Peter Fenves

Taking Stock of the Kantian Sublime

Les dilemmes et les difficultes des diverses variantes du rationalisme et du positivisme durant les vingt dernieres annees ont abouti soit a la renaissance de la metaphysqiue soit a la reapparition et la reaffirmation du sublime

Of Philosophical Style—from Leibniz to Benjamin

This essay seeks to be nothing more than a commentary on three consecutive entries in Convolute N of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Of course, this convolute, which was, until recently, the only one translated into English, has served as the point of entrance and center of attraction for a large number of readers—and with good reason: Nowhere else does Benjamin discuss more directly the stakes of his massive study, and nowhere else, with the possible exception of Convolute K, with its depiction of the Copernican turn in historical intuition, does Benjamin more explicitly lay out the points around which his puzzling venture revolves. Entries on the dialectical image, the idea of progress, and the meaning of Marx, all under the promising title ‘‘Epistemological [Erkenntnistheoretisches], Theory of Progress,’’ give Convolute N its characteristic momentum. The remarks on which this essay comments have almost nothing to do with such matters, however, except e contrario, for they momentarily interrupt a sequence of entries in which the character of the image, the figuration of progress, and the thought of Marx are brought into line. Coming immediately after two suggestive citations—one from a work on nineteenth-century French litera-

The Problem of Popularization in Benjamin, Schrödinger, and Heidegger circa 1935

The essay seeks to show how Benjamin and Heidegger addressed the problem of popularization in the mid-1930s. Locating the source of their respective responses to the problem in Kants distinction between “scholastic” and “popular” language, the essay analyzes congruent passages in the writings of Benjamin and Heidegger where the problem transcends any simple solution, according to which popularization occurs whenever experts find illustrations capable of communicating their concepts to non-experts with a corresponding loss of precision. After showing how Benjamins reception of Arthur Eddington reaches into his theory of the aura, the essay suggests certain affinities between his formulation of this theory in 1935 and a contemporaneous paper of Erwin Schrödinger. It concludes with an analysis of certain passages in Heideggers 1935 lecture, Einführung in die Metaphysik, especially a passage where he, like Schrödinger, he captures an image of a “space” that recedes from illustration through the term “Verschränkung.”

At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy

While searching for the original meanings of the river names of Germany, the etymologist soon discovers that in many cases the names derive from words meaning “river.” So prevalent is this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that gives rise to such modern German verbs as rennen (“to run,” as in the running of a race) and rinnen (“to run,” as in the running of water), both of which are cognates of rhein, the Greek verb that can be found in the famous Heraclitean or pseudo-Heraclitean apothegm, panta rhei, ouden gar menei (“everything flows, nothing remains”). Apropos the name “Ruhr,” which flows into the Rhine, however, the etymologist hesitates. There is a common noun in modern High German, antiquated though it may be, which corresponds to the name of the river and is, in addition, closely related to archaic words that are probably not themselves cognates of rennen and rhein but nevertheless mean something very similar. And yet, in the eyes of the etymologist, there is something perverse about the proposal that the proper name “Ruhr” be associated with the corresponding common noun, as though in this instance, unlike so many others, the name of a river cannot be referred back to a word referring to a flux and thus to the appearance of a Fluss (“river”). The etymologist therefore goes in search of a source for the name Ruhr that remains unencumbered by an ugly association with the identical common noun. The name of the etymologist is Theodor Lohmeyer, whose passion for tracing the source of geographical terms is comparable to that of the Cure, an “excellent man,” who, as recounted in the first volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu, descends upon Marcel’s aunt at particularly inauspicious moments. About the origin of the Rhine, Lohmeyer is both brief and unequivocal: it emerges from the Germanic root-term rana, cognate with both the English run and the Greek rhein (Lohmeyer 1904, 5). Apropos the name “Ruhr,” by contrast, he is highly circumspect: it doubtless could derive from similar-meaning words in Middle German, roren or ruren, themselves derivatives of the Old High German verb hruoran or ruoran and thus related to the modern High German ruhren and

“Workforce without Possessions”: Kafka, “Social Justice,” and the Word Religion

Among the fragments to be found in Franz Kafka’s octavo notebooks, there is a curious proposal for what appears, at first glance, to be a utopian community of dedicated workers. Unlike the surrounding fragments, the proposal is more akin to an historical or sociological document than a literary sketch or philosophicoreligious meditation. It stands out, above all, because of its odd officiousness, as if the insurance office from which Kafka had recently been released suddenly insinuates itself into his literary existence. Kafka called the fragment “Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft,” which I will henceforth translate, with some reservations, as “Workforce without Possessions.”1 Arbeiterschaft designates a body of workers, sometimes—but not necessarily—organized into a union. Unlike workforce, the German term does not imply stored-up labor power, which can be effectively applied to a given economic situation; rather, it suggests nothing beyond a collection of workers whose only commonality lies in the work they are called upon to perform, whether alone or in combination with one another. Probably written in February or March of 1918, “Workforce without Possessions” is neither a defense nor a critique of the October Revolution in Russia, the events of which Kafka seemed to follow with some degree of interest.

Géza von Molnár (1932-2001), in memoriam

We deeply mourn the loss of Géza von Molnár, who died on July 27th of this year. Géza was a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a trusted advisor of this journal. A widely known and much-admired figure in German studies, his work opened up important new perspectives on the relation between literature and philosophy in the age of Goethe. Much of his energy as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of the academic community was also devoted to exploring the complicated cultural conditions and accomplishments of German Jewry. Since 1963, he was a faculty member of Northwestern University; after teaching for a year at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, he returned to Northwestern, serving as chair of the Department of German for a total of ten years. In the late 1980s he established Northwestern’s Graduate Program in German Literature and Critical Thought, while co-founding and directing the Undergraduate Program in European Thought and Culture.