1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910462694903321

Autore

Blumenthal-Barby Martin

Titolo

Inconceivable Effects : Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film / / Martin Blumenthal-Barby

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, NY : , : Cornell University Library, , 2013

©2013

ISBN

0-8014-6738-1

0-8014-6739-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (222 p.)

Collana

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Disciplina

830.9/353

Soggetti

Ethics in motion pictures

Ethics in literature

Ethics - Germany - History - 20th century

German literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

"The odium of doubtfulness" : or, the vicissitudes of Arendt's metaphorical thinking -- Why does Hannah Arendt lie? : or, the vicissitudes of imagination -- "A peculiar apparatus" : Kafka's thanatopoetics -- A strike of rhetoric : Benjamin's paradox of justice -- Pernicious bastardizations : Benjamin's ethics of pure violence -- The return of the human : Germany in autumn -- A politics of enmity : Müller's Germania death in Berlin.

Sommario/riassunto

In Inconceivable Effects, Martin Blumenthal-Barby reads theoretical, literary and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and filmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern world-including Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, the directors of Germany in Autumn, and Heiner Mueller-these essays furnish a cultural base for contemporary discussions of totalitarian domination, lying and politics, the relation between law and body, the relation between law and justice, the question of violence, and our ways of conceptualizing "the human." A consideration of ethics is central to the



book, but ethics in a general, philosophical sense is not the primary subject here; instead, Blumenthal-Barby suggests that whatever understanding of the ethical one has is always contingent upon a particular mode of presentation (Darstellung), on particular aesthetic qualities and features of media. Whatever there is to be said about ethics, it is always bound to certain forms of saying, certain ways of telling, certain modes of narration. That modes of presentation differ across genres and media goes without saying; that such differences are intimately linked with the question of the ethical emerges with heightened urgency in this book.