'Walter Benjamin' tag archive

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

Waiter Benjamin and surrealism The story of a revolutionary spell Michael Lowy ‘Fascination’ is the only term that does justice to the intensity of the feelings Waiter Benjamin experienced when he discovered surrealism in 1926-27. His very efforts to escape the spell of the movement founded by Andre Breton and his friends are an expression […]

Wrapping the Reichstag Re-visioning German history Esther Leslie Whoever emerges victorious participates, to this day, in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. As is always the case, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. The historical materialist views them with […]

‘The world spirit on the fins of a rocket’ Adorno’s critique of progress Michael Lowy and Eleni Varikas The ideology of progress, born (in its modern guise) during the Enlightenment, finds its culminating philosophical expression in Hegel’s conception of history. Here, everything that happens marks a further step in mankind’s march towards freedom: watching Napoleon […]

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse Joanna Hodge Thoughts occasioned by reading Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Roberts, Waiter Benjamin (Macmillan, 1982) There are five grand’ ‘o’ld me~ of’ twentieth-century European Marxism: Adorno , Benjamin , Bloch , Lukacs , and Marcuse . Their works loom bulky and ominous […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

‘eorg Lukuc:s, Waiter Benjamin, and the Motivation to make Politic:al Art Jennifer Todd In this paper I re-explore the relations which do and which should hold between art and politics. I reaffirm the traditional Marxist view that there is an overlap between socialist politics and aesthetic activity from which both politics and art should benefit. […]

B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist modes of production B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Mode of production and social formation: An auto-critique of ‘Pre-capitalist modes of production’ Graham Burchell Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No. 10: On Ideology Ian Craib Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama Michael Ryan Jean-Pierre Faye, ed., […]

The work of the German philosopher Michael Theunissen spans a forty-year period from 1958, when he published his doctoral thesis The Concept of Earnestness in Søren Kierkegaard, to the present. [1] His general intellectual trajectory can be divided into four loosely distinct phases, developing from an early interest in existentialism, via a period focused on […]

for all its voluminousness. This is testament, no doubt, to the historical power of Benjaminʼs writings, but also to a certain more contemporary need for what they have come to represent. For if Benjamin has prospered, in part, from the notorious multiplicity of his personae – and hence from a seemingly endless capacity for reinvention […]

Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies John roberts The following presents a genealogy and critique of the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philosophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts which radically transformed its contents after the Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with the ʻdailyʼ and […]

Childhood experience and the image of utopia The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations Matt F. Connell adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization of the reality which insists that the infant must only enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and pleasure, which demand everything in an […]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a major revival of interest in the work of Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on the essays he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. [1] As a result of this renewed interest in Kracauerʼs early writings, a revisionist school of Kracauer criticism has emerged, particularly in the USA. […]

Althusser and usLouis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, edited by François Mathéron, translated and introduced by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 1999. xxii + 136 pp., £20.00, 1 85984 711 0. It suffices to know the history of the constitution of nation states in broad outline to appreciate that Machiavelli does nothing but think […]

The central tenet of Charles Fourierʼs theory was the promise of universal happiness and social unity through a radical revision of manʼs relationship to labour. Vehemently opposed to both the violence of mass insurrection and the hypocrisies and corruption of burgeoning industrial capitalism, he dreamed of a pacific cultural revolution that would emerge from the […]

In Friedrich Schlegelʼs famous fragment, the philosophical radicalism of Fichteʼs system is compared to both the artistic experimentalism of Goetheʼs Wilhelm Meister and the politically emancipatory force of the French Revolution. The Romantic project as a whole was prototypical for Benjamin in its willingness to align just such political, historical and aesthetic phenomena with the […]

Music and philosophy follow the same principle of working, that of construction and deconstruction. They are both systems for arriving at a poetical structure. Massimo Cacciari1Luigi Nono (1924–1990) occupies a key place in the development of contemporary music. Conventional accounts identify him as the composer who in the 1950s most coherently confronted the implications of […]