Introductory Note

Abstract

Introductory Note Kristina Mendicino (bio) and Gerhard Richter, Guest Editors (bio) "It is dangerous to be an heir." —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra The articles gathered in this special issue of MLN are, for the most part, based on papers delivered at an international conference entitled "Inheriting the Frankfurt School," organized by Kristina Mendicino and Gerhard Richter at Brown University on 23–24 September 2016. The conference explicitly devoted itself to the critical question of what it might mean to inherit the contested legacy of the Frankfurt School and, indeed, what it might mean to inherit an intellectual legacy in general. The wager of the conference, as well as the essays collected here, is that "inheriting an intellectual legacy…is not a self-evident given—a transaction to be initiated and completed whenever we choose—but rather an open question."1 Unlike the linear temporality of a causal-mechanical sequence or the unbroken continuity implied by certain rhetorical figurations of familial lineage, inheritance takes place in the precarious moment in which a tradition is taken up and interpreted as something both essential and enigmatic. Collectively, the papers address—explicitly or implicitly, and from diverse perspectives—problems of intellectual and cultural inheritance, including issues of transmission, reception, survival, and living on. Broadly conceived, the essays speak to the challenge and perils of attempting [End Page 471] to navigate the urgency and potential unreadability of a critical legacy. Evoking Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin—along with those readers who have intervened most vigorously to carry their legacies forward in transformative ways, such as Jacques Derrida—thus calls for critical consideration of the concept of inheritance in its own right. It is precisely this much-needed kind of reflection that the essays collected here, each in its own singular way, perform. Key questions of inheritance are examined in such variegated contexts as the relationship between Benjamin and Nietzsche (Mendicino); the fate of modernism as a political form of life and aesthetic experience (Bernstein); the haunting inheritance of film in critical theory (Koch); the uneasy survival of Benjamin in deconstructive modes of thought (Balfour); Adorno's paratactical inheriting of Hölderlin (Wildanger), as well as Adorno's political testament as it emerges in his thinking of resignation (Tabor); the contested legacy of Marx in Benjamin's thinking (Richter); Benjamin's understanding and practice of miniaturization in the context of the digital age (Johannßen); the contradictions of critical theory as they come to the fore in the chapter on the "Culture Industry" from Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Völker); the "biophilology" of Benjamin's literary-critical legacy (McLaughlin); the question of a reconciliation with nature as thought through Adorno (Düttmann); the legacy of play in Benjamin and Freud (Powers); the aesthetic politics of inheriting trash in Benjamin and the Polish writer Bruno Schulz (Lozinski-Veach); and the inheritance of the Frankfurt School along the Brazilian periphery (Durão). In addition to those whose texts are included here, we would like to thank the following colleagues, from Brown and beyond, whose contributions as speakers or as session moderators helped to make the conference a success: Amanda Anderson, Timothy Bewes, Rebecca Comay, Michael W. Jennings, Thomas Kniesche, Thomas A. (Tal) Lewis, Marc Redfield, Thomas Schestag, Zachary Sng, and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. Geoffrey Wildanger's artistic and administrative contributions were invaluable. As always, Wendy Perelman assisted with the conference logistics in an exemplary way. We also would like to thank the Department of German Studies, the Humanities Initiative, the Pembroke Center, and the Dean of the Faculty at Brown University, as well as the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) in New York and the Max Kade Foundation, whose collective financial support helped to make this conference a reality. Our editorial assistant, Dr. Karen Embry, helped in the most perceptive and thoughtful of ways. And, finally, we are indebted to our cherished colleagues in [End Page 472] the German Department at Johns Hopkins University, without whom this special issue at the vital nexus of Denken and Danken would not have come into being. Kristina Mendicino Kristina Mendicino is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Humanities and German Studies...