What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Equality and Truth on Campus
by Ulrich Baer
What Snowflakes Get Right About Free Speech pulls the lens back on today’s free-speech campus controversies to reveal that they are not about the feelings of offended students but about our democracy’s commitment to equality. What is also stake is the university’s critical role as an arbiter of truth in society. Once free speech is framed as an absolute abstraction to be decided by legal principles alone, the debate between the university’s purpose of pursuing the truth and the premise that all knowledge should be debated in the marketplace of ideas leads to a dead end. But there’s another way of looking at these controversies that allows universities to draw a clear line when it comes to speech. By focusing on the legal mandate and moral principle of equality which undergirds both universities and our nation, Baer offers a creative and principled way out of the speech debates. He shows how and why free speech has become the rallying cry that forges an otherwise uneasy alliance of liberals and ultra-conservatives, and why this apparent consensus of First Amendment absolutism is neither tenable in law nor in society in general.
“…a spirited and forceful defense of a position far too often mocked…Even those who disagree with Baer’s views…are well-advised to think carefully and open-mindedly about his examples, his arguments and his timely analysis.” Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, author, The Force of Law (Harvard 2015)
“…highlights the fundamental issues that are at the stake in the debates about campus speech.” Nadine Strossen, Immediate Past President, ACLU
We Are But A Moment
by Ulrich Baer
We Are But A Moment takes the reader on a brisk tour of the globe that vividly imagines the inescapable crisis of the near future posed by overpopulation, diminishing natural resources, climate change, species extinction, and economic tumult. It is 2025, and a young White House aide, Aleks, finds himself locked up in quarantine when he tested positive after a routine briefing from a hotspot. Thus temporarily removed from the fast-paced world of politics, Aleks recounts how our much-admired female president Lucia Jackson became a globally revered leader who unites much of the world under the environmental banner. Aleks’s position as a trusted environmental advisor to the president gives him a privileged insider’s view into the political maneuvering - and the need for compromises - that have led to U.S. global dominance. What Aleks finally uncovers confronts the reader with the moral choices we all have to make in our precarious times. Philosophical rather than prescriptive, We Are But A Moment explores how we live and die in the 21st century, what we consume, how we inhabit our world, and whether we can all live, and love, in the future.
Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
by Ulrich Baer
In this remarkable contribution to photographic criticism and psychoanalytic literature, Ulrich Baer traces the hitherto overlooked connection between the experience of trauma and the photographic image. Instead of treating trauma as a photographic "theme," Baer examines the striking parallel between those moments arrested mechanically by photography and those arrested experientially by the traumatized psyche -- moments that bypass normal cognition and memory. Taking as points of departure Charcot's images of hysteria and Freud's suggestion that the unconscious is structured like a camera, Baer shows how the invention of photography and the emergence of the modern category of "trauma" intersect. Drawing on recent work in the field of trauma studies, he shows how experiences that are inherently split between their occurrence and their remembrance might register in and as photographic images.
Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai
by Ulrich Baer
An exciting and moving collection of stories, this book introduces denizens of the wildly disparate worlds populating China's most vibrant city: Shanghai. Different and unique, these spirited stories are united by the universal longing to feel connected, to be known, and to love and be loved. Told with tenderness and emotional acuity, it delves deep into the hearts and minds of everyday individuals caught up in China's great transformation.
Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan
by Ulrich Baer
In a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself. The two poets share a feature that seems to block their placement in such an easy chronological or historical scheme: each accounts for an experience that will not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form of trauma, fragments, and shock. While Baudelaire, as Paul Valéry was the first to show, explores the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence in modern life, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust and how it has altered our understanding of history. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire's poems to the historical horror addressed in Celan's work without denying either the singularity of suffering and loss or the uniqueness of the historical event of the Shoah?
Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust research, Remnants of Song challenges existing interpretations of Baudelaire and Celan by constantly holding in view both the aesthetic dimension of their works and their historical import. The author demonstrates that the act of engaging with a poem on its own terms may serve as an important model for an ethical response to the radical experiences of trauma. Answering Adorno's famous dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, he shows that Celan's poetry continues to posit its own truth by drawing on Baudelaire as a precedent—yet it does so in ways that have little to do with conventional understandings of history.
PHotoEspaña 2010 Catalogue: Time Expanded
by Ulrich Baer
Held annually in Madrid since 1998, PHotoEspaña has become one of the most acclaimed and important photography festivals in the world, incorporating exhibitions, workshops, portfolio reviews and a number of other events. The 2010 edition focuses on the theme of time and features the work of Helen Levitt, László Moholy-Nagy, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Isabel Muñoz and many others.
Hannah Arendt zwischen den Diszipline (German Edition)
by Ulrich Baer
Die Bedeutung von Hannah Arendts Denken auch für unser Zeitalter beruht auf ihrem bedingungslosen Anspruch, die konkreten Probleme der Welt um jeden Preis zu verstehen. Deshalb verlässt ihre Arbeit oft die Disziplin der Politikwissenschaft. Um der Welt gerecht zu werden, denkt Arendt in einem Gebiet zwischen Politik und Philosophie, zwischen Theorie und Literatur, zwischen Amerika und Europa, zwischen Analyse und Essay. Die Autorinnen und Autoren des Sammelbandes untersuchen die Konturen dieses Grenzbereichs. Sie zeigen Arendts unerbittlichen Einsatz für das Verstehen, das ihrem Denken seine Schärfe und Originalität verleiht.
Traumadeutung (
German Edition)
by Ulrich Baer
Thomas Demand: L'Esprit d'Escalier
by Ulrich Baer