scholarly journals Walter Benjamin and the Weak Messianic Power

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Denysenko
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Jewish Descent ◽  
Western Marxism

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German intellectual of Jewish descent, a well-known literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator and essayist, and a key figure in continental philosophy. His works on topics such as historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism have had a marked influence on contemporary aesthetic theories and the development of Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. These articles will focus on the analysis of the concept of messianism, which Benjamin develops in his work “On the concept of history” or “Theses on the philosophy of history” (1940). Messianism here is neither a theological dogma nor a modern figure of the utopian. Benjamin’s messianic time does not refer to the future, but to the urgency of the “now.” The author contrasts the “weak messianic force” of the tradition of the oppressed, which demands the past with the realization of happiness and liberation in the present, and Jetztzeit – a model of messianic time, open and nonlinear time of rupture, based on modern (contemporary) forms of collective experience past and liberation memory (Eingedenken).

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.

scholarly journals William Morris’s Conditional Moment

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Megan Ward
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Conditional Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cost

Abstract This article argues that William Morris’s “The Defence of Guenevere” (1858) writes history through a singular unit of the time, the ephemeral moment. The moment is constructed through sensory experience, lodging historical narrative in the body and departing from mainstream Victorian progressive narratives. Morris constructs what I call an historiography of conditionality, an historical consciousness predicated on the immanent self-contradiction of memorializing any particular moment. In doing so, Morris anticipates what Walter Benjamin and others, following Karl Marx, theorized as historical materialism. My reading of “The Defence of Guenevere” departs from critics who have labeled Morris as escapist, nostalgic, or someone who uses the past to critique the present. Instead, Morris creates a poetic historical consciousness that weighs the cost of memorialization for the present day.

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.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

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.

Jerzy Topolski’s Marxist Anthropocentrism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-377
Author(s):  
Ewa Domańska ◽  
Paul Vickers
Keyword(s):  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
The World ◽  
Separate Discipline

Abstract In this article I demonstrate that the ideas outlined in Jerzy Topolski’s Methodology of History (Polish 1968, English translation 1976) could not only offer a reference point for and indeed enrich ongoing debates in the philosophy of history, but also help to set directions for future developments in the field. To support my argument, I focus on two themes addressed in Topolski’s work: 1) the understanding of the methodology of history as a separate discipline and its role both in defending the autonomy of history and in creating an integrated knowledge of the past, which I read here through the lens of the current merging of the humanities and natural sciences; and 2) the role of a Marxist anthropocentrism based on the notion of humans as the creators of history, which I consider here in the context of the ongoing critique of anthropocentrism. I point to the value of continuing to use concepts drawn from Marxist vocabulary, such as alienation, emancipation, exploitation and overdetermination, for interpreting the current state of the world and humanity. I stress that Marxist anthropocentrism, with its support for individual and collective agency, remains crucial to the creation of emancipatory theories and visions of the future, even if it has faced criticism for its Eurocentrism and might seem rather familiar and predictable when viewed in the context of the contemporary humanities. Nevertheless, new manifestations of Marxist theory, in the form of posthumanist Marxism and an interspecies historical materialism that transcends anthropocentrism, might play an important role in redefining the humanities and humanity, including its functions and tasks within human and multispecies communities.

The Study of Heikhalot Literature: Between Mystical Experience and Textual Artifact

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ra'Anan S. Boustan
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Complex Material ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Heterogeneous Nature ◽  
Material Conditions

This essay outlines the fundamental methodological and empirical advances that the study of Heikhalot literature has experienced during the past 25 years with the aim of encouraging specialists and enabling non-specialists to approach this complex material with greater precision and sophistication. The field of early Jewish mysticism has been profoundly shaped by the increasing integration in the humanities of cultural and material histories, resulting in an increased focus on scribal practice and other material conditions that shaped the production and transmission of these texts. Against previous assumptions, recent research has shown Heikhalot literature to be a radically unstable literature. This article will review the research tools (editions, concordances, translations, etc.) that now allow for careful analysis of Heikhalot and related texts. Tracing recent research, I demonstrate how our new understanding of the fluid and heterogeneous nature of the Heikhalot corpus will better enable scholars to pursue the important work of understanding its social and religious significance, within the broader landscape of late antique and medieval religions.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Human Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Reflective Thought ◽  
The World

THIS BOOK EXPLORES some of the implications of and opportunities within the speculative turn in continental philosophy from the perspective of art history. Speculation? Besides its only legitimate domain today, that of finance, is this not a thing of the past, when metaphysicians were used to making unverifiable claims about the nature of God, the World and the Self? From Kant to Wittgenstein, critical philosophy has taught us to remain silent on that of which we cannot speak. Likewise, art history has come a long way in establishing itself as a positive human science independent from its metaphysical beginnings. In both cases, enlightened, self-critical and self-reflective thought has worked hard on closing the door to ontology, on reducing the Ideas of reason to ideology and on limiting the domain of knowledge to phenomenal objects. Speculation, it seems, has not been ...

Hasidism: The Third Century

1996 ◽  
pp. 415-426
Author(s):  
Joseph Dan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the third century of hasidism, considered the most enduring phenomenon in Orthodox Judaism in modern times. Gershom Scholem described hasidism as the ‘last phase’ in a Jewish mystical tradition that spanned nearly two millennia. Yet at the conclusion of his account of the movement in the last chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he appeared, with some regret, to view his subject as a phenomenon of the past. The contrast between this view of hasidic history and the reality of Jewish life in the late twentieth century could not be greater. The hasidism of today cannot be treated as a lifeless relic from the past. It appears to have made a complete adjustment to twentieth-century technology, the mass media, and the intricate politics of democratic societies without surrendering its traditional identity in the process.

Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angeliki Spiropolou
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Literary Critic

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a philosopher, essayist and literary critic associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). Initially trained in idealist philosophy, Benjamin developed his own version of Marxian historical materialism in the late 1920s, mixed with elements of Judaic mysticism.

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