Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as (...) the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.--. (shrink)

Hamlet’s character sets, under different shapes and extents, the benchmark against which a large part of the European philosophy of the very long «short twentieth-century» behind us has had to measure. In the name of Hamlet as the most enigmatic among Shakespeare’s creatures, even Europe, its spirit and destiny, is identified, according to the well-known claim by Paul Valery.Common trait to a big part of these interpretations – from the juvenile works of Pavel Florenskij and Lev S. Vygotskij to Carl (...) Schmitt’s Hamlet oder Ekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel – is offered by the detection, in Hamlet’s figure, of the contradiction inherent to an epochal transition: the time of an unresolved passage between two ages that only knows the endless pain of an “interim”. My paper concerns the possibility to interpret Hamlet’s time as the time of an “interim” in light of Benjamin’s claims about Shakespeare’s drama contained in his book on the German Trauerspiel.While Florenskij interprets Hamlet’s time as tragic and the figure of Hamlet as a tragic one, in my essay - moving from some observations on the " Hamlet Problem " by the young Franz Rosenzweig - I consider the original Benjaminian thesis about the character and the drama of Hamlet as the end of the modern Trauerspiel. Starting from a statement by Theodor Adorno in the famed Hornberger Brief to Benjamin of August 2, 1935, I outline, therefore, how Benjamin characterizes the figure of Hamlet. This, from his early writings on the relationship between tragedy and Trauerspiel up to the great book on the Origin of the German Trauerspiel. In the frame of Benjamin’s interpretation, exactly by virtue of its distance from the thesis on the duality of tragedy, the Shakespearian theatrum of consciousness, paradigmatically represented in the figure of Hamlet and in the intimately dialectic character of his drama, is accounted for as necessary correlate of the Cartesian’s theatrum of consciousness. From a theoretical point of view, the Benjaminian characterization of Hamlet's figure reveals, therefore, something of the nature of modern consciousness and of consciousness in general in relation to the problem of truth and its representation. Hence the end of modern Trauerspiel coincides with the original incompleteness of its time. Consequently, I also claim Hamlet's dramatic figure to represent the aporetic characters of modern politics. This contrasts the thesis of Carl Schmitt who speaks, instead, of the Shakespearean drama as an expression of a pre-modern barbaric time. (shrink)

Michael J. Thompson (ed.): Georg Lukács Reconsidered. Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, London/New York: Continuum 2011, 253 + ix p. Timothy Bewes/Timothy Hall (eds.): Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, London/New York: Continuum 2011, 239 + xi p.

A tematização de uma política para o corpo, nas contingências do progresso técnico, leva a reflexão de Walter Benjamin a desenvolver a versão filosófica do torso barroco da arte seiscentista que irá explicar, nesse artigo, a contraposição entre os conceitos de mera vida ( blosses Leben ) ao de espaço para o corpo ( Leibraum ).

The present work proposes to analyze the dialectic between allegory and symbol elaborated from Walter Benjamin's rhetorical-aesthetic reading of the artistic form of the German Trauerspiel. Based on this, through a way of expository interpretation, we will address how the following three key moments are articulated in the book on the German Trauerspiel: the link between the Trauerspiel and the profane scene of reading, the particularity of allegorical signification, and the inseparability of allegory and mourning. From the (...) exposition of these moments, we will arrive at some final considerations: within the field of the philosophy of art, the dialectic between allegory and symbol constitutes a rhetorical-aesthetic conception of meaning (Bedeutens), thought through a double characterisation that Benjamin finds in die Sprache. (shrink)

El 19 de agosto de 1925 Walter Benjamin y Asja Lacis publican en el Frankfurter Zeitung «Nápoles», un ensayo sobre la ciudad italiana en el que analizan las costumbres y prácticas culturales de la zona a partir de un peculiar método de superposición de imágenes. Si bien resulta habitual estudiar Calle de dirección única o Infancia en Berlín como textos tempranos en los que Benjamin se aproxima a la fisionomía como forma de expresión, este trabajo pretende llamar la atención sobre (...) la primera de las Denkbilder sobre ciudades que Benjamin había elaborado en los años veinte y a la que seguirán «Moscú», «Marsella» o «San Gimignano». El objetivo es mostrar de qué manera estos retratos de ciudades no solo permiten al autor dar cuenta de los cambios que experimentaron las urbes europeas a partir del siglo XIX, sino también poner en marcha una teoría de la representación que parte del estudio de los recursos alegóricos en el Trauerspiel sobre los que trabajaba en esa época. Con ello, el ensayo sobre Nápoles será presentado como el primero de los esfuerzos llevados a cabo por Benjamin para conducir la investigación sobre la dramática barroca a problemas de la cultura contemporánea. (shrink)

El personaje de Hamlet ha sido un punto de referencia para gran parte de la filosofía europea del siglo XX, representando el espíritu y destino de Europa. Diversos autores, como Pavel Florenskij, Lev S. Vygotskij y Carl Schmitt, han visto en Hamlet la contradicción inherente a una transición epocal no resuelta, caracterizada por el dolor interminable de un interim. Mi artículo explora la posibilidad de interpretar el tiempo de Hamlet bajo esta luz, en relación con las ideas de Walter Benjamin (...) sobre el Trauerspiel alemán. A diferencia de Florenskij, que lee a Hamlet de manera trágica, sigo la tesis benjaminiana que sitúa a Hamlet como el fin del Trauerspiel moderno. En este marco, se revela la naturaleza de la conciencia moderna y su relación con la verdad, destacando cómo Hamlet encarna los rasgos aporéticos de la política moderna, en contraste con la visión premoderna de Carl Schmitt. (shrink)

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In (...) my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning. (shrink)

Through the discussion of the two texts: "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" by Walter Benjamin and "Birth of the Clinic" by Michel Foucault, the aim of this thesis consists in trying to point out a kind of history of ambivalence and to understand its rapport with possible knowledge. The thesis contained in this work can be formulated as follows: Benjamin and Foucault grant an important position to writing in its aspect to knowledge. In fact the direct question arises as (...) follows : how is it possible for these two philosophers to think the ambivalence? How and why has it an interest to philosophical knowledge? We act on the assumption that ambivalence contains a postulation for truth and that it is not only a relativization of the latter. The motivation of this thesis resides in the intuition that the concept of writing employed by Benjamin and Foucault is characterized by ambivalence. Thus the writing can be understood not only like a mobile limitation of thought for these philosophers, but as an experience of the world. Ambivalence thus expresses a fundamental experience of modernity. Ambivalent writing makes the effort to find significations which cannot be fixed in a system. The writing challenges the established discourse. It can be understood as a political and critical turning point. It appeared to us, that the text Intuition of the moment by Gaston Bachelard, and its analysis about ‘time and writing’ can serve as a link between the conception of Benjamin’s allegory and the Clinic of Foucault. It seemed to us that in a similar manner the two implicitly question the relationship between writing and time. (shrink)

In his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin analyses the role of the baroque allegorist in an age in which his word is the expression of the melancholic gaze of an abandoned subject handed over to an absolute immanence. But the allegorist makes a move through which he achieves to go from immanence to God, allegorizing the concept of evil that he himself has produced. Even when he meets the characteristics of those allegorists, Baltasar Gracian does not make, in our judgement, this (...) kind of betrayal to his own logos, surrendering completely to the consequences of natural history, the immanence and the allegorical saying. (shrink)

Die Lust am Trauerspiel.--Leib und Seele.--Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie.--Zur Methodik der Kinderpsychologie.--Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie.--Vom ethischen Skeptizismus.--Die Anfänge der Musik.

En Das Passagen-Werk Benjamin vuelve sobre el concepto de Ursprung, esta vez como salto genuino de lo que ha sido, como vuelco dialéctico en el instante del Jetztzeit del materialista histórico, instante de legibilidad, pero también como parada e interrupción [Stillstand] de este despliegue, donde la fuerza dialéctica queda suspendida por un instante, en el ahora de su cognoscibilidad. Para llegar a esto, el berlinés ha hecho un recorrido reflexivo, crítico y contundente, el cual comienza a definirse más intensamente desde (...) el prólogo Epistemocrítico de su Trauerspiel. Rastrearemos el recorrido en ambas obras y en las construcciones problemáticas de sus textos y fragmentos anteriores, especialmente en la tensión de la mediación, relación y conexión entre la obra de arte y el arte como despliegue teórico; sobre todo la tensión existente entre los primeros Románticos y Goethe, en la dialéctica entre la forma pura [Idee] y el contenido ideal [Ideale] del arte. También nos inmiscuiremos en las tesis Sobre el concepto de historia y Parque central y algunos fragmentos sobre Baudelaire. Nuestro objetivo principal es mostrar el despliegue de la imagen [Bild] en la escritura filosófica benjaminiana, en medio [Mittel] de los extremos de idea y fenómeno, de verdad y conocimiento, por tanto en la misma construcción conceptual, cuando nombrar y contemplar la realidad histórica, la realidad material debía ser comentada, interpretada y leída en su eterna caducidad [ewige Vergängnis] o hundimiento [Untergang], como exposición [Darstellung] de una experiencia histórica configurada por determinadas constelaciones imaginales. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epic and Tragic Music: The Union of the Arts in the Eighteenth CenturyJoshua BillingsI. The Union of the Arts in WeimarAround 1800 in Weimar, thought on Greek tragedy crystallized around the union of speech, music, and gesture—what Wagner would later call the Gesamtkunstwerk. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottfried Herder both found something lacking in modern spoken theater in comparison with ancient tragedy’s synthesis of the arts. Schiller’s 1803 “ (...) class='Hi'>Trauerspiel mit Chören,” Die Braut von Messina, represents a radical experiment in recreating the ancient union of the arts.1 The Greek tragic chorus, revived in Schiller’s drama, becomes the modern locus for this union. In a preface appended to the published version of the play, Schiller writes,The tragic work of poetry first becomes a whole through its theatrical performance: the poet only gives the words; music and dance must be added as well to enliven them. As long as the chorus lacks this powerful sensory accompaniment, so long will it appear in the economy of a tragedy as an alien element, a foreign body, a retardation.2 [End Page 99]Exactly contemporary (and possibly in response), Herder’s discussion of drama in his journal Adrastea similarly views the union of the arts in ancient tragedy as a corrective for modern drama:3A Greek who attended our tragedy [Trauerspiel], used to the musical voice of his own, would have to find in it a sad play [trauriges Spiel]. “How wordy-mute,” he would say, “how dull and soundless! Have I stepped into a decorated grave? You shout and sigh and bluster! Move your arms, strain your facial features, reason, declaim; but does your voice and feeling never become song? Do you not miss the strength of this demonic expression? Do your rhythms, your iambs never urge you on to the accents of the true language of the gods?”4The focus on media distinguishes these Weimar discussions of tragedy both from the Jena aesthetics of the Schlegel brothers and from the Idealist “philosophy of the tragic” already underway in the works of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel.5 Though both Schiller and Herder are relatively indifferent to dance, their writings reflect strong interests in music.6 Their considerations [End Page 100] of tragedy show a close engagement with the sensory experience of drama that is unusual for its time, and has little precedent in Germany.For Schiller’s late poetics, the union of words, music, and gesture is a means of radically dividing the experience of theater from daily life. The tragic chorus “should be for us a living wall, which tragedy sets up around itself in order to close itself off wholly from the real world.”7 It “justifies the tragic poet in this raising of tone, which fills the ear, which strains the spirit, which broadens the whole mind.”8 Musical speech, Schiller argues, allows for an expression that transcends conventional language and quotidian existence. Schiller had hoped “to let [the choral intermezzos] be recited in the way of song and to accompany them with an instrument,” though his wish went unfulfilled in the first, and subsequent performances.9 Yet even after relinquishing the real possibility of a union of the arts in performances of Braut, Schiller upheld it as an ideal in his preface.Herder is remembered today primarily for his elaboration of an organic historicism, which understands cultural phenomena according to the circumstances of their creation. Yet his concern was more than merely historical; especially in the Adrastea, he continually sought guidance for the present in the events of the past. A contemporary, writing shortly after Herder’s death, saw the two orientations, historical and critical, as equally important: investigation of the past was intended as “a didactic or warning image” for his own time.10 The guiding idea of the journal was similarly educative, based on Herder’s understanding of Adrastea as a principle of justice and moderation.11 In Herder’s thought, as in most writing on ancient literature of the eighteenth century, there is no absolute division between scholarly and critical concerns: the study of ancient works was both an end in itself and a... (shrink)

Una lectura de la "Erkenntnis-kritische Vorrede" a Ursprung des deutsches Trauerspiels busca determinar en qué sentido Benjamin efectúa, en la teoría de las ideas allí esbozada, lo que él mismo llamó después una "tranposicion" del concepto goetheano de Urphänomen. El cotejo con algunos de los naturw..

Este ensayo pretende mostrar la presencia en _El origen del Trauerspiel alemán_, escrito de habilitación de Walter Benjamin_,_ de algunas de las ideas más relevantes que plantea en sus “Tesis de filosofía de la historia”. Para ello, se realiza en primer lugar una exposición de este último escrito de Benjamin centrada en su defensa de la necesidad de que el historiador materialista contemple la historia a partir de su propio presente, en la visión de la misma como catástrofe y (...) ruina que Benjamin opone al historicismo y en el potencial revolucionario que subraya en esta comprensión del acontecer histórico. Posteriormente, se emprende un análisis de aquellos aspectos del escrito de habilitación de Benjamin que se dejan iluminar desde las “Tesis de filosofía de la historia”. Entre ellos, el significado que en él adquieren las nociones de constelación y mónada, que apunta a una interpretación del Barroco llevada a cabo desde la actualidad de Benjamin, y la percepción de la historia que atribuye a esta época, marcada igualmente, según se revela en su examen del _Trauerspiel_ y de su recurso a la alegoría, por su carácter ruinoso y catastrófico. (shrink)

Vor dem Hintergrund der Allegoriediskussion, die von Augustinus’ Christenlehre zu Paul de Mans Allegorien des Lesens führt, wird an Texten unterschiedlicher Gattungszugehörigkeit — an Gryphius’ Trauerspiel Cardenio und Celinde, Grimmeishausens Springinsfeld und Greiffenbergs poetologisch lesbaren Sonetten (Uber das unaussprechliche Heilige Geistes=Eingeben! und O Wort!) — nachgewiesen, in welchem Maße die Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts von der Problematik betroffen ist, die aus der Polyvalenz des allegorischen Zeichens und deren Kehrseite, der Erfahrung von Sinnentzug und Bedeutungsleere, resultiert. Wie sich zeigen läßt, (...) reagieren die in Frage stehenden Texte auf diese Problemlage in jeweils eigentümlicher Weise: Während sich Gryphius’ Trauerspiel die aufgebrochenen Widersprüche noch einmal zu kaschieren bemüht und die Gauckeltaschen-Episode des Springinsfeld zu einer Selbstkritik findet, durch die sich die Allegorie von ihrem eigenen Sinnbegehren distanziert, erweisen sich die Greiffenbergschen Sonette als Formen einer Sinnimplosion, die umso schockhafter erscheint, je kompromißloser die Texte ihren Ordnungsvorgaben zu entsprechen versuchen. (shrink)

This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features (...) a discussion of the _Trauerspiel_ book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. _Philosophy and Melancholy_ also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. (shrink)

Why does Walter Benjamin claim “indirection” to be the proper method for philosophical contemplation and writing? Why is this method—embodied, according to Benjamin, in the convoluted form of scholastic treatises and in their use of citations—fundamental for understanding his Origin of German Trauerspiel as suggesting an alternative to most strands of modern philosophy? The explicit and well-studied function of this method is for the presentation of what cannot be represented in language, of what cannot be intended or approached in (...) thinking. Namely, of what Benjamin understands as “truth.” Indeed, as Adorno implied, providing a method for presenting an intentionless reality, rather than for re-presenting the world as corresponding to the mind, is revolutionary. However, I claim that beyond its presentational function, the method of indirection has a further, pedagogical function. Benjamin’s concept of truth requires thinking in a manner that does not impose any exterior form, any conceptual or intuitive intention on truth and the materials in which it might be exhibited. The methodological adoption of digressive and intermittent writing is supposed to transform the way we think, or more accurately, the position from which thinking occurs. By examining Benjamin’s use of pedagogical terms against the backdrop of scholastic history and the Urfigure of modern method, that of Descartes, I show that writing and reading in the form of the tractatus serves as exercise in receding from the subject-position—a position of a subject intending an object—and thus conditions the presentation of intentionless truth. (shrink)

Even if it has not been so thoroughly investigated, the importance of Platonic philosophy in Benjamin’s work can hardly be argued. Numerous texts, notes and letters reveal the presence of Plato in Benjamin’s thought. But it is specially The origin of German Trauerspiel the place where Benjamin takes Plato’s philosophy most explicitly and extensively. In the “Epistemocritical Preface” –where he develops his theory of knowledge through a revindication and reinterpretation of the Platonic “doctrine of ideas”– as well as in (...) other sections of the book, Plato appears as a fundamental source. In this context, a dialogue stands out: the Symposium. This article aims at investigating Benjamin’s reading of that dialogue, a reading which articulates the figure of a Plato that develops his philosophy as a way to oppose myth, and that allows to elevate philosophy again as a form for the exposition of truth in language. (shrink)

Cuando Walter Benjamin desarrolla en el “Prólogo epistemocrítico” de _El origen del Trauerspiel_ alemán la más extensa de las presentaciones de su teoría del conocimiento (así como la única publicada en vida), lo hace a partir de una explícita reinterpretación de la filosofía platónica, en particular de su “doctrina de las ideas”. Este artículo se propone investigar las afinidades entre el prólogo de Benjamin y la filosofía platónica, poniendo especial énfasis en las relaciones entre los desarrollos metodológicos de ambos autores, (...) es decir entre la “forma de la exposición” de Benjamin y la dialéctica de Platón. A partir de explorar estas relaciones, se busca poner de relieve una visión de la filosofía que ambos autores comparten, y de la que se quiere señalar la originalidad, potencia y actualidad. (shrink)

El presente artículo es un estudio comparativo donde se argumenta la relación disonante entre las obras de Schmitt y Benjamin sobre la estética barroca. Se defiende que la diferencia entre ambos consiste en su concepción de lo político. Para Benjamin, son dos los aspectos fundamentales del Trauerspiel alemán: 1) la diferencia entre drama barroco y tragedia clásica y 2) el recurso a la alegoría como técnica de expresión. Schmitt, por su parte, encuentra lo singular del drama barroco en la (...) irrupción del tiempo histórico-político dentro de la forma estética. Para el crítico berlinés, lo alegórico debe estudiarse desde la filosofía de la historia, mientras que para Schmitt lo decisivo es lo político, ejecutado a través de la soberanía y la decisión. Tal es la línea argumental del presente estudio. This paper is a comparative study about the Works of Benjamin and Schmitt on the baroque art. It argues that the specific difference between them most be found in their concept of the political. For Benjamin there is a difference between tragedy and drama, the german Trauerspiel it is an allegorical approach to thingsand history. Schmitt argues that the singularity of baroque drama is the irruption of time in the plastic form. These are the points that the paper proposes. (shrink)