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Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. This book explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. It discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as the author explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, the book opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.

This book examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world. The book considers the aesthetics of Susan Sontag in greater detail. It details how in On Photography (1977), Sontag argues that a photograph of a person who is suffering only aestheticizes the suffering for the viewer's pleasure. It also highlights how Sontag insists in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that such a photograph can have a sustainable moral-political effect precisely because of its aesthetics. The book considers this dramatic change to be symptomatic of a cultural shift in our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It discusses these issues in connection with Gerhard Richter's and Doris Salcedo's art, which is chosen because it is often identified with the anti-aesthetic, even though it is clearly aesthetic. The book reveals the place of critique in contemporary art and confirms that it is integral to art. Finally, it advocates a critical aesthetics that confirms the limitless power of art.

Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. This book fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi perpetrator. Like their fellow Germans, postwar artists and architects grappled with the Nazi past and the problem of defining the Nazi perpetrator—a problem that was thoroughly entangled with contemporary conservative politics and the explosive issue of former Nazis living in postwar Germany. Beginning with the formative connection between Nazi politics and art during the 1930s, this book traces the dilemma of identifying the perpetrator across the entire postwar period. The book examines key works and episodes from West Germany and, after 1989, reunified Germany, showing how the changing perception of the perpetrator deeply impacted art and architecture, even in cases where artworks and buildings seem to have no obvious relation to the Nazi past. The book also reinterprets important periods in the careers of such major figures as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind.

The book presents a highly original reflection on the status of an “anthropology of the contemporary”. Following on the same authors’ Demands of the Day, this new and convincing manuscript gives a coherent elaboration of the central arguments, movements and shifts from research rooted in the experience of the present to a contemporary one understood as an ethos. The book contains two highly original case studies which illustrate the relevance and richness of this approach. In Part 1, the authors undertake an erudite discussion of philosophical grounds and concepts necessary for an anthropology of the contemporary by way of an ongoing engagement with arguments established by Max Weber, John Dewey and Michel Foucault (e.g. his notion of ‘foyers d’expérience’), as well as with other authors (e.g. Kant, Blumenberg, Warburg, Geertz). Central to this engagement is the guiding idea of anthropological inquiry as ‘practice of form-giving’ linked to an ongoing attention to questions of ethics. The book considers inquiry--and its aftermath—where a near future is at stake, one, however, which is not (or only in part) determined by the past and the present. Part II consists of two case studies: one on the Rushdie Affair, the second one on ‘Gerhard Richter’s Pathos’. Based on different kinds of texts (interviews, letters, printed articles, anthropological research, etc.), they demonstrate the basic ideas of an exploration of the contemporary and its key challenge (for anthropology and contemporaries): how to conceptualize and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct.

This book uses critical theory to answer key gender-related questions about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group that was masterminded by women and which terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. The questions include: Why were women so prominent in the RAF? And what does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? The book analyzes works by pivotal writers and artists, including Gerhard Richter and Elfriede Jelinek, that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. The book maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces “postmilitancy” as a new critical term. It demonstrates how the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy but also investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. The book uses previously untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. It also focuses on German cinema and provides interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff and Fatih Akın. This analysis discloses dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body and the relationship between mass media and the arts.