Emir Yigit

Overview

Emir is a PhD candidate in the program with his project entitled "The Social Sublime: The Aesthetics of Anticipation, Reconciliation, and Modern Life" which attributes a reflective capacity to literary prose that enables it to reimagine the world in light of what it lacks. Tackling the long-standing reputation of German realism that it is aloof to the very social world it is the product of, this project argues that German realism has problematized the social developments of modernity by posing an aesthetic solution. Drawing on Kant’s reflective judgment of the sublime, the project argues that German realism represents modernity by teasing literary sensibility with fragmentary sightings of a social whole. These sightings arouse the reader into imaginative labor where the totality of modern life is formed in aesthetic judgment. In 2023-24, Emir will work on his dissertation as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Outside of his close work on German realism, Emir is interested in aesthetic cognition and the question concerning the epistemic authority of narrative prose over other ways of knowing. He plans to integrate his close reading of literary texts into an overarching position about the primacy of fiction in constituting the self-understanding of humankind, a function that many since Hegel's aesthetics would rather attribute to philosophical discourse as the apex of self-consciousness. Next 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, under review.
“Hegel and Nietzsche on the Possibility of  Self-Judgment, Self-Mastery, and the Right to One’s Life” - Nietzsche-Studien, 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.