Alain Badiou: Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998–)

“Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.

Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.

Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett.”

Originally published in French as Petit manuel d’inesthetique, Seuil, Paris, 1998

Translated by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2004
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804744092, 9780804744096
168 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)

Susan Buck-Morss: The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and The Frankfurt Institute (1977-) [English, Spanish]

Publisher The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1977
ISBN 0029049105
352 pages

review (Gillian Rose, History and Theory)

google books (EN)
Susan Buck-Morss at Monoskop wiki

The Origin of Negative Dialectics (English, 1977)
Origen de la dialéctica negativa (Spanish, trans. Nora Rabotnikof Maskivker, 1981, no OCR)

Walter Benjamin: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 (1994)

“Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin’s correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.”

Edited and Annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno
Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0226042375, 9780226042374
674 pages

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2015-11-15 upon request of the publisher)