In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

"An admirable accomplishment.... Roberts provides valuable insights into the current debate on the nature of historical knowledge in our present 'postmodern' time. Anyone concerned with the philosophy of history will need to reckon with this book."--Allan D. Megill, author of "Prophets of Extremity".

In the crisis scenarios of modernity which flourished in the Weimar Republic, technology is typically seen as destiny or fate. Thus Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger both construe the coming struggle for world power in terms of the integration of production and technology in the industrial-military complex. Martin Heidegger’s critique of Jünger’s blueprint for total mobilization in Der Arbeiter (1932) springs from his reading of modernity as nihilism. Just as the crisis of Western history is reaching completion in modernity, so (...) equally metaphysics reaches completion in modern technology. Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, written after the Second World War, is contrasted with Ernst Cassirer’s essay ‘Form and Technology’ (1930), directed against Spengler’s regression to irrationalism, in terms of two fundamental relationships to the world: Heidegger’s Greek-oriented ontology of world disclosure and Cassirer’s modern ontology of construction (the possibilization of the world) with reference to technology and art. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMy paper aims to situate and contextualize György Márkus’s key writings on cultural modernity on the one hand in relation to their theoretical antecedents in Kant and Hegel’s conception of modern society as a society of culture and in Lukacs’s reception of Kant and Hegel in his early pre-Marxist works, and on the other hand in relation to an examination of the contemporary ramifications of certain tendencies in modern culture highlighted in Márkus’s writings. The paper is accordingly divided into two (...) parts. Part I sets out to reconstruct the presuppositions of Márkus’s theory of the high culture of classical modernity in order to bring out the descriptive strength and the analytic contribution of his approach in relation to the tradition of cultural critique in modernity, in particular in Western Marxism. Part II aims to show how Márkus’s theory of modern culture from the late eighteenth century to the end of World War II contains elements crucial to the theorization of contemporary culture, characterized by new forms of paradoxicality that go beyond his own model. (shrink)

The article examines Adorno and Heidegger's contrasting conceptions of art and myth in relation to their reading of western history since the Greeks and to German thinking on the relation between nature and history since Kant. In Part I Adorno's lecture `The Idea of Natural History' (1932), which draws on Lukács's Theory of the Novel and Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heidegger's fundamental ontology in Being and Time, serves as focus for (...) the interrelation between myth, origin and repetition in western history, construed as the forgetting of nature (Adorno) or the forgetting of Being (Heidegger). In Part II, the question of the remythologization or the demythologization of art in Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno is examined in the context of aesthetic modernism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In The Longing for Total Revolution, Bernard Yack claims not to account for totalitarianism but simply to unearth a new, specifically modern mindset. Still, the problem of totalitarianism, and whatever connection it might have had with that mindset, lurks throughout his book. Yack convincingly posits a relationship between a troubling new sense of historical embeddedness and novel totalist thinking. But his sense of the range of responses to historicity proves too limited to illuminate the connection between the longing for (...) total revolution and the advent of totalitarianism. Another look at Yack’s two culminating figures, Marx and Nietzsche, suggests a more illuminating alternative. (shrink)

Fundamental changes in the world economic system have resulted in a new differentiation, that between centre and periphery, between a global financial market on the one hand and production, services and labour on the other. As modern society has now become financial society, the old distinction between capital and labour has lost its informational value for party politics. The fact that the distinction between centre and periphery cannot be copied into the national political system means that economic policy can no (...) longer be decided through political choice. Politics has the task of coping with the political effects of the global financial market with the result that elections are dependent on the state of the economic cycle. Would a new political alignment involve a centre party of capital and labour against an ecological left and a `law and order' right? (shrink)

Richard Konrad claims that businessmen are guilty of adhering to a vicious form of ethical relativism. In practice, the relativism takes the form of doing an act which ordinarily would be called wrong and then claiming that the act is right or justified because it falls under a special set of codes (business ethics) which preempt ordinary ones. These codes or business ethics establish moral sanctuaries for businessmen. Konrad examines three versions of the sanctuary position, argues that they fail, and (...) concludes that the position is untenable. In this article it is claimed that Konrad is in error, that upon closer examination the three versions do provide justification for businessmen claiming relief from moral criticism. (shrink)

Debord’s influential theory of the spectacle is vitiated by its lack of historical and analytical differentiation. This article draws on Debord’s own undeveloped distinction between the concentrated spectacle and the diffuse spectacle in order to propose a double genealogy and a fourfold typology of the spectacle since the French Revolution.

The geography of contemporary bohemia is integral to Richard Florida’s thesis of the rise of a new creative class in the USA. The strong correlation between the presence of bohemians and innovative high-tech industries in a number of American cities stands in sharp contrast to the historical image of a bohemian subculture of artists and intellectuals, defined by their antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society. Rather than a sign of social marginality, bohemian life-styles have now become a marker of the ‘new (...) economy’, variously labeled the creative, the cultural or the aesthetic economy. In my paper I want to compare and contrast these two opposed images of bohemia – the 19th-century idea of bohemia as the libertarian other of liberal-bourgeois society and the new, highly topical economic geography of bohemia – with the following questions in mind: How and why does the 19th-century artistic critique of capitalism mutate into an expression of the new spirit of capitalism? Does this change from an antagonistic to an affirmative relationship signal the emergence of a new spirit of art that can be related to the new spirit of capitalism? (shrink)

Despite suggestions that the end of metaphysics leaves us with nothing but history, essential questions about the place of history in a post-metaphysical culture have been neglected. In one sense history "weakens" as the scope for "realism" or a teleological master narrative fall away. But it invites overreaction to suggest that history becomes a "process of weakening" insofar as things have come to be as they are not as the resultants of full, meaningful origins, but only through the "dread accident" (...) of the historical process. The world that has resulted from history is the only one we have, and it weighs on us; in that sense history does not weaken but strengthens. Still, the historical process enveloping us is not Hegelian and necessary but weak and contingent, its outcomes subject to further contest. Conversely, although truth is weak, finite, and provisional, it is not merely consensual or relative precisely because it is historical. To grasp the sense it which history both weakens and strengthens enables us to grasp the scope for learning more deeply from our historical experience. A fuller range of historical questions about modernity would enable us better to understand the ongoing dangers and possibilities of modern politics. (shrink)

Houellebecq’s critical reading of Huxley’s Brave New World in his novel Atomised takes Canetti’s novel Auto da Fe as its template. Houellebecq takes from Canetti the structuring contrast of antithetical brothers and shares his diagnosis of the crisis of Western individualism. Both writers identify the sickness at the heart of Western civilization that presages its coming end as the egotism of the monadic individual, enclosed in a private world of fears and desires. The role of the crowd in Canetti’s novel (...) as the Other of the fallen world of self-interest is taken in Houellebecq by the posthuman vision of social unity beyond division realized through cloning. (shrink)

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its (...) own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art. (shrink)

Agnes Heller’s philosophy of history is divided between A Theory of History (1982) and A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993). The one is a reflection on the stages of historical consciousness, the other is a manifestation of postmodern historical consciousness, situated between the crisis of European philosophy of history and a dawning world-historical consciousness. The crisis of European philosophy of history is defined by the irresolvable contradiction between the absolute present of Hegel’s self-knowing subject of History and the consciousness (...) of the sheer contingency of the historical present. From Hegel to Benjamin philosophy of history sought the absolute redemption of the contingent moment. It is against this philosophical legacy that Heller sets out in A Philosophy of History in Fragments to rethink the meaning of the present as absolute, not in itself but in relationship to the past and future of our present. Our absolute present is thereby revealed as inescapably paradoxical. Just as we live from the afterlife of a departed absolute spirit so the self-consciousness of our post-modernity resides in the self-consciousness with which we endow the past. Beyond this limit we must return to A Theory of History. Its reconstruction of the evolution of historical consciousness points to the emergence of a truly planetary consciousness and hence to the possibility of the end of history in a philosophy of World History. (shrink)

The following reflections, occasioned by Agnes Heller’s death, attempt to reconstruct Heller’s sense of temporality and historicity as the key to her rethinking of the idea of philosophy of history after the demise of the grand narratives in the form of a fragmentary philosophy of history and a theory of history.