Uncontainable Legacies: Theses on Intellectual, Cultural and Political Inheritance

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.

Gerhard Richter is University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University. In 2020, Brown honoured Richter with the title ’University Professor’, which recognizes distinguished senior faculty whose accomplishments and influence transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Richter was educated in Germany and the United States, earning his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1996. He publishes in English and German and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. Richter has published eight single-authored books, seven edited books, and over 70 journal articles and book chapters across a wide range of European critical thought. His books include Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (Fordham University Press, 2019); Ästhetische Eigenzeiten und die Zeit des Bewahrens. Heidegger mit Arendt, Derrida und Kafka (Wehrhahn, 2019); Inheriting Walter Benjamin (Bloomsbury, 2016); Verwaiste Hinterlassenschaften. Formen gespentischen Erbens (Matthes & Seitz, 2016) and Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2011).