Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique

Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique
Author: Carlo Salzani
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1527573168

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.

Toward the Critique of Violence

Toward the Critique of Violence
Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1503627683

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.

Better Living Through Criticism

Better Living Through Criticism
Author: A. O. Scott
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0143109979

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin
Author: Howard Caygill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000158756

This book analyzes the development of Walter Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour. It represents Benjamin as primarily a thinker of the visual field.

Decay and Afterlife

Decay and Afterlife
Author: Aleksandra Prica
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022681159X

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

Truth Decay

Truth Decay
Author: Kavanagh
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1977400132

Political and civil discourse in the United States is characterized by “Truth Decay,” defined as increasing disagreement about facts, a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, an increase in the relative volume of opinion compared with fact, and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. This report explores the causes and wide-ranging consequences of Truth Decay and proposes strategies for further action.

The Artist as Critic

The Artist as Critic
Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 1982
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226897648

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, [1969]

Working with Walter Benjamin

Working with Walter Benjamin
Author: Andrew Benjamin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-11-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748634355

This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of 'working with' Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.

To Die and Not Decay

To Die and Not Decay
Author: Matthew V. Wells
Publisher:
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2009
Genre: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780924304583

The author examines the autobiographical writing of Ge Hong (ca. 283-343) and compares it to other early texts of the genre. A minor official during the early Eastern Jin dynasty, 317-420, Ge Hong is best known for his interest in Daoism, alchemy, and techniques of longevity. But this book focuses on the two authorial postfaces appended to his most celebrated work, Baopuzi, translated as The Master Embracing Simplicity. Among his topics are the proscriptive power of genre, reading self-narrative and the self in early China, and transcending history through autobiography. Two other early texts concerning early autobiography are translated and appended in alternating paragraphs of Chinese and English.