Arne De Boever
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634620
- eISBN:
- 9780748652440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634620.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter explores the relation between violence and justice in Giorgio Agamben's work. It investigates the essential role that Walter Benjamin's classic essay ‘Critique of Violence’ plays for ...
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This chapter explores the relation between violence and justice in Giorgio Agamben's work. It investigates the essential role that Walter Benjamin's classic essay ‘Critique of Violence’ plays for Agamben. This essay is a foundational text for Agamben's study of sovereign power. It shows links between Benjamin's obscure notion of ‘divine violence’ and his essay on ‘The Storyteller’. Carl Schmitt's sovereignty confirms the dialectic between violence and the law; Benjamin's divine violence breaks with it. Agamben's reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx turns into an implicit critique of Benjamin when he develops his preference of the enigmatic Sphinx over and against the transparency that Oedipus brings into a reflection on the story. The distinction between the violent political strike and the nonviolent proletarian strike makes perfect sense in the context of Agamben's reading of the Benjamin-Schmitt debate.Less
This chapter explores the relation between violence and justice in Giorgio Agamben's work. It investigates the essential role that Walter Benjamin's classic essay ‘Critique of Violence’ plays for Agamben. This essay is a foundational text for Agamben's study of sovereign power. It shows links between Benjamin's obscure notion of ‘divine violence’ and his essay on ‘The Storyteller’. Carl Schmitt's sovereignty confirms the dialectic between violence and the law; Benjamin's divine violence breaks with it. Agamben's reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx turns into an implicit critique of Benjamin when he develops his preference of the enigmatic Sphinx over and against the transparency that Oedipus brings into a reflection on the story. The distinction between the violent political strike and the nonviolent proletarian strike makes perfect sense in the context of Agamben's reading of the Benjamin-Schmitt debate.
Heron Nicholas
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634620
- eISBN:
- 9780748652440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634620.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter reconstructs the series of references, left largely unexamined by Giorgio Agamben himself, that gather around the central notion of ‘the idea of prose’. It reviews the origin of this ...
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This chapter reconstructs the series of references, left largely unexamined by Giorgio Agamben himself, that gather around the central notion of ‘the idea of prose’. It reviews the origin of this movement in three major texts of Walter Benjamin: ‘The concept of criticism in German Romanticism’, ‘The Storyteller’, and the preparatory notes to his final text ‘On the Concept of History’. According to Benjamin, the basic epistemological presuppositions of the early Romantic concept of criticism are entirely concentrated in the concept of reflection. ‘The idea of poetry is prose’: this formula, according to Benjamin, is the ‘final determination’ of the early Romantic idea of art. The idea of poetry as that of prose must be confronted — according to that salient expression which, more than two decades later, suffuses Benjamin's very last fragments — with the idea of prose, understood, precisely, as that of poetry.Less
This chapter reconstructs the series of references, left largely unexamined by Giorgio Agamben himself, that gather around the central notion of ‘the idea of prose’. It reviews the origin of this movement in three major texts of Walter Benjamin: ‘The concept of criticism in German Romanticism’, ‘The Storyteller’, and the preparatory notes to his final text ‘On the Concept of History’. According to Benjamin, the basic epistemological presuppositions of the early Romantic concept of criticism are entirely concentrated in the concept of reflection. ‘The idea of poetry is prose’: this formula, according to Benjamin, is the ‘final determination’ of the early Romantic idea of art. The idea of poetry as that of prose must be confronted — according to that salient expression which, more than two decades later, suffuses Benjamin's very last fragments — with the idea of prose, understood, precisely, as that of poetry.
Paul Wake
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074905
- eISBN:
- 9781781701256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074905.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the ...
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This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the idea that Conrad's narratives are structured around the transmission of story, and questioning the possibility of sustaining the distinction between that which is transmitted and the means of transmission. With this established, it reads Marlow's role as a narrator in the oral tradition alongside Benjamin's ‘The Storyteller’ in order to introduce a connection between narrative authority and death. The chapter concludes with a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the narrative frame becomes central to a reading of Marlow's ‘central’ story.Less
This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the idea that Conrad's narratives are structured around the transmission of story, and questioning the possibility of sustaining the distinction between that which is transmitted and the means of transmission. With this established, it reads Marlow's role as a narrator in the oral tradition alongside Benjamin's ‘The Storyteller’ in order to introduce a connection between narrative authority and death. The chapter concludes with a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the narrative frame becomes central to a reading of Marlow's ‘central’ story.
