book: Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the...

book: Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present) | Gerhard Richter

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	• Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present) Gerhard Richter Stanford University Press, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Required Reading

Any reader of the Frankfurt School knows that many of their books are basically collections of short aphoristic writings. There is a first order difficulty in interpreting these works. Is each aphorism meant to be read on its own? Does each build on the previous? How is the book to be understood as a whole? How does these books stand with their more commonly organized works?
In this book, Gerhard Richter returns to these works in an effort to revitalize the formal style of these writings--the Denkbild or thought-image. In masterful close readings of Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Bloch, Richter gives us a firsthand tour through the labrynth of the Denkbild and allows us to answer these questions of interpretation. Richter, through these chapters, shows himself to not only be a wonderful guide but a masterful writer of the Denkbild in his own right.
If you have never read the Frankfurt School, Richter's book would give you a great introduction, on par with Jay's Dialectical Imagination and Kellner's Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. If you are schooled in the Frankfurt School, then, Ricther's book deepens your understanding of what is at stake in these friends' writing style. In a time where books on Benjamin and Adorno are more common than tabloid magazine titles, Richter's book is set apart. Moreover, he returns to the important work of Bloch and Kracauer--who are not as trendy these days. Bloch and Kracuaer are important associates of Benjamin and Adorno's and Richter is right to present them as members of the Frankfurt School.
Another interesting feature of Richter's book is that he makes connections between these writers and contemporary French theorists like Derrida, Levinas and Nancy. In that regard, Richter's book shows the affinities and dialectical possibilities between German and French thought, much like Jameson and Kellner have done.
I only have two quibbles with the book. The first is purely petty. In the introduction, Richter describes his book thus "Seeking to learn from the singular and the unverifiable, each of the chapters that follow proceeds by examining one or more Denkbilder composed by a particular writer associated with the Frankfurt School in relation to that writer's majro theoretical texts." And then, just a few lines down, he writes: "The third chapter considers Denkbilder from Kracauer's Weimar period...in relation to the theory of extraterritoriality developed in his philosophy of history and in relation to Derrida's monolingualism of the other." I thought Monolingualism of the Other was written by Derrida, not Kracauer! I wished the editor would have asked Richter to make the caveat that the Kracauer would be discussed in relation to Derrida. My second quibble is only slightly more substantive. If the French thinkers who are so popular today indeed have much in common with these Weimar period German thinkers, then, isn't the argument a bit stronger? Isn't it that the French thinkers of today have yet to say anything truly original but are merely repeating in more opaque language what Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Block grasped more dialectically decades before? It would seem that today's French thinkers do not have much in common with these thinkers but rather have much to learn from them.
All in all, Richter's book is required reading for anyone studying the Frankfurt School or any of its members. It sheds light on their peculiar style, and it provides commentary on their projects as a whole. Richter himself, it would seem, has revitalized the necesary dialectical magic of the Denkbild.

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In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter?s careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

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