Beginn, Anfang, Ursprung

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Esposito
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Formative Years

This chapter focuses on the two distinct and even contradictory readings of origin that lie in pursuit of each other in Arendt, alternating and intertwining throughout the entirety of her work. The first is of a deconstructive nature, while the second is constitutive. In order to identify them separately—and before turning to the antonymic point at which they converge—the chapter returns to two authors who were both very much present in Arendt's formative years. The first is Nietzsche and, more specifically, the “genealogist” Nietzsche, who was considered by Foucault to be the first to deconstruct the sacred conceptualization of origin. The second is Walter Benjamin, to whom Arendt dedicated one of her most forceful essays, the “Gnoseological Foreword” to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama.

The Dreamer's Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Keefer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Tragic Drama

[Descartes] ne croioit pas qu'on dût s'étonner si fort de voir que les Poëtes, même ceux qui ne font que niaiser, fussent pleins de sentences plus graves, plus sensées, & mieux exprimées que celles qui se trouvent dans les écrits des Philosophes. Il attribuoit cette merveille à la divinité de l'Enthousiasme, & à la force de l'lmagination.— Adrien Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691), paraphrasing Descartes's Olympica manuscript of 1619-20Methode ist Umweg.— Walter Benjamin, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” The Origin of German Tragic DramaJacques Derrida begins a recent reflection upon Descartes's Discours de la méthode by remarking upon the metaphor of the path, way, or road contained within the etymology of the word “method”: “methodos, metahodos, c'est-à-dire ‘suivant la route,’ suivant le chemin, en suivant le chemin, en chemin.”

The Philosopher’s Baroque: Benjamin, Lacan, Deleuze

2018 ◽  
pp. 486-496
Author(s):  
William Egginton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Distinct Aspect ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

This essay examines three twentieth-century intellectuals, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze, who, inspired by historical baroque thought or cultural production, developed a body of thought around the concept “baroque” that has in turn pollinated a new field of inquiry that continues to thrive today. These groupings are only partially distinct because, as we will see, the philosophical Baroque draws in some ways from baroque philosophy, although it is more often and obviously motivated by reflections on aesthetics and form. Each of these thinkers was concerned with a distinct aspect or figure of baroque culture or thought. In Walter Benjamin’s case, he drew out significant aspects of the Baroque in his never-to-be-accepted Habilitationsschrift on German tragic drama. In Jacques Lacan’s case, he devoted several weeks of his 1972–1973 seminar on feminine sexuality to the Baroque. Finally, Gilles Deleuze’s contribution came in the form of a book-length study of the German baroque philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. In this essay, I summarize what each of these thinkers extracted from his engagement with that specific aspect of baroque culture or thought that fascinated him at the time, before concluding with some thoughts about how these three, in many ways wildly different thinkers, overlap in their consideration of the Baroque.

The “German” Origin of the Birth of Theory

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 776-786
Author(s):  
Jane O. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
The Social ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
German Origin ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Historical Periods

When Walter Benjamin gave his so-called baroque book its title—Ursprung Des Deutschen trauerspiels (origin of the German Tragic Drama; 1928)—he was clearly in dialogue with Nietzsche's project in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy; 1872). Indeed, it is the difference between the traditional concept of birth (Geburt) and the Benjaminian notion of origin (Ursprung)—and thus the failure of the mourning play's origin to be a matter of its genesis (Entstehung) in ancient tragedy—that helps us see what Benjamin claims is the difference between the two genres and the way he would have us read the “historical” periods aligned with each (Newman 74). Moreover, precisely because the origin of the Trauerspiel is not a monodirectional birth for Benjamin, his commentary on the complex amalgam of ancient and medieval, Renaissance and baroque, and Lutheran and Catholic ideological forces and aesthetic forms that battle it out in the historical seventeenth-century Silesian dramas that he takes as his subject can be read both as an account of the multiple temporalities that shaped these odd plays and as a reflection on how those same forces traveled forward in time to shape the social, political, and existential concerns of his own, early-twentieth-century German modernity—which of course had helped produce his account of the early modern in the first place (Koepnick; Newman). Benjamin's famous association of his theory of Ursprung with a “Strudel… im Fluss des Werdens” (“eddy in the stream of becoming”) thus helpfully confounds the conventional directionality of Geburt by literally muddying the waters of just where the origin of any period's meaning might lie (226; my trans.).

scholarly journals Walter Benjamin e a filosofia da escrita: apresentação, constelação e crítica/ Walter Benjamin and the philosophy of writing: presentation, constellation and criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Leonardo Izoton Braga
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The World ◽  
Elective Affinities ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
The One ◽  
Tragic Drama

Resumo: Este artigo busca evocar as dimensões política, poética e filosófica na escrita de Walter Benjamin, trabalhando as concepções de apresentação (Darstellung) da verdade, constelação e crítica, como dimensões constitutivas de seu exercício de pensamento, praticado na linguagem. Para isso, trabalhamos: as concepções de tratado, fragmento e constelação, em sua crítica à escrita sistemática, em paralelo ao seu modo de pensar a filosofia como apresentação (Darstellung) da verdade, presentes no Prefácio do Drama Trágico Alemão (1928); a sua concepção de linguagem como arquivo de semelhanças não sensíveis, evocada na Doutrina das Semelhanças e em Sobre a faculdade mimética (1933); e sua distinção entre o químico e o alquimista, assim como a relação entre o comentário e a crítica, presentes no ensaio sobre as Afinidades Eletivas de Goethe (1922). Por fim, afirmamos seu modo ensaístico de escrita como locus de um exercício de crítica imanente, exposição e desvio, na construção de um método, uma política de leitura e escrita do mundo, que nasce como tarefa de “ler o que nunca foi escrito”, daquele não tem nada a dizer, somente a mostrar.Palavras chave: escrita; apresentação; constelação; crítica; desvio.Abstract:This article seeks to evoke the political, poetic and philosophical dimensions in the writing of Walter Benjamin, working the concepts of presentation (Darstellung) of truth, constellation and criticism, as constitutive dimensions of his exercise of thought, practiced in language. Therefore, we worked on: the conceptions of treaty, fragment and constellation in its critique of systematic writing, in parallel with its mode of thinking philosophy as presentation (Darstellung) of truth, present in the Preface of German Tragic Drama (1928); his conception of language as an archive of nonsensuous similarities, evoked in the Doctrine of Similarities and On mimetic faculty (1933); and his distinction between the chemist and the alchemist, as well as the relation between comment and criticism, present in the essay about Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1922). Finally, we affirm his essayistic mode of writing as the locus of an exercise of immanent critique, exposition and detour, in the construction of a method, a policy of reading and writing the world, born as a task of “reading what was never written” by the one who has nothing to say, only to show.Keywords: writing; presentation; constellation; criticism; detour.

scholarly journals A alegoria como poética do (ex)combro em Manoel de Barros: uma visada benjaminiana

eLyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Paulo Eduardo Benites de Moraes ◽  
Rosana Cristina Zanelatto Santos
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Experience ◽  
Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin was one of the philosophers who most appropriately discussed the dialectics of history as a movement of extremes, that is, as an impoverished present experience before the glories of the past, which conceals, ironically, another formulation, exposed in the 9th thesis “On the concept of history”: which presents the interpretation of the allegory (ex)put in The Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, as the “hippocratic facies of history” (Benjamin 1984), thinking this image as “the core of allegorical vision” (ibidem). Manoel de Barros, in his time, dialogues with both Klee and Benjamin, in a movement of (ex)position of episodic scenes/fragments of a nature always in a state of violence, suffering, tedium and death, despite an appearance of exuberance and abundance. In this essay, we propose to discuss/read in Barros’ poetry these poetic-allegorical constructions of nature, especially in the light of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin (1984 and 1986, respectively), as well as texts by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2013) and Michel Löwy (2005) on allegory in the Benjamin’s perspective.

scholarly journals Alegoría barroca e imagen dialéctica: el esfuerzo de Walter Benjamin y Theodor W. Adorno para pensar la dialéctica de la naturaleza y la forma estética

2017 ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Vanessa Vidal Mayor
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Constructive Criticism ◽  
Historia Natural ◽  
Common Effort ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
The Way

El artículo expone en la primera parte la concepción de la forma estética alegoría en El origen del drama barroco alemán de Walter Benjamin y el modo en que Adorno se apropia de esta concepción para construir su idea de historia natural. La segundaparte del artículo se centra en exponer la relación de las alegorías con las imágenes dialécticas de la Exposé de 1935 para La obra de los pasajes y la crítica constructiva que hace Adorno a las mismas en la Carta-Hornberg. El artículo pretende mostrar el esfuerzo común de ambos pensadores para abordar el problema de la forma estética y su relación con la dialéctica y la naturaleza.This article offers in the first part an exposition of the aesthetic form allegory in Walter Benjamin’s ‘The origin of the German tragic drama’ and the way in which Adorno appropriates the allegory to build his idea of natural history. The secondpart of the article focuses on exposing the liaison between allegories and dialectical images of the 1935 Exposé to “The work of the passages” and Adorno´s constructive criticism to them in the Hornberg letter. The article aims to show the common effort of both thinkers to address the problem of the aesthetic form and its relation to dialectics and nature.

Vergangene Vergängnis: Für eine Philologie des Stattdessen

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyowon Cho
Keyword(s):  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
The One ◽  
Tragic Drama

AbstractBetween Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin, there existed a remarkable friendship, which on the one hand manifested itself as an unobtrusive disputation, and yet which on the other hand could be considered an unintended collaboration toward an old-new ideal of philology. Auerbach claims that with the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Western European literature reached the climax of the figuralism that Auerbach, if belatedly, wants to bring to the fore. Benjamin, in contrast, finds energy for the revolution in the surrealistic love that traces back not to Dante, but to the Provençal poetry which Auerbach regards merely as preliminary to Danteʼs literary achievement. In his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin highlights the concept of creatureliness, whose significance for his philosophy of history is no less than that of justice. Auerbach, for his part, does not find its expression in the Germany of the 17th century, but in the France of the 16th century, namely in the work of Michel de Montaigne. However, Montaigneʼs creatureliness is rooted in sermo humilis, which is best embodied in the story of Peter who denied his Lord Jesus Christ three times. By contrast, German creatureliness detects its dissolution in the idea of natural theatre that Benjamin locates in the work of Franz Kafka. Sermo humilis is the perfection of figuralism, whereas the idea of natural theatre means reversal of allegory. The perfected figuralism and the reversed allegory cooperate in the idea of the philology of instead (Philologie des Stattdessen), whose task it is to make bygone the futility of worldly things.

O “Silêncio Trágico”: Walter Benjamin Entre Franz Rosenzweig e Friedrich Nietzsche

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (46) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Ernani Chaves ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Tragic Drama

This article seeks to present, in its most general terms, the question of the tragic silence and its function within the analysis concerning the Greek tragedy in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which was written by Walter Benjamin. For this purpose, we turn to two sources related to Benjamin’s analysis: The Star of Redemption, by Franz Rosenzweig, and The Birth of Tragedy, by Nietzsche. However, in addition to the two other thinkers, Benjamin thinks about the issue of the “tragic silence” from the confrontation between “ambiguity” and “paradox”, between “myth” and “history”, in such a way that silence is a means of resistance: while expressing the guilt of the hero, what you see is his/her “silent suffering”, and, instead of being found guilty, the gods themselves are the ones who must recognize their guilt.

scholarly journals The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin�s "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Ethical Question ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Proposal A ◽  
German Original ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Critique Of Violence

This essay is a close reading of the �Epistemo-Critical Prologue� of Walter Benjamin�s The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a methodological proposal. A comparative reading of the English translation with the German original reveals a sustained reflection on the gestural rhythm of interpretation that the translation obscures. The question of interpretation is an ethical question for Benjamin and for this reason the essay argues against Giorgio Agamben�s idea of gesture as �the communication of communicability,� an idea derived from a reading of Benjamin�s �Critique of Violence.� Hence, the larger issue at stake is how the interpretive gesture is to be defined with respect to violence and what role spatialization and choreography play in the Trauerspiel book�s chapters as extensions of the halting or intermittent gesture of the Prologue in a secularized vision of history.

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