Continental Philosophy

Perspectives on Heidegger

MATHESON RUSSELL: Phenomenological Reductionin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit: A New Proposal

KRZYSZTOF ZIAREK: The Return to Philosophy? Or:Heidegger and the Task of Thinking

JANET DONOHOE: The Place of Tradition: Heidegger and Benjamin on Technology and Art

LIN MA: The Mysterious Relations to the East

TANJA STAEHLER: Unambiguous Calling? Authenticity and Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time

PATRICK O’CONNOR: There is no World Without End (Salut):Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane

New Left Review

Paris, 23 March 1940

Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,

It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.

Via Ready Steady Book

Articles are available here

Frederic Will — Can We Get Inside the Aesthetic Sensibility of the Archaic Past?
Maryvonne Saison — “The People Are Missing”
Thomas Leddy — The Aesthetics of Junkyards and Roadside Clutter
Emmanouil Aretoulakis — Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11
Dan Disney — Toward a Poeticognosis: Re-reading Plato’s The Republic via Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
Jonathan Davis — Questioning “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: A Stroll around the Louvre after Reading Benjamin
Grant Tavinor — Definition of Videogames
SYMPOSIUM: Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later
Ivan Gaskell — The Riddle of a Riddle
Thomas E. Wartenberg — Not Just Mere Things
Cynthia Freeland — Danto and Art Criticism
Arthur C. Danto — Ontology, Criticism, and the Riddle of Art Versus Non-Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

“A Small History of Photography” by Walter Benjamin

Small History of Photography.pdf

“The Author as Producer” by Walter Benjamin

The Author as Producer.pdf

Link

(via wood’s lot)

Essays are available here

Making Poverty Visible – Three Theses
Alexander García Düttmann, translated by Arne De Boever

‘Falling out of one’s role with art’: Samuel Weber on Benjamin’s -abilities
Interview by Arne De Boever and Alex Murray

Becoming against History: Deleuze, Toynbee and Vitalist Historiography
Christian Kerslake

Differance of the ‘real’
Michael Marder

Why is ‘speaking the truth’ fearless? ‘Danger’ and ‘truth’ in Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia
Alison Ross

I have just reviewed Esther Leslie's new book Walter Benjamin (Reaktion Books – Critical Lives).

Link to the review 

TOC and articles

Walter Benjamin on Photography: Towards Elemental Politics — Mika Elo

Benjamin, Trauma and the Virtual — Allen Meek

Cybersurgery and Surgical (Dis)embodiment: Technology, Science, Art and the Body — Julie Doyle

Fossilising the Commodity: Tactical Engagements with Time, Art and the Virtual in Models by Ricky Swallow — Marita Bullock

Aura as Productive Loss — Warwick Mules

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction — Martin Dixon

“Politicizing Art”: Benjamin’s Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of Fascism — Amresh Sinha

Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter Benjamin’s Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive — Catherine Russell

The Dissipating Aura of Cinema — Kristen Daly

From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging, Photo Sharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0 — Simon Lindgren

Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism — Daniel Palmer

Tillers of the Soil/Travelling Journeymen: Modes of the Virtual — A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul

Paradise Regained? The Work of Mediation Technology in an Age of Open Communities — John Grech

It’s a gigantic file…

TOC

THE CLASH BETWEEN THEATER AND FILM: Germaine Dulac, André Bazin and La Souriante Madame Beudet
Author: Charles Musser

WALTER BENJAMIN’S SHELL-SHOCK: Sounding the acoustical unconscious
Author: Robert G. Ryder

THINGS THAT COME AFTER ANOTHER
Author: András Bálint Kovács

CONSTRUCTING MOVEMENT IN THE CINEMA
Author: Nick Redfern

CRITICS, CLONES AND NARRATIVE IN THE FRANCHISE BLOCKBUSTER
Author: Bradley Schauer

THE PLANET AT THE END OF THE WORLD FREE ACCESS FREE ACCESS: ‘Event’ cinema and the representability of climate change
Author: Gill Branston

EVERYDAYNESS IN FILM ETHICS
Author: Wim Staat

From Seven Oaks Magazine (via Wood's Lot)

Lucky for us that back in the 1920s Walter Benjamin’s doctoral thesis was far outside the academic mainstream. His subject was the origins of tragic drama in Germany, and his argument was so full of esoteric ideas, Kabbalistic and otherwise, that he was never given a teaching post. Instead he had to eke out a living with pieces for assorted newspapers and magazines. Today some of these writings are among the most often praised, cited and quoted examples of cultural and social criticism in the entire western tradition. All serious general readers should know something about Benjamin and his ideas. One publisher, Harvard University Press, is doing its best to make this a realistic goal.

Ultrapolitics: Biopower, Sovereignty and Total Mobilisation

Biological Sovereignty: EUGENE THACKER

The Task of Thinking in the State of Exception- Agamben, Benjamin and the Question of Messianism: CHRISTIAN NILSSON

The Obscene Voice: Terrorism, Politics and the End of Representation in the Works of Baudrillard, Žižek and Sloterdijk: SJOERD VAN TUINEN

“The Sovereign Disappears in the Election Box”: Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on Sovereignty and (Perhaps) Governmentality: THOMAS CROMBEZ

Freedom Ablaze: Ernst Jünger and Michel Foucault's Concept of Force: LEON NIEMOCZYNSKI AND KEVIN SÖDERGREN

Deleuze, Leibniz and the Jurisprudence of Being: SEAN BOWDEN

Levinas, 'Illeity' and the Persistence of Skepticism: DARREN AMBROSE

Link

Via Roundtable:

There is a certain lineage from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin does notably use the idea of the monad. There is a section on Monadology in his Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel) fairly universally hailed as Benjamin’s most sustained and original work. Further in the Passagenwerk he treated the arcades as a monad to the extent that they were closed, and to which there were no windows or doors for anything to get in (Gunn 2003). The monad for Benjamin is the idea, the pure idea, or ideas that form what he calls ‘constellations’. Here ideas are purely mental, purely geistlich, they are totally immaterial. They cannot be communicated to, nor can they communicate. Ideas and God for Benjamin are pure intensity. But whereas the monad is at centre stage for Leibniz, for Benjamin at centre stage is language.

What Benjamin gives us is less a theory of the pure intensity of the monad than a theory of the medium.

Here is the rest…

Here is a review of Walter Benjamin's On Hashish:

In September 1940, while fleeing from the Gestapo, Walter Benjamin ended his life with an overdose of morphine. In preceding years, Benjamin had used morphine, mescaline and, mostly, hashish in curious attempts to explore the workings of the human mind. From letters we know Benjamin ultimately planned to publish "a truly exceptional book about hashish" (145). The project, however, was never finished. Only two brief texts Benjamin did complete, the articles "Hashish in Marseilles" and "Myslovice — Braunschweig — Marseilles". Apart from these, what we know about his drug experiments is based upon a number of entries in Benjamin's notebooks, some passages from personal letters, and, most importantly, protocols of his drug sessions. Now, Howard Eiland has published a handy English edition that brings these different texts together. On Hashish is thus not, as the title might suggest, a book about cannabis. It is hence of less interest to the hemp aficionado than to the student of Benjamin's intellectual world. 

The rest of the review.

And another link of interest on Benjamin.