Ansgar Mohnkern: Grund. Szenen einer Metapher

In everyday life, we assume the presence of “ground” to be certain. However, contributions about Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Hölderlin, Latour, and the high-wire acrobat Philippe Petit show that this assumption is rather porous, also because the rhetoric of “ground” plays into the field of metaphorical language. Particularly this metaphoricity makes “ground” an unstable referent regarding the legitimacy of knowledge, history, society, law, and of metaphorical language itself. At the same time, it appears to be an urgent matter today to be oriented in the wide metaphorical field of “ground”, particularly since the most literal of all “grounds”, the earth, fell into a mode of (ecological) crisis. While refraining from any solutionist gestures, this book offers some orientation.

Ansgar Mohnkern: Grund. Szenen einer Metapher [Ground, Scenes of a Metaphor], Vienna: Passagen 2021.