Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[A] fascinating and suggestive book . . . The intellectual framework of
The Moment of Rupture successfully demonstrates the importance of the instantanteist chronotrope and shows how it emerged from the history of philosophy to take center stage in the interwar Weimar Republic."" *
Contemporary Political Theory *
"
Beck makes a potent case for the historical significance of instantaneity, and he shows convincingly that the way we understand time underpins our response to crises. Even as we ponder the wholesale changes demanded by today’s pandemic, it is useful and bracing to see how earlier thinkers sought visions of political transformation in moments of rupture.
" * Journal of Modern History *
"Compelling...[
The Moment of Rupture] is a compact, lucid, and enjoyably biographical study of an intellectual and world-historical interregnum that has only become more significant for how we understand our histories a century later." * The Marginalia Review of Books *
"Connecting a trajectory of aesthetic thought that began in the eighteenth century with a vision of a radically different future,
The Moment of Rupture shows how the complex and multifaceted conception of the 'instant' in Weimar culture was central to the political philosophy that sought to transcend Germany's first republic. Humberto Beck persuasively argues that Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin are, from very different angles, reflecting on a particular and peculiar sense of time and crisis in their works." * Carl Caldwell, Rice University *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. The Instant from Goethe to Nietzsche: The Modern Beginnings of a Concept
Chapter 2. The Instant of the Avant-Garde
Chapter 3. Ernst Jünger and the Instant of Crisis
Chapter 4. Ernst Bloch and the Temporality of the Not-Yet
Chapter 5. Walter Benjamin and the Now-Time of History
Conclusion. Instantaneism as a Regime of Historicity
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
