Florian Klinger joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012. He graduated from the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, and received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2010. From 2010-14, he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Florian has had a previous career as a professional musician and holds an Artist Diploma, Violin, from Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. His book Urteilen, which proposes a conception of human judgment for our present, was published by diaphanes Verlag, Zürich/Berlin in 2011. A second book, Theorie der Form. Gerhard Richter und die Kunst des pragmatischen Zeitalters, a pragmatist account of aesthetic form, came out with Carl Hanser Verlag, München in 2013. A revised English translation is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. For the forthcoming critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt (general eds. Hahn/ Nordmann/ Wild), Florian is co-editing the volume Kant Lectures (with Susanne Lüdemann). At this point, Florian is working on a book that undertakes to replace nature-based and culture-based accounts of life by arguing that life belongs to the order of act.
Courses Taught
Pragmatist Aesthetics
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Poetic Force
Kant's Third Critique
Literature of the Actual
Heinrich von Kleist
Heidegger's Being and Time
Poetry and the Human (Humanities Core)
Literature as Trial
Kafka: Acrobatics of Reading
