Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Dark Images, Secret Hints PDF full book. Access full book title Dark Images, Secret Hints by Bram Mertens. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Bram Mertens Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9783039102938 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
This book examines the influence of the Jewish tradition on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was hitherto always assumed that Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism was very limited and that he was interested only in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the study of which was pioneered by his friend Gershom Scholem. However, on the latter's recommendation, Benjamin also read Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (1827-1857), a massive four-volume work which presents a comprehensive overview of both mainstream and mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. Having unearthed the most likely written source of Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism, this study sets out to show that Benjamin's thought was influenced considerably by Jewish concepts of language, experience and history, and that this influence is persistent enough to lend a unity to Benjamin's work that transcends its division into an early, metaphysical and a late, materialist or Marxist stage. Within this context, the book also provides a reassessment of some of Benjamin's key texts, from the early programmatic writings on language, philosophy and literature to the little-known Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and the unfinished Passagen-Werk.
Author: Bram Mertens Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9783039102938 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
This book examines the influence of the Jewish tradition on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was hitherto always assumed that Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism was very limited and that he was interested only in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the study of which was pioneered by his friend Gershom Scholem. However, on the latter's recommendation, Benjamin also read Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (1827-1857), a massive four-volume work which presents a comprehensive overview of both mainstream and mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. Having unearthed the most likely written source of Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism, this study sets out to show that Benjamin's thought was influenced considerably by Jewish concepts of language, experience and history, and that this influence is persistent enough to lend a unity to Benjamin's work that transcends its division into an early, metaphysical and a late, materialist or Marxist stage. Within this context, the book also provides a reassessment of some of Benjamin's key texts, from the early programmatic writings on language, philosophy and literature to the little-known Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and the unfinished Passagen-Werk.
Author: Bram Mertens Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Incorporated ISBN: 9780820472195 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
This book examines the influence of the Jewish tradition on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was hitherto always assumed that Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism was very limited and that he was interested only in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the study of which was pioneered by his friend Gershom Scholem. However, on the latter's recommendation, Benjamin also read Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder uber die Tradition (1827-1857), a massive four-volume work which presents a comprehensive overview of both mainstream and mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. Having unearthed the most likely written source of Benjamin's knowledge of Judaism, this study sets out to show that Benjamin's thought was influenced considerably by Jewish concepts of language, experience and history, and that this influence is persistent enough to lend a unity to Benjamin's work that transcends its division into an early, metaphysical and a late, materialist or Marxist stage. Within this context, the book also provides a reassessment of some of Benjamin's key texts, from the early programmatic writings on language, philosophy and literature to the little-known Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and the unfinished Passagen-Werk.
Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022640336X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Author: Tamara Tagliacozzo Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1786600439 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Offering a panoramic view of much of Benjamin’s thought, and concentrating in particular on his early writings, this book derives from a philosophical analysis of readings and studies by Benjamin that have not heretofore been considered in detail.
Author: Kocku von Stuckrad Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 161451349X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
The enigmatic relation between religion and science still presents a challenge to European societies and to ideas about what it means to be ‘modern.’ This book argues that European secularism, rather than pushing back religious truth claims, in fact has been religiously productive itself. The institutional establishment of new disciplines in the nineteenth century, such as religious studies, anthropology, psychology, classical studies, and the study of various religious traditions, led to a professionalization of knowledge about religion that in turn attributed new meanings to religion. This attribution of meaning resulted in the emergence of new religious identities and practices. In a dynamic that is closely linked to this discursive change, the natural sciences adopted religious and metaphysical claims and integrated them in their framework of meaning, resulting in a special form of scientific religiosity that has gained much influence in the twentieth century. Applying methods that come from historical discourse analysis, the book demonstrates that religious semantics have been reconfigured in the secular sciences. Ultimately, the scientification of religion perpetuated religious truth claims under conditions of secularism.
Author: Andrew Benjamin Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748634355 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
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.
Author: Christian Karner Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 135129654X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about—and allusions to—World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction. This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches. The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.
Author: Daniel H. Weiss Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009221663 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.
Author: Wesley Phillips Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137487259 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.
Author: Jay Howard Geller Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501731580 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 490
Book Description
The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.
Author: Bram Mertens
Author: Bram Mertens
Author: Bram Mertens
Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Author: Tamara Tagliacozzo
Author: Kocku von Stuckrad
Author: Andrew Benjamin
Author: Christian Karner
Author: Daniel H. Weiss
Author: Wesley Phillips
Author: Jay Howard Geller