Presents the first English translation of Herder's foundational essay along with critical responses to it by today's leading Herder scholars. In recent years, Johann Gottfried Herder has been the focus of much interest in the English-speaking world. While he was long disregarded, current scholarship in both German and English is revisiting his importance as an early theorist of the limits of Enlightenment. Increasingly, scholarship is remembering that in the closing decades of the eighteenth century Herder was one of the most important alternative voices to Kant. Herder's Versuch uber das Sein (Essay on Being, ca. 1764) was likely composed in reaction to Kant's lectures on metaphysics. In it, Herder unfolds his philosophical project, setting the terms that remained the foundation of his work throughout his life and influenced Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. Given the central importance of the essay and Herder's increasing recognition in the English-speaking world, it is striking that it has not been translated into English until now. This volume presents a facsimile of the manuscript along with a German transcription, an annotated translation, and critical essays by the most important Herder scholars writing in German and English today. Contributors: Manfred Baum, Arnd Bohm, Nigel DeSouza, Ulrich Gaier, Alexander J. B. Hampton, Marion Heinz, John K. Noyes, Wolfgang Pross, Sonia Sikka. John K. Noyes is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at theUniversity of Toronto and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is the author of Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism.

Der Band enthalt Aufsatze von Literaturwissenschaftlern aus Deutschland, Sudafrika und verschiedenen anderen Landern. Die Beitrage befassen sich schwerpunktmassig mit der Beziehung zwischen Kultur, Sprache und Macht. Besonders wichtig ist die kulturvergleichende und multikulturelle Perspektive, die in vielen Fallen mit einer germanistischen "Aussenseiterstellung" zusammengeht. So beschaftigen sich die Autoren mit der Relativitat kulturellen Wissens und der Multikulturalitat. Es wird eine Begegnung zustandegebracht, die nicht nur bekanntere Texte der deutschen Literatur, sondern auch die weniger bekannten Werke aus anderen Traditionen einbezieht.

Among his generation of intellectuals, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is recognized both for his innovative philosophy of language and history and for his passionate criticism of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. A student of Immanuel Kant, Herder challenged the idea that anyone - even the philosophers of the Enlightenment - could have a monopoly on truth. In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder's anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations. Noyes argues that Herder's anti-rationalist epistemology, his rejection of universal conceptions of truth, knowledge, and justice, constitutes the first attempt to establish not just a moral but an epistemological foundation for anti-imperialism. Engaging with the work of postcolonial theorists such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak, this book is a valuable reassessment of Enlightenment anti-imperialism that demonstrates Herder's continuing relevance to postcolonial studies today.

"A very erudite, comprehensive, and searching study, which investigates masochism from a variety of perspectives". -- Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

Individuals sometimes derive sexual pleasure from submission to cruel discipline. While that predilection was noted as early as the sixteenth century, masochism was not codified as a concept until 1890. According to John K. Noyes, its invention reflected a crisis in the liberal understanding of subjectivity and sexuality which continues to inform discussions of masochism today. In essence, it remains a political concept.

Viennese physician Richard yon Krafft-Ebing coined the term masochism, based on the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Noyes analyzes the social and political problems that inspired the concept, suggesting, for example, that the triumphant expansion of European colonialism was in part animated by an ambivalence in masculine sexuality.

Noyes documents the evolution of the concept of masochism with scenes in literature from John Cleland's Fanny Hill through Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs and Pauline Reage's Story of O. Analysis of Freud's vastly influential rereading of masochism precedes an exploration of the work of his successors, including Wilhem Reich, Theodor Reik, Helene Deutsch, and Karen Horney. Noyes suggests that the thematics of feminine masochism emerged only gradually from an exclusively male concept.