The constant back and forth between the poles of the android id and the human ego gave rise to the soul drama of the mid-Modern Age, which was simultaneously a technical drama. Its topic is...

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his...

The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most...

But if man genuinely produces man, it is precisely not through work and it’s concrete results, not even the ‘work on oneself’ so widely praised in recent times, let alone through the alternatively invoked phenomena...

The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses … the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is...

The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended...

It is not only the weary Homo faber, who objectifies the world in the ‘doing’ mode, who must vacate his place on the logical stage; the time has also come for Homo religiosus, who turns...

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author’s point is not that the thing depicts...

This much should be clear by now: the term ‘renaissance’ can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life...

As in the days of the first Merovingian, who pledged allegiance to the cross because of a victorious battle, today’s children of the banalized Enlightenment are likewise meant to burn what they worshipped and worship...

We know from accounts of Rilke’s life that his stay in Rodin’s workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet’s view of the mutilated body thus...

In Nietzsche’s usage, the word ‘Christianity’ does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced disposition, an ascetically (in the penitent...

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or ‘endo-clinical’ competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and –...

Mysticism is the acquired immunodeficiency of regional ontologies; one catches it through unprotected thought intercourse with the stirred-up concept of the infinite.

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who...

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the ‘transformation of being into message’ (more commonly, ‘linguistic turn’). ‘Being that can be be understood is...

In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which...

I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me ‘You must’. It is...

…only very few – only humans, as far as we know – achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest...

If Enlightenment in a technical sense is the programmatic word for progress in the awareness of explicitness, one can say without fear of grand formulas that rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of...

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity’s turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when...

Fatally, the term ‘barbarian’ is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any...

The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to ‘tell’ us, those who have run away from...

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing – otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to...

In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its construction since they...

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold...

[Nietzsche’s] questions – transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? – would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his...

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l’idée de faire histoire n’était qu’un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c’est de faire nature.

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with...

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring...

Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can...

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost...