Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such ...
More
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.Less
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.
Michael W. Jennings
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691135106
- eISBN:
- 9781400846788
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691135106.003.0011
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first ...
More
This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.Less
This chapter offers a careful exposition of themes and debates in Weimar Kulturkritik, or cultural criticism, focusing on its two greatest exemplars, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. At first tentatively, and then beginning in 1926 with a new focus and resolve, Benjamin and Kracauer set out to reinvent German cultural criticism as a form. Their writings do not simply mirror the new set of preoccupations and circumstances that characterize cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic: no other writers were so instrumental in setting its agenda and defining its formal means and strategies. Kracauer and Benjamin virtually invented the criticism of popular culture. In books and essays such as One Way Street and “Surrealism” (Benjamin) and “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography” (Kracauer), the two writers reinvent cultural analysis as a specific form of the critique of the new urban metropolis. And in doing so, they formulate what is arguably the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism.
Daniel L. Purdy
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801476761
- eISBN:
- 9780801460050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801476761.003.0011
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
This chapter describes how Walter Benjamin's writing responds to the German philosophical appropriation of Renaissance theory. From the start, Enlightenment revolutionaries looked back to the ...
More
This chapter describes how Walter Benjamin's writing responds to the German philosophical appropriation of Renaissance theory. From the start, Enlightenment revolutionaries looked back to the Vitruvian history of building to uncover a new genealogy of construction. This process began before the French Revolution but became more than a theoretical debate with the emergence of industrial technology. Benjamin's physiognomy of modern industrial cities builds on the architectonic model of correspondences between buildings and humans, intensifying the Renaissance's particular emphasis on the facade as parallel to the face, while allowing for many more differentiations in appearance and function than classical architectonics, which always presumed the existence of a single ideal type.Less
This chapter describes how Walter Benjamin's writing responds to the German philosophical appropriation of Renaissance theory. From the start, Enlightenment revolutionaries looked back to the Vitruvian history of building to uncover a new genealogy of construction. This process began before the French Revolution but became more than a theoretical debate with the emergence of industrial technology. Benjamin's physiognomy of modern industrial cities builds on the architectonic model of correspondences between buildings and humans, intensifying the Renaissance's particular emphasis on the facade as parallel to the face, while allowing for many more differentiations in appearance and function than classical architectonics, which always presumed the existence of a single ideal type.
Christopher GoGwilt
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751624
- eISBN:
- 9780199866199
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751624.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Framed by a comparative study of Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Conrad's The Shadow-Line, Chapter 4 examines the problem of interior space that links Rhys's urban topography, Conrad's sea ...
More
Framed by a comparative study of Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Conrad's The Shadow-Line, Chapter 4 examines the problem of interior space that links Rhys's urban topography, Conrad's sea passages, and the arcades of Benjamin's Arcades Project. This problem of interiority is illuminated by the problematic anteriority of Creole narrative perspective in Rhys's early work. Tracing correspondences between the contrasting male and female experiences of metropolitan modernity in Benjamin and Rhys, the chapter relates these to the problem of white racial identity in the later work of Joseph Conrad. What emerges is the recognition of a non-European Creole identity as the lost cultural and historical perspective of Europe's past.Less
Framed by a comparative study of Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Conrad's The Shadow-Line, Chapter 4 examines the problem of interior space that links Rhys's urban topography, Conrad's sea passages, and the arcades of Benjamin's Arcades Project. This problem of interiority is illuminated by the problematic anteriority of Creole narrative perspective in Rhys's early work. Tracing correspondences between the contrasting male and female experiences of metropolitan modernity in Benjamin and Rhys, the chapter relates these to the problem of white racial identity in the later work of Joseph Conrad. What emerges is the recognition of a non-European Creole identity as the lost cultural and historical perspective of Europe's past.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter explores how Walter Benjamin sought to mediate the duality of German and Jew in his writings. It focuses on two primary “names” by which he analyzed modernity, aura and mimesis, and how ...
More
This chapter explores how Walter Benjamin sought to mediate the duality of German and Jew in his writings. It focuses on two primary “names” by which he analyzed modernity, aura and mimesis, and how they emerged, respectively, from smell and reproduction: two principal sites for the social and scientific identification of alterity, generally, and Jewish difference, specifically. It then traces the remains of those sites throughout Benjamin's work. The analysis is furthered by juxtaposing his corpus with contemporary writings familiar to him, notably by Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Klages, and by examining Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's olfactory analysis of antisemitism and its relationship to mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It concludes by essaying whether Benjamin and other Jewish-identified authors commerce with the Other Jewish Question was “endowed with a weak Messianic power.”Less
This chapter explores how Walter Benjamin sought to mediate the duality of German and Jew in his writings. It focuses on two primary “names” by which he analyzed modernity, aura and mimesis, and how they emerged, respectively, from smell and reproduction: two principal sites for the social and scientific identification of alterity, generally, and Jewish difference, specifically. It then traces the remains of those sites throughout Benjamin's work. The analysis is furthered by juxtaposing his corpus with contemporary writings familiar to him, notably by Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Klages, and by examining Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's olfactory analysis of antisemitism and its relationship to mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It concludes by essaying whether Benjamin and other Jewish-identified authors commerce with the Other Jewish Question was “endowed with a weak Messianic power.”
Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter deals with the complex affinities between Louis Aragon's fantastical, autobiographical, surrealist philosophical work flânerie, Le Paysan de Paris, and the unfinished Arcades Project of ...
More
This chapter deals with the complex affinities between Louis Aragon's fantastical, autobiographical, surrealist philosophical work flânerie, Le Paysan de Paris, and the unfinished Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. It analyses the possibilities of the uncanny as a way of understanding historical as well as psychical phenomena. Le Paysan de Paris is in many ways the archetypal surrealist text. Combining autobiography and polemic in the form of a sometimes fantastical stroll through Paris's more obscure and insalubrious locations, it is the literary record of surrealism as a lifestyle. Aragon himself was already aware of the appeal of such a form. Towards the end of the text, he reproduces an ironical letter of his own to Philippe Soupault, then editor of the Revue européene in which Le Paysan de Paris was being serialised, describing his intention to present his philosophical views in this form so as not to frighten the reader off.Less
This chapter deals with the complex affinities between Louis Aragon's fantastical, autobiographical, surrealist philosophical work flânerie, Le Paysan de Paris, and the unfinished Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. It analyses the possibilities of the uncanny as a way of understanding historical as well as psychical phenomena. Le Paysan de Paris is in many ways the archetypal surrealist text. Combining autobiography and polemic in the form of a sometimes fantastical stroll through Paris's more obscure and insalubrious locations, it is the literary record of surrealism as a lifestyle. Aragon himself was already aware of the appeal of such a form. Towards the end of the text, he reproduces an ironical letter of his own to Philippe Soupault, then editor of the Revue européene in which Le Paysan de Paris was being serialised, describing his intention to present his philosophical views in this form so as not to frighten the reader off.
Dimitris Vardoulakis
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232987
- eISBN:
- 9780823235698
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823232987.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter argues that staging by theatricality is crucial for an understanding of the Doppelgänger. Walter Benjamin's work on Franz Kafka is structured by the opposition ...
More
This chapter argues that staging by theatricality is crucial for an understanding of the Doppelgänger. Walter Benjamin's work on Franz Kafka is structured by the opposition between life and work. Benjamin argues that there are three kinds of theater in Kafka's essay on the subject: the world theater, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and a theater characterized by what Benjamin calls the “lost gesture”. The second section of the chapter addresses the distinction between the world theater and the nature theater. The third section examines the “lost gesture”. The final section shows that alongside Kafka's Doppelgänger, the critic himself—Benjamin—must also respond to the Doppelgänger.Less
This chapter argues that staging by theatricality is crucial for an understanding of the Doppelgänger. Walter Benjamin's work on Franz Kafka is structured by the opposition between life and work. Benjamin argues that there are three kinds of theater in Kafka's essay on the subject: the world theater, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and a theater characterized by what Benjamin calls the “lost gesture”. The second section of the chapter addresses the distinction between the world theater and the nature theater. The third section examines the “lost gesture”. The final section shows that alongside Kafka's Doppelgänger, the critic himself—Benjamin—must also respond to the Doppelgänger.
Carlo Ginzburg
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195394337
- eISBN:
- 9780199777358
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394337.003.0014
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting ...
More
This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting work. Eliade’s Lisbon Journal provides a context for the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return: the terror (or rejection) of history. The chapter argues that this theme and its implications throw much light on Eliade’s paradoxically ambivalent legacy.Less
This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting work. Eliade’s Lisbon Journal provides a context for the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return: the terror (or rejection) of history. The chapter argues that this theme and its implications throw much light on Eliade’s paradoxically ambivalent legacy.
Lecia Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823233977
- eISBN:
- 9780823241200
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. ...
More
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.Less
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.
Lecia Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823233977
- eISBN:
- 9780823241200
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Walter Benjamin ended his life in the peculiar and inevitably disturbing death-event called suicide, the same as Virginia Woolf. We might speculate that the scenes of authorial death have played no ...
More
Walter Benjamin ended his life in the peculiar and inevitably disturbing death-event called suicide, the same as Virginia Woolf. We might speculate that the scenes of authorial death have played no small part in sustaining the critical longing and melancholic identification that surround the two figures. Benjamin's disparagement of his radio works can hardly account for the relative scarcity of critical attention given to the material. His radio programs figure an interrupted, broken transmission, in part because their archival residuum remains incomplete. Catastrophism augurs the dead end, albeit a potentially explosive one, in which the possibility of any encounter with alterity is buried, killed, destroyed. Apter's argument draws on Gayatri Spivak's elaboration of the “planet” as a figure in a critical rewriting of the system-logic of globalization.Less
Walter Benjamin ended his life in the peculiar and inevitably disturbing death-event called suicide, the same as Virginia Woolf. We might speculate that the scenes of authorial death have played no small part in sustaining the critical longing and melancholic identification that surround the two figures. Benjamin's disparagement of his radio works can hardly account for the relative scarcity of critical attention given to the material. His radio programs figure an interrupted, broken transmission, in part because their archival residuum remains incomplete. Catastrophism augurs the dead end, albeit a potentially explosive one, in which the possibility of any encounter with alterity is buried, killed, destroyed. Apter's argument draws on Gayatri Spivak's elaboration of the “planet” as a figure in a critical rewriting of the system-logic of globalization.
Christopher Bush
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195393828
- eISBN:
- 9780199866601
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393828.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The third chapter analyzes a series of unremarked references to China and Chinese writing in the work of Walter Benjamin. By relating these scattered references to Benjamin’s canonical writings on ...
More
The third chapter analyzes a series of unremarked references to China and Chinese writing in the work of Walter Benjamin. By relating these scattered references to Benjamin’s canonical writings on technological media, I demonstrate a decades-long affiliation in his work between China and media as figures of bodily mimesis. Even more so than with Segalen’s inscriptive model, Benjamin’s mimetic model of writing is not simply a different way of representing Chinese writing but is itself symptomatic of a qualitatively different relationship to “China” and indeed China.Less
The third chapter analyzes a series of unremarked references to China and Chinese writing in the work of Walter Benjamin. By relating these scattered references to Benjamin’s canonical writings on technological media, I demonstrate a decades-long affiliation in his work between China and media as figures of bodily mimesis. Even more so than with Segalen’s inscriptive model, Benjamin’s mimetic model of writing is not simply a different way of representing Chinese writing but is itself symptomatic of a qualitatively different relationship to “China” and indeed China.
Seyla Benhabib
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691167251
- eISBN:
- 9780691184234
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691167251.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter examines the subterranean affinities between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, two of the most famous exiles of the last century, through the so-called “Benjaminian moment” present in ...
More
This chapter examines the subterranean affinities between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, two of the most famous exiles of the last century, through the so-called “Benjaminian moment” present in their work. It is widely known that any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted by the profound dislike that Arendt seems to harbor toward Adorno. However, such psychological attitudes and personal animosities cannot guide the evaluations of a thinker's work. This is particularly true in the case of Arendt and Adorno, who both shared a profound sense that one must learn to think anew, beyond the traditional schools of philosophy and methodology—a concept that will be referred to as their Benjaminian moment.Less
This chapter examines the subterranean affinities between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, two of the most famous exiles of the last century, through the so-called “Benjaminian moment” present in their work. It is widely known that any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted by the profound dislike that Arendt seems to harbor toward Adorno. However, such psychological attitudes and personal animosities cannot guide the evaluations of a thinker's work. This is particularly true in the case of Arendt and Adorno, who both shared a profound sense that one must learn to think anew, beyond the traditional schools of philosophy and methodology—a concept that will be referred to as their Benjaminian moment.
Dimitris Vardoulakis
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232987
- eISBN:
- 9780823235698
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823232987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter examines the politics of the Doppelgänger, looking at the subject of history as understood by Walter Benjamin. It also looks into cosmopolitanism in Alasdair ...
More
This chapter examines the politics of the Doppelgänger, looking at the subject of history as understood by Walter Benjamin. It also looks into cosmopolitanism in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things. It notes that the finite and particular human activities that comprise the sphere of politics should not be confused with the political that enacts the excess proper to the Doppelgänger. The Doppelgänger counteracts the attempt to base the subject on a principle of infinity. The chapter claims that the political is the interruption of the relation between the infinite and the finite. Such an interruption is associated, first, with the enactment of judgment, as understood by Walter Benjamin's materialist historiography, and, second, with a notion of the cosmopolitical, with recourse to Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, with intermingled autonomy and automaticity. The political is an interruption of metaphysical self-reflection and hence a rupture of the politics of self-interest.Less
This chapter examines the politics of the Doppelgänger, looking at the subject of history as understood by Walter Benjamin. It also looks into cosmopolitanism in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things. It notes that the finite and particular human activities that comprise the sphere of politics should not be confused with the political that enacts the excess proper to the Doppelgänger. The Doppelgänger counteracts the attempt to base the subject on a principle of infinity. The chapter claims that the political is the interruption of the relation between the infinite and the finite. Such an interruption is associated, first, with the enactment of judgment, as understood by Walter Benjamin's materialist historiography, and, second, with a notion of the cosmopolitical, with recourse to Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, with intermingled autonomy and automaticity. The political is an interruption of metaphysical self-reflection and hence a rupture of the politics of self-interest.
Eric Downing
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501715907
- eISBN:
- 9781501715938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501715907.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, ...
More
This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, commodity culture, and “Lebensphilosophie” or vitalism. It explores his writings on fate, graphology, gambling, childhood, language theory, his doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty, foregrounding his Neoplatonist investments, interests in magic, and take on the nineteenth century. Overall, the chapter considers the relations between Benjamin’s model of reading, especially magic reading, and the idea of happiness or “Glück.”Less
This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, commodity culture, and “Lebensphilosophie” or vitalism. It explores his writings on fate, graphology, gambling, childhood, language theory, his doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty, foregrounding his Neoplatonist investments, interests in magic, and take on the nineteenth century. Overall, the chapter considers the relations between Benjamin’s model of reading, especially magic reading, and the idea of happiness or “Glück.”
Tamara Levitz
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199730162
- eISBN:
- 9780199932467
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730162.003.0000
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter provides background on the collaborators involved in Perséphone by recreating from archival sources their meeting at Ida Rubinstein’s house on 20 October 1933, about six months before ...
More
This chapter provides background on the collaborators involved in Perséphone by recreating from archival sources their meeting at Ida Rubinstein’s house on 20 October 1933, about six months before the premiere. It provides a historical account of each collaborator’s negotiations with Rubinstein and involvement in the production, before then describing the theatrical context in which the performance took place. Both the collaborators themselves and danced productions in France in this period (after the death of Diaghilev and demise of his Ballets Russes) were plagued by melancholia. This backdrop serves as a point of departure for a theoretical discussion of the connections between neoclassicism, melancholia, Antigone, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century classicist aesthetics, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of Baroque allegory, which grounds the arguments presented in this book.Less
This chapter provides background on the collaborators involved in Perséphone by recreating from archival sources their meeting at Ida Rubinstein’s house on 20 October 1933, about six months before the premiere. It provides a historical account of each collaborator’s negotiations with Rubinstein and involvement in the production, before then describing the theatrical context in which the performance took place. Both the collaborators themselves and danced productions in France in this period (after the death of Diaghilev and demise of his Ballets Russes) were plagued by melancholia. This backdrop serves as a point of departure for a theoretical discussion of the connections between neoclassicism, melancholia, Antigone, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century classicist aesthetics, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of Baroque allegory, which grounds the arguments presented in this book.
Robert G Ryder
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199759392
- eISBN:
- 9780199918911
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759392.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The first section of this chapter explores a theory of the acoustical unconscious and how it can be applied to listening to radio. The notion of an acoustical unconscious is largely derived from ...
More
The first section of this chapter explores a theory of the acoustical unconscious and how it can be applied to listening to radio. The notion of an acoustical unconscious is largely derived from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on radio and the optical unconscious. In the second part of the chapter, the author argues that the motif of ambiguity in Günter Eich’s famous radio play, Dreams (1951), which decenters the listeners’ own sense of self and what is real, taps into an acoustical unconscious that forces listeners to awaken to and contend with the collective history of which they are a part.Less
The first section of this chapter explores a theory of the acoustical unconscious and how it can be applied to listening to radio. The notion of an acoustical unconscious is largely derived from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on radio and the optical unconscious. In the second part of the chapter, the author argues that the motif of ambiguity in Günter Eich’s famous radio play, Dreams (1951), which decenters the listeners’ own sense of self and what is real, taps into an acoustical unconscious that forces listeners to awaken to and contend with the collective history of which they are a part.
Stefan Jonsson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231164788
- eISBN:
- 9780231535793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164788.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter examines interwar discourse on the masses as expressed through various art forms, literary genres, and performing arts. It considers works such as Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy's ...
More
This chapter examines interwar discourse on the masses as expressed through various art forms, literary genres, and performing arts. It considers works such as Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy's photoplastic images, which illustrate the idea of the masses underpinning the disciplines of mass psychology and mass sociology; Weimar artist Marianne Brandt's montages, which invites viewers to see the world through the eyes of a personification of the new woman; and Walter Benjamin's major writings from the late 1920s and through the 1930s, which explore how contemporary modes of aesthetic representation and visual perception referred to “the collective,” just like the culture of an earlier era expressed a social life organized around “the individual”.Less
This chapter examines interwar discourse on the masses as expressed through various art forms, literary genres, and performing arts. It considers works such as Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy's photoplastic images, which illustrate the idea of the masses underpinning the disciplines of mass psychology and mass sociology; Weimar artist Marianne Brandt's montages, which invites viewers to see the world through the eyes of a personification of the new woman; and Walter Benjamin's major writings from the late 1920s and through the 1930s, which explore how contemporary modes of aesthetic representation and visual perception referred to “the collective,” just like the culture of an earlier era expressed a social life organized around “the individual”.
Andrew Benjamin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748634347
- eISBN:
- 9780748695287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634347.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter argues that engaging with Benjamin’s work, if it is to be the site of philosophical thinking, requires a two-fold move. First, there needs to be a loosening of the hold of the proper ...
More
This chapter argues that engaging with Benjamin’s work, if it is to be the site of philosophical thinking, requires a two-fold move. First, there needs to be a loosening of the hold of the proper name and thus the modes of compatibility and consistency that the insistence of proper names may demand. Second, it must be able to recover a project whose potentiality is necessarily already there within a range of different texts. Each of the texts deemed central to this project will be taken up in the course of this book, and individual chapters will be devoted to each one of them. These texts include The Meaning of Time in the Moral World (1921), Fate and Character (1919– 21), Towards a Critique of Violence (1921), and Theological-Political Fragment (1920).Less
This chapter argues that engaging with Benjamin’s work, if it is to be the site of philosophical thinking, requires a two-fold move. First, there needs to be a loosening of the hold of the proper name and thus the modes of compatibility and consistency that the insistence of proper names may demand. Second, it must be able to recover a project whose potentiality is necessarily already there within a range of different texts. Each of the texts deemed central to this project will be taken up in the course of this book, and individual chapters will be devoted to each one of them. These texts include The Meaning of Time in the Moral World (1921), Fate and Character (1919– 21), Towards a Critique of Violence (1921), and Theological-Political Fragment (1920).
Andrew Benjamin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748634347
- eISBN:
- 9780748695287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634347.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter presents a reading of Benjamin’s Towards a Critique of Violence, a text whose structure is far more a series of overlapping elements than the presence of sustained and deliberate ...
More
This chapter presents a reading of Benjamin’s Towards a Critique of Violence, a text whose structure is far more a series of overlapping elements than the presence of sustained and deliberate argumentation. Hence, a proper reading of the text demands that attention be paid to its own structuring force and thus its own complex form of argumentation. Moreover, there has to be an engagement that is consistent with the constitutive elements of this overall project, namely, that integral to the recovery of a political philosophy from Benjamin’s writings is the contention that his use of destruction – either as a named or as a figured presence, and in terms of specific modes of analysis – is inextricably bound up with a conception of value that is, contrary to the Kantian heritage, intrinsic to life.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Benjamin’s Towards a Critique of Violence, a text whose structure is far more a series of overlapping elements than the presence of sustained and deliberate argumentation. Hence, a proper reading of the text demands that attention be paid to its own structuring force and thus its own complex form of argumentation. Moreover, there has to be an engagement that is consistent with the constitutive elements of this overall project, namely, that integral to the recovery of a political philosophy from Benjamin’s writings is the contention that his use of destruction – either as a named or as a figured presence, and in terms of specific modes of analysis – is inextricably bound up with a conception of value that is, contrary to the Kantian heritage, intrinsic to life.
Perry S. Moskowitz
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813175164
- eISBN:
- 9780813175195
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0016
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter by Perry S. Moskowitz examines the politics of Richard Wright’s textual practices in 12 Million Black Voices. In particular, it focuses on how Wright responds to being tasked with ...
More
This chapter by Perry S. Moskowitz examines the politics of Richard Wright’s textual practices in 12 Million Black Voices. In particular, it focuses on how Wright responds to being tasked with representing a transhistorical and universal account of the black experience. Rather than use his position as a prominent black intellectual to authorize this account, Wright employs literary montage to invite other textual agents to contest the singularity and credibility of his narrative. Through montage, Wright exposes his reader to the white supremacist logics of representation that entrust him to serve as a delegate for a collective black narrative. Moreover, Wright uses montage to propose a counterpolitics of representation—one that values decentralized representative authority in order to stress the inconsistency and multiplicity that accompanies political representation.Less
This chapter by Perry S. Moskowitz examines the politics of Richard Wright’s textual practices in 12 Million Black Voices. In particular, it focuses on how Wright responds to being tasked with representing a transhistorical and universal account of the black experience. Rather than use his position as a prominent black intellectual to authorize this account, Wright employs literary montage to invite other textual agents to contest the singularity and credibility of his narrative. Through montage, Wright exposes his reader to the white supremacist logics of representation that entrust him to serve as a delegate for a collective black narrative. Moreover, Wright uses montage to propose a counterpolitics of representation—one that values decentralized representative authority in order to stress the inconsistency and multiplicity that accompanies political representation.
