02524oam 22004214a 450 991052490480332120240424225745.0(CKB)3710000000534138(WaSeSS)IndRDA00058750(OCoLC)1181774492(MdBmJHUP)muse87171(EXLCZ)99371000000053413820200729e20202015 uy 0engur|||||||||||txtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierTheory Is Like a Surging SeaMichael MunroBaltimore, Maryland :Project Muse,2020©20201 online resource (74 pages)0-692-49390-5 Includes bibliographical references.Dichtung und Wahrheit -- 'Without this nothing thinks' : the enigma of the active intellect -- Nearer to you than the sea -- Vertigo, beatitudo : Spinoza and philosophy -- The idea of prose -- Appendix A. Theses on aesthetics as first philosophy -- Appendix B. On exactitude in non-library science -- Coda : on the riddle of history solved.In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, "Theory is like a surging sea." This small book takes more than its title from that line--it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach's sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin's sentence: "Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave [...] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks." That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what's come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it's as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks.PoetryModern philosophy21st centuryPoetry.Modern philosophy190Munro M(Michael),984397MdBmJHUPMdBmJHUPBOOK9910524904803321Theory Is Like a Surging Sea3083729UNINA