Anselm Haverkamp – författare

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.

What impact has deconstruction had on the way we read American culture? And how is American culture itself peculiarly deconstructive?To address these questions, this volume brings together some of the most provocative thinkers associated with deconstruction, among them Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Avital Ronnel. Ranging across a wide field, from the ethics of reading to the rhetoric of performance, the contributors offer provocative insights into a new sense of the political. The America of the volume's title turns out to be the place where the politics and poetics of responsibility meet. It is also the place where we confront the tension between difference and profound otherness.

What impact has deconstruction had on the way we read American culture? And how is American culture itself peculiarly deconstructive?To address these questions, this volume brings together some of the most provocative thinkers associated with deconstruction, among them Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Avital Ronnel. Ranging across a wide field, from the ethics of reading to the rhetoric of performance, the contributors offer provocative insights into a new sense of the political. The America of the volume's title turns out to be the place where the politics and poetics of responsibility meet. It is also the place where we confront the tension between difference and profound otherness.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines, generations, and geopolitical divides to revisit Jacques Derrida’s account of law, violence, and justice. Deconstruction is variously a philosophy of aporia, a method of patience, a practice of paradoxes, an ontography of uncertainty, a hermeneutics of escalation that sought not only to challenge metaphysical complacencies but also to transgress boundaries, test limits, and above all to provoke, invoke and convoke thought. As a reworking of the philosophical tradition, its impact on law and legal theory became unavoidable in 1989 when Derrida, persuaded by the late Drucilla Cornell, came to address a law school audience on the mystical foundations of law. In a lecture – ‘Force of Law’ – that had global intellectual resonance, he startled the jurists by declaring that deconstruction ‘is’ justice. For some lawyers, it was a landmark thesis, a liberation. For others, it was deemed to be nihilist, a denial of all possibility of meaning, and so denounced as the equivalent of tearing up the constitution, or burning the flag. Some twenty years after his death, in this book, renowned Derridean scholars revisit this legacy. Derrida and Law offers a series of re-readings of ‘Force of Law’, and a conspectus of new reflections on Derrida’s account of the violence of legality and the possibility of justice.This book will appeal to philosophers, legal theorists, and others with an interest in deconstruction and Continental theory.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines, generations, and geopolitical divides to revisit Jacques Derrida’s account of law, violence, and justice. Deconstruction is variously a philosophy of aporia, a method of patience, a practice of paradoxes, an ontography of uncertainty, a hermeneutics of escalation that sought not only to challenge metaphysical complacencies but also to transgress boundaries, test limits, and above all to provoke, invoke and convoke thought. As a reworking of the philosophical tradition, its impact on law and legal theory became unavoidable in 1989 when Derrida, persuaded by the late Drucilla Cornell, came to address a law school audience on the mystical foundations of law. In a lecture – ‘Force of Law’ – that had global intellectual resonance, he startled the jurists by declaring that deconstruction ‘is’ justice. For some lawyers, it was a landmark thesis, a liberation. For others, it was deemed to be nihilist, a denial of all possibility of meaning, and so denounced as the equivalent of tearing up the constitution, or burning the flag. Some twenty years after his death, in this book, renowned Derridean scholars revisit this legacy. Derrida and Law offers a series of re-readings of ‘Force of Law’, and a conspectus of new reflections on Derrida’s account of the violence of legality and the possibility of justice.This book will appeal to philosophers, legal theorists, and others with an interest in deconstruction and Continental theory.

Productive Digression is a translation of the ancient term poetics: as a practice of theory. The products produced in the mode of poiesis are ‘digressive’ in that they operate off track; they resist the main stream of every day prose. They do so for various reasons and in various respects. Mostly, they are explained historically, relative to historical contexts and, that is, contrary to what they are meant to resist. Instead, this book investigates the modes of resistance, their epistemology of production, in short, the logic of digression. The method addresses the singular exemplarity of art and literature; it elucidates the impact of poiesis as an epistemological challenge and redefines the analysis of literature and art as branches of an Historical Epistemology. Proceeding from the state of affairs in 20th century criticism and aesthetics (Benjamin, Adorno, Blumenberg, Merleau-Ponty), the epistemology of representation (Whitehead, Canguilhem, Bachelard, Rheinberger) is revised in, and with respect to critical consequences (Derrida, Marin, de Man, Agamben). From literary criticism and critical legal studies to the scenario of the life sciences, the essays collected here redirect the logic of research towards the epistemological grounds of an aesthetics underneath the hermeneutics of every day life.

Metaphorologie ist eine Methode der Textanalyse und Textbehandlung, die im Wesentlichen von Hans Blumenberg angeregt und praktiziert wurde, aber keine nennenswerte Wirkung hatte. Sie besitzt eine größere Reichweite und deutet tiefere Konsequenzen an, als bisher erkannt und umgesetzt worden ist. Das liegt an technischen Aspekten, die es weiter zu entwickeln gilt. Metapher, Mythos und Halbzeug sind Blumenbergs Kernbegriffe, an denen die Weiterführung einer analytischen Ausarbeitung ansetzen kann und hier in einer Folge selbständig lesbarer Kapitel ausgeführt werden. Sie führen von den ersten Ansätzen in der Philosophie Blumenbergs und ihrer technischen Ergänzung auf die exemplarischen Problemfelder von Lebenswelt, Politik und Ästhetik. Die Anordnung in Dreiergruppen entspricht den Ausgangsbegriffen des Titels. Sie differenziert nach historischen, politischen, ästhetischen Hinsichten, bevor diese in zwei Skizzen die Perspektive des Gesamtprojekts Metaphorologie eröffnen und in wissenschaftshistorischer und methodischer Hinsicht entwerfen.

Der Dichter Klopstock hatte einen überwältigenden Erfolg von kurzer Dauer. Er erfand eine lyrische Masche, die er in Weiterführung Miltons episch verankerte. Damit entsprach er für einen Moment in der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts, gleichzeitig mit Baumgartens Begründung der Ästhetik, einem von der Renaissance gesetzten Standard, den Bodmer und Breitinger erkannten, der aber nur wenig später in einer anders verlaufenden Entwicklung, der Klassik Lessings, Goethes und Schillers (unter marginaler Begleitung Hölderlins und Kleists), jede übergreifende Bedeutung verlor. Nur in seltenen Phasen von nachgerade historischer Ironie trat die Transversale Milton–Klopstock in den europäischen Avantgarden zutage und ließ ihre kaum je gewärtigte poetische Potenz aufblitzen. So als Nina Hagen, aufgewecktes Kind eines an Klopstock neu interessierten literarischen Milieus, dem deutschen Punk Rock mit den letzten Versen von Miltons Verlorenem Paradies auf die Beine half.

Shakespeare mit Hegel nimmt die gemeinsame Wurzel von Literatur und Philosophie beim Wort. Aus Hegels Lektüre Shakespeares erwächst in der Phänomenologie des Geistes ein neuer, dialektischer Begriff von Geschichte, der in nuce bereits ein ‚negativ dialektischer‘ ist und bei Adorno zu Anlass, Ärgernis und Hoffnung Ästhetischer Theorie wird. Die begriffliche Ausarbeitung der seit Hegels Ästhetik immer neu diskutierten dialektischen Natur der Kunst ist in Hegels Rezeption Shakespeares nicht nur generell nachzuweisen, sondern wird hier in der buchstaben-genauen Lektüre, die Hegel praktiziert hat, aber von Philosophen kaum beachtet worden ist, identifiziert und in ihren Voraussetzungen und Konsequenzen nachgezeichnet. Herauskommt dabei ein anderer Hegel und ein neuer, historisch spektakulärer Shakespeare. Es handelt sich bei diesem Buch um eine in konzentrierten Analysen enggeführte, historisch konkretisierte Zusammenführung und Neusituierung der Schnittstellen eines philosophischen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisinteresses, als dessen letzter, Hegel weiterführender, aber aporetisch schwieriger Gesamtentwurf Adornos Ästhetische Theorie neu zu lesen ist.