Thinking Unrest

Reconsiders major thinkers and works of German Idealism and their legacy for our own restless times.

From the longing in which Schelling based human freedom to the "restlessness of the negative" that Jean-Luc Nancy famously traced through Hegel's corpus, unrest centrally preoccupied many thinkers associated with German Idealism. Thinking Unrest gathers original essays from eight leading scholars to reopen the question of what moves thought both within German Idealism and among the movement’s heirs. Through readings of Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling, as well as more contemporary writers such as Nicolas Abraham, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Rainer Maria Rilke, contributors expose more broadly what it may mean for philosophy to be a matter of responding to that which provokes, troubles, and withdraws from thought. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives—poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, the history of science, political theory—the volume reconsiders the legacy of German Idealism for thinking unrest today.