The Germanic Review, 90: 358370, 2015

c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Copyright 
ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online
DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2015.1096176

Book Reviews

Angus Nicholls. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenbergs Theory of Myth.
New York: Routledge, 2015. 278 pp. ISBN: 978-0-41-588549-2
he overwhelming success of French theory in the United States was, as Francois
Cusset has shown, due to a fortunate amalgamation of reasons, among them the early
ability to take root in certain U.S. institutions and the simultaneous resonance with a countercultural zeitgeist.1 But, more importantly, the very label French theory had an unusually
persuasive power. It was able to bring together currents of thought whose proponents would
consider themselves quite dissimilar in their country of origin; in its new home, it could
spawn a self-sustaining mode of thinking and gather acolytes. French theory never existed
in France. It was an American invention that became impressively productive on its own.
At the same time, the label provided a continuously open gate for new French philosophy
to enter the Anglophone world. Ranci`ere, Laruelle, and Meillassoux will not be the last to
profit from the warm reception that Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida kindled.
Why, one could ask, were the German philosophers read in the United States during
the same period less fortunate? Was it because the most established German currents of
thoughtFrankfurt School and hermeneuticswere too obviously at odds with one another
for something like German theory to be conceivable? Had Luhmann and Kittler, writing
in the 1980s, missed their moment of countercultural significance (then again, what could
that have been)? Whatever the reason, it seems likely that recent German philosophy has a
much harder time finding adherents in the United States at least partly because it lacks the
unifying label enjoyed by its French counterpart, which simplified the transfer to another
research culture by dropping much of its historical-theoretical baggage.
Hans Blumenberg is a case in point: a philosopher who suffers from exactly such
baggage, which his foreign readers must struggle much harder to cheerfully disregard. He had
a brief American moment in the theory-heavy 1980s, when Robert Wallace translated three
of Blumenbergs major works for MIT Press: Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983), Work on
Myth (1985), and The Genesis of the Copernican World (1987). But already Blumenbergs
characterization as an intellectual historian rather than a philosopher showed how unprepared
the American academic public was for him. The strict separation between both disciplines was
at odds with a German tradition that often practiced philosophy by way of the history of ideas,

See Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
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so that Legitimacy and Genesis were received as mere works of intellectual historiography,
which, although impressively erudite, inevitably lowered expectations as to Blumenbergs
philosophical originality. While Legitimacy, with its subject range of secularization, political
theology, and a critical engagement with Carl Schmitt, made Blumenberg a staple in the
persisting wave of Schmitt scholarship, Genesis went ignored, and Work on Myth appeared
repetitive and frequently obscure,2 stuffed with references that remain totally obscure to
the average North American.3
It seems that German theory requires us to unravel its obscurities, not suffering us
to gloss over them in the way of the deterritorializing misreadings that have served French
theory so well. Such an unraveling is what Angus Nichollss book Myth and the Human
Sciences aims at, and it thus offers a test case for the question how German theory might
be introduced to an English-speaking public. He strives to offer at once a skeleton key to
Work on Myth and an introduction to Blumenbergs whole oeuvre by way of explicating the
philosophical traditions that inform his work. The book also shows how such an undertaking
always risks suffocating the originality of its subject under the weight of the uncovered
influences.
After a biographical introduction that situates Blumenberg in the context of German
postwar philosophy (ch. 1), Nicholls unfolds a long genealogy from the Sattelzeit of 1800
up to the Davos debates between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. In doing so, he traces
the specifically German co-evolution of theories of myth and anthropological thought he
identifies as the main influences of Work on Myth (ch. 24). Nicholls, a Goethe scholar,
especially excels at making sense of Blumenbergs Goethe chapter, which, not only for
an Anglophone audience, seems out of place in a book about myth (ch. 6). The two final
chapters (the book has no explicit conclusion) are devoted to Blumenbergs unspoken political
theoryNicholls, oversimplifying somewhat, calls it a liberal conservatism (197)that
flows from what he deems to be the philosophical anthropology of Work on Myth.
Indeed, it is on the very notion of philosophical anthropology that Nichollss account
is centered (ch. 45). And he is certainly correct in asserting that this tradition, still little known
in the Anglophone world, deserves a special place for the understanding of Blumenberg and
that of German theory. Dating back to Herder, but explicitly formulated as a research
paradigm in 192728 by Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, philosophical anthropology
was an attempt at providing a theory of the human that avoided the pitfalls of speculative
idealism without being dragged down to a merely accumulative scientism. Nicholls finds
in Blumenberg a late representative of this current, and he deems Work on Myth its last
achievement. It is for him a reading [of] the history of Western thought as a story of human
self-assertion against what [Blumenberg] calls the absolutism of reality (16).
However, instead of remaining a distanced observer, Nicholls is drawn in himself. The
connection between myth and human nature he describes historically also informs his basic
normative assumptions: Any theory of myth must, by necessity, involve a theory of human
nature; and this theory of human nature, also by necessity, constitutes the basic core of the
2

William J. Bouwsma, Work on Blumenberg, Journal of Modern History 56, no. 4 (1987): 347.
William G. Doty, Review of Work on Myth, by Hans Blumenberg, Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 55, no. 2 (1987): 376.
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VOLUME 90, NUMBER 4 / 2015

humanities (33). This may in itself be a problematic statement, but what is worse is that
Blumenberg actually offers little to back it up.
Blumenbergs relationship toward philosophical anthropology was immensely complicated. While it was indubitably a major influence, Blumenberg does not have an anthropology
in the sense of the tradition in which Nicholls wants to place him; often, he actively works
against it, much too aware of the pitfalls of essentialism that lurk at its every turn. Nicholls
indeed identifies what he calls anthropological reduction (109) in Blumenberg: Just as
Husserl tried to evade the decision between positivism and psychologism by applying an
eidetic reduction (the bracketing of circumstantial knowledge in the process of phenomenological analysis), so does Blumenberg bracket the question of the essence of man.
However, Nicholls stops short of drawing the conclusion that this amounts to a negative
anthropology, which does not merely bracket but actually negates the question of anthropological essentialism. And Blumenberg indeed does not shy away from giving the answer
Nicholls has him evade: precisely because the human is always given to itself as a secondary synthesis of a primary multiplicity, as a phenomenon external to consciousness
like any other, anthropology can only exercise a deconstructive function by showing that
human nature is a creation of this consciousness: What remains as the subject matter of
anthropology is a human nature that has never been nature and never will be.4
Nicholls is aware of this deconstructive tendency, yet he either ignores itdeclaring
Blumenberg squarely an anthropologist driven by a will to scienceor tries to solve it by
highlighting the historical dimension: Blumenbergs theory of myth amounts to a historicist
version of philosophical anthropology (153). Yet by doing so, he completely overlooks that
Blumenberg conceives of history no less phenomenologically than the human. Nicholls
does not even mention the project of a historical phenomenology that dominated the first
part of Blumenbergs career and never faded away completely.
This anthropological bias has to do with Nichollss choice of taking Work on Myth as
his starting point. In this way, he gets Blumenberg backwards, and he tries to explain the
whole oeuvre from this one last book, which inevitably sets it up as its telos. This smooths
out the kinks from a body of work that is much more diverse than the simple decision for or
against philosophical anthropology might suggest. His discussion of Blumenbergs political
thought suffers from the same bias (although it offers a welcome analysis of two important
texts from the Nachlass5 ). The bias is also not helpful for making sense of another key text
that has been available to the English reading public for some time now: Paradigms for a
Metaphorology (trans. 2010) is completely untainted by any anthropological claims; yet as
an important supplement to both analytic and deconstructivist theories of metaphor, it holds
the greatest promise as a gateway for a new and deeper reception of Blumenberg in the
Anglophone world.

4
Hans Blumenberg, An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric,
After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy
(Cambridge: MIT, 1987), 456.
5
One of which Nicholls edited together with Felix Heidenreich: Hans Blumenberg, Prafiguration:
Arbeit am politischen Mythos, ed. Felix Heidenreich and Angus Nicholls (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014).

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Nichollss book is valuable as the introduction to an important late work, as well

as the depiction of one of its authors major influences. This quality makes it a helpful
tool for understanding German theory as a set of currents and influences, specifically
that of philosophical anthropologybut because it tries to commit its main subject, Hans
Blumenberg, to this current almost completely, it leaves little room for him to stand on his
own.
HANNES BAJOHR
Columbia University

Andreas Huyssen. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 346 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-41672-7
etween Germanys relatively later processes of urbanization, industrialization, and
democratization on the one hand and its more drastic experience of the caesura of war
and revolution on the other, Weimar has more often lent itself to analysis for thinking about
modern German culture than modernism. Weimar was modern, but it was modern, so
the associations go, in the form of film, photography, and radio, avant-garde and reportage,
mass culture and mass media. The epithet literary seldom springs to mind as one of the
first attributes for describing (or, indeed, for teaching) the cultural production of the interwar
period in the German language context.
If a fundamental (though implicit) achievement of Huyssens book is to ask what
German-language literary modernism was, then the concept of the metropolitan miniature
offers him a sophisticated way of answering this question by binding together, in small form,
the perceptual and theoretical upheavals induced by new visual media, the experience of the
metropolis as an island of accelerating modernization (5), and the rise of a mass, consumer
culture. Crucially, the miniaturean innovative and critical short prose form that draws on
the ways of seeing found in new media in order to capture the temporalities and fragmented
experiences of the modern metropolisallows him to draw this constellation under the rubric
of the literary. In this sense the miniature offers both a loose category of literary forms and
a periodizing mechanism for delineating the distinct historical epoch of high modernism.
If its first premonition, in Baudelaires Le Spleen de Paris, depended on the twin contexts
of the feuilleton of the modern mass press and the modern city, Adornos Minima Moralia
registers the end of the miniature as a specifically modern form, as the experience of the
metropolis became generalized and globalized. The miniatures proper setting is necessarily
transitional, its subject the host of perceptual and experiential changes central to modernity
as such.
More a form or an approach than a genre and recognizable only after the fact, the
concept of the modernist miniature most evidently includes feuilletons, but it also encompasses other short prose forms, whether these find themselves in a novel (Rilke, Keun) or
hitherto classified as novellas (Benn), and the idea of the miniature can even involve ways of
seeing generated by photomontage, as it, too, confronted the possibilities and limitations of
photography (Hoch). The modernist miniature differs from earlier literary representations of