Could there have been television without California? California without television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing ...transparency of the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience — a pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time — they are also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay (“If you’re going to San Francisco…,” “two girls for every guy”), by the contradiction played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the dead to bury the dead. California and television, as it were, conspire in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest, what really “takes us back.”
This article is an attempt to connect Spinoza's concept of 'wonder' (
admiratio
) to 'aesthetic interruption'-the response of being 'frozen' by a performative event. According to Spinoza we ...experience wonder when we perceive an object we have never perceived before, and being unable to relate the object to anything else, our mind pauses on it as an unfamiliar singular image. And because for Spinoza body and mind are parallel and equal forms of each of us, our body too ceases its ongoing movement. This wonder, moreover, as Christopher Davidson (
2019
) notes in his interpretation of Spinoza's 'wonder', may intensify the affects induced in us by external bodies and arouse powerful emotions in the perceiver, as, for example, in ecstatic events such as festivals. However, the aspect of 'wonder' Davidson does not touch upon is the question of aesthetic interruption. Since Spinoza does not elaborate on 'wonder' in relation to the theatre or the arts in general, I draw an analogy between his concept of wonder and Benjamin's concept of 'interruption' (
Unterbrechung)
in Brecht's epic theatre. For much like Spinoza's description, Benjamin describes 'interruption' as a break in an ongoing situation that we see as an unfamiliar standing image that induces our 'astonishment' (
Staunen
). In both cases the wonder or astonishment arises from the element of 'pause'-an image that interrupts the movement of our body and mind. I conclude my brief exploration of Spinoza's concept of wonder as aesthetic interruption by applying it to two concrete responses to a performative event: Normand Berlin's response to Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
, and my own response to Thom Luz's
When I Die
.
The principle of the 'gesture', which according to Walter Benjamin is crucial for Bertolt Brecht's early conception of the 'epic theatre', can as well be understood as the structural principal of ...Benjamin's descriptions of the later Brecht in his exile in Svendborg in the 1930s. According to Benjamin the actor in epic theatre should be able to treat gestures in the same way as a typesetter treats the writing of words with spaced letters. Gestures thus are produced where the flow of action is interrupted. In Benjamin's writings about Brecht this principle of the latter's theatre becomes crucial for the philosopher's style. Gestures as interruptions turn Benjamin's biographical descriptions of Brecht into an epic theatre. Its stages are in the first place the pages of Benjamin's writing, but not only. Rather Brecht himself becomes an 'empty stage on which the contradictions of our society are acted out', that is to say not an individual but rather a 'dividuum harbouring and hiding many possibilities', comparable to the characters of Brecht's most radical plays, written in the years between 1926 and 1933, as, for example,
A Man is a Man
,
Fatzer
or
The Decision
. Benjamin thus holds on to what can be called a 'theatre of potentiality' in a moment when Brecht, deprived of his theatre, his friends, his way of living and producing, temporarily gives up his earlier conceptions in order to return to a more conventional theatre. According to Ludwig Jäger a script is produced retrospectively by the act of a transcription as that which must have preceded this transcription, but has not become visible up to the very moment of this transcription. In this respect Brecht's life in exile is turned into a script in Benjamin's notes.
On Interruption Kobialka, Michal
Performance research,
06/2021, Volume:
26, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The events of 2020 are a central metaphor for the interruption and the possibility of putting a halt to that which is. They make us think of a ‘world without us’, or demand a social action that would ...make us ‘think otherwise’. This essay investigates what conditions need to be fulfilled for this vision to be sustainable, rather than a momentary intensification and radicalization of statements, which, as evidenced by the aftermath of those other interruptions in 1968 or 1989, can rapidly exhaust emancipatory endeavours. With this dose of historiographic scepticism, I begin this essay about Walter Benjamin’s, Theodor Adorno’s and Tadeusz Kantor’s encounters with their own historical interruptions, registered in their critiques of the relationship between historical conditions and aesthetic theory or practice. Even though their critiques come from very different contexts and historical moments (Benjamin 1934; Adorno 1936, 1962, 1968; Kantor 1949), can their criticism, under the name of refractory art in both senses of the word—as a negation and a deviation from the route that proceeded it—be of use to us today while we are working through our pasts as well as the relationship between historical events and art in this present?
This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu
(1930-1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of
memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu, once ...a
cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame
in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while
themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received
critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu's oeuvre, the
evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored:
Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through
his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu
gives in his Beyoğlu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural
difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own
repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin's
autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating
Karasu, Gökberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework,
which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the
twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances.
Walter Benjamin and Teleology Pérez López, Carlos Alberto
Ideas y valores,
12/2018, Volume:
67, Issue:
168
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
It has often been rightly said that the representation of history in Walter Benjamin's thought is essentially anti-teleological. However, his writings reveal two important mentions of the term ...“teleology” that make it possible to think of an exceptional use of this concept: "Teleology without End" and the “ teleologicalmoment of awakening”. The article examines how these almost hidden clues regarding teleology have full repercussions on Benjamin's conception of history, thus refuting the interpretation according to which teleology would have been completely banished from his philosophy.
En contexte de cinéméducation enseignante, le cinéma est mobilisé aupres d'enseignants dans le cadre d'activités de formation professionnelle destinées a développer leur réflexivité pédagogique et ...éthique. La cinéméducation adopte généralement une approche identificatoire, c'est-a-dire une approche qui incite les enseignants a s'identifier ou se dissocier des personnages des films sélectionnés; mais a l'aide de quelques concepts issus des théories de Walter Benjamin sur le cinéma (les idées de cinéma comme dynamitage et de Spielraum), la cinéméducation enseignante nous permet aussi d'insister sur la dimension révélatoire du cinéma, et ce, afin de permettre l'exploration pédagogique de pratiques inédites ou encore á-venir en éducation.
According to traditional Western views on translation, conveying the meaning is the first aim. In Benjamin's eyes, this is an acceptance of the "non-identity of languages", harming linguistic ...development. With his understanding, Benjamin challenged ideas viewing language as a tool. For this challenge, he has been regarded by many scholars as a forerunner, rebelling against Western logocentrism. He also contributed to the development of translation studies, e.g., with his concept of a "pure language". Another dominant figure of deconstructivism is Derrida, who also challenged logocentrism. He has created many concepts like "la difference", dissemination, trance etc., which serve not only linguistics and philosophy, but also translation studies. In the history of Western translation, Benjamin has often been classified as a member of deconstructivism, even being compared with Derrida in regard to their deconstructive architectural concept of "absence" (MacArthur 1993). However, Benjamin's understanding of translation differs from Derrida's. This paper compares their comprehension of translation mainly regarding the aspects of "pure language" and "la différence", metaphrase and relevant translations, "afterlife" and "rebirth" of the original. Their attitudes towards the five dimensions original work, author, translator, translation work and translation criterion respectively are explored. It is concluded that Benjamin does not belong to deconstructivism.
Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism offers for the first time a sustained exploration of parallels between the fiction of James Joyce and the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin is ...perhaps modernism's most eloquent theorist, Joyce its finest writer of fiction; both haunted the same Paris streets at the height of the modernist moment, and both developed accounts of the flaneur's encounter with the city, with commodity culture and with others, that were revolutionary in their day and continue to set the agendas for culture and cultural critique. To place some of the work of each side by side is to make evident their affinities: the skills of each as new cartographers of the urban, the interest of each in ethnicity, nationalism, and exile, the way in which the 'Profane illumination' celebrated by Benjamin meets the 'Epiphany' of Joyce's A Portrait, as each rethought the epistemology of insight in the modernist moment. This collection explores these parallels between two of the greatest modernists, casting the aesthetic strategies of Joyce in the light of the aesthetic critique of Benjamin, opening up the politics of the one in the light of those of the other, and discerning the parallels between Joyce's version of a modern urban world in which self and society effect an uneasy rapprochement and Benjamin's modernist scenarios in which the aura might still linger. This collection discovers extraordinary parallels between the two writers who, writing in Paris, offered new accounts of urban selfhood and survival to the world.
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