Philosophy and Culture

Romantic Circles

Book

Philosophy and Culture Öffentlichkeit Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/books/mp48sf340

Abstract

This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Rei Terada, with essays by Manu Chander, Ted Underwood, Thomas Pfau, J. Hillis Miller, and Daniel Tiffany.

This volume addresses a perceived opposition between philosophy and critical theory on the one hand, and culture and cultural studies on the other. It seeks to revalidate critical work that develops a philosophy of culture and a culturally historical philosophy. The contributors develop such cultural work by comparing Romantic, modern, and/or contemporary notions of individuality and society and by considering ways of thinking about the dynamics of autonomy and collectivity on which culture depends. Manu Chander discusses the perpetual antagonism of Kant's philosophical aesthetic and Bourdieu's cultural sociology; J. Hillis Miller examines contrasting sense of the performative in cultural studies and philosophy; Thomas Pfau explores the contrary relationship between nineteenth-century European liberalism and pessimistic notions of freedom; and Daniel Tiffany argues that an affinity-based model of culture may be understood through a dialogue between Leibniz's monadic thought and the "placeless places" of modern nightlife. All of these contributions suggest that culture is less about intentionality or a coherent group of people and more about a network of habits, ideas, and enigmatic affliations. The difficulty of construing the relations between deliberate practices and their non-deliberate outcomes underlies each of the papers in this volume; a philosophy of culture and a culturally historical philosophy best address such difficulty.

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