Posts tagged ‘Walter Benjamin’
Art, documentary and the essay film
by Esther Leslie / RP 192 (July/Aug 2015) / Article, Philosophy of the Essay Film
Film as document
The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960. [1] Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a …
Generative grafting
Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy
by Elina Staikou / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Commentary
In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones chronicles the initial controversies surrounding their emergence and his own participation …
Extra, extra, read all about it!
Contemporary art is postconceptual art
by Antonia Birnbaum / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Article
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the main text refer to page numbers of this book.
‘The coming together of …
Defiance or emancipation?
by Peter Hallward / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Article
On Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Bloomsbury, London, 2013. 264 pp., £20.00 hb., 978 1 472522 58 0. Numbers in parentheses in the main text refer to pages of this book.
What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice …
Benjamin’s International Reception
18–20 September 2013, Berlin
by Elisa Santucci-Nitis / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Conference Report
Gudrun Schwarz, the main organizer of the recent symposium of the Walter Benjamin Archive in the Akademie der Künste, has been thinking about it – she says – for eight years, talking about it for six, and savouring its practical organization for the last four. Cai-Yong Wang from Fudan University, Shangai, opened by giving …
Socialism and the sea
Allan Sekula, 1951–2013
by Steve Edwards / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Obituary
Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The author of pioneering histories of photography, he produced genre-shifting exhibitions, books and videos. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and was renowned for the sheer range of …
Total social crisis and the return of fascism
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Elsa Papageorgiou / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom
In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clement Meric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.
This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What is at issue is the return of …
Politics in a Tragic Key
by Alberto Toscano / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Article
In memory of Joel Olson (1967-2012)
In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, …
Look at his marvellous hands!
by Esther Leslie / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Review
Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0.
Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in Heidegger’s Todtnauberg and peasants in ‘folksy …
On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht
With an Introduction by Andrew McGettigan
by Walter Benjamin and Andrew McGettigan / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013) / Extras
Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’
Andrew McGettigan
These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble …
Voyage au bout de l’ennui
by Alex Dubilet / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Review
After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013.
In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photograph projected onto a bare wall. The …
174 Reviews
Books Reviewed:Walter Benjamin, Early Writings, 1910–1917Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New ManifestoBernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial DemocraciesMiguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian MomentErika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global PoliticsAlison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal SubjectivityCatherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of PhilosophyNadir Lahiji, ed., The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s NarrativeGillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of MethodMartin Woessner, Heidegger in AmericaChris Danta, Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot
by Matthew Charles, Todd Cronan, Tom Bunyard, James D. Ingram, Jessica Schmidt, Christine Battersby, Tamkin Hussain, Douglas Spencer, David Winters, Samantha Frost and Martijn Boven / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012) / Reviews
Elementary
by David Cunningham / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012) / Review
Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0.
David Cunningham
In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of …
Faust on film
Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology of Goethe’s Faust 2
by Matthew Charles / RP 172 (Mar/Apr 2012) / Article
Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? (Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1a, 4)
Whilst the …
Occupy Time
by Jason Adams / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Commentary
Until recently a casual observer might have thoght that Occupy had developed a time-management problem: it was increasingly managed by movement a static, essentially timeless image of space. While Occupy Wall Street initially began with the declaration that 17 September would be the starting date and that it would continue for an unspecified …
Philosophy for children
by Matthew Charles / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article
A well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National …
Robinson in Ruins
New materialism and the archaeological imagination
by Paul Dave / RP 169 (Sep/Oct 2011) / Article
Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keiller’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson.1 The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson in Space, in 1997. Together they represent, aesthetically and politically, some of the most enlivening …
History (Problem with)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
by Michele Riot-Sarcey / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely …
It was better not to know
Chess News
by Peter Buse / RP 163 (Sep/Oct 2010) / Extras
What have we learnt from Andrew McGettigan’s reconstruction (in RP 161) of the photographedSvendborg chess match? In a nutshell, that Brecht played bad moves and Benjaminfailed to take advantage. For those of us who have long cherished the idea of these two playingmatches of the highest standard to match their contributions outside the chess board, …
Benjamin and Brecht
Attrition in friendship
by Andrew McGettigan / RP 161 (May/Jun 2010) / Extras
Andrew McGettigen on Benjamin and Brecht’s games of chess.
Art, documentary and the essay film
by Esther Leslie / RP 192 (July/Aug 2015) / Article, Philosophy of the Essay FilmFilm as document
The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960. [1] Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a …
Generative grafting
Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacyby Elina Staikou / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Commentary
In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones chronicles the initial controversies surrounding their emergence and his own participation …
Extra, extra, read all about it!
Contemporary art is postconceptual artby Antonia Birnbaum / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / Article
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013. vi + 282 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78168 113 8 hb., 978 1 78168 094 0 pb. Numbers in parentheses in the main text refer to page numbers of this book.
‘The coming together of …
Defiance or emancipation?
by Peter Hallward / RP 183 (Jan/Feb 2014) / ArticleOn Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Bloomsbury, London, 2013. 264 pp., £20.00 hb., 978 1 472522 58 0. Numbers in parentheses in the main text refer to pages of this book.
What is resistance? Rather than offering a conceptual definition, Howard Caygill’s new book approaches resistance as a problematic and elusive practice …
Benjamin’s International Reception
18–20 September 2013, Berlinby Elisa Santucci-Nitis / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Conference Report
Gudrun Schwarz, the main organizer of the recent symposium of the Walter Benjamin Archive in the Akademie der Künste, has been thinking about it – she says – for eight years, talking about it for six, and savouring its practical organization for the last four. Cai-Yong Wang from Fudan University, Shangai, opened by giving …
Socialism and the sea
Allan Sekula, 1951–2013by Steve Edwards / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Obituary
Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The author of pioneering histories of photography, he produced genre-shifting exhibitions, books and videos. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and was renowned for the sheer range of …
Total social crisis and the return of fascism
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Leftby Elsa Papageorgiou / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom
In memory of Sahtzat Loukman, 27 years old, murdered on 17 January 2013 in Athens, and Clement Meric, 18 years old, murdered on 5 June 2013 in Paris.
This contribution seeks to mobilize certain concepts in order to symbolize what, in part, always resists symbolization. What is at issue is the return of …
Politics in a Tragic Key
by Alberto Toscano / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / ArticleIn memory of Joel Olson (1967-2012)
In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, …
Look at his marvellous hands!
by Esther Leslie / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / ReviewYvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0.
Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in Heidegger’s Todtnauberg and peasants in ‘folksy …
On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht
With an Introduction by Andrew McGettiganby Walter Benjamin and Andrew McGettigan / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013) / Extras
Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Brecht’
Andrew McGettigan
These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble …
Voyage au bout de l’ennui
by Alex Dubilet / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / ReviewAfter History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May–15 July 2012; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 21 September–16 November 2012; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2012–7 January 2013.
In a darkened room stand seven podiums, like black treadmills at a standstill. Each faces a digitized photograph projected onto a bare wall. The …
174 Reviews
Books Reviewed:Walter Benjamin, Early Writings, 1910–1917Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New ManifestoBernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial DemocraciesMiguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian MomentErika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global PoliticsAlison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal SubjectivityCatherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of PhilosophyNadir Lahiji, ed., The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s NarrativeGillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of MethodMartin Woessner, Heidegger in AmericaChris Danta, Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchotby Matthew Charles, Todd Cronan, Tom Bunyard, James D. Ingram, Jessica Schmidt, Christine Battersby, Tamkin Hussain, Douglas Spencer, David Winters, Samantha Frost and Martijn Boven / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012) / Reviews
Elementary
by David Cunningham / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012) / ReviewBen Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, Unkant, London, 2011. 217 pp., £10.99 pb., 978 0 95681 760 0.
David Cunningham
In a much-cited March 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno famously remarks of the separation between autonomous art and mass culture that, while both ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism’, and ‘both contain elements of …
Faust on film
Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology of Goethe’s Faust 2by Matthew Charles / RP 172 (Mar/Apr 2012) / Article
Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one? (Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1a, 4)
Whilst the …
Occupy Time
by Jason Adams / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / CommentaryUntil recently a casual observer might have thoght that Occupy had developed a time-management problem: it was increasingly managed by movement a static, essentially timeless image of space. While Occupy Wall Street initially began with the declaration that 17 September would be the starting date and that it would continue for an unspecified …
Philosophy for children
by Matthew Charles / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / ArticleA well-orchestrated public relations campaign led primarily by educational charity The Philosophy Shop has helped raise the profile of the philosophy for children movement in the UK significantly over the last few years. Whilst The Philosophy Shop has been promoting its ‘Four Rs’ campaign to make ‘Reasoning’ a central feature of the National …
Robinson in Ruins
New materialism and the archaeological imaginationby Paul Dave / RP 169 (Sep/Oct 2011) / Article
Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keiller’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson.1 The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson in Space, in 1997. Together they represent, aesthetically and politically, some of the most enlivening …
History (Problem with)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)by Michele Riot-Sarcey / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely …
It was better not to know
Chess Newsby Peter Buse / RP 163 (Sep/Oct 2010) / Extras
What have we learnt from Andrew McGettigan’s reconstruction (in RP 161) of the photographedSvendborg chess match? In a nutshell, that Brecht played bad moves and Benjaminfailed to take advantage. For those of us who have long cherished the idea of these two playingmatches of the highest standard to match their contributions outside the chess board, …
Benjamin and Brecht
Attrition in friendshipby Andrew McGettigan / RP 161 (May/Jun 2010) / Extras
Andrew McGettigen on Benjamin and Brecht’s games of chess.
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