Tragic Play explores the deep philosophical significance of classic and modern tragedies in order to cast light on the tragic dimensions of contemporary experience. Romanticism, it has often been claimed, brought tragedy to an end, making modernity the age after tragedy. Christoph Menke opposes this modernist prejudice by arguing that tragedy remains alive in the present in the distinctively new form of the playful, ironic, and self-consciously performative. Through close readings of plays by William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller, and Botho Strauss, Menke shows how...

Bachelorarbeit aus dem Jahr 2009 im Fachbereich Padagogik - Berufserziehung, Berufsbildung, Weiterbildung, Note: 1,5, Fachhochschule Munster (Institut fur Berufliche Lehrerbildung (IBL)), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Wirft der aufmerksame Zuschauer einen Blick in die heutigen Nachrichten, so erhalt er einen unmittelbaren Eindruck von der rasanten Entwicklung der Gesellschaft. Der demographische Wandel vollzieht schleichend seinen Lauf, die Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien gewinnen zunehmend an Bedeutung und die Halbwertszeit des Wissens verandert sich kontinuierlich. All diese...

The book aims at a new exposition of the basic idea of modern aesthetics by way of a reconstruction of its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment. The claim is that the historical invention of aesthetics was not about expanding the range of legitimate objects of philosophical inquiry--these objects all existed before aesthetics. Rather, aesthetics, by introducing the category of the "aesthetic," fundamentally redefined these objects. But most importantly, the reconstruction of the historical genesis of aesthetics shows that the...

This book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment.

Force demonstrates that aesthetics, and hence modern philosophy, began twice. On the one hand, Baumgarten's Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the "subject": as a totality of faculties; an agent defined by capabilities; one who is able. Yet an aesthetics in the Baumgartian manner, as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of...

Christoph Menke is a third-generation Frankfurt School theorist, and widely acknowledged as one of the most interesting philosophers in Germany today. His lead essay focuses on the fundamental question for legal and political philosophy: the relationship between law and violence. The first part of the essay shows why and in what precise sense the law is irreducibly violent; the second part establishes the possibility of the law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence. The volume contains responses by Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez, Daniel Loick, Alessandro Ferrara, Ben Morgan,...

Christoph Menke is a third-generation Frankfurt School theorist, and widely acknowledged as one of the most interesting philosophers in Germany today. His lead essay focuses on the fundamental question for legal and political philosophy: the relationship between law and violence. The first part of the essay shows why and in what precise sense the law is irreducibly violent; the second part establishes the possibility of the law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence. The volume contains responses by Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez, Daniel Loick, Alessandro Ferrara, Ben Morgan,...