Introduction; Chapter 1 Urban Flights: The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York; Chapter 2 The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists; Chapter 3 The Morals of Genealogy: Or Is There a Poststructuralist Ethics?; Chapter 4 The Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis: Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille; Chapter 5 Women in Dark Times: Agnes Heller and Hannah Arendt; Chapter 6 “The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology: Or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?; Chapter 7 The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn; Chapter 8 The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism; Chapter 9 Scopic Regimes of Modernity; Chapter 10 Ideology and Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything Behind the Mirror's Tain?; Chapter 11 Modernism and the Retreat from Form; Chapter 12 The Textual Approach to Intellectual History; Chapter 13 Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legitimation in the Humanities;