SUNY in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

A Death of the World offers a phenomenological description of what happens to the world for those who survive the death of someone. Bringing Jacques Derrida's works into conversation with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Romano; the poetry and literature of Paul Celan, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Ovid, and Jonathan Safran Foer; and psychological works concerning trauma, mourning, epigenetics, and memory, author Harris B. Bechtol provides interdisciplinary language for understanding the death of the other as an event. He argues that such death must be understood as an event because this death is more than just the loss of the other who has died insofar as the meaning of the world to and with this other is also lost. Such loss manifests itself through the transformations of both the spaces in which meaning takes place and the lived time of a survivor's world. These transformations of the world culminate in his account of workless mourning, which establishes the contours of the life after these deaths of the world.

A purely political understanding of justice does not convey the cosmological origins of the ancient conception of justice, Dikē, in Aeschylus's Oresteia. Drawing from Walter Burkert's anthropology of the hunt in Homo Necans, which articulates an ancient cosmology and implies a theory of (tragic) seriousness that parallels Aristotle's naturalist interpretation of tragedy, Hunting for Justice argues that justice is rooted in predation as exemplified by the Furies. Although the Oresteia has been read as the passage from the violence of nature to civic justice, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou offers an original interpretation of the trilogy: the ending of the feud is less an instance of political deliberation (as Hegel maintained), and more an instance of nature's necessary halting of its own destructiven'ess for life to resume. Extending to contemporary contexts, she argues that nature's arbitrariness continues to underpin our notions of justice, albeit in a distorted form. In this sense, Hunting for Justice offers a critique of the political infinitization and idealization of justice that permeates our current discourses of activism and social justice.

This book begins with an unexplored and unanswered question that Martin Heidegger raises in a 1923 Freiburg course: "Problem: What is woman?" Yet, why should we care that Heidegger raises this "problem"? What could he, a member of the National Socialist Party, help feminists understand about responding to "the woman question"? How can Heidegger help us understand our own historical climate in which this question continues to hold significance? Jill Drouillard divides Heidegger's thought into two categories to think about the sexed/gendered experiences that coordinate our birth: (1) the one that suspends "the woman question" and that provides useful resources for thinking the fluidity of sex/gender, and (2) the one that provides a totalized reply to this query by manipulating tropes of the feminine to advance a politico-poetic project of Nazi politics. She uses Heidegger as a cautionary tale to demonstrate the harm that occurs when society tries to define the being (or "what is") of woman in any definite sense. In some chapters, she teases apart how Heidegger may have offered a reply to "the woman question" and, in others, shows what happens in today's society when law, bioethics, politics, and pedagogy reckon with this query.

Presented here is the first philosophical engagement with the pictorial work of Leonardo, seen as a systematic whole. It is not written from the point of view of an art historian, even as it tries to benefit from art historical insights and procedures, but that of contemporary continental philosophy and theories of modern artistic media. Author Eyal Peretz's main objective is to understand the historical and logical place Leonardo's paintings occupy in the transition from the age of medieval sacred images to Renaissance or early modern painting. Leonardo, Peretz argues, introduced a media revolution, which has still not been fully assimilated and understood. His "modernity" is still ahead of us. Written in a clear and engaging style, Messengers of Infinity, will appeal equally to Leonardo experts, experts in continental philosophy, and those who are experts in neither of these fields but have an intellectual curiosity about the historical and conceptual significance of Leonardo in particular and of modern painting in general.

Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of the greatest intellectual figures of the twentieth century. As a philosopher trained in phenomenology, he established philosophical hermeneutics as one of the leading traditions of contemporary philosophy and opened new paths for philosophical reflection. Within the many dimensions of Gadamer's vast, complex, and multifaceted thinking, a special role is played by the question concerning the relevance of the various arts and the centrality of aesthetic experience in human life. Despite being one of the most relevant voices of twentieth-century philosophy, Gadamer's hermeneutics has at times been overlooked in contemporary philosophical debates. The firm conviction at the basis of this volume is that Gadamer's thought is still relevant today, especially regarding aesthetic questions concerning the persistent meaning and truth of art in the age of what he called "the shadow of nihilism" and in the age of the so-called "end of art." In contrast to the claim that Gadamer's philosophy is "anti-modern," or allegedly "out of date" in comparison to other philosophical approaches to aesthetic questions, “Gadamer on Art and Aesthetic Experience” aims to show that a renewed and critical confrontation with Gadamer's aesthetic thinking can offer stimulating and penetrating insights to understand the role of art in contemporary society in all its transformations and its challenging manifestations.

An in-depth and unique take on Martin Heidegger's understanding of animality, showing that the question of the animal was central to Heidegger's philosophical project from beginning to end. The Great Detour offers an in-depth and unique take on Martin Heidegger's understanding of animality, showing that the question the animal's nature in comparison to the human was central to Heidegger's philosophical project from beginning to end. More importantly, by engaging certain key texts from across his corpus, including some of the Black Notebooks, author S. Montgomery Ewegen shows that Heidegger's understanding of animality is much more nuanced than has typically been presented. Whereas most scholars have argued that Heidegger held a somewhat dismissive and ill-informed view of animals (as "world-poor," as lacking language, etc.), Ewegen argues that animals for Heidegger hold an inestimable value, serving as one of the primary ways through which the human is able to become aware of its own being and, indeed, Being itself. In short, the question of the animal was, for Heidegger, indissolubly connected with the question of the human being's relation to Being, the latter of which serves as the focal point of Heidegger's philosophy.

Investigates permutations of the terror to examine the complex political and intellectual transformation of literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot between 1933 and 1949. Between 1933 and 1949 Maurice Blanchot's writings underwent a rather infamous political and critical transformation. Its overarching trope is the terror, which features prominently in his work in 1936, 1941, and 1947. The terror is a reflexive discourse about whether language is bound to reality, and so forceful, or merely a series of empty signs. Marty Hiatt provides an in-depth study of Blanchot's political and critical writings from this period, elaborating his various reckonings with the terror so as to demonstrate the categorical nature of his intellectual shift. Blanchot first calls for an insurrection that would violently expurgate the foreign and execute a Jewish prime minister in order to save France. After the Fall of France, he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric dialectically constitute literature as world construction and world destruction. In his first postwar encounter with Hegel, he links this conception back to history by arguing that it corresponds to revolution. He also doubles the dialectical account of revolutionary history through an account of poetic language that makes contact with an unknowable substrate of existence, resulting in a kind of absolute ambiguity, and seeks to explore and inhabit a form of negativity beyond revolution.

A translation of the 1843 novella by Edgar Bauer, a significant if overlooked work of German literary history that casts new light on the Young Hegelian movement and, possibly, Karl Marx. In early 1843, the Young Hegelian philosopher and activist Edgar Bauer published a comic novella titled Es leben feste Grundsätze! or A Life of Solid Principles! It told the story of an idealistic young journalist named, significantly enough, Karl. While the work was more or less ignored for one and a half centuries, recent scholarship has suggested that it may contain a fictionalized and deeply critical portrait of Karl Marx. That on its own makes it fascinating and valuable. But it is also an important piece of literary history in its own right. And it offers a powerful way into the life and career of its author-a figure who, despite an enormous amount of interest in the intellectual history of the German Vormärz in recent years, has remained conspicuously overlooked in the literature. This volume combines an original translation of Es leben feste Grundsätze! with a long essay outlining Edgar Bauer's revolutionary political thought. Along the way, it shows how the Young Hegelian movement constituted a crucial inflection point in the history of the relationship between radical political theory, on one side, and concrete political institutions, on the other.

Historical fiction centered around the life and tragic death of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode. In 1806, when she was only twenty-six, Karoline von Günderrode plunged a dagger through her heart. She was a gifted poet and philosopher, a member of the circle of Romantic writers such as Bettine Brentano, Clemens Brentano, and Achim von Arnim. Women were not admitted to universities at the time (1780–1806) and so Karoline educated herself with the help of mentors and a library of books. She was devoted to the greatest writers, philosophers, and thinkers of her time and of all times, among them Goethe, Kant, Schelling, Novalis, Hölderlin, Plato, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. Yet neither her learning nor her intense love of nature were able to sustain her life. Karoline fell in love with a Heidelberg professor of classics who was married and unable or unwilling to leave his wife. There were of course other factors that led to her suicide-and the novel details them in its eighty-six episodes narrated by twenty-six different characters. Each character tells her or his or its own version of the story, and the reader is left to piece it all together-which is what one must do when confronting any case of suicide. We are called upon to understand the catastrophe but also to realize that our understanding will never satisfy us. Tragedy is not about understanding. When the old men of Thebes see Antigone marching to her tomb, they can only cry, "Child! Child!"