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This review essay offers an extended analysis of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. By proposing a critical theory for our present times, the book dissects modes of being related to the world and how these relations are conditioned by the dynamic of escalation that is inscribed into modern social formations. Rosa argues that the wide‐ranging compulsion to grow, accelerate, and innovate produces a distorted and alienated mode of being in the world, suppressing and limiting possibilities for developing dialogic and responsive relations that are characterized by the concept of resonance. This review essay parses the categorical distinction between alienation and resonance, critically interrogating Rosa's notion that resonant relations form the basis for a good and successful life. While my analysis argues that the structural shortage of resonant relations can make subjects and collectives vulnerable to acting on the promise of resonance—possibly giving rise to problematic and undesired effects—I nonetheless contend that the concept of resonance is an effective explanatory tool that exhibits significant potential for interdisciplinary engagement. To illustrate this potential, I explore the extent to which Rosa's theorizing can illuminate contemporary matters of history and historical temporality. More specifically, I consider the perspective that the framework of resonance provides a comprehensive background for the paradigm of presence and the related surge in interest to theorize bodily and perceptual modes of being connected to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with modalities of historicizing associated with specific fields and perspectives (including, for instance, memory studies, microhistory, and the history of concepts); and with questions of context, temporality, space, and agency by accounting for translation's transformative movement, migration, and metamorphosis. This review essay follows the book's journey in and out of disciplinary and conceptual borders in order to discuss some of the stakes at play in it, especially problems pertaining to the delimitation of translation as a differential, but distinct, object of historical research, one that lays bare the power of translations to mobilize cultural works and frontiers. By the same token, it attempts to inscribe a translation paradigm into historical theory and, crucially, into debates that shift our focus from rigid historiographical borders toward mobilizing and transformative motifs, identities, and domains of history. This focus grants a new orientation to (translation) history, setting malleability, thresholds, mobility, and resistance to movement at the center of ongoing attempts to configure alternative spatialities, temporalities, subjects, and worlds of the past beyond conventional accounts of contextualizing, periodizing, and only human history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History theory does not have a mature theory of questions. This reflects both historical and philosophical assumptions. As Holly Case has argued in The Age of Questions (2018), the big questions of the nineteenth century and their proposed final solutions arguably primed the murderous logic of genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. On her account, questions have become tamed as technical tools in historical monographs and reviews like this one. This picture of the twentieth century, though, runs up against R. G. Collingwood's historiographical logic of questions and the rise of erotetic logics in computer science. Computational erotetic logics have shaped the creation of large language models such as the GPT series and focused our attention on expressivity, effectivity, and classification in the relation of questions and answers. Collingwood's logic is different, using the relation of questions to questions to point to presuppositions. This metaphysical view of erotetic logic is timely, for it reminds why it might be so hard for historians to cut through with true propositions in an age of AI. Collingwood reminds us that a focus on truth‐evaluable answers to questions does not explain why those questions were asked in the first place. Chasing chains of questions back to presuppositions, Collingwood argues that tackling what is assumed and what is lived with can help historians to change an unthinking world. In our age, this includes the idea of a shift from historians being the users of large language models to historians being the designers of new forms of relationship between people and information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review of Noël Carroll's Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays, I focus on the issue of Danto's philosophy of art history and Carroll's position that, unlike Danto, we ought to understand Danto's "end of art (history)" thesis as an orientational narrative (that is, a pragmatic‐instrumental narrative with cognitive purchase) rather than as a historical‐scientific narrative. In making this case, I show how Carroll's argument demonstrates that Danto's "end of art (history)" thesis is in tension with Danto's philosophy of history. Furthermore, I engage and respond to the most substantive critiques that Carroll proffers in this text, especially as they concern Danto's philosophy of art history and the related issue of Danto's (art) historically anchored search for a definition of art. In giving special attention to the socio‐historical background conditions (namely, "the artworld" conditions) for an object to be conferred art status, I also show how Carroll's incisive reading offers a critical rejoinder to claims made by recent critics such as Robert B. Pippin and Ivan Gaskell, who have dehistoricized Danto's definition of art, claiming that it allows for any artist to enfranchise any object as an artwork, proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay offers an extended analysis of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. By proposing a critical theory for our present times, the book dissects modes of being related to the world and how these relations are conditioned by the dynamic of escalation that is inscribed into modern social formations. Rosa argues that the wide‐ranging compulsion to grow, accelerate, and innovate produces a distorted and alienated mode of being in the world, suppressing and limiting possibilities for developing dialogic and responsive relations that are characterized by the concept of resonance. This review essay parses the categorical distinction between alienation and resonance, critically interrogating Rosa's notion that resonant relations form the basis for a good and successful life. While my analysis argues that the structural shortage of resonant relations can make subjects and collectives vulnerable to acting on the promise of resonance—possibly giving rise to problematic and undesired effects—I nonetheless contend that the concept of resonance is an effective explanatory tool that exhibits significant potential for interdisciplinary engagement. To illustrate this potential, I explore the extent to which Rosa's theorizing can illuminate contemporary matters of history and historical temporality. More specifically, I consider the perspective that the framework of resonance provides a comprehensive background for the paradigm of presence and the related surge in interest to theorize bodily and perceptual modes of being connected to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with modalities of historicizing associated with specific fields and perspectives (including, for instance, memory studies, microhistory, and the history of concepts); and with questions of context, temporality, space, and agency by accounting for translation's transformative movement, migration, and metamorphosis. This review essay follows the book's journey in and out of disciplinary and conceptual borders in order to discuss some of the stakes at play in it, especially problems pertaining to the delimitation of translation as a differential, but distinct, object of historical research, one that lays bare the power of translations to mobilize cultural works and frontiers. By the same token, it attempts to inscribe a translation paradigm into historical theory and, crucially, into debates that shift our focus from rigid historiographical borders toward mobilizing and transformative motifs, identities, and domains of history. This focus grants a new orientation to (translation) history, setting malleability, thresholds, mobility, and resistance to movement at the center of ongoing attempts to configure alternative spatialities, temporalities, subjects, and worlds of the past beyond conventional accounts of contextualizing, periodizing, and only human history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]