‘Theory’ - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from?
In his magnificently written book, Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only came from big ideas. It was the time of apocalyptic master thinkers, upsetting reading experiences and glamorous incomprehensibility. As the German publisher Suhrkamp published Adorno’s Minima Moralia and other High Theory works of the Frankfurt School, a small publisher in West Berlin, Merve Verlag, provided readers with a steady stream of the subversive new theory coming out of France.
By following the adventures of the publishers who provided the books and the reading communities that consumed and debated them, Philipp Felsch tells the remarkable story of an intellectual revolt when the German Left fell in love with Theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction: What Was Theory?1965: The Hour of Theory
1. Federal Republic of Adorno
Reflections from Damaged Life
Culture After Working Hours
In the Literary Supermarket
Adorno Answers
Are Your Endeavours Aimed at Changing the World?
2. In the Suhrkamp Culture
New Leftists
He Didn’t Write
School of Hard Books
Paperback Theory
Birth of a Genre
1970: Endless Discussions
3. Ill-made Books
Theoretical Practice
Smash Bourgeois Copyright!
Mondays, Fridays and Sundays
The Disorder of Discourse
4. Wolfsburg Empire
Proletarian Public Sphere
In the Land of Class Struggle
The Lightness of Being Communist
A Fateful Stroke of Luck
1977: Reading French in the German Autumn
5. (Possible) Reasons for the Happiness of Thought
All Kinds of Escapes
Intensity Is Not a Feeling
The Laugh of Merve
Vague Thinkers
6. The Reader as Partisan
The Death of the Author
The Pleasure of the Text
Children’s Books
A Different Mode of Production
Lying on Water
7. Foucault and the Terrorists
A Schweppes in Paris
Political Tourists
Vermin
On Tunix Beach
1984: The End of History
8. Critique of Pure Text
The Master Thinkers
Adults Only
Sola Scriptura
Aesthetics of Counter-Enlightenment
A Little Materialism
9. Into the White Cube
The Mountain of Truth
Be Smart - Take Part
German Issues
The Island of Posthistoire
The Trouble with Duchamp
10. Prussianism and Spontaneism
War in the Time of Total Peace
Machiavelli in Westphalia
The Wild Academy
In Search of the Punctum
Jacob Taubes’s Best Enemy
11. Disco Dispositive
Tyrannies of Intimacy
Pub Blather
The Art of Having a Beer
In the Jungle
Above the Clouds
Epilogue: After Theory?
Bibliography
Appendix: Translations of Illustrations
Notes
Index
