Friedrich A. Kittler: Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985–) [German, English]

“This is a highly original book about the connections between historical moment, social structure, technology, communication systems, and what is said and thought using these systems–notably literature. Friedrich Kittler focuses on the differences between ‘discourse networks’ in 1800 and in 1900, in the process developing a new analysis of the shift from romanticism to modernism. The artful structure of the book begins with Goethe’s Faust and ends with Valéry’s Faust. In the 1800 section, the author discusses how language was learned, the emergence of the modern university, the associated beginning of the interpretation of contemporary literature, and the canonization of literature. Among the writers and works Kittler analyzes in addition to Goethe’s Faust are Schlegel, Hegel, E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Golden Pot, and Goethe’s Tasso. The 1900 section argues that the new discourse network in which literature is situated in the modern period is characterized by new technological media–film, the photograph, and the typewritten page–and the crisis that these caused for literary production. Along the way, the author discusses the work of Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, Mallarmé, Bram Stroker, the Surrealists, Rilke, Kafka, and Freud, among others.”

Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900
First published in 1985
Third, completely revised edition
Publisher Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1995
ISBN 3770528816, 9783770528813
524 pages

Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
Translated by Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens
Foreword by David E. Wellbery
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1990
ISBN 9780804720991
496 pages

Reviews: Franz Futterknecht and David Wellbery (Poetics Today, 1987, EN), Robert C. Holub (German Quarterly, 1987, EN), Thomas Sebastian (MLN, 1990, EN).

Wikipedia (DE)
Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)

Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (German, 3rd ed., 1985/1995, removed on 2024-2-6 upon request from Brill)
Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (English, 1990, updated to the full book on 2014-1-30 via poshumano, updated to single-page OCR’d version on 2014-1-31 via Marcell Mars)

Online version of Index of persons (at Monoskop wiki)

Walter Benjamin: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 (1994)

“Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin’s correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.”

Edited and Annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno
Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0226042375, 9780226042374
674 pages

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2015-11-15 upon request of the publisher)

Quentin Meillassoux: The Number and The Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés (2011/2012) [French, English]

“A meticulous literary study, a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an adventure novel – such is the register in which can be deciphered the hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, infinity and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés, patiently deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly simple and lucid insight with regard to that ‘unique Number that cannot be another’.

Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard constitutes perhaps the most radical break in the history of modern poetry: the fractured lines spanning the double page, the typographical play borrowed from the poster form, the multiplication of interpolations disrupting reading. But the intrigue of this poem is still stranger, always resistant to full elucidation. We encounter a shipwreck, and a Master, himself almost submerged, who clasps in his hand the dice that, confronted by the furious waves, he hesitates to throw. The hero expects this throw, if it takes place, to be extraordinarily important: a Number said to be ‘unique’ and which ‘can be no other’.

The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child’s game. All the dimensions of the Number, understood progressively, articulate between them but one sole condition: that this Number should ultimately be delivered to us by a secret code, hidden in the Coup de dés like a key that finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama that is still unfolding.

The English volume contains the entire text of the Coup de dés and three other poems, with new translations.”

Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé
Publisher Fayard, 2011
ISBN 2213666989, 9782213666983
256 pages

English edition
Translated by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, and Sequence Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 9780983216926
306 pages

Review (Michael Reid, Mute)
Review (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry)
Review (Thomas H. Ford, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy)
Review (Edward K. Kaplan, Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
Review (Brian Kim Stefans, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Graham Harman’s blog post about the book, part 2

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

PDF, PDF (French, updated on 2015-1-24)
PDF, PDF (English, updated on 2015-1-24)