Overview
Emir is a doctoral candidate in the program with his project entitled "The Social Sublime: The Aesthetics of Anticipation, Reconciliation, and Modern Life". This project assigns a reflective capacity to literary prose, allowing it to envision the world in response to its deficiencies. Challenging the established notion that German realism is detached from the social world it originates from, Emir's project contends that German realism has, in fact, problematized the social developments of modernity by posing an aesthetic solution. Drawing on Kant’s reflective judgment of the sublime, he argues that German realism represents modernity by teasing literary sensibility with fragmentary sightings of a social whole. These sightings, then, arouse the reader into imaginative labor where the totality of modern life is produced in aesthetic judgment.
In the academic year 2024-25, Emir will conduct dissertation research as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Outside of his work on German realism, Emir is interested in aesthetic cognition and the question concerning the epistemic standpoint of fiction and narration over other ways in which we make knowledge claims about the world. His goal is to incorporate his analysis of literary texts into a comprehensive perspective on the paramount role of fiction in shaping humanity's self-understanding—an idea often attributed to philosophical discourse as the pinnacle of self-consciousness since Hegel's aesthetics. In addition to his work on German literature, Emir has also published projects on ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history.
Publications
“Reconciling Hegel with the Dialectic: Islam and the Fate of Muslims in Hegel’s Philosophy of History” - co-authored with Zeyad el Nabolsy, Hegel Bulletin, forthcoming.
“Hegel and Nietzsche on Self-Judgment, Self-Mastery, and the Right to One’s Life” - Nietzsche-Studien 52.1, 148-170, 2023.
“Disenchantment as Reenchantment and the Genesis of the Pöbel in Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1856)” - The German Quarterly 95.3, 293-308, 2022.
“Dialectical Abnormality? Jewish Alienation and Jewish Emancipation between Hegel and Marx” - Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 16.1, 79-100, 2022.