Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989-) [English, Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, advertising, bourgeoisie, city, commodification, critical theory, cultural criticism, fashion, flaneur, history, literary criticism, literature, paris, photography, poetry
Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.
Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.
The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.
Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.
Publisher MIT Press, 1989
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Series
ISBN 0262022680
493 pages
publisher
google books
review (Beste Alpay, The Montréal Review)
Susan Buck-Morss at Monoskop wiki (incl. source bibliography)
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (English, updated on 2013-5-2)
Dialectica de la mirada: Walter Benjamin y el proyecto de los Pasajes (Spanish, trans. Nora Rabotnikof, 1995, updated on 2013-5-2)
Download Benjamin’s Arcade Project (German, English)
Jacques Rancière: Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998/2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, critical theory, history, history of literature, literary criticism, literature, philosophy, poetry, politics
Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.
Originally published in French as La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Hachette Litteratures, 1998
Translated by James Swenson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory series
ISBN 0231151039, 9780231151030
194 pages
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project (1982/1999) [German/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, advertising, bourgeoisie, city, commodification, critical theory, cultural criticism, fashion, flaneur, history, literary criticism, literature, paris, photography, poetry
“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.”
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris—glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism—Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Dream City,” “Photography,” “Catacombs,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution,” “Baudelaire,” and “Theory of Progress.” His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things—a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
German edition: Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5: Das Passagen-Werk
Edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1982
ISBN 3518285351
1354 pages
English edition
Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
Publisher The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA and London, 1999
ISBN 067404326X, 9780674043268
1073 pages
wikipedia (EN)
publisher (EN)
google books (EN)
Benjamin at Monoskop wiki (incl. source bibliography)
Download (German)
Download (English)
Susan Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 1989
Roger Behrens: Kulturindustrie (2004) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · critical theory, culture industry, dialectics
Beschränkte sich die Kritik der Kulturindustrie, die Adorno und Horkheimer in ihrer Gemeinschaftsarbeit »Dialektik der Aufklärung« entwickelt haben, darauf, dass sie bloß den Kommerz und Ausverkauf der Kultur monierten? Und erklärten sie die Massen für zu dumm, das Unterhaltungsangebot als stumpfsinnigen Betrug zu durchschauen? Entgegen dieser gängigen Lesart der Kulturindustriethese interpretiert Roger Behrens den Begriff als zentrale Kategorie einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Die Kritik der Kulturindustrie bewahrt ihre Aktualität angesichts der neueren Entwicklung – Stichwort »Popkultur« – als radikale Diagnose einer von der ökonomischen Verwertungslogik bestimmten Gesellschaft. Die kritische Theorie der Kulturindustrie konstatiert, dass von der Kulturindustrie durchaus mehr Befriedigung und Glück erwartet werden darf, als heute dem Publikum vermittelt wird. Das Publikum ist keineswegs zu dumm, um sich mit den angebotenen Kulturwaren zu bescheiden, sondern verfügt über genügend Phantasie, sich eine bessere Welt vorzustellen, die freilich mehr menschliches Glück garantiert als die durch das abstrakte Profitmotiv vermittelte Ideologie der Kulturindustrie. – Nicht die Kultur gilt es abzuschaffen, sondern die Gesellschaft selbst muss verändert werden, um das Recht der Menschen auf gute Unterhaltung zu gewährleisten.
Publisher Transcript, 2004
Issue 15 of Bibliothek dialektischer Grundbegriffe
ISBN 3899422465, 9783899422467
50 pages
Axel Honneth: Critical Essays: With a Reply by Axel Honneth (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · autonomy, critical theory, critique, intersubjectivity, philosophy
Axel Honneth: Critical Essays brings together a collection of critical interpretations on the work of Axel Honneth, from his earliest writings on philosophical anthropology, his reappraisal of critical theory and critique of post-structuralism, to the development and extension of the theory of recognition, his debate with Nancy Fraser and his most recent work on reification. The book also includes a comprehensive reply by Axel Honneth that not only addresses issues and concerns raised by his critics but also provides significant insights and clarifications into his project overall. The book will be essential reading for all those interested in Honneth’s work, and in critical theory, philosophy and social theory more generally.
Edited and introduced by Danielle Petherbridge
Publisher BRILL, Leiden/Boston 2011
Volume 12 of Social and Critical Theory
ISBN 9004208852, 9789004208858
452 pages
Fred Botting, Scott Wilson (eds.): The Bataille Reader (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, art, art history, critical theory, economics, literature, philosophy, sociology
Since the publication in France of his Oeuvres Completes in the mid-1970s, the breadth of Bataille’s writing and influence has become increasingly apparent across the disciplines in, for example, the fields of literature, art, art history, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, economics, and anthropology.
Publisher Wiley, 1997
Blackwell Readers series
ISBN 0631199594, 9780631199595
368 pages
Download (no OCR, link fixed on 2012-10-25)
Comments (3)Axel Honneth: The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985/1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · critical theory, critique, hermeneutics, history, philosophy, philosophy of history, power, psychoanalysis, social theory
Axel Honneth’s Critique of Power is a rich interpretation of the history of critical theory, which clarifies its central problems and emphasizes the “social” factors that should provide that theory with a normative and practical orientation.
Honneth focuses on the dialog between French and German social theory that was beginning at the time of Michel Foucault’s death. It traces the common roots of the work of Foucault and Jürgen Habermas to a basic text of the last generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – and draws from this connection the outline of a program that might unite and surpass their seemingly irreconcilable methods of critiquing power structures. In doing so, Honneth provides a constructive and nonpolemical framework for comparisons between the two theorists. And he presents a novel interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of social systems.
Honneth traces the internal contradictions in critical theory through an analysis of Horkheimer’s early programmatic writings, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno’s later social-theoretical writings. He shows how Habermas and Foucault in their distinctive ways reinserted the social world into critical theory but argues that neither operation has been wholly successful. His cogent analysis redirects critical social theory in ways that can draw on the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of the two approaches.
Originally published in German under the title Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1985
Translated by Kenneth Baynes
Publisher MIT Press, 1991
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262581280, 9780262581288
372 pages
review (Elaine Martin)
Comment (0)
