In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive.  Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic.  Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human.  Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplativa. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.

Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being.  And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling shouts out loudly but narratives no longer have their binding force.  Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers.  No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out.  It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers.  Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.  The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of the information society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.

“A superb biographical portrait and work of historical analysis…Let us hope that it will serve if not as a manual then at least as an inspiration—good statesmanship is needed more than ever.� —Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal “Brilliantly refreshes our understanding of Metternich and his era…[He] was an intellectual in politics of a kind now rare.� —Christopher Clark, London Review of Books “Succeed[s] in forcing readers to wonder whether Metternich’s efforts to defend an essentially conservative order against populists and terrorists are so different from the struggles that liberal democracies face today.� —Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs Metternich is often portrayed as the epitome of reactionary conservatism, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power to stifle liberalism and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. But in this landmark biography, the first to make use of state and family papers, Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man, revealing him to be more forward-looking and nimble than we have ever recognized. Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars committed above all to the preservation of peace. As the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister and chancellor he was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. But short of compromising on his overarching goal, Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this dazzling man to life. Hailed as a masterpiece of historical writing, Metternich is indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution, reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.

Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China and is strongly focused on meditation. It is characteristically sceptical towards language and distrustful of conceptual thought, which explains why Zen Buddhist sayings are so enigmatic and succinct. But despite Zen Buddhism's hostility towards theory and discourse, it is possible to reflect philosophically on Zen Buddhism and bring out its philosophical insights. In this short book, Byung-Chul Han seeks to unfold the philosophical force inherent in Zen Buddhism, delving into the foundations of Far Eastern thought to which Zen Buddhism is indebted. Han does this comparatively by confronting and contrasting the insights of Zen Buddhism with the philosophies of Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others, showing that Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy have very different ways of understanding religion, subjectivity, emptiness, friendliness and death. This important work by one of the most widely read philosophers and cultural theorists of our time will be of great value to anyone interested in comparative philosophy and religion.

Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being.  And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling shouts out loudly but narratives no longer have their binding force.  Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers.  No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out.  It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers.  Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.  The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of the information society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.

In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive.  Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic.  Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human.  Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplativa. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.

A compelling new biography that recasts the most important European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and reform, pursuing international peace. Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized. Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace. That often required him, as the Austrian Empire's foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority. He was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life. We meet him as a tradition-conscious imperial count, an early industrial entrepreneur, an admirer of Britain's liberal constitution, a failing reformer in a fragile multiethnic state, and a man prone to sometimes scandalous relations with glamorous women. Hailed on its German publication as a masterpiece of historical writing, Metternich will endure as an essential guide to nineteenth-century Europe, indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution, reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.

Wittgenstein's thought is reflected in his reading and reception of other authors. Wittgenstein Reading approaches the moment of literature as a vehicle of self-reflection for Wittgenstein. What sounds, on the surface, like criticism (e.g. of Shakespeare) can equally be understood as a simple registration of Wittgenstein's own reaction, hence a piece of self-diagnosis or self-analysis. The book brings a representative sample of authors, from Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dostoyevsky to some that have received far less attention in Wittgenstein scholarship like Kleist, Lessing, or Wilhelm Busch and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy. Furthermore, the volume offers means for the cultural contextualization of Wittgenstein's thoughts. Unique to this book is its internal design. The editors' introduction sets the scene with regards to both biography and theory, while each of the subsequent chapters takes a quotation from Wittgenstein on a particular author as its point of departure for developing a more specific theme relating to the writer in question. This format serves to avoid the well-trodden paths of discussions on the relationship between philosophy and literature, allowing for unconventional observations to be made. Furthermore, the volume offers means for the cultural contextualization of Wittgenstein's thoughts.

Throughout his work, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno repeatedly invokes the rhinoceros. Taking its cue from one of these passages in Aesthetic Theory, ‘So a rhinoceros, the mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros’, this book explores the life of this animal in Adorno’s texts, and articulates the nuanced interconnections between art, nature and critique in his thought. By thus illuminating key elements of Adorno’s work, this volume reveals the invaluable contributions that this ‘classical’ thinker can make to our current reflections on the various pressing natural and political crises of our times.

Otto Weininger s controversial book Sex and Character, first published in Vienna in 1903, is a prime example of the conflicting discourses central to its time: antisemitism, scientific racism and biologism, misogyny, the cult and crisis of masculinity, psychological introspection versus empiricism, German idealism, the women s movement and the idea of human emancipation, the quest for sexual liberation, and the debates about homosexuality. Combining rational reasoning with irrational outbursts, in the context of today s scholarship, Sex and Character speaks to issues of gender, race, cultural identity, the roots of Nazism, and the intellectual history of modernism and modern European culture. This new translation presents, for the first time, the entire text, including Weininger s extensive appendix with amplifications of the text and bibliographical references, in a reliable English translation, together with a substantial introduction that places the book in its cultural and historical context."

After communism collapsed in the former Soviet Union, capitalism seemed to many observers like the only game in town, and questioning it became taboo for academic economists. But the financial crisis, chronic unemployment, and the inexorable rise of inequality have resurrected the question of whether there is a feasible and desirable alternative to capitalism. Against this backdrop of growing disenchantment, Giacomo Corneo presents a refreshingly antidogmatic review of economic systems, taking as his launching point a fictional argument between a daughter indignant about economic injustice and her father, a professor of economics. Is Capitalism Obsolete? begins when the daughter's angry complaints prompt her father to reply that capitalism cannot responsibly be abolished without an alternative in mind. He invites her on a tour of tried and proposed economic systems in which production and consumption obey noncapitalistic rules. These range from Plato's Republic to diverse modern models, including anarchic communism, central planning, and a stakeholder society. Some of these alternatives have considerable strengths. But daunting problems arise when the basic institutions of capitalism-markets and private property-are suppressed. Ultimately, the father argues, all serious counterproposals to capitalism fail to pass the test of economic feasibility. Then the story takes an unexpected turn. Father and daughter jointly come up with a proposal to gradually transform the current economic system so as to share prosperity and foster democratic participation. An exceptional combination of creativity and rigor, Is Capitalism Obsolete? is a sorely needed work about one of the core questions of our times.

Throughout his work, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno repeatedly invokes the rhinoceros. Taking its cue from one of these passages in Aesthetic Theory, ‘So a rhinoceros, the mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros’, this book explores the life of this animal in Adorno’s texts, and articulates the nuanced interconnections between art, nature and critique in his thought. By thus illuminating key elements of Adorno’s work, this volume reveals the invaluable contributions that this ‘classical’ thinker can make to our current reflections on the various pressing natural and political crises of our times.

Traditional concepts of social, political, and legal theory are increasingly at odds with current practices of warfare, while more recent poststructuralist theories tend to mimic their form. A conceptual framework for capturing the real-world phenomena is missing. In robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly in weapon systems that are constituted as man-machine ensembles, there are no longer 'agents' to whom 'responsibility' could be ascribed, making fundamental legal concepts inapplicable. These technologies become self-validating, morally blind practices. And yet, the visual systems employed in warfare, and the rhetoric surrounding them, follow the paradigm and dream of omnivoyance, a God's eye view of the world. This idea of perfect accuracy and completeness of vision (and hence knowledge) seemingly affords objectivity to the acts carried out by the systems. It is forgotten that any form of vision produces its own forms of invisibilities (and therefore ignorance). Together the three chapters and their respondents demonstrate that it is less and less possible to articulate the oppositions between knowledge and ignorance, lawfulness and lawlessness, and visibility and invisibility, leading to a stasis in which acts of war, and war-like acts continue to spread, while their precise nature becomes increasingly difficult to pin down. Closing on a manifesto, jointly authored by Liljefors, Noll and Steuer, the book draws further conclusions regarding the changing forms of violence and likely consequences of a fully digitalized world.

This book examines the continuing relevance of Buchner in the early twenty-first century, in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, performance and cultural studies, uniquely combining close readings with wide-ranging cultural, theatrical, philosophical and theoretical contextualizations. Der Band beschaftigt sich mit Buchners anhaltender Aktualitat in den verschiedensten Bereichen. Er zeichnet sich durch detailliert textbezogene Interpretationen aus, die gleichzeitig zahlreiche aktuelle kultur- und theaterwissenschaftliche, philosophische, naturwissenschaftliche, asthetische und theoretische Themen ansprechen.

Traditional concepts of social, political, and legal theory are increasingly at odds with current practices of warfare, while more recent poststructuralist theories tend to mimic their form. A conceptual framework for capturing the real-world phenomena is missing. In robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly in weapon systems that are constituted as man-machine ensembles, there are no longer 'agents' to whom 'responsibility' could be ascribed, making fundamental legal concepts inapplicable. These technologies become self-validating, morally blind practices. And yet, the visual systems employed in warfare, and the rhetoric surrounding them, follow the paradigm and dream of omnivoyance, a God's eye view of the world. This idea of perfect accuracy and completeness of vision (and hence knowledge) seemingly affords objectivity to the acts carried out by the systems. It is forgotten that any form of vision produces its own forms of invisibilities (and therefore ignorance). Together the three chapters and their respondents demonstrate that it is less and less possible to articulate the oppositions between knowledge and ignorance, lawfulness and lawlessness, and visibility and invisibility, leading to a stasis in which acts of war, and war-like acts continue to spread, while their precise nature becomes increasingly difficult to pin down. Closing on a manifesto, jointly authored by Liljefors, Noll and Steuer, the book draws further conclusions regarding the changing forms of violence and likely consequences of a fully digitalized world.

Most people would agree that we should behave and act in a responsible way. Yet only 200 years ago, 'responsibility' was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. What is the significance of the fact that 'responsibility' now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as 'responsible' agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of 'responsibility' focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life? In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility's spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by 'responsibility' - those of the attributors and bearers of responsibility - within them. The power relations between these positions, which Vogelmann carefully excavates from the grounds of our practices, reveal that the deck is stacked unevenly from the start. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

Ludwig Wittgenstein loved movies, and based on his remarks on watching them, there is a strong connection between his experience of watching films and his thoughts on aesthetics. Furthermore, however, Wittgenstein himself has been invoked in recent cinema. Wittgenstein at the Movies is centered on in-depth explorations of two intriguing experimental films on Wittgenstein: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein and Peter Forgacs' Wittgenstein Tractatus. The featured essays look at cinematic interpretations of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy in a manner bound to provoke the lively interest of Wittgenstein scholars, film theorists, and students of film aesthetics. As well, the book engages a broader audience concerned with philosophical issues about film and Wittgenstein's cultural significance, with the world of fin-de-siecle Vienna, of Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century, of artistic modernism.

Most people would agree that we should behave and act in a responsible way. Yet only 200 years ago, 'responsibility' was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. What is the significance of the fact that 'responsibility' now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as 'responsible' agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of 'responsibility' focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life? In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility's spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by 'responsibility' - those of the attributors and bearers of responsibility - within them. The power relations between these positions, which Vogelmann carefully excavates from the grounds of our practices, reveal that the deck is stacked unevenly from the start. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)