Walter Benjamin's Other History

Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels

By:

Beatrice Hanssen

Format:

Paperback / softback

Series:

Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism

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Description

This text reveals the philosophical and ethical dimensions of the "Trauerspiel" study, showing how its thematics were to become prominent in Benjamin's writings from the 1930s. Hanssen finds in Benjamin's "The Origin of German Tragic Drama", a profound critique of anthropocentric historical thinking. Insisting on the materialistic category of natural history, Benjamin not only criticized idealistic conceptions of history writing, but also introduced an ethico-theological dimension that is often overlooked. Hanssen reconstructs this dimension through an analysis of the seemingly innocuous figures of stones, animals and angels that are scattered throughout his writings. She places Benjamin's work in the context of such contemporaries as Adorno, Cohen, Lukacs, Kafka, Kraus and Heidegger, and demonstrates the persistence of Benjaminian themes in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.

Author Biography:

Beatrice Hanssen was trained in Comparative Literature at Johns Hopkins University and is Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. She is the author of Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, an editor of The Turn to Ethics, and co-editor of the series Walter Benjamin Studies.

Release date Australia

December 4th, 2000

Author

Beatrice Hanssen

Audience

Professional & Vocational

Pages

202

Series

Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism

Dimensions

152x229x15

ISBN-13

9780520226845

Product ID

7699334

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