‘Re-generative Habit: Dancing the mimetic faculty’ examines the role of habit in choreographic practice through a comparison with Walter Benjamin's concept of the 'mimetic faculty'. This article ...considers the intersection of habit, dance and language as being distinct yet interconnected expressions of an innate mimetic ability. Drawing on Benjamin's theories of the ‘mimetic faculty’ and ‘non-sensuous similarity’ from his philosophy of language, I examine how these concepts intersect in my choreographic practice, using my recent screendance project 'Mimeisthai' as a case study. This project presents a specific example of a 'performance-generating systems' approach to dance-making, inspired by Danish Canadian dance theorist Pil Hansen, and highlights the inherent tension between established habit and the desire for creative innovation. By emphasizing the relational, performative and dynamic aspects of habit within creative practice, this article challenges familiar views of habit as being simply automatic behaviour. Instead, habit is depicted as a flexible, versatile element that not only offers stability but also opens up possibilities for new forms of expression to emerge.
Walter Benjamin was a radically innovative cultural theorist and a German Jewish Marxist, securing refuge in France in 1933. Following the 1940 Nazi invasion he fled France, bound for the USA. ...However, on the mountainous approach to the French– Spanish border he realised dictator Franco had suddenly blocked transit. Benjamin was in ill health and struggling to carry a briefcase with a heavy manuscript, which he declared more precious than his life. Sadly, he completed suicide: there was family history on his father’s side. Benjamin maintained a fiercely productive focus on his intellectual mission throughout his life, despite repeatedly complaining of ‘grand-scale defeats’ and lows. After his request for divorce from Dora Pollak was granted in 1932, he suffered 10 paralysing days during which he seriously prepared suicide. Suicidal thoughts endured.
Este artigo tem por objetivo principal a compreensão de como o capitalismo ‘oculta’, deliberadamente e a depender de seus interesses históricos e de classe, as camadas que separam a realidade ...vivenciada pelo capital daquela realidade vivida pelo trabalho. Tratou-se, aqui, dos mecanismos que o capital encontra, ao longo do tempo, para se perpetuar não somente como sistema econômico, mas também como modelo ideológico e religioso. Em especial, foi realizada uma reflexão acerca dos mecanismos de construção de invisibilidades sociais no capitalismo a partir das obras marxiana e benjaminiana. No que diz respeito ao pensamento marxiano, o enfoque foi dado, especialmente, a seção IV do capítulo I do ‘Capital’ (‘O caráter fetichista da mercadoria e seu segredo’) (Marx, 1988). Em relação a obra benjaminiana, duas obras fundamentais do autor foram utilizadas, quais sejam, o fragmento ‘O Capitalismo como Religião’(Benjamin, 2013) e o livro das ‘Passagens’ (Benjamim, 2019) (Das Passagen-Werk).
Walter Benjamin Friedlander, Eli
2012, 2012-01-15, 20120101
eBook
Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant, 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 finds an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.
Este artigo trata do modo de escritura do filosofo alemão Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), escritura essa ao mesmo tempo poética e filosófica. Circulando entre os choques da vida moderna e as profundezas ...do desejo coletivo, ela faz colidir o mais atual com o mais antigo, por meio de um estilo teorizado com ironia pelo próprio autor na margem de suas grandes obras.
"This is a sophisticated and fascinating argument written in a very enjoyably entertaining style. It is hard for me to see how readers initially interested in these texts will not be 'swept off their ...feet' by the core assertions of this author, and the devastatingly comprehensive way in which he demonstrates those arguments."-Brent Steele, University of Kansas
InTextual Conspiracies,James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the question of politics and the predicament of the contemporary left. Through the lens of Benjamin's theories, as influenced by Kafka, of the fetishization of political symbols and signs, Martel looks at the ways in which various political and literary texts "speak" to each other across the gulf of time and space, thereby creating a "textual conspiracy" that destabilizes grand narratives of power and authority and makes the narratives of alternative political communities more apparent.
However, in keeping with Benjamin's insistence that even he is complicit with the fetishism that he battles, Martel decentralizes Benjamin's position as the key theorist for this conspiracy and contextualizes Benjamin in what he calls a "constellation" of pairs of thinkers and writers throughout history, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Allen Poe, Hannah Arendt and Federico García Lorca, and Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar.
Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took ...to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the intellectual field, McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. The fullest account of Benjamin available in English, this lucid and penetrating book will be welcomed by intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, historians of German literature, and Continental philosophers.
This book explores the relationship between time, life, and history in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and examines his work in relation to his contemporary, Walter Benjamin. By focusing on texts from ...the margins of the Borges canon—including the early poems on Buenos Aires, his biography of Argentina's minstrel poet Evaristo Carriego, the stories and translations from A Universal History of Infamy, as well as some of his renowned stories and essays—Kate Jenckes argues that Borges's writing performs an allegorical representation of history. Interspersed among the readings of Borges are careful and original readings of some of Benjamin's finest essays on the relationship between life, language, and history. Reading Borges in relationship to Benjamin draws out ethical and political implications from Borges's works that have been largely overlooked by his critics.
An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, ...kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self- understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity, " a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.
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