Behind the Angel of History PDF Download

Author: Annie Bourneuf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816702
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
"This short book offers a dazzling new interpretation of Paul Klee's most famous work: his Angelus Novus (1920), which was purchased by Walter Benjamin and became the model for his Angel of History, a figure saturated with Jewish mysticism that he introduces in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 2014 the celebrated American artist R. H. Quaytman made a surprising discovery about Klee's work when she examined it at the Jewish Museum in Israel. She realized that Klee had carefully pasted the Angelus down over another image, a face, leaving just a finger's breadth of it showing. Through forensic science and lots of sleuthing it was determined that face belonged to Martin Luther. Behind the Angel of History tells the story of how Quaytman solved the mystery of who lurks behind Klee's angel. It then plunges into questions about why a face long hidden beneath another picture might matter. The book travels through a tangle of loaded conversations among images-from Klee's Angelus to Benjamin's own drawing of a crucified angel, from Klee's Angelus to Quaytman's own layered panels meditating on its secret"--

Author: Stéphane Mosès
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804741166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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In "The Angel of History," Moses looks at three philosophersFranz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholemwho formulated a new vision of history informed by Jewish messianism in 1920s Germany."

Author: Bruno Arpaia
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1841959839
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
For a brief moment in 1940 the lives of a young Spanish militant and a reclusive academic of German and Jewish heritage are thrown together. Both men have fled their homeland in the face of fascist persecution, yet until the day their paths converge on a remote mountain pass, their experience of war has been vastly different.

Author: Joshua Farris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100043334X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
The influence of materialist ontology largely dominates philosophical and scientific discussions. However, there is a resurgent interest in alternative ontologies from panpsychism (the view that at the base of reality exists potential minds, minds, or mind-lets) to idealism and dualism (the view that all of reality is material and mental). The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism is an outstanding reference source and the first major collection of its kind. Historically grounded and constructively motivated, it covers the key topics in philosophy, science, and theology, providing students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to idealism and immaterialism. Also addressed are post-materialism developments, with explicit attention to variations of idealism and immaterialism (the view that reality depends on a mind or a set of minds). Comprising 44 chapters written by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, the Handbook is organised into five clear parts: Idealism and the history of philosophy Important figures in idealism Systematic assessment of idealism Idealism and science Idealism, physicalism, panpsychism, and substance dualism Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind, The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism will also be of interest to those in related discplines where idealist and immaterialist ontology impinge on history, science, and theology.

Author: Louis E. Wolcher
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000951200
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
What is the law of the law? What produces our craven subservience to linguistic norms, and our shocking indifference to the phenomenon of universal suffering? In a path-breaking new work of philosophy, Louis Wolcher seeks to answer these questions from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Bringing an Eastern sensibility into contact with three of the most important themes in Western philosophy, Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy meticulously investigates three of the twentieth century's most important philosophers: Martin Heidegger - on being, Emmanuel Levinas - on ethics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - on language. In the context of the larger Western obsession with transcending the ordinary, Louis Wolcher argues that the yearning for transcendence is born of the illusion that there is a fundamental difference between the ordinary and the profound. Employing Zen koans and stories to advance a 'deflationary' view of language and knowledge, he goes on to argue that the norms of transcendence to which we cling are not eternal truths but artefacts of desperate minds adrift on a sea of impermanence. What used to seem so majestically True, Right and Just thus shows itself to be utterly mundane: as merely true, right and just. What is left, however, is not nihilism - for clinging to a view of 'nothingness' is just as deluded as clinging to a view of 'somethingness' - but rather a new beginning of compassionate concern for the suffering of others. Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy is a strikingly original synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. It will enlighten philosophers and legal theorists, as well as those who are interested in or open to the insights of Zen Buddhism.

Author: Jun Young Lee
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820486420
Category : Capitalism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos' novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos' epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.

Author: Jessica Rizzo
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192881
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
If at its most elemental, the theater is an art form of human bodies in space, what becomes of the theater as suicide capitalism pushes our world into a posthuman age? Waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater traces the twentieth-century theater's movement from dramaturgies of efficiency to dramaturgies of waste, beginning with the observation that the most salient feature of the human is her ability to be ashamed of herself, to experience herself as excess, the waster and the waste of the world. By examining theatrical representations of capitalism, war, climate change, and the permanent refugee crisis, Waste traces the ways in which these human-driven events signal a tendency toward prodigality that terminates with self-destruction. Defying its promise of abundance for all, capitalism poisons all relationships with competition and fear. The desire to dominate in war is revealed to be the desire to obliterate the self in collective conflagration. The refugee crisis raises the urgent question of our responsibility to the other, but the climate crisis renders the question of anthropocentric obligations moot.Waste proposes that the theater is the form best suited to confronting the human's perverse relationship to its finitude. Everything about the theater is suffused with existential shame, with an acute awareness of its provisionality. Unlike the dominant narrative of the human, which is bound up with a fantasy of infinite growth, the theater is not deluded about its nature, origins, and destiny. At its best, the theater gathers artist and audience in one space to die together for a little while, to consciously waste, and not spend, their time. JESSICA RIZZO is an American writer, director, and dramaturge. She holds a DFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama, where she served as Associate Editor of Theater magazine and was awarded the John W. Gassner Prize for Criticism. She has taught at the Yale School of Drama, Yale College, and Bryn Mawr College. In 2017, she directed the North American premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's Shadow: Eurydice Says in New York City. She has also worked at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, and has had her work presented as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Her writing has appeared in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, TheaterForum, Theatre Journal, Theater, TDR, Austrian Studies, the Theatre Times, Vice, Momus, LA's Cultural Weekly, Philadelphia's Broad Street Review and ArtBlog, and Romania's Scena.ro.

Author: Peter Buse
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719069895
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
'Benjamin's Arcades' is an innovative text for students and specialists on the intellectual and political context of Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece, 'The Arcades Project'. It includes a special 'convoluted index' to aid the reader in discovering recurrent themes and ideas, both in the book itself and Benjamin's methods.

Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472152360
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
'A profoundly beautiful novel that infolds the political with the personal in unexpected and new ways . . . An extraordinary book' Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman, 'Books of the Year 2016' 'His stories take the reader into the labyrinth that is the mind . . . The Angel of History is digressive and daring' the Economist 'Alameddine has created a scintillating, original work whose moral complexity and detail of observation are wholly contemporary and entirely his own' Spectator Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana'a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives. 'Here is a book, full of story, unrepentantly political at every level. At a time when many western writers seem to be in retreat from saying anything that could be construed as political, Alameddine says it all, shamelessly, gloriously and, realised like his Satan, in the most stylish of forms' the Guardian

Author: Mark Schmitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031253515
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.