Ebook: Uncontainable Legacies: Theses on Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Inheritance

How do our ceaseless conversations with what has passed and with those who have passed something on to us propel us into a precarious future?

• Examines one of the central human concerns – the problem of what it means to inherit an intellectual, cultural, and political legacy – in a new light
• Argues that to inherit always means to interpret something that resists full transparency
• Draws on a wide range of figures in philosophy, literature, political thought and the arts from the German, English, French and American traditions
• Offers an engaging and highly topical intervention in the stakes and possible futures of the humanities today

In a series of evocatively titled theses, including ‘Wrinkles’, ‘Inheriting a Feeling’, ‘Weight of the World’ and ‘Making Treasures Speak’, Gerhard Richter engages the quintessentially human dilemma of how to receive an intellectual, cultural or political inheritance.

In dialogue with philosophers including Heraclitus, Arendt and Derrida; writers such as Montaigne, Hölderlin, Kafka and Knausgaard; artists such as Michelangelo, Picasso, Anselm Kiefer and Art Spiegelman; filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub; scholars and scientists Freud and Einstein; and pop-cultural phenomena the rock band The Who and the Broadway play The Inheritance, Richter contemplates the problem of interpreting an inheritance that resists full transparency.

Richter argues that inheriting is not the same as yearning for a former presence or nostalgically striving to preserve an identity. At once philosophical and poetic, his aphoristic theses illuminate how the constantly shifting nature of our relationship to what we inherit from others makes us who we are.