German Literature Commons^™

The Small Worlds Of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, And The Queer Temporalities Of Early Life, Lauren Shizuko Stone

Gender & Sexuality

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value …

Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan [Toc], Marc Redfield

Philosophy & Theory

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronunce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities, and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context …

Heidegger And Hölderlin On Aether And Life, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Nietzsches Lyrik. Archilochus, Musik, Metrik, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S Zarathustra And Parodic Style: On Lucian’S Hyperanthropos And Nietzsche’S Übermensch, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’s Übermensch derives from Lucian of Samosata’s hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’s Kataplous – literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. The Kataplous he tyrannos, usually translated Downward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) …

Future Past: The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra And Eternity Or What Is The Weight Of The Greatest Heavy Weight?, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Zu Nietzsches Stil, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Das Thema von Nietzsches Stil ist hier sowohl von Bedeutung als Frage nach dem Wesen jenes Stils wie auch als Frage danach, was er in philosophischer, nicht einfach in asthetischer oder literarischer Hinsicht erreicht hat. Hier wird nachgelegt, dass die Kunst des Lesens, die technische Kunst des hörens als eine Art des Hörens in einer philosophischen Seinsweise zu verstehen sei. Damit setzt sie nicht allein eine diskursive Kunst musikalischen Gespürs seitens des schreibenden, sondern eigentlich auch seitens des Lesenden voraus. Untersucht wird vor allem, Nietzsches Aphorismos im Rahmen des Antisemitismus. Diese außerordentlich komplexe innere Ausrichtung von Nietzsches Stil ist die …

Nietzsche And Eros Between The Devil And God’S Deep Blue Sea: The Problem Of The Artist As Actor–Jew–Woman, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In just one aphorism in The Gay Science, Nietzsche arrays “The Problem of the Artist” in a complex, highly reticulated constellation. Addressing every member of the excluded grouping of disenfranchised “others,” Nietzsche turns to the destitution of a god of love keyed to the self- or inward-turning absorption of the human heart. His ultimate and irrecusably tragic project to restore the innocence of becoming requires the affirmation of the problem of suffering as the task of learning how to love. Nietzsche sees the eros of art as what can teach us how to make things beautiful, desirable, lovable in the …