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Yale Margellos
The Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters series identifies works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers, as well as important contemporary authors whose work has not yet been translated into English.
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Serhiy Zhadan; Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Antonio Lobo Antunes; Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Cees Nooteboom; Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson; With Photographs by Simone Sassen
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Martin Mittelmeier—
As a student, I was fascinated by Theodor Adorno’s texts. Throughout my course of studies I tried to understand his essays and books, which were enigmatic to me but had the promise that, once I understood them, I would know everything about the condition of contemporary society, how fascism was possible in the modern world, etc.
When I became exhausted reading the same essay again and again and my eyes got tired, something weird happened. When I squinted at the text, its surface became indistinct. I thought I had discovered something: a constellation-like structure that always organizes the texts in the same way—I thought I had cracked the Adorno code. I became obsessed with proving my sensational discovery. But I learned that nobody was really interested in this observation.
With the little free time I had when I was an editor for publishing houses like Luchterhand, I was able to create some inscrutable pages of long Adorno quotes that nobody would have wanted to read. Holidays had been my only chance to read more, to work on making my ideas clearer, to convince the world of my discovery. When my girlfriend, Ines (to whom Naples 1925 is dedicated), and I visited Lanzarote, I was the usual killjoy. I didn’t want to sightsee on the island; I wanted instead to read and work on my Adorno project.
When Ines persuaded me to join at least the volcano tour, I suddenly recalled the beginning of Adorno’s essay on Schubert, which contains an impressive and enigmatic metaphor of a volcano. I also remembered that there had been a meeting in the 1920s near Naples, attended by Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other philosophers. They met at Mount Vesuvius.
Was that location a coincidence? And didn’t the encircling of the volcano bring to mind the constellation-like structure I thought I had found in Adorno’s texts? From there, I developed the conviction that I could write about the emergence of a new kind of philosophy among upcoming thinkers—Critical Theory—as influenced by the dramatic landscape of the Gulf of Naples.
Martin Mittelmeier, an editor and author, is honorary professor at the Institute for German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne. His books include Dada: A Century’s Tale and Freedom and Darkness. He lives in Cologne, Germany.
The post Looking for the Origins of Critical Theory in Naples appeared first on Yale University Press.
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