Landgraf Edgar - Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism

New Directions in German Studies

Vol. 23

Series Editor:

IMKE MEYER

Director, School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics, and Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

Editorial Board:

KATHERINE ARENS

Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin

ROSWITHA BURWICK

Distinguished Chair of Modern Foreign Languages Emerita, Scripps College

RICHARD ELDRIDGE

Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College

ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE

Professor Emerita of Theater Studies, Freie Universitt Berlin

CATRIONA MACLEOD

Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German, University of Pennsylvania

STEPHAN SCHINDLER

Professor of German and Chair, University of South Florida

HEIDI SCHLIPPHACKE

Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

ULRICH SCHNHERR

Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Haverford College

JAMES A. SCHULTZ

Professor of German Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles

SILKE-MARIA WEINECK

Professor of German and Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

DAVID WELLBERY

LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, University of Chicago

SABINE WILKE

Joff Hanauer Distinguished Professor for Western Civilization and Professor of German, University of Washington

JOHN ZILCOSKY

Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Volumes in the series:

Vol. 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives

by Edgar Landgraf

Vol. 2. The German Pcaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter

by Bernhard Malkmus

Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature

by Thomas O. Beebee

Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: Sublimation from Goethe to Lacan

by Eckart Goebel

Vol. 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form

edited by Sabine Wilke

Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salom

by Gisela Brinker-Gabler

Vol. 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity

by John B. Lyon

Vol. 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation

by David Horton

Vol. 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West

by Silke-Maria Weineck

Vol. 10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems

by Luke Fischer

Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory

by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins

Vol. 12. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World

by Lorely French

Vol. 13. Viennas Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State

by Katherine Arens

Vol. 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange

edited by Tobias Dring and Ewan Fernie

Vol. 15. Goethes Families of the Heart

by Susan E. Gustafson

Vol. 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno

edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck

Vol. 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe

by Joseph D. ONeil

Vol. 18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond

edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone

Vol. 19. Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 19551973

by Curtis Swope

Vol. 20. Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebalds Poetics of History

by Richard T. Gray

Vol. 21. Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzlers Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings

by Marie Kolkenbrock

Vol. 22. Sissis World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth

edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke

Vol. 23. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant

edited by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby

Posthumanism in the
Age of Humanism

Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences
after Kant

Edited by
Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop,
and Leif Weatherby

Christian J. Emden is Professor of German intellectual history and political thought at Rice Universitys department of Classical and European Studies and director of the Program in Politics, Law, and Social Thought. He is the author of Normativity Matters: Philosophical Naturalism and Political Theory, in The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science, edited by Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito (2017); Nietzsches Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (2014); Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (2008); Walter Benjamins Archologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (2006); and Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (2005). Much of his current work focuses on the emergence of normativity and philosophical naturalism, including the latters relevance for political theory.

Patrick Fortmann is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His main area of research is the long nineteenth century, specifically the Romantic Age. He is the author of Autopsie von Revolution und Restauration: Georg Bchner und die politische Imagination (2013) and the co-editor (with Martha B. Helfer) of Commitment and Compassion: Essays on Georg Bchner (2012). Recurring interests include sovereignty and spectacle, exchanges between literature and the sciences, and the idea of Romantic love.

Peter Gilgen is Associate Professor of German Studies at Cornell University. He works on philosophy and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and has also published numerous essays on aesthetics, lyric poetry from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, contemporary theory (especially systems theory), and the university. He is the author of Lektren der Erinnerung: Lessing Kant Hegel (2012) and Unterlandschaft (1999).

Alex Hogue is Assistant Professor of German at Coastal Carolina University. He defended his dissertation entitled I, (Post)Human: Being and Subjectivity in the Quest to Build Artificial People in 2016 at the University of Cincinnati. Other publications examine the issues of metaphysics within the transhumanist movement and Martin Heidegger as a forerunner of posthumanism.

Jocelyn Holland is Professor of Comparative Literature at the California Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on intersections between literature, philosophy, and science around 1800. She has authored two books, German Romanticism and Science (2009) and Key Texts by Johann Wilhelm Ritter on the Science and Art of Nature (2010) and co-edited special journal editions on topics that include modes of equilibrium around 1800, theories and practices of timekeeping, the aesthetics of the tool, and the role of the Archimedean point in modernity.

Jeffrey West Kirkwood is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Cinema at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His work concentrates on media theory and histories of image technologies. He has written the introduction to and edited the first translation of Ernst Kapps Elements of a Philosophy of Technology