relation between the liberal core concept of political equality and the idea of individuality.

Through the emblematic work of acclaimed French novelist Gustave Flaubert, this book contributes to the controversial discussion of modernity's relationship to religion.

This book traces the history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and Vaclav Havel.

A fictionalized hybrid of personal memoir, case studies, dream sequences, and theoretical reflection, this book on madness, trauma and psychiatry uses a fictional form to engage with psychotic experience and to make the case for a less mechanized, more humane treatment of "fools and madmen."

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and existence that has been in place since Plato's parable of the cave.

"The New Demons" combines an original investigation of twentieth century philosophical debates on evil and a critical engagement with the latest research on power and biopolitics in order to offer a unique vision of our contemporary human condition.

This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century engages Augustine's Confessions, one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing. Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training.

This book investigates the forces that shape and limit interpretive practices. Weber suggests that institutions are never entirely free of the necessity of consolidating their authority through an ambivalent process of reinstituting themselves, a process in which interpretation plays a crucial role.

In The Reality of the Mass Media, Luhmann extends his theory of social systems-applied in his earlier works to the economy, the political system, art, religion, the sciences, and law-to an examination of the role of mass media in the construction of social reality.

This book argues against the widely celebrated utopia of "transparency" by showing, across a panorama of postwar French thought, how attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

Unconventionally fusing the the history of faith and reason in Islam, this book traces the Qur'an-inspired intellectual revolution that took off in the Islamic world of the seventh century, revealing its highlights and following it through to its sixteenth-century demise.

This book reconstructs John Locke's political theology to offer a revolutionary theory of the secular as public religion.

The Neuro-Image investigates cinema's survival in the digital age through neuroscientific and philosophical understandings of the brain, our conception of the future, and the affective intensity of contemporary screen culture.

This book offers a complex theory of modern society that simultaneously considers issues of communication, the media, differentiation, and evolution.

"Originally published in German under the title Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder."

This is the second volume of the author's magnum opus, which offers a complex theory of modern society that simultaneously considers issues of communication, the media, differentiation, and evolution.

Examines the residual influence of the Eurocentric literary canon in the age of postcolonial and world literature and looks at emergent formations of canons and classics at large.

The book situates the philosophical significance of Bataille's anthropological reflections within the fourfold made up by the names of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud.

"Originally published in French under the title Hypotheses sur l'Europe: Un essai de philosophie."