Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

SERIES FOUNDED BY THE LATE WERNER HAMACHER

This series is closed. Encompassing 125 titles published over the period 1993 - 2019, the Meridian series, named in honor of Paul Celan’s pioneering poetological speech, opened up new avenues of aesthetic inquiry. The series explored literature, painting, music, architecture–and their theoretical phrasing–as analytical media, as techniques to subvert the allures of semblance and to decompose the mystifications of immediacy. Presenting investigations in philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, ethnology, politics, and history, it set the arts in their broadest contexts, recharting the territory of the aesthetic and disclosing new horizons for critical thought.  Meridians run from pole to pole and trace connections. They draw lines of tension, crossing virtually all the points of a sphere and exposing to critical remapping the places and objects through which they pass. Books in the series, as well as the arts to which they are devoted, do the same. They, too, are critical lines that cross through the entrenched tropes and topoi of discursive orders. They locate fractures and suggest alternative arrangements and distribution, thereby connecting disciplines, institutions, national traditions, and historical sites. Significant interventions, they have long offered new maps of theoretical action.