Charles Haimoff Fellows in German Studies

Karen Feldman

Class of Fall 2025

Professor of German, University of California, Berkeley

The Rhetoric of Moralizing: On Affect, Epistemology, and "Knowing Better"

At the Academy, Feldman is working on a book project entitled “The Rhetoric of Moralizing: On Affect, Epistemology, and ‘Knowing Better.’” The project considers the rhetorical, epistemic, and affective dimensions of moralizing, which she describes as “an appeal to right principles and the certainty of one’s own judgment, couched in a typically high-handed affective mode.” “The Rhetoric of Moralizing” will seek to address the following questions: Should humanistic disciplines hold out moral lessons? To what extent do the humanities fall into moralizing self-justifications? Does a focus on aesthetics constitute an abrogation of moral responsibility? Is there a purely literary judgment that does not depend on the identity position, ethical position, or likeability of an author or text? The project will consist of a series of essays on Western philosophical approaches to moralizing, and on contemporary treatments of moralizing within literary studies, focusing on such canonical and recent texts as Adam Smith’s “Moral Sentiments,” Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals,” Rei Terada’s “Feeling in Theory,” Eve Sedgewick’s “Paranoid Reading,” and Rita Felski’s “The Limits of Critique.”

Karen Feldman is Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University. Feldman’s research lies at the intersection of philosophy and literary theory, reflecting a philosophical and literary-critical approach to classic texts of the German literary and philosophical canon, with a strong emphasis in Critical Theory. She has published on works by Johann Christoph Gottsched, G.F. Meier, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Reinhart Koselleck, and Hannah Arendt; and on topics including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the rhetoric of Marxism, and Cold War effects on US philosophy. She is author of Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality (De Gruyter, 2019) and Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (Northwestern, 2008), and co-editor of Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion (Fordham, 2018) and Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998). Feldman has held fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” at the Free University of Berlin. She has also conducted research as part of the “Cultural Foundations of Europe” research cluster at the University of Konstanz and the “Enlightenment, Religion, Knowledge” cluster at the University of Halle.