Michael Mack Libros

German photography has led the world in the reassessment of our relationship to the urban and man-made environment. Themes such as the way we move through space, and our alienation from the world around us, are explored by artists including Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gosbert Adler, Laurenz Berges, Mona Breede, Johannes Bruns, Susanne Brügger, Michael Danner, Thomas Demand, Christine Erhard, Andreas Gursky, Matthias Hoch, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Heiner Schilling, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Schmidt, Heidi Specker, Petra Wunderlich and Ulrich Wüst. The artists' portfolios are supported by a series of essays that set the work in a theoretical and historical context.

The book presents a fresh analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's "Apologie for Poetric," showcasing it as a groundbreaking theory of poetic creativity. Michael Mack delves into Sidney's arguments, highlighting their significance and influence in the realm of literature. By reinterpreting this classic work, Mack emphasizes its role in shaping the understanding of poetry's purpose and the creative process, making it a vital contribution to literary studies.

Considering the support behind Brexit and Donald Trump's 'America first' policies, this book challenges the idea that they are motivated solely by fear and instead looks at the hope and promises that drive these renewed forms of nationalism. Addressing these neglected motivations within contemporary populism, Michael Mack explores how our current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic and political state of affairs partakes of a history of failed promises that goes back to the inception of modernity; namely, to Spinoza's radical enlightenment of diversity and equality. Through this innovative approach, Spinoza emerges less as a single isolated figure and more as a sign for an intellectual constellation of thinkers and writers who – from the romantics to contemporary theory and literature – have introduced various shifts in the way we see humanity as being limited and prone to disappointment. Combining intellectual history with literary and scientific theory, the book traces the collapse of traditional values and orders from Spinoza to Nietzsche and then to the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad and postmodernism of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

Highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology, this book analyses the heuristic value of fiction. It alerts us to how we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction in our everyday lives, because fictional representations constantly feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. Philosophy and literature disclose how the substantive sphere of social, economic and medical practice is sometimes driven and shaped by the affect-ridden and subjective. Analysing a wide range of literature—from Augustine, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Deleuze to Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Littell—Michael Mack rethinks ethical attitudes towards the long or eternal life. In so doing he shows how philosophy and literature turn representation against itself to expose the hollowness of theologically grand concepts that govern our secular approach towards ethics, economics and medicine. Philosophy and literature help us resist our current infatuation with numbers and the numerical and contribute towards a future politics that is at once singular and diverse.

Whereas many other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers - including Derrida - have concentrated on a refusal of totality and celebration of 'otherness', the poet and intellectual Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) combines this emphasis with an equal stress on the 'need' for certain collectively acknowledged limits. Next to the wider significance of this book for discussions of Holocaust studies in relation to current theoretical and social issues, it will also offer a new interpretation of Elias Canetti's work. This is the first detailed examination of Steiner's anthropology and philosophy and its relation to the work of his close intellectual friend Canetti.