Thinking Unrest by Kristina Mendicino

Thinking Unrest by Kristina Mendicino

Reconsiders major thinkers and works of German Idealism and their legacy for our own restless times.

From the longing in which Schelling based human freedom to the "restlessness of the negative" that Jean-Luc Nancy famously traced through Hegel's corpus, unrest centrally preoccupied many thinkers associated with German Idealism. Thinking Unrest gathers original essays from eight leading scholars to reopen the question of what moves thought both within German Idealism and among the movement’s heirs. Through readings of Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling, as well as more contemporary writers such as Nicolas Abraham, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Rainer Maria Rilke, contributors expose more broadly what it may mean for philosophy to be a matter of responding to that which provokes, troubles, and withdraws from thought. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives—poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, the history of science, political theory—the volume reconsiders the legacy of German Idealism for thinking unrest today.

"An exciting volumeEach essay thinks through details of German Idealist texts through to the end without compromise or flinching. This gives the book a genuine atmosphere of ambition, wide scope, and invention. New insights emerge on every page, and it is thrilling to read researchers on top of their game doing work that is both so precise and so speculatively far-reaching." — Daniel Whistler, author of Schelling's Theory of Symbolic Language

"Thinking Unrest makes an eloquent case for Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin (among others) as critical resources for an age grappling with the ambivalences of its own forms of restlessness. Each essay draws on seminal texts and thinkers of German philosophy and poetry around 1800 to confront the consequences of various sources of restlessness and forms of destabilization: in language, in rhythms, in concepts, in history, in ways of knowing and architectures of knowledge, and in consciousness. The volume thus offers a comprehensive reevaluation of German Idealism and a welcome addition to intellectual history, continental philosophy, literary theory, comparative literature, and German studies." — Gabriel Trop, author of Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century

Kristina Mendicino is Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) and Announcements: On Novelty, both by SUNY Press.