This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant (...) to and, in part, motivated by concerns of more mainstream twentieth century philosophy of language, in particular Russell's paradox. His “metaphysics of language” understands reference or designation, central to analytic theories of meaning, as derived from a more fundamental, aesthetic meaning. (shrink)

Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the “optical uncon...

The philosophical underpinnings of this article are the Peircian notion of the triadic nature of the sign as iconic, linguistic and indexical, and the use of the sign as a ‘Zeug’ or thing as a means of pointing to or deixis in the context of creative activity in the classroom. This involves Lyotard's conception of desire as the generation of a space where the pupil can be affected by what the world donates. Both deixis and desire take on added value (...) in relation to the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott in terms of the role of transitional object use in the generation of ‘potential space’, and Nussbaum's notion of tyche or being on the lookout for what the world has to offer. In terms of education, the central section of the article looks at the way these notions can be applied to teaching and learning in the secondary art classroom. This involves the use of what I have termed transitional notation, combining all three Peircian sign modes on a surface of inscription that is ‘ready-to-hand and that operates as what the anthropologist Alfred Gell termed an ‘index of agency’. (shrink)

Cet article examine les liens entre, pour l’aspect technique, le plan séquence et le montage, et, pour l’aspect philosophico-historique, la vie quotidienne et la politique mondiale, du point de vue d’une profanation capable de désamorcer la puissance et avec une attention particulière portée à l’unique film expérimental de Pasolini : La sequenza del fiore di. Ce court métrage n’a pas seulement un statut spécial dans la filmographie de Pasolini, il marque aussi un tournant du tragique vers un ton comique/pessimiste de (...) son cinéma profanateur. Cet article révèle aussi une réception inattendue de Heidegger, par l’intermédiaire du marxisme heideggerien de Karel Kosik et d’une conception benjaminienne du profane fondée sur l’idée de bonheur. (shrink)

Why does Walter Benjamin claim “indirection” to be the proper method for philosophical contemplation and writing? Why is this method—embodied, according to Benjamin, in the convoluted form of scholastic treatises and in their use of citations—fundamental for understanding his Origin of German Trauerspiel as suggesting an alternative to most strands of modern philosophy? The explicit and well-studied function of this method is for the presentation of what cannot be represented in language, of what cannot be intended or approached in thinking. (...) Namely, of what Benjamin understands as “truth.” Indeed, as Adorno implied, providing a method for presenting an intentionless reality, rather than for re-presenting the world as corresponding to the mind, is revolutionary. However, I claim that beyond its presentational function, the method of indirection has a further, pedagogical function. Benjamin’s concept of truth requires thinking in a manner that does not impose any exterior form, any conceptual or intuitive intention on truth and the materials in which it might be exhibited. The methodological adoption of digressive and intermittent writing is supposed to transform the way we think, or more accurately, the position from which thinking occurs. By examining Benjamin’s use of pedagogical terms against the backdrop of scholastic history and the Urfigure of modern method, that of Descartes, I show that writing and reading in the form of the tractatus serves as exercise in receding from the subject-position—a position of a subject intending an object—and thus conditions the presentation of intentionless truth. (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)

Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts all of which touch upon the concept of youth and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith and political action, religion and secularization, God, and the world. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed Benjamin’s early works on language, literature, and esthetics, less attention has been given to his work on youth. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. (...) Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart, who is rarely discussed in connection to Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modern-mystical theory of youth. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo explora las figuras del flâneur y del "mestizo". Reúno con el sustantivo "mestizo" una serie de operaciones estilísticas y retóricas que emplea Echeverría para describir el mestizaje como fenómeno histórico de las sociedades urbanas en las colonias españolas en los siglos XVI y XVII. Partiré de la lectura de Echeverría a Benjamin de principios de los años noventa. Luego analizaré la figura del flâneur y la del mestizo para mostrar algunas líneas de conexión, desde la estrategia alegórica (...) a la relación entre el barroco y la sociedad moderna. Por último, consideraré ambas figuras como paradigmas de sujetidad barroca, es decir, como principios de inteligibilidad de formas sociales que resisten las contradicciones de la modernidad capitalista.This article explores two figures: the flâneur and the "mestizo". Under the word "mestizo" I gather a group of stylistic and rhetorical operations that Echeverría uses to describe mestizaje as a historical phenomenon occurred in the urban societies of spanish Colonies during the 16th and 17th centuries. I start with a historical approach to Echeverría's readings of Benjamin from the beginning of the 1990s. Then I show some possible connections between both figures, from the allegorical strategy to the relationship between baroque and modern society. Finally, I conceive them as paradigms of baroque sujetity; that is, principles of intelligibility of social forms that resist the contradictions of Western modern capitalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a reflection on his Marxist past, J. F. Lyotard described a différend between himself and the revolutionary discourse. This might also represent the relations between the latter and the contemporary discourse of resistance, with its characteristic fascination with non-teleological political action. The disdain for teleology apparently justifies the incommensurability of these discourses, thus disabling any inheritance of elements of the revolutionary tradition. This essay challenges the unbridgeable nature of this gap and explores alternative relations between the two discourses, (...) such as mimetic ones, by reading Walter Benjamin's somewhat neglected fragments on barricades in his Arcades Project. Benjamin's concept of interruption – celebrated by contemporary theorists of resistance – alongside his non-teleological concept of revolution, provides the theoretical armature for this task. Thus, I use barricades, commonly conceived as the emblem of the revolutionary tradition, in order to reconsider the possibility of inheriting aspects of this tradition in times in which the predominant discourse is that of resistance. (shrink)