The Violence of the Ark

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Violence

Proposals that the violence of the ark in 2 Sam 6:7 can be explained in terms of punishment or educative violence are reviewed and shown to be unsupported by details in the text. Unlike the parallel account in 1 Chr 13 and 15, no laws are sufficient to ensure safety from the ark and the ark is simply removed. Similarly, there is a lack of evidence for punishment or educative violence in 1 Sam 6:19. It is proposed that the violence of the ark remains inexplicable, and fits the concept of Divine Violence as defined by Walter Benjamin. Divine Violence is neither a means to an end or end to a means, it is beyond law. It irrupts in the context of a misalignment in the world and is beyond ethics.

Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Prime Elements ◽  
Cultural Turn

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals TOOLS IN VIRAL TIMES: QUESTIONING THE USE OF TECHNOLOGIES IN MEXICAN SCHOOLING PRACTICES

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alonso Casanueva
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Radio Waves ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
The World ◽  
Technological Tools ◽  
Critical Theorist ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Many ◽  
Schooling Practices ◽  
The City

From 1929 to 1932, the German critical theorist Walter Benjamin broadcast a radio show intended for children, «Enlightenment for Children» (Aufklärung für Kinder). His program consisted of illuminating lessons that bound together culture and history in creative ways, to teach children about the world. Used as a tool for convivial purposes, the radio waves transported German kinder to the sites where witch trials happened, or to learn the secret language built into the city walls of Berlin, or to wonder about the life of the Romani and imagine the features of the many characters that formed part of Benjamin’s radio plays. It was an imaginative pedagogical exercise that has made me wonder about the possibilities of technological tools in the service of learning experiences.

The Rhythm of History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das
Keyword(s):  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Historical Reason ◽  
The World

This chapter presents a reading of the posthumously published fragment The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) to show that the deconstruction of sovereignty demands a re-thinking of the question of history. Confronting Hegel's pantheistic-immanent philosophy of history, it attempts to reveal an eschatological vision of history at work in Schelling's The Ages of the World which radically puts into question the secularising theodicy formulated by Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history. He thereby opens up the possibility, later elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin, of a messianic-eschatological critique of historical Reason. Such an eschatological-messianic conception of history, by withdrawing from the triumphal march of universal world-historical politics, gives voice to those who are oppressed by the irresistible demand of progress.

Who is Able to Stand before the LORD, this Holy God?

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-153
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
The Right

Two accounts of the ark’s violence in 1 Sam 6:19 and 2 Sam 6:7 have prompted a multitude of interpretations in scholarship. Most explanations for the violence of the ark assume the violence is related to the right (or wrong) treatment of the ark. Even if these interpretations acknowledge that the violence is out of proportion to the transgression, they propose, nevertheless, that a known law has been broken; or the violence establishes a custom for the ark’s treatment or endorses the ark’s holiness. This chapter introduces the thought of Walter Benjamin whose work gives categories to understand divine violence as neither preserving or creating law.

scholarly journals How Fairy Tales Educate and Civilize Us: Ethical Literary Criticism on Fairy Tales

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Li Xiaoyi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
The World ◽  
Bruno Bettelheim ◽  
Cultural Force

This article first discusses the history and ideology of fairy tales. As Walter Benjamin said in his essay “The Storyteller”, rumors and information were spread verbally, from person to person. So were fairy tales. Through storytelling, the history and experience is spread from generation to generation. So that audience, especially children, gather to listen to the folks and stories about things “long long ago”, sharing the memories and experience of the storytellers. Based on this idea, the article further analyses the utopian function of fairy tales, which depict the feasibility of utopian alternatives by means of fantastic images. Because in the name of fairy tales, anything is possible. Apart from hope and wish, there was dissatisfaction in fairy tales. Ernst Bloch placed special emphasis on dissatisfaction as a condition which ignites the utopian drive, so that it remains a powerful cultural force among the audience, urges them to resist, to change the unreasonable things in the world. At last, it comes to the ethical use of fairy tales with children. Many scholars, like Bruno Bettelheim and Julius E. Heuscher, have done some psychiatric and psychological research on the meaning and usefulness of fairy tales. Different from those, this article mainly talks about the literary education in fairy tales, how the words, characters and plots play a role in education.

Reconceiving Immigration Politics: Walter Benjamin, Violence, and Labor

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
INÉS VALDEZ
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Production Chain ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Immigration Politics ◽  
Coalition Of Immokalee Workers ◽  
The Stability

This article theorizes the circulation of violence in the realms of immigration and labor. Through Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the relationship between racial violence and law, and note that although violence can support the authority of law, excessive violence makes law vulnerable to decay. This tension between authority and excess is eased by humanitarianism. I find clues for disrupting this circulation in Benjamin’s twin notions of the real state of exception and the general strike, introduced two decades apart and invested in theorizing how labor and other marginalized groups threaten the stability of law supported by violence. This reconstruction proceeds alongside an examination of the contemporary US regime of immigration enforcement, which combines the excessive violence of detention and deportation with marginal humanitarian adjustments, which ultimately legitimate violence. On the disruptive side, a Benjaminian reading of labor activism by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers offers three dimensions of emancipatory politics: (a) practices of refusal (to engage on the terms of the immigration debate), (b) the establishment of historical constellations (of racial regulation of labor constitutive of law), and (c) divine violence (through exposure of lawful violence in the food production chain).

Technologies of Critique

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Thayer
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Critique—a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world—is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. This book elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident artists and the central entangling of politics and aesthetics, the book engages continental philosophical traditions, from Aristotle, Descartes and Heidegger through Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and in implicit conversation with the Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Allegory at the Limits of Classicism: EUGENIO MONTALE'S LA BUFERA E ALTRO

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-417
Author(s):  
Elias Polizoes
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This article offers a reading of the “Conclusioni provvisorie,” the last section of Eugenio Montale's La bufera e altro. It takes its lead from notion of Classicism outlined by T.S. Eliot in his 1923 review of Ulysses and argues that the recourse Montale makes to Dante in particular, and to Christian symbolism in general, is structurally akin to the parallel James Joyce draws between Homer's Odyssey and the world of the early 1920s. In Eliot's view, it is by invoking the coherence of ancient myth that a writer can lend shape and significance to the chaos of the modernity. In Montale's case, however, rather than work to organize the chaotic present according to the idealized image of form and order Classicism promises, the structural use the poet makes of Christianity serves a demythologizing function. On the one hand, it exposes how Classicism is unable to marshal the chaos of the present beyond transforming it into a work of art; on the other, it shows that ideas of order are in fact allegories of the kind elaborated by Walter Benjamin, that is to say, provisional, makeshift, and ultimately empty.

scholarly journals Representation of reality in filmmaking: philosophical and culturological aspects

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
Yaroslav Klimov
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
Film Editing ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Reality

This article explores the issues pertaining to perception of reality through cinematography, including modern film editing. Analysis is conducted on modern surrealistic portraying of the world in movies, highlighting the importance of created reality in movies and its perception by the viewers. The article presents brief analysis of the works of such renowned philosophers as André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin. Modern cinematography in form of “movie universes” and “movie franchises” is used as an example. This research covers modern films, which reflect popular demand for maximal realism as an opportunity to identify and reach maximal immersion into story on the screen. Cinematography began be showing real events as chronicles, later undergoing changes, and with development of technology becomes more distant from portrayal of specific reality and people. In the 1980s the conceptual idea changes, and cinematography becomes more realistic. However, in the early XXI century, while chasing realism modern movies became hyper-realistic, causing gradual degradation of sense of reality of the picture.

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen A. Johnson ◽  
Mauro Carbone ◽  
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Francis Ponge ◽  
Claude Simon ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
André Breton ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Apparatus ◽  
The Invisible

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

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