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The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the 'midnight of the century', with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques - such as the famous 'estrangement effect' - Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society.This volume contains Benjamin's introductions to Brecht's theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin's insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin's masterful essay "The Author as Producer" as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht's place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war. ... Read more

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Important Benjamin
This is an invaluable collection of essays and diary entries that sheds as much light on Benjamin himself as it does on his truculent and difficult friend Brecht. Another way of putting that is that the Brecht this book sheds light on is Benjamin's Brecht, who is also, due to the high esteem we hold Benjamin in, a Brecht with a good deal of currency in the field today. Brigid Doherty, for example, in "Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin" (MLN 115.3 (2000): 442-81), explores the Benjaminian Brecht (and perhaps the Brechtian Benjamin) in persuasive and useful ways:

"Interruption, as we have seen, is also the epic theater's technique for representing Gesten and making them quotable. 'The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain. Hence the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theater' [a quotation from this edition of Benjamin on Brecht, p. 3]. In epic theater, that mode of interruption resembles techniques of photographic representation employed in psychotechnical testing. Interruption fixes, as if cinematographically, the 'strict, frame-like enclosure of each element of a Haltung (i.e., each gesture)' (UB 3; GS II.2, 521). The frames of the gesture are like the frames of a strip of film, and hence they are also like the projections that hovered behind the action in the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, which was designed by Caspar Neher. Those projections recapitulated elements of the action in telegraphic prose and, you will recall, in arithmetic. In epic theater, projections are gestic; they function as interruptions, and their own form is punctuated either paratactically or mathematically. Seen that way, the projections call to mind Benjamin's likening of the epic actor's presentation of quotable gestures to the setting of type for emphasis: 'he must be able to space [sperren] his gestures as the compositor spaces words' (UB 11; GS II.2, 529). That metaphor in turn recalls Brecht's assertion of the need for 'footnotes' in dramatic writing, as well as his emphasis on the writer's desire to emulate the apparatus, a point I have said we should understand in relation to Benjamin's claims about the 'training regimen' of Hemingway's prose, and hence in relation to his thoughts on Haltung as the interrupted action of a body in motion. All of which underscore the mechanical aspects of writing, understood in terms of a text's capacity to represent Gesten" (Doherty 474-75).

Doherty has here selected from the first version of "What Is Epic Theatre?"--the first essay in Benjamin's book--some of the most strongly structuralizing of Benjamin's interpretations of Brecht, making it seem as if for Benjamin epic theater was largely an abstract matter of forms or frames or spacings, rather than, say, a series of complex interactions. This is not entirely accurate: Benjamin does in passing recognize the importance to epic theater of the various relationships "between stage and public, text and performance, producer and actors"--"For the stage, the public is no longer a collection of hypnotized test subjects, but an assembly of interested persons whose demands it must satisfy" (2)--and indeed Doherty's first quotation, from page 3 of that essay, seems to take us to a rehearsal, where Brecht is pushing his actors to complicate their gestic movements: "The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain. Hence the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theater." But that "we" is not Brecht running a rehearsal but people in general, indeed a kind of generalized or universalized principle of human behavior disguised rhetorically as an interactive intervention. And in any case Benjamin's emphasis on the quantification of interruptions and gestures ("The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain") comes out of his remarks just previous on the framing of the gesture ("it has a definable beginning and a definable end ... this strict, frame-like, enclosed nature of each moment of an attitude ...," 3), which in turn set up his discussion of the serial spatialization of gesticity, the likening of interruptions or "haltings" to cinematic frames on a strip of celluloid, "punctuated either paratactically or mathematically," or to typesetting, and thus to "the mechanical aspects of writing." Hence also, presumably, the temptation to use the literary text of Mann ist Mann to represent the estranging effect of the Brechtian Gestus (Benjamin 2-3, 8-9, 12-13): for a depersonalizing or desomatizing critique, the truest form of any theatrical or literary effect is one that has been abstracted out of the realm of human interaction.

And this is largely what Benjamin gives us of Brecht: a Brecht removed from the context he most insistently inhabited, the theater, the interaction between actors and audience, the impact of actor bodies on audience bodies and minds. Benjamin is brilliant, of course, but his is the brilliance of the study, the text, the abstract structure, and that is largely what he finds in Brecht as well. If you're a depersonalizing poststructuralist or a structuralist Marxist like Fredric Jameson (see his Brecht and Method), you'll find this book indispensable. If you're doing performance studies or working in the theater and are mostly interested in Brecht's thoughts on estranging gestic acting styles, you may want to give this book a pass, and read John Willett's superb collection from 1964, Brecht on Theatre. ... Read more

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If you did not know Mr. Franklin, you do now.
In his own words, a history written by one of the greatest historical figures of his time.The narration is great as well.

Benjamin Franklin Autobiography
The recording level of this product is extremely low (which may be a batch recording problem)...however once you get past that problem the reader is easy to listen to and the original text of the book is a benefit to any and every person.I was glad to find that an audio recording of the book is available as the book itself is one that I have re-read several times. ... Read more

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This volume provides an invaluable overview of Walter Benjamin's writings about technology, history, politics and the visual. From a variety of theoretical viewpoints, twelve brilliant scholars have come together to map the aura - perhaps the most elusive concept in Benjamin's philosophy. The collection is a scholarly feat that serves as an introduction to one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, while at the same time providing new perspectives for the advanced reader.The writings of Walter Benjamin once hovered on the margins of modern literary genres. From there he developed a unique type of critical writing, positioned between the technical, historical and political ramifications of dialectical thinking.Today Benjamin is centrally placed in most curricula for modern art, literature, and social sciences, and his text "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" is often referred to in contemporary critical theory. It is in this article that readers have to confront the notorious concept of the aura. This concept characterizes the typically bourgeois way of relating to art, history, media and perception, but the aura is also a philosophical concept with complex implications for a dialectical sociology, aesthetics and history. Assessing the critical force of Benjamin's concept in our time is the prime achievement of this collection. Actualities of Aura isindispensable reading for anyone engaged in the discourses of visual culture, critical theory and continental philosophy. ... Read more

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translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen

It was in Paris in 1937 that Georges Bataille introduced Pierre Missac to Walter Benjamin. This meeting launched the young French scholar on a half-century of engagement with Benjamin's work that culminated in the writing of Walter Benjamin's Passages.

Taking a cue from his subject, Missac adopts a form of indirect critique in which independent details examined seemingly in passing emerge over the course of the book as parts of larger patterns of understanding. The interlocked essays move among such topics as reading and writing, collecting, the dialectic, and time and history. Many of the subjects are standard in Benjamin studies, but the freshness and directness of Missac's response to them makes this book compelling.

After the war, Missac took it on himself to make Benjamin's work more widely known in France. He published a series of translations and critical essays and this one book, which appeared just a few months after his death in 1986. Benjamin, who committed suicide at age forty-eight, has no marked grave, and in one sense Walter Benjamin's Passages is a tombeau, a poem honoring a writer's achievement that in calmer times was written for the dedication of a physical monument but now must stand in place of the absent monument. It is a work of sophisticated and imaginative criticism that shows how Benjamin's work anticipated the future and how--as Missac's excursus on the glass atrium in the architecture of the 1980s shows--it can be fruitfully extended.

Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought ... Read more

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A collection of original papers tackling the problems arising from the use of the concept of modernity. Contributions cover a wide range of topics, from feminism to music. This book should be of interest to students of philosophy, critical studies and modern literary theory. ... Read more

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This book follows the theme of sacred text from Benjamin's early writings on religion, Judaism, and language to the study of Baroque tragedy, modernism, history and the Paris Arcades. All of these writings reflect a commentary on the idea of the sacred text in Western culture. ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin's work represents one of the most radical and controversial responses to the problems of 20th century culture and society. This new interpretation analyzes some of the central enigmatic features of his writing, arguing that they result from the co-presence of religious skepticism and the desire for a religious foundation of social life. Margarete Kohlenbach focuses on the structure of self-reference as an expression of Benjamin's skeptical religiosity and examines its significance in his writing on language, literature and the cinema, as well as history, politics and modern technology.
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Der Erwerb des Buches enthält gleichzeitig die kostenlose Mitgliedschaft im Buchklub des Verlags zum Ausprobieren - dort können Sie von über einer Million Bücher ohne weitere Kosten auswählen. Das Buch besteht aus Wikipedia-Artikeln: Jürgen Habermas, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Oskar Negt, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Ulrike Prokop, Stephan Grigat, Dieter Prokop, Robert Kurz, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Franz Neumann, Helmut Reichelt, Axel Honneth, Rolf Tiedemann, Friedrich Pollock, Walter G. Neumann, Claus Offe, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Gerhard Stapelfeldt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Stefan Breuer, Regina Becker-Schmidt, Alfred Schmidt, Roswitha Scholz, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Günther Mensching, Helmut Dubiel, Peter Bulthaup, Leo Löwenthal, Rainer Riehn, Dirk Hülst, Joachim Bruhn, Nancy Fraser, Rolf Wiggershaus,. Online finden Sie die kostenlose Aktualisierung der Bücher. Nicht dargestellt. Auszug: Jürgen Habermas (* 18. Juni 1929 in Düsseldorf) ist einer der weltweit meist rezipierten Philosophen und Soziologen der Gegenwart. Er wurde bekannt durch Arbeiten zur Sozialphilosophie mit diskurs-, handlungs- und rationalitätstheoretischen Beiträgen, in denen er eine konstruktive Umformung der Kritischen Theorie verfolgte. Habermas sieht die Grundlage der Gesellschaft kommunikativ und durch Geltungsgründe bestimmt. Habermas 2007 an der Hochschule für Philosophie München Nicht zuletzt durch regelmäßige Lehrtätigkeiten an ausländischen Universitäten, vor allem in den USA, sowie aufgrund von Übersetzungen seiner wichtigsten Arbeiten werden seine Theorien weltweit diskutiert. Er zählt zu den bekanntesten Vertretern der nachfolgenden Generation der Kritischen Theorie. Vom hegelianisch-marxistischen Ursprung der Frankfurter Schule hat er sich durch die Rezeption und Integration neuerer Theorieansätze gelöst. Wegen der Vielfalt seiner philosophischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Aktivitäten gilt Habermas als ein ...http://booksllc.net/?l=de&id=2542 ... Read more