Kirjahaku

More Than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art is the first book to trace the philosophical relation between Georg Simmel and his one-time student Walter Benjamin, two of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century.Reading Simmel’s work, particularly his essays on Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, alongside Benjamin’s concept of Unscheinbarkeit (inconspicuousness) and his writings on Charlie Chaplin, More Than Life demonstrates that both Simmel and Benjamin conceive of art as the creation of something entirely new rather than as a mimetic reproduction of a given. The two thinkers diverge in that Simmel emphasizes the presence of a continuous movement of life, whereas Benjamin highlights the priority of discontinuous, interruptive moments.With the aim of further elucidating Simmel and Benjamin’s ideas on art, Stéphane Symons presents a number of in-depth analyses of specific artworks that were not discussed by these authors. Through an insightful examination of both the conceptual affinities and the philosophical differences between Simmel and Benjamin , Symons reconstructs a crucial episode in twentieth-century debates on art and aesthetics.

For over fifty years the concept of memory has played a crucial role in a large number of academic and societal debates. The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? draws attention to the limits of the academic field of memory studies. It argues that the faculty of memory offers an inadequate response to the challenges of the present. The book sets up a dialogue between the philosophies of forgetting that underlie the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and the philosophies of memory that inform the work of Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. It builds on the idea that history is inseparable from a type of transience that cannot be counter-acted by the preserving work of memory and develops a new understanding of the phenomenon of forgetting in which the passage of time is asserted in thought and thus made productive.

For over fifty years the concept of memory has played a crucial role in a large number of academic and societal debates. The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? draws attention to the limits of the academic field of memory studies. It argues that the faculty of memory offers an inadequate response to the challenges of the present. The book sets up a dialogue between the philosophies of forgetting that underlie the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and the philosophies of memory that inform the work of Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. It builds on the idea that history is inseparable from a type of transience that cannot be counter-acted by the preserving work of memory and develops a new understanding of the phenomenon of forgetting in which the passage of time is asserted in thought and thus made productive.