Posthumous People

by Cacciari, Massimo; Friedman, Rodger

• ISBN13: 9780804727099
• ISBN10: 0804727090
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-12-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Friedrich Neitzsche imagined himself belonging to a society of visionaries, thinkers, architects, poets, musicians, and artists running ahead of the mainstream. They were condemned to be misunderstood or ignored in the present, but their work would become significant in the future. To them he addressed the aphorism from which Massimo Cacciari's book takes its name, saying "It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!" Cacciari isolates Vienna as the European capitol of posthumous people at a crucial turning point in Western thinking, as the nineteenth century ended. There he finds Ludwig Wittgenstein, together with Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Lou Andreas-Salome, Adolf Loos, Martin Buber, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Cacciari treats this extraordinarily rich concentration of activity as the hub upon which European culture wheeled into the twentieth century. He reaches directly to the intellectual content in each of the various figures he discusses.

Author Biography

Massimo Cacciari is the Mayor of Venice.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note	xiii
Introduction: The View from Steinhof	1	(3)
Posthumous People	4	(3)
Sprachliches	7	(5)
Inquietum Cor Nostrum	12	(6)
The New Domain of Trauerspiel	18	(8)
A Critique of the Modern	26	(7)
The Impossibility of the Tragic	33	(5)
Visit the Serraglio!	38	(9)
Music, Voice, Text	47	(10)
Wonders and Marvels	57	(9)
The Misfit	66	(5)
Acheronta Movebo	71	(6)
The Private Adolf Loos	77	(4)
Lou's Buttons	81	(8)
The Glass Chain	89	(4)
Invalid des Todes	93	(4)
On the Mystical Again	97	(5)
Abendland	102	(7)
On Cliffs and Swamps	109	(14)
Centaurs	123	(4)
Weibliches	127	(8)
The Eternal Child	135	(5)
Songs of the Departed	140	(17)
The Art of Archery	157	(13)
A Dark Alley in the Old City	170	(5)
The Star of Narration	175	(16)
Kraus's Ideogram	191	(5)
Profane Attention	196	(13)
Notes	209
Sixteen pages of figures follow page 96.