In 1947 Horkheimer and Adorno connected the Enlightenment with totalitarianism. Since when the Left has drifted into the language and imagery of the European Counter-Enlightenment, the movement against 1776 and 1789. Bronner sets out to reclaim the heritage of progressive politics.

Over his distinguished career as a European intellectual historian and cultural critic, Martin Jay has explored a variety of major themes: the Frankfurt School, the exile of German intellectuals in America during the Nazi era, Western Marxism, the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, the discourse of experience in modern Europe and America, and lying in politics. Essays from the Edge assembles Jay’s writings from the intersections of this intellectual journey. Several essays focus on methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences: the limits of interdisciplinarity, the issue of national or universal philosophy, cultural relativism and visuality, and the implications of periodization in historical narrative. Others examine the concept of "scopic regime" and the metaphors of revolution and the gardening impulse. Among the theorists treated at length are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The essays also include several of Jay’s Salmagundi columns, dealing with subjects as varied as the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, the impact of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and the demise of the Partisan Review. All of these efforts can be considered what Arthur Schopenhauer called, to borrow the title of one of his most celebrated collections, "parerga and paralipomena." As essays from the edges of major projects, they illuminate Jay’s major arguments, elaborate points made only in passing in the larger texts, and explore ideas farther than would have been possible, given the focus of the larger works themselves. The result is a lively, diverse offering from an extraordinary intellect.

In this study, Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of the Trauerspiel study, showing how its thematics persisted well into the later writings of the thirties. For by introducing the materialistic category of natural history in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin not only criticized idealistic conceptions of history writing but also expressed an ethico-theological call for another kind of history, one no longer anthropocentric in nature. This profound critique of historical thinking, Hanssen shows, went hand in hand with a radical de-limitation of the human subject, informed by his interest in questions about ethics, the law, and justice. Through an analysis of the seemingly innocuous figures of stones, animals, and angels that are scattered throughout his writings, Hanssen reconstructs the often neglected ethical dimension of his historical thought. In the course of doing so, she not only places Benjamin's work in the context of contemporaries such as Adorno, Cohen, Lukacs, Kafka, Kraus, and Heidegger but also demonstrates the persistence of Benjaminian themes in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.

Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders. Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.

A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twenty-first-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work. In an introduction that comprehensively defines the planetary model of art, culture, and cultural-aesthetic interpretation, the editors explain how the living planet is emerging as distinct from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism and is becoming a new ground for exciting work in contemporary literature, visual and media arts, and social humanities. Written by internationally recognized scholars, the twelve essays that follow illustrate the unfolding of a new vision of potential planetary community that retools earlier models based on the nation-state or political “blocs” and reimagines cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships for the post–Cold War era.

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

With stunning regularity, the search for our cosmic roots has been yielding remarkable new discoveries about the universe and our place in it. In his compelling book, Origins: The Quest for Our Cosmic Roots addresses some of the most profound issues humans have ever confronted. In his compelling book, veteran science journalist Tom Yulsman chronicles the latest discoveries and describes in clear and engaging terms what they mean. From the interior of protons to the outer reaches of the universe, and from the control room of one of the world's most powerful particle accelerators to an observatory atop the tallest mountain in the Pacific basin, Yulsman takes readers on a fantastic voyage at the cutting edge of science.