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Distributed for Seagull Books

On Tarrying

1st Edition

Translated by Helmut Müller-Sievers

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, and decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy, and political theory, and have left their imprint on the most intimate processes of individual decision-making and geo-political strategies. But, in On Tarrying, Joseph Vogl argues for a third way, a mode of thought that doesn’t insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies, and suspends the strictures of decision-making.

In his far-ranging reflections Vogl shows that the traditional insistence on the exclusivity of these terms impoverishes and distorts the range of human responses to a world full of possibilities. His readings of texts by Freud, Sophocles, Friedrich Schiller, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka provide rich examples of how to resist the binary of activity and passivity through tarrying. This important book offers the first-ever extended analysis of tarrying as a mode of subversion and presents provocative new readings and interpretations of significant works of German literature and thought.  


152 pages | 5 x 8 | © 2019

The German List

Literature and Literary Criticism: Germanic Languages


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Table of Contents

Translator’s Introduction

Chapter One: Wrath and Tarrying
Chapter Two: The Raised Hand
Chapter Three: A Wallenstein-Problem
Chapter Four: A Doctrine of Method
Chapter Five: Labyrinths, Threshold
Chapter Six: Idiosyncrasies

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