Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power PDF Author: Lutz Peter Koepnick
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227446
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin?s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin?s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present. Lutz Koepnick first explores the development of the aestheticization thesis in Benjamin?s work from the early 1920s to his death in 1940. Pushing Benjamin?s fragmentary remarks to a logical conclusion, Koepnick sheds light on the ways in which the Nazis employed industrial mass culture to redress the political as a self-referential space of authenticity and self-assertion. Koepnick then examines to what extent Benjamin?s analysis of fascism holds up to recent historical analyses of the National Socialist period and whether Benjamin?s aestheticization thesis can help conceptualize cultural politics today. Although Koepnick insists on crucial differences between the stage-managing of political action in modern and postmodern societies, he argues throughout that it is in Benjamin?s emphatic insistence on experience that we may find the relevance of his reflections today. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power is both an important contribution to Benjamin studies and a revealing addition to our understanding of the Third Reich and of contemporary culture?s uneasy relationship to Nazi culture.

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power PDF Author: Lutz Peter Koepnick
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227446
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin?s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin?s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present. Lutz Koepnick first explores the development of the aestheticization thesis in Benjamin?s work from the early 1920s to his death in 1940. Pushing Benjamin?s fragmentary remarks to a logical conclusion, Koepnick sheds light on the ways in which the Nazis employed industrial mass culture to redress the political as a self-referential space of authenticity and self-assertion. Koepnick then examines to what extent Benjamin?s analysis of fascism holds up to recent historical analyses of the National Socialist period and whether Benjamin?s aestheticization thesis can help conceptualize cultural politics today. Although Koepnick insists on crucial differences between the stage-managing of political action in modern and postmodern societies, he argues throughout that it is in Benjamin?s emphatic insistence on experience that we may find the relevance of his reflections today. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power is both an important contribution to Benjamin studies and a revealing addition to our understanding of the Third Reich and of contemporary culture?s uneasy relationship to Nazi culture.

Fascist Modernism

Fascist Modernism PDF Author: Andrew Hewitt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804726979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Using the literary work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement and an early associate of Mussolini, the author explores the point of contact between a "progressive" aesthetic practice and a "reactionary" political ideology.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781774640074
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin discusses whether art is diminished by the modern culture of mass replication, arriving at the conclusion that the aura or soul of an artwork is indeed removed by duplication. In an essay critical of modern fashion and manufacture, Benjamin decries how new technology affects art. The notion of fine arts is threatened by an absence of scarcity; an affair which diminishes the authenticity and essence of the artist's work. Though the process of art replication dates to classical antiquity, only the modern era allows for a mass quantity of prints or mass production. Given that the unique aura of an artist's work, and the reaction it provokes in those who see it, is diminished, Benjamin posits that artwork is much more political in significance. The style of modern propaganda, of the use of art for the purpose of generating raw emotion or arousing belief, is likely to become more prevalent versus the old-fashioned production of simpler beauty or meaning in a cultural or religious context.

Aesthetics and Politics

Aesthetics and Politics PDF Author: Theodor Adorno
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788738586
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

The Aesthetics of Power

The Aesthetics of Power PDF Author: Claire Keyes
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
When still a senior at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich was selected as a Yale Younger Poet. The judge, W.H. Auden, wrote the introduction to her first book of poems. Thus Rich's career was launched by one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century, someone Rich herself admired and emulated. Adrienne Rich's early mentors were men, and her early poetry consequently adopted a strong male persona. In her development as artist, woman, and activist, however, Rich emerged as a leading voice of modern feminism--a voice which rejects a male-dominated world, forcing new definitions of power, new possibilities for women, and profound repercussions for society. In The Aesthetics of Power, Claire Keyes examines the shape and scope of Rich's poetry as it applies to Rich's female aesthetic. Keyes uncovers the process by which Rich embraces, then rejects, accepted uses of power, achieving a vision of beneficent female power. In her early poems, Adrienne Rich accepts certain traditions associated with the divisions of power according to sex. Later, Rich continually defines and redefines power until she can reject power-as-force (patriarchal power) for the power-to-transform, which, for her, is the truly significant and essential power. Surveying Rich's poetry and prose from 1951 to the present, this book traces the development of Adrienne Rich's new understanding of the power of the poet and the power of woman. Sharing Rich's feminist sensibilities, yet at times critical of her more radical positions, Claire Keyes draws a portrait of an artist who was molded by the complex political and social climate of post-World War II America. It is a portrait that reveals the creative growth of an artist, and the personal growth of a powerful and controversial woman.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin PDF Author: Richard Wolin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520914309
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.

Illuminations

Illuminations PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 147352444X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.

Aesthetics and Politics

Aesthetics and Politics PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: Verso Trade
ISBN: 9781844676644
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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Blackshirts and Reds

Blackshirts and Reds PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. "A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks." —The Catholic Journalist "By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a 'rational' and integral component of the system."—Stan Goff, author of Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. Author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, his writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

On Slowness

On Slowness PDF Author: Lutz Koepnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538251
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.