Moribund elegance

Reivew of Philipp Ekardt, Benjamin on Fashion

Sam Dolbear ~ RP 2.10 (Summer 2021), pp. 103–106 ~ Review

Philipp Ekardt, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 256pp., £74.59 hb., 978 1 35007 599 3 In Daniel Mourenza’s Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film (2020), we learn that Walter Benjamin, in the summer of 1938, went to see a Katharine Hepburn film at the cinema — it might have been Holiday, it might […]

Photograph of Helen Hessel with eyes closed

All their play becomes fruitful: The utopian child of Charles Fourier

Maeve Pearson ~ RP 115 (Sep/Oct 2002) ~ Article

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 […]

As flowers turn towards the sun: Walter Benjamin’s Bergsonian image of the past

Andrew McGettigan ~ RP 158 (Nov/Dec 2009), pp. 25–35 ~ Article

Benjamin’s theses ‘On the Concept of History’, the final precipitate of the unfinished Arcades Project, was intended to strike at the fundamental pil ars of a thought complicit in its times. [1] On the seventieth anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, which prompted its drafting, it is tempting to question the attraction of this set of […]