Download or read book Revolution and History in Walter Benjamin written by Alison Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book places Benjamin’s writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin’s approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem of revolution to be primarily that of the conceptualization of collective experience (its possibility and sites) under the conditions of modern bourgeois society. The novelty of his approach to revolution lies in the fact that he directly connects it with historical experience. Benjamin’s conception of revolution thus constitutes an integral part of his distinctive theory of historical knowledge, which is also essentially a theory of experience. Through a detailed study of Benjamin’s writings on the topics of the child and the dream, and an analysis of his ideas of history, the fulfilled wish, similitude and communist society, this book shows how the conceptual analysis of his corpus can get to the heart of Benjamin’s conception of revolutionary experience and distil its difficulties and mechanisms.
Download or read book Revolution and History in Walter Benjamin written by Alison Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book places Benjamin's writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin's approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem of revolution to be primarily that of the conceptualization of collective experience (its possibility and sites) under the conditions of modern bourgeois society. The novelty of his approach to revolution lies in the fact that he directly connects it with historical experience. Benjamin's conception of revolution thus constitutes an integral part of his distinctive theory of historical knowledge, which is also essentially a theory of experience. Through a detailed study of Benjamin's writings on the topics of the child and the dream, and an analysis of his ideas of history, the fulfilled wish, similitude and communist society, this book shows how the conceptual analysis of his corpus can get to the heart of Benjamin's conception of revolutionary experience and distil its difficulties and mechanisms.
Download or read book Fire Alarm written by Michael Lowy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.
Download or read book On the Concept of History written by Walter Benjamin and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-08-21 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On The Concept of History is a politics & social sciences essay written by German philosopher and social science critic Walter Benjamin. On The Concept of History is one of Walter Benjamin's best known, and most controversial works. The politics & social sciences essay is composed of twenty numbered paragraphs in which Benjamin uses poetic and scientific analogies to present a critique of historicism. Walter Benjamin wrote the brief essay shortly before attempting to escape from Vichy France, where French collaborationist government officials were handing over Jewish refugees like Walter Benjamin to the Nazi Gestapo. Walter Benjamin completed On The Concept of History before fleeing to Spain where he unfortunately committed suicide. Benjamin's work is often required textbook reading in various subjects such as humanities, philosophy, and politics & social sciences.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History written by Michael P. Steinberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin s Other History written by Beatrice Hanssen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-12-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of the Trauerspiel study, showing how its thematics persisted well into the later writings of the thirties. For by introducing the materialistic category of natural history in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin not only criticized idealistic conceptions of history writing but also expressed an ethico-theological call for another kind of history, one no longer anthropocentric in nature. This profound critique of historical thinking, Hanssen shows, went hand in hand with a radical de-limitation of the human subject, informed by his interest in questions about ethics, the law, and justice. Through an analysis of the seemingly innocuous figures of stones, animals, and angels that are scattered throughout his writings, Hanssen reconstructs the often neglected ethical dimension of his historical thought. In the course of doing so, she not only places Benjamin's work in the context of contemporaries such as Adorno, Cohen, Lukacs, Kafka, Kraus, and Heidegger but also demonstrates the persistence of Benjaminian themes in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.
Download or read book Images of History written by Richard Eldridge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human subjects are both formed by historical inheritances and capable of active criticism. Insisting on this fact, Kant and Benjamin each develop powerful, systematic, but sharply opposed accounts of human powers and interests in freedom. A persistent constitutive tension between Kantian and Benjaminan ideals is woven through human life. By examining the two philosophers through this volume, Richard Eldridge attempts to make better sense of the commitment forming, commitment revising, anxious, reflective and acculturated human subjects we are.
Download or read book Berlin Childhood Around 1900 written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Change written by A. M. Pusca and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-01-20 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the spirit of Benjamin's Arcades Project, this book acts as a kaleidoscope of change in the 21st century, tracing its different reflections in the international contemporary while seeking to understand individual/collective reactions to change through a series of creative methodologies.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Terry Eagleton and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.
Download or read book The Revolution is the Emergency Break written by Michael Löwy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 European Walter Benjamin Prize, The Revolution is the Emergency Break is a rich discussion of Walter Benjamin’s lesser-known writings by renowned social scientist Michael Löwy. Translated into several languages but available in English for the very first time, Löwy’s book brings together the philosophical, literary, theological and cultural aspects of Benjamin’s writings, including his relation to figures such as Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig, his interpretation of historical materialism, surrealism, anti-fascism and anarchism, his contribution to understanding capitalism as a religion, and his relevance for Latin America and ecology today. The concept of revolution in his writings – not only the political ones but also those that deal with art, literature or theology, run through the work, connecting the various chapters. The Revolution is the Emergency Break also features four new chapters in this collection. Written in a clear-eyed, accessible language, The Revolution is the Emergency Break is a must-read for researchers, teachers and students interested in the works of this influential German intellectual.
Download or read book Hegel Haiti and Universal History written by Susan F. Buck-Morss and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-02-22 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.
Download or read book Toward the Critique of Violence written by Walter Benjamin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
Download or read book Love s Shadow written by Paul A. Bové and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique written by Carlo Salzani and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The striking actuality of Walter Benjamin’s work does not rest on a supposed “usefulness” of his philosophy for current concerns, but rather on the high “legibility” to which his oeuvre has come in the present. Indeed, this legibility is a function of critique, which unearths the truth-content of a work in a constellation of reading with the present, and assures thereby that the work lives on. Following this methodological tenet, this book approaches Benjamin’s work with two foci: the actuality of his critique of violence, a central and unavoidable topic in the contemporary political-philosophical debate, and the actuality of his critique of experience, which perhaps is not as conspicuous as that of his critique of violence but constitutes, nonetheless, the bedrock upon which his whole philosophy rests.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Theology written by Colby Dickinson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.
Download or read book The Moment written by Heidrun Friese and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses from different perspectives the key questions posed by the moment and thereby elucidates the connection between social theory, philosophy, literary theory and history that are opened by the moment.
