Since Hegel, the idea of an end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. This book analyzes its role and its rhetoric in Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in order to account for the topic's enduring persistence. In addition to providing a general overview of the main thinkers of post-Idealist German aesthetics, the book explores the relationship between tradition and modernity. For despite the differences that distinguish one philosopher's end of art from another's, all authors treated here turn the end of art into an occasion to thematize and to reflect on the very thing that modernism cannot or should not be: tradition. As a discourse, the end of art is one of our modern traditions.

Since Hegel, the idea of an end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. This book analyzes its role and its rhetoric in Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in order to account for the topic's enduring persistence. In addition to providing a general overview of the main thinkers of post-Idealist German aesthetics, the book explores the relationship between tradition and modernity. For despite the differences that distinguish one philosopher's end of art from another's, all authors treated here turn the end of art into an occasion to thematize and to reflect on the very thing that modernism cannot or should not be: tradition. As a discourse, the end of art is one of our modern traditions.

Constellation is the first extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The affinity between these noncontemporaneous thinkers serves as a limit case manifesting the precariousness and potentials of cultural transmission in a disillusioned present.
In five chapters, Constellation presents the changing figure of Nietzsche as Benjamin encountered him: an inspiration to his student activism, an authority for his skeptical philology, a manifestation of his philosophical nihilism, a companion in his political exile, and ultimately a subversive collaborator in his efforts to think beyond the hopeless temporality--new and always the same--of the present moment in history.
By excavating this neglected relationship philologically and elaborating its philosophical implications in the surviving texts of both men, Constellation produces new and compelling readings of their works and through them triangulates a theoretical limit in the present, a fractured "now-time" suspended between madness and suicide, from which the collective future regains a measure of consequential and transformative vitality.

Volume 29 features articles on Anton Reiser; the legacies of German romanticism; Goethe's morphology and computational analysis; Goethe commemorations in Argentina; and Goethe's Weltliteratur in the context of trade with China, along with two special sections and the book review. Volume 29 features articles on Anton Reiser; the legacies and myths of German romanticism; Goethe's morphology as antecedent to computational analysis; on Goethe commemorations in Argentina; and a reconsideration of Goethe's Weltliteratur in the context of Handelsverkehr (trade) with China. Additionally, volume 29 features two special sections. The first commemorates an anniversary, Hoelderlin's 250th birthday, with work devoted to "Reading and Exhibiting," compiled by Meike Werner. The other special section, on movement and edited by Heidi Schlipphacke, further explores research featured at MLA 2021 and revisits many questions of sentimentalism, visuality, and narration that are at the core of canon formation and eighteenth-century thresholds of modernity. As always, the book review section, edited by Sean Franzel, concludes the volume.

What begins in madness and desperation must eventually end that way.

The Taylors want nothing more than to start a family, but the couple remains childless. A stranger, known only as Mr. Smith, arrives on their doorstep late one night with a strange proposition: safeguard a crate for the peculiar man and they'll get their offspring. They strike a dark and irrevocable bargain. Almost twenty-five years later, the Taylors' farmland is occupied by a new family-but the curse of the past lives on. Does wickedness dwell in the soil itself, or does evil grow from what takes root there?

Constellation is the first extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The affinity between these noncontemporaneous thinkers serves as a limit case manifesting the precariousness and potentials of cultural transmission in a disillusioned present.
In five chapters, Constellation presents the changing figure of Nietzsche as Benjamin encountered him: an inspiration to his student activism, an authority for his skeptical philology, a manifestation of his philosophical nihilism, a companion in his political exile, and ultimately a subversive collaborator in his efforts to think beyond the hopeless temporality--new and always the same--of the present moment in history.
By excavating this neglected relationship philologically and elaborating its philosophical implications in the surviving texts of both men, Constellation produces new and compelling readings of their works and through them triangulates a theoretical limit in the present, a fractured "now-time" suspended between madness and suicide, from which the collective future regains a measure of consequential and transformative vitality.