Walter Benjamin And The Idea Of Natural History

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Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History

Eli Friedlander
Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History Book PDF

Author : Eli Friedlander
Publisher : Cultural Memory in the Present
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1503636550

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Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History by Eli Friedlander Pdf

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.

Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History

Michael P. Steinberg
Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History Book PDF

Author : Michael P. Steinberg
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : History
ISBN : 0801482577

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Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History by Michael P. Steinberg Pdf

This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.

On the Concept of History

Walter Benjamin
On the Concept of History Book PDF

Author : Walter Benjamin
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 24 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-21
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1537061062

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On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin Pdf

On The Concept of History is a politics & social sciences essay written by German philosopher and social science critic Walter Benjamin. On The Concept of History is one of Walter Benjamin's best known, and most controversial works. The politics & social sciences essay is composed of twenty numbered paragraphs in which Benjamin uses poetic and scientific analogies to present a critique of historicism. Walter Benjamin wrote the brief essay shortly before attempting to escape from Vichy France, where French collaborationist government officials were handing over Jewish refugees like Walter Benjamin to the Nazi Gestapo. Walter Benjamin completed On The Concept of History before fleeing to Spain where he unfortunately committed suicide. Benjamin's work is often required textbook reading in various subjects such as humanities, philosophy, and politics & social sciences.

Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History

Eli Friedlander
Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History Book PDF

Author : Eli Friedlander
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2024-01-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781503637719

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Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History by Eli Friedlander Pdf

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.

Walter Benjamin

_l” Fr”dlander,Eli Friedlander
Walter Benjamin Book PDF

Author : _l” Fr”dlander,Eli Friedlander
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2012-01-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780674061699

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Walter Benjamin by _l” Fr”dlander,Eli Friedlander Pdf

Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his "unclassifiable" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition. Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.

Walter Benjamin's Other History

Beatrice Hanssen
Walter Benjamin s Other History Book PDF

Author : Beatrice Hanssen
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2000-12-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780520226845

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Walter Benjamin's Other History by Beatrice Hanssen Pdf

In this study, Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of the Trauerspiel study, showing how its thematics persisted well into the later writings of the thirties. For by introducing the materialistic category of natural history in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin not only criticized idealistic conceptions of history writing but also expressed an ethico-theological call for another kind of history, one no longer anthropocentric in nature. This profound critique of historical thinking, Hanssen shows, went hand in hand with a radical de-limitation of the human subject, informed by his interest in questions about ethics, the law, and justice. Through an analysis of the seemingly innocuous figures of stones, animals, and angels that are scattered throughout his writings, Hanssen reconstructs the often neglected ethical dimension of his historical thought. In the course of doing so, she not only places Benjamin's work in the context of contemporaries such as Adorno, Cohen, Lukacs, Kafka, Kraus, and Heidegger but also demonstrates the persistence of Benjaminian themes in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.

Images of History

Richard Eldridge
Images of History Book PDF

Author : Richard Eldridge
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2017-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780190847364

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Images of History by Richard Eldridge Pdf

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth. Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hölderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires. By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism (standing on sharply specified normative commitments at all costs) and waywardness (rejecting all settled commitments). And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are.

Walter Benjamin and History

Andrew Benjamin
Walter Benjamin and History Book PDF

Author : Andrew Benjamin
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2005-12-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781847143303

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Walter Benjamin and History by Andrew Benjamin Pdf

The first book to examine in detail Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin's collection of fragments, Theses on the Philosophy of History, play a determining role in how Benjamin's thought is understood, as well as in the debate about the interplay between politics, history and time. Walter Benjamin and History is the first volume to give access to the themes and problems raised by the Theses, providing valuable exegetical and historical work on the text. The essays collected here are all the work of noted Benjamin scholars, and pursue the themes central to the Theses.

Fire Alarm

Michael Lowy
Fire Alarm Book PDF

Author : Michael Lowy
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781784786434

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Fire Alarm by Michael Lowy Pdf

This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.

Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy

Nathan Ross
Walter Benjamin s First Philosophy Book PDF

Author : Nathan Ross
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2021-02-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000345476

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Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy by Nathan Ross Pdf

This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin’s first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of body and mind, and the limits of human knowledge. While most attention is paid to Benjamin’s later works, his writings from roughly 1914-1925 explore philosophical themes and develop a critical method. This book argues that this early work founds a series of original and lasting questions and insights. Benjamin understands experience as a broken continuum of diverse forms of spiritual expression, each of which is ephemeral. This leads Benjamin to a series of thought figures: the notion of language as a medium of experience; a philosophy of perception based in the natural history of the human body; an emphasis on mimesis as a faculty of creative assimilation; and a discovery of memory as a power for excavation of meaning in past experience. This book demonstrates that the need for a new understanding of the metaphysical structure of experience, as well as a new conception of truth, play a special role in shaping Benjamin’s subsequent work. Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on the thought of Walter Benjamin, 20th-century Continental philosophy, comparative literature, and modern German thought.

How to Measure a World?

Martin Shuster
How to Measure a World Book PDF

Author : Martin Shuster
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780253054579

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How to Measure a World? by Martin Shuster Pdf

What does it mean to wonder in awe or terror about the world? How do you philosophically understand Judaism? In How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism, Martin Shuster provides answers to these questions and more. Emmanuel Levinas suggested that Judaism is best understood as an anachronism. Shuster attempts to make sense of this claim by alternatively considering questions of the inscrutability of ultimate reality, of the pain and commonness of human suffering, and of the ways in which Judaism is entangled with the world. Drawing on phenomenology and Jewish thought, Shuster offers novel readings of some of the classic figures of Jewish philosophy while inserting other voices into the tradition, from Moses Maimonides to Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin to Stanley Cavell. How to Measure a World? examines elements of the Jewish philosophical record to get at the full intellectual scope and range of Levinas's proposal. Shuster's view of anachronism thereby provokes an assessment of the world and our place in it. A particular understanding of Jewish philosophy emerges, not only through the traditions it encompasses, but also through an understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. In the end, Levinas's suggestion is examined theoretically as much as practically, revealing what's at stake for Judaism as much as for the world.

Love’s Shadow

Paul A. Bové
Love s Shadow Book PDF

Author : Paul A. Bové
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2021-01-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674977150

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Love’s Shadow by Paul A. Bové Pdf

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.

Critique in German Philosophy

María del Rosario Acosta López,J. Colin McQuillan
Critique in German Philosophy Book PDF

Author : María del Rosario Acosta López,J. Colin McQuillan
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 536 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781438480282

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Critique in German Philosophy by María del Rosario Acosta López,J. Colin McQuillan Pdf

Critique has been a central theme in the German philosophical tradition since the eighteenth century. The main goal of this book is to provide a history of this concept from its Kantian inception to contemporary critical theory. Focusing on both canonical and previously overlooked texts and thinkers, the contributors bring to light alternative conceptions of critique within nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, which have profound implications for contemporary philosophy. By offering a critical revision of the history of modern European philosophy, this book raises new questions about what it means for philosophy to be "critical" today.

Judaism and Modernity

Gillian Rose
Judaism and Modernity Book PDF

Author : Gillian Rose
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2017-03-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781786630902

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Judaism and Modernity by Gillian Rose Pdf

A reinterpretation of thinkers from Benjamin and Rosenzweig to Simone Weil and Derrida Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ‘other’ of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Book PDF

Author : Walter Benjamin
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2008-08-07
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780141963426

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin Pdf

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.