In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the pedagogical context, and (...) secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. (shrink)

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overcome spatial obstacles that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our democratic capacities and created complex crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers via enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today’s crises.

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and the (...) Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation. (shrink)

In the contemporary era, we identify ourselves based on what we consume or what we possess. Besides, various advertisements, celebrities, and other influential personalities encourage and make us believe that we can make a new identity by consuming a specific brand, or relating to a particular institution or connecting with an extraordinary group, etc. Hence, we tend to identify ourselves with consumer goods. In such conditions, Srimad Bhagwat Gita becomes significantly relevant to look for alternative way of life. This paper (...) attempts to explore the concept of Self in Gita as a model for realizing environmental consciousness. Largely, it will analyse the concepts of Nishkama Karma (Detached Action) and the Self to see what it may contribute in developing an apt environmental consciousness. With the analysis of these concepts the paper tries to probe for an epistemological and metaphysical alternative to the Ecology understanding. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that archism, a form of political power that is ubiquitous in the world and is based on hierarchy and violence, effectively denies us a future. Archism in invested in continuing the current power dynamics. Accordingly, it projects a false sense of the future which is actually only a continuation of the present on and on forever. I look at two thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who try to take the future back from archism (my (...) word, not theirs). In doing so, they do not seek to determine the future but on the contrary, to allow it to actually occur in all of its infinite complexity and unpredictability, that is to say, to submit it to anarchist forms of temporality. (shrink)

A serendipitious event in everyday life is common: it means unexpected information that yields some unintended information and potential value later on. Serendipity as a word has been around for hundreds of years. As a studied concept it is rather recent. Serendipity is not just the unexpected information or experience but rather the ability to recognize and do something with it. Serendipitious discovery of information is different from purposive or known item search as it is more complicated and lasts much (...) longer. The discovery of information by chance or accident is still looking it’s explicit place in models and frameworks of information behaviour. It is still not clear what constitutes the core of the research area of serendipity in information behaviour. The qualities of interaction among people, information, and objects differ in physical vs. digital environments. The bisociation, a creative association between different peaces of information may be computer supported. This article presents an overview of the research study of serendipity in information seeking behaviour. We explore serendipity mainly in the digital information environment. As a setting for our study we use six main drivers of serendipity research relating to digital enviroments presented in McCay-Peet and Toms (2017). The drivers are: 1. Theoretical understanding of the phenomena of serendipity, 2) physical vs digital, 3) information overload, 4) filter bubbles, 5) user experience, and 6) user strategies. A new refined temporal model of information encountering by Erdelez and Makri (2020) is also presented in this article. The model presents a framework for better understanding of the temporal dimension of the information acqusition. At a macro level the model positions information encountering within contextual factors related for user, information, task and environment related characteristics. (shrink)

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as (...) well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the everyday can (...) be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. With an unflinching honest approach, Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. -/- As people come together to mourn the loss of (...) the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness looks to the new communities created around climate activism. Together, our collective mourning enables us to become human in ways previously unknown. -/- Why Climate Breakdown Matters is a practical guide on how to be a radical, responsible climate activist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is establish the difference between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of works of art. The argument is advanced drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant and Gunter Figal.

Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired (...) students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other. (shrink)

This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır (Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully exhibit the material world on screen. As the Turkish title of the series indicates, these objects (...) are “bir başkadır”: one of a kind. Through themes and practices of lost innocence, counter-archives, and archiveology, I sift through the quotidian objects, miniatures, old photos, souvenirs, and analogue film footage re-presented and re-collected in this series with an eye to their new scope and allure. The past and present rest adjacent to one another in the mise-en-scène of this series. In engagement with the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin on the collector, the archive, and memory, Andreas Huyssen's concept of the “museal gaze,” Jennifer Culbert's “counter-archival sensibility,” and finally Catherine Russell's practice of “archiveology,” this article examines how the objects that fashion the on-screen world acquire depth and meaning and the film as museum comes to form. (shrink)

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. (...) The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with (...) the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche’s critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual’s growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, (...) who represent the last nail in the imagination’s coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche’s wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze’s early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille’s emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno’s art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos. (shrink)

In this essay, I sketch the contours of a critical phenomenology of walking. I begin by briefly characterizing the critical phenomenological project and marking some of its invitations to think method and movement alongside one another. Then, I explore two modes of doing a critical phenomenology of walking: attending to how one walks and when and where one walks. I revisit and reread, in particular, the stories of Charlie Howard and Latisha King, whose walks not only signaled a unique comportment (...) in the world, but a comportment so offensive as to be extinguished by a fatal admixture of homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Finally, I close by considering the conditions under which a critical phenomenology of walking can be ameliorative—that is, how it can participate in liberatory projects of thinking and making. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and María Lugones, I argue not only that a critical phenomenology of walking can diagnose how structures of oppression constrain walking chances in the world, but also can witness how walking critiques those very structures. Walking is a movement of resistance and reimagination against the constraints of embodiment and subjectivity so singularly inherited and enforced. Traversing the space of this inquiry, I aim to complexify my understanding of walking as a practice, but also to deepen my appreciation of critical phenomenology as a method. (shrink)

In this essay, Giovanbattista Tusa suggests that we are currently witnessing a mutation, which disrupts the mythical imaginary that had confined viruses, climate change, and atmospheric turbulences to an immutable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature. I argue that the incapacity of translating this mutation in cultural and social terms, and the repression of this traumatic experience, are the cause of the perturbation that haunts our time. Disorientation pervades philosophy when the entire imaginary to which it (...) had anchored its power to change the world seems to dissolve in the air, when what was silent and distant turns out to be vibrant, more familiar to us than any known proximity. Precisely for this reason, philosophy must rediscover its ability to inhabit times and spaces different from those oriented by the hegemony of capitalist progress, with its correlate of regular catastrophic emergencies and calculated risk. In this essay, Giovanbattista Tusa aims to present a perspective in which, instead of coming back straightforwardly ‘down to earth’, philosophy accepts inhabiting the fluctuating disorientation of its own time, itself populated by intermittent and uncertain opportunities of experiencing differently the past and the future—to encounter different relationships with the times that change. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

Recent work on trauma, especially in the field of Holocaust studies, has tackled the question of how the “generation after” relates, and relates to, the trauma of its immediate ancestors as it navigates between the poles of remembrance and appropriation. Other studies have shifted focus towards the effects of trauma upon narration, in part through critiquing the prevailing psycho-analytic model of trauma as an unrepresentable event that evades/forecloses language. Aeschylus’ Suppliants, with its chorus of fifty female Danaids who react to (...) their traumatic present by recourse to tales of the traumatic past of their ancestor Io and her son Epaphos, offers a productive stage for testing the applicability of these theoretical frames to the genre of ancient Greek tragedy. The Danaids’ turn to the past explores the agency of an ancestral trauma that reaches into their present, and in doing so highlights the unsteady inheritance of trauma both for those who relate and for those who witness these acts of testimony. The act of supplication itself is defined in part by physical contact between the suppliant and the supplicandus, yet this ritual emphasis on touch is amplified by the play’s consistent focus upon a series of real and hypothesized touches, from the traumatic to the salvific. Through this engagement with the haptic context of trauma and traumatic recall, Aeschylus’ play proposes an enlarged aetiology of touch—across cognitive, affective, and physical registers—for the ritual of supplication itself. (shrink)

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how (...) new networked technologies, such as facial recognition, challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. (shrink)

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine.

During the last two decades, a sharp re-reading of St. Paul’s letters allowed several thinkers to embed a messianic element in their political philosophy. In these readings, the messianic refusal of the world and its laws is understood through the suspensive act of ‘subtraction’ – a movement of withdrawal which nonetheless proved too often ineffective when translated in political practice. -/- After having analysed Agamben’s declension of Subtraction in terms of ‘inoperativity’, this article focuses on the notion of Parousia as (...) a key element to understand his anti-utopian account of messianic time. In contrast with Agamben’s reading, Bloch’s interpretation of the Pauline Parousia envisages the messianic event as infra-historical, but at the same time opened to ultimate (meta-historical) purposes. Bloch’s messianic call – I argue – takes the form of mediation, a correction of subtraction towards the direction of a more committed political engagement. I conclude suggesting that the concrete implementations of this mediation perform their emancipatory function in so far as they assume the character of practical ethics, with the attention directed to the underprivileged and marginalised. (shrink)

For John Forrester, the ‘case’, particularly in its psychoanalytic version, makes possible a science of the particular – knowledge open to the differences of individuals and situations. This article takes up that aspect of Forrester’s account that linked the psychoanalytic case with forms of autobiography – new narrations of that particular self. After Freud, many authors – literary and psychoanalytic – have taken up the challenge of narrating subjectivity in new forms, engaging a quasi-psychoanalytic framework (H. D., Walter Benjamin, Frantz (...) Fanon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are examples). Focusing on Luisa Passerini’s text Autobiography of a Generation, which deals with the Italian experience of 1968, the article examines some of the features of such hybrid texts, and argues that psychoanalysis makes a contribution not just to the forms of self-investigation they pursue, but more significantly to the search for a radically new methodology of narration. Such models end up as ‘impossible’ cases, but in so doing they explore new interdisciplinary means for understanding the historical shaping of subjectivity. (shrink)

English- Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places offers a set of concepts that stimulate new approaches in planning, architecture, urban design, policy and other practices of spatial development. These diverse concepts might reveal blind spots in urban discourse or bring insights from one discipline to another. The term ‘minor’ refers to the ambition to look at the local and social specificity of urban places, and to challenge established discursive frameworks by giving voice to multiple actors in the debate. (...) This publication hopes to be a fieldguide that inspires spatial professionals, researchers, students and communities to exchange knowledge, to engage with urban places and to discover and develop responsible approaches to current urban challenges. -/- Dutch – Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places biedt een reeks concepten die nieuwe benaderingen in architectuur, stedenbouw en ruimtelijke ontwikkeling stimuleren. Deze uiteenlopende concepten kunnen blinde vlekken in het stedelijke discours onthullen of inzichten van de ene discipline naar de andere brengen. De term 'minor' verwijst naar de ambitie om naar de lokale en sociale specificiteit van stedelijke plekken te kijken en om gevestigde discursieve kaders uit te dagen, door stem te geven aan meerdere actoren in het debat. Deze publicatie is te zien als een veldgids die ruimtelijke professionals, onderzoekers, studenten en gemeenschappen inspireert om kennis uit te wisselen, over onderzoek naar stedelijke plekken, en om verantwoorde benaderingen te ontdekken en te ontwikkelen voor de hedendaagse stedelijke uitdagingen. -/- . (shrink)

This essay argues for the philosophical standing of Walter Benjamin’s early work and posits a deeper continuity between this early work as a philosopher and the subsequent development of his work as a writer. When these fragments are read in proper relation to each other, they reveal for the first time many of the key innovations of Benjamin as a philosopher, as well as his points of influence on Horkheimer and Adorno. His early ‘Program’ critiques the Enlightenment conception of experience (...) as a means for gaining empirical knowledge, and announces the need for a new concept of experience. Benjamin follows through on this program with a method of philosophical enquiry that is by turns fragmentary and constellational, developing a series of provisional notions of experience, which form a constellation with one another: perception, mimesis, language as a medium of experience, observation and memory. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth review of Andrew Feenberg’s Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. To this end, the anal...

This article argues that Walter Benjamin’s aesthetico-political philosophy cannot be understood without reconsidering Hamlet. It elucidates Benjamin’s Hamlet via his theory of Baroque “mourning” and its counter-measure, the “Saturnine Dialectic.” It likewise offers an analysis of the 1877 Herman Ulrici edition of Hamlet, the German edition Benjamin cites exclusively. This analysis reconciles the differences in the secondary literature regarding Benjamin’s Hamlet, expounding upon the edition’s singular use of the word “foreordination”. Finally, by rereading Benjamin’s Hamlet through Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or (...) Hecuba, it argues that Fortinbras’s succession, effectuated by Hamlet’s dying voice, conditions the repetition of sovereignty in Hamlet, betraying the emergence of the new. Despite this betrayal, the revolutionary potential that is sunken into the content of Hamlet is disjunctively brought to the surface by examining the “dialectical image” of Laertes’s rebellion, rescuing what I term the revolutionary-new from the jaws of defeat. (shrink)

From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions, this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental (...) connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin’s treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the “bad” way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the “good”? (shrink)

In this paper, the notion of pearl diving as a metaphor for historical methodology is explored as a possible conceptual contribution to pedagogical thinking and practice. Pearl diving in the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin refers to a process of bringing to life and coming to terms with a fragmented past, and requires of the thinker a form of Homeric impartiality. This they contrast with the processual and functional modern understanding of historiography, where events and things are subsumed (...) by a causal linearity. According to Arendt and Benjamin, our past cannot be understood as though in one piece, but should rather be engaged as fragmented and crystallised into events—or pearls—which can be retrieved and can help us to illuminate our past and to understand our present. This paper considers what such an approach would entail for pedagogical theory and practice, as well as for the work of the pedagogical thinker and the teacher. (shrink)

This paper explores the philosophies of myth of Walter Benjamin and Hans Blumenberg. It defends the thesis that both approaches to myth, despite their differences, bring the longer, more ambiguous, legacy of the history of the human species into relation with the more familiar history of logos (a history of thinking). They do this by maintaining a distinction between myth as it probably first emerged, namely as a way of controlling human anxieties and vulnerabilities that arose as a consequence of (...) the pragmatic, material conditions of the pre-historical world, and myth as the vast array of orally transmitted traditions left to history. In the case of both thinkers, this dichotomy illuminates myth, not as one category of human expression, but as a representation of the deeper vulnerabilities experienced by human beings, and the concerted, collective (largely failed) attempts to overcome them. Philosophy’s task in the face of a longer, darker history of the species, is a vigilant negotiation with the human frailties that might see its work undone. (shrink)

The overall aim of the composite thesis is the critical examination of the poetics and politics of memory, particularly in the extended role of the ekphrasis in literature. The creative work A Strange Chinese Tale draws on theoretical elements from Debord, Deleuze, Lefebvre, and Baudrillard, and provides a narrative for the post-modern political and cultural landscape of contemporary China, in relation to the individual’s search for a sense of belonging. The exegesis The Poetics, Politics and Writing of Memory argues for (...) the extension of the ekphrastic project into the domains of the photographic image and the ‘space of memory’. (shrink)

‘Plastinates’ (i.e. corpses conserved through plastics) are lab created artifacts which since the nineties have been the subject of a cultural field experiment via an anatomical exhibition. Similarly to brain-dead or digitalized bodies, they constitute an ambiguous form of post-mortem existence. The article inquires after the ways in which the ontological status of these entities is constituted through the practices of body donors, anatomists and visitors. Plastinates owe their ambiguity to an oscillation between two different frames of perception. Their meaning (...) is determined by the extent to which an anatomy exhibition can impose a ‘medical gaze’ over a non-professional way of perception, which would stubbornly associate bodies with persons. This association depends on two qualities of plastinates, which refer back to the donor: on the one hand, they draw the observer into a communicational relationship, since the body is the archetypal medium of the self-representation of persons. On the other hand, the plastinated body, considered as ‘bequest’, acquires a biographical dimension: though the exhibition tries to appropriate the individual body anatomically, as an exemplar of a timeless, abstract idea of the human, the visitor’s mundane perspective reintegrates the exhibit into history. Plastinates are the embodied expression of the last will of those people whom the public meets in the exhibition. (shrink)

The archive is the place for the storage of documents and records. With the emergence of the modern state, it became the storehouse for the material from which national memories were constructed. Archives also housed the proliferation of files and case histories as populations were subjected to disciplinary power and surveillance. Behind all scholarly research stands the archive. The ultimate plausibility of a piece of research depends on the grounds, the sources, from which the account is extracted and compiled. An (...) expanding and unstable globalizing archive presents particular problems for classifying and legitimating knowledge. Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies. Not only does the volume of recordable archive material increase dramatically (e.g. the Internet), but the volume of material seen worthy of archiving increases too, as the criteria of what can, or should be, archived expands. Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive. (shrink)

Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative-thus creative-force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender imaginary (...) on the other. The ontological metaphor as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes. (shrink)

Following the distinctions made by Susan Pearce between souvenir collections, fetishism collections and systematic collections, the present study will underline the idea that, for Walter Benjamin, collection was a way to reconnect with the past and to reconstruct an image of what was destroyed. Every object collected by Benjamin was for him a souvenir of the European cultural identity.

This paper examines the changing context for sexual images and the spaces that give law meaning. The details are evident in Congressional efforts to regulate sex on the Internet and the Supreme Court’s response as well as changing contexts for encountering forbidden images from the old stag films and peep shows to the local public library and sex sites on the web. The paper is part of a larger project on seeing law and the idea that Lady Justice is blind.

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

Benjamin has long been known for his literary and aesthetic theory but political theorists, as well as other scholars who are interested in questions of politics, tend to downplay (or simply not notice) his contributions to an actionable rhetorical-political discourse. In terms of a politics that speaks directly to the ongoing crisis of global capitalism, existing power arrangements, and the effective depoliticization of the vast majority of people living under such conditions (very much including advanced liberal capitalist democracies such as (...) the United States), it often seems that Benjamin might not have all that much to say.That, at least, is the way that he is often read. Marxists, if they pay attention to .. (shrink)

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history."Few areas of American public life have received as much attention with as little actual on-the-ground study as citizen deliberation," Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini argue. "Whether and how real citizens engage in discursive participation; the nature, settings, and impact of this public talk; and (...) when and if 'talk' ever rises to the level of 'democratic deliberation'—each of these is ignored or, at best, occasionally introduced by way of illustration or anecdote" (2009, 20-21).This is .. (shrink)

This paper recognizes that we become bored in our post-modern, consumerist Western world and that boredom is related to this existence and hidden within it. Through Heidegger, it seeks to provide a way to structure our understanding of boredom and suggest ways of acknowledging its cause, and then to allow it to liberate our authentic appreciation of the world of our workplace and what can be learnt through it. Using the approach of focusing on being in a societal workplace environment, (...) and the link to Heidegger’s notion of mood, revealed in Being and Time, boredom’s fundamental role is shown as a complex temporal manifold. Our superficial attempts to deal with things in datable time means that we miss the essential importance of the temporal manifold through which our being is revealed and where the Augenblick, (moment of vision) is the authentic present and temporalises itself of the authentic future (Heidegger in Being and time (trans: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). Blackwell, Oxford, 1962 , p. 338). For Heidegger this is to be understood as ecstasis (ibid, p. 338) when the resolute Dasein “is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered (ibid, p. 338). Such resoluteness enables the private capabilities to arise in public practice, not, however, in the conformity of what ‘one does’ (Das Man) but as an authentically choosing being. The challenge of an ontological pedagogy, regardless of its place of revelation that this prescribes a possibly be edifying mission for Dasein. Instead of chasing away boredom through busyness, a moment of vision could produce creative and authentic ways of being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Task of the Name: A Reply to Carol PosterJason HelmsIn the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.—Walter Benjamin, Arcades N1, 1 (1999)Logos, in whose lighting they come and go, remains concealed from them, and forgotten.—Martin Heidegger, “Aletheia” (1975, 122)One of the first things learned in the most rudimentary attempt at stargazing is (...) that the utmost effort must be paid in neglecting to gaze at stars. Instead, one must gaze near them. Owing to the physiological organization of the eye, night vision is enhanced toward the periphery of vision rather than the center. Consequently, one can actually perceive one’s own lack of perception by staring at a star, finding it disappear, and then staring near the star only to see it reappear. What follows, in this light or darkness or tension of these two extremes, is not empirical in any sense of the word, which is given to its own extremes. Rather, I hope through various a/(i)llusions and sidelong tangents to glance offthe surface of my target. As you may guess, superficial puns—like star(e)—provide one of the most reflective surfaces offof which to bounce/riff. [End Page 278]Carol Poster’s recent article, “The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language” (2006), provides much fruitful ground for a rhetorical critique of Heraclitus and a Heraclitean critique of rhetoric—many surfaces offof which to glance. However, her analysis is often in a decidedly unharmonious tension with itself. Accordingly, this essay constitutes an attempt to tune by ear. In the course of this response I will outline at which points I diverge from her argument, offering my own listening relation to, and consequently my own reading of, Heraclitus, and propose alternative, but perhaps corrective, views of Heraclitus’s relation to the Logos and his practiced rhetorics. Let us first start at the end before proceeding through Poster’s argument.Poster’s ConclusionsAt the end of her article, Poster offers five conclusions that afford us now an ingress for her essay. For the sake of brevity (and, of course, clarity and sincerity) I have shortened them and added a sixth with which she concludes the article:1. Heraclitus focuses on the problem of correctness of names substantially before Prodicus and Protagoras.... Heraclitus thus prefigures two themes discussed more extensively by later writers. First, Heraclitus seems concerned with the art of what came to be called “orthoepeia” (the study of correctness of names) for which the sophists Prodicus and Protagoras later became famous. Second, he at least considers the possibility that one can learn something about the nature of things by examining the nonliteral senses of their names, a position that is articulated in its most extreme form by the Heraclitean Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that name.2. Heraclitus is an early example of logos philosopher, in the Gadamerian sense, in that he believes that investigation of language can provide information that is not exclusively or trivially linguistic. He is an early example of the “linguistic turn” in Greek thought.3. For Heraclitus, the instability of language is part of a radical instability of the world. Since things change too quickly to be examined, their stable names are all that is available for investigation. While surfaces change, hidden harmonies, which are both concealed and revealed in words, remain. And yet even names themselves, if temporally fixed, are still interpretively unstable. [End Page 279]4. Each positively attributed name or statement should be read two ways simultaneously in a sustained and irresolvable tension, literally and nonliterally, with the opposing figurative statement both contradicting and yet sustaining the literal one.5. These considerations lead Heraclitus, in his own prose, to a constant tension between rejection of epic vocabulary and ideas as inaccurate and frequent use of them; even when Homer and Hesiod are partially rejected, inquiry into them remains a valid means of investigation. Heraclitus does not simply suggest that epic should be entirely ignored in favor, for example, of direct examination of or experimentation on physical objects, nor purely internal (Cartesian... (shrink)

In the article the painting Card Player Showing His Hand by T. Rombouts is being interpreted. It is noticed that two existential manifestations may interact in this composition: the gambler’s and Vanitas. In the first part of this article, an analysis is made how Rombouts presents card play as a way of being and how he integrates it into the genre of Vanitas. In the second part the hypothesis, is it proven that the composition of the painting continues the theme (...) of Vanitas and questions it at the same time. (shrink)

Siegfried Kracauer's reading of the work of R.G. Collingwood illuminates the crisis point in the relation between philosophy, history and how the present is thought. In this paper I argue that Kracauer's dismissal of Collingwood illuminates a misunderstanding of the latter's philosophical project, and takes no account of a certain affinity between the two thinkers. Collingwood not only shared Kracauer's view that a philosophically oriented historical investigation of the past might offer some hope for the present, but also had a (...) fuller grasp of the philosophical implications of the ambivalent relation between historical time and the present than Kracauer gave him credit for. (shrink)