... on the theme of “unburdening from the absolute”—the task of human beings to keep an overwhelming reality at bay. Marquard thus interprets him mainly as a proponent of the German current of “philosophical anthropology.” The text also sheds light on Blumenberg’s relationship to finitude, his life...

... autonomous listening (always already institutionalized in terms of habitus) to automatic listening (absolutizing habitus through executable algorithms), the article detects a link to technological misrecognition, whereby the sensuous/immediate and humanizing must—as a condition of its possibility—also...

... his mind, however, Strauss, a refugee in England and then in America, began to retreat from the ideas that had influenced him during the 1920s and from his own previous attitude toward certain elements of modern civilization. This retreat was not clear, absolute, or complete but complicated, vague...

... for philosophy, however, with a shift from analysis to pragmatism: while metaphorology demanded, retroactively, that absolute metaphors be revisited throughout the history of philosophy to gauge the plasticity lost by philosophical language, Blumenberg’s fabulology proposes, proactively, to change philosophical...

... the “turn to religion” in recent and contem- porary Continental philosophy, Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Jour- nal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 1–25. 74 Hannah Arendt on the Secular The Problem of an Absolute The baseline for appreciating the challenge of fi nding...

... had the absolute subject-object totality of Hegel’s system broken apart by the beginning of the twentieth century, but subject and object themselves had broken up into numerous mutually opposed subjects and objects, each declaring the subject matter and the practice of philosophy to be something...

.... According to Horkheimer, metaphysics, as classically conceived, is concerned with securing an absolutely perfect understanding of ultimate reality. Traditionally, this is understood in terms of the inquiring subject trying to discern with perfect clarity the fundamentally unified and universal structure...

..., such as ecomodernist fantasies of controlling the Earth system. Blumenberg’s account of philosophical anthropology in Work on Myth contains four elements: the terminus a quo (absolutism of reality / creature of deficiencies), a compensatory lifeworld, self-assertion, and an implicit idea of humanity as a life...

.... On an anthropological scale the situated fragility of the human body clashes with the claims of ideology put across in language. Here literature works to expose the fragility of absolute master narratives and ideologies, revealing the lethal dimension of words while corroding the violence of the absolute...

... of a uni- versalist internationalism; and its preference for charging Eichmann with a “crime against humanity” rather than a specific one against the Jewish people. But the most fundamental of Blumenberg’s charges was against Arendt’s alleged truth-telling absolutism, which was symptomatic...

... have meant “our glassy essence” (to quote Richard Rorty, citing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure , in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ), 14 but an infinitely wider dimension and greater depth of and in the soul, “the spiritual” finds the objectivity, universality, absoluteness, and true...

... Alexander . Lesbarkeit nach Hans Blumenberg . Berlin : de Gruyter , 2020 . Zill Rüdiger . Der absolute Leser: Hans Blumenberg; Eine intellektuelle Biografie . Berlin : Suhrkamp , 2020 . 10. Blumenberg, History, Metaphors, Fables . For an accessible introduction to Blumenberg’s...

...- fashioned about it (“Die Zeit,” 22). But Adorno was a thinker who always knew that for humans there could be no absolute beginning. His entire intellectual profi le—especially when it comes to formulating problems of the conception and critique of language—represents a reworking of impulses, intuitions...

...” (ND, 17). By expressing itself, the subject frees itself from itself and from the captured and reduced object concealed behind every unful- filled need ND( , 92). Taken to the extreme, expressive absolution inaugurates one’s ecstatic existence outside oneself, the existence no longer encumbered...

...- criminate denial of anything positive, the stereotyped formula of nothing- ness as used by Buddhism, ignores the ban on calling the absolute by its name. (DE, 17) Instead of magic—the divinization of the immediate—Judaism insists on strict categorical distinctions, on making sure...

... practice? Adorno also offers us a way into interrogating the rela- tionship between what he termed “the absolute art work and the absolute commodity”—which, it should now be clear, enlightens a central axis of Glöckner’s small-scale works. Despite their abstraction, metaphysical, or subjective...

... as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction . (TF, 202; my emphasis) Here Adorno not only claims that film’s representational basis is its primary limitation; he also provides a characterization of what he considers film’s essence. According...

... that was accomplished in Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise deprived the law of its divine and absolute authority and of its public political function. What remains in the post-Spinoza age is a notion of revelation as a personal experience of a call that gives itself to Heidegger’s secularized, interior...

... as a locus of political identity finds its counterpoint in what one could call Blumenberg’s political anti-absolutism. It comes to the fore most succinctly in his confrontation with Schmitt in Legitimacy . The story of this intellectual standoff has been told many times, and here I give only a brief...

... intersubjectivity, in other words, that is not absolute and mechanical but is not altogether relative either. Instrumental science, by laying claim to a depersonalized absolute, as Husserl insisted in his last book, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, erases the self, dam...