'Walter Benjamin' tag archive

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 […]

Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 376pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 69119 866 8 Christopher Tomlins is not the first historian to have focused on the Nat Turner rebellion. In 1831, the slave Nat Turner led a group of blacks in an insurrection in St. […]

1. I will attempt here to reflect on three major themes, ‘masses, class, suggestion’, with the hope that, by doing so, I will also indirectly bring to light the relevance of Gabriel Tarde’s thought today. One may wonder why my title does not include – perhaps in place of the term ‘class’, which is not […]

Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion, 2016). 288pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 78023 645 2 When viewed on a hot plate under a polarising microscope, liquid crystals appear as a fluctuating kaleidoscope of colour: swirling, as Esther Leslie describes them, like ‘twisting lines of silks’, ‘pearlescent baubles’ […]

The crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state is being posed today with an urgency and acuity not seen since the debates over the legitimacy of Weimar parliamentary democracy. Its constitutive claim to be able to satisfy both the values of justice and pluralism appears to be coming apart at the seams. Far […]

Dossier PHILOSOPHY OF tHE ESSAY FILM Art, documentary and the essay film Esther LeslieFilm as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a […]

Defiance or emancipation? peter hallward What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book* approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice that calls for reflective judgement in the Kantian sense. His point of departure is the claim that resistance demands appreciation on its own evolving terms, rather than as an […]

extra, extra, read all about it! Contemporary art is postconceptual art Antonia birnbaum * Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the […]

COMMENT Generative grafting Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy Elina staikou In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones […]

Obituary Socialism and the sea Allan Sekula, 1951–2013 Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The author of pioneering histories of photography, he produced genre-shifting exhibitions, books and videos. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and […]

school leavers as well as retirees, part-time workers and the unemployed. How we communicate our work to different people and how we negotiate difference and dissent among ourselves are recurring questions. We are based in a small city; while there are fewer existing networks of solidarity than might exist in larger cities, there is also […]

Total social crisis and the return of fascism Elsa papageorgiou In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clément Méric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What […]

Reviews Look at his marvellous hands! Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in […]

In memory of Joel Olson (1967–2012) In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, but […]

Document Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble ideas developed in other texts […]

After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013. In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photo­graph projected onto a bare wall. The […]

Reviews SWøWalter Benjamin, Early Writings, 1910–1917, trans. and intro. Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 320 pp., £20.95 hb., 9 780 67404 993 2. This translated collection of forty-five of Benjamin’s early writings begins with his first published work, a poem that appeared pseudonymously just before his eighteenth birthday, and follows the tempestuous […]

Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0. David Cunningham In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of change’, they […]

Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (N1a, 4)Whilst the […]

3 Thanks to Anustup Basu for his generous help in the preparation of this article. See, in particular, Carlos Ruiz, De la república al mercado. Ideas educacionales y políticas en Chile, LOM Ediciones, Santiago, 2010. 4. ^ José Joaquín Brunner, Hernán Courard and Cristián Cox, Estado, mercado y conocimientos: políticas y resultados de la educación […]