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Idealistic Studies

Volume 38, Issue 1/2, Spring/Summer 2008

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1. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Jeffrey A. Bernstein

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2. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Jeffrey A. Bernstein

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This paper attempts to explore the problem of collective identity and its subsequent historical legacies through a reading of Spinoza’s and Freud’s respective accounts of Moses. In working their way through the aggadah (i.e., legend) of Moses, both Spinoza and Freud find the halakhic (i.e., legal) core of collectivity to be expressed in and as social mediation. Moreover, both thinkers discover that the occlusion of this core leads to a collective trauma (in Freud’s sense), the symptom of which is the formation of the ‘theological-political’ (in Spinoza’s sense).
3. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Rebecca Comay

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This essay explores the familiar German ideology according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying proportions, precede, succeed, accommodate, and generally upstage a political revolution whose defining feature was increasingly thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. Germany thus sets out to quarantine the political threat of revolution while siphoning off and absorbing the revolution’s intensity and energy for thinking as such. The essay holds that this structure corresponds to the psychoanalytic logic of trauma: the dissolution of the event into a missed event, and the hypertrophic investment in the trivial, the non-event, the negligible remainder.
4. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Alejandro A. Vallega

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The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfolding of spirits out of singularities that overwhelm any single or universal call for unity. In terms of history, this concerns not a thinking that gives sense to history through concepts, but a thought that from its specificity and situation unfolds diverse articulations, and hence configurations of the senses of spirit or histories.
5. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Elaine P. Miller

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I argue that in Julia Kristeva’s concept of negativity, conceived of as the recuperation, through transformation, of a traumatic remnant of the past, we can find a parallel to what Theodor Adorno, following Walter Benjamin, calls a mimesis that in its emphasis on non-identity is able to remain faithful to the ban on graven images interpreted materialistically rather than theologically. A connection between negativity and the theological ban on images is suggested in Adorno’s claim that a ban on positive representations of utopia leads to a practice of negating the negative, that is, of exposing the injustices of modern life. Both Adorno and Kristeva discern in contemporary art a capacity to critique modernity and envision a better world, but insist that this art must not represent what it indicates. I also examine Benjamin’s writings on photography in order to argue that a mimesis that respects the ban on graven images moves us beyond the systematic optimism of the Hegelian dialectic, and extends the philosophy of history into the unknown of the unconscious.
6. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Dmitri Nikulin

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This article traces some modern conceptions of memory in history (Halbwachs, Nora), indirectly comparing them with the ancient poetic tradition of so-called “catalogue poetry.” In the discussion of memory and oblivion, I argue that history encompasses multiple histories rather than constituting one single teleological and universal history. Every history is produced by a historical narrative that follows and interprets what may be called the historical proper, which comprises lists of names of people, things, or events that have to be kept and transmitted within a history. The historical and the narrative within a history are relatively independent, insofar as the narrative that interprets the historical may in principle change, whereas the historical has to be preserved, which is the primary task of historical memory. Historical being, then, is being remembered within a history.
7. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Daniela Vallega-Neu

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This article aims at making Heidegger’s understanding of history fruitful for a consideration of history that both takes into account the complexity and multitude of historical lineages and also pays attention to smaller historical events. After revisiting Heidegger’s understanding of history in terms of a history of being and our being-historical, the author brings into play the notion of rhythm. She thinks of rhythms of history in terms of durations of historical configurations of things and events in relation to their beginnings and endings (their rhythmic caesura), and in relation to other historical confi gurations. This leads to an understanding of history in terms of being-historical that does not simply indicate things happening in time, but instead focuses on the happening that determines how things appear and are deployed.
8. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Eric Sean Nelson

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This paper explores Dilthey’s radical transformation of epistemology and the human sciences through his projects of a critique of historically embodied reason and his hermeneutics of historically mediated life. Answering criticisms that Dilthey overly depends on epistemology, I show how for Dilthey neither philosophy nor the human sciences should be reduced to their theoretical, epistemological, or cognitive dimensions. Dilthey approaches both immediate knowing (Wissen) and theoretical knowledge (Erkenntnis) in the context of a hermeneutical phenomenology of historical life. Knowing is not an isolated activity but an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by situated reflexive awareness (Innewerden) and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). As embedded in an historical relational context, knowing does not only consist of epistemic validity claims about representational contents but is fundamentally practical, involving all of human existence. Empirically informed Besinnung, with its double reference to sense as meaning and bodily awareness, orients Dilthey’s inquiry rather than the “irrationalism” of immediate intuition or the “rationalism” of abstract epistemological reasoning.
9. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Jason Kemp Winfree

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This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community.
10. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1/2
Alan Udoff

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It is not at once evident what is meant by “the question of the history of philosophy.” This essay sets forth a way of looking at that question by locating it on the path taken by Nietzsche’s consideration of the question of the philosophy of history.