Karl Löwith's History and Salvation: A Controversial Reissue

The French translation of Karl Löwith's "Meaning in History" (published in English in the late 1940s and German in the early 1950s) has just been released by Gallimard. Löwith's structural analysis of Western philosophies of history—from the Bible through Augustine, Vico, Voltaire, Hegel, and Burckhardt—identifies a transcendent principle that gives history a mission to manifest truth. However, a racist passage in the Marx chapter, attributing historical materialism to Marx's Jewishness, casts a shadow over the work. Separately, Jean-Philippe Antoine's "Six rhapsodies froides sur le lieu, l'image et le souvenir" (Desclée de Brouwer) and the Villa Gillet notebooks issue no. 17, "Les Moyens Age de l'art contemporain" (edited by Antoine), explore non-teleological approaches to art history. Antoine draws on medieval arts of memory (artes memoriae) to analyze how Duchamp and Beuys resonate with archaic plastic and psychic rules. The volume includes studies by Jean-Pierre Criqui on reuse ("remploi") as a discontinuous time practice, Jean-Claude Bonne comparing Matisse's "Zulma" to the Beatus of Saint-Sever, Werner Hofmann on polyfocality in art history, and Antoine on Beuys's debt to Ewald Mataré's medieval-influenced sculpture. The overall argument is that art history operates through difference and repetition, not linear progress.