Simmel Studies

Die subjektiven und die objektiven Dimensionen des sozialen Lebens. Simmels sozio-anthropologische Perspektive.

Monica Martinelli — 2023-11-18

Simmel’s concern is to analyse the relationship between subjective and objective dimensions and at the same time to search for a horizon of meaning that sustains this relationship. A topic that Simmel analysed from many viewpoints. The focus of this paper is mainly on the socio-anthropological point of view. According to Simmel, when the subjective and objective dimensions are seen as contradictory, the integrity of the individual is undermined. The subject's experience in modernity is submitted to a logic characterised by a strong dualism. Nevertheless, the relationship between the subjective and the objective dimension shapes our experience: society could be seen as the progressive development of this nexus. Simmel suggests that one and the other poles are complementary in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual limitation - an expression of the original duality of life which embodies “the whole being”.

“The good wanderer leaves neither footprints nor traces”: On Georg Simmel ́s “Individualismens Former” published during WWI

Peter Dahler-Larsen — 2023-11-18

In January 1917, an article by Georg Simmel, “Individualismens Former”, appeared in the Danish journal Spectator. Citing an editorial note herein, Simmel researchers have trusted that Simmel wrote the text in Danish and authorized the article (Rammstedt et al, 2015: 690; Christensen et al (eds.): 2019).

On the contrary, we use archives, memoires and historical research to show that the editorial note in fact concealed the true provenance of Simmel ́s text. The German propaganda machine during World War 1 secretly financed the journal Spectator. The editor therefore had a motivation to alter a crucial passage in the text.

Flirting with Things: Simmel on Coquetry and Money

Arthur Bueno — 2023-11-18

This paper reconstructs Simmel’s arguments on coquetry in light of his Philosophy of Money. There are remarkable similarities between money and flirtation as Simmel understood them. Both are characterized by a paradoxical form of desire for which satisfaction is synonymous with dissatisfaction. Moreover, both are the locus of a specific type of power (i.e., power as pure possibility) and a corresponding kind of submission (experienced as adventure). Yet, unlike money, coquetry can become play for play’s sake. It thus symbolizes life in a different way. Located between economy and art, flirtation permits reconciling opposites that in money appear in maximum tension.

In Search of a Unity or Persistence of Tragedy? On Simmel’s City Writings

Vincenzo Mele — 2023-11-18

This article is devoted to an analysis of Simmel’s “metaphysical longing” (metaphysische Sehnsucht) and its consequences for his cultural and sociological analysis of the city and, consequently, modernity. Simmel’s “metaphysical longing” expresses itself equally in the sought-after relationship between part and whole, surface and depth, reality and idea. It intends to explore especially how this approach is developed in Simmel’s so- called minor essays, including the essays on historic Italian cities that are often referred to as those most characteristic of this metaphysical longing for unity. However, to understand the essence and characteristics of this approach, it is necessary to explore other minor, preparatory essays, coeval with and following the Philosophy of Money, which attest to Simmel’s path toward the construction of what he himself had defined as “sociological aesthetics,” that is, a space of analysis intermediate between philosophy and empirical sociological science. At the end of this path, we will see some stages of Simmel’s conceptual journey from nostalgia as Sehnsucht toward acceptance of the tragedy of culture, that is, the impossibility for man to find the lost unity of nature and spirit, form and life.

(*) This article takes up the arguments developed in my book Fragments of Metropolis. City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, Palgrave 2022), particularly in chapters 3 and 4.

Massimo Cerulo and Adrian Scribano (Eds.), The Emotions in the Classics of Sociology. A Study in Social Theory, New York: Routledge, 2022

Paulina Sabugal — 2023-11-18

No abstract

Marco Santoro, Mafia Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022.

Vincenzo Mele — 2023-11-18

No abstract