Walter Benjamin and Theology

Walter Benjamin and Theology PDF Author: Colby Dickinson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082327019X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Walter Benjamin and Theology

Walter Benjamin and Theology PDF Author: Colby Dickinson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082327019X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book

Book Description
In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Walter Benjamin and Theology

Walter Benjamin and Theology PDF Author: Colby Dickinson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823270217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Benjamin's relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should. 'Walter Benjamin and Theology' brings together some of the world's most renowned experts to reassess the stake theology has in Benjamin's writings, aiming for nothing less than the beginning of a new phase in Anglophone Benjamin scholarship.

Metaphysics of the Profane

Metaphysics of the Profane PDF Author: Eric Jacobson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231501536
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem are regarded as two of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Together they produced a dynamic body of ideas that has had a lasting impact on the study of religion, philosophy, and literary criticism. Drawing from Benjamin's and Scholem's ideas on messianism, language, and divine justice, this book traces the intellectual exchange through the early decades of the twentieth century—from Berlin, Bern, and Munich in the throws of war and revolution to Scholem's departure for Palestine in 1923. It begins with a close reading of Benjamin's early writings and a study of Scholem's theological politics, followed by an examination of Benjamin's proposals on language and the influence these ideas had on Scholem's scholarship on Jewish mysticism. From there the book turns to their ideas on divine justice—from Benjamin's critique of original sin and violence to Scholem's application of the categories to the prophets and Bolshevism. Metaphysics of the Profane is the first book to make this early period available to a wider audience, revealing the intricate structure of this early intellectual partnership on politics and theology.

The Late Walter Benjamin

The Late Walter Benjamin PDF Author: John Schad
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441131582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A startling critical-creative examination of one of the 20th Century's leading thinkers, The Late Walter Benjamin is a documentary novel that juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. The novel centres on one particular tenant who claims to be Walter Benjamin, and only ever uses words written by Benjamin, apparently oblivious that the real Benjamin committed suicide 20 years earlier whilst fleeing the Nazis. Initially set in the sixties, the text slips back to the early years of the estate and to Benjamin's last days, as he moves across Europe seeking ever-more desperately to escape the Third Reich. Through this fictional narrative, John Schad explores not only the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism but also the implications of his utopian Marxism, forged in exile, for the very different context of a displaced working class community in post-war Britain.

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition PDF Author: John McCole
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728679
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "intellectual field," McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. The fullest account of Benjamin available in English, this lucid and penetrating book will be welcomed by intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, historians of German literature, and Continental philosophers.

Metaphysics of the Profane

Metaphysics of the Profane PDF Author: Eric Jacobson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231126564
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem are regarded as two of the foremost Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, yet much of their early work remains obscure and under appreciated. This volume concentrates on the period 1918-1923, when Benjamin and Scholem produced a dynamic body of ideas.

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics PDF Author: S. Brent Plate
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415969925
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Divine Violence

Divine Violence PDF Author: James R. Martel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136632557
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Divine Violence looks at the question of political theology and its connection to sovereignty. It argues that the practice of sovereignty reflects a Christian eschatology, one that proves very hard to overcome even by left thinkers, such as Arendt and Derrida, who are very critical of it. These authors fall into a trap described by Carl Schmitt whereby one is given a (false) choice between anarchy and sovereignty, both of which are bound within—and return us to—the same eschatological envelope. In Divine Violence, the author argues that Benjamin supplies the correct political theology to help these thinkers. He shows how to avoid trying to get rid of sovereignty (the "anarchist move" that Schmitt tells us forces us to "decide against the decision") and instead to seek to de-center and dislocate sovereignty so that it’s mythological function is disturbed. He does this with the aid of divine violence, a messianic force that comes into the world to undo its own mythology, leaving nothing in its wake. Such a move clears the myths of sovereignty away, turning us to our own responsibility in the process. In that way, the author argues,Benjamin succeeds in producing an anarchism that is not bound by Schmitt’s trap but which is sustained even while we remain dazzled by the myths of sovereignty that structure our world. Divine Violence will be of interest to students of political theory, to those with an interest in political theology, philosophy and deconstruction, and to those who are interested in thinking about some of the dilemmas that the ‘left’ finds itself in today.

Working with Walter Benjamin

Working with Walter Benjamin PDF Author: Andrew Benjamin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748634355
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of 'working with' Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.

Walter Benjamin and Political Theology

Walter Benjamin and Political Theology PDF Author: Brendan P. Moran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350284357
Category : Political theology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Tracing Walter Benjamin's convergences with, and divergences from, influential German theorist Carl Schmitt, this edited collection places his thinking in the context of broader 20th century political philosophy of his time, and examines the question of whether Benjamin presents the possibility for a distinctive political theology, mapping the coordinates of this question without collapsing the tensions internal to Benjamin's thought. This volume brings together a host of multifaceted contributions that explore why Benjamin has been a fertile source for thinking about political theology and the possibilities that this new perspective brings to light"--