Todd Cronan | Emory University (original) (raw)

Papers by Todd Cronan

Modern fiction studies, Jun 1, 2024

Routledge eBooks, Aug 6, 2020

Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 2007

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2003

Art Bulletin, Oct 2, 2019

Critical Inquiry, Sep 1, 2017

Viceroy. A pretty tale. But tell me, what's the point? Missena. Instead of class war cleaving ric... more Viceroy. A pretty tale. But tell me, what's the point? Missena. Instead of class war cleaving rich from poor / There's war between the Zaks and Ziks. Viceroy. Ahah. Not bad.-Bertolt Brecht, Round Heads and Pointed Heads (1936) "Brecht's sins were revealed for the first time after the Nazis had seized power," Hannah Arendt writes in Men in Dark Times (1966). It was the "'classics'"-Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin-that "did not permit him to recognize what Hitler actually did." By 1935 or 1936 Hitler had liquidated hunger and unemployment; hence, for Brecht, schooled in the "classics," there was no longer any pretense for not praising Hitler. In seeking one, he simply refused to recognize what was patent to everybody-that those really persecuted were not workers but Jews, that it was race, and not class, that counted. There was not a line in Marx, Engels, or Lenin that dealt with this, and the Communists denied it-it was nothing but the pretense of the ruling classes, they said-and Brecht, stolidly refusing to "look for himself," fell into line. 1 My thanks to Jennifer Ashton, Nicholas Brown, Charles Palermo, Emilio Sauri, and Daniel Zamora for comments on earlier drafts. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York, 1983), p. 243; hereafter abbreviated MDT. The Bertolt Brecht essay originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1966. Arendt could cite in support of her position the fact that (as Edmund Silberner observed) Nazi anti-Semitism was not addressed at the 1935 Seventh World Congress of the Comintern. Arendt, of course, is taking aim not only at Brecht but at the whole range of so-called economistic analyses of anti

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2004

Page 1. ON MAX HORKHEIMER'S "SCHOPENHAUER AND SOCIETY" (1955)1 Todd Cronan "H... more Page 1. ON MAX HORKHEIMER'S "SCHOPENHAUER AND SOCIETY" (1955)1 Todd Cronan "Humanism," says Julien Benda in La Trahison des Clercs, "has nothing to do with globalism." "It is the impulse," he goes on to say ...

Politics, Religion & Ideology, Jan 2, 2016

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology excavates a crucial and decisive debate in twentieth-century thought... more Spinoza Contra Phenomenology excavates a crucial and decisive debate in twentieth-century thought that has consequences far beyond problems in French philosophy. Part of the challenge of reading Spinoza Contra Phenomenology is discovering where the author stands in light of the story he’s telling. Despite Peden’s claim to render his history ‘enthusiastically rather than suspiciously’ he seems reticent to break the historian’s role as observer. For this reason Peden’s introduction and conclusion do crucial work in articulating the stakes of the Spinozist critique of phenomenology, and they are large. One of the basic values of Spinozism is its ‘corrosive’ effect on political ontologies. Peden quotes Deleuze (glossing Spinoza) saying ‘No just ideas, just ideas’. Every time an idea threatens to take on political meaning (or meaning at all), Spinoza is there to undercut those all-too-human pretenses by placing ideas in their proper sequence within the expressive order of thought and extension. But make no mistake, this is a politics, and Althusser and Deleuze were not wrong to draw specific consequences from it. As Peden makes clear, the twentieth-century debates around phenomenology and the New Spinozism are largely a replay of earlier debates around Descartes and Spinoza. The difference between the two rationalist philosophers hinges on the status of the subject. For Descartes and his phenomenological inheritors, the cogito is the starting point, and for some, the end point, of analysis. For the Spinozist, on the other hand, there is a nonsubjective anteriority, Deus sive Natura, that gives rise to the subject. As Peden rightly points out, ‘the demotion of the subject to a consequence of other, more fundamental forces, rather than a founding instance, is one of the unifying themes of postwar French thought’ (6). But that’s not enough; it’s more like a unifying theme of modern thought itself. Ricoeur famously described Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as instances of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Class, will, and the unconscious were discovered as steering the ship of human agency. I would further add Bergson’s ‘memory’, Heidegger’s ‘unthought’, Lacan’s ‘desire’, and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘invisible’ as instances of an agency controlling the subject behind the scenes. Peden remarks that what is ‘at issue is whether those anterior processes or forces are in principle amenable to a rational elucidation ... A Spinozist thinks they are’ (6). Almost everything hinges on the standing of the ‘rational’ explanation here. For Althusser, rational means scientific, and I gather he might invoke neuroscience to explain (away) subjectivity. But if it is not neuroscience – as it is not for Deleuze, nor anyone else in Peden’s story – then is the anteriority essential to the Spinozist critique nonsubjective? Is the subject (still) the problem? Elsewhere I have argued that Bergson’s project, beginning with Matter and Memory, was driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion. For Bergson, memory, the active content of virtuality, generates subjectivity. Bergson remains a kind of phantom figure in Peden’s account. He was largely loathed by the Spinozists for his irrationalism, but he was hardly admired by phenomenologists. Virtually the whole of French philosophical discourse after 1930, including Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Georges Politzer, Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gaston Bachelard, Martial Gueroult, and Jacques Derrida, defined itself against Bergson’s philosophy (obviously this is not a story I can tell here). The list includes phenomenologists and structuralists, Cartesians and Spinozists. Undoubtedly, it was Deleuze who revived Bergson’s project and reputation beginning in the 1950s. For Deleuze, Bergson was compatible with Spinozism. This is key because if there is large scale consensus that there is a defining anteriority to the subject, a set of features prior

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

Encompassing works by 700 photographers, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon collection dates back to... more Encompassing works by 700 photographers, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon collection dates back to the 1840s and the birth of the medium. In this volume Britt Salvesen has selected over 100 works from this massive collection and organised them sequentially in four categories that build upon and complement one another: descriptive naturalism, subjective naturalism, experimental modernism and romantic modernism. This new arrangement of the Vernon collection allows us to understand the interconnection between photography and visual experience. Works by history's most acclaimed photographers and the author's thoughtful observations are accompanied by writings in the field of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and art history. As the art world is increasingly interconnected with science and technology, this book offers a much-needed meditation on how this synergy is played out in the area of photography.

Presented on March 31, 2017 at the 2017 Spring Symposium on Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the... more Presented on March 31, 2017 at the 2017 Spring Symposium on Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism in the Architecture Library, Architecture West Building, College of Design at Georgia Tech.

Art History, Mar 15, 2018

New German Critique, 2009

... 9. Leo Steinberg, Rodin, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New ... more ... 9. Leo Steinberg, Rodin, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford ... As writers from Gustave Kahn to Steinberg have argued, Rodin's practice is a search for a ... In what follows I offer a provisional defense of Simmel's psychologism, and the ...

William Connolly is in error when he remarks that I begin my article with a discussion of scienti... more William Connolly is in error when he remarks that I begin my article with a discussion of scientific accounts that reduce the emotions to a few genetically wired categories and that I suggest that the cultural theorists who are interested in affect are driven in the same reductive direction (William E. Connolly, “The Complexity of Intention,” Critical Inquiry 37 [Summer 2011]: 792–99). Rather, I begin by considering certain theories of Brian Massumi and other cultural theorists including Connolly who, as I show, claim to be inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza, and other philosophers of nature and who accordingly attempt to distance themselves from a crude determinism and geneticism by recasting biology in dynamic, energistic, and nondeterministic terms that stress its unpredictable and potentially emancipatory qualities. That Connolly gets this wrong— he seems to think he is making an important point against me—is a telling sign. As I make clear, t...

The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, 2019

caa.reviews, May 11, 2018