Reading Magic in Walter Benjamin

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Downing
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Commodity Culture

This chapter focuses on divination in Walter Benjamin’s work, against the background of modernism’s self-imposed rejection of futurity and engagement with ‘primal history’, and the rise of fascism, commodity culture, and “Lebensphilosophie” or vitalism. It explores his writings on fate, graphology, gambling, childhood, language theory, his doctrine of the similar and the mimetic faculty, foregrounding his Neoplatonist investments, interests in magic, and take on the nineteenth century. Overall, the chapter considers the relations between Benjamin’s model of reading, especially magic reading, and the idea of happiness or “Glück.”

Vor- und Nachgeschichte Bild und Zeit bei Walter Benjamin

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212
Author(s):  
Cornelia Zumbusch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Hidden Agenda ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Time

Abstract Benjamin’s approach to the history of the nineteenth century as a prehistory (Vorgeschichte) of modernity relies on his concept of the dialectical image. Starting from Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust’s narrative endeavor as the evocation of images that have not been seen before, this essay tries to situate Benjamin’s dialektisches Bild in new contexts. Examining Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s Urphänomen as well as implicit references to Lessing’s concept of fruchtbarer Augenblick or Cassirer’s idea of symbolische Prägnanz, this essay stresses not so much the important but often considered aspects of discontinuity and destruction of chronological time, but tries to trace a hidden agenda: the affinity of Benjamin’s dialectical image to genetic processes.

The Poetry and the Prose of the Future

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Third ◽  
Science Of History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Poetic Response ◽  
Century Science

The Introduction examines three moments that have proven foundational for the fraught relationship between poetry and history. The first occurs in the fourth century B. C. in Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest attempt to provide a systematic definition of the structure and effects of poetry and, consequently, the origin of all later crises of verse. The second appears in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, a text that offers a complicated poetic response to a moment of crisis in Marx’s own historical method. The third appears in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, where, against the onset of the nineteenth-century science of history, the demand to see history become poetry is made explicit. Focusing on these three moments, the Introduction establishes the intellectual-historical coordinates of the poetico-historical problem that T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin inherit.

scholarly journals Marketing ‘Women’s Medicines:’ Gender, OTC Herbal Medicines and Medical Culture in Modern Japan1

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Herbal Medicines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Print Advertisements ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Government ◽  
Gender Specific

AbstractThis essay examines the marketing of ‘women’s medicines’ as a means to understand the evolving relationship between commodity culture and medical culture from the nineteenth century to the present. It examines the print advertisements associated with two of the best-known medicinal products for women, Tsumura Corporation’s Jitsubosan and Kitani Company’s Chūjōtō, two herbal decoctions that claimed efficacy for a wide range of gender specific ills. From the late nineteenth century through the 1950s, as Tsumura and Kitani negotiated the government-sponsored program of medical modernization and an intensely competitive pharmaceutical marketplace, they responded with aggressive advertisement campaigns that medicalised the female body by defining an expanding list of symptoms that required treatment. In the 1950s, however, Kitani and Tsumura confronted a declining market as clinic-based care became routine. As a result, they experimented with new products, defined new efficacies, and ultimately succeeded in repositioning their products in relation to the care now readily available from medical professionals.

Coleridge and Language Theory

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. McKusick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Origin Of Language

This article examines the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in relation to language theory. It argues that Coleridge's speculation on linguistic universals anticipates Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar. The article suggests that Coleridge's engagement with language theory was vitally important to the intellectual culture of its own time, and that it remains a seminal instance of nineteenth-century speculation on the nature and origin of language.

scholarly journals Muro em queda: Projeto para uma teoria da linguagem em Walter Benjamin/ Wall falling: Project for a theory of language in Walter Benjamin

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Estevan Negreiros Ketzer
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Theory Of Language

Resumo: O presente artigo propõe pensar os elementos iniciais no pensamento de Walter Benjamin acerca de uma teoria da linguagem. A questão a partir da qual o centro de sua indagação passa a ser a superficialidade e a falta de vinculação do ser humano com o ato nominativo, vulgarizando-se no decorrer do tempo, obtendo seu ápice na era moderna. A ideia na qual o ser humano se afastou de sua essência está relacionada a uma indistinção da realidade a partir da tradição grega do logos. Como crítica ao fundamento grego, Benjamin recorre à tradição da ciência cabalística hebraica ao realizar uma leitura do capítulo primeiro do pentateuco.Palavras chave: Walter Benjamin; Teoria da Linguagem; Cabala; Pentateuco.Abstract: The present article proposes to think the initial elements in Walter Benjamin’s thought on a theory of the language. The question from which the center of his inquiry becomes the superficiality and lack of attachment of the human being to the nominative act, becoming without value through the time, getting its apex in the modern age. The idea in which the human being departed from its essence is related to an indistinction of reality from the Greek tradition of logos. As a criticism of the Greek foundation, Benjamin resorts to the Hebrew Kabbalistic tradition to read the first chapter of the Pentateuch.Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Language Theory; Kabbala; Pentateuch.

Romantic Generations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Taste ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Generational Succession ◽  
The French Revolution

The concept of generation continues to influence how Romantic writing is read and interpreted. While ‘the Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’ are retrospective organizational terms, emerging in later nineteenth-century criticism, the Romantic generations are not back-formations of this kind: Romantic writers constructed themselves and others within loose but coherent groups based on age, affiliation, aesthetic taste, and, above all, their stance in relation to the sublime historical moment, the French Revolution. It is in the poetry of the period that generational succession is most keenly articulated. There are two widely recognized generations of Romantic writers: that of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the younger generation of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. To this traditional pairing can be added a third Romantic generation of the 1820s and ’30s, including often overlooked writers such as Beddoes, Darley, Hood, and Landon, who extended Romantic themes of imaginative creativity into the commodity culture of the mid-nineteenth century.

Historia y filosofía de la historia en el Benjamin tardío

1998 ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
José Sazbón
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophical Style ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Compare And Contrast

This paper deals with Walter Benjamin’s text largely known as "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and disputes its classification under that rubric. The circumstances of the elaboration and, more important, the explicit destination assigned to the reflections of the "Theses," require a consideration of its content and its relation to the historical studies the author was engaged in concerning the "prehistory" of modernity, especially of the remnants of the Parisian nineteenth century: the commonly known work "The Arcades Project." The relevance of a sameness in the language used in the two writings, particularly the resort to images, metaphors and the technique of montage, is stressed. It is argued that Benjamin’s philosophical style was always imagistic and that this fact is particularly relevant to the reflections on the concept of history. Philosophers and historians are both concerned by the historical research and concept construction of a thinker like the late Walter Benjamin. It is therefore desirable to compare and contrast their views.

The Reincarnation of the Aura

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-230
Author(s):  
Victoria Bigliardi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Original Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Object Biography ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Plaster Casts

In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the aura as the abstract conceptualization of uniqueness, authenticity, and singularity that encompasses an original art object. With the advent of technological reproducibility, Benjamin posits that the aura of an object deteriorates when the original is reproduced through the manufacture of copies. Employing this concept of the aura, the author outlines the proliferation of plaster casts of sculptures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, placing contextual emphasis on the cultural and prestige value of originals and copies. Theories of authenticity in both art history and material culture are used to examine the nature of the aura and to consider how the aura transforms when an original object is lost from the material record. Through an object biography of a fifteenth-century sculpture by Francesco Laurana, the author proposes that the aura does not disappear upon the loss of the original, but is reincarnated in the authentic reproduction.

Hashishdom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Alexandre Dumas ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

By the 1840s cannabis was beginning to be used in Western societies, particularly in France and America; as the century progressed, it enjoyed some popularity among physicians and psychiatrists. By the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Ernst Bloch and particularly Walter Benjamin were experimenting with the drug. This chapter is a discussion of the reception and use of hashish, primarily in the nineteenth century. As well as exploring its relationship with the Orient in the minds of users, it discusses its emergence as a technology of transcendence. Of particular significance in this respect was the work of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, particularly The Hasheesh Eater. However, other figures are discussed, including Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Frederic Jameson ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

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