The article argues for the relevance of Simmel's life‐philosophy ( Lebensphilosophie) for the contemporary thought about life and death. By considering life, paradoxically, at once as a pre‐individual flux of becoming and individuated, Simmel manages to avoid both reductionism and mysticism. In addition, unlike Deleuze, for example, Simmel thinks that we can experience and know life only in some individual, actual form, never in its pure virtuality, as an absolute flow. During the course of examination, Simmel's insights will also be (...) discussed in connection with Heidegger. The article maintains that what remains on the Simmelian side beyond the striking affinities between the two thinkers is a kind of animal vitality. Though Simmel's life‐philosophy is mainly concerned with the world‐relation of humans, when it comes to death, it places humans on a par with all living organisms. A death that is immanent in life is appropriate to anything that is living. Thus the human individual, too, is dying precisely as a living organism, as some‐body that is alive. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s letter correspondence with Walter Benjamin throughout the decade of the 1930’s entertains the central question concerning the possibility of philosophy in their intellectual milieu. The fate of this possibility for Adorno hinges on Benjamin’s work-in-progress Das Passagen-Werk—a fate that is catastrophically blocked by an uncritical tendency convicted repeatedly by the former as “undialectical.” And yet Adorno obstinately persists in clinging to the canon of a philosophically overdetermined demand he endearingly calls “my Arcades orthodoxy.” The threatening destruction of (...) the aura of this orthodoxy reaches a crisis in Adorno’s ruthless metacritique of Benjamin’s alleged undialectical treatment of aesthetic autonomy in a draft of the Kunstwerk essay, marking a critical wound in the correspondence which the following exposition tracks in the enigmatic changeover in the philosophical exigency of the said orthodoxy from prima philosophia to ultima philosophia. The lingering wound is registered in Adorno’s late philosophical work. (shrink)

In the paper at hand I introduce Goethe’s ontology and methodology for the study of life as an alternative to current theories. ‘Life,’ in its individual, social and/or pan-natural form, has been a recurring topic in the social sciences for the last two centuries and may currently experience a renaissance, if we are to believe Scott Lash. Goethe’s approach is of particular interest because he formulated it as one of the first critical responses to the nascent discipline of biology. It (...) can be characterised broadly as phenomenology with a strong dose of life philosophy. For this reason, and to draw its contours more clearly, I compare his approach to the respective thoughts in Husserl’s and Simmel’s work. The comparison focuses on the two central concepts phenomenon and life but also discusses broader epistemological and methodological issues, such as the relationship between observer and observed, the relationship between culture and nature, the nature of causality as well as preferred methods of study. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving (including freeways, motorways and autobahns) a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly (...) globalizing car system, conceptualized as a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production (Fordism) and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has again become of interest. Its reception, however, has been fairly one-sided and selective, mostly because Simmel’s philosophy has been bypassed in favor of his sociological contributions. This article examines Simmel’s explicit reflections on the nature of philosophy. Simmel defines philosophy through three aspects which, according to him, are common to all philosophical schools. First, philosophical reasoning implies the effort to think without preconditions. Second, Simmel maintains that in contrast (...) to other sciences, only philosophy is oriented toward constructing a general view of the world. Third, Simmel claims that philosophical work worthy of the name creates a sphere of a typical way of being in relation to world, a third sphere that is between the personal and the objective. According to Simmel, what has made philosophy’s eminent figures great is that they have advanced a type of thinking and developed it into a particularly interesting form, and this type can still correspond with the way we experience the world. It is significant that these three aspects through which Simmel defines philosophical activity emphasize the forms of questioning, not the contents or objects of thought. Still, he thinks that an interaction with concrete examples is always required in order to make philosophy a meaningful activity. This stance is reflected in the wide variety of topics studied by Simmel himself. In his last works Simmel began to emphasize another aspect of philosophy, its nature as a living movement of thought related to fundamental human limitedness: just as life itself ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking. (shrink)

The articles brought together in this double-length section of the Annual Review of Theory, Culture & Society focus on two intertwined strands of the thought of Georg Simmel, both of them neglected until recent years. A first bears on what might be called Simmel’s metaphysics of the social, or what he himself once called ‘sociological metaphysics’. A second strand centres on the renewed contemporary relevance of Simmel’s ideas about money economies and their relation to precarious individual life-situations in an age (...) of global economic turbulence. Current sensibilities in the wake of global economic crisis and the demise of some of the more euphoric sociologies of globalization of the last two decades provide a timely setting for a reappraisal of Simmel’s thinking. With the completion in 2012 of the Suhrkamp edition of Simmel’s collected works, Simmel’s themes need to be explored more deeply, including particularly his thinking about lived experience, transcendence, death, fragmentary worlds of value, and allegorical representation. This issue of the journal showcases some of the latest scholarly work and foregrounds several pivotal primary pieces unavailable in English until now. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, a comprehensive semantics of crowds emerged in European social theory, dominated in particular by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde. This article extracts two essential, but widely neglected, sociological arguments from this semantics. First, the idea that irrationality is intrinsic to society and, second, the claim that individuality is plastic rather than constitutive. By following the destiny of this semantics in its American reception, the article demonstrates how American scholars soon transformed the conception of crowds. (...) Most importantly, the theoretical cornerstone of the European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the USA. It is argued that this rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it is also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights. The article recalls the semantics of crowds in order to evoke an early branch of social theory that still contains a provocative gesture. (shrink)

The article discusses Georg Simmel’s theorizing on the social in the light of his treatment of the ‘dyad’ and the ‘triad’, constellations of two and three elements. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that they express the difference between the primary intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals and the objectified social forms in numerical terms, as quantitatively determined. In the article, it is argued that in its basic, methodologically simplest form, the social amounts for Simmel (...) to dyadic interaction between I and you, that can be conceptualized as ‘beingwith’. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, it is claimed that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The ‘third’ not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but it is also capable of transforming it into a completely new figure: a social whole, a ‘we’, which obtains a supra-individual life independent of the individuals. (shrink)

The extent to which Walter Benjamin's thought is bound up with the conceptual framework and debates of Bergsonism is overlooked to the detriment of our understanding of both. Benjamin's conception of Erfahrung/ experience is defined in relation to Bergson's conception of experience in the durée/duration. Benjamin implicitly evokes and extends a Bergsonian conception of creativity. This is central to Benjamin's understanding of the political implications of the decay of aura. The enhanced potentiality for creativity constitutes the possibility of new forms (...) of genuine Erfahrung in the scattered debris of the old. This would be based upon an affirmative nihilism, the mobilization of the creative second technology, the loosening of the masses, and the `politicization of art'. Crucially, however, Benjamin rejects Bergson's ahistorical approach to creativity within human experience. Virtual difference, the durée, is not external to human history. Creativity does not `flow into' actual human life but is the actualization of virtual difference that is generated and delimited by given socio-technological conditions. Modern creativity is not the gift of` God but of the capitalist mode of production. Benjamin provides a materialist explanation for the utility of Bergson's conception of creativity in the political critique of the present and a materialist justification for the normative prioritization of openness and qualitative segmentarity. He treats the durée as fully immanent to human experience and affirms a politics that is both more realistic and more committed to the value of difference in itself than is articulated in Bergson's own sociobiology. Benjamin does, as such, make a direct and critical contribution to the contemporary attempt to deploy Bergsonism in political critique and to render vitalism sociological. (shrink)

Contrary to common perceptions of Simmel’s work as dividing into three stages of Darwinism, Kantianism, and Goethean/Bergsonian Life-Philosophy, consideration of the full scope of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe demonstrates Simmel’s concern with both Kant and Goethe as life-long, just as was his engagement with core principles respectively associated with them: Form and Life. What changed in his mind over time was how those two principles were construed and related. In this view, Simmel’s Soziologie can be read as a treatise on (...) the properties of social forms that emerge out of vital processes – following a dynamic akin to Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, whereas the Lebensanschauung puts more emphasis on the ways in which forms channel, constrain, and inspire the streams of life. This opens the door for creative work pursuing lines of connection between the two disciplines – a sociology of authentic individuality and a kind of existentialized sociology – and, beyond that, to a unified theory of action and evolution. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to explore the reasons for the continued attractiveness of Simmel's thought today and to probe the contemporary affinities to his philosophical stance towards the world. Simmel anchored the ‘philosophical attitude' in the philosopher’s particularly developed disposition for Erlebnis, i.e. the unified pre-conceptual experience of each moment of reality and life, as well as in a particular mode of objectivating this experience. We provide an illustration of such an approach and its implications through Simmel's analysis (...) of ‘remoteness from oneself’ and the restlessness it entails in The Philosophy of Money. We argue that Simmel's attempt at phenomenologically unveiling the contours and depths of life moments and fragments, as well as his emphasis on constant movement, provide much reassurance to contemporary subjectivities. But his philosophical stance is also driven by a quasi-mystical yearning for the One that lies beneath and beyond the fragments. We propose an initial assessment of the main implications of such a stance by relating it to the philosophical path it opened up (a path directly linking to Heidegger and his followers, but also in part to Deleuze) and by placing it in what we understand to be the new philosophical situation today. (shrink)