Category: Fiction
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Frankenstein, oder, Der moderne Prometheus
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelleys Roman Frankenstein, oder der moderne Prometheus, hier in der deutschen Übertragung Friedrich Polakovics’ (Carl Hanser Verlag, München 1970) zugänglich, stellt eine der eigentümlichsten Problemkonstellationen dar, die die europäische Romantik hervorgebracht hat: Er befragt nicht allein die Grenzen naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis und die Verantwortlichkeit des schöpferischen Subjekts, sondern erprobt an einem konstruierten Extremfall, was…
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Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792 and here read in its second edition as presented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, is one of the most consequential and philosophically ambitious texts in the history of European moral and political…
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; revised for book publication 1902) poses with compressed precision a question that refuses easy resolution: whether the categories through which European civilization understands itself — progress, idealism, civilization, moral purpose — are constitutively dependent upon the very violence they profess to redeem. The novella’s governing ambition is not to…
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Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography
Free, Melania develops a sustained inquiry into how a public figure can be simultaneously hyper-visible and structurally unknowable, and how a biographical account can remain evidentially responsible under such conditions. Its governing ambition is to reconstruct Melania Trump’s practical agency—within marriage, media, and the institutional architecture of the first lady’s office—without dissolving that agency into…
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Ewiger Friede on the Earth’s Surface: Aesthetic Testimony, Historical Complicity, and the Inherent Negativity of Peace in Kant
Anna Enström’s lecture proposes a reorientation of the contemporary reading of Kant’s peace theory by binding Zum ewigen Frieden to an aesthetic and material reflection on surfaces: the textual surface of the essay, the earthly surface that grounds Kant’s cosmopolitan right, and the historically sedimented surface of Europe’s war architecture as it reappears in Elle-Mie…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Gaze
The book advances the claim that Beckett’s visual universe can be described neither through a general theory of “modernist perception” nor through a simple psychoanalytic allegory of seeing, but only by reconstructing the specific way in which the gaze functions as an impersonal, structuring dimension where subject and world fail to meet. In forming a…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice
Brown’s Beckett, Lacan and the Voice stakes its claim on a very precise terrain: it proposes that Beckett’s entire œuvre can be re-read if one takes seriously the Lacanian thesis that the voice is a specific psychoanalytic object—neither pure sound nor mere vehicle of meaning, but the residue of language that both grounds and unravels…
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‘The Unnamable’ by Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s The Unnamable presents itself as the limit‐case of narrative fiction and as an experiment in what remains of subjectivity when every conventional support of the novel—plot, character, world, and even a stable first person—is progressively dissolved. It pursues, with almost pedantic consistency, the question of whether there can be a self at all once…
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Stories from Wagner
The distinctive contribution of Stories from Wagner lies in its careful construction of a narrative hinge between mythic material and the nineteenth-century project of the music drama. It composes a lucid, story-forward surface that remains legible to new readers while quietly staging a set of methodical choices about origin, authority, and transmission—how oral legends, medieval…
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Philosophical Book Review: Chasing Homer: Good Luck, and Nothing Else: Odysseus’s Cave
This book stages a controlled experiment in narrative pressure and philological memory. László Krasznahorkai compresses a pursuit story into a sequence of conceptual modules—Velocity, Faces, Relating to sheltered places, and so on—whose cumulative claim is that survival, once reduced to method, becomes a cognitive discipline that interrogates its own premises. The distinctive contribution lies in…
Simon Gros 