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Eva Geulen: Expression and Suffering; Semblance and Mimesis (Notes on an Enigmatic Passage in Adorno’s  Aesthetic Theory)
Expression and Suffering; Semblance and Mimesis (Notes on an Enigmatic Passage in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory)
(p. 53 – 68)

Eva Geulen

Expression and Suffering; Semblance and Mimesis (Notes on an Enigmatic Passage in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory)

PDF, 16 pages

  • aesthetics
  • criticism

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Eva Geulen

is Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research and teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin. She studied German Literature and Philosophy at the University of Freiburg and the Johns Hopkins University. She has held teaching positions at Stanford University, the University of Rochester and New York University, and was Professor of German Literature at the University of Bonn and at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research focuses on literature and philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present, pedagogical discourses around 1800 and 1900 as well as Goethe’s morphology and its reception in the twentieth century. Her publications include Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (Berlin: August Verlag, 2016), The End of Art: Readings of a Rumor after Hegel (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2005, 3rd edition 2016), Worthörig wider Willen. Darstellungsproblematik und Sprachreflexion in der Prosa Adalbert Stifters (Munich: ludicium, 1992), as well as essays on Nietzsche, Benjamin, Raabe, Thomas Mann and others. She has been co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie since 2004.
Other texts by Eva Geulen for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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