Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging.Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be th...

Dieses Buch greift ein zentrales, aber wenig beachtetes Thema im Werk Hannah Arendts auf: ihr ambivalentes Verhältnis zum jüdisch-christlichen Erbe. Schon in ihrer Dissertation über den Liebesbegriff bei Augustinus entwickelte sie die Hauptmomente ihrer Lesart. Arendts starkes Konzept der »Weltlichkeit« könnte gerade heute hilfreich sein für einen Ausgleich zwischen Säkularismus und dem offenkundigen Fortwirken religiöser Überzeugungen. Obschon Arendt sich erklärtermaßen als säkulare Denke...

What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony?Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology...

This book digs into the complex archaeology of empathy illuminating controversies, epistemic problems and unanswered questions encapsulated within its cross-disciplinary history.The authors ask how a neutral innate capacity to directly understand the actions and feelings of others becomes charged with emotion and moral values associated with altruism or caregiving. They explore how the discovery of the mirror neuron system and its interpretation as the neurobiological basis of empa...

The book presents an overview of the term neuropsychoanalysis and traces its historical and scientific foundations as well as its cultural implications. It also turns its attention to some blind spots, open questions, and to what the future may hold. It examines the cooperative and conflicted relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Articles from different fields investigate the neurological basis of psychoanalysis as well as the psychological terms of neurology. They also dis...

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding ...

A groundbreaking examination of word and image through the lenses of modern art and Continental philosophy: "Probing and lucid" (Stephen H. Watson, University of Notre Dame).Engagement with the image has played a decisive role in the formulation of the very idea of philosophy since Plato. Identifying pivotal moments in the history of philosophy, Dennis J. Schmidt develops the question of philosophy's regard of the image by considering painting―where the image most ...

From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebook**s. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic...

J. G. Herder is enjoying a renaissance in philosophy and across the humanities. This book offers important new insights into the complexity and depth of his thought. This unprecedented collection fills a gap in the secondary literature, highlighting the genuinely innovative and distinctive nature of Herder's philosophy. Not only does Herder offer highly original answers to important philosophical questions, such as the mind-body problem and the role of sensibility in cognition and ethics, ...

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his well-known transgressions—his complicity with National Socialism and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow, Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in a debate that has seen much attention in scholarly and popular media from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been ...

An insightful look at alienation in the modern world from the New York Times –bestselling author of The Art of Loving and Escape from Freedom .Social psychologist Erich Fromm observed the spread of alienation in the 1960s, arguing that humans who were once dynamic, creative beings were reduced to fixating on TV screens, emotionally pa...

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousa...