Issue 153, August 2019 Utopia Inverted: Günther Anders, Technology and the Social

This small glimpse of the formative contexts and personal and intellectual networks that shaped the trajectory of Anders’s work as a thinker, poet, and literary author gives a sense of how Anders’s writings can be mapped back onto the intellectual landscape of the 20th century in multiple and often unexpected ways.1 Over the last 25 years, this has given rise to a now vast body of scholarly work in German, French, and Italian (there are over 50 book-length engagements with Anders), and this special journal issue marks the growing interest in Anders’s work in Anglophone research

Agnes Heller (1929-2019): A Personal-Philosophical Memoir

I remember it clearly, as if it was yesterday, the day I first met Ágnes Heller. It was early in 1980 on the ground floor of La Trobe University’s Social Sciences building. I had an appointment with her. I had come to ask her if she would supervise my PhD. I had read an article she had published in Telos journal on ethics, and I felt a strong affinity with it. I brought with me my Honours thesis on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As I got to her office she appeared—both of us characteristically on time. My first impression: a short woman with penetrating deeply intelligent eyes. My lasting impression: she appeared with slightly damp hair and a towel around her shoulders. She’d been swimming in the university pool, one of her life-long favourite activities.

Happy 90th Birthday, Ágnes Heller

Thesis Eleven wishes a very warm happy birthday to Ágnes Heller on the occasion of her 90th birthday today. Ágnes has lived through much of the Twentieth Century and continues to live well into the Twenty-first. She has experienced the worst of modernity but stayed focused on its best. Her intellectual contribution provides us with…

Radio: Cooking for assimilation

Thesis Eleven editor Sian Supski features in this fascinating episode of The History Listen on RN that explores Evi Balint’s story of migration through the lens of recipe books, cooking and the kitchen radio.

Video: Agnes Heller on Globalisation and Modernity

Agnes Heller discusses modernity and globalisation at the ‘Workshop on Civilisation and Modernity’ hosted by Sichuan University and co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven. Heller argues that technology, science, popular culture and high culture are all globalised in modernity whereas political traditions and social relations retain particular cultural and regional articulations.