An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena-including money, gender, urban life, and technology-that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.

Although boredom appears to be a perennial feature of the human condition, it is linked to ways of experiencing time and thinking about human existence that are recognizably modern. By tracing the emergence and evolution of the modern discourse on boredom in French and German literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, "Experience Without Qualities" makes a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of European modernity.In interpreting that discourse as the reflection of a specifically modern crisis of meaning, it contributes to the theorization of modernity and modern experience. And in bringing these historical and theoretical dimensions into conversation, it develops analytic strategies that are of broader application in interdisciplinary inquiry - for the methodological problems that arise in thinking about boredom as a phenomenon of both philosophical and more broadly cultural significance illuminate the constraints that confront any attempt to reflect historically on subjective experience in modernity.