Günther Anders: Media Aesthetics and Intellectual Networks

It is the projects aim to prepare critically the writings on media aesthetics and the correspondence of the literary estate of the philosopher and writer Günther Anders (1902-1992) and to make them available in the form of a digital edition and to examine their cultural and intellectual historical contexts. Anders estate contains a considerable amount of writings on media aesthetics, media theory, and film theory from a number of distinct phases of Anders life and work, including the 1920s and 1930s, the periods of Anders exile in Paris (1933-36) and in the U.S. (1936-50), especially those years he spent in Hollywood (1939-43), and the immediate post-war years into the 1950s. These texts, drafts, radio and television scripts, and essays are valuable not only because of the insight they provide into Anders entire oeuvre, especially the well-known late media theory from his main oeuvre Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Vol. 1 (1956), but also because they serve as a brand new source for productive lines of inquiry that have enjoyed recent attention in cultural history and media studies. In contrast to his later work, Anders earlier writing on media theory unmistakably grounds its arguments in phenomenology, theories of perception, and aesthetics. Through the contextualization of this little- known writings Anders will be repositioned: as a representative of an early film theory of the 1920s and 1930s, as a representative of an aisthetic concept of media as it is currently formulated by current media theories. Günther Anders belonged to an international network of intellectuals that included a great number of prominent twentieth-century philosophers, writers, activists, and artists. This network of Anders correspondence will be made available in the form of an online database. Further the intellectual constellations and historical contexts of his correspondence will be analyzed. The text-critical preparation of Anders Writings on Media Aesthetics and his Correspondence will be implemented within the framework of a digital open access edition following recent scientific methodology. This includes the transcription, annotation, and encoding of the selected texts and letters (according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, TEI). The subsequent contextualization of the edited writings will reposition and re-evaluate Günther Anders entire work, and will give a new impetus to recent research fields (film, media theory, research letter, network analysis, digital humanities). Finally, as a result of this project significant research gaps in the philosophy and the history of ideas of the 20th century, as well as within recent cultural studies will be closed.

The project was dedicated to the edition and publication as well as the historical and systematic contextualization of the writings on media aesthetics and selected correspondence from the estate of the philosopher and writer Günther Anders (1902-1992). Anders estate contains a considerable amount of unpublished writings on media theory, radio and film theory from the 1920s and 1930s, the periods of Anders exile in Paris (1933-36) and in the U.S. (1936-50), especially those years he spent in Hollywood (1939-43), and the immediate post-war years into the 1950s. These texts, analyses, drafts, reviews and radio reports were prepared for publication within the work edition in single volumes of Günther Anders with the publisher C.H. Beck, Munich: In October 2020, the volume Günther Anders: Writings on Art and Film (edited by Reinhard Ellensohn and Kerstin Putz) was published. This volume contains, in addition to Anders' original writings, an extensive appendix and an afterword by the editors, which will reposition Anders as a representative of an early film theory as well as a representative of a phenomenologically and aesthetically oriented media theory. This also sheds new light on Anders' well-known media criticism from the first volume of his main oeuvre Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen ("Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize", 1956). The second part of the project consisted in the indexing of selected parts of Günther Anders extensive correspondence, which will also reposition him as a member of an extensive intellectual network. The project focused on Anders' important and previously unpublished correspondence with the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Helmuth Plessner. This volume is expected to be published in 2021 with the publisher C.H. Beck, Munich (edited by Reinhard Ellensohn and Kerstin Putz): It shows new lines of connection, illuminates Anders' close relationship to the representatives of the Frankfurt School and highlights his early occupation with philosophical anthropology as well as his close relationship to Helmuth Plessner or the Marxist thinker Ernst Bloch, which is far too rarely appreciated. In addition to the above-mentioned two editions from Anders estate, the project also provides numerous scientific essays, smaller publications of previously unpublished writings from Anders' estate, translations, lectures and conference participations in which the research results were discussed and presented not only to a specialist audience but also to a broader public.