By Richard Wolin
Ten essays on concerns in philosophy, literary idea and highbrow historical past. The query of radical imperialism of the postmodern flip, the unspoken schedule of neoconservative cultural conception and a dialogue of Walter Benjamin's position in cultural reviews are integrated within the textual content.
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Extra info for Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture)
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These intellectual currents, which dominate the fin-de-siècle, signal a decisive historical rejection of the normative legacy of modernity. 9 In this chapter I shall focus on the third of the aforementioned three value-spheresthe sphere of aesthetic rationalityin order to gauge its significance in the modernism/postmodernism debate. I When we speak of art in terms of its import for the paradigm of modernity, we refer to the unfettered right of the artist to independent self-expression. We moderns assume this right to be self-evident, whereas in fact it is essentially an achievement of recent origin, postdating centuries in which art was fully implicated in the legitimation of what Weber termed traditional authoritybe it in the form of myth (Homer's Iliad), religion (medieval Christian painting), or the divine right of kings (courtly art).
23 Heidegger, of course, had come to a series of very different conclusions. " 24 More important, however, such occasional political judgments were rooted in a philosophical standpoint that increasingly devalued the whole of Western reason as "onto-theological"hence, valueless and nihilistic. "26 Nor did the propagation of a radical critique of reason and universality take place in a social and political vacuum. 27 It would be shortsighted and dishonest to downplay the contributions that such intellectual tendencies made toward paving the way for the European catastrophe.
Though written for different contexts and occasions, they are in many respects thematically related. At issue are the origins and peregrinations of contemporary theoretical discourse: more specifically, the ways in which a certain German intellectual lineage that, in its prime, displayed affinities with fascism (namely, the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Carl Schmitt connection, which, needless to say, neither can nor should be reduced to its manifest political sympathies) was subsequently taken up by French intellectuals in the post-World War II period and, as it were, made canonical.