UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Rochelle Tobias is Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, where she studied English, French and German literature from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries with emphasis on modern poetry and aesthetics. Her work has consistently focused on the intersection of modern European literature and philosophy. She has additional expertise in German-Jewish culture, environmental thought, religious studies, and theories of the novel. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a grant from the American Association of University Women and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.

• modern literature
• transcendental idealism
• poetry
• aesthetics
• phenomenology
• mysticism
• scholasticism
• German-Jewish culture

Thinking at the Edge of Thought: Transcendental Idealism in an Age of Climate Change and Chat GPT.

Few philosophical movements have come under more sustained attack in recent years than idealism conceived as a tradition that prioritizes the operations of the mind over the world in its infinite richness. From the Negative Dialectics onward, Adorno criticized idealism for its commitment to a logic of the same. Idealist thought reduces the world to a set of concepts that reveal more about the subject than any object it considers. Poststructuralism expanded Adorno’s critique by drawing attention to the metaphysics of presence, which characterizes western philosophy from Descartes onwards and triumphs in Fichte and Hegel. Both assume the subject’s capacity to derive a world through self-reflection. Irony provides the sole way out of this specular relation to the extent that it underscores the accident that launches thought but which thought can never account for.

New materialism offers yet another critique of the power of the subject which robs things of their freedom as “actants.” Yet the exaltation of things has resulted in a curious reversal, whereby the subject is more pervasive than ever before in the agency attributed to things.

This project seeks to overcome the impasse in current debates on mind and matter by attending to the mutual implication of the two. It takes as its point of departure Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that matter does not exist except as the stuff of which things are made and links this position to Hegel’s account of spirit’s manifestation of itself in and as the world and Husserl’s distinction between transcendental subjectivity and embodied minds (human or other). The project concludes with a meditation on Robert Walser’s fiction, which chronicles how a chance encounter prompts a writer to give birth to himself as a world.

BOOKS:

The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan. Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.

Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 2021

Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature (editor with Kristina Mendicino and Philippe P. Haensler. De Gruyter, 2020.

Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature (editor). Edinburgh UP, 2019.

ARTICLES

“Countenancing the Stars: Thinking and Being in Rilke’s ‘Spanish Trilogy.’” Rilke’s Poetry and Phenomenlogy’s Horizon, edited by Bradley Harmon and Alexander Sorenson, de Gruyter, forthcoming 2024.

“So Ordinary, So Extraordinary: The Power of the Nondescript in Melville’s ‘Bartleby.’” MLN, vol. 139, no. 3, 2024.

“Phenomenology in Literary Criticism,” Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Ted Toadvine and Nicolas de Warren (Berlin: Springer, 2022).
 
“Celan’s Punctum,” Monatshefte 114:4 (Winter 2022), 661-74.

“The Expanse of the Sky: Nature, History and Dwelling in Celan and Hölderlin,” Aesthetica, the journal of Società Italiana di Estetica (SIE), 118 (Sept-Dec 2021), 137-159.

“Gregor Samsa and the Problem of Intersubjectivity in Husserl,” Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature, ed. Philippe Haensler, Kristina Mendicino, and Rochelle Tobias (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 309-29.