1.1 Fermentation - eine alte Kunst 1m weiteren Sinne wird bei einer Fermentation organische Materie mit Hilfe von Mikroorganismen einer enzymkatalysierten Stoffumwandlung unterwor fen. Die Giirung wurde iiber die Jahrhunderte regelrecht zu einer Kunst wei terentwickelt. Wein ist seit mindestens 10000 v. Chr. bekannt, und die Hi storiker nehmen an, daB die .Agypter bereits zwischen 5000 und 6000 v. Chr. Bier brauten. Sie lie en Gerste in irdenen Gefa en ankeimen, zerkleinerten sie, teigten an, buken den Brei und trankten schlief31ich alles mit Wasser. Aus diesem Ansatz entstand dann das Bier. Etwa 4000 v. Chr. verwendeten die .Agypter Brauhefe, um bei der Teigsauerung die Bildung von Kohlen dioxid zu erreichen. Die Azteken in Mexiko ernteten Spirulina Algen aus Teichen mit alkalis chen pH-Werten und verwendeten sie als Lebensmittel. Viele lokal bekannte, fermentativ gewonnene Nahrungsmittel und Saucen in Asien und iiberall auf der Welt werden eindeutig schon seit Tausenden von Jahren hergestellt. Heute wei man, daB sie durch Garung, Enzymproduk tion und enzymatische Hydrolyse unter Mithilfe von Oberflachenkulturen gebildet werden. Uber die Umwandlung von Milch in Kase wurde schon 5000 v. Chr. berichtet, als man beobachtete, daB Milch, die in Kalbetmagen transportiert wurde, zum Ausflocken neigte (Kalbermagen enthalten En zyme, die die Milch ausflocken lassen). Essig ist vermutlich bekannt seit Wein hergestellt wird, obgleich die friihesten Zeugnisse tiber Essig aus dem Alten und Neuen Testament stammen. Die friihesten Berichte iiber destil lierte alkoholische Getranke stammen aus China etwa 1000 v. Chr.

In "The Making of a Terrorist, "Jeffrey Champlin examines key figures from three canonical texts from the German-language literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Goethe s "Gotz von Berlichingen, "Schiller s "Die Rauber, "and Kleist s "Michael Kohlhaas." Champlin situates these readings within a larger theoretical and historical context, exploring the mechanics, aesthetics, and poetics of terror while explicating the emergence of the terrorist personality in modernity. In engaging and accessible prose, Champlin explores the ethical dimensions of violence and interrogates an ethics of textual violence."

Product Description: In "The Making of a Terrorist, "Jeffrey Champlin examines key figures from three canonical texts from the German-language literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Goethe s "Gotz von Berlichingen, "Schiller s "Die Rauber, "and Kleist s "Michael Kohlhaas...read more

Product Description: Humankind has imagined and depicted fantastical creatures since the formation of the first societies. Beasts such as the Chimera, the Golem, the Minotaur and Galatea could be said to be culturally symptomatic. Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then--through the agency of biotechnologies--brought to life...read more

Product Description: The Test Drive deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida...read more

Product Description: For twenty years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing...read more

Product Description: "[Dictations] will change not only the way we read Goethe, but the way we read". -Rainer Nagele, author of Reading after Freud. Dictations treats the way in which Goethe continues to speak from beyond the grave; not only in the texts of Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud, but also in the ventriloquised writings of the spiritualist, Johann Peter Eckermann...read more

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The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy.Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.