Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1955-) [EN, ES, SK]
Filed under book | Tags: · cultural criticism, literature, philosophy of history, theatre, translation
“Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht’s Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history.
Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin’s life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin’s continued relevance for our times.”
First published in German as Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1955
English edition
Translated by Harry Zohn
Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt
First published in 1968
Preface by Leon Wieseltier
Publisher Schocken Books, a division of Random House, New York, 2007
ISBN 0805202412, 9780805202410
278 pages
Publisher (EN)
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (English, 1968/2007, updated on 2020-3-16)
Iluminaciones II: Baudelaire: un poeta en el esplendor del capitalismo (Spanish, trans. Jesús Aguirre, 1972, added on 2013-6-11)
Iluminácie (Slovak, trans. Adam Bžoch and Jana Truhlářová, 1999, added on 2013-6-11)
Luc Boltanski: Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics (1993/1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, ethics, humanitarianism, mass media, media, moral theory
“Distant Suffering examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith’s moral theory, he examines three rhetorical ‘topics’ available for the expression of the spectator’s response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a ‘crisis of pity’ in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.”
Keywords and phrases
Bernard Kouchner, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Marxism, Adam Smith, Hannah Arendt, However, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, mediatisation, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Genealogy of Morality, Marquis de Sade, spectator, Pierre Favre, sentimental literature, Paris, USSR
Originally published in French as La Souffrance à Distance by Editions Métailié, 1993
Translated by Graham D. Burchell
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1999
ISBN 0521659531, 9780521659536
246 pages
EPUB (updated on 2019-5-15)
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