As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Laura Groenendaal looks at Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s “From Oedipal Hermeneutics to a Philosophy of Presence,” from Telos 138 (Spring 2007).

In his article “From Oedipal Hermeneutics to a Philosophy of Presence,” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht responds to a colloquium’s debate on whether “academic heresy” can produce “revolutions within the humanities” by rejecting its language:

I see the humanities as a cluster of disciplines that continuously shifts and, by shifting, transforms itself—mostly (but not always) without any programmatic direction, and sometimes stirring up sudden splashes, waves, and even tsunamis in the formless ocean of the public sphere. If anything, such splashes, waves, and tsunamis follow (and here I am producing my own metaphorical contradiction) an emotional “logic” of family romances and oedipal revolts, rather than the institutional logic of heresies and revolutions.

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