"The "Impossibility of Poetry

If the French Revolution has been important in the modern period, it is not only as a historical event with specific political and social consequences but as an idea, a powerful epistemological tool for thinking about and organizing a certain historical process. The paradox is worth noting. What at first seemed terrifying, chaotic, irrational, to contemporary observers rapidly became the event through which one could make sense of history, ascribe to it a direction and logic. The revolutionary break with tradition is in fact the consecration of tradition insofar as any endpoint crystallizes what has come before it into a distinct, apprehensible form. In the 20th century this endpoint has been constituted not by the Russian Revolution of 1917, but by the terror of National Socialism, by Auschwitz. What initially seemed to defy all reason, to be unthinkable and unimaginable, beyond the limits of or inappropriate for representation, has in fact become a central historical, aesthetic, even metaphysical category for thinking about and making sense of the recent past

Art · Impossibility · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty

• A Date, a Place, a Name

  Dorota Glowacka•CR The New Centennial Review•2007

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• Dichten, Denken, Lesen

  Kristin Rebien•The Germanic Review Literature…•2009

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• Near the End

  Open Access•Nitzan Lebovic•The German Quarterly•2010

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