... reflection on the entwining of religious symbols and social theory by Habermas, Vattimo, and Girard brings to light an alternative project, namely, the aestheticization of religion. © 2013 by New German Critique, Inc. 2013 Nihilism and Belief in Contemporary European Thought...

... exist on one experiential continuum. The difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of bringing them together is a particularly revealing index of the practical deficit in Adorno's thinking. © 2013 by New German Critique, Inc. 2013 Thought Woken by Memory: Adorno’s Circuitous Path to Utopia...

... of today. New German Critique, Inc. 2009 A Close Reading of Georg Simmel’s Essay “How Is Society Possible?” The Thought of the Outside and Its Various Incarnations Stéphane Symons In the following close reading of Georg Simmel’s “How Is Society...

...Adi Armon During the Weimar years Leo Strauss was intellectually and spiritually close to streams of thought that were averse to liberalism, enlightenment, and democracy. Specifically, he was mostly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. The political philosophy...

... utopias of both consumerism and communism, considering these objects in the context of the history of Soviet constructivism and the nonofficial practices to emerge later in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Hermann Glöckner: Waste as a Figure of Thought...

...Fred Rush Theodor W. Adorno has a complex attitude toward utopian thought. Although he views as destructive and dangerous fascist and “vulgar” Marxist strands of utopianism and has a subtle diagnostic critique of their attractions and deficiencies, he finds the proper use of utopian imagination...

...Gili Kliger While the founding members of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor W. Adorno, devoted much of their thought to aesthetic experience, Jürgen Habermas came to reflect on aesthetics only sparingly. This article considers the role of Adorno's aesthetic theory in Habermas's thought...

...Noah B. Strote This essay traces the historical evolution of a novel type of individual in western and especially German-speaking Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: the Jew who recognized himself, and was recognized by others, through the way he thought as opposed to how he looked...

..., Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilbert Simondon—these concepts came to define the place of Husserl in modern thought. Husserl's phenomenology structured the use and meaning of these concepts for a new generation of French philosophy; at the same time, it came under increased scrutiny, at least in part on account...

...Victoria I. Burke Goethe thought that Antigone's celebrated speech of defiance, attesting to the irreplaceability of Polyneices, was surely spurious. This motive for her action, he thought, bordered on the comic. Hegel, however, takes seriously the irreplaceability of the brother and women's desire...

...Edward Baring In the early reception of Martin Heidegger in Europe, networks of religious philosophers and theologians, in particular dialectical theologians and neo-scholastics, helped carry Heidegger's thought throughout and beyond the German-speaking world. Despite the paucity of references...

... and Scholem’s thought also reveals a deep intellectual affinity that both were unwilling to face. This article shows how Scholem and Taubes had a surprisingly similar understanding of the nature of messianism, though not its scope. For Scholem, messianism remains a strictly Jewish phenomenon; for Taubes...

... the class-based identifications associated with the proletariat into the race-based categories that redefined the people, and hence the workers, in line with antisemitic thought. The writings of the prolific but largely forgotten August Winnig (1878–1956) can be used to reconstruct how workerdom came...

...Stefanos Geroulanos This essay, a history of multiple receptions, assesses three interdependent innovations in French thought during the 1930s: the ascendancy of several Russian émigré intellectuals, especially the historian of religion and science Alexandre Koyré; the introduction...

... form of criticism as an intervention into the Methodenstreit (methodological debate) and the field of social energetics, two crucial discussions around 1900 on the future of the humanities. The article also shows that Worringer's new criticism, which takes the form of the Denkbild (thought-image...

...Brian Britt Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as “Critique of Violence” (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates...

...Dan Diner In this article Diner briefly rethinks the impact of enlightenment as a historical current of thought and of modernity as its material equivalent. The text unfolds its argument against the backdrop of growing intellectual skepticism toward Western culture and its achievements, especially...

...David Kaufmann The theological underpinnings of Theodor W. Adorno's thought are nowhere clearer than in his insistence that reconciliation ( Versöhnung ) is a form of redemption ( Erlösung ). This essay charts the relation between these two terms by looking at Adorno's dialectically mortified...

... to be one rooted in the political, economic, and psychological analysis of individuals and the society in which they live. Many of these themes were already addressed in the twentieth century, and one thinker in particular—Ernst Bloch—made some of the same thought discoveries that are being made...

... own thought, an intellectual messianism or revolutionary nihilism that frames Kafka's legal world with a radical critique of law. The verdict against modernity that Benjamin finds in Kafka is couched in a series of theologically tinted figures. The obscurity of Kafka's “parables,” the fruit...