Walter Benjamin

Partant des débats entre « film joué » et « film non-joué » ayant entouré la sortie d’Octobre d’Eisenstein en 1927, nous interrogeons la notion de punctum de Barthes à travers le rapprochement qui a pu en être fait de celle d’attraction. Remettant en question l’existence même du punctum, d’une vérité intrinsèque de l’image, nous proposons avec Merleau-Ponty de cesser de considérer l’image cinématographique comme une « seconde chose » pour en faire valoir la rencontre, seule capable de nous en faire comprendre la réalité. Nous rappelons alors la figure de « précession réciproque » évoquée par Merleau-Ponty dans L’Œil et l’esprit, qu’il identifie à la « vision même », pour montrer combien elle peut nous aider à saisir les potentialités de l’image cinématographique déjà entrevues par Eisenstein qui voyait en elle un phénomène de « momification dynamique ».

How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the city’s ‘new skyline’ as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers ‘destroy’ the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My argument for ruining the cityscape’s ‘beautiful appearance’ focuses on compositional wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light to the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful.

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects,  or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.

“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University

“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin

Tarihin her döneminde, o dönemin politik özeliğine, düşünme tarzına, teknolojik gelişmelerine ve zevklerine bağlı olarak değişik sanatsal anlatım biçimleri doğar. Zevk, insan doğasının bilinmeyen yönlerinin ortaya çıkartılması kadar, toplumsal yapıyı belirleyen ve sınırları az çok belli olan yaşam koşullarına bağlı olarak biçimlenir. Kralların etkin olduğu dönemindeki sanatta, portelerde hükümdarlara yaraşır bir görünüm sergileme hevesi baskındı. Bu ancak ve en iyi portelerde yapılabiliyordu. Aynı şey burjuvazinin egemen olmaya başladığı dönemde de geçerli bir savdır. Aydınlanma Çağı ve akabinde sanayi devriminin bütün hayatı olduğu gibi sanatı da kökten değiştirmesi kaçınılmazdı. Bunu şu şekilde formüle edebiliriz; Bu sanatsal üretimler; toplumun gereksinimlerinden ve geleneklerinden doğar ve bir şekilde bunları yansıtır. Toplumsal yapıdaki ve teknolojideki her değişim beraberinde sanatsal anlatım biçimlerini de dönüştürdü. 19. yy. makinelerin hüküm sürdüğü dönemde sadece portrelerdeki yüzler değişmedi, bunun yanı sıra sanatsal üretim şekilleri de değişime uğradı. Bu yeni teknolojik gelişmeler (litografi vb.) sanatın geçireceği evrimde çok önemli belirleyenler oldu. Bu değişimi en iyi gözlemleyebileceğimiz, bu değişimin getirdiği sorunları, açmazları ya da olanakları en iyi anlayabileceğimiz metinlerden bir tanesi de Walter Benjamin'in 1935 yazıp yayınladığı " Tekniğin Olanaklarıyla Yeniden Üretilebildiği Çağda Sanat Yapıtı " adlı eseridir. Bu yazıda da konu edeceğimiz metin olan bu makale, yazıldığı tarihten bu yana tartışma konusu olmuş, birçok çalışmaya kaynaklık etmiş bir çalışmadır. Makale temel olarak kapitalizmin yükseliş dönemine denk gelen bir çağda sanat yapıtının bundan etkilenmesi üzerine durmaktadır. Bunu da teknolojinin sanatsal üretimi ve teknolojiyle aracılanmış sanat ürünün yeniden üretimini sorunsallaştırmaktadır. Walter Benjamin'in de dâhil olduğu Frankfurt Okulu modern toplum üzerine yaptıkları eleştirilerinde, teknolojinin ve bu teknolojinin sermayedarlarının toplum üzerinde kurmuş oldukları tahakküm ilişkileri üzerine durmaktadırlar. Eleştirel teoriye dâhil olan bu okul ağırlıklı olarak kültürel çalışmalar ile kültürel üretim, ekonomi politik, kültürel yapıtların sınıfsal mücadelede aracı haline gelmesine kadar çeşitli alanlarda tezler ortaya koymuşlardır. Her ne kadar Benjamin okulun diğer üyelerinden belli oranda farklı düşünse de kültürün toplumu manipüle ettiğine inanırlar. Bunu da 'Kültür Endüstrisi' olarak kavramlaştırdıkları tezlerinde kültürün toplum tarafından değil egemen olan sınıflar tarafından üretildiğine bağlamaktadırlar. Buda mevcut olan haksız durumun devam etmesinden başka işe yaramadığını söylemektedirler. Sanatın yeniden üretilmesini izlerini Marx'ta da görebilmekteyiz. Marksist teorinin özünü oluşturan kapitalist üretimin eleştirisi ve karşı bir sistem oluşturma istenci sanatta da kendisini göstermiştir. Seri üretimin bütün alanlarda etkin olduğu bir dönemde bunu sanatta da kendini göstermesi kaçınılmazdı. Giséle Freund Fotoğraf ve Toplum adlı eserinde sanatın tekniğin olanaklarıyla yetiden üretim döneminde zanaat olmaktan çıkıp nasıl sanayi dönüştüğünü şu cümleleriyle belirtmektedir: " 1867 yılında atölyede yüzden fazla işçi çalışıyordu ve o döneme kadar bir zanaat olarak kabul edilen çoğaltım mesleği, artık bir sanayi dalına dönüşüyordu. " (Freund, 2006:91) Benjamin bu tartışmaların ayyuka çıktığı bir dönemde bunu yazması birazda dönemin tartışma çerçevesiyle bağlantılıydı. Sanatta kapitalist üretimin en belirgin olduğu alan kuşkusuz görüntüydü ve bununla bağlantılı olarak fotoğrafçılıktı. Sanat, fotoğraf makinesinin bulunmasıyla büyük dönüşüme uğramıştır.

In this article I attempt to outline Walter Benjamin's peculiar notion of "myth" through a reading of his essay on Goethe's "Elective Affinities" and referring to Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of an "interruption of myth" (developed in his book "La communauté désœuvrée").

Um olhar que se deixa apreender, ou melhor, que segue o movimento da imagem cativante, um olhar que se emociona – que se coloca em movimento, portanto –, que se deixa tocar pela presença fugidia da imagem: diante desta, antes de “asfixiar a maravilha em um frasco de éter”, o olhar corre atrás da imagem – e, com isso, correndo o risco de perdê-la –, ciente de que ela é uma fagulha que sobrevive à sempre possível destruição. Um olhar que se arma para perceber na imagem o que nela ainda queima, o que faz dela um sintoma e, ao mesmo tempo, uma possibilidade de conhecimento. É nestas bases que a o gesto de olhar é proposto por Georges Didi-Huberman neste pequeno livro, cuja primeira publicação se deu como ensaio na revista Art Press, em 2004. Numa leitura que interpola seus referenciais mais prestigiados – Walter Benjamin e Aby Warburg –, Didi-Huberman, que no mesmo ano acabara de publicar seu controverso estudo Imagens apesar de tudo (uma intervenção pela possibilidade do uso de imagens remanescentes dos campos de concentração), aponta, mais uma vez, para o risco do defrontar-se com os arquivos de imagens: como, diante desse risco, ainda assim insistir em olhar? Como pelas imagens deixar-se queimar e, ainda assim, para elas imaginar e montar uma legibilidade? Perceber como as imagens estão carregadas de tempo é, para Didi-Huberman, o estopim para nelas perceber aquilo que nos queima: saber soprar as cinzas para que a brasa que está por baixo possa mostrar-se, apesar de tudo, como sobrevivente do incêndio que, agora, diante da imagem, é possível mais uma vez imaginar.

Vinícius Nicastro Honesko

Mimesis ist eine zentrale Kategorie bei Walter Benjamin. Er fasst sie als anthropologisches Vermögen. Damit geht er über Platon und Artistoteles hinaus. Das mimetische Vermögen wird zu einer Erkenntnisfunktion jenseits des ideologischen Schleiers. Die Kategorie der Hellsicht, die Benjamin in seiner metaphysischen Phase untersuchte, wird in seiner materialistischen Phase in die Mimesis umgeschmolzen. Das heißt, die Mimesis ist eine materialistische Kategorie. Der Aufsatz untersucht die Bedeutung der Mimesis bei Benjamin, ihre Beziehung zur Sprache und zur Erkenntnis und grenzt sie gegen die Konzeptionen der Mimesis anderer Forscher ab. Insbesondere die Interpretationen der Benjaminschen Mimesis durch Michael Taussig und Jean-Michel Palmier sind Gegenstand einer kritischen Betrachtung.

1923 yılında bir grup aydın tarafından Marksizmi yeniden düşünmek amacıyla kurulan Frankfurt Okulu, sanattan sosyolojiye, eğitimden psikolojiye dek pek çok alanıda yeni fikirlerin ortaya konmasında etkili olmuştur. Bu alanların yanı sıra, Okul’a bağlı birçok aydın edebiyat alanında da çalışmalar yapmış, yaptıkları çalışmalar edebiyat kuramlarının modern dünyayla olan ilişkisini yeniden düşünmek açısından faydalı olmuştur. Makalenin temel fikri Frankfurt Okulu’nun modern edebi kuramların seyrini belirlediğidir. Bu çalışmada önce Frankfurt Okulu tanıtılacak, sonrasında ise bu ekole bağlı olarak edebiyata dair fikir üreten düşünürler ve onların fikirlerinden bahsedilecektir.

This document critically reviews the theories of the avant-garde of both the Left and the Right put forward between the 1920s – the time of the vigorous assertion of the avant-garde – and the late 1970s – the beginning of the conservative turn led by Regan and Thatcher and reflected in cultural, change. The focus is on modern autonomous art and the historical avant-garde art movements. Art is first of all put in its place by locating it in the context of the institutional framework of modern society. This includes historical references to the emergence of the modern concept of art and of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics. The review of the theories opens with analyses of Ortega y Gassett and Poggioli’s proposals dating from 1925 and 1968 respectively. Important among the theories of the Left are those of the representatives of Critical Theory such as Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger. Among the Right, both the German and American Neo-conservatives are considered, Gehlen, Ritter and Marquard representing the former and Bell that latter. The analysis closes with final reflections on the concepts of the autonomy of art and of the avant-garde which become comprehensible only within the context of rationalised and disenchanted (i.e. disillusioned and enlightened) modern society.

Ya sea en su forma embrionaria como comienzo de la estimulación lógica, o como punto de referencia y contraposición frente a lo que no es físico, la filosofía regresa a lo aprehensible-sensorial para poder ser proyecto. Lo evidente o aprehensible a tratar acá y que de antemano damos por hecho, es la existencia de una crisis que abraza múltiples dimensiones de la vida en el planeta.

se matou, aos 48 anos, em setembro de 1940, fugindo da polícia francesa do regime de Vichy (pró-Hitler) e barrado na fronteira com a Espanha pela polícia franquista, vivia exilado e desempregado em Paris. Sem jamais ter conseguido um posto de professor na universidade, mantinha-se como crítico literário, com um pequeno auxílio do Instituto de Pesquisa Social, embrião da escola de Frankfurt. Havia publicado poucos livros, alguns artigos, várias resenhas, mas as portas se fechavam cada vez mais para ele em razão de sua origem judaica alemã. Era conhecido num pequeno círculo de amigos, em sua maioria escritores que fugiram do nazismo: Brecht, Adorno, Scholem, e, em Paris, também Bataille e Klossovski. Quando, em compensação, Benjamin caiu em domínio público, 70 anos mais tarde, sua fama não cessava de crescer. Por mais justificado que seja, tal fenômeno deve nos deixar desconfiados. Teria Benjamin se transformado em mais um "bem cultural", um "Kulturgut", isto é, uma mercadoria cultural, cujo valor de fetiche ele não se cansou de denunciar? ONDA Muitíssimo citado, em geral de maneira fragmentária, Benjamin é agora objeto de uma onda de traduções que arrisca se transformar, no Brasil, em epidemia. Cabe, portanto, perguntar se essa onda de fato leva a um conhecimento mais preciso do autor, em particular em relação a suas reflexões sobre as transformações da percepção e das práticas estéticas na modernidade, ou se não assinalaria uma tendência mercadológica de "glamour" com a qual se confunde, tantas vezes, a ideia de cultura viva. Seu primeiro texto traduzido no Brasil foi "A Obra de Arte na Era de sua Reprodutibilidade Técnica". O ensaio introduz hipóteses essenciais para uma teoria da arte contemporânea, marcada, segundo Benjamin, pela "reprodutibilidade técnica", central na fotografia e no cinema, que abole progressivamente a 'aura' de unicidade e de autenticidade da obra de arte. Existem hoje quatro versões diferentes desse texto nas "Gesammelte Werke" (obras reunidas, editora Suhrkamp): três em alemão, uma em francês. A única publicada em vida de Benjamin foi a francesa, traduzida por ele e por Klossovski a partir de duas versões em alemão, escritas em fins de 1935 e inícios de 1936. A primeira delas foi traduzida por Sérgio Paulo Rouanet para a editora Brasiliense, nos anos 1980; a segunda ficou desaparecida por décadas. A versão francesa saiu em 1936, na "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung", revista para pesquisa social, publicada

A few years before the beginning of the Second World War, the rapprochement between socialism and western esotericism  would  be  outlined  in  France.  This  effort,  produced around the Collège de Sociologie as a reaction to Fascism, aimed to reactivate ideas and efforts that can be traced back to the French Revolution. The resulting meta-narrative,  constructed  by  various  intellectuals  around  Georges  Bataille,  including  Walter  Benjamin  and Pierre Klossowski, sought to establish its origins in Valentianism and, later, in Roman theology. The aim was to create an intellectual alternative to Marxism through the  ideas  of  Fourier,  Blanqui,  Sade,  and  Nietzsche  inventing  a  construct  that  would  decisively  influence Post-structuralism in the 1960s.KEYWORDSPALAVRAS-CHAVEMarxismo; História da historiografia; Walter BenjaminMarxism; History of Historiography; Walter BenjaminRenato Amado Peixotohttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-2342-4215

The article proposes a hermeneutic approach to the films of M. Night Shyamalan based on a study of the convergence of three parallel processes: the detailed use of planning and, most of all, the shotcountershot, and the dialectic between field and out of field, the open construction of otherness; and, lastly, the narrative motif of the dead person who returns. The director manages to link those three aspects with a detailed investigation into the possibilities of the fantastic genre in order to metaphorically approach the problems of contemporary society and a new involvement of the viewer in the suspension of disbelief required by fiction.

RESUMO: A iconologia do anjo, analisada à luz das reflexões de Walter Benjamin e de Jean-François Lyotard, leva-nos a investigar os efeitos de presença e a presentificação da ausência que essa figura gera nos diversos meios da criação artística.

ABSTRACT: The angel's iconology, in the light of Walter Benjamin and Jean-François Lyotard's reflections on this theme, leads us to analyse both the effects of presence and a presentification of the absence that this figure enables in various media of artistic creation.

Trechos da correspondência de Walter Benjamin registram que a publicação de “A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica” na Rússia apresentava-se, para ele, como uma tarefa de primeira ordem. Em abril de 1936, Benjamin confessou a Kitty Marx- Stenchnerider suas expectativas e pessimismo frente a desejada publicação: “A avaliar por essas reações, quase teria razões para concluir que o trabalho terá a menor repercussão no lugar que deveria ser naturalmente o seu, na Rússia”. Quais seriam as motivações da expectativa benjaminiana? Porque a Rússia seria o destino ou o lugar “natural” de “A Obra de Arte...”?  Como explicar seu pessimismo? O presente artigo discute o caráter político e militante do ensaio em questão, bem como sua articulação com o debate russo, na contracorrente da estetização da política stalinista e em direção “à formulação de exigências revolucionárias” da arte.  

O Angelus Novus, como visto por Walter Benjamin em suas Teses sobre o conceito de história, é a história à contrapelo das imagens com que se querem representar a liberdade. A história da estátua chamada Liberdade conta sua apropriação pela monarquia e como os motes revolucionários dos séculos XVIII e XIX foram utilizados para legitimar o Império, no caso, a aliança anglo-americana que começara a se gestar.

Before we can assess the impact of the digital revolution on our conception of psychic work, the author argues, we need to understand how the new spatio-temporal coordinates instituted by the Digital Revolution demand a revisioning of our conceptions of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The melancholic dimension and the narcissistic regression involved in the virtual must, therefore, be reconceived if we are to recognize the transfiguring power of the virtual phenomenon.

This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in hate crime legislation. This article addresses the underlying rationale of the new resistance and its implications for the mainstream debate. It begins by undertaking a comparative analysis of hate crime legislation in Canada and the US. It then considers the mainstream legal debate in both countries as well as some statistical data on hate crime. The third section turns to the new resistance as well as emerging data on the connection between victimization and the criminal legal system itself. It then draws on the legal theory of Walter Benjamin to reveal limits in the way that the mainstream legal debate conceptualizes criminalization. The final section of the article considers the implications of Benjamin’s concept of law for both the mainstream debate and the new resistance.

In his 2006 novel Against the Day, set around the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Pynchon renegotiates his relationship with modernism. His juxtaposition of postmodernism and modernism conforms to Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s account of metamodernism. De Bourcier reads the Kafkaesque story of Lew Basnight through Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity.” The chapter examines Pynchon’s engagement with the technological contexts of modernism, focusing on his fictional inventions the Tesla device and the Integroscope, and deploying theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler. It shows that Pynchon juxtaposes Divisionism—a school of painting influenced by scientific investigations into colour such as Ogden N. Rood’s Modern Chromatics—with Kit Traverse’s embroilment in Futurism and Fascism.

Abstract: This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
Keywords: Atlantic Return, economies of virtues, incarnation, Pauline event, Pope Francis, sovereignty, theopolitics, touch-event

Displayed on two high-definition television screens, Hito Steyerl’s work Abstract (2012) vies for the viewer’s attention, even as it severs it. On one screen, Steyerl herself comes into focus wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Within the frame, Steyerl holds another screen: that of a smartphone, the logo of its American super-corporation tugging at the center of a shot framed, in turn, by the Brandenburg Gate and a Berlin office building belonging to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The words “Shot/Countershot” light up a black transition across both screens: “one opens the door to the other.” The references Abstract makes are instantly manifold. On the one hand, “shot/countershot” refers to the filmic technique of characters looking at each other across distinct frames, and on the other, to the sentiment of counterattack in battle. Abstract is about Andrea Wolf, a childhood friend of Steyerl turned radical activist and Kurdish militant, who was murdered in 1998 by Turkish forces. Abstract is about the ways in which “the grammar of cinema follows the grammar of battle,” including the inherent violence of the cut and the edit, carried out by filmmakers in pursuit of their craft. At the remote desert location where her friend was murdered, Steyerl is guided through a taxonomy of detritus by a local Kurdish man. “This is a piece of cloth. This is a jacket. This is an ammunitions container.” On the opposite screen, film, battle, and conceit flicker white on black once more: “This is a shot. This is a hellfire missile.”

“Un giorno, preso dal cruccio, mi scappò di dire che l’arte è una forma della morale, ma non un mezzo morale. Mi si rispose che era una massima oscura”. Nell’oscurità di questa formula riportata nelle Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen c’è tutta l’ambiguità della morale manniana, una morale eteronoma, le cui leggi sono quelle cui l’artista obbedisce nella produzione, nell’obbedienza all’opera. Etica, pessimismo, sacrificio, senso della forma sono, in Thomas Mann, termini difficilmente svincolabili gli uni dagli altri, ricondotti all’“aura etica” di una Heimatsphäre che contempla in sé, insieme al senso più alto dello Humanitätsideal, le declinazioni più oscure o tragiche del nichilismo. L’arte è il luogo privilegiato i cui convergono le antinomie delle spirito, un’arte ‘morale’ e ‘antimorale’, morale per il rigore della forma, la verità dell’espressione che non può darsi senza l’esperienza profonda e radicale di ciò che solo apparentemente le si oppone, senza le estasi erotico-wagneriane di tanti personaggi manniani, senza le irrinunciabili componenti di dilettantismo, malattia e degenerazione, senza, dunque, le implicazioni ‘antimorali’ dell’arte stessa, origine del ‘dolore’ e della ‘grandezza’ che costituiscono la dignità e l’ambiguità dell’attività artistica. Per il ruolo preminente della forma e del rigore strutturale, per la sua specificità metafisica e la potenza dei suoi effetti, la musica è, per Mann, il paradigma, “il più sacro archetipo di ogni arte”, l’arte in cui “la morale diventa forma”.

Walter Benjamin in his 1921 written essay, Capitalism as Religion, tried to express an opinion that Capitalism was a cultic religion without mercy or truce and its immanent principle is to create a “house of despair.”  Benjamin directly asserts the view that capitalism is the most omnipotent religious cult of all time and there is not exist any space beyond it. In other words, the utilitarian practices of capitalism have the meaning of a religious cult. Capitalism does not require the acceptance of a creed, a doctrine or a theology. What counts are the actions, which take the form, in terms of their social dynamics, of cult practices. After several decades influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben shared the somewhat same view about Capitalism. Agamben argues that people who belong to the religious cult of capitalism sacrifice every facet of life and end up in a supremely frustrating environment where everything is sacred, hence off-limits to personal use. It must be emphasized that both of these thinkers related capitalism to sacred space in which, in Agamben's opinion, everything is beyond of communal or cooperative use. To put this opinion in other words, sacred space and practice of sacrifice displaces something from the domain of human use to the domain of exclusively divine use, thus making it sacred and thus, in this case, the divine is capital and the sacred is anything required by the apparatus of capitalism. Agamben thinks that against the abovementioned process we should appeal an act of profanation which the opposite of and antidote to sacrifice. After the act of profanation, everything which was sacred now becomes restored to communal use. Agamben differentiates an act of profanation from secularization. He firmly asserts that secularization leaves the status-quo without any revolutionary change while profanation is intended as modes of resisting the universal absorption into capitalist production and consumption. Profaning the unprofanable as an exit strategy, a way to escape a religious cult that offers no hope of redemption. Agamben tells us: "The profanation of the unprofaniable is the political task of the coming generation."

In recent years, science has become a popular topic in British drama. Biology and physics are a source of new themes and metaphors, but also stimulate formal experimentation: this paper analyses Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012) as an attempt to derive new dramatic form from the hypotheses of quantum physics. Constellations draws on the Many Worlds Interpretation, in which an infinite amount of divergent universes are superposed but do not communicate: rather than a linear plot, the plays presents us with a series of variations on encounters between two lovers, corresponding to coexisting possibilities in the divergent universes. With an emphasis on paradigmatic superposition, the resulting dramatic syntax allows Payne to examine the themes of mortality and euthanasia from a fresh perspective, as the play enacts alternative conceptions of time and questions their consequences for the viewer.

The question of ethics posits, at its core, an idea of the other. But what is this other? What is it made of? What is the meaning of its power over the human subject? The paper looks at the idea of otherness as its appears in Levinas and Paul de Man – two thinkers who share a fascination with radical exteriority but could not disagree more on its meaning – and its implication on the question of freedom. With Walter Benjamin in supporting role.

This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic project set in motion after the Holocaust is indissociable from thinking Utopia, with Adorno intuiting an emancipatory potential within the artwork. To do so, I explicate in detail Adorno's "negative dialectics", a dialectic driven by impossibility which structures his thinking, from his "Categorical imperative", to his conceptions of the artwork and Utopia. Moreover, this paper elucidates the relation between Adorno's materialist Bilderverbot, "autonomous art" and Utopia, culminating in a critical engagement with the work of Anselm Kiefer and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Various thinkers have dealt over the years with the influence of technology on how humans find their place in the world (Habermas 2003; Heidegger [1953] 2008; [1953] 1996). The technological developments of recent times have great potential to influence this positioning. Due to the extreme changes and the challenges to the traditional place of human in the world, some even call these developments the post-human era (Braidotti 2013; Hayles 1999; Pepperell 2003). Walter Benjamin, as a philosopher with a broad social and cultural awareness, who lived a century ago, addressed the way in which the technology of his days, photography and cinema, changes the way human society is organized, towards the creation of art in general and the act of creation itself (Benjamin [1935] 2008; Ferris 2008; Goebel 2009). In this article, I examined how Benjamin diagnoses the impact of the technological changes on the culture of his time-the loss of the aura that accompanied the technical reproduction, following the technologies of photography and cinema. From this analysis, I will illustrate what can be learned from Benjamin regarding the reproduction processes carried out by today's information technologies and may offer an explanation for the cultural phenomena we encounter today. Of all the themes that can be learned from Benjamin, I will focus on the questions-how the possibilities of reproduction on the creation process itself change following the information technologies. And how the meaning of technology is shaped by the business / technological / political elite that produces it in relation to its consumers, us. Although Benjamin wrote after the new technologies of his day became established, he felt that they had not yet reached their potential and especially the potential for influence and change on the reorganization of human perception in the face of evolving technologies-"The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities" ([1935] 2008, 9).

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Theater und Philosophie – dieser Band vereint erstmals zwei paradigmatische, historische Konstellationen: zum einen jene von der Zusammenarbeit mit Walter Benjamin geprägte Theatertheorie und -praxis Bertolt Brechts, die sich in den »Lehrstücken« und im Fragment »Der Messingkauf« findet. Zum anderen die in gegenwärtigen Theater- und Theoriediskursen einander korrespondierenden Redeweisen von Theater als einer Form des szenischen Denkens (William Forsythe u.a.) und von Philosophie als einer Form des Theaters (Jacques Derrida, Samuel Weber). Die Beiträge aus Philosophie, Theater- und Literaturwissenschaft analysieren das Theater der Philosophie und fragen, wie Theater denkt.

Mit einem Beitrag von Jacques Derrida.

INHALT

Vorwort | 7

SHAKESPEARES THEATERDENKEN

The Merchant of Venice
(Auszug)
William Shakespeare | 23

„When mercy seasons justice“
Vorbemerkung zu einer Vorlesung Jacques Derridas
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll | 29

Was ist eine „relevante“ Übersetzung?
(Auszug)
Jacques Derrida | 33

NACH BRECHT UND BENJAMIN

Über Theater überhaupt und das Theater des Menschen
Benjamin, Brecht, Derrida, Le Roy
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll | 59

Die Bühne mit der Bühne denken
Zu Pirandellos Sechs Personen suchen einen Autor und Brechts
Der Messingkauf
Lydia J. White | 81

Besessen vom Theater
Der Dibbuk am Habima Theater Moskau (1922)
Freddie Rokem | 95

(Musik-)Dramaturgische Verfremdungen
Zur Aktualität von Brechts Naturalismuskritik
Tore Vagn Lid | 117

SZENISCHE KONSTELLATIONEN

Die Bühne des Denkens
Über den Dialog von Manes und Empedokles in Hölderlins
Empedokles auf dem Ätna
Jörn Etzold | 137

Zur Dekonstruktion der Bühne bei Antonin Artaud
Timo Ogrzal | 155

Heideggers Schweigen vom Theater
Marten Weise | 167

Konstellationen denken
Ulrike Haß | 181

ANDERE CHRONOTOPOGRAPHIEN

„Hold your breath against time“
Zum Denken einer Widerständigkeit der Zeit bei William Kentridge
Julia Schade | 201

Was heißt: sich im Tanzen orientieren?
Zwei verschiedene Denkweisen auf der Bühne
Leonie Otto | 215

Entzug und Bezug
Das Theater der Affizierbarkeit in Walid Raads
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow
Leon Gabriel | 229

CHORA UND TOPOS

Die denkende Bühne
Samuel Weber | 249

Autorinnen und Autoren | 273

How can one think of History in a time in which Europe happened to be haunted by the specter of catastrophe, in our modern times? How can one escape the perils of Progress? This urgency determined the thought of Walter Benjamin since his youth, and decisively marked his conception of history itself, but also of his vision of language and of translation, of his own critique of art and reception. Starting from the concept of dialectic image as a new paradigm of comprehension of history, Benjamin tries to substitute an idea of a narrative of progress for discontinued and figurative idea of history, that regains in the present the possibility of reactivate the past and that values a qualitative dimension of temporality, instead of a quantitative temporality that homogenized and disfigured his reading of history. Benjamin takes, essentially from the idea of Messianism, as a secularized category of Jewish tradition, to “build” what he designated as the dissident and revolutionary gesture of the historian of “brushing history against the grain”, focusing on himself that potentiality of rescuing the “messianic parcel” that become our fate and that brings in itself the echoes of voices that come to us. This is also the most important dimension of Benjamin’s thought, eminently political and ethical, configuring a radical gesture that reclaims justice for the ones that the history of Progress forgot: the overpassed and the victims of history.