Download or read book Dark Images Secret Hints written by Bram Mertens and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the influence of the Jewish tradition on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was hitherto always assumed that Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism was very limited and that he was interested only in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the study of which was pioneered by his friend Gershom Scholem. However, on the latter's recommendation, Benjamin also read Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (1827-1857), a massive four-volume work which presents a comprehensive overview of both mainstream and mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. Having unearthed the most likely written source of Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism, this study sets out to show that Benjamin's thought was influenced considerably by Jewish concepts of language, experience and history, and that this influence is persistent enough to lend a unity to Benjamin's work that transcends its division into an early, metaphysical and a late, materialist or Marxist stage. Within this context, the book also provides a reassessment of some of Benjamin's key texts, from the early programmatic writings on language, philosophy and literature to the little-known Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and the unfinished Passagen-Werk.

Download or read book The Secret written by Byron Preiss and published by ibooks. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full color paintings and verses of The Secret. Yet The Secret is much more than that. At long last, you can learn not only the whereabouts of the Fair People's treasure, but also the modern forms and hiding places of their descendants: the Toll Trolls, Maitre D'eamons, Elf Alphas, Tupperwerewolves, Freudian Sylphs, Culture Vultures, West Ghosts and other delightful creatures in the world around us. The Secret is a field guide to them all. Many "armchair treasure hunt" books have been published over the years, most notably Masquerade (1979) by British artist Kit Williams. Masquerade promised a jewel-encrusted golden hare to the first person to unravel the riddle that Williams cleverly hid in his art. In 1982, while everyone in Britain was still madly digging up hedgerows and pastures in search of the golden hare, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt was published in America. The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues.

Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason A. Josephson-Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the early human sciences and their deep connections to spiritualism dispenses with the myth that separates magic and modernity. Many theorists contend that the defining feature of modernity is our collective loss of faith in spirits, myths, and magic. But in The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues against this narrative, showing that attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than not. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. He demonstrates that the founding figures of these “mythless” disciplines were in fact profoundly enmeshed in the occult and spiritualist revivals of Britain, France, and Germany. It was in response to this milieu that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Download or read book The Scholems written by Jay Howard Geller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.

Download or read book Working with Walter Benjamin written by Andrew Benjamin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of 'working with' Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.

Download or read book The Mathematical Imagination written by Matthew Handelman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.

Download or read book Gershom Scholem written by Amir Engel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-10-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was ostensibly a scholar of Jewish mysticism, yet he occupies a powerful role in today’s intellectual imagination, having influential contact with an extraordinary cast of thinkers, including Hans Jonas, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno. In this first biography of Scholem, Amir Engel shows how Scholem grew from a scholar of an esoteric discipline to a thinker wrestling with problems that reach to the very foundations of the modern human experience. As Engel shows, in his search for the truth of Jewish mysticism Scholem molded the vast literature of Jewish mystical lore into a rich assortment of stories that unveiled new truths about the modern condition. Positioning Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine, and later the state of Israel, Engel intertwines Scholem’s biography with his historiographical work, which stretches back to the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, through the lives of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Sabbatai Zevi, and up to Hasidism and the dawn of the Zionist movement. Through parallel narratives, Engel touches on a wide array of important topics including immigration, exile, Zionism, World War One, and the creation of the state of Israel, ultimately telling the story of the realizations—and failures—of a dream for a modern Jewish existence.

Download or read book Experience and Infinite Task written by Tamara Tagliacozzo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a panoramic view of much of Benjamin’s thought, and concentrating in particular on his early writings, this book derives from a philosophical analysis of readings and studies by Benjamin that have not heretofore been considered in detail.

Download or read book Nietzsche s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin written by Mauro Ponzi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of “permanent catastrophe”, where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin’s Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.

Download or read book PostSecret written by Frank Warren and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-11-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The project that captured a nation's imagination. The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary. "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative." It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously. The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional. As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity. Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.

Download or read book The Secret Guide to Computers written by WALTER and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Use and Abuse of Memory written by Christian Karner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about—and allusions to—World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction. This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches. The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.

Download or read book Transfinite Life written by Bruce Rosenstock and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries—Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others—with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.

Download or read book Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger written by Wesley Phillips and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

Download or read book Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence written by Daniel H. Weiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers connections between modern Jewish philosophers and classical rabbinic thought, arguing for rethinking of Judaism, politics, and violence.

Download or read book The Straight A Conspiracy written by Hunter Maats and published by 368 Press. This book was released on 2013-07-13 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the only reason you aren't doing well in school is that you've been lied to about your own brain? For centuries, students worldwide have been tricked into making school more difficult, more stressful, and less successful than it needs to be. In reality, you already have the ability to make anything that you do in school easy. From writing essays to mastering any math concept to acing even your most difficult final exam, The Straight-A Conspiracy takes you through the simple, stress-free ways to conquer any class in school. The truth about straight-A's has been kept from you. It's time you knew about The Straight-A Conspiracy.

Download or read book Limbo Strategy Guide written by GamerGuides.com and published by Gamer Guides. This book was released on 2015-11-07 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take on the role of a silhouetted boy trapped in a mysterious, monochrome realm in one of last generation’s most highly acclaimed indie platform titles. Work your way through the creepy landscape, avoiding its denizens, solving all of the tricky puzzles and eluding all of those macabre traps that litter your path. Our guide for LIMBO features: - Complete walkthrough from start to finish, grabbing all of the hidden items and achievements/trophies as you go. - Locations of all the hidden eggs for achievements/trophies. - Complete guide to the PS3/PC exclusive secret level. - Locations of the 11 Xbox360 version exclusive hidden eggs.