S D Chrostowska
Biographic Data
| ID | 6090399 |
|---|---|
| NAME | S D Chrostowska |
| GIVEN NAMES | S D |
| FAMILY NAME | Chrostowska |
| SIGNATURE | CHROSTOWSKA S D |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University Toronto Canada |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics
A pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as someth…
Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology
Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularit…
Progress
This article begins from the assumption that what was once an integral dimension of progress-the development of literature and of art more generally-now lies outside its scope. The essay falls into three parts that juxtapose French with German intellectual history. The first part examines the notion of literary progress developed by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, as well as the opposition to it by Boileau and other antiquarians, during the quer…
Serious, not all that serious: Utopia beyond realism and normativity in contemporary critical theory
Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives
The Spring and the Reel: On Film and Revolution
This essay deals with the problem of filmically representing political revolutions. In working out what film can do with and for revolution, it argues that the representation of revolution is not as powerful or mobilizing as the reflection of revolutionary practices and ideas, always at a distance from the realm of representation. Documentary practices, I contend, can serve active reflection on the side and site of struggle. The concept of reflec…
Anti-Sisyphus: The Future is Not What it Used to Be – a photograph by Gilbert Garcin
Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries
This short essay considers the increasingly nostalgic life of physical books. From immaculate leather-bound collections to "dummy" libraries, in private homes or department stores, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, old books have enjoyed past-directed affective relationships with users and consumers, communicating continuity with, appreciation of, and longing for aspects of time past. These relationships, falling along a spectrum from li…
Thought Woken by Memory: Adorno's Circuitous Path to Utopia
The essay argues that utopian thinking plays a central role in Theodor W. Adorno's social critique. To make the case, Chrostowska draws on Adorno's critical engagements with Walter Benjamin, Thorstein Veblen, Oswald Spengler, and Aldous Huxley. Adorno offers two utopian visions: the first a “chronotope” in which the possibility of change is revived, an indeterminate time and place for action; the second an image of utopia achieved, from which all…
Consumed by Nostalgia
Consumed by Nostalgia? S. D. Chrostowska (bio) I "Philosophy is essentially homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home."1 This fragment, a "single gesture" of thought toward an object,2 is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and self-discovery, solidify our self, or multiply…
Notes for a History of the Political: Capital Events and Bodies Politic in the French Revolution
I. Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1927; revised 1932 and 1933) has come to be widely recognized as a work of rare insight into the formative logic of the state. Much less apparent is that implicit within this theoretical distillation is a new type of political history. There is every indication—given the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of Schmitt's writings, no less than his overtly personal beliefs in this regard—…
Vis-à-vis theglaneuse
Gleaning [glanage] itself is unknown–is forgotten. The word is passe. I was intrigued by people in the street picking up discarded food, and I wondered: what's happening to the fields of wheat? Not
Stanislaw Brzozowski, Philosopher of History, Myth, and Will
Before his untimely death, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) had proven himself a thinker of exceptional acumen, through critical analyses spanning the gamut of Polish and European culture. Next to Czesaw Milosz, he holds a signal place in twentieth-century Polish intellectual culture, yet is surprisingly little-known abroad. A prolific writer of literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, and prose fiction, Brzozowski remains to be situated with…
Serious, not all that serious: Utopia beyond realism and normativity in contemporary critical theory
Consumed by Nostalgia
Consumed by Nostalgia? S. D. Chrostowska (bio) I "Philosophy is essentially homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home."1 This fragment, a "single gesture" of thought toward an object,2 is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and self-discovery, solidify our self, or multiply…
Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries
This short essay considers the increasingly nostalgic life of physical books. From immaculate leather-bound collections to "dummy" libraries, in private homes or department stores, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, old books have enjoyed past-directed affective relationships with users and consumers, communicating continuity with, appreciation of, and longing for aspects of time past. These relationships, falling along a spectrum from li…
Thought Woken by Memory: Adorno's Circuitous Path to Utopia
The essay argues that utopian thinking plays a central role in Theodor W. Adorno's social critique. To make the case, Chrostowska draws on Adorno's critical engagements with Walter Benjamin, Thorstein Veblen, Oswald Spengler, and Aldous Huxley. Adorno offers two utopian visions: the first a “chronotope” in which the possibility of change is revived, an indeterminate time and place for action; the second an image of utopia achieved, from which all…
Stanislaw Brzozowski, Philosopher of History, Myth, and Will
Before his untimely death, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) had proven himself a thinker of exceptional acumen, through critical analyses spanning the gamut of Polish and European culture. Next to Czesaw Milosz, he holds a signal place in twentieth-century Polish intellectual culture, yet is surprisingly little-known abroad. A prolific writer of literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, and prose fiction, Brzozowski remains to be situated with…
Vis-à-vis theglaneuse
Gleaning [glanage] itself is unknown–is forgotten. The word is passe. I was intrigued by people in the street picking up discarded food, and I wondered: what's happening to the fields of wheat? Not
Notes for a History of the Political: Capital Events and Bodies Politic in the French Revolution
I. Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1927; revised 1932 and 1933) has come to be widely recognized as a work of rare insight into the formative logic of the state. Much less apparent is that implicit within this theoretical distillation is a new type of political history. There is every indication—given the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of Schmitt's writings, no less than his overtly personal beliefs in this regard—…
Consumed by Nostalgia
Consumed by Nostalgia? S. D. Chrostowska (bio) I "Philosophy is essentially homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home."1 This fragment, a "single gesture" of thought toward an object,2 is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and self-discovery, solidify our self, or multiply…
Thought Woken by Memory: Adorno's Circuitous Path to Utopia
The essay argues that utopian thinking plays a central role in Theodor W. Adorno's social critique. To make the case, Chrostowska draws on Adorno's critical engagements with Walter Benjamin, Thorstein Veblen, Oswald Spengler, and Aldous Huxley. Adorno offers two utopian visions: the first a “chronotope” in which the possibility of change is revived, an indeterminate time and place for action; the second an image of utopia achieved, from which all…
Anti-Sisyphus: The Future is Not What it Used to Be – a photograph by Gilbert Garcin
Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries
This short essay considers the increasingly nostalgic life of physical books. From immaculate leather-bound collections to "dummy" libraries, in private homes or department stores, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, old books have enjoyed past-directed affective relationships with users and consumers, communicating continuity with, appreciation of, and longing for aspects of time past. These relationships, falling along a spectrum from li…
Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives
The Spring and the Reel: On Film and Revolution
This essay deals with the problem of filmically representing political revolutions. In working out what film can do with and for revolution, it argues that the representation of revolution is not as powerful or mobilizing as the reflection of revolutionary practices and ideas, always at a distance from the realm of representation. Documentary practices, I contend, can serve active reflection on the side and site of struggle. The concept of reflec…
Serious, not all that serious: Utopia beyond realism and normativity in contemporary critical theory
Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics
A pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as someth…
Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology
Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularit…
Progress
This article begins from the assumption that what was once an integral dimension of progress-the development of literature and of art more generally-now lies outside its scope. The essay falls into three parts that juxtapose French with German intellectual history. The first part examines the notion of literary progress developed by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, as well as the opposition to it by Boileau and other antiquarians, during the quer…
Art (8 works) · Art history (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (5 works)