Rosenzweig - Understanding the Sick and the Healthy

Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God

Rosenzweig's Understanding the Sick and the Healthy is a rare gem of a book. The importance of Rosenzweig's work-like that of Walter Benjaminis only now beginning to emerge. Like Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig explicitly undertakes to provide a therapy that will liberate the reader from philosophical questions as they arise. Three features of Rosenzweig's little book now seem ahead of their time: first, his desire not to eliminate the wonder with which philosophical questioning begins; second, his insistence on reconceiving and thus preserving the traditional subject-matter of metaphysics; and third, his seminal thought that wonder within that nexus could be expressed within a life lived according to the liturgical calendar of Judaism, with its alternation between profane and sacred time?
--Paul Franks, Indiana University, Bloomington

Product Description
Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century's great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible prcis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig's "new thinking," Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard's Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.

(putnam wrote an introduction to this,sorrily it's a total self-celebration)

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Cadava - Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History

MADE IN ISTANBUL


Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History
by Eduardo Cadava

# Paperback: 204 pages
# Publisher: Princeton University Press; New Ed edition (August 3, 1998)

Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding.

Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.

1ST TIME ON THE NET
Here is one of the books which changed my path of thinking. I was already a company of Benjamin, but Cadava helped me to constellate with Heidegger, JL Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. amazing is the words that are flashes, letting the gesture, a fissure we are, actuality in its full absence -a logical modality that absences all predications- you see how Benjamin: dwelling at the margins of modernity, shows us the boundaries that it can extend(i.e. excessive moments of the law): Theses on History. I think the most radical answer given to Benjamin is from Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.

"The disaster does not put me into question, but annuls the question, makes it disappear – as if along with the question, “I” too disap-peared in the disaster which never appears. The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event: it does not happen, not only because there is no “I” to undergo the experience, but because (and this is exactly what presupposition means), since the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it." (WD 28)