Babette Babich

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era of screen-being, this essay reads the challenges of on-line music magazines, Leonard Cohen and k.d.lang, between modes of memorialization, including a reading of Anders’s poetic memorial on the violence of Walter Benjamin’s death to conclude with Ivan Illich on the ongoing expropriation of death (and health) today.

Beginning with a reflection on ‘conceptual schemes’ and ‘very’ ideas and proceeding to examine different approaches to thinking philosophy of science not only with Kant but also between traditional analytic and hermeneutico-phenomenological approaches, this essay features a review of Kant’s 1755 solar nebular hypothesis and a reading of Nietzsche and Kant on cosmology along with a reflection on chemistry and the properties of cinnabar. Overall it is argued that a philosophy of science must be critical rather than normative/prescriptive. Seeking to raise the question of science along with the question of truth, the essay also raises the question of esoteric historiography in science, including alchemy.

What I here call Merleau-Ponty’s crystal lamellae corresponds to a phenomenology of the crystal of the interstices of being: the between. Phenomenology’s crystal as I refer to this here is a layered in and through spatial tensions, shimmering, overlapping, intervals magnifying planes and surfaces in all dimensions. This is a crystallography in words to retrace the relations of lived space, tactically navigated, anticipated, recalled, as this experienced awareness of the world around, the places in which we live, especially public spaces, layered in layers, including lattice arrays of space, seen and unseen, including a reflection on art, aesthetic production, especially but not only in Lascaux, and perception, on anger, and the political including the terrorism of capital.

To talk about automation and invisibility in our digitally projected world, I argue the case for the “cancelled” or lost voices of postphenomenology such as, most notably, Günther Anders. Reflecting on Nietzsche as on the role of GPS for location and for dating services like Grindr, I take up Nietzschean humanism including the fragility of his portable brass typing ball, latterly not unlike daisy wheel printer technologies and the programmed death of ink jet printers. With a casual reflection on pocket robots and screen-intentionality, GPS, triangulating perambulation, and programmed addiction, I raise the necropolitical question of climate change as of technology and its scotosis.

What is the nineteenth century? If some historians of the "long" nineteenth century date its beginning back to 1750, does it end in 1900 or, as is said, in 1914 or, as one German historian reflects on the ongoing influence of the so-called "historical century," is it still ongoing? In continental philosophy, the nineteenth century seems to have a certain durability, to take the case of Slavoj Žižek and other Hegelians like Robert Pippin. Is Nietzsche representative of his own times? Or is he, as he himself says, "posthumous"? Robert C. Holub's book introduces Nietzsche as "The Timely Meditator", the better to contradict what Holub describes as Nietzsche's "conscious effort to present himself as an 'untimely'...

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and the Making of Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution.

This essay raises the question of material hermeneutics in Heelan’s philosophy of techno-science. For Heelan, a continental philosophy of technoscience, referring to Husserl and Heidegger and especially to Merleau-Ponty, features hermeneutic contexts of mathematics and measurement as well as laboratory observation, including what the later Heelan spoke of as “portable laboratories,” for the sake of objectivity and “meaning making.” For Paul Feyerabend, this material practice corresponded to the use of both techniques of observation and instrumentation, and not less “propaganda” in the case of Galileo which practice for Heelan included the ontological status of measures and numbers as well as apprenticeship in what Heelan called “contingent local practical cultural milieus.” The essay includes a discussion of Heidegger on mathematics and Bruno Latour on pasteurization.

This collection dedicated to and including David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. Contributors include Babette Babich, Howard Caygill, Timothy M.Costelloe, Andrej Démuth / Slávka Démuthová, Bernard Freydberg, Peter Kivy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Christopher MacLachlan, Emilio Mazza, Roger Schiner, Roger Scruton, and Dabney Townsend,

Günther Anders offers one of the first phenomenological analyses of broadcast radio and its transformation of the contemporary experience of music. Anders also develops a reflection on its political consequences as he continues his reflection in a discussion of radio and newsreel, film and television in his 1956 ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’. A reflection on the consequences of this transformation brings in Friedrich Kittler’s reflection on radio and precision bombing. A further reflection on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘speech without response’ permits a review of digital culture and the self-creation of the digital consumer absorbed in what Anders named a schizo-topia, that is, today, an autistic culture of distraction, displacement, and self-driven surveillance.

This essay foregrounds “covers” of popular recorded songs as well as male and female desire, in addition to Nietzsche’s interest in composition, together with his rhythmic analysis of Ancient Greek as the basis of what he called the “spirit of music” with respect to tragedy. The language of “sonic branding” allows a discussion of what Günther Anders described as the self-creation of mass consumer but also the ghostly time-space of music in the broadcast world. A brief allusion to Rilke complements a similarly brief reference to Jankelevitch’s “ineffable.”

A book reading between k.d. lang's interpretation of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah,' male and female desire, today's network culture, Adorno on radio and Nietzsche on the Greeks. The working of music is transformed by digital media, broadcast and recording dynamics. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, musically, as joy.

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research

Responsibility has traditionally been associated with a project of appropriation, understood as the securing of a sphere of mastery for a willful subject, and enframed in a metaphysics of will, causality and subjectivity. In that tradition, responsibility is understood in terms of the subjectum that lies at the basis of the act, as ground of imputation, and opens onto the project of a self-legislation and self-appropriation of the subject. However, one finds in Heidegger and Derrida the reversal—indeed, the deconstruction—of such a tradition, and responsibility is approached instead as an exposure to an inappropriable: assumption of an inappropriable thrownness and finitude for Heidegger, ‘experience of the im-possible’ for Derrida. I will explore how responsibility can be thought from such inappropriable, in an experience that Derrida called ‘ex-appropriation.’ In the process, I will engage the very complex and tortuous relation of Derrida to Heidegger

Günther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To make this case I draw on Baudrillard on ‘speech without response’ and Gadamer on conversation.

This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche's thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel — names commonly associated with Darwin — they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche's thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation of Darwin's views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin's class-based racism, but Nietzsche's argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average man. This insight drives Nietzsche's view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Übermensch, which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources.