Rapid Response Collecting (RRC) is a recent approach in museum collecting, where museums acquire objects considered reflective, illustrative, or exemplary of recent trends, current topics or social ...concerns. Objects gathered through Rapid Response Collecting reflect existing societal narratives, tending to be 'commonplace' items indicative of the narrative of the 'now', and symbolise a change away from artefacts typically collected, thus reflecting a larger, ongoing shift in how important societal issues or narratives are acknowledged and addressed through a growing discourse around Rapid Response Collecting.
This article assesses the place of allegory in a literary field influenced by weak theory. As an ancient form of expression that encrypts ulterior meanings, allegory requires claims that would seem ...to supersede the restricted and descriptive methods of contemporary criticism. Drawing from the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin and setting it to work through the art collection of the Hollywood icon Mary Pickford, I argue that allegory's respect for deterioration can actually support the restrictedness of critical claims, and that its image of ruin provides a strong emblem for weak theory.
From the late 1980s onward, Daniel Bensaïd developed an extensive theoretical oeuvre marked by the influence of Walter Benjamin intertwined with Bensaïd's own classical Marxist background. Through ...Benjamin, Bensaïd came to the work of Charles Péguy, whose role in his thought has yet to be fully analyzed. Bensaïd does not ignore Péguy's contradictions and limits but reads them selectively to better understand history, politics, and temporality. The starting point of Bensaïd's analysis of Péguy is the triad formed by the critique of historical reason, modern temporality, and progress. Péguy was also a source of inspiration for his reflection on politics, victory, and defeat and for his framing of political commitment as a melancholic wager.
A great part of Hamlet's mystery resides in the Mousetrap. Its role is fundamental for the tension of the play, yet its importance extends beyond that. Philosophers and psychoanalysts alike have been ...fascinated by it. The former have underlined its epistemological aspects and capacity for self-reflection: its power to mirror reality and reveal something new. The latter have placed weight on its 'primal scene' character and have underlined its failure to move Hamlet to act. Here I explore the paradox that results from putting philosophy and psychoanalysis together. To illustrate its functions, as well as the different readings of it, I delve into certain moments of the scene and Hamlet several times. Expanding on some remarks made by Lacan about the Mousetrap, I contend that it is a 'rigging system', a highly complex mise-en-abyme structure and intersubjective complex unfolded over successive layers. This explains the self-reflectivity discerned by philosophers. Following Benjamin and Lacan, and by means of a detour through Schmitt, I argue at the end that its failure needs to be situated in the historical moment when it was created - a world characterised by the lack of transcendent values - one in which art folds back upon itself infinitely.
In 1968, twenty-eight years after Walter Benjamin's death, Hannah Arendt published a literary portrait of Benjamin that questioned the Frankfurt School's editorial infringements on and interpretive ...appropriations of Benjamin's work. In recent discussions of her intervention in the debate that had escalated upon Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem's publication of Benjamin's letters in 1966, it has been neglected that Arendt published two versions of her portrait, American and German. This article shows that the American version differs significantly from the German as it amplifies a characteristic citation method through which Arendt performatively preserves and promotes Benjamin's work. Thus, the American version indicates how Arendt transformed her strong editorial commitment to rescuing European Jewish cultural heritage after the Holocaust into a critical method. The initial occasion for Arendt's portrait was her American Benjamin edition Illuminations (1968), toward which she had begun working since her arrival in New York in 1941. The edition's continuing global distribution demonstrates the lasting impact of Arendt's intervention.
This text is about Early Childhood Education, focusing on the process of pedagogical documentation as a possible peculiar narrative to and with very young children. The paper presents elements of a ...doctoral research in education, held in 2014, observing four daycare centers located in the city of Pistoia, Italy. Considering its different forms and types, the research found common threads in the documentation produced by the teachers: the image of an active child, able to grow and relate, and a learning environment potentially rich in experience. Through the theoretical lenses of Walter Benjamin, the teacher is taken as a narrator,while the pedagogical documentation is taken as a peculiar narrative woven by the thread of language enshrined in things. Through this material, the very small child speaks and is spoken. Between the visible and the invisible, between voice and silence.Treasures are documented, narrated in everyday life...
The author analyzes the traumatic effect of the idea of shock with which Walter Benjamin described modern life and, through the review of Buck- Mors on this sensory perspective, makes the following ...interpellation: if the modern technological world forms an anaesthetic system To avoid perceptual shock, how can there be a sufficiently traumatic sign-object to be considered avant-garde? The article states that the only artistic object that can deride this anaesthetic name is that which is isolated from any semantic relationship with anything else in its own manual process of realization. An object lacking approximation allusive to another form. A rhetorical option that does not allow the transfer of a style of the subject. The iconic representation totally impartial. The form that cannot exist as a representation. The text argues that the perfect duplication of the ready-made Fontaine could be and concludes that Duchamp renews but does not innovate, because the urinal remains as a make-ready phantasmagoria.
Abstract
Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image (photographic, cinematic) and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the "optical ...unconscious," "thought image," and "dialectical image" in Benjamin, especially in his autobiographical text, Berlin Childhood Around 1900. The article seeks to draw attention to another sensory undercurrent in Berlin Childhood, namely, the sense of hearing and acoustics. Benjamin does not only think in images: he is also drawn to sounds, noises, and voices. I offer close readings of sections from Berlin Childhood (specifically, "Loggias," "Imperial Panorama," "Mummerehlen," "Market-Hall," "Blumeshof 12," and "News of Death") and show that there are two types of an acoustic presence in the text. The first pertains to the city sounds the child hears and the adult no longer pays attention to, and the second involves the sounds of language.
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