Benjamin's -abilities

Benjamin's -abilities PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674033957
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts. Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings. Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

Benjamin's -abilities

Benjamin's -abilities PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674033957
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts. Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings. Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

The Proper of the Mass for Sundays and Solemnities

The Proper of the Mass for Sundays and Solemnities PDF Author: Fr. Samuel F. Weber O.S.B.
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621640116
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1026

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Book Description
Introduction by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone. The Propers of the Mass book contains English chant settings for the Entrance and Communion Antiphons given in The Roman Missal, 2010, as well as suggestions for the Offertory Antiphons, following the pattern of the Graduale Romanum,1974. For most antiphons, four levels of settings from complex to very simple are provided, : i. through-composed melismatic; ii. through-composed simple; iii. Gregorian psalm tone; iv. English psalm tone. Optional psalm verses are provided in the Gregorian psalm tone style. Thus this collection provides an option intended to suit the abilities and needs of any choir or cantor. Ordination and nuptial Masses are also included, as well as the Asperges me and Vidi aquam. The Gloria Patri is given in the eight Gregorian tones, solemn and simple.

Mass Mediauras

Mass Mediauras PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804726764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The essays and interviews that compose this book provide an excellent introduction to and overview of the thought of one of the most brilliant critical and cultural theorists of our day. They include Weber's readings of some of the central texts of critical theory - including Kant's Critique of Judgment, Heidegger's Questing after Technology, and Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Other essays examine the thought of Plato, Descartes, Husserl, Kafka, Joyce, and Derrida discussing questions of objectivity, translation, iterability, representation, and mass media. The essays are supplemented by interviews and discussions that range over such topics as the effects of film and television on the perception of reality, differences in reporting the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, problems of authority and authorship, the controversies over Paul de Man's wartime writings and Heidegger's political positions, the relation of the Frankfurt School to deconstruction, and generally the status of critical 'theory'.

Singularity

Singularity PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452964890
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature For readers versed in critical theory, German and comparative literature, or media studies, a new book by Samuel Weber is essential reading. Singularity is no exception. Bringing together two decades of his essays, it hones in on the surprising implications of the singular and its historical relation to the individual in politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature. Although singularity has long been a keyword in literary studies and philosophy, never has it been explored as in this book, which distinguishes singularity as an “aporetic” notion from individuality, with which it remains historically closely tied. To speak or write of the singular is problematic, Weber argues, since once it is spoken of it is no longer strictly singular. Walter Benjamin observed that singularity and repetition imply each other. This approach informs the essays in Singularity. Weber notes that what distinguishes the singular from the individual is that it cannot be perceived directly, but rather experienced through feelings that depend on but also exceed cognition. This interdependence of cognition and affect plays itself out in politics, economics, and theology as well as in poetics. Political practice as well as its theory have been dominated by the attempt to domesticate singularity by subordinating it to the notion of individuality. Weber suggests that this political tendency draws support from what he calls “the monotheological identity paradigm” deriving from the idea of a unique and exclusive Creator-God. Despite the “secular” tendencies usually associated with Western modernity, this paradigm continues today to inform and influence political and economic practices, often displaying self-destructive tendencies. By contrast, Weber reads the literary writings of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Kafka as exemplary practices that put singularity into play, not as fiction but as friction, exposing the self-evidence of established conventions to be responses to challenges and problems that they often prefer to obscure or ignore.

Religion and Media

Religion and Media PDF Author: Hent de Vries
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734974
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
Counter The twenty-five contributors to this volume - who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel - confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media. The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media. The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion. The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas's Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).

Theatricality as Medium

Theatricality as Medium PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0823224171
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Ever since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the "mythos," or the "plot." This conception of theater has subordinated characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified narrative. This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary study explores theatrical writings that question this aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic assumptions about the theatrical medium. His readings also interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in theater since the Greeks. Praise for Samuel Weber: What kind of questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural critics and thinkersMLN

Points of Departure

Points of Departure PDF Author: Peter Fenves
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Since the late 1960s, when he introduced Theodor Adorno’s work on literature and cultural critique to an English-speaking public, Samuel Weber has stimulated the discovery of new and unexpected links within a broad spectrum of humanistic disciplines, including critical theory and psychoanalysis, media studies and literary analysis, continental philosophy and theater studies. The international group of scholars who contribute to Points of Departure demonstrate the persistent fecundity of Weber’s work. Centered around his essay on the Ghost of Hamlet, as reflected in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, the volume is broadly divided into explorations of the nature of spectrality, on the one hand, and the dynamics of reading, on the other. Each of the twelve essays thus takes its point of departure from “Weber’s singular path between languages, cultures, and traditions”—to quote Jacques Derrida, whose fictive “interview with a passing journalist” is published here for the first time.

Return to Freud

Return to Freud PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521377706
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this major work, leading theorist Samuel Weber provides a much-needed introduction to the thought of Jacques Lacan. Professor Weber approaches his subject from a dual perspective: he reads Lacan in the light of Freud (whose work Lacan is concerned to interpret), and from the perspective of structuralism, above all Saussure, from whom Lacan borrows and develops a distinctive conception of language as 'signifier'. Lacan is shown to contribute crucially to the rethinking of subjectivity that marks much of contemporary literary theory, and his 'return to Freud' - the complex relationship between his work and its Freudian antecedents - is explored extensively. The result, made available here for the first time in English (in a form thoroughly revised, updated, and augmented by the author) is a constantly illuminating work of intellectual enquiry, with important implications for our age.

The Legend of Freud

The Legend of Freud PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804731218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"Psychoanalysis is dead!" Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as well—and why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est. Review "The Legend of Freud is a fine example of what can be done with Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge, and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage him, performing what Freud would have called an Auseinandersetzung, a discussion or argument that's also a taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like Weber's. The Legend of Freud is the best deconstructive work I've seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative, respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new ideas." —Village Voice Literary Supplement

The Max Weber Dictionary

The Max Weber Dictionary PDF Author: Richard Swedberg
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150360022X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Max Weber is one of the world's most important social scientists, but he is also one of the most notoriously difficult to understand. This revised, updated, and expanded edition of The Max Weber Dictionary reflects up-to-the-moment threads of inquiry and introduces the most recent translations and references. Additionally, the authors include new entries designed to help researchers use Weber's ideas in their own work; they illuminate how Weber himself thought theorizing should occur and how he went about constructing a theory. More than an elementary dictionary, however, this work makes a contribution to the general culture and legacy of Weber's work. In addition to entries on broad topics like religion, law, and the West, the completed German definitive edition of Weber's work (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe) necessitated a wealth of new entries and added information on topics like pragmatism and race and racism. Every entry in the dictionary delves into Weber scholarship and acts as a point of departure for discussion and research. As such, this book will be an invaluable resource to general readers, students, and scholars alike.