This article seeks to renegotiate Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory as an image that is a “fragment [… in which] the false appearance of totality is extinguished” in the cont...

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)

Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis reenacts and actualizes the time-honored tradition of a mental experiment that purports to efface the boundaries between man and animal. This ancient conceptual device, known in Baroque times as physica naturalis, seeks to illuminate the world of culture by means of its approximation with the world of nature. Instead of opposing poles, nature and culture become reflecting mirrors where man can acknowledge his ties to nature and the animal kingdom. More than just a rhetorical trope, the (...) so-called allegory of natural history comprises what could be defined as a "philosophy of animality," espoused by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simondon and Jacques Derrida. In Vampyroteuthis, Flusser resorts to a strange marine creature in order to elaborate a sophisticated meditation on human existence and our relationship with the technological apparatuses we incessantly devise. The goal of this paper is to examine the recent history of the allegory, tracing its developments in the works of contemporary scholars, such as Siegfried Zielinski, Manuel de Landa and Vilém Flusser himself. Moreover, it investigates the applicability of the "philosophy of animality" within the field of film theory, suggesting an approach to filmic experience that focuses on the "material" aspects of cinema and regards the spectator's body as a site for the translation of images into affect and sensation. (shrink)

In this article, I reconstruct Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language and refine the non-predicational view of meaning often attributed to him. By situating his 1916 essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ within the context of his struggle with Russell's paradox and its implications for phenomenology, I show how Benjamin arrives at his conception of non-conceptual content as an environmentally embedded affordance that is directly apprehended by appropriately situated and capable agents. This affordance-like character of meaning (...) explains Benjamin's account of communication, Adamic naming, and his famous distinction between linguistic and spiritual essences (sprachliche- and geistige Wesen). I conclude by showing why translation is central to his views on expression and communication and how it reinforces his account of language-use. (shrink)

El presente trabajo explora la posible afinidad de método entre las obras de Walter Benjamin y Ludwig Wittgenstein. El intento por parte de Benjamin de desarrollar un nuevo método de representación histórica gravita en torno a la categoría de “origen”, la cual sostiene sus más importantes trabajos de investigación histórica. En paralelo al trabajo de Benjamin, Wittgenstein dedicó una especial atención al problema de una exposición filosófica de los fenómenos, en especial en sus investigaciones sobre el lenguaje, a través de (...) categorías como la “representación perspicua” o la “visión de aspectos”. La filiación común de la reflexión de ambos autores en la morfología de Goethe nos permitirá definir el perfil de un posible enfoque estético para la investigación filosófica, dirigida a captar la generalidad de los fenómenos sin renunciar a salvaguardar su singularidad única. (shrink)

‘Tragedy’ is one of those curiously elastic words reserved for life's saddest spheres and events, irrespective of the forms in which they appear. Even though a vast body of genre studies has emerged, however, only a handful of studies have drawn cross-historical comparisons between tragic forms. This essay demonstrates how Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Attic tragedy may contribute to such a line of thought, focusing both on tragedies’ subversive potential and on the social-historical constellations in which they first emerged. In (...) the first part, Benjamin’s conception of the Attic tragedies is explored by focusing on his The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the theoretical roots of his earlier work. According to Benjamin, Attic tragedies offered a messianic, dialectical critique on the social-historical constellation in which they appeared. The second part of the article discusses the relevance of these reflections for the analysis of contemporary tragic forms, thereby identifying the heirs of Attic tragedy outside the strict boundaries of ‘drama’. (shrink)