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Walter Benjamin And Political Theology
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Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and Theology by : Colby Dickinson
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Theology written by Colby Dickinson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Metaphysics of the Profane by : Eric Jacobson
Download or read book Metaphysics of the Profane written by Eric Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II. Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.
Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and Political Theology by : Brendan Moran
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Political Theology written by Brendan Moran and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing Walter Benjamin's convergences with, and divergences from, influential German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this edited collection contextualizes Benjamin's thinking in the intellectual currents of his time, while also placing him in dialogue with traditions and thinkers from antiquity to the present. At stake is whether Benjamin presents the possibility of a distinctive political theology-a question which the collection addresses without collapsing the tensions internal to Benjamin's thought. Benjamin's thought has been a touchstone, explicitly or implicitly, in numerous efforts to conceive of a 'new' political theology that is not anchored in legitimizing and preserving power, but in justice and liberation. Benjamin interrogates the political-theological complex from what may be construed as a vantage point opposed to Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt excavates the theological elements in modernity in order to shore up liberalism's illiberal inheritance, Benjamin roots out these latent structures in order to dissolve them and liberate us from their oppressive legacy. This volume's multifaceted contributions explore why Benjamin has been such a fertile source for thinking about political theology beyond – and often against – Schmitt. Benjamin indicates how existing political theologies can be challenged or expanded. This book accordingly makes a wide range of relevant work available for study whilst also opening new perspectives on Benjamin's œuvre.
Book Synopsis Toward the Critique of Violence by : Walter Benjamin
Download or read book Toward the Critique of Violence written by Walter Benjamin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
Book Synopsis Divine Violence by : James R. Martel
Download or read book Divine Violence written by James R. Martel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Working with Walter Benjamin by : Andrew Benjamin
Download or read book Working with Walter Benjamin written by Andrew Benjamin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Future of Illusion by : Victoria Kahn
Download or read book The Future of Illusion written by Victoria Kahn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with the theological underpinnings of modern politics, Victoria Kahn proposes a return to secularism—whose origins she locates in the art, literature, and political theory of the early modern period—and argues in defense of literature and art as a force for secular liberal culture. Kahn draws on theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt and their readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Spinoza to illustrate that the dialogue between these modern and early modern figures can help us rethink the contemporary problem of political theology. Twentieth-century critics, she shows, saw the early modern period as a break from the older form of political theology that entailed the theological legitimization of the state. Rather, the period signaled a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency and a new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction intersected the terrain of religion.
Book Synopsis Political Theology by : Paul W. Kahn
Download or read book Political Theology written by Paul W. Kahn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation In a text innovative in both form and substance, Kahn forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary.
Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy by : Duy Lap Nguyen
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy written by Duy Lap Nguyen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.
Book Synopsis Hermeneutic Humility and the Political Theology of Cinema by : Sean Desilets
Download or read book Hermeneutic Humility and the Political Theology of Cinema written by Sean Desilets and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits the tradition of Western religious cinema in light of scholarship on St. Paul’s political theology. The book’s subtitle derives from the account in the Book of Acts that St. Paul was temporarily blinded in the wake of his conversion on the road to Damascus. In imitation of Paul, the films on which Sean Desilets’s analysis hinges (including those of Carl-Th. Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Carlos Reygadas) place a god-blind mechanism, the camera, between themselves and the divine. Desilets calls the posture they adopt "hermeneutic humility": hermeneutic in that it interprets the world, but humble in that it pays particular—even obsessive—attention to its own limits. Though these films may not consciously reflect Pauline theology, Desilets argues that they participate in a messianic-hermeneutic tradition that runs from Paul through St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, Karl Barth, and Walter Benjamin, and which contributes significantly to contemporary discussions in poststructuralist literary theory, political theology, and religious studies. Desilets’s insightful explication of Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity and Georgio Agamben’s recent work on religion makes a substantial contribution to film philosophy and emerging critical trends in the study of religion and film. This book puts forward a nuanced theoretical framework that will be useful for film scholars, students of contemporary political theology, and scholars interested in the intersections of religion and media.
Book Synopsis The Political Theology of Paul by : Jacob Taubes
Download or read book The Political Theology of Paul written by Jacob Taubes and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original interpretation of Paul by the Jewish philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes was presented in a number of lectures held in Heidelberg toward the end of his life, and was regarded by him as his "spiritual testament. Taubes engages with classic Paul commentators, including Karl Barth, but also situates the Pauline text in the context of Freud, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, and Rosenzweig. In his distinctive argument for the apocalyptic-revolutionary potential of Romans, Taubes also takes issue with the "political theology advanced by the conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Taubess reading has been crucial for a number of interpretations of political theology and of Paul--including those of Jan Assmann and Giorgio Agamben--and it belongs to a wave of fresh considerations of Pauls legacy (Boyarin, Lyotard, Badiou, Zîzêk). Finally, Taubess far-ranging lectures provide important insights into the singular experiences and views of this unconventional Jewish intellectual living in post-Holocaust Germany.
Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique by : Carlo Salzani
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique written by Carlo Salzani and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The striking actuality of Walter Benjamin’s work does not rest on a supposed “usefulness” of his philosophy for current concerns, but rather on the high “legibility” to which his oeuvre has come in the present. Indeed, this legibility is a function of critique, which unearths the truth-content of a work in a constellation of reading with the present, and assures thereby that the work lives on. Following this methodological tenet, this book approaches Benjamin’s work with two foci: the actuality of his critique of violence, a central and unavoidable topic in the contemporary political-philosophical debate, and the actuality of his critique of experience, which perhaps is not as conspicuous as that of his critique of violence but constitutes, nonetheless, the bedrock upon which his whole philosophy rests.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Uwe Steiner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intriguing theorist. Acknowledged only by a small circle of intellectuals during his lifetime, Benjamin is now a major figure whose work is essential to an understanding of modernity. Steiner traces the development of Benjamin’s thought chronologically through his writings on philosophy, literature, history, politics, the media, art, photography, cinema, technology, and theology. Walter Benjamin reveals the essential coherence of its subject’s thinking while also analyzing the controversial or puzzling facets of Benjamin’s work. That coherence, Steiner contends, can best be appreciated by placing Benjamin in his proper context as a member of the German philosophical tradition and a participant in contemporary intellectual debates. As Benjamin’s writing attracts more and more readers in the English-speaking world, Walter Benjamin will be a valuable guide to this fascinating body of work.
Download or read book Political Theology written by Saul Newman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God is dead, but his presence lives on in politics. This is the problem of political theology: the way that theological ideas find their way into secular political institutions, particularly the sovereign state. In this intellectual tour-de-force, leading political theorist Saul Newman shows how political theology arose alongside secularism, and relates to the problem of legitimising power and authority in modernity. It is not about the power of religion so much as about the religion of power. Examining the current crisis of the liberal order, he argues that recent phenomena such as the rise of populism, the renewed demand for strong national sovereignty and the return of religious fundamentalism may be understood through this paradigm. He illustrates his argument through an exploration of themes such as sovereignty, democracy, economics, technology, ecological catastrophe, messianism and the future of radical politics, engaging with thinkers ranging from Schmitt and Hobbes to Stirner, Foucault, and Agamben. This book will be a crucial text for all students, scholars and general readers interested in the meaning and significance of political theology for political theory.
Book Synopsis Textual Conspiracies by : James Martel
Download or read book Textual Conspiracies written by James Martel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a sophisticated and fascinating argument written in a very enjoyably entertaining style. It is hard for me to see how readers initially interested in these texts will not be ‘swept off their feet’ by the core assertions of this author, and the devastatingly comprehensive way in which he demonstrates those arguments.” —Brent Steele, University of Kansas In Textual Conspiracies, James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the question of politics and the predicament of the contemporary left. Through the lens of Benjamin’s theories, as influenced by Kafka, of the fetishization of political symbols and signs, Martel looks at the ways in which various political and literary texts “speak” to each other across the gulf of time and space, thereby creating a “textual conspiracy” that destabilizes grand narratives of power and authority and makes the narratives of alternative political communities more apparent. However, in keeping with Benjamin’s insistence that even he is complicit with the fetishism that he battles, Martel decentralizes Benjamin’s position as the key theorist for this conspiracy and contextualizes Benjamin in what he calls a “constellation” of pairs of thinkers and writers throughout history, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Allen Poe, Hannah Arendt and Federico García Lorca, and Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar.
Download or read book Fire Alarm written by Michael Lowy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.
Book Synopsis Benjamin's Library by : Jane O. Newman
Download or read book Benjamin's Library written by Jane O. Newman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Benjamin’s Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin’s day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin’s work, Newman recovers Benjamin’s relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
