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Thomas Glaser: Roland Barthes’ Critical Writing from  the Materials of Cy Twombly—and  the Criticism of Form in the Early Texts of Lukács and Benjamin
Roland Barthes’ Critical Writing from the Materials of Cy Twombly—and the Criticism of Form in the Early Texts of Lukács and Benjamin
(p. 239 – 258)

Thomas Glaser

Roland Barthes’ Critical Writing from the Materials of Cy Twombly—and the Criticism of Form in the Early Texts of Lukács and Benjamin

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  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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Thomas Glaser

is research fellow at the Department of Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Erfurt. At the Leuphana University Lüneburg he was visiting professor in the research training group “Cultures of Critique” (2019–2020) and held a professorial chair in Rhetoric with Anselm Haverkamp (2013–2015). He was postdoctoral research fellow at the forum “Texte. Zeichen. Medien” at the University of Erfurt (2010–2013), where he also did his PhD on the problem of aesthetic communication in the works of Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Outside university he worked as an assistant director at the Badisches Staats­theater Karlsruhe and as a research assistant at the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart. He was a founding board member of the Association of Museum Education Baden-Württemberg. With Bettine Menke he co-edited Experimentalanordnungen der Bildung. Exteriorität, Theatralität, Literarizität (Paderborn: Fink, 2014).
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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