Richard Wolin
Biographic Data
| ID | 244611 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Wolin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolin |
| SIGNATURE | WOLIN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
El león en invierno. Leo Löwenthal y la integridad del intelectual
Este texto analiza el pensamiento de Leo Löwenthal, miembro de la llamada “primera generación” de la Escuela de Frankfurt, a la luz de varias de sus contribuciones teóricas en el ámbito de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Para ello expone varias de sus ideas en relación con otros de los pensadores vinculados al mismo círculo intelectual. Varios de sus postulados se pueden ver reflejados en los diálogos intelectuales con figuras como Theodor Ador…
Blanchot Collabo: From the Jeune Droite to Jeune France
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was best known for his pathbreaking forays in literary criticism: dense meditations on the abyss of literary meaning, culminating in his radical insight concerning the ontological impossibility of writing or écriture. Accordingly, Blanchot was justly canonized by luminaries of French Theory such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as an indispensable precursor of their influential prognostications …
Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Heidegger and race
In this article, Wolin attempts to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the philosophical grounds of Heidegger’s support for National Socialism. Much of the previous literature has assumed that Heidegger, as an exponent of Existenzphilosophie, opposed Nazism on epistemological grounds. Heidegger’s defenders maintain that, since the Nazi world-view was predicated on ‘biological racism’, and since Heidegger was an inveterate critic of …
The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 196…
P eter E. G ordon . Adorno and Existence
Peter E. Gordon is the author of compelling monographs on Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig (Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy [2003]) and Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer (Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos [2012]). The central focus of his most recent contribution, Adorno and Existence, is the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s contentious relationship vis-à-vis the Existenzphilosophie of Heidegger. Hence, we…
The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s - Second Edition
I.4. L’affaire Peter Trawny
The recent publication of the first three volumes of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” ( Gesamtausgabe volumes 94-96) has given rise to a new genre of apologetics. In seeking to minimize or deny the philosopher’s intellectual support for Third Reich criminality, his more vehement supporters have perpetuated the Master’s obfuscations and dissemblance. One finds a particularly egregious instance of these practices in the case of two recent “essays” by …
Heidegger: La Question Juive
Cet article analyse la fragmentation croissante du corps dans deux domaines : l’esthétique et la maternité. Dans les deux cas, les nouvelles technologies corporelles favorisent des représentations légitimées par le désir individuel et par la forte conviction de leur réalisation. Les procédures de cet enchantement symbolique substituent des corps imaginaires aux corps réels, à partir desquels se centrent et redéfinissent les droits humains. Le nom…
Richard H. King. Arendt and America
The continued fascination with Hannah Arendt’s political thought is itself a phenomenon that beseeches explanation. On the one hand, the answer is relatively straightforward. As a scholar and as an intellectual, Arendt consistently addressed the central dilemmas of twentieth-century historical life: above all, the problem of totalitarianism, itself a fraught concept given its proximity to Cold War concerns. Moreover, on account of her training in…
Introduction to the Symposium on Jonathan Israel’s Democratic Enlightenment
An introduction to the symposium to follow, on Jonathan Israel’s 2011 volume Democratic Enlightenment, with contributions by Helena Rosenblatt, Joanna Stalnaker, and Jonathan Israel. The symposium was held at the CUNY Graduate Center on February 25, 2013, and moderated by Richard Wolin; all contributions have been revised for publication
Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
Under Western Eyes: Critical Reflections on the Confucius Revival
The economic opening up of China has paved the way for a renaissance of thought and scholarship, and Confucianism, while still not considered the “national religion,” has regained its place as the heart of Chinese humanities and academic debate. It has even transcended the academic arena and has become a social phenomenon. But to what extent is this resurgence a natural response to a changing society, the response of a populace that is possibly g…
The Decline of the German Mandarins
The term “intellectual” is a French coinage that dates to the years preceding the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, the concept has a distinguished pedigree that can be traced back to Voltaire's heroic interventions under the ancien régime —most notably, the Calas affair—as well as Victor Hugo's vehement protests against Louis Bonaparte's petty caesarism. The first intellectuals were, as a rule, littérateurs . They were interlopers who relied on the …
Le moment maoïste parfait de Sartre
Entamer des études à l’université amène souvent les étudiants à envisager autrement leurs études dans la mesure où la maîtrise des exigences scolaires repose davantage sur l’invention de stratégies individuelles et moins sur un suivi et un encadrement pédagogique continus. En nous appuyant sur une enquête sociologique de terrain, nous mettons en évidence l’existence de cohérences et de tensions entre la socialisation aux normes et à la vie univer…
Modernity”: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept
THE EVIDENCE FOR MODERNITY’S OBSOLESCENCE as an analytical concept for historical study is both overwhelming and overstated. Many of the polemical barbs that have been directed against modernity by practitioners of global and postcolonial history are fair-minded and compelling. After all, empirically speaking, modernity has often been used as a transparent normative justification for the West’s predatory and imperious mission civilisatrice. As “m…
The idea of cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Iraq War and beyond
With the end of the Cold War the world approached the prospect of realizing what one might call the ‘Kantian moment’ in international relations. Auspiciously, 1995 marked both the 50th anniversary of the establishment of UN Charter, in which human rights guarantees prominently figured, as well as the 200th anniversary of Kant’s celebrated text on ‘Perpetual Peace.’ During the era of the EastWest political stalemate, the idea of effective world go…
The Frankfurt school revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society
The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism
Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodern's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernis…
Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
September 11 and the Self-Castigating Left
September 11 has proved to be something of a Rohrschach test: the initial responses told us much more about the prejudices and fears of the various commentators and respondents than about the events themselves. Literary exhibitionists, unencumbered by inhibitions-and, in most cases, by factual knowledge-could hardly resist the opportunity to pontificate or, simply, to puff-up a flagging resume with an easy by-line. After all, given what will like…
Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
Ce qui rattache les fascismes et le communisme à la modernité
Un tabou historiographique de gauche a longtemps proscrit toute comparaison entre communisme et fascisme. Bien que ce tabou ait été levé avec la chute du communisme, de nombreuses questions relatives à cette comparaison demeurent sans réponse. Doit-on mettre l'accent sur les similitudes entre les régimes totalitaires (l'Union Soviétique de Staline et le Troisième Reich de Hitler) ou insister sur leurs différences ? En mettant au premier plan la t…
Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism
Between fact and interpretation: On the social misconstruction of reality
Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror
Carl Schmitt's polemical discussion of political Romanticism conceals the aestheticizing oscillations of his own political thought. In this respect, too, a kinship of spirit with the fascist intelligentsia reveals itself. Jürgen Habermas, “The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English” The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (19…
Carl Schmitt, political existentialism, and the total state
Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology
Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism
In the last two centuries aestheticism and decisionism have gained prominence among anti-enlightenment intellectual currents. Aestheticism suggests the exclusive primacy of an artistic approach to life, in opposition to science and morality. Although the term was first coined in the mid-nineteenth century in association with the Pre-Raphaelites' emphasis on the absolute purity of the artistic sphere vis-à-vis all extra-artistic concerns — a formu…
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
It is well known that in his “Author's Introduction” (1920) to the “Collected Essays on the Sociology of World Religions” Max Weber grapples with the problem of the cultural specificity of the West. He phrases his inquiry in the following way: Why is it “that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”?…
Modernity”: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept
THE EVIDENCE FOR MODERNITY’S OBSOLESCENCE as an analytical concept for historical study is both overwhelming and overstated. Many of the polemical barbs that have been directed against modernity by practitioners of global and postcolonial history are fair-minded and compelling. After all, empirically speaking, modernity has often been used as a transparent normative justification for the West’s predatory and imperious mission civilisatrice. As “m…
Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism
ion, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as it did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them .... The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered .... The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination 40. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin ofNegative Dialectics (New York, 1977). 41.…
Jürgen Habermas on the Legacy of Jean-paul Sartre: Conducted by Richard Wolin
T HE ENSUING INTERVIEW with Jurgen Habermas was conducted in Frankfurt am Main in October 1990. It was originally commissioned by Les Temps Modernes for a special issue commemorating the tenth anniversary of Sartre's death. However, due to difficulties in preparing the French translation, the interview did not appear in Les Temps Modernes until August 1991. The interview was originally conducted in German. The translation and notes are the interv…
The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie
If in traditional societies, whose universe was governed by the notion of cyclical time, where the predictable and familiar position of the sun in the sky would prescribe the rhythm of daily life, the dominant category of aesthetics was that of beauty, in modern societies, where the flow of life has been all but reduced to a series of minutely subdivided instants, that is, to the calculations of time-clock and stop-watch, the predominant category…
The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism
It is possible that a philosopher could be guilty of a compromise with political authority in an apparently inconsequential manner; he himself might be aware of this. But what he could not be aware of is the possibility that this apparent compromise with authority finds its basis in the most profound deficiency . . of his own doctrine. If therefore a philosopher should conform (by making concessions to authority), his disciples will have to expla…
Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger: An Exchange of Letters
Lieber Herr Heidegger, I have thought for a long time about what you told me during my visit to Todtnauberg, and I would like to write to you about it quite openly. You told me that you fully dissociated yourself from the Nazi regime as of 1934, that in your lectures you made extremely critical remarks, and that you were observed by the Gestapo. I will not doubt your word. But the fact remains that in 1933 you identified yourself so strongly with…
Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
IN 1980, LEO LOWENTHAL FORMULATED asetofprescientinsights about the future of Critical Theory in an interview entitled The Utopian Motif Is Suspended.' By motif, Lowenthal was referring to the eschatological hopes for a better life in the here and now that inspired not only the enterprise of Critical Theory but an entire generation of Central European, Jewish thinkers who, like himself, came of age around the time of World War I and drew on utopi…
Recent Revelations Concerning Martin Heidegger and National Socialism
From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin
Despite its pronounced esotericism and manifestly recondite character, Benjamin's early literary criticism is consistent, at times single-minded, in the pursuit of its program. At issue is the character of human such that it takes on the appearance of natural history, a history that is consigned to an inexorable, rigid fate of decay and decline. subjective corollary of this fate is an inescapable network of guilt, a guilt which originates with ma…
Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Heidegger and race
In this article, Wolin attempts to clarify a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the philosophical grounds of Heidegger’s support for National Socialism. Much of the previous literature has assumed that Heidegger, as an exponent of Existenzphilosophie, opposed Nazism on epistemological grounds. Heidegger’s defenders maintain that, since the Nazi world-view was predicated on ‘biological racism’, and since Heidegger was an inveterate critic of …
Between fact and interpretation: On the social misconstruction of reality
Aestheticism and Social Theory: The Case of Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk
The French Heidegger Debate
Few events in recent memory have shaken the world of French letters as much as the appearance last fall of Victor Farias's book, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Trans. Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset [Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987]). Through an extremely thorough and painstaking (and for French Heideggerians, clearly painful) labor of documentation, Farias has single-handedly given the lie to four decades of inventive rationalizations concoct…
Agnes Heller on everyday life: A discussion of Agnes Heller, Everyday Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984)
The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie
If in traditional societies, whose universe was governed by the notion of cyclical time, where the predictable and familiar position of the sun in the sky would prescribe the rhythm of daily life, the dominant category of aesthetics was that of beauty, in modern societies, where the flow of life has been all but reduced to a series of minutely subdivided instants, that is, to the calculations of time-clock and stop-watch, the predominant category…
An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamin's Path to Trauerspiel
In his seminal essay on Benjamin, Habermas distinguishes between ideology critique — the confrontation of an illusory truth claim with the reality underlying it — as employed by Adorno and Marcuse, and redemptive critique, preferred by Benjamin, a type of criticism that relates conservatively rather than critically to its object. As Habermas explains: “While Marcuse would like to prepare for the transformation of demystified material conditions o…
From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin
Despite its pronounced esotericism and manifestly recondite character, Benjamin's early literary criticism is consistent, at times single-minded, in the pursuit of its program. At issue is the character of human such that it takes on the appearance of natural history, a history that is consigned to an inexorable, rigid fate of decay and decline. subjective corollary of this fate is an inescapable network of guilt, a guilt which originates with ma…
The Benjamin-Congress: Frankfurt (July 1-3, 1982)
Exactly ten years ago Suhrkamp Verlag published the first installment of an projected six-volume edition of Walter Benjamin's collected works (volume 3: Kritiken und Rezensionen) and simultaneously a volume entitled Die Aktualität Walter Benjamin, a collection of essays which sought to determine the contemporary relevance of the thinker who had died 40 years ago, but whose reception in West Germany was short of phenomenal. In 1972 Benjamin would …
Benjamin's materialist theory of experience
Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, Trans. Harry Zohn, (JPS: Philadelphia, 1981)
Wolin on Benjamin
Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption
Expressionismus: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910-1920
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
It is well known that in his “Author's Introduction” (1920) to the “Collected Essays on the Sociology of World Religions” Max Weber grapples with the problem of the cultural specificity of the West. He phrases his inquiry in the following way: Why is it “that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”?…
The Bankruptcy of Left-Wing Kulturkritik: The "After the Avant-Garde" Conference
The words of the keynote speaker at the “After the Avant-Garde” Conference (University of Houston, March 6-9, 1985) were destined to fall on deaf ears. Here was the 55-year-old Hans Magnus Enzensberger—poet, essayist, editor of Kursbuch —who 15 years earlier had argued for a left-wing “takeover” of the media for revolutionary ends. Yet this night he had a more Socratic wisdom to convey: an innate distrust of the concept of the avant-garde, a noti…
Adorno
Martin Jay is well aware of the pitfalls involved in contributing a volume on Adorno to the “Modern Masters” series. “Adorno, let it be admitted at the outset, would have been appalled at a book of this kind devoted to him,” is the sentence with which the book begins. Indeed, for Adorno, who strove concertedly to resist easy consumption in the bourgeois marketplace of ideas, such canonization would have been simply anathema. At the outset of his …
False Criteria: The New Criterion or the Cultural Politics of Neo-Conservatism
It was inevitable that the neo-conservative reaction of the 1980s would spread from politics to culture. It has done this with a vengeance in the pages of The New Criterion, the journal of cultural criticism launched in September 1982 by Hilton Kramer, former art critic for the New York Times. The ideological slant of the journal was boldly enunciated with the very first number. “Standards,” “values,” and “morality” were to be preserved over agai…
Communism and the Avant-Garde
Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism
In the last two centuries aestheticism and decisionism have gained prominence among anti-enlightenment intellectual currents. Aestheticism suggests the exclusive primacy of an artistic approach to life, in opposition to science and morality. Although the term was first coined in the mid-nineteenth century in association with the Pre-Raphaelites' emphasis on the absolute purity of the artistic sphere vis-à-vis all extra-artistic concerns — a formu…
A Radical Philosophy
Three Headstones: Recent Books on Walter Benjamin
Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism
ion, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as it did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them .... The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered .... The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination 40. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin ofNegative Dialectics (New York, 1977). 41.…
Agnes Heller on everyday life: A discussion of Agnes Heller, Everyday Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984)
The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism
It is possible that a philosopher could be guilty of a compromise with political authority in an apparently inconsequential manner; he himself might be aware of this. But what he could not be aware of is the possibility that this apparent compromise with authority finds its basis in the most profound deficiency . . of his own doctrine. If therefore a philosopher should conform (by making concessions to authority), his disciples will have to expla…
"Introduction to "Martin Heidegger and Politics: A Dossier
Heidegger's philosophical outlook as it relates to his specific political of the early 1930s by narrowly focusing on the various merits and demerits of Farias's book itself. This is precisely the strategy of dissemblance the French Heideggerians have pursued.' They challenged the legitimacy of Farias's inquiry in order to avoid coming to grips with the fact that 1) not only was their mentor an advocate of the National Socialist Revolution in a fa…
The French Heidegger Debate
Few events in recent memory have shaken the world of French letters as much as the appearance last fall of Victor Farias's book, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Trans. Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset [Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987]). Through an extremely thorough and painstaking (and for French Heideggerians, clearly painful) labor of documentation, Farias has single-handedly given the lie to four decades of inventive rationalizations concoct…
The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger
Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers
On Misunderstanding Habermas: A Response to Rajchman
One does not need a Ph.D. in contemporary American fiction to decipher the allusion contained in the title ofJohn Rajchman's review of Jiurgen The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas's Complaint.'' The reference is clearly to the masturbation-obsessed protagonist of Philip Roth's 1968 novel, Alexander Portnoy, who also had a complaint. The theoretical implications of Rajchman's witty literary analogy, moreover, are spelled out clearly …
The politics of being: The political thought of Martin Heidegger
For over fifty years the philosophical achievements of Martin Heidegger have been haunted by a devilʼs bargain struck between the philosopher and the National Socialist movement in the early 1930s-an alliance that Heidegger himself never explicitly renounced. The Politics of Being: the Political Thought of Martin Heidegger by Richard Wolin reconstructs the delicate interrelationship between philosophy and politics and the way in which Heideggerʼs…
Philosophy (50 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Epistemology (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Politics (23 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Aesthetics (16 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (16 works) · Art (15 works)