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"Psychoanalysis is dead " Again and again this obituary is
pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and
scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought
continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. "The Legend of
Freud" shows why psychoanalysis has remained "uncanny, " not just
for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as
well--and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is
not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict
with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are
most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text
that must be "read: " deciphered, interpreted, rewritten.
Psychoanalysis: "legenda est."
"Review"
""The Legend of Freud" is a fine example of what can be done with
Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge,
and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and
Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage
him, performing what Freud would have called an
"Auseinandersetzung, " a discussion or argument that's also a
taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up
a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand
it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like
Weber's. "The Legend of Freud" is the best deconstructive work I've
seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close
attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to
what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative,
respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new
ideas."
--"Village Voice Literary Supplement"
An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its
implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and
literature For readers versed in critical theory, German and
comparative literature, or media studies, a new book by Samuel
Weber is essential reading. Singularity is no exception. Bringing
together two decades of his essays, it hones in on the surprising
implications of the singular and its historical relation to the
individual in politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and
literature. Although singularity has long been a keyword in
literary studies and philosophy, never has it been explored as in
this book, which distinguishes singularity as an "aporetic" notion
from individuality, with which it remains historically closely
tied. To speak or write of the singular is problematic, Weber
argues, since once it is spoken of it is no longer strictly
singular. Walter Benjamin observed that singularity and repetition
imply each other. This approach informs the essays in Singularity.
Weber notes that what distinguishes the singular from the
individual is that it cannot be perceived directly, but rather
experienced through feelings that depend on but also exceed
cognition. This interdependence of cognition and affect plays
itself out in politics, economics, and theology as well as in
poetics. Political practice as well as its theory have been
dominated by the attempt to domesticate singularity by
subordinating it to the notion of individuality. Weber suggests
that this political tendency draws support from what he calls "the
monotheological identity paradigm" deriving from the idea of a
unique and exclusive Creator-God. Despite the "secular" tendencies
usually associated with Western modernity, this paradigm continues
today to inform and influence political and economic practices,
often displaying self-destructive tendencies. By contrast, Weber
reads the literary writings of Hoelderlin, Nietzsche, and Kafka as
exemplary practices that put singularity into play, not as fiction
but as friction, exposing the self-evidence of established
conventions to be responses to challenges and problems that they
often prefer to obscure or ignore.
The latter part of the twentieth century saw an explosion of new
media that effected profound changes in human categories of
communication. At the same time, a "return to religion" occurred on
a global scale. The twenty-five contributors to this volume--who
include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel--confront the conceptual,
analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the
complex relationship between religion and media.
The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the
multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these
multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide
exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to
the study of religion and media, ranging from the biblical
prohibition of images and its modern counterparts, through
theological discussion of imagery in Ignatius and Luther, to recent
investigations into icons and images that "think" in Jean-Luc
Marion and Gilles Deleuze. The third part presents case studies by
anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion who deal with
religion and media in Indonesia, India, Japan, South Africa,
Venezuela, Iran, Poland, Turkey, present-day Germany, and
Australia.
The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from
Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and
media in the context of political agitation ("The Psychological
Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses") and a section
from Niklas Luhmann's monumental "Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft
"("Society as a Social System").
"Institution and Interpretation" investigates the forces that shape
and limit interpretive practices. Whereas the prevailing use of the
term "institutions" tends to reduce their role to that of
maintaining the status quo, Weber suggests that institutions are
never entirely free of the need to consolidate their authority
through an ambivalent process of reinstituting themselves, a
process in which interpretation plays a crucial role.
Interpretation thus emerges not only as an activity made possible
by institutions but as an essential component of their operation.
To the book's original nine essays--addressing such topics as
professionalism in criticism, the relation between psychoanalysis
and hermeneutics, and the contemporary situation of the
humanities--this new edition adds six essays, one of them
previously unpublished. Topics discussed include the future of the
university and of the humanities, Kierkegaard's notion of
"repetition," Josiah Royce's conception of a "community" of
interpretation, and the problematic place of reading in
reader-response theory.
"Reviews of the First Edition"
"One of the primary proposals of Samuel Weber's important new book
is that we must look at what institutions exclude and delimit as
well as what they include and enable."
--"Critical Texts"
"A text of major importance and remarkable originality. For the
first time, the antecedents and the complexities of the question
are clearly defined and understood."
--Paul de Man, 1983
""Institution and Interpretation" recommends itself here for its
rigorous appraisal of the process through which oppositions come to
be instituted. . . . It provokes a rethinking of gender in all of
its 'contingent essentiality.'"
--"Genders"
The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across
the humanities and social sciences by the influential media
theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media
studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical
tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler's work has redrawn
the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions. The
contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan,
Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and
psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance
of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the
cultural production and its technological entanglements.
With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that
dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age
that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity
politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple
ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than
concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of
these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink
the "concept" of violence, both in itself and in relation to the
formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or
collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In
particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to
stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes
violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its
relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister?
Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the
critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications
and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms
that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end,
the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a
variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural
representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and
the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical
discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology,
as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power
relations.
The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth,
Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris,
Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson,
Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer,
Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.
The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post
to describe the American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the
start of the war against Iraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting
(skopos) as the name of an intentional structure in which the
subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming to destroy a
target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus's killing of
the suitors; the second concerns Carl Schmitt's Roman Catholicism
and Political Form; the third and fourth treat Freud's "Thoughts
for the Times on War and Death" and "The Man Moses and Monotheistic
Religion." Weber then traces the emergence of an alternative to
targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself
("Network Centered Warfare"), and then in Walter Benjamin's
readings of "Capitalism as Religion" and "Two Poems of Friedrich
Hoelderlin."
Ever since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of
theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of
representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the "mythos," or
the "plot." This conception of theater has subordinated
characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the
process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified
narrative. This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary
study explores theatrical writings that question this
aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the
medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber
tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and
philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians,
Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many
others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic
assumptions about the theatrical medium. His readings also
interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of
electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking
with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media
intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in
theater since the Greeks. Praise for Samuel Weber: aWhat kind of
questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that
can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the
links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed
by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber
formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge
to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural
critics and thinkersaaMLN
"Institution and Interpretation" investigates the forces that shape
and limit interpretive practices. Whereas the prevailing use of the
term "institutions" tends to reduce their role to that of
maintaining the status quo, Weber suggests that institutions are
never entirely free of the need to consolidate their authority
through an ambivalent process of reinstituting themselves, a
process in which interpretation plays a crucial role.
Interpretation thus emerges not only as an activity made possible
by institutions but as an essential component of their operation.
To the book's original nine essays--addressing such topics as
professionalism in criticism, the relation between psychoanalysis
and hermeneutics, and the contemporary situation of the
humanities--this new edition adds six essays, one of them
previously unpublished. Topics discussed include the future of the
university and of the humanities, Kierkegaard's notion of
"repetition," Josiah Royce's conception of a "community" of
interpretation, and the problematic place of reading in
reader-response theory.
"Reviews of the First Edition"
"One of the primary proposals of Samuel Weber's important new book
is that we must look at what institutions exclude and delimit as
well as what they include and enable."
--"Critical Texts"
"A text of major importance and remarkable originality. For the
first time, the antecedents and the complexities of the question
are clearly defined and understood."
--Paul de Man, 1983
""Institution and Interpretation" recommends itself here for its
rigorous appraisal of the process through which oppositions come to
be instituted. . . . It provokes a rethinking of gender in all of
its 'contingent essentiality.'"
--"Genders"
The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post
to describe the American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the
start of the war against Iraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting
(skopos) as the name of an intentional structure in which the
subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming to destroy a
target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus’s killing
of the suitors; the second concerns Carl Schmitt’s Roman
Catholicism and Political Form; the third and fourth treat
Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “The
Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” Weber then traces the
emergence of an alternative to targeting, first within military and
strategic thinking itself (“Network Centered Warfare”), and
then in Walter Benjamin’s readings of “Capitalism as
Religion” and “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.”
Ever since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of
theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of
representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the "mythos," or
the "plot." This conception of theater has subordinated
characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the
process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified
narrative. This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary
study explores theatrical writings that question this
aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the
medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber
tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and
philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians,
Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many
others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic
assumptions about the theatrical medium. His readings also
interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of
electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking
with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media
intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in
theater since the Greeks. Praise for Samuel Weber: “What kind of
questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that
can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the
links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed
by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber
formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge
to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural
critics and thinkers”—MLN
Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often
been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After
Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play
with general annihilation while also paying close attention to
films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve
Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film
gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and
with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the
film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema,
in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic
horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling
radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but
other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy
of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white,
its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is
not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions
of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that,
every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the
cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a Postface
specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his
argument into a debate with speculative materialism.
Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that
question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The
cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic
structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique,
allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.
An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its
implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and
literature For readers versed in critical theory, German and
comparative literature, or media studies, a new book by Samuel
Weber is essential reading. Singularity is no exception. Bringing
together two decades of his essays, it hones in on the surprising
implications of the singular and its historical relation to the
individual in politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and
literature. Although singularity has long been a keyword in
literary studies and philosophy, never has it been explored as in
this book, which distinguishes singularity as an "aporetic" notion
from individuality, with which it remains historically closely
tied. To speak or write of the singular is problematic, Weber
argues, since once it is spoken of it is no longer strictly
singular. Walter Benjamin observed that singularity and repetition
imply each other. This approach informs the essays in Singularity.
Weber notes that what distinguishes the singular from the
individual is that it cannot be perceived directly, but rather
experienced through feelings that depend on but also exceed
cognition. This interdependence of cognition and affect plays
itself out in politics, economics, and theology as well as in
poetics. Political practice as well as its theory have been
dominated by the attempt to domesticate singularity by
subordinating it to the notion of individuality. Weber suggests
that this political tendency draws support from what he calls "the
monotheological identity paradigm" deriving from the idea of a
unique and exclusive Creator-God. Despite the "secular" tendencies
usually associated with Western modernity, this paradigm continues
today to inform and influence political and economic practices,
often displaying self-destructive tendencies. By contrast, Weber
reads the literary writings of Hoelderlin, Nietzsche, and Kafka as
exemplary practices that put singularity into play, not as fiction
but as friction, exposing the self-evidence of established
conventions to be responses to challenges and problems that they
often prefer to obscure or ignore.
Die Beitrage dieses Bandes lenken den Blick auf einen blinden Fleck
universitarer Selbsterkenntnis: auf die von aussen diktierten
Bedingungen, denen zumal die Geisteswissenschaften stets
unterliegen, ohne sich daruber Rechenschaft abzulegen. Konigliche
Erlasse, institutionelle Praktiken, wechselnde technische Standards
regulieren die Zugange zu den Gegenstanden und Erkenntnissen von
Philosophen, Psychologen, Philologen, Sprachen, Paradigmen,
Adressatenund Ubertragungsgeschwindigkeiten des Wissens liegen
ausserhalb professoraler Souveranitaten. Die in ganz
unterschiedliche historische Perspektiven einfuhrenden Beitrage
bieten daher keine akademischen Selbstreflexionen, sondern
Diskursanalysen universitarer Geltungsanspruche."
"Psychoanalysis is dead " Again and again this obituary is
pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and
scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought
continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. "The Legend of
Freud" shows why psychoanalysis has remained "uncanny, " not just
for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as
well--and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is
not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict
with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are
most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text
that must be "read: " deciphered, interpreted, rewritten.
Psychoanalysis: "legenda est."
"Review"
""The Legend of Freud" is a fine example of what can be done with
Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge,
and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and
Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage
him, performing what Freud would have called an
"Auseinandersetzung, " a discussion or argument that's also a
taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up
a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand
it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like
Weber's. "The Legend of Freud" is the best deconstructive work I've
seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close
attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to
what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative,
respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new
ideas."
--"Village Voice Literary Supplement"
There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,
Walter Benjamin remarked, and one only sees in the world what is
preconditioned by language. In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading
theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive
aspect of Benjamin s thought by focusing on a little-discussed
stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.
Weber s focus is the critical suffix -ability that Benjamin so
tellingly deploys in his work. The -ability ("-barkeit," in German)
of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin s
oeuvre, from impartibility and criticizability through the
well-known formulations of citability, translatability, and, most
famously, the reproducibility of The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility. Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber
points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity
rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a
consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin s writings.
Weber first situates Benjamin s engagement with the -ability of
various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in
relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida.
Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this
suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin s
"Trauerspiel" book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of
Wagner s "Ring." The result is an illuminating perspective on
Benjamin s thought by way of his language and one of the most
penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin s work ever
written.
"Demarcating the Disciplines " was first published in 1986.
Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make
long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published
unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press
editions.
With publication of this volume, "Glyph " begins a new stage in
its existence: the move from Johns Hopkins University Press to the
University of Minnesota Press is accompanied by a change in focus.
In its first incarnation "Glyph "provided a forum in which
established notions of reading, writing, and criticism could be
questioned and explored. Since then, the greater currency of such
concerns has brought with it new problems and priorities. Setting
aside the battles of the past, the new "Glyph "looks ahead - to
confront historical issues and to address the institutional and
pedagogical questions emerging from the contemporary critical
landscape.
Each volume in the new "Glyph " series is organized around a
specific issue. The essays in this first volume explore the
relations between the practice of reading and writing and the
operations of the institution. Though their approaches differ from
one another, the authors of these essays all recognize that the
questions of the institution - most notably the university - points
toward a series of constraints that define, albeit negatively, the
possibilities for change.The contributors: Samuel Weber, Jacques
Derrida, Tom Conley, Malcolm Evans, Ruth Salvaggio, Robert Young,
Henry Sussman, Peter Middleton, David Punter, and Donald
Preziosi.
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