On the sidelines: theory about Christmas

We love it at the holidays: dragging ourselves to crowded Christmas markets where the professionals drink liters of mulled wine in the morning, letting ourselves be pushed in crowded pedestrian zones, arguing in bookstores with honorable members of the educated classes about who has the last copy of a book “first saw” on the shelf, then overeating on the holidays and then getting drunk in order to get at each other’s throats with dear relatives in arguments about the Middle East, asylum policy and other family matters. The days at the end of the year – they are the most beautiful time.

When Theodor W. Adorno stated in 1951: “People are forgetting how to give gifts!”, he did not mean that the point was to pay their respects to their loved ones with as many, as large as possible, products from the cultural industry, but rather, on the contrary, to treat the recipients as gifts To think about subjects, to see them as people, and not to reduce them to a reason for a shopping spree. However, over seventy years later, consumer behavior has not improved, and everyone knows the moment when small children – still largely uncorrupted by many delusions – ignore the iPads and mountains of chocolate and instead play intensively with those little things that are only thrown in as a bonus planted the tree.

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Frustrated by misguided gift-giving, many people have now resorted to simply giving themselves presents at the end of the year. Most people think they know each other well, which is why, alongside iPads and mountains of chocolate, books suddenly appear in the house that can’t be found on the bestseller lists or from the bookstore shelf labeled “The Original Gift” or even “Naughty Women.” were stolen.

The person who was treated to a well-written science book (or who, as we say today, “granted it to herself”) is particularly lucky. In this way, people who are tormented by the holiday hustle and bustle and family disputes can retreat into the solitude of the readers. However, in which one does not act anti-socially, since readers indulge in social solitude, a good book always brings company with it, in both senses of the word.

This Christmas science book should definitely be well written, as what should lift you intellectually is, at best, written in a language that you like to read. For the holidays I bought the book “Suhrkamp Theory. A book series in the philosophical post-war” by Morten Paul, published by Spector Books. The author examines the largely forgotten book series, which was published for 20 years and in which many classics of modern thought were published – however, he does not limit himself to retelling the history of publishing, but asks to what extent theoretical texts can develop relevance. The text is of course very well written.

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