Archive for 2010

The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin

22/11/2010
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The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time:  Marx with Benjamin

Whereas for traditional Marxism history was driven by ‘objective’ historical forces towards its communist telos within history, critical Marxism attempted a blast of the very horizon of capitalisthistory itself. According to Slavoj Žižek (1989), in Marxian thought this ‘non-historical “ex-timate” kernel of history’ was only touched by Walter Benjamin’s last reflections On the Concept...


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Posted in Materialist Theology | 1 Comment »

Seven Short Temporary Statements on Anthropological Materialism

15/11/2010
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Seven Short Temporary Statements on Anthropological Materialism Anthropological materialism is a tradition, a polemical term, a sensibility, a temporality, an (internal) category and an actuality. 1. An uncommon and idiosyncratic tradition. Anthropological materialism originally designates afterwards a group of isolated French and German authors from the 19th Century and the 1930s who don’t always relate explicitly to any sort of materialism....
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Posted in Anthropological Materialism | 2 Comments »

Chronique du mur de Berlin. Sur le rapport entre temps et mémoire

08/10/2010
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Chronique du mur de Berlin. Sur le rapport entre temps et mémoire Il y a plus que vingt ans que le mur de Berlin est tombé. Mais il semble que tout le monde se souvient parfaitement de ce moment. Aujourd’hui, de nombreux politiciens prétendent en avoir été les témoins ou  activistes de la première heure, comme si leur présence avait sécurisé le déroulement des évènements dans...
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Posted in City, Experience, Phantasmagoria, Social Movement | 2 Comments »

Ten Comments of eight Thesis on Phantasmagoria

27/09/2010
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10 Comments of 8 Thesis on Phantasmagoria for Marc Berdet 1.    Phantasmagoria is the highest stage of capitalism, in the sense that it is the latest stage of false consciousness. As such, phantasmagoria is as abstract as concrete; it is a social relation and the mystification of that same relation in reified forms and...
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Posted in Phantasmagoria | 4 Comments »

Eight Thesis on Phantasmagoria

06/09/2010
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Eight Thesis on Phantasmagoria 1. Phantasmagoria is a set of images, in the sense of a set of dream-images, i. e. a dreamlike imagery – a fantasy – reified in an urban space. 1.1. Phantasmagoria is the screen-image which the society that produces commodities makes of itself when it refuses to acknowledge that it is essential for it...
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Posted in Phantasmagoria | 1 Comment »

The Revolution is Man-made

23/08/2010
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Dans son approche des révolutions, Walter Benjamin nous rappelle le rôle de l’être humain. Une révolution se produit seulement en présence de l’intervention des gens, grâce à leur collaboration et leur confrontation, dans un espace commun comme la rue. Benjamin cite par exemple les émeutes du « Boulevard de Bonnes Nouvelles » au XIXème siècle ou,...
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Posted in Anthropological Materialism, Social Movement | Comments Off

All that is Solid Melts into Pixels

02/08/2010
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    For the Sixth Berlin Biennal, Marc Boulos mounts a video installation (that you can see above), with two channels facing one another: on one screen the rebels, on the other the traders. The goal, however, is not to show, by means of technical finesse in filming, editing and assembling beautiful collages, a...
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Posted in Art/Technique, Phantasmagoria, Social Movement | 1 Comment »

Building lies in our Nature

16/07/2010
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Building lies in our Nature Benjamin helped us to understand that mimesis is not only reserved to art and the representation of the world. It is fundamental to social conduct, language and writing, even if these mimetic roots are often hidden and unrecognizable in the language and writing of today. Meike Schmidt-GleimMore Posts
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Posted in Art/Technique, City | Comments Off

Urban Topography and Cultural Memory

12/07/2010
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It has often been observed that our time is obsessed with collective forms of cultural memory, which are seen as an emergency brake in the storm of unfettered ideologies of progress and rapid acceleration in the age of late capitalist consumer society and universal media networks. Our globalizing cities seem to function as the...
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Die Ideologie und ihre Kritik. Ein Problemaufriss mit einigen Leerstellen und vielen Fußnoten

06/07/2010
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Der Kapitalismus ist in der Praxis konsequent, weil er muß. Ist er aber konsequent in der Praxis, dann ist er inkonsequent in der Ideologie. Bertolt Brecht   Ideologie wie Mundgeruch immer das, was die anderen haben. Terry Eagleton Die Frage nach der Ideologie und ihrer Kritik berührt einen zentralen Punkt marxistischer Theoriebildung, die...
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Infernolands? – a Dreamworld Exhibition in Paris

21/06/2010
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Infernolands? – a Dreamworld Exhibition in Paris En 1904, à Coney Island, dans le sud de l’Etat de New York, une ville fut montée de toutes pièces pour que de nouveaux types de citadins puissent partager le même rêve : Dreamland. Cette ville était en fait un parc d’attraction sur le modèle de ceux qui étaient jusque-là logés au sein des...
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Posted in Art/Technique, Phantasmagoria | Comments Off

Bloodshed

21/05/2010
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Bangkok is the venue of bloodshed these days. The number of dead and injured people rises every couple of days. It had all started with a different sort of bloodshed in March this year, when many demonstrators against the government (that had seized power in a military putsch in 2006) and its police forces...
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Expérience et savoir dans notre temps

10/05/2010
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Être les spectateurs de conflits au travers d’une actualité dont la valeur historique apparaît douteuse. Avoir tous les jours une quantité immense d’informations, sans en tirer aucune sagesse. Faire son opinion des luttes contemporaines qui se présentent par le scénario journalistique de notre temps, sans y être engagé. Se former une idée de la...
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The Echo of Injustice

03/05/2010
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What happens to the world when you wake up one day and get the news that your loved one is in “Evin” prison (The Iranian detention center for political detainees), or worse, that they have been taken off life-support, and buried, without an autopsy? The blogger Amir (www.zahras-paradise.com) asks this question before interviewing Stephan Kazemi whose mother...
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Note materialistico-antropologiche sull’attualità “globale” della pedofilia.

12/04/2010
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Non trascorre ormai giorno senza che i media di tutto il mondo non riferiscano polemiche riguardanti la pedofilia, polemiche che colpiscono gli ambiti più diversi. Nel mirino soprattutto i cattolici, insieme al corpo insegnante o esercitante una funzione tutoriale in istituti dediti alla cura dell’infanzia, nei paesi più diversi. Per lo più si tratta...
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Posted in Anthropological Materialism | Comments Off

What is Anthropological Materialism?

08/04/2010
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What is Anthropological Materialism? Marc Berdet, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, CETCOPRA. Version française / Deutsche Fassung “The history of anthropological materialism stretches, in Germany, from Jean Paul to Keller (passing through Georg Büchner and Gutzkow); in France, the socialist utopias and the physiologies are its precipitate.” In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin tries to re-evaluate a...
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Was ist der anthropologische Materialismus ?

08/04/2010
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Was ist der anthropologische Materialismus ? Extrakt des Doktorarbeits Marc Berdet, Fantasmagories et mouvement social dans Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. La démarche historico-sociologique d’un chiffonnier, Chap. II “Mouvement social et matérialisme anthropologique”. Übersetzung: Meike Schmidt-Gleim. Im Passagen-Werk sowie in den Manuskripten, die ihm als Entwurf dazu dienten, spricht Benjamin vom „anthropologischen Materialismus“, um eine Sicht auf die Welt zu...
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Qu’est-ce que le matérialisme anthropologique ?

08/04/2010
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Qu’est-ce que le matérialisme anthropologique ? Extraits de la thèse de Marc Berdet, Fantasmagories et mouvement social dans Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. La démarche historico-sociologique d’un chiffonnier, Chap. II “Mouvement social et matérialisme anthropologique”. Dans Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle et dans les manuscrits qui en forment le brouillon, Benjamin parle de « matérialisme anthropologique » pour nommer une...
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Ästhetik der zweiten Natur bei Lukacs und Benjamin

08/04/2010
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Ästhetik der zweiten Natur bei Lukacs und Benjamin In Lukács’ “Theorie des Romans” beschreibt das Bild einer ersten und einer zweiten Natur zwei ungleiche Zustände des Verhältnisses zwischen Mensch und Welt. In Antike und Moderne ist der Mensch mit einer in ihrem metaphysischen Gehalt jeweils fundamental anderen Welt konfrontiert. Die äußere Wirklichkeit im Zustand der ersten Natur findet das Subjekt mit dem...
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Posted in Ideology | Comments Off

Iranian internet a glasshouse?

15/03/2010
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In ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin embraces glass architecture as a revolutionary change of collective experience. Glass architecture, he states, dissolves the distinction between interior and exterior and annuls the possibility of the secret, of a hermetically closed self-assuring worldview. ‘Glass is generally the enemy of secrets’, writes Benjamin in his 1933 text, ‘and the...
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Posted in Art/Technique, Social Movement | 1 Comment »

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