Sigrid Weigel – författare

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany''s leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin''s theory.

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany''s leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin''s theory.

Die Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Genetik wirft nicht nur ethische Fragen auf, die den Umgang mit ihren Möglichkeiten und Techniken betreffen. Sie führt auch zu einschneidenden Veränderungen tradierter kultureller Konzepte. Diese aber sind bislang weitgehend im Schatten eines verfehlten Streites über ‚Vererbung versus Erziehung‘ geblieben, in dem bekannte Angst- und Wunschbilder einer genetischen Determination oder Steuerung menschlicher Attribute und Verhaltensweisen zirkulieren. Weitgehend unreflektiert dagegen sind bislang jene Zäsuren geblieben, die die Praktiken von Gentechnologie und Reproduktionsmedizin für die ‚elementaren Strukturen der Verwandtschaft‘ und für das tradierte genealogische Denken bedeuten.

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals’ thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky.

The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual’s work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.