Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analyses—across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media—conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake.

Politics & Social Sciences

RICHTER, Gerhard

Philosophy

Columbia University Press

An engagement with the relation between the world in which an artwork is created—a world that perishes or decays over time—and the new world that the artwork opens up.\nGerhard Richter explores the relation between two worlds: the world in which an artwork is created, that is, a world that over time perishes or decays beyond interpretive understanding, and the new world that the artwork opens up. The multiple relations between these worlds are examined in a number of central thinkers and in various modes of aesthetic production, including poetry, painting, music, film, literature, and photography. It is precisely in and through the work of art, Richter shows, that central elements of the thinking of world as world are negotiated in the most essential and moving ways.\nExploring the relationship between these worlds through art and European philosophy, Richter offers bold new interpretations of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida. The book also provides stimulating new insights into the works of heterogeneous artists such as Paul Celan, Friedrich Hölderlin, Werner Herzog, Arnold Schönberg, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Andrew Moore, Botho Strauß, Didier Eribon, and even prehistoric cave painters. In each case, Richter’s readings are guided by a consideration of the conceptual constraints and singular interpretive demands imposed by the specific genre and medium.

This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is one of the foremost painters of his generation. A great deal has been written about the bewildering heterogeneity of his work over the past 30 years. His seemingly willful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation and his seemingly inconsistent methods of applying paint to canvas are consistent, if nothing else, with Richter himself—the master of the paradoxical statement. Although he has emphasized that he is first a painter and has never been a theorist, he has, throughout his career issued provocative, contentious, and memorable statements. Over seven years in preparation, this book makes available a selection of Richter's texts from all periods of his career, many translated for the first time. There are public statements about specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics, and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods, and sources of his works from various periods. The writings are accompanied by 87 biographical illustrations of paintings from the artist's personal collection. Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London

The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993

Individual Artists

Mit Pr

This monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of our time. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist’s thinking, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. Year by year, the images closely parallel the subjects of Richter’s paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter’s working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Richter redefined the terms of contemporary painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter’s photographs--sometimes found, sometimes original--have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

Gerhard Richter Atlas /anglais

Thames&Hudson

Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)

In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Literature & Fiction

Stanford University Press

In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

The awe inspiring vastness of the sea, its overpowering beauty, and its unfathomable depths never fail to impress us. Throughout history people have ventured out onto the sea in boats that are powered only by wind in sails and steered only by hand. Why? Perhaps because the sea is the embodiment of freedom? Or because it holds a magic appeal for both body and mind? Only the wind knows. This comprehensive book, unique in concept and execution, tries to find the answers to these questions. At the same time, it traces the development of yachting from its beginnings to the present. Sailors who have made solo voyages around the world tell of their adventures on the Seven Seas. But the sea offers more than just a challenge, It also offers an opportunity to explore the inner life. At sea, time often loses its meaning, and the thythms of life become one with the mighty forces of wind and water. Writers with experience of the sea deal with all these aspects of yachting. Professional photographers from all over the world have contributed to a fascinating collection of pictures. This is a magnificent book that opens to us, through word and image, one of the last arenas of adventure left in our time.

The Big Book of Sailing: The Sailors, the Ships, and the Sea

Sports & Outdoors

Grube, Frank

Water Sports

Barron's Educational Series,Inc.

Although Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in twentieth-century Western culture, his enigmatic sense of the political has eluded definition. His later work in particular stages a perpetual but little understood confrontation with German fascism. 
Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamin's engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement of his language. Richter traces Benjamin's radical notions of the political through a series of corporeal figures in his often neglected autobiographical writings-the Moscow Diary, the Berlin Chronicle, and the Berlin Childhood around 1900. Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy: the body, the ear, and the eye. Richter places these figures into a wide network of references from Benjamin's corpus demonstrating that Benjamin's innovative acts of self-portraiture are inseparable from his analyses of the physiognomy of Weimar culture and German fascism. Benjamin's preoccupation with the body becomes visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the self, history, reading, and language. Benjamin's autobiographies, as Richter shows, negate fascism and its ideology of stable meaning with each turn away from an essential corporeal self.
Readers interested in modem German literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, comparative literature, Weimar culture, and fascism will welcome this book.

Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Kritik)

Wayne State University Press

Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter’s book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno―both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from the primacy of the object to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.Richter vividly shows how Adorno’s highly suggestive―yet often overlooked―concept of the “uncoercive gaze” designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: It moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it, whether the object is an idea, a thought, a concept, a text, a work of art, an experience, or a problem of political or sociological theory.Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.

Fordham University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RICHTER, Gerhard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by RICHTER, Gerhard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by RICHTER, Gerhard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art

The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993

Gerhard Richter Atlas /anglais

Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)

The Big Book of Sailing: The Sailors, the Ships, and the Sea

Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Kritik)

Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)