Walter Benjamin

Disabled by chasing curricular criteria (required for accreditation and professional registration), architecture schools are mostly compliance and reproduction machines serving the building industry. As a corrective, Recoding Architecture Pedagogy: Insurgency and Invention asserts disciplinary knowledge over professional skills as the proper aim and focus of architecture education. The insurgent pedagogy introduced subverts architecture and its teaching’s capture by capitalism’s dominant modes of production and consumption to reveal unexpected tactics for enlarging possibilities. Grounded in architecture histories and theories, philosophy, and anarchism’s (...) emphasis on use and dissensus, combined with PUNK’s DIY ethos, design studio emphasis on technicity is upended to reveal the subversive aim of intensifying tensions between (doomed) desires for artistic autonomy and (intrinsic) burdens of use constituting architecture as a discipline, instead of seeking resolution, some neutral middle ground, or escape into banal practice or paper palaces. By concentrating on what architecture education suppresses (tensions), disavows (its capture within the building industry), or affirms (commercial practice over disciplinary knowledge), Recoding Architecture Pedagogy: Insurgency and Invention cracks open horizons of possibility by showing how intensifying agonistic relationships between the myriad binaries that characterize architecture and its teaching is generative, in ways conciliatory synthesis, cathartic resolution, and uncritical affirmation are not. (shrink)

El problema filosófico de la pérdida de la experiencia no solo es relevante en el contexto histórico de Benjamin —la crisis tras la Primera Guerra Mundial y la consolidación del capitalismo industrial—, sino también en el presente. En la contemporaneidad, marcada por la digitalización y la cultura de la inmediatez, se observan similitudes claras con el diagnóstico de Benjamin: la aceleración tecnológica (Rosa, 2016), la fragmentación de la memoria colectiva y la superficialización de las relaciones humanas parecen haber profundizado esta (...) crisis. ¿Es posible aún hablar de experiencia auténtica en un contexto dominado por la inmediatez y la superficialidad? Dado lo anterior, aquí pretendo analizar cómo la modernidad contribuye a la pérdida de la experiencia desde la obra de Walter Benjamin y explorar las implicaciones filosóficas y sociales de este fenómeno. Pues insisto en que el empobrecimiento de la experiencia no se refiere solo a un diagnóstico del pasado, sino una problemática que sigue afectándonos en el presente. (shrink)

Ce mémoire vise à élucider le rapport entre la violence et le pouvoir souverain à partir de la Critique de la violence de Walter Benjamin et Force de loi de Jacques Derrida. Les réflexions proposées ici sont issues de deux constats : (i) que nos structures politiques reposent sur l’emploi continu de la violence et (ii) qu’une révolution abolit l’ordre existant en s’accordant le monopole sur la violence légitime, reconduisant ainsi le cycle de la violence. Pour sortir de cette impasse, (...) Benjamin imagine une violence capable de destituer le pouvoir souverain, c’est-à-dire de l’abolir sans pour autant le saisir à son tour. Ce mémoire poursuit le développement du concept de destitution en trois temps. Dans un premier temps, nous lisons de près la Critique de la violence de Benjamin. Dans un deuxième temps, nous approfondissons notre analyse avec la lecture déconstructive proposée par Derrida dans Force de loi. Finalement, le concept de destitution est enrichi par des travaux contemporains et examiné sous l’angle de la responsabilité pour l’avenir. -/- *** -/- This thesis investigates the relationship between violence and sovereign power by drawing on Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence and Jacques Derrida's Force de loi. The reflections proposed here are based on two observations: (i) that our political structures are based on the continuous use of violence, and (ii) that a revolution abolishes the existing order by granting itself a monopoly on legitimate violence, thus renewing the cycle of violence. To break this deadlock, Benjamin imagines a form of violence capable of destituting sovereign power, i.e. abolishing it without seizing it. This dissertation further develops the concept of destitution in three steps. First, we carefully read Benjamin's Critique of Violence. Secondly, we deepen our analysis with the deconstructive reading proposed by Derrida in Force de loi. Finally, we enrich the concept of destitution with contemporary works and examine it through the lens of responsibility for what is to come. (shrink)

The article employs the concept of the “Resonance Relationship” to examine the theoretical and practical tensions inherent in the process of artistic creation as it pertains to the practice of film montage. A re-reading of the film Blow-Up will facilitate an examination of the interplay between the two conceptual poles of control and uncontrollability as they manifest in artistic practices. The study will be supported by an analysis of various perspectives on interrelated issues, including the “photographic zoom” as described by (...) Walter Benjamin, Walter Murch’s approach to montage, and the concept of the “aporia of art” as articulated by Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory. (shrink)

Benjamin’s essay Toward the Critique of Violence has often irritated readers. This is even more true of his concept of divine violence, which is defined as “law-annihilating” and goes against legally sanctioned state sovereignty. In this paper, I present a new reading of both Benjamin’s essay and divine violence. Against an apocalyptic tendency of Benjamin, I argue that divine violence can only be an instrument of justice if it is understood as violence suffered rather than perpetrated. This is especially the (...) case where people suffer persecution – imprisonment, torture, death – as a result of nonviolent resistance to an oppressive political regime. Only where such resistant suffering occurs, can violence properly be called divine. Only then does it offer a perspective beyond the never-ending atrocities of human history. (shrink)

Im Zentrum meines Beitrages steht der Begriff einer „höheren Erfahrung“, wie Benjamin ihn in seiner 1917/18 entstanden Schrift Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie entwickelt. Mithilfe einer ideengeschichtlichen Situierung zwischen und gegen den Neukantianismus Hermann Cohens und die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls nähere ich mich insbesondere der Denkfigur einer „Sphäre totaler Neutralität“, die es Benjamin zufolge jenseits von Subjekt und Objekt „auszumitteln“ gilt, um einen Begriff höherer Erfahrung gewinnen zu können. Ausgehend von dieser ideengeschichtlichen Verortung wende ich mich Benjamins von Johann (...) Georg Hamann inspirierter „Metaphysik der Sprache“ zu, um dafür zu argumentieren, dass die göttliche Sprache das ontologische Fundament bildet, in dem sowohl Erkenntnisobjekt als auch -subjekt in Benjamins frühem Denken gründen. (shrink)

Zachary Zolty English 699 : Gothic Studies Master’s Thesis, National University of San Diego, California. -/- Advisor: Dr. Ramie Tateishi -/- Abstract The current situation in the United States of America is that Latin immigrants and migrants are mistreated and subjected to gross human rights violations, with entire extensions of the Nation-State being given virtually unlimited power over a powerless populace. The current gap in the literature revolves around Agamben and political theology as it relates and overlaps with the political (...) reality of Latin American immigrants and migrants being mistreated and subjected to human rights violations with impunity. This research is very important to allow a path to resist nation-states when they collapse into authoritarianism or oppress humans without citizenship of the territory of the nation-state, in question. This will provide a way to assist Latin immigrants and migrants without fear of a revolution that will dissolve into tyranny, as happens so often. How can the political theory of Agamben’s use of Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence establish a new way of assuring Latin migrants and immigrants’ safety and dignity as human beings who should be allowed to live anywhere they please as long as they are not harming anyone? My research objective is to show how Benjamin’s notion of divine violence combined with that of Agamben’s notion of destituent power can provide a way to break out of the dialectic of tyrannies that collapse in revolution to birth yet a new regime of tyrannies. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the everyday can (...) be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—throughout post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus (...) on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries. (shrink)

This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, I argue that his (...) account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning. (shrink)

Che cos’è “Propaganda”? Un tema più che attuale nella società odierna del villaggio globale, eppure se ci si riflette, non si riesce a dare una definizione precisa su che cosa essa sia. Una delle domande fondamentali che bisogna porsi nel tentativo di rispondere a questo spinoso quesito è: quando e come ha avuto inizio il processo di questo draconiano meccanismo nella società dei Mass Media? Attraverso un’analisi combinata delle tesi di Kracauer, Adorno, Horkheimer e Taylor, assieme ad una ricostruzione storica (...) e culturale di quei processi che hanno portato alla genesi dell’infausta industria propagandistica tedesca, è possibile dare una risposta a questi quesiti. (shrink)

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role that the concept of “presence of mind” (Geistesgegenwart) plays in Walter Benjamin’s thought, deepening lines of interpretation that are connected to other relevant concepts such as “attention” (Aufmerksamkeit) and “now-time” (Jetztzeit). It examines elements of Benjamin’s work that develop the philosophical importance of presence of mind, emphasizing its corporeal dimension and its aesthetic and critical relevance. The analysis covers fve lines of interpretation that intersect in different ways: (i) presence of mind is a (...) form of thought/action that should be cultivated as a way of dealing with the experience of shock; (ii) having presence of mind is an attitude that can be exercised; (iii) “seizing the day” involves the body and presupposes an experience of intensive time; (iv) the conceptual framework of presence of mind integrates elements related to play; and (v) by valuing the present, presence of mind implies a relationship between danger and a critical gesture – in Benjamin’s historical and political reflection, this gesture intertwines the individual and the collective dimensions. (shrink)

Knowing that Cloud Atlas (2016) opens various analytical possibilities, this brief essay chooses to map possible relationships that the book, especially concerning stories 3, 5, and 6, can establish with Walter Benjamin's philosophy, more punctually, his Theses on the Philosophy of History. It will be briefly introduced, to this end, a summary of each of the six short stories that make up Cloud Atlas and its structural organization. After that, it will be indicated specific passages by Walter Benjamin that would (...) present similarities and resonances synchronized with the concepts that cross the literary work of David Mitchell. (shrink)

While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction (...) is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state. (shrink)

How can the medium be addressed when it is always already saturated in religious over-determinations and ever marked by theological concerns (such as revelation and incarnation) while, at the same time, religion would not be practiced and theology not be done without using some such medium? We encourage methodological and conceptual shifts, first, from medium to mediality; second, from religion to its partial negation (or, perhaps, partial permeation); third, from theology to doing the theological differently. With these shifts we desire (...) to initiate, continue, and intensify debates, specifically between theologians and scholars of religious studies and media theory. (shrink)

​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy. The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic (...) of the Baroque sensibility adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading. (shrink)

The Frankfurt School addresses the anxieties of modernity.

This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with attention to Walter Benjamin’s treatment of experience in capitalist society. I argue (...) that Benjamin’s distinction between experience as the shock of isolated events [Erlebnis] and experience as a long-term practice [Erfahrung] helpfully illuminates Lukács’ conception of dereification, allowing us to see the latter as a long process of cultivation. This account ultimately leads to a consideration of the formal role played by the party—as the facilitator of the working class’s self-education—in Lukács’ philosophy of social praxis. (shrink)

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

This article examines the turn to the aesthetic dimension in early 20th century critical theory, particularly in the work of Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno. It focuses on the concept of play ( Spiel), which garnered particular attention as a possible form of aesthetic resistance to the reification of reason in modern society. The article traces the concept of play from the work of Lukács, who engaged with Schiller’s notion of the play-drive but ultimately viewed it to be an inadequate form (...) of aesthetic resistance, to the work of Benjamin, who optimistically embraced the revolutionary possibility of play. In contrast, the article argues that Adorno’s work tacitly advances a critical concept of dark play that offers a third perspective between Lukács’s pessimism and Benjamin’s optimism, thus avoiding both the retreat into an apolitical aesthetic dimension and the uncritical embrace of play’s revolutionary potential. (shrink)

: In this paper I attempt to rethink the relationship between art and life by formulating it based on the rereading of the Benjaminian mimetic faculty by the anthropologist Michael Taussig. Taking this position within history as non-teleological change and based on human activity, to uphold a distinction between original and representation metaphysically becomes impossible. This is important in so far as any notion of primacy becomes obsolete, while at the same time one can work with the historical existence, both (...) material and ideational, of initially abstract concepts such as art. Art then is something that in itself does not have a materially specific reality, but forms reality through artworks, institutions, pecuniary allocations or human motivation. Taking art as a world-forming force that is nonetheless historically produced in turn opens up new, pluralist ways of using this historical given for possible futures. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s letter correspondence with Walter Benjamin throughout the decade of the 1930’s entertains the central question concerning the possibility of philosophy in their intellectual milieu. The fate of this possibility for Adorno hinges on Benjamin’s work-in-progress Das Passagen-Werk—a fate that is catastrophically blocked by an uncritical tendency convicted repeatedly by the former as “undialectical.” And yet Adorno obstinately persists in clinging to the canon of a philosophically overdetermined demand he endearingly calls “my Arcades orthodoxy.” The threatening destruction of (...) the aura of this orthodoxy reaches a crisis in Adorno’s ruthless metacritique of Benjamin’s alleged undialectical treatment of aesthetic autonomy in a draft of the Kunstwerk essay, marking a critical wound in the correspondence which the following exposition tracks in the enigmatic changeover in the philosophical exigency of the said orthodoxy from prima philosophia to ultima philosophia. The lingering wound is registered in Adorno’s late philosophical work. (shrink)

This essay argues that Rorty's reliance on love evinces a residual bit of dogmatism on his part (with some guest appearances by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno).

Die Rezeption von Walter Benjamins Arbeiten ist von einer Paradoxie durchzogen: Obwohl Konsens darüber besteht, dass er seine Begriffe in ›enger Fühlung‹ mit dem jeweiligen Material entwickelt, werden seine Schriften häufig ohne ein eigenständiges Studium seiner Quellen gelesen, losgelöst vom jeweiligen Problem- und Debattenzusammenhang. Das verstärkt den Eindruck einer Esoterik seiner Texte und kann zu der Annahme verleiten, Benjamin entnehme Motive willkürlich aus seinem Material- und Quellenstudium und nutze sie als Vehikel eines an sich schwer in eine Tradition einzuordnenden Denkens. (...) Die Autorinnen und Autoren des vorliegenden Bandes legen das Gewicht auf Benjamins Material, sei es Literatur, Theater, Metaphysik, Rechts- und Moralphilosophie, Zeitschriftenprojekte, soziale Bewegungen oder Stadtarchitektur. Anhand von Texten unterschiedlicher Werkphasen untersuchen sie das Verhältnis von Material und Begriff aus beiden Blickrichtungen. Dieses Vorgehen ermöglicht es, auch Licht auf theoretische Beziehungen und Arbeitszusammenhänge zu werfen, die bisher eher unbeachtet blieben. (shrink)

This article argues for a much more profound interconnection between philosophical romanticism and Walter Benjamin’s theses "On The Concept of History" than has been acknowledged up to now. It particularly reveals a number of parallels between Benjamin’s historical approach and the philosophy of history of the two principal thinkers of Early German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who had already formed the object of Benjamin’s doctoral thesis. It examines Benjamin’s final philosophical work in the light of three central topics inherited (...) from Early German Romanticism, which have been less explored in romanticism studies and Benjamin scholarship, yet are decisive for helping clarify what is at stake in Benjamin’s text: the relation to prophecy; the question of messianism; and the heliotropism of the past. -/- _____________ Cet article défend l’idée d’un lien entre la philosophie romantique et les thèses de Walter Benjamin Sur le concept d’histoire bien plus profond qu’on ne l’a admis jusqu’à présent. Il met plus particulièrement en lumière des parallèles entre la démarche historique de Benjamin et la philosophie de l’histoire des deux principaux penseurs du premier romantisme allemand, Friedrich Schlegel et Novalis, auxquels Benjamin avait déjà consacré sa thèse de doctorat. L’article examine le dernier écrit majeur de Benjamin à la lumière de trois thématiques centrales héritées du romantisme, qui ont été peu approfondies tant dans les études romantiques que dans le commentaire benjaminien et qui sont pourtant décisives pour éclaircir ce qui est en jeu dans ce texte : le rapport à la prophétie ; la question du messianisme ; et l’héliotropisme du passé. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s texts on Baudelaire put forward a threefold analogy, surprising at first glance, between the experience of the crowd, typical of modern metropolises, mechanized work and games of chance. While exploring gambling and the gambler in Benjamin’s analysis, this article explores the inner ambiguity of the concept of repetition: firstly conceived as belonging to the «time of hell» of the ever-new, it can also be understood as a gateway for understanding the processes of experimentation, which are crucial to modern (...) and contemporary aesthetic experiences. In this sense, urban space can also be conceived as a room for play, vulnerable to and enriched by chance and playful mechanisms encompassing aesthetic and political dimensions. (shrink)

Una reseña de un libro en el que participé.

Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way (...) of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "intellectual field," McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. The fullest account of Benjamin available in English, this lucid and penetrating book will be welcomed by intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, historians of German literature, and Continental philosophers. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

En este texto se ofrece una interpretación del blues a la luz de la teoría del arte de Walter Benjamin y la teoría de la cultura de Bolívar Echeverría. El texto hace consideraciones sobre el blues, la música, la cultura y la reproducción social en general, a partir de lo cual se realiza un estudio de caso sobre la relación entre Junior Kimbrough y Robert Palmer y se sacan conclusiones respecto a la cultura del blues como fenómeno social.

In this article, we argue that the usual restriction of critical theory to ‘modern’ norms is subject to problems of coherence, historical accuracy and moral obligation. First, we illustrate how critical theory opposes itself to societies designated as pre-modern, through a summary of Honneth’s recognition theory. We then show how an over-emphasis on modernity’s normative novelty obscures counter-currents in ethical life that threaten the unity of the modern era. Those two steps prepare the main analysis: that the ‘exceptionalist’ modernism of (...) critical theory distorts our view of history and ignores normative dimensions of the past. We show how medieval and early-modern societies in Europe experienced many conflicts and possessed institutions that create illuminating configurations with modern norms. As a result, we articulate several kinds of moral and political link to the past that should lead critical theorists to expand the historical reach of their analyses. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin and the Post-Kantian Tradition engages with Benjamin as a theorist of a historical and philosophical problematic, and demonstrates how Benjamin moves from an aspiring idealist philosopher to a politically engaged Marxist critic without abandoning the theoretical project he develops early on.