Walter Benjamin and the “Tradition of the Oppressed”
First translation of the fragmentary notes “Problem of Tradition I and II” from the paralipomena and notes of Benjamin’s “Theses On the Concept of History”
Tagged: Walter Benjamin
Allegorie und Revolte bei Baudelaire und Blanqui. Walter Benjamins Zeugen der Urgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
“Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht”[1] – Marx berühmte Formel aus dem Kommunistischen Manifest, die die Umwälzung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse durch das Fortschreiten der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise beschreibt, darf auch für die Geschichte der Sprache in der...
A Sketch of Benjamin’s Baudelaire Project
A while ago I did this little sketch of Benjamin’s Baudelaire project. Maybe someone finds it useful. 1. Teil/ These: “Baudelaire als Allegoriker” Vorheriger Titel im Brief an Horkheimer vom 16.4.1938: “Idee und Bild” Kompositorische Funktion: Fragestellung Geplante Motive: sensitive...
Technique as a Pure Means. On Walter Benjamin’s non-instrumental concept of technique between his early metaphysical and later anthropological materialist writings
In this paper I will outline a central aspect of Walter Benjamin’s concept of technique throughout his work, namely its non-instrumental character. In order to do this, I will look at a shift that occured in Benjamin’s thinking around the...
Publication : Fantasmagories du capital
Marc Berdet, Fantasmagories du capital. L’invention de la ville-marchandise, Paris, La Découverte (coll. Zones), 2013. Quel rapport entre les spectres d’un couvent parisien, des héroïnes séquestrées dans des châteaux gothiques et les flâneurs des passages couverts de Paris ? Quel...
Towards a Politics of ‘Pure Means’: Walter Benjamin and the Question of Violence
In his compelling essay on the On the Critique of Violence (1921), Benjamin dwells on the dialectic of “mythic violence” consisting of law-preserving and law-constituting violence (Gewalt), which mutually presuppose each other. While the former might be identified with today’s bio-political microphysics of power, the latter refers to the constitutive act of establishing power through violence (terror, war, “original accumulation”). Whereas in the sphere of direct state repression the two forms of mythic Gewalt – law-preserving force and law-constituting violence – are always spectrally conflated and their inherent dialect is concealed, in the realm of the social order mythic violence has almost fully turned into the juridical web of bio-political practices. Against the repetitive cycle of law-preserving and law-constituting Gewalt, Benjamin introduces the term “divine violence” which suspends mythic violence and its legal supplementation. The profane correspondence to divine violence is ‘pure’ or ‘revolutionary violence’ – a paradoxical non-violent violence that de-poses the law and its application to “bare life.” Revolutionary violence as a non-violent “pure means” is not bound to thetical, teleological, or purposive-rationalist acting. Rather, it ‘inoperates’, deactivates the nexus of means and ends within the realm of ethical acting, that is to say, the revolutionary de-posing of law suspends any instrumental use of violence and the violent inscription of bare life into the socio-juridical web of capitalism’s mythic violence.
