This article focusses on Walter Benjamin’s approach to the experience of modernity through his long-term engagement with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Benjamin translated Baudelaire and produced ...a theoretical reflection on translation based on this experience in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Years later, he would place Baudelaire at the centre of his attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modernity in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project. This article brings to light the relationship between translating and interpreting Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work, attempting to recover a systematicity in his thought that escapes from traditional disciplinary borders. In order to do so, it reads Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’ in light of major issues that can only be clarified with reference to his later adoption of historical materialism and, conversely, it approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire as the writer of modern life as a revision of philosophical concerns that were first approached in his metaphysics of language and translation. A concluding section explores how such an interpretation relates to a materialist physiognomics which puts language and translation at the heart of a critique of modernity.
Proust et le présent Serça, Isabelle
Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France,
08/2023, Volume:
123, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Partant de la définition linguistique du terme, on examine ici la notion de « présent » chez Proust pour montrer comment ce présent « élastique », qui déborde à la fois sur le futur et sur le passé, ...ressortit à la conception proustienne du temps et de la mémoire.
L’articolo analizza il ruolo dell’immagine nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e in particolare come l’immagine rappresenti per l’autore una distanza, ovvero un punto di vista fuori dall’intenzionalità ...del pensiero del soggetto conoscente. La prima parte del saggio esamina diversi testi nei quali Calvino pensa la distanza in termini di solitudine, tempo, novità e silenzio. Il saggio poi guarda alle potenzialità gnoseologiche che Calvino riconosce all’immagine fotografica e alla fotografia come tecnica attraverso l’analisi del racconto L’avventura di un fotografo (da Gli amori difficili ), del libro La giornata d’uno scrutatore e dell’articolo “In memoria di Roland Barthes” uscito su La Repubblica in occasione della morte del filosofo. Quella che emerge da questo saggio è una vera e propria fenomenologia del visibile che Calvino sviluppa attraverso personaggi immaginari e riflessioni sue che lo avvicinano a filosofi quali Barthes e Walter Benjamin e anticipano ambiti di teoria critica contemporanea come, ad esempio, la affect theory (“teoria dell’affetto”).
El trabajo examina la novela Ramal (2011) de Cynthia Rimsky en busca de las particulares relaciones presentes entre espacio e imagen. Se analizan, por un lado, las características materiales de las ...imágenes fotográficas de la novela para comprender cómo dialogan con e intervienen en la configuración de la narración verbal y sus particulares tonos y operaciones de mostración e invisibilización. Por otro, se piensa el paisaje en tanto que dispositivo fundamental para la política narrativa de la novela. La articulación que estos dos dispositivos elaboran para generar una caracterización, ambigua y problemática, de la genealogía del protagonista es el objeto principal del presente artículo.
Este ensayo de Miriam Bratu Hansen, que se publica por primera vez en español, apareció originalmente en el año 1999 en la prestigiosa revista académica Critical Inquiry. Se trata de un texto que ...pronto se convirtió en una referencia obligada, no solo para los especialistas en la obra de Walter Benjamin, sino para los teóricos del cine y de los medios de comunicación, así como para el campo de los estudios culturales anglosajones. El ensayo de Hansen marcó una directriz importante para empezar a valorar la relevancia de la propuesta de Benjamin más allá de las lecturas marxistas de su obra, que marcaron la primera recepción del autor, y mostró su pertinencia para una reflexión sobre el cine y la teoría de los medios de la época. Incluso hoy, más de dos décadas después de su publicación, el ensayo de Hansen resulta sorprendente por su pertinencia para la discusión sobre nuestra propia relación, no solo con el cine, sino con los medios digitales. Por otro lado, la lectura que hace Hansen del ensayo de Benjamin sobre la obra de arte tiene mucho que aportar a las más recientes discusiones sobre el poshumanismo y los estudios sobre la tecnología. Hansen fue una de las primeras en comprender que la obra de Benjamin implica un cuestionamiento sobre la relación entre el humano y la máquina, y en este sentido ayuda a recuperar el legado benjaminiano para discusiones actuales. En palabras de Hansen, para Benjamin "no hay un más allá ni un afuera de la tecnología", con lo que señala que en la obra benjaminiana hay una reformulación de conceptos como los de naturaleza, humanidad, subjetividad y tecnología. En su ensayo, Hansen examina y desarrolla el concepto de "inervación", que Benjamin propone en la segunda versión de su ensayo fundacional "La obra de arte en la era de su reproductibilidad técnica". Si bien este concepto fue abandonado por Benjamin en versiones posteriores, Hansen comprende su relevancia para una discusión sobre el cine y los medios. Para el pensamiento dialéctico de Benjamin, aunque el cine implicaba el peligro de la alienación y la manipulación de las masas, también escondía un potencial, pues podía llevar a lo que él llamó una "inervación del colectivo". Con este término Benjamin sugería una imbricación de la tecnología con los sentidos y con el cuerpo humano, de manera que se hiciera posible un nuevo tipo de percepción y de acción, con potencial revolucionario, así como un nuevo tipo de colectividad distinta al nacionalismo propio del fascismo. Para Hansen, esta teoría difiere de la más conocida interpretación del ensayo sobre la obra de arte, a saber: que los medios de comunicación masiva invitan a las masas urbanas a la distracción. En cuanto a la traducción del texto de Hansen, he intentado remplazar las citas tomadas de versiones inglesas de los textos por versiones ya publicadas en español. Esto ha sido posible con contadas excepciones. He revisado también las traducciones que Hansen hace del alemán al inglés, y he hecho la traducción directa del alemán al español donde ha sido necesario. Finalmente, he incluido algunas notas para aclarar asuntos lingüísticos que son importantes en el ensayo de Hansen pero se perderían en español. Palabras clave: Walter Benjamin, cine, obra de arte, reproductibilidad técnica, inervación, colectividad, tecnología, crítica
Impossible Modernism reads the writings of German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) to examine the relationship between ...literary and historical form during the modernist period. It focuses particularly on how they both resisted the forms of narration established by nineteenth-century academic historians and turned instead to traditional literary devices-lyric, satire, anecdote, and allegory-to reimagine the forms that historical representation might take. Tracing the fraught relationship between poetry and history back to Aristotle's Poetics and forward to Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, Robert S. Lehman establishes the coordinates of the intellectual-historical problem that Eliot and Benjamin inherited and offers an analysis of how they grappled with this legacy in their major works.
Imagination, our commune Didi-Huberman, Georges
Textual practice,
05/2023, Volume:
37, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article by the renowned philosopher and art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman explores the relationship between politics and the imagination. To summarise its main hypothesis, the article argues ...that the imagination is not only a common faculty of knowledge but an inherently political faculty which rises up against the established political and aesthetic order and radically reimagines human existence as something that we hold in common. In a series of readings of Aristotle, Kant, Hugo and Benjamin, the essay goes on to explore imagination as a political commune or commons in the work of music, art, literature, and philosophy.
Theatre of Countertime Schade, Julia
Performance research,
06/2021, Volume:
26, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article takes into account contemporary discourses on the end of (anthropocentric) time in the wake of colonial extraction and environmental destruction and asks for other ways of representing ...time beyond the dominant Western representational paradigm of human-centric time. Is another representation of time, or at least of its rupture even possible without reaffirming the self-referential dialectic it aims to overcome? Is there a way out of or beyond its known representation? In order to tackle this question, the article draws on a conversation between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem in the summer of 1916 in which the problem of the (im)possibility of imagining time other than in its metaphysical representation is addressed and time is imagined as a cycloid. Taking up this experimental scene of thought this contribution discusses the potentiality of a radically different, other shape of time or temporality and introduces countertime as a temporality of suspension that has been rejected from philosophy as the unthinkable because it eventuates in time as something untimely, belonging to another or something other than time. As such countertime points us towards representation itself, its premises, its form, its politics and last but not least it is the temporality that inaugurates theatre. The article proposes to think of a theatre of countertime as something that introduces a temporality of rupture while taking into account the ‘position of the unthought’ of the Western time paradigm and its consequences for representation.
Interpreting the model of the epic theatre in 1939, Walter Benjamin introduced the practice of ‘the quotable gesture’ that involves the interruption of its context. This article explores the ...phenomenon of turning the foundation scene of a nation state into a quotable gesture given to interruptions while attributing it to the Israeli context. The main practice of re-performing the declarative foundation scene is substitution of original components. Its main effect is the failure to validate both the authority of foundation and the power of ruling.The interruptive power of foundational re-performance lies, first, in the original scene’s rationale, caught in a circular quotation in order to gain the authority to sign the Declaration, and theatrically simulates the reclaim of power. Second, the foundational re-performances range from the official national framework—in Israel, the Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948—bound to ratifying authority, to a critical orientation. Interruption, however, is implicit in a validating context and can be found throughout all the gestures of quoting, exposing the vulnerability of authority.The range of interruptions is discussed through several cases: the Israeli Ur-scene; its first formal quotation in 1958, including the ambivalent role—both ratifying and undermining—of Hanna Rovina, iconic Habima actress, known from The Dybbuk and ‘penetrating’ to the scene of foundation; the socio-political complexity of the formal re-performance in 1978; and three different critical acts: a substitution of simulative signing of the Declaration with an ‘inappropriate’ name; a poignant replacement of David Ben-Gurion’s authoritative reading of the Declaration by a Mizrahi-Moroccan woman; and foundational subversions that have become an important component of the struggle for the rehabilitation of democracy during the 2020–1 civic protests in Israel, serving to the article as an actual frame of reference.
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