Cold Contact

This is a book about “appropriate distance”, a construct of cultural history. Its historical setting is between 1914 and 1945, a thirty-year period of war. It depicts the trauma experienced in German culture after the defeat in 1918: the familiar horizons of the Wilhelmine Empire had disappeared. Following the dissolution of the system of authority, people experience the immediate encounter with modernity as a chilling shock. As a reaction to this, the coldness of industrialized civil society is replaced by a warm community ideal.

Philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner intervenes in this situation of community worship, which has fatal political consequences, with his book The Boundaries of Community, which is a manifesto advocating coldness. Plessner's manifesto interests us today because it is uncannily relevant to the problems that surface in debates about communitarianism. Plessner opposes the idea of community as a comradeship based on symbiosis with the idea of a society that does not have heavenly features. This is an open system made up of complete strangers. In order for people to function according to the laws of this society, they need to distance themselves from the areas of trust where they "still feel warm".

Cold Contact examines the interesting dimensions of the anthropological principle that “human beings are artificial by nature”. He reconstructs the historical background of this principle, both its connection with Nietzschean aestheticism and its closeness with the statements of the European avant-garde on the left, from Brecht to Kracauer and Benjamin, and on the right, from Carl Schmitt to Jünger. Lethen thinks that we will be able to escape more easily from the period of disaster that has kept us under its spell for so long, after describing this core with all its strangeness.

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Prepared for Publication by: Özge Çelik

Dough Type: 2nd Dough

Size: 13 x 19.5

First Print Year: 2017

Number of Printings: 1st Edition

Number of Pages: 304

Media Type: Paperback