Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs Walter Benjamin Benjamin Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Michael Löwy
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Past ◽  
General Orientation ◽  
The Future

AbstractWe are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic of the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his death, some trying to bring him back into the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours. These three books, quite different in object and method ‐ a collection of documents from his archives, a biography, and a ‘Benjamin Handbook’ ‐ belong to these exceptions.

Acta Fluens – Generatives Handeln und Improvisation im Jazz

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Davide Sparti
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Obwohl jede menschliche Handlung mit einem gewissen Grad an Improvisation erfolgt, gibt es kulturelle Praktiken, bei denen Improvisation eine überwiegende Rolle spielt. Um das Risiko zu vermeiden, einen zu breiten Begriff von Improvisation zu übernehmen, konzentriere ich mich im vorliegenden Beitrag auf den Jazz. Meine zentrale Frage lautet, wie Improvisation verstanden werden muss. Mein Vorgehen ist folgendes: Ich beginne mit einem Vergleich von Improvisation und Komposition, damit die Spezifizität der Improvisation erklärt werden kann. Danach wende ich mich dem Thema der Originalität als Merkmal der Improvisation zu. Zum Schluss führe ich den Begriff affordance ein, um die kollektive und zirkuläre Logik eines Solos zu analysieren. Paradigmatisch wird der Jazzmusiker mit dem Engel der Geschichte verglichen, der nur auf das Vergangene blickt, während er der Zukunft den Rücken zugekehrt hat, und lediglich ihr zugetrieben wird. Weder kann der Improvisierende das Material der Vergangenheit vernachlässigen noch seine genuine Tätigkeit, das Improvisieren in der Gegenwart und für die Zukunft, aufgeben: Er visiert die Zukunft trotz ihrer Unvorhersehbarkeit über die Vermittlung der Vergangenheit an.<br><br>While improvised behavior is so much a part of human existence as to be one of its fundamental realities, in order to avoid the risk of defining the act of improvising too broadly, my focus here will be upon one of the activities most explicitly centered around improvisation – that is, upon jazz. My contribution, as Wittgenstein would say, has a »grammatical« design to it: it proposes to clarify the significance of the term »improvisation.« The task of clarifying the cases in which one may legitimately speak of improvisation consists first of all in reflecting upon the conditions that make the practice possible. This does not consist of calling forth mysterious, esoteric processes that take place in the unconscious, or in the minds of musicians, but rather in paying attention to the criteria that are satisfied when one ascribes to an act the concept of improvisation. In the second part of my contribution, I reflect upon the logic that governs the construction of an improvised performance. As I argue, in playing upon that which has already emerged in the music, in discovering the future as they go on (as a consequence of what they do), jazz players call to mind the angel in the famous painting by Klee that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his Theses on the History of Philosophy: while pulled towards the future, its eyes are turned back towards the past.

scholarly journals The Burden of the Past, the Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia Woolf's and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of History

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Bahun
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face

Writing in a Paris rife with war-anxieties, refugees and political plots, a stateless individual by the name of Walter Benjamin recorded on 11 January 1940: “Every line that we succeed in publishing today - given the uncertainty of the future to which we consign it - is a victory wrested from the power of darkness.” The fusion of desperation and mystical activism in the face of historical horror, expressed in Benjamin's last letter to Gershom Scholem, was echoed across the Channel. Only ten days later, Virginia Woolf - assailed by a mixture of historical, financial, creative and publishing worries - responded to a commission to write about peace by stating that the “views on peace […] spring from views on war.”

Identitŕ dell'architettura del XX secolo e progetto contemporaneo

TERRITORIO ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Pierfranco Galliani
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
The Past ◽  
General Orientation ◽  
Enormous Amount ◽  
Active Protection ◽  
The Future ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
Positive Assessment ◽  
The Many

Considering the enormous amount of the architecture built in the 20th century, only the most significant instances will be able to be restored in the true sense of the term. To do this a positive assessment must be made of the many forms of the general orientation towards the restoration of modern architecture. The difficult and operational relationship proposed by the design of restoration for buildings or modern urban fabrics can in fact highlight the issues of the ‘critical continuity' between the past and the present and also the actions designed to maintain architecture and to modify contexts may constitute supports for each other for development which looks to the future. As an alternative to the analogical relationship between the concepts of protection and conservation which usually compress use objectives, the search for the identity of a work of architecture is a path which connects ‘value judgements' with the objective of contemporary design itself, fully representing the idea of ‘active protection'.

Presentness

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex E. Chávez
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Precise Moment ◽  
Real State

Typically, the structures of consciousness in how we experience time—or the broader phenomenological question of temporality—divide said experience into past, present, and future. These distinctions are not self-evident; rather, they are shaped by politics, institutions, society, economy, and so forth. Indeed, in his expressed engagement with historical materialism, Walter Benjamin claims that history—as one such structuring of temporality—is neither ideal nor causal, discrete nor universal, determined by the past nor exclusive to the future. Rather, it is a living process of present-future-pasts folding in on themselves. And a “real state of emergency”—recall that he wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History in early 1940 in France, where he was living in exile, having escaped Hitler’s Nazi regime—lays bare this fold of history, for its temporality is one that disrupts the anticipatory relation to the future as a type of progress and with it also the normalization of injustice as a necessity in history. The critical temporality Benjamin proposes resists the notion that the past can be understood exclusively in the precise moment in which it is recognized (frozen as an eternal image). In other words, historical moments are often naturalized, petrified as objective elements of our reality, and this reification—or estrangement from the totality—mirrors the logics of commodity fetishism. The task, in turn, is to illuminate how history is not a congealed “thing” and thus release its existence as process so that we may see ourselves in the totality of history rather than merely as its reified products. This critical temporality is an imperative that makes clear our agentive relation in creating the possible. This active sensing of the temporal, as it were, is where I turn my attention. I offer this meditation on presentness as an epistemological horizon, drawing on my work on both the ephemerality of performance and its politicized relationship to the US-Mexico border.

Borges's Elimination of Past and Future: A Paradox

KronoScope ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Bertrand Helm
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Complementary Approach ◽  
The Future

AbstractGiven the influence of fiction and fantasy about time travel in popular literature, there is a certain urgency to overhauling human attitudes toward time. A first step appears in Walter Benjamin?s Illuminations. He works through the seemingly upside down thesis that facts only become historical posthumously. A sturdier, complementary approach to despatializing time is worked out by Jorges L. Borges in his paradoxical argument that the future emerges prematurely.Across several of his essays, Borges analyzes several overlapping idealistic claims made by the likes of Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Schopenhauer, in achieving the composite view that the future in addition to the past are willful projects tossed off from our present condition. Future and past are not bookends for the present, but are modes of a human presence. These modes arise as we recast our present ordeals into forms that are most auspicious for maintaining a limited tenancy in selfhood.

Integrative Action: The Past for Physiology, the Future for Psychology

1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-231
Author(s):  
MARCEL KINSBOURNE
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Future
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