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Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were
contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a
planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of
the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces
the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting,
unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature
written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series
of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by
Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a
geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed
geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental
thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers
a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it
was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human
and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of
contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral
encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the
imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments
in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and
beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points
toward alternative relations with, and less destructive
mobilizations of, the geologic.
Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were
contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a
planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of
the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces
the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting,
unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature
written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series
of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by
Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a
geological unconscious-unthought and sometimes actively repressed
geological knowledge-in European literature and environmental
thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers
a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it
was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human
and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of
contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral
encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the
imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments
in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and
beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points
toward alternative relations with, and less destructive
mobilizations of, the geologic.
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Minima Philologica (Hardcover)
Werner Hamacher; Translated by Catharine Diehl, Jason Groves
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R2,004
Discovery Miles 20 040
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher
that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its
restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their
meanings. In these two texts, “95 Theses on Philology” and
“For—Philology,” Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized
philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic
utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or
even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language
where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes
the structure of language in general. The first text, “95 Theses
on Philology,” challenges academic philology as well as other
disciplines across the humanities and sciences that “use”
language, assuming it to be a given entity and not an event. The
theses develop what Hamacher calls the “idea of philology” by
describing the constitution of its objects, its relation to
knowledge, its suspension of consciousness, and its freedom for
what remains always still to be said. In “For—Philology,”
both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively
and non-discursively, the desire for language.
Desire—philía—is the insatiable affect that drives the
movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that.
Desiring language—logos—means to respond to an alien utterance
that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead,
accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language
and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others,
cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher
responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers
such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as
well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and
Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima
Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of
linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language
and those who live by it.
What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as
an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a
practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is
segregated to one that is integrated – from global to planetary;
from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance
live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue
from Edouard Glissant’s vision of multilingualism and reignites
the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural
encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which
she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers
and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant.
Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of
art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision
and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining
the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept
of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space – an astro-culture –
in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation,
media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she
instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder
forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.
What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as
an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a
practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is
segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary;
from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance
live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue
from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the
myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural
encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which
she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers
and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant.
Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of
art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision
and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining
the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept
of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in
which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation,
media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she
instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder
forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.
Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher
that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its
restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their
meanings. In these two texts, “95 Theses on Philology” and
“For—Philology,” Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized
philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic
utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or
even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language
where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes
the structure of language in general. The first text, “95 Theses
on Philology,” challenges academic philology as well as other
disciplines across the humanities and sciences that “use”
language, assuming it to be a given entity and not an event. The
theses develop what Hamacher calls the “idea of philology” by
describing the constitution of its objects, its relation to
knowledge, its suspension of consciousness, and its freedom for
what remains always still to be said. In “For—Philology,”
both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively
and non-discursively, the desire for language.
Desire—philía—is the insatiable affect that drives the
movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that.
Desiring language—logos—means to respond to an alien utterance
that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead,
accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language
and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others,
cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher
responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers
such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as
well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and
Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima
Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of
linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language
and those who live by it.
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