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.
O artigo objetiva analisar a potencialidade política das obras de arte em contextos de perpetração de graves violações de direitos humanos e de silenciamento dos órgãos estatais sobre as ...mesmas. Tendo como base a obra de Walter Benjamin, A obra de arte na era da reprodutibilidade técnica (1936/1955), será discutido como a arte, sob a lógica da reprodutibilidade, pode fornecer aportes críticos para que a coletividade conteste padrões de violência estatal e de impunidade, que persistem mesmo após a transição à "democracia procedimental". Como estudo de caso, apresentar-se-á a arte conceitual e política de Cido Meireles, mais específicamente o projeto Cédulas , no qual o artista plástico carimbou, em notas de Cruzeiro, a indagação "Quem matou Herzog?" (1975).
This book brings the Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) into a new critical spotlight by examining the author's poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu. Gökberk ...contextualizes these posthumously published pieces in an approach informed by studies on memory, identity, place, and remembering as literary representation.
Known inside and outside the radical Left, Daniel Bensaïd's political and intellectual trajectory entered a new stage in the second half of the 1980s amid the historical changes of the period. This ...essay estimates the importance of Judaism as an issue during this new phase of Bensaïd's reflection, particularly emphasizing how the emergence of the issue in his thought is mediated by a very specific interpretation of Walter Benjamin.
Em seu ensaio “A tarefa do tradutor”, Benjamin se empenha em mostrar que a tradução não é um simples derivado do original, mas a “expõe” ao leitor. Contestando qualquer função comunicativa do texto ...literário, ele nega também para a tradução deste texto uma função meramente intermediadora. A tradução não abre um canal de acesso ao original, mas ambos são partes de um todo maior que convergem na “pura língua”.
In Walter Benjamin. Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend Stéphane Symons offers an innovative reading of the work of German philosopher, essayist and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) ...that characterizes his writings as "neither a-theological, nor immediately theological.".
Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan ...of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings with Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he started to theorize about films.
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