Review:

Friedrich Kittler. Paranoia und Theorie

This review focusses on the precarious relationship between Kittler's ideas of media technology as a bias of the analysis of literature on the one hand and a traditional, often hermeneutical concept of literary criticism on the other hand – a relational of bidirectional suspicion of paranoia. His habilitation treatise was nearly not accepted but meanwhile he himself became a classic. That may reveal the disavowals in history of theories in literary studies in the 20th and 21st century. A special focus lies on his attempt to transform the Foucaultian concept of discourse as a media technology of an «Aufschreibesystem».