Title: Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics
Lecturer: Richard Wolin (Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center)
Chairperson: WANG Jiajun (Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 10:30 am, October 24th, 2017 (Tuesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The “Cosmic Circle” was a literary cenacle, anchored by the charismatic German symbolist poet, Stefan George, whose members inhabited the Bohemian quarter of fin-de-siècle Munich. The “Cosmics” were committed aesthetes who celebrated matriarchy and hierarchy, and engaged in séances and bacchanalia. During the late 1890s, they hatched an improbable scheme to awaken a comatose Nietzsche through free-form dance. They flirted with “Ariosophy” - a mystical doctrine of Aryan supremacy – and contributed to Stefan George’s yearbook, Blätter für die Kunst, which unabashedly featured a swastika on its cover. Among its members were: Ludwig Klages, Alfred Schuler, and Karl Wolfskehl - the so-called “Jewish Cosmic,” who fought an uphill battle to preserve his standing in the face of his colleagues' growing anti-Semitism. It is a well-kept secret that Walter Benjamin eulogized the Cosmics: he corresponded with Klages and employed their ideas as the methodological cornerstone of his celebrated Arcades Project. Why did he revere their work and why is the “Cosmic connection” so little discussed in conventional Benjamin scholarship?
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Richard Wolin is a Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is known for a series of debates concerning postmodernism and has criticized particular contributors to and sources of the late-20th-century formulation of postmodern thought, including Nietzsche, Heidegger and Bataille. He has published books such as: The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger; The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism; The Frankfurt School Revisited; etc.