The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust. The book's principal aim is to move beyond the familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of alternative theories of meaning and understanding from the Anglophone analytic tradition. The book takes as its starting point the claim that Holocaust artworks must fulfill at least two specific yet potentially reciprocally countervailing desiderata: they must meet aesthetic criteria (lest they be, say, merely historical documents) and they must meet historical criteria (they must accurately represent the Holocaust, lest they be merely artworks). I locate this problematic within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy, and claim that Theodor W. Adorno's "dialectic of aesthetic semblance" describes the normative demand that a successful artwork maintain a dynamic tension between these dual desiderata. While working within a framework inspired by Adorno, the book further claims that certain concepts and lines of reasoning from contemporary philosophy best explicate how individual artworks fulfill these dual desiderata, including the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre's theory of the imaginary, work in the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin's theory of dialectical images. Individual chapters provide close readings of lyric poetry by Paul Celan (including a critique of Derridean deconstruction), Holocaust memorials in Berlin, texts by the Austrian quotational artist Heimrad Backer, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. The result is a set of interpretations of Holocaust artworks that, in their precision, specificity and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art.

Poetry. Annotated and translated from the Russian by Henry W. Pickford. "Loseff is one of the chief representatives of Russian exilic poetry, a great master of ironic postmodern verse. Pickford's work merits the highest recognition: this perfectly annotated book is indispensable for any student of new Russian poetry."--Tomas Venclova"Henry Pickford does a splendid job of capturing the distinctive voice of Lev Loseff's poetry, at once witty and profound. The translations are remarkably accurate, yet still convey the rich linguistic play of the original."--Michael Wachtel

Der Band geht zuruck auf die Tagung "Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen Kapitalismus", die im Januar 2016 in Weimar stattgefunden hat. Ihr Ziel war es, unterschiedliche Traditionen zusammenzufuhren, Modelle kritischen Denkens zu vergegenwartigen und neue Perspektiven der Gesellschaftstheorie zu eroeffnen. Die Beitrage widmen sich der Standortbestimmung kritischer Theorien. Sie reflektieren auf ihre Ursprunge, loten ihr zeitdiagnostisches Potential aus und dokumentieren ihren interdisziplinaren Charakter. Der "aufrechte Gang" (Ernst Bloch) im Denken bedeutet, sich von der UEbermacht des Bestehenden nicht einschuchtern zu lassen, konformistischer Akzeptanz wie irrationaler Sinngebung zu widerstehen und die Moeglichkeit des Neuen, die Utopie, wach zu halten.