Friedrich Kittler: The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence (2013–) [DE, EN]

“Few German scholars in the past 50 years have had such a lasting impact on the cultural situation of our time, including its academic institutions, as Friedrich Kittler. It is in large part due to his writings that the radio, the gramophone, and the computer are not just objects of cultural fascination, but also of philosophical reflection.

This volume contains a collection of essays written by Kittler over the course of 40 years which serve as a testament to the enormous breadth, intensity, and the singular creativity of his thought.”

German edition
Edited and with an Afterword by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Publisher Suhrkamp, Berlin, 2013
ISBN 9783518732984
432 pages

English edition
Translated by Erik Butler
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2014
ISBN 9780804792622
400 pages

Reviews: Oliver Jahraus (zfm, 2014), Stavros Arabatzis (Weimarer Beiträge, 2014).

Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)
Worldcat (DE)
Worldcat (EN)

Die Wahrheit der technischen Welt (German, EPUB, updated on 2019-11-2)
The Truth of the Technological World (English, updated on 2019-11-2)

Peter Gay: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (1968–) [EN, CR]

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay’s career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany’s tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century.

First published by Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2001
ISBN 0393322394, 9780393322392
205 pages
via chef

Review (Walter Laquer, The New York Times Books, 1968)
Review (Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Spectator, 1969)
Review (Sterling Fishman, History of Education Quarterly, 1970)

Publisher

Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (English, 1968/2001, EPUB)
Weimarksa kultura: Isključenik kao uključenik (Croatian, trans. Danja Šilović-Karić, 1999, added on 2014-8-3)

Jacques Rancière: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011/2013)

Rancière’s magnum opus on the aesthetic.

“Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.”

First published as Aisthesis : Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art, Éditions Galilée, 2011

Translated by Zakir Paul
Publisher Verso Books, 2013
ISBN 1781680892, 9781781680896
304 pages
via falsedeity

Reviews: Hal Foster (London Review of Books), Joseph Tanke (Los Angeles Review of Books), Marc Farrant (The New Inquiry), Ali Alizadeh (Sydney Review of Books), Jean-Philippe Deranty (Parrhesia).
Roundtable discussion with Rancière at Columbia (video, 43 min)
Selected interviews and reviews (in French)

Publisher

PDF