... of an aesthetics of “failure” that observes das Bilderverbot , veils a messianic vision of justice. Benjamin's gnostic picture of modernity as a bureaucratic prison house reflects Josef K.'s victimized view of his situation in The Trial . Hans Blumenberg's therapeutic account of myth suggests a view of Kafka's...

... of the transcendental life force in the human species as a whole. Copyright © 2019 by New German Critique, Inc. 2019 Martin Heidegger Oskar Goldberg modern gnosticism vitalism geopolitics This article brings together two thinkers, one of whom, Martin Heidegger, will be known to all the readers...

... theology as it plays out in his philosophy of history as well as his historical anthropology and lays a particular emphasis on the peculiar role that the figure of Judaism plays in them. © 2013 by New German Critique, Inc. 2013 Beyond Gnosticism and Magic...

... and prejudices and of misreading the autonomy of literature as an end in itself. Foster establishes this position by looking at Stanley Corngold's essay “Adorno's ‘Notes on Kafka,’” particularly Adorno's account of Kafka's “gnosticism.” Foster then draws on Adorno's recently published lectures on aesthetics...

... : Harvard University Press . Bloom Harold . 1975 . Kabbalah and Criticism . New York : Seabury . ———. 1987 . “Scholem: Unhistorical or Jewish Gnosticism.” In Gershom Scholem: Modern Critical Views , edited by Bloom Harold , 207 – 20 . New York : Chelsea House . Campanini...

... to deter- Willem Styfhals 187 mine the normative identity of Judaism and its role in modern culture. Focus- ing on the heresies of gnosticism and Pantheism in Scholem’s work, Benjamin Lazier draws the same conclusion: “The program is clear: heresy...

....” Humans’ lifelong task is to ease the burden of the absolute, and culture is work on that distance. That, I think, is what Blumenberg’s philosophy is about. It is what The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is about. Humans cannot bear God; that is why they invented, as the first overcoming of Gnosticism...

...Martin Jay The challenge of nominalism in philosophy and theology to the reality of universals has been a motor of modern thought. Translated into aesthetic terms, it has abetted resistance to generic conventions and helped undermine essentialist notions of aesthetic form. Theodor W. Adorno had...

... we understand that the “medieval” in that argument is as much the invention of the modern imagi- nation as it was a historical reality. A third approach combines aspects of both: theocracy was and forever will be an option for organizing our political lives. It is in fact the default option...

... of Gnosticism,” while fascinating in Blumenberg’s detailed delineation as the origin and legitimacy of modernity, is not exactly a barn burner as a programmatic statement. 23. For a partial examination of Blumenberg’s relation to Heidegger (and Husserl), see my entry “Sorge” in Blumenberg Lesen...

... Modern Academic Scholarship.” 25. Scholem, Shabetai Ẓevi (translated as Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi ). 26. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism ; Scholem, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (translated as Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah ); Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der...

... ; Trierweiler, review of Work on Myth , 155 ; Lindahl, “Macht en rationaliteit,” 10 ; Ingram, “Blumenberg and the Philosophical Grounds of Historiography,” 5 ; Palti, “In Memoriam,” 504 ; Yack, “Myth and Modernity,” 253 ; Bouwsma, review of Legitimacy , 698. 42. Lazier, “Overcoming Gnosticism...

... and theoretically, to domesticate and distance ourselves from the relentless indifference of the real. Escape from the world—the temptation of world-denying gnosticism—is fruitless, although the temptation to do so always remains. Thus modernity, Blumenberg argued, could be understood as entail- ing...

..., uniqueness, individuality, and contingency 2. Ibid., 198. 3. See Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–29; John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physi- ognomy (London: Whittingam, 1804); Charles Darwin...

... it, but Bloch’s purpose is thus quasi-Gnostic, in that he uses the concept of time and humanity’s separation from the world in time to reconcile with the world and its completion as something that cannot yet be comprehended. He sees no separate ontology but that of incomplete- ness, so that the transitive...

... of aesthetic autonomy may strike critics as a remnant of antiquated values of social elitism and context transcendence that we often associate with the artwork in the age of high modernism. Adorno was well aware of such problems. As a theorist who willfully adopted a precarious stance in a “force field...

... certain manner; appeal must be made to collections of images which, taken together and through intuition alone, before any considered analyses are made, are capable of evoking the mass of sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society...

... to claim that the dissolution of any transcendent source of value and authority in the modern world—the advent of nihilism in that sense—is a liberating opening initiated in Western culture by the figure of Christ: Paul's interpretation of Christ's kenosis, divinity lowering itself into human mortality...

.... In Heidegger’s hands, the great religious thinker had been made godless. Heidegger’s reading of Kierkegaard has come to represent the most important milestone in the move from a Christian to an atheistic existential- ism.1 It is a watershed in modern European intellectual history. At stake...

... Being and Event, the event often emerges as an irruption, taking on a quasi- miraculous significance reminiscent of some of the Gnostic-utopian thinkers of the 1920s. The main difference between the two here resides in the gap between being and becoming. While Badiou asserts the primacy of being...