Hermeneutics and Negativism

This volume explores existential questions within the following three thematic fields: first, experiences of anxiety and despair as related to the question of what these phenomena show about freedom and its difficulties; second, hermeneutical theories as related to the question of how we can develop an existential hermeneutics that can account for the ambiguities of self-understanding between transparency and opacity, and, third, selfhood between self-understanding and self-alienation as a focal point of existential psycho(patho)logy. What can disturbances to or breakdowns in self-understanding teach us about personhood? Making visible one's own blindness by articulating the shadows of our knowledge and abilities is at the core of a negativistic approach to existential questions discussed in a dialogue between philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, theology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry.Claudia Welz/René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics – Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology – René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics – Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past 'Has' Us Before We 'Have' It: Inheriting Hereditary Sin? – Emil Angehrn: Self-Understanding and Self-Deception: Between Existential Hermeneutics and Negativism – Carsten Pallesen: The Single Individual as the Single Individual: A Response to Subjektivitet og negativitet – Hans-Christoph Askani: In Quest for Identity: The Self as (a) Stranger to Himself – Ingolf U. Dalferth: Self-Alienation: Self, Finitude and Estrangement – George Pattison: The Grace of Time: Towards a Kataphatic Theology of Time – Ettore Rocca: Analogy and Negativism – Günter Bader: From Alphabet to Poem: On a Parenthesis in Sigmund Freud's On Aphasia – Sonja Frohoff: Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery: Artworks of the Prinzhorn Collection – Helene Stephensen/Josef Parnas: Schizophrenia, Subjectivity and Self-Alienation – Borut Škodlar: Anxiety and Despair: Experiences from the Negativity of Disturbed Selfhood in Schizophrenia – Claudia Welz: Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception: Existential Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis