Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Art Works

Walter Benjamin was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers of culture. His work combines formal analysis of art works with social theory to generate an approach which is historical, but is far more subtle than either materialism or conventional Geistesgeschichte (cultural and stylistic chronology). The ambiguous alignment of his work between Marxism and theology has made him a challenging and often controversial figure.

scholarly journals Philip Rieff’s typology of culture and its applicability to the literary hybridization of the theological ideas of humanity and spiritual progress (a Bulgarian case study)

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 467-481
Author(s):  
Grażyna Szwat-Gyłybowa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Art Works ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Thinking

Philip Rieff’s typology of culture and its applicability to the literary hybridization of the theological ideas of humanity and spiritual progress (a Bulgarian case study)The twentieth century has become in a special way a time of reflection on the theologi­cal roots of human thinking, including thinking in political terms; suffice it to mention such names as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and Erich Voegelin. One of the thinkers who joined the ongoing disputes was Philip Rieff, who in his book My Life Among the Deathworks (2006), took on the task of a controversial (according to many) revitalization of the Judeo-Christian paradigm. Reflecting on the subject of art works over several centuries, he abstracted typo­logical criteria allowing him to build a dichotomous model of art, as dedicated either to death (the non-Judeo-Christian variety) or to life (the Judeo-Christian variety). The paper attempts to verify his reasoning by reflecting on the theological models of humanity and spiritual progress in Teodora Dimova’s novel The Train to Emmaus (Vlakat za Emaus, 2014). O przydatności typologii Philipa Rieffa w badaniach nad literackimi hybrydyzacjami teologicznych idei człowieczeństwa i duchowego postępu (na jednym przykładzie bułgarskim)Wiek dwudziesty w szczególny sposób stał się czasem refleksji nad teologicznymi korze­niami ludzkiego myślenia, w tym myślenia w kategoriach politycznych; dość wspomnieć choćby nazwiska tak różnych myślicieli jak Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Erich Voegelin. Jednym z badaczy, który włączył się w toczące się dysputy był Philip Rieff, który w książce My Life Among the Deathworks (2006) podjął trud dyskusyjnej (zdaniem wielu) rewitalizacji paradygmatu judeochrześcijańskiego. Snując rozważania na temat dzieł sztuki na przestrzeni kilku wieków, wyabstrahował kryteria typologiczne, pozwalające budować dychotomiczny model sztuki jako dedykowanej śmierci (wariant antyjudeochrześcijański) lub życiu (wariant judeochrześcijański). Jego sposób rozumowania autorka poddaje próbie weryfikacji w reflek­sji nad teologicznym modelem człowieczeństwa i duchowego postępu w powieści Teodory Dimowej Влакът за Емаус (2014).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

‘What is to become of the Crystal Palace?’ The Crystal Palace after 1851

After 1851 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Nichols ◽  
Sarah Victoria Turner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art World ◽  
The South ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
International Exhibitions ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Sydenham Crystal Palace ◽  
Great Exhibition

This introductory chapter explores and establishes the Sydenham Crystal Palace in relation to existing scholarship on the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydenham Palace combined education, entertainment and commerce, and spans both nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We resituate it as an important location within the London art world and establish the broader connections it had with rival ventures such as the South Kensington Museum and the numerous international exhibitions in the period. We set out the new possibilities for the analysis of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and material cultures opened up by this unique venue, problematising the periodisation of art works and attitudes into discretely ‘Victorian’ and ‘Edwardian’ categories.

Synchronic Times

2017 ◽  
pp. 204-234
Author(s):  
Enzo Traverso
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The seventh chapter retraces the encounter of the French philosopher Daniel Bensaid and the work of Walter Benjamin, that reveals a resonance between two crucial turns of the twentieth century—1940 and 1990—through a vision of history based on the idea of remembrance. After the fall of Berlin Wall, the survivors of the 1960s and 1970s met a vision of history engendered by the defeats of the 1930s. This encounter reveals the potentialities of a political reinterpretation of the tradition of melancholy Marxism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Peter E. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Proper Sense ◽  
Religious Theme

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia This book is a meditation on a philosophical and religious theme. In it I explore the problem of secularization, not as a social process, but as a conceptual gesture that appears with some prominence in the writings of three key theorists: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. The fact that all three of these writers were affiliates of the Institute for Social Research, the so-called Frankfurt School of social philosophy and cultural criticism, may encourage the impression that they agreed upon a common doctrine, though in fact their differences were often profound. This is especially clear when we examine their distinctive views on secularization, a topic that surely ranks among the more controversial problems in modern social theory. Philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and historians continue...

Bloch, Ernst Simon (1885–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Geoghegan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Open System ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
New Material ◽  
Closed Systems ◽  
The Many ◽  
Fundamental Categories ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
The Universe

Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion.

Alienation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen W. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Way

‘Alienation’ is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of various social or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation which sunders things that properly belong together. People are alienated from one another when there is an interruption in their mutual affection or reciprocal understanding; they are alienated from political processes when they feel separated from them and powerless in relation to them. Reflection on your beliefs or values can also alienate you from them by undermining your attachment to them or your identification with them; they remain your beliefs or values faute de mieux, but are no longer yours in the way they should be. Alienation translates two distinct German terms: Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) and Entäußerung (‘externalization’). Both terms originated in the philosophy of Hegel, specifically in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Their influence, however, has come chiefly from their use by Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1930). Marx’s fundamental concern was with the alienation of wage labourers from their product, the grounds of which he sought in the alienated form of their labouring activity. In both Hegel and Marx, alienation refers fundamentally to a kind of activity in which the essence of the agent is posited as something external or alien, assuming the form of hostile domination over the agent.

Book Reviews

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-430
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Nuclear State ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Victor Tadros ◽  
At Home

Book reviews: Adam, Barbara, Ulrich Beck and Joost van Loon (eds), The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (reviewed by Charlotte Augst); Mansell, Wade, Belinda Meteyard and Alan Thompson, A Critical Introduction to Law (reviewed by Ralph Sandland); Rowe, Michael, The Racialisation of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain (reviewed by Preet Nijhar); Boland, Faye, Anglo-American Insanity Defence Reform: The War Between Law and Medicine (reviewed by Victor Tadros); Kauzlarich, David and Ronald C Kramer, Crimes of the American Nuclear State at Home and Abroad (reviewed by Roger S. Clark); Lippens, Ronnie, Chaohybrids: Five Uneasy Peaces (reviewed by Bruce A. Arrigo); Basu, Srimati, She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (reviewed by Saira Rahman)

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